what's in the making?

Stephen Walt:  There is one feature of the East Asian security environment that is worrisome, however, though it bears little resemblance to pre-war conditions in 1914. Today, conflict in East Asia might be encouraged by the belief that it could be confined to a naval or air clash over distant (and not very valuable) territories and thus not touch any state's home territory or domestic population. All Asian countries would be exceedingly leery of attacking each other's homelands, but naval and air battles over distant islands are precisely the sort of military exchange one might use to demonstrate resolve and capability but at little or no risk of escalation.  That's the scenario that I worry about, but that is not what happened back in July 1914.







Gibbon:  The American public remembers little more than movies and sports and the American media little more than that.  On April 7, 2002 the Japan Times, which represents the interests of the Japanese Foreign Ministry and other Japanese ministries carried the comments by Liberal Party leader Ichiro Ozawa that Japan could easily become a nuclear power. He stated Japan had enough plutonium to make 3 to 4 thousand nuclear weapons.  “If that should happen, we wouldn’t lose (to China) in terms of military strength. What would (China) do then?”   Not one word appeared in the American press that concentrates its resources on Israel and the Middle East.  One must ask what the Chinese thought and even what Americans would have thought if they had known.  If a German party leader had made a similar remark about the Russians, the New York Times would have pushed Israel off the front page.

In 1995 when Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama visited Peking he was met by an accusation in the People's Daily, the newspaper of the Chinese government, that 35 million Chinese died due to brutality of the Japanese.[i]  Within days the New York Times had an article written by their Tokyo correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner which credited only 10 million Chinese dying due to Japanese depredations.[ii]  Who would want to quibble over 25 million dead Chinese?  It must be noted this number was over four times the number of Jews killed by the Nazis and occurred in the period remembered by Jews as the Holocaust to the exclusion of other people dying and by most of the rest of the world as World War II.  The Chinese have never forgotten this, and one must assume one day they will make sure the rest of the world does not either.  This most certainly must include the United States.

James Reston asked Chou En Lai if China were really worried about Japan, and Chou's reply was that China had suffered for fifty years which was a rather long time.  Chou also pointed out to Reston that in the two world wars of this century the United States benefited greatly while suffering rather small losses.  Reston in many ways the most influential newsman of his generation confided to Eric Sevareid of CBS News that one of the most appealing things about his American countrymen was "that we have no memory".[iii]  Reston claimed we were struck at Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, but we have no hatred of the Japanese, or the Germans either - "we are forward looking people".  This provoked Sevareid to state he did not understand China's long range thinking about Japan.

The United States needs more realistic responses and policies to world events and if we are to pivot to Asia, we should pivot from the Middle East.  China will not tolerate a Japan with nuclear weapons.  What will be the American response?

[i].  NYT, May 7, 1995, pE3

[ii].  NYT, May 21, 1995, p4

[iii].  New York Times: Report From Red China, pp92-4 & 346 (Quadrangle Books, 1971)

Nathan C Langston

 Gibbon 

If we are going to remember, let's remember:

● For a century, tens of thousands of American medical missionaries wen to China. For generation after generation they devoted their entire lives, and those of their families, to the Chinese people.  

● The US was the only participant in the Boxer Rebellion, that refused to pocket the shameful reparations extorted from the Chinese. Instead she used the money to endow some of China's best universities and to establish scholarships that brought tens of thousands of Chinese to America to study. 

● Let us also not forget that the reason Japan attacked Pearl Harbor was because the US had embargoed Japan. She was denied strategic materials like oil. And why? Her occupation of China. Japan had to either withdraw from China or die of thirst for fuel and other key resources. She chose to fight. In short, we suffered Dec 7 on behalf of China and fought that war, at least in part, to liberate China. Chenault's Flying Tigers were an early effort in that direction. 

What we are getting in return is China slyly using her North Korean vassal, to threaten us with nukes on ICBMs.

FranzLiebkind

 Nathan C Langston  Gibbon 

Magister Nathan criticizes KathleenGalt above for going off the topic of WWI, but then yammers on about Pearl Harbor, ICBMs, and other anachronisms. Well, there are rules for the lesser orders, and more favorable rules for the Magisterium . 

But some of his assertions warrant reply. Nathan surrounds his historical points with his usual churchillian bodyguard of lies. He neglects to remark that the majority of those medical missionaries in China were first and foremost Christian proselytizers, i.e. religious imperialists. The Chinese were happy to take the doctoring, thank you very much. They were, however, disinclined to accept the Christianity. (There were notable and influential exceptions, such as the Soong family, and their delectable daughter, the formidable Madame Chiang. More anon on that danger.)

In themselves, the missions were inconsequential;  but their propaganda effect back on the farm occasioned great harm and the most extravagant expectations. Barbara Tuchman writes: "Congregations all over the United States listened to the returned missionary with his lantern slides tell of the deserving qualities of the Chinese people and of the great reservoir of future Christians. Along with the public impression that America had saved China's integrity by the doctrine of the Open Door, missionary propaganda helped to create the image of China as protégé, an image which carries an accompanying sense of obligation toward the object of one's beneficence."

So effective was the  propaganda that even isolationists in the Midwest came to consider the Chinese as their saintlike, crypto-Christian brethren. In this they were encouraged by the biased journalism of Henry Luce and the sentimental literary inelegancies of Pearl S. Buck. Yet those heartland Primitives did not succeed in getting FDR's administration to intervene in China, where the Japanese had been since 1931. (The mischief would come later, in the form of the postwar China Lobby, which exacted gruesome political retribution for the "loss" of that country.) Japan was by necessity a maritime power; China, to the extent it had power of any sort under Chiang--except the power to extract money from the peasantry--was a continental power. When Japan occupied southern Indochina in 1941, providing it a pied-à-terre from which to bomb and invade the oilfields of the Dutch Indies, the threat in America's Pacific Pond was manifest, and the embargoes--casus belli--against her were expanded. FDR, Stimson, Welles, and the rest were not only realists, but had some knowledge of Asia and the Pacific. In short, China was but incidental to the Peal Harbor bombing and the US declaration of war.

Chennault was a brave man, a  brilliant tactician of pursuit aviation, a masterly cultivator of his own legend, apparently a whoremonger, and insubordinate in the opinions of Marshall, Arnold, and Stilwell. He was also a strategic incompetent, repeatedly trying to sell his superiors on his plan to bomb Japan to submission with just 200 airplanes, flying from Chinese land bases defended by--what? In any case, the Allies made China-Burma-India the last priority among its theaters of war--deservedly so, given the incompetence and corruption of the KMT. The US supported, wanly,  the wrong side--was there a right side to support?--and failed to heed the words Stilwell wrote in his diary after the Japanese surrender: "We ought to get out--now!"

Nathan's requisite but unrelated coda--stoking panic about China's vassal, North Korea--is a bit puzzling, given that the DPRK appears far from ready to deliver a nuke to Mt. Fuji, much less Mt. McKinley or Mt. Rainier. Does he realize that China might support the Kim regimes to avoid a refugee crisis, or the descent into chaos of an armed neighbor, or for any number of reasons other than annoying the US? Perhaps Nathan is agitating for a revival of the China Lobby, that virulent  disease of the American body politic that I hoped had died along with Joseph McCathy's liver.

Gibbon

 FranzLiebkind  Nathan C Langston I agree and appreciate most of what you write, but I must stop with Barbara Tuchman.

Barbara Tuchman gained fame and favor by espousing the interpretation of events so favored by the New York literati even if lies and deceit are used.  She complimented Denmark on their resistance to German rule.  In April of 1940 when Germany invaded Denmark, the Danes made virtually no resistance.[i]  It was not until 1943 that the Germans executed the first Dane for resisting their rule.  On October 1, 1943 the Germans had scheduled the arrest and deportation of the 7000 Jews in Denmark.  The commander of the German troops in Denmark, General Best, had informed his maritime attache, Georg Duckwitz, of the decision to deport Jews to the concentration camps.  Duckwitz with the tacit approval of General Best informed his friends among the Danish government who arranged for the flight of these Jews.  On a very warm October 1 while wearing winter coats and all their jewelry, many Jewish ladies rode the train from Copenhagen to the coast.  As most Danish Jews lived in Copenhagen, and there was only one train line to the coast, Herbert Pundik, then 16 years of age, remembered the train being "loaded with Jews".  In not one case did German officials attempt to check the identity of even one Jew.  One who did escape remembered Germans having an observation post near where his boat had left.  Another remarked that the escape could not have happened without the connivance of the Germans.  Explanations of the behavior of the Germans have revolved around the fact that Denmark was furnishing the German Reich with ten percent of its food needs, and General Best had determined that continued tranquility in Denmark was his most important consideration.  Mr. Pundik later an editor of the newspaper Politiken thought the reason the truth of the escape from Denmark took fifty years to emerge was that the myth was too satisfying, and people did not want to smash it.[ii]  For those who might want to sneer they should ask if Americans would have behaved any more nobly.

          British historian, John Keegan, reminded readers of the ineffectiveness of the Resistance in Europe.  While he applauded the Danes, Mr. Keegan noted that far more Danes, Walloons, Norwegians, Flemish and Belgians were enthusiastic soldiers in ethnic formations of the Waffen SS on the Eastern Front.  Mr. Keegan went to the heart of the matter when he stated that many would like to believe "on moral grounds alone, the Resistance ought to have triumphed".[iii]

Barbara Tuchman wrote a letter to the New York Times of May 30, 1967 when Arab countries, principally Egypt, were attacking Israel.  While her state of Israel was engaged in battle, Ms. Tuchman baldly stated "the integrity and security, not to say its survival is a closer concern of ours than that of South Vietnam".  Forthrightly she wrote of America's reputation being at stake and of the need for America to take straightforward independent action with courage and conviction.[iv]  That there were almost a half million troops of America in Vietnam did not concern Ms. Tuchman, nor did the possible effects on these troops by an effort to help Israel by the United States.  She appraised the goyim as distinctly secondary considerations. 

In assessing the performance of John Kennedy to the Bay of Pigs invasion Ms. Tuchman stated JFK showed "admirable resolve" in making the hard decision to not send in Marines or the Army to rescue men who were left to perish.[v]  Ms. Tuchman's senses of compassion and honor were narrowly funneled to issues involving Jews. 

[i].  William Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic, p567 (Simon & Schuster, 1969)

[ii].  NYT, p3, Sep 28, 1993

[iii].  Times Literary Supplement, p15, May 8, 1992

[iv].  NYT, May 30, 1967, p20

[v].  Barbara Tuchman, March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, p284 (Ballantine, 1985)

FranzLiebkind

 Gibbon  Nathan C Langston 

Gibbon,

I am well familiar, from my readings on the life of Niels Bohr, with the saga of the Jews escaping Nazi-occupied Denmark. (I was after all trained as a physical chemist.)  I also had a good friend whose father was in the Danish resistance. I believed her when she said that he was in the resistance, but nodded silently at her insistence that he was one of those freed by the RAF Mosquito raid on the Copenhagen SS headquarters. I'm sure there are thousands of such Danish family war stories. Like you, am skeptical of the effectiveness of the various resistance organizations.

Obviously, over 90% of Denmark's Jews could not have saved themselves by spontaneous organization. Once Bohr and other notables had secured Sweden's agreement to receive them, the path was clear. The local Nazis commanders had no desire to spoil their sinecures, nor to starve Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg.   So they at least looked the other way.  

I will not defend Tuchman's entire opus. Much of it cannot be defended. As you point out, "The March of Folly" was Camelot-addled; it reflected her late-career moralism and sloppiness. In "Writing History," her celebration of the IDF in the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War is as lacking in objectivity as any panegyric to the Heroes of the Red Army penned by Ilya Ehrenbug. "Bible and Sword," a very early work about centuries of British attitudes toward the Jews and Palestine, is lame--as much because of its romantic Anglophilia as its Zionism. Tuchman was, after all, a daughter of American Zionist royalty, and niece of the author of the Morgenthau Plan.

Her biography of Stilwell, however, holds up well four decades later. It is especially impressive during its composition she had no access to the archives of the USSR and PRC, nor to much of the US intelligence record. (If she had access to the ONI records, she would likely have portrayed the KMT as even more murderous.)

http://worldview.carnegiecouncil.org/archive/worldview/1)979/10/3290.html/_res/id=sa_File1/v22_i010_a019.pdf.

Perhaps "Stilwell" succeeds because Zionist concerns were altogether remote from the China-Burma-India theater that was its subject. 

The book  is simultaneously a biography of the General, a history of WWII China, and a thinly-disguised allegory of US involvement in Indochina.  Its most important  influence was on David Halberstam, whose "The Best and the Brightest" was, after the Pentagon Papers, the most influential book in influencing a broad American audience to question the Vietnam War. It was only in later editions that Halberstam fully acknowledged his book's debt to Tuchman in informing him of the persistent  influence of the China Lobby--and of JFK and LBJ's fear of being smeared as "soft" by that lobby--in the decisions to escalate in Vietnam.

An Aussie sees through the emperor's new clothes, it's all within family in the land of opportunity for fewer

An American legend is ''from log cabin to White House''. This is the idea that worth can triumph over obscurity and adversity, and that political opportunity is equal to all. A glance around Washington shows how false this belief is.

No sooner had Barack Obama been re-elected than feverish speculation began about the next presidential election. Specifically, as one headline ran, could it be ''Clinton v Bush in 2016?'' This sounds very much like a case of Yogi Berra's ''deja vu all ver again'': just over 20 years ago, Clinton defeated Bush for the presidency. But then, ''Clinton v Bush'' meant Bill Clinton winning against George H. W. Bush. The reprise for 2016 would be Hillary Clinton against Jeb Bush: Bill's wife against George H. W.'s son, or rather his second son, after George Bush the Younger served two terms as president in between the first Clinton and Obama.

''Clinton'' and ''Bush'' have brand-name recognition, and they are both marketable. That should scarcely confer on them any hereditary right of succession, and yet that is the only explanation for ''Bush v Clinton 2016?'' British prime ministers will have served as members of parliament before reaching No.10: for nearly 40 years in Winston Churchill's case; 20 in Margaret Thatcher's. There were no equivalent years of such hard political toil at all in Hillary Clinton's case. To be fair to the Bush brothers, George W. and Jeb, they could at least claim to have run something, as governors of Texas and Florida, but Clinton's story has been one of inexplicable entitlement, part of a larger pattern of ''heritable right''.

With what might have seemed either magnanimity or cunning, Obama chose as his first secretary of state his defeated rival for the Democratic nomination in 2008, senator Hillary Clinton of New York, wife of President Bill Clinton. Following her departure from the State Department, Obama has nominated to replace her with Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the unsuccessful Democratic candidate in 2004, whose mother came from the Forbes dynasty of rich Boston bankers. Four years before Kerry lost, the Democratic candidate, also defeated, was Bill Clinton's vice-president, Al Gore, son of Senator Albert Gore snr of Tennessee.
Advertisement

He was beaten in 2000 by George Bush the Younger, son of George Bush the Elder, whose father was Senator Prescott Bush. And now there is Jeb Bush, Bush the Elder's younger son.

But the sprouting of Bushes is not more remarkable than the career of Hillary Clinton, which is really one of the oddest things ever seen in any democratic country. Indeed she didn't have a political ''career'' at all until she was well into her 50s, when one was created for her by her husband as a form of recompense. Until the last days of Clinton's presidency, his wife had never run for, let alone won, any kind of elective office whatever. Nor had she worked in any administrative position except on the occasion when her husband put her in charge of his proposed healthcare reform, in the course of which fiasco she exhibited all the failings, from incompetence to petulance, that have marked her ventures in public life since.

She is a most wooden speaker, and any idea that she is a woman of intellectual gifts should not survive a reading of her footling book It Takes a Village. All in all, nothing she had ever done until the tail-end of her husband's erratic and lurid years in the White House could possibly justify the way that, having spent her life in Illinois, Arkansas, and Washington, she turned up in New York and demanded to become a senator as if by right.

What's more, she did. She was nominated and elected, and spent the next eight years on Capitol Hill. Once again, an objective view would suggest that nothing she did in her time in the Senate justified her candidature for the presidency, although Bill Clinton, who remains widely if unaccountably popular, did everything he could on her behalf. One has known errant husbands who tried to placate their wives with lavish presents of clothes or jewellery; this must be the first time a man hoped to atone for his infidelity by giving his wife not frocks and rocks but the presidency of the US.

After Obama had won the Democratic nomination and been elected, Hillary Clinton said - privately, sourly, and correctly - that her support for the Iraq war had tipped the balance against her. In fact it was worse than that. Her first year in the Senate saw the September 11 attacks. In October 2002 she was one of the large majority of senators who passed a resolution authorising the use of force against Iraq.

She then did nothing to halt or even criticise the administration's drive to war - or not until years later, by which time the Iraq enterprise had gone horribly wrong. But then her chief characteristic has been her expediency. As the Washington Post's Richard Cohen put it, she has always been ''dead centre in American public opinion, foursquare for what's popular and courageously opposed to what's not''. By the beginning of 2007, with eyes now fixed firmly on the White House, she belatedly deplored the fact that removing the Iraqi dictator had been an ''obsession'' with Bush.

Without the name Bush, George the Younger would never have reached the White House. And without the name Clinton, Hillary Rodham would never have held high office.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of a forthcoming book on Winston Churchill. This is an extract from his essay in the latest edition of American Review, published by the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.

Why do we have brakes on a car?

Mary, New Hampshire
Two defining characteristics of a fascist state:

1) The industrial and business aristocracy are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite. This characteristic, we note, continues to be well and happy.

2) Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed. This, we note, is proceeding nicely.



Karen Garcia, New Paltz NY

Let's just call out the cult of the deficit scolds for what it is: class warfare.

They have their gold-plated knives out for the safety net of the New Deal. They're spending millions just to ensure that millions of their own fellow citizens don't ever get to collect on the great social insurance policies of the New Deal and the Great Society. The Fix the Debt campaign might be more aptly called The Fix is In -- for all but the most obscenely wealthy. Pete Peterson, and his sidekicks Simpson and Bowles, are in cahoots with our own "Democratic" president to hype their Orwellian "balanced approach." This is Newspeak for the imposition of austerity on the middle class -- combined with a few fleeting, token tax hikes on the plutocrats to make it seem like everybody's doing their "fair share."

It's an illusion. The Fix Is In.

The "tweaking" of Social Security via chained CPI is an exercise in cruel subterfuge. The average woman on Social Security received only $997 a month in 2010. If the Grand Bargain had succeeded then, her monthly income would have fallen to $933 (in inflation-adjusted 2010 dollars) by age 85 and $915 by age 95.

How is this not a War Against Women? Millions of older women already are living in poverty, unable to pay their bills, putting off medical care, scrimping on food. I guess the Scrooges of the ruling class won't be happy until we switch from Fancy Feast to the Walmart brand.

The Fix Is In, unless we all band together and fix their wagon.

Meme, Chicago
"Why do we have brakes on a car?"

That was the question posed by John Reed, the chairman of Citigroup from 1984-2000, to journalist extraordinaire, Bill Moyers, when Reed and Moyers sat down in early 2012 to discuss America's feeble, flaccid and failed financial services industry.

"Why do we have brakes on a car?" Moyers queried rhetorically. "So we can stop."

"No," Reed countered. "So we can go fast."

America needs serious, high-tech, state-of-the art, ABS brakes placed on her reckless, shameless financial services industry before another AIG or Lehman or Bear Stearns decides to drive the world's economies in a "suicide rap" right off the cliff--again! Dodd-Frank, while well-intentioned and produced with earnest deliberation, is nonetheless a miserable failure. It is too expansive, too vague and too deferential to the financial industry. If only one third of the rules have been implemented to date, the problem is not with the enforcement of the rules but the rules themselves.

At the risk of torturing the metaphor, the time to put new brakes on a car is not when it is already on the road "steppin' out over the line." The time for new brakes is/was when the car was in the shop, hobbled and broken.

Instead of Dodd-Frank, let's break up the "too big to fail banks" and reinstate Glass-Steagull--on steroids.





William D, London
How many bankers went to jail as a result of the 2008 crisis?

That is why things won't change.





rturkington, Virginia
I keep thinking how, right after it all unraveled, how any politico in reach of a microphone swore that heads would roll, that they would get to the bottom of things. That immediate actions would be taken to halt the types of practices that trashed the whole economy of not just this country but other countries as well.Then wealth spoke, and like the beholden, frightened weasels they are, the politicos scurried back into line.
Inside of a month, the new headlines read that, heck, it wasn't Wall St or the bankers or the bad business practices that were the problem, nah, wasn't 'them' and to try and regulate anything would just be the most horrid thing. You see they intoned, it was not them who was the problem, nah, it was 'really' all the fault of those who bought homes they couldn't afford. Middle classers who just lived too well and dreamed too big. No mention that those they were trash-talking were the ones who worked long and hard for years to have a taste of the American Dream.The spokesmen for wealth didn't see fit to mention that their chosen scapegoats, the working class, 'were' paying their bills til the jobs were all sent overseas. To increase corporate profit. Or that while Wall St and the investor class were quickly being bailed out the middle class was dying. That lack of decent paying jobs to be had, that lack of protections for those that remained meant the ones who could least afford it were once again taking it in the shorts. Jobs, homes, savings ..gone.

Newfie, Newfoundland
The never ending growth economy is a de-facto Ponzi scheme. Nothing grows forever in a finite world. The era of growth is ending. This will be the century of contraction and limits.



William B. Hess, Edwardsville IL
The key, as it has always been, is social accountability. Until all the perpetrators and their lobbied minions in Congress are held fully accountable for their decisions and actions, nothing will change all that much.

Corporate re-chartering needs to be done in accordance with the fine work of the Tellus Institute. 21st century corporations need to include wage earners and the public as equal and permanent stakeholders. Corporate charters need to be for specific, socially beneficial purposes and of limited duration, subject to review and renewed only if they clearly serve the public good. The idiocy of unlimited growth and an obsession with short-term profits at all costs needs to be abandoned to sustainable plans for the long-term benefit of all.

As long as we embrace the notion that the central purpose of corporations is to funnel the productivity of the nation into the already-bulging coffers of a few sociopathic plutocrats, we will create disaster after disaster until we are ground into the dust of history.

What we lack is not a paucity of good ideas for change, but the political will to throttle the latest generation of international robber barons.





Tim Kane Mesa AZ

I remember, I was in 8th grade. That made me, 14 years old, sick in bed. My mother threw me the tomb "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich". It's been some time, but somewhere in there, I walked through the logic of Germany's ability to re-arm itself and not face inflation during the depression. The problem I was trying to figure out why printing money created inflation in the 1920s but not in the 30s.

Here, at the age of 14 mind you, is what I walked through: A vendor cannot raise his prices if he has more supply to sell than there is demand for- especially if his competitors are in the same boat. In the Great Depression, as now, there was more supply than demand. If a widget maker raises prices, his competitor across the street will be glad to sell his widgets at the old prices. So the Germans could go ahead and borrow &/or print money in the Great Depression for rearmament and not worry about inflation.

How is it that so many buffoons of high office can't understand something so simple that a 14 year old could figure it out (meanwhile I, as of last Friday, am unemployed)?

A former co-worker once said that it's not a good idea to assume that someone did something because they are stupid. Same here. They have other motives.

In the case of our society, wealth is so concentrated, that elite gadflies in political circles, punditry, media, and so on want to dance to the tune that favors the wealthy. It's a variation of Stockholm syndrome. That or they are cruel. Or both.

Stabilization Won’t Save Us
By NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB

THE fiscal cliff is not really a “cliff”; the entire country won’t fall into the ocean if we hit it. Some automatic tax cuts will expire; the government will be forced to cut some expenditures. The cliff is really just a red herring.

Likewise, any last-minute deal to avoid the spending cuts and tax increases scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 1 isn’t likely to save us from economic turmoil. It would merely let us continue the policy mistakes we’ve been making for years, allowing us only to temporarily stabilize the economy rather than address its deep, systemic failures.

Stabilization, of course, has long been the economic playbook of the United States government; it has kept interest rates low, shored up banks, purchased bad debts and printed money. But the effect is akin to treating metastatic cancer with painkillers. It has not only let deeper problems fester, but also aggravated inequality. Bankers have continued to get rich using taxpayer dollars as both fuel and backstop. And printing money tends to disproportionately benefit a certain class. The rise in asset prices made the superrich even richer, while the median family income has dropped.

Overstabilization also corrects problems that ought not to be corrected and renders the economy more fragile; and in a fragile economy, even small errors can lead to crises and plunge the entire system into chaos. That’s what happened in 2008. More than four years after that financial crisis began, nothing has been done to address its root causes.

Our goal instead should be an antifragile system — one in which mistakes don’t ricochet throughout the economy, but can instead be used to fuel growth. The key elements to such a system are decentralization of decision making and ensuring that all economic and political actors have some “skin in the game.”

Two of the biggest policy mistakes of the past decade resulted from centralized decision making. First, the Iraq war, in addition to its tragic outcomes, cost between 40 and 100 times the original estimates. The second was the 2008 crisis, which I believe resulted from an all-too-powerful Federal Reserve providing cheap money to stifle economic volatility; this, in turn, led to the accumulation of hidden risks in the economic system, which cascaded into a major blowup.

Just as we didn’t forecast these two mistakes and their impact, we’ll miss the next ones unless we confront our error-prone system. Fortunately, the solution can be bipartisan, pleasing both those who decry a large federal government and those who distrust the market.

First, in a decentralized system, errors are by nature smaller. Switzerland is one of the world’s wealthiest and most stable countries. It is also highly decentralized — with 26 cantons that are self-governing and make most of their own budgetary decisions. The absence of a central monopoly on taxation makes them compete for tax and bureaucratic efficiency. And if the Jura canton goes bankrupt, it will not destabilize the entire Swiss economy.

In decentralized systems, problems can be solved early and when they are small; stakeholders are also generally more willing to pay to solve local challenges (like fixing a bridge), which often affect them in a direct way. And when there are terrible failures in economic management — a bankrupt county, a state ill-prepared for its pension obligations — these do not necessarily bring the national economy to its knees. In fact, states and municipalities will learn from the mistakes of others, ultimately making the economy stronger.

It’s a myth that centralization and size bring “efficiency.” Centralized states are deficit-prone precisely because they tend to be gamed by lobbyists and large corporations, which increase their size in order to get the protection of bailouts. No large company should ever be bailed out; it creates a moral hazard.

Consider the difference between Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, who are taught to “fail early and often,” and large corporations that leech off governments and demand bailouts when they’re in trouble on the pretext that they are too big to fail. Entrepreneurs don’t ask for bailouts, and their failures do not destabilize the economy as a whole.

Second, there must be skin in the game across the board, so that nobody can inflict harm on others without first harming himself. Bankers got rich — and are still rich — from transferring risk to taxpayers (and we still haven’t seen clawbacks of executive pay at companies that were bailed out). Likewise, Washington bureaucrats haven’t been exposed to punishment for their errors, whereas officials at the municipal level often have to face the wrath of voters (and neighbors) who are affected by their mistakes.

If we want our economy not to be merely resilient, but to flourish, we must strive for antifragility. It is the difference between something that breaks severely after a policy error, and something that thrives from such mistakes. Since we cannot stop making mistakes and prediction errors, let us make sure their impact is limited and localized, and can in the long term help ensure our prosperity and growth.

men are promiscuous, women reproduce (with) the powerful ...but that's old story, not the story!

In an bellicose age, military leaders come on top.  At first, that is.  Yet that can last awhile in a place like the US where Petreus goes against Obama's instincts with the Surge, fails, and then is appointed head of the CIA.  I include below Maureen Dowd's account of the love/fall-story of the generalissimo.   

As Lyndon Johnson said, the two things that make leaders stupid are envy and sex.

Macbeth kills a king out of envy. Egged on by an envious Iago, Othello smothers his wife out of a crazed fear of her having sex with his lieutenant.

Now another charismatic general has shattered his life and career over sex. When you’ve got a name like a Greek hero, and a nickname like a luscious fruit, isn’t hubris ripe to follow?

It’s been a steep fall for Peaches Petraeus, once the darling of Congress and journalists, Republicans and Democrats, Paula Broadwell and Jill Kelley.

Washington is suffused with schadenfreude. Yet President Obama and others felt genuinely sad to see a man so controlling about integrity and image — he warned protégés that “someone is always watching” — spin out of control on integrity and image. As Shakespeare wrote in “Othello”: “Reputation, reputation, reputation.”

As a West Point cadet, David Petraeus clambered up the social ladder by winning the superintendent’s daughter; now he has been brought down by his camp followers clambering up the social ladder.

Even when he was the C.I.A. director, Petraeus’s ego was so wrapped up in being a shiny military idol that, according to The Washington Post, he recently surprised guests at a D.C. dinner when he arrived to speak wearing his medals on the lapel of his suit jacket.

His fall started as Sophocles and turned sophomoric, a mind-boggling mélange of “From Here to Eternity,” “You’ve Got Mail,” “The Real Housewives of Centcom,” and “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” It features toned arms, slinky outfits, a cat fight, titillating e-mails, a military more consumed with sex than violence, a plot with more inconceivable twists than “Homeland,” and a Twitter’s-delight lexicon: an “embedded” mistress named Broadwell, a biography called “All In,” an other-other woman of Middle East ancestry who was a “social liaison” to the military, a shirtless F.B.I. agent crushing on the losing-her-shirt-to-debt Tampa socialite, a pair of generals helping the socialite’s twin sister with a custody case, and lawyers and crisis-management experts linked to Monica Lewinsky, John Edwards and the ABC show “Scandal.”

“This is The National Enquirer, ” an alarmed Senator Dianne Feinstein told Wolf Blitzer of CNN. If only it were that highbrow. Now that erotic activity is entwined with the Internet, rather than closeted in hideaway Capitol offices and Oval Office pantries, it’s even more likely to be a trip wire for history.

It is disturbing that an ethically sketchy, politically motivated F.B.I. agent could spark an incendiary federal investigation tunneling into private lives to help a woman he liked and later blow it up to hurt a president he didn’t like.

It’s also worrisome that the nation’s spymaster — who had presided in a military where adultery could result in court-martial — could not have found a more clandestine manner of talking naughty to his biographer babe than a Gmail drop box, a semiprivate file-sharing system used by terrorists, teenagers and authors.

It’s understandable that men accustomed to being away from their families and cloistered with other men in Muslim countries where drinking and blowing off steam are frowned upon might get used to cavorting on e-mail.

But Petraeus should have realized that the Chinese and Russians were snooping and sent Paula Broadwell an Enigma e-mail: “I would like your insights into the debate over COIN versus CT in Helmand Province. Our HVT kills are falling a little short of the mark. Let’s discuss.”

And Broadwell could have sent ones more like: “I’ve been reading Chapter 3 notes and the Galula theory of counterinsurgency confuses me. Hope you can clarify.”

The scandal is a good reminder that, although John McCain and Sarah Palin urge total trust and blank checks for the generals, these guys are human beings working under extremely stressful circumstances, and their judgments are not beyond reproach.

Petraeus’s Icarus flight began when he set himself above President Obama.

Accustomed to being a demigod, expert at polishing his own celebrity and swaying public opinion, Petraeus did not accept the new president’s desire to head for the nearest exit ramp on Afghanistan in 2009. The general began lobbying for a surge in private sessions with reporters and undercutting the president, who was trying to make a searingly hard call.

Petraeus rolled the younger commander in chief into going ahead with a bound-to-fail surge in Afghanistan, just as, half a century earlier, the C.I.A. had rolled Jack Kennedy into going ahead with the bound-to-fail Bay of Pigs scheme. Both missions defied logic, but the untested presidents put aside their own doubts and instincts, caving to experience.

Once in Afghanistan, Petraeus welcomed prominent conservative hawks from Washington think tanks. As Greg Jaffe wrote in The Washington Post, they were “given permanent office space at his headquarters and access to military aircraft to tour the battlefield. They provided advice to field commanders that sometimes conflicted with orders the commanders were getting from their immediate bosses.”

So many more American kids and Afghanistan civilians were killed and maimed in a war that went on too long. That’s the real scandal.    

The ReaderWave has it:


Look on the bright side. Finally, even people who don't belong to the ACLU are concerned about our intrusive spy state. If the Spook-in-Chief can have his privacy invaded. so can anyone. Even congress critters. Even presidents.

Now is as good a time as any to rethink the massive Homeland Security/spy state/military shadow government, an entity so monstrous that nobody is actually in charge of it. Let's repeal the Patriot Act. Let the Pentagon budget plummet over the fiscal cliff.

I spent most of my adult life in the same town where Peaches grew up. In recent years, Cornwall on the Hudson had begun to insidiously morph into Petraeusville. Hail-the-conquering-hero parades. Petraeus picnics. Petraeus posing with starry-eyed mentees. The presentation of custom-upholstered Petraeus memorial chairs to the public library.

Then there was the dreadful day when they renamed part of the main drag after the hometown hero. What used to be Quaker Avenue (because it meandered past the historic Friends' Meeting House) is now David Petraeus Drive. Peace was exchanged for war. The centuries-old Quakers in the cemetery next door must have been spinning in their graves.

If they will now un-rename it, I don't know. The locals are still in a state of stunned disbelief. But the meeting house motto still stands: "We utterly deny all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons, for any end or under any pretence whatsoever. And this is our testimony to the whole world."




Mary Scott
NY

No matter the scandal, there's always someone like the FBI agent ready to wrap it around the president's neck.

But the big picture here is, of course, the war in Afghanistan. You are right to remind us, Ms. Dowd, that the scandal here is those "killed and maimed in a war that went on too long." Just tragic.



Rima Regas
Mission Viejo, CA

I'm glad you're not mincing your words on this, either, Maureen.

I will go a bit further. This isn't just about reputations anymore. Petraeus, Allen and who else? Is this how our top military brass operates?

Today, I read that letters written by Generals Petraeus and Allen were presented in a legal custody battle having to do with Ms. Kelley's sister. Another curious news item popped up. Ms. Kelley, apparently called 911, asking to have people removed from her front lawn, and claiming "diplomatic inviolability," (sic). Craziness aside, it turns out this woman may have been given the title of honorary consul. By whom? Why? Why does a general who is managing a war have the time to send thousands of emails?

I'm glad Senator Feinstein reiterated that General Petraeus will testify in front of her committee regardless of his employment status. I hope she summons Allen, too.

Whoever takes over as secretaries of Defense and CIA had better bring a broom, a very large bottle of disinfectant and a copy of their ethics textbook from college. This bizarre story reeks of one thing only: corruption.




Bosco Ho
Boston, MA

Thank you Ms Dowd. It is amazing that you have captured everything relating to this - still unraveling - mess in one column. And you didn't even use the name 'Barry' once!

Your final paragraph is especially poignant and heartfelt but I'd like to turn this statement, "a military more consumed with sex than violence," around by asking: why is it that violence is okay but consensual sex is not? Like you said, war violence kills and maims. But consensual sex, real or electronic, only exposes the foolishness or even the lonely life of a cloistered military and its groupie. Which one is worse?




Richard
Bozeman, MT

I don't want Peaches to appear before congress. This tedious fiasco wastes time in the way that Clinton wasted a rare opportunity. The press should be hounddogging the Republicans for their tax plans rather than obsessing about private email. But this story is too tasty it seems.




Henry Stites
Scottsdale, Arizona

Every kid that is killed in Afghanistan from this point on is pure murder. Frankly, I would like to pin Petraeus's medals to his forehead for pushing the surge, which accomplished nothing more than pouring more blood and gold down the toilet for no better reason than giving generals like him a place to win a fourth star. Our nation has been at war for 11 years. It is time we, as in we the people, demand our soldiers come home. There is nothing to win in Afghanistan but more heartache and pain. The generals embed cute girls with nice arms with them in their compounds to write self serving biographies and fly around in heliocopters, while the common soldiers are out getting blown up by IEDs. It makes me sick to my stomach as it should every single American who hates to see young people murdered and maimed for no better reason that an extra chapter or two about reputation, reputation, reputation.



Stu Freeman
Brooklyn, N.Y.

Finally Americans are talking about Afghanistan!




Liz Dickson
Burke, VA

This is what happens when you label everyone who dons a military uniform a hero even though it's been a voluntary force for almost 40 years and the people who sign up very specifically know or should know what they are getting into.

I think the hero term is thrown about because of the failing sense of these two wars. No easier way to bulk up support of a failed venture than to talk about the honor and heroism involved. Thrown in enormous lobbyist efforts, various medals and badges, almost unlimited monetary support, and excellent benefits - at least while you wear the uniform - and it's no wonder these wars have continued despite all evidence as to lack of effectiveness.

Yes, the emperor's clothes are now being removed from Petraeus, bit by bit. I was just commenting to my husband last night about how we never see a photo of Petraeus wearing a suit, even though he's been retired for over a year - now I hear that even in a civilian suit he sometimes wears his medals. That would have looked strange on even on TV!


tom mcmahon
millis ma

Syria is alsmost at war with Turkey, Iran still seeks nuclear weapons. The Israeli's threaten, no actually promise that Iran will never be a nuclear state. Greece austerity measures are causing social unrest with the same spreading to Spain.

The best we can do, or write and discuss is Sex, sex and spies ? The people of the United States are nuts. I mean really who cares about everyones sex lives except those unhappy with their own



John McBride
Seattle, WA

Maureen, you ask most "real" people, those of us down here, in the trenches, living from anxiety to anxiety, about the Petraeus "scandal" and we'll yawn.

This is a D.C. soap opera. Not good soap opera, but soap opera nonetheless.

I don't care.

You know what I care about? Were there warrants needed and obtained? Is the "man" Petraeus one more victim of all those Bush era laws that Congress should have revoked several years ago, if they should have passed them at all. If he committed "crime" where's the due process?

Congress wouldn't impeach Clinton for betraying Hillary right in the White House and Washington D.C. wants me to be outraged about General Petraeus. I wonder how many in the nation's elite who are rending their garments and gathering stones shouldn't be out there in the ring with the good general or better yet, instead of him.

If you're going to cite Shakespeare cite the appropriate character, Julius Caesar. Marc Antony's eulogy is apropos:

"But yesterday the word of Caesar might
Have stood against the world: now lies he there,
And none so poor to do him reverence.
O masters, if I were disposed to stir
Your hearts and minds to mutiny and rage,
I should do Brutus wrong and Cassius wrong,
Who, you all know, are honourable men."

Ya,I know how "honourable" all of you outraged and guilt-free ruling class figureheads are.



RLW
Chicago

Thank you for reminding us that, but for Petraeus who squeezed Obama into the "surge", we would now be mostly out of Afghanistan. Unfortunately Eisenhower, who knew the hubris of generals first hand was the only president who recognized the overreach of the military and its sycophantic Congressional supporters. Hopefully whoever replaces General Allen has learned something from this mess.




cboy
nyc

What do you expect when you let heterosexual men, with their uncontrollable impulses and desires, into the military?



Paul
Nevada

Great job Maureen, you made the real point, while these people preened and pranced to polish their own status and reputation real people were dying and being maimed. Though you do caustic better than anyone in your business with a whole bunch of style and grace I will take this opportunity to be more blunt. It is sick. The nation fell over itself because some prancing organization climber shoved his fruit salad in everyones face and they all folded when they had better hands. Congressmen and journalists of all stripes gave this guy a pass when they should have been saying "where were you when the dumb idea of these two wars were being debated?" Hopefully the cult of adoration for all things military will now come to a close. It is about time. We couldn't have found a better chump to bring it down the curtain on this era than this guy.



rhdelp
Ellicott City, MD

Your final sentence says it all. It not only went on too long, but we know the additional war in Iraq was instigated by the former Commander in Chief, George Bush, was based on lies to Congress and the country and he was not held accountable for his deception.

Sending troops into Afghanistan with sub par head gear, which led to private citizens, personally opposed to war contributing funds for proper protection, was just pathetic. Insufficient armor on vehicles led to additional injuries and deaths that could have been avoided. No one in command was held responsible for that gross negligence.

Presently Veterans are faced with lost or destroyed records for their service in Iraq and Afghanistan which is causing extreme strife for many. Will anyone be capable of retrieving or be held accountable for that?

This may seem like a small issue in the scheme of things but the military failed to bury the dead in Arlington in the proper sites and treated the bodies in Delaware with total disrespect.

Allen and Patraeus chose their priorities, the incredible amount of time spent communicating with those women, while those under their command suffered is the crime. Show no mercy, let them fall on their own swords.




Rebecca
Maryland

Millions of Americans who've been hurt by the Recession are enraged by the clamorous dire warnings of budget deficits and their to-be-feared consequences, because we know full well that the groundwork for such crises was laid down by unnecessary wars and military expansion beginning in the Bush years, to say nothing of those years' deregulation and financial crime spree. Once again, the hypocrisy of the Republican Conservative machine is "All In" this scandal, absorbing our tax dollars and endangering the US as it is once again a global focus of criticism and ridicule. This scandal exposes the cult of military power and license that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, while endeavoring to shame and silence Americans who marched in protest. There is no "high achievement" in endangering the lives and future prospects of your fellow countrymen. Cut the salaries, pull the medals off, and downsize our military to refine its purpose to only the most essential defense.




ben pinczewski
new york, new york

The greatest issue of alarm here is the actions of the FBI agent. It shows just how vulnerable every citizen is if a rogue agent acting out of personal enmity or to impress or grind an axe can ruin people's lives. Imagine if this happened to a former General and head of the CIA what an agent like that could do to an ordinary citizen. E mails that do not detail illegal activity are nonetheless ransacked and made public? When the Bureau doesn't proceed fast enough he consults Congressman who get involved! Wow, talk about Big Brother.


Diana Moses
Arlington, MA

"So many more American kids and Afghanistan civilians were killed and maimed in a war that went on too long. That’s the real scandal."

While the affair is said to have begun after Petraeus (looks Latinate, not Greek, to me) retired from the military, since he and Broadwell engaged in some sort of collaboration, in connection with her research, during his time in Afghanistan, there could still be a sense of Nero fiddling while Rome burned, it seems to me.



Dave Viens
Pacific Northwest

Anyone at that level of power dumb enough to use a g-mail draft dropbox to conduct an extra-marital affair is too dumb to be in such a position.

There are no surprises in any of this, including the predictable mess of the Afghan war.

Ahh, Afghanistan! Graveyard of empires.



boomer
Massachusetts

"the real scandal" is horrifying, and heartbreaking.

And General Allen has time for 20,000 + emails to Ms. Tampa over two years???

I have worked on Wall Street, taught in various schools, and been a full-time parent. I have NEVER had time for that kind of personal correspondence. How can these men be entrusted with so much and yet be willing to prioritize this nonsense in their workday? It's not the sex as much as the cheating on their jobs (not to mention the obvious security risks) that bothers me. We pay them, and they've been playing on the job --- to our children's peril. Shameful.



Donald Seekins
Waipahu HI

Petraeus seems to have been Patton and MacArthur rolled up into one big package. Thanks to this scandal, I trust he won't become Julius Caesar.



davidrs
Hamilton NY

Thank you for calling attention to the most important part of this 'scandal'--the prolonging of the Afghanistan conflict by Petraeus. Someone had to say it, and you did.



sdavidc9
Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut

I doubt if honor was ever all that prevalent. What was undoubtedly more prevalent than today was talk and admiration of honor, but this was the sort of talk one gets about the emperor's new clothes. The honor that was praised was in fact a carefully constructed and burnished image.



Elizabeth Bennett
Arizona

You are so right that the real scandal is that so many Americans and Afghanistan civilians have been killed and maimed. General Petraeus is no hero--his "surge" extended the war and resulted in many more deaths. His hubris and ignorance in sending compromising messages via email to his mistress is especially shocking since he was the head of the CIA. I thought everyone knew that you don't send anything by email that needs to be private, but that the head of our intelligence service either didn't know or didn't care is truly frightening.



Anetliner Netliner
Washington, DC area

I don't condone sexual harassment and I'm not a fan of adultery, but...

The FBI appears to have determined that General Petraeus did not commit any crime, nor had security been breached. His affair with Paula Broadwell was over by the time the FBI investigation had concluded. While General Petraeus committed a significant lapse of personal judgment and violated his marriage vows, he was also a tremendously capable foreign policy, defense and strategic expert whose service made America far more secure. Unless there is considerably more to this matter than has been yet revealed, I am not at all sure that he should have been required to resign.

I will reserve judgment on whether General Allen's e-mails were inappropriate, pending the outcome of that inquiry. In the interim, let's remember that General Allen has serious and important responsibilities to perform and allow him appropriate due process.

What can be said is that it's unfortunate that America's intelligence and military establishments have been turned into a reality show spectacle since November 9. I hope that this was necessary, but I have my doubts.



James. jordan
Falls Church, Va

Ms. Dowd,
This was an interesting read. I don't want to comment on the affairs because passion and infatuation are an absolute mystery to me. I was in the Navy for 24 years and have been married 53 years but at 75, I still cannot understand the mysteries of females and their strong feelings for romance. As a student of E.O. Wilson, the father of sociobiology, I still remember an experiment in which females by the dilation of their pupils as the measure of excitement/interest when viewing certain pictures were a lot more passionate than males. Males just were not as excitable except when a picture of a field of grass landscape was flashed. Females had more interest in pictures of a female with baby, nude male, nude female and a landscape scene, in that order. The interests of men were the reverse. The amazing finding was that the females just had more interest in all of the pictures than the males.

Men just seem to have the need to dominate and amazingly women are attracted to the dominant males. Then there is the old Navy/Marine Corps tale that men only have a fixed amount of blood, which if used for an erection drains the blood from their brain and they become completely stupid. I think both came into play with the General.

This essay summed the moral of this story very well in the last two sentences.

"So many more American kids and Afghanistan civilians were killed and maimed in a war that went on too long. That’s the real scandal." 4-Stars to this close.



Sandy Eggo Squat
Spring Valley, CA 91977

Advice too late for these general officers, but to others who might be contemplating an affair outside of their lawful marriage: Say it with candy, say it with flowers, but never ever, my son, say it in ink.



George Myers
New Bern, NC

Yes Maureen you hit the nail on the head. The surge in Afghanistan is the real scandal.




Christine McMorrow
Waltham, MA

Maureen is dead on with the real scandal here (no pun intended). But what concerns me most with all of these revelations that, frankly, would not make a very good movie script given the tawdriness, contrived sexual double entendres in book titles and names, and general messiness. I mean, what's the point? That people are fallible?

In addition to the very real shame of prolonged war, I wonder how these people--all of them--have so much time to spend on sexual titillation. The FBI, the generals, the socialite hanger ons. Volumes of emails, volumes of investigations, it is totally exhausting. How could Petraeus run a huge agency, and the FBI spies spend so much time and money on a pure fishing mission launched by a "friend" of friends on the very scantest of complaints?

We pay for all this, folks. We pay military salaries and the salaries of the FBI, freelancers or not.

Now wouldn't all those salaries go a long way to paying down the deficit? We have real problems these days, and all our handwringing over loose military morals isn't going to help the country and our newly engergized president start solving them.



C. Coffey
Jupiter, Fl.

Most of the comments here seem ready to defend the Director of the CIA and former Commander of both of our foreign wars with the concept of 'what's the big deal with a little adultery'?

The big deal is that many less senior officers have been court martialed out of the military, or had to resign their commissions. The other big deal is that the CIA is in the business of protecting our secrets and monitoring the activities of foreign nations in order to safeguard our national security. The Director of this agency, just like a General in the field no less, cannot have events spin out of control.

Adultery is usually a nasty business with secrets and lies to the injured spouse. This requires a great deal of attention and a life of personal clandestine behavior. The only sneaking around I want from our most secret agency's leader is against our adversaries around the world.

Finally, did I tell you that General Patreous is reported to be a Christian Fundamentalist, who has presided over Religious retreats that in many instances were mandatory for ordinary service members? See Huffington Post, and MRFF, Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

Sometimes a tragedy is forthcoming and the public has the right to know about it.




Don P.
Perth Amboy, NJ

Maureen, your last paragraph is the most important message in your Op-Ed...the real scandal is that so many more American kids, our soldiers, and Afghanistan civilians were killed of maimed in a war that went on too long!

The sex scandal involving General Patraeus while shocking and disappointing is simply not worthy of all of the attention that it is being given. No crimes were committed, no security compromised, and no national secrets leaked, it was just sex!

Americans need to stop clinging to some mythical, Puritanical views on sex and end its fascination with National Enquirer type stories. We have far more important things to be concerned about.

Instead we need to be focused on what really matters. Tens of thousands of Americans in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut are still without power, heat, water, sanitary facilities, adequate food, medical care, and their homes and lives have been devastated and or destroyed! Our nation needs to restore our economic vitality, create more jobs, improve public education, repair our critical infrastructure, solve our budget, tax, revenue and deficit problems, and help improve and expand our middle-class, just to name a few things we should be focused on!

Yes the real scandal is a war that has gone on too long and even worse is how poorly our Veterans are treated by our government when they return home or attempt to seek benefits they earned and deserve!



j24
CT

In the case of Jill Kelley is even more frightening. Consider that a socialite not a historian, not military advisor, not even a family member has access to a military leader to the count of thousands of emails! And, Mrs. Kelley is a super secrete special Ambassador to South Korea, given the right to special FBI backup in a catfight?

The problematic issue is that we are looking at an almost feudal system with high level courtesans possibly calling shots. The one arena thought safe from House Wives of Tampa has been self-inflected with another version of the Kardashians.

Now wonder why the assault and harassment of women in the military is tolerated.

The highest levels of our Armed Forces seem to have a groupie mentality when it comes to women,while young men and women are dying for their country under the command of the pre-occupied.




Pragmatic
San Francisco, CA

Loved your column Maureen but why are we spending so much time on a sex scandal involving consenting adults when female soldiers are being raped and afraid to complain because they have to do it 'through the chain of command'? When as much outrage is expressed about those rapes as about these infidelities, maybe, just maybe, we will have gotten our priorities straight.



Matthew
San Francisco

I'm confused why the President accepted Petraeus's resignation. Doesn't that just signal to would-be blackmailers that exposing adultery (which is probably more common that many would like to admit) is an effective tool for extorting intelligence?

From what I've read, Petraeus did not commit a crime nor did he breach security. Unless there is more to the story than what has currently been reported, it appears that the only reason for his resignation was cheating on his wife. If President Obama had rejected his resignation, he could have made clear that cheating on your spouse is a purely private matter that will not cost your job and sent the message to our enemies that knowledge of an adulterous affair is not a useful way to blackmail or extort our officials.

I'm sure the moralists among us will reply that the social shame that accompanies publicity of an affair is enough to make the blackmail effective. However, given the nature of the CIA's work, if some social clucking is sufficient reason for an intelligence officer to betray U.S. intelligence efforts, then that person probably isn't fit for the job in the first place.



Tim
Glencoe, IL

Rules to live by:

The bottom 99%: prudence, temperance, justice, courage, faith, hope, and charity.
The top 1%: greed, envy, lust, pride, wrath, gluttony, and sloth.

Do we really want to funnel ever greater power and resources to the top 1%?


anthony weishar
Fairview Park, OH

Ms. Dowd, great analysis of ego and power, society groupies, politicized military strategy, the consequences of being a not too wise demigod, and the "collateral damage."



Sajwert
NH

I paid little if any attention to Patraeus in the past, and have learned more than I could have wanted to know from your article, Maureen.

And it is far less uplifting than anything one might read in the Enquirer. The problem with touting oneself as a model for rectitude is that the spotlights that shine on you are of a higher wattage than on those who generally keep themselves in the background. so the flaws are seen more sharply.

"What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive" is probably appropriately here also.



Robert Henry Eller
Milan, Italy

"So many more American kids and Afghanistan civilians were killed and maimed in a war that went on too long. That’s the real scandal."

Finally, a truly appropriate post-mortem to this menagerie (in every sense).

It's not the gratuitous sex. It's the needless death and destruction.

The pro-war military is still trying to prove that Vietnam was indeed a missed opportunity, when in fact it was an avoidable debacle.

Well, they've now proved what Vietnam really was twice over, in Iraq and Afghanistan. But they won't admit it.

Meanwhile, those who did learn the lessons of Vietnam, Senator Kerry, General Powell, are vilified to this day.

Thanks, Ms. Dowd.




Steve Singer
Chicago

No we aren't. There's no debate. No anti-war marches fill the streets day-after-day. No teach-in's or sit-in's paralyzing college campuses. No "Stop the Draft" week.

Why? Because nobody's being drafted to fight in Afghanistan.

I'm a veteran of late-60's / early-70's civil strife on-campus and off. I remember it well, especially its scalding heat, the absolute fury boiling everywhere; pro-war; anti-war; "America, love it or leave it!"; "Amerika is devouring its children!". A bath in acid.

Nothing remotely like that in America today because nobody in that 17-28 year-old demographic group risks having their civilian-lives upended then ripped from their hands. They don't wake up in the morning facing forced imprisonment into an Army whose training cadre despises them. They won't be brutalized by that same cadre during basic and advanced MOS training then flushed into a stupid, pointless overseas conflict in which their assigned role is "cannon-fodder".

That's one difference.

Another is superb news management by the Pentagon's public-relations bureaucracy. The Pentagon learned some hard lessons about cultivating and managing public opinion from its Vietnam debacle. The sheer bloody-awfulness, utter stupidity and futility of our Afghan military misadventure isn't served to the American public the same way that Vietnam's was, front-row-center night-after-night on network television news, and at at dinner time.



Z_i_am
New Jersey

It looks to me like the military just reflects the rest of our culture; the top 1% operates by different rules from the other 99%.



Doc B
Midwest

Two words: "Acquired narcissism."

Very difficult, from what I have studied, to be waited upon hand and foot in any role or status in life, and not slowly be drawn into the trap of thinking too highly of one's own power and invulnerability and forget how to empathize with the consequences of one's actions on others.



BrandonM
nyc

What's really interesting about this article -- and the only thing that will be remembered or debated by a very few historians and academics -- is the third to last paragraph where Maureen equates the surge to the Bay of Pigs fiasco. I hope she's wrong but I suspect she's right. In another country putting such an important point so late in a column might be considered burying the lead...but not in the here and now. Our soldiers deserve to be treated better than political pawns.



SBevilacqua
Wisconsin

Thank you, Maureen. As a civilian who served at a provincial reconstruction team in a far-flung corner of Afghanistan(and as one who vociferously opposed the surge for reasons obvious to those of us with boots on the ground), once again you have hit the nail on the head. The real scandal is the hubris of a public servant who thought he could manipulate a commander in chief into sending more American men and women to their deaths whilst he played footsie with his biographer. I hope history is very unkind to General Peaches Patraeus.




JoJo
Boston, MA

"So many more American kids and Afghanistan civilians were killed and maimed in a war that went on too long. That’s the real scandal."

I agree. I think our moral priorities are skewed. Too much emphasis on sex. Clinton gave us a surplus, prosperity and peace, but he engaged in extramarital foreplay, so he was publicly humiliated and impeached.

GW Bush ignored warnings about 9/11, started an entire trillion dollar war in Iraq that killed at least a hundred thousand people without necessity, let New Orleans drown, lost what may have been our last opportunity to avert climate change, let the economy tank, our debt balloon, unemployment skyrocket, and introduced torture into our military, but he's sexually pure, as far as we know, so he's still considered morally upright.



bklynbar
bklyn, ny

It's nice to hear that the top brass live so well in Tampa; wish we could take these party animals down a notch and give our military men and women the support that they need both overseas and for their families in the USA while they are deployed.



Star
California

I am so over these men and women in positions paid with tax dollars having no moral character. Come on, head of the United Stated of America's Central Intelligence Agency and you have extra time on your hands to some lame affair? Really now, I home school two children, keep my household in shape, pay the bills, end up exhausted by 9:00 at night, but wishing I could have an extra few hours to get more done - and I get no salary. I just hope they replace Petraeus with someone who has come up through the ranks and truly earned it.




Scott
Atlantic beach, FL

Conducting an affair with someone else's spouse requires premeditated dishonesty, a willingness to lie to those you have sworn to be truthful with, sneaking, plotting and risk taking. It also requires large amounts of time that is unaccounted for, and being a good actor, as in, "Honest, Dear. I was caught in traffic for two hours."

So, Gen. Patreaus has proved himself good at all of these things.

So remind me: why is his downfall considered a "loss" for President Obama?




jimbo
seattle

I served in the Air Force for 22 years, and retired as a colonel in 1980. Sorry if I offend your delicate sensitivities, but the military has always been about sex and alcohol. Happy hours at the Officer's Club, very frequent trips to everywhere, Officer's professional schools at Maxwell AFB, in Montgomery Alabama. Montgomery was dry in '65, but the young ladies had open access to the casual bar in the officer's club, where they could drink, dance, and meet college educated junior, middle grade, and senior officers. If your next assignment carried the risk of death, dismemberment, or prisoner status, who cared? My generation seemed to be capable of being more discreet.

When I went to Vietnam in 1966, I brought a collection of Kipling with me, because he had brilliant insight into the far East and military cultures.

Some examples:

Ship me somewhere east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
where there ain't no ten commandments, and a man can raise a thirst.
We ain't no thin red heroes nor we ain't no blackguards too,
but single men in barracks most remarkable like you.
And if our conduct isn't all your fancy paints,
Well, single men in barracks don't grow into plaster saints.

There is nothing new under the sun. I don't think Petraeus should have resigned. JFK had his fun, and maybe Eisenhower did also with his beautiful Brit driver. Not all indulge, but some do. Most males are slaves to their hormones. Which is why females are superior.



C.W.
West Coast

I'm not interested in Petraeus' peccadillos but I do fault him for his arrogant insistence on the surge in Afghanistan which has been a failure. Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy and nation-building there has cost us billions of dollars and too many lives. And I agree with you, that's the real scandal. Kudos to Maureen Dowd for being one of the few journalists with enough gumption to criticize the lionized Petraeus. The rest of the media have been shamefully obsequious.




Capt. Penny
Silicon Valley

Ms Dowd,
You buried the lede, says this father of an active duty soldier. Afghanistan is not past tense, it's a continuing scandal.

The real scandal is that my son and hundreds of thousands of others will serve in Afghanistan in the next 2 years - long after we should have been gone.

My neighbor's son served a couple tours there between 2010 and 2012, returning with a clear sense of core problems that have never been resolved and never will be, including the inability of US military to grasp that some things aren't worth doing, even though they can do them.




the doctor
allentown, pa

This scandal illustrates once again that older, powerful, self-absorbed and arrogant men - once smitten - will engage in the kind of reckless behavior illustrated by our CIA Director. I can only conclude General Pertreaus, like many tragic figures before him, lived in a make-believe, third-person world and somehow came to believe he was immune from the consequences of his actions.



Stu
west mystic connecticut

Petraeus is merely the cutting edge of the military elite that we have allowed. Their arrogance and entitlement matches that of our--95 percent always re-elected--political royalty. Corruption and selective morality is typical of any ruling class.. The fix? A professional officer corps held to strict standards under a tight civilian leash. Those officers need to lead a citizen military chosen by required selective service. There's nothing like a good old-fashioned draft to keep the politicos who are so anxious to send in the troops on their toes. And maybe the American public will take more of a personal interest in their wars when it's their kiddies that get shipped out. A really engaged public will implement tight term limits and get rid of our professional political royalty.



Bruce
Pensacols

Probably by sometime Friday, more journalistic energy and resources will have been spent on this scandal than that expended in questioning the validity of the second war in Iraq. And soon after, the same could be said about Congressional questioning. There's your failure in leadership.



richard kopperdahl
new york city

Wearing his medals on his civilian suit coat is a most pathetic image, Maureen. Reminds me that during the last presidential debate, Romney's lapel flag was twice a big as Obama's.

Ike had his lady driver for comfort during WWII, Bill, his pleasures in the Oval office, FDR and JFK had pretty much, whoever they wanted but were protected by the reporters who covered them The ones who stay on the straight and narrow, Carter and Romney, we find kind of creepy when all is said and done.

Maybe we should concern ourselves less with the sexual lives of others. Seems to me we have a few really pressing things to deal with now.



retired teacher
Austin, Texas

"So many more American kids and Afghanistan civilians were killed and maimed in a war that went on too long. That’s the real scandal. "

Thank you for reminding us of the real tragedy behind all the sordid headlines. Our military is over-delployed after two wars. It is ime for us to get out of Afghanistan. Why are we staying another two years?



CSpade
Brewster, MA

"So many more American kids and Afghanistan civilians were killed and maimed in a war that went on too long. That’s the real scandal."

It's more than a scandal; it's a hideous decision most government officials and the main stream media seem intent on ignoring.



Sophia
bangor, maine

The bigger they come, the harder they fall. I agree that the real scandal is how Petraeus rolled the president about the surge. Unnecessary American and Afghani deaths just so the general could get his way.

I never liked Petraeus. I'm not unhappy he's gone. I hope the President now has enough trust in himself to not be rolled again by another of these power-hungry men.

Sex and the internet. Who will be the next important man to succumb to the thrills of emails from attractive women stroking their ego? Or have they learned from this? Probably not. It's an old tune, played out on modern technology which makes it so easy and exciting. Petraeus (and Allen) certainly are not the first and will not be the last to get 'tripped up'.



Bryan Barrett
Malvern, Pa.

"That's the real scandal'; indeed. You are correct. That the misbehavior of any General Officer, who had presided over the command of a contemporary GI, while he so dishonored himself, in the full knowledge of the Code of Military Justice, is to the average veteran, astounding. That this story would coincide with the celebration of Veterans Day, which for those of us who have had the enormous privilege of serving in some small way, in whatever branch of the service, with pride and honor; if this episode of selfishness, if proven to be correct, proves to be an example of a lack of honor which is enough to consign a so called officer and a gentleman, to the lowest level of dishonor, is reprehensible.

Honor has in recent years virtually disappeared in civilian life, whether it is even referred to in passing in the service academies, or in ROTC, or in OCS, today is unknown to me, and clearly these disclosures have exposed the fact that the academies have a serious problem to rectify. The fundamental idea of honor in military service was, when I was a young man, more than a half century ago, a well understood concept. And among those with whom I served, both enlisted, and officers, was well understood.

General Petreus and General Allen have their battles to fight on the civilian and military justice levels. Should they be found guilty on charges, not yet published, I will be sad, and sincerely hope and pray that their successors will prove to be above reproach.



szel
Loiza, Puerto Rico

Poor on Shakespeare.

Macbeth did not kill his king out of envy. We don't know how to figure Iago's motives -- there are too many of them. Shakespeare wrote, but did not advocate "reputation" as the key ethical imperative and is not personally responsible for what his characters, many of them reprobates, say.

Your professors have failed you, and Congress should look into this malfeasance.



SW
Los Angeles, CA

So sad that the concepts of duty and honor seem to stop at the waist for so many of those in power. If those in the highest levels of the military and the government can't be trusted to control their own sexual urges, how can they be trusted to control the lives of those in their command and to guide the destiny of their country? To claim "these guys are human beings working under extremely stressful circumstances" seems a rather flippant excuse that tries to explain everything and yet excuses nothing. They cheated, they lied, they tried to evade responsibility for their actions all the while insisting their subordinates uphold the very virtues they mocked. But off they go into comfortable retirement, probably write still another book extolling their wisdom and virtues and all the while collect outrageous fees for speaking engagements. Alas.



Prunella
Florida

Yes, and as the war raged into overtime, the deaths, all of them senseless, the traumatic brain injuries, the amputations, and the permanent damage to our soldiers minds all mounting, so did the promotions, and the shiny medals. Therein lies the sting of these senseless wars: that's how to get your promotion and your next decoration, you keep the war raging. Bring on the peace and the opportunity for advancement and pretty ribbons withers. Hmmm...makes one wonder if there was ever a promotion used as hush-money.



molosgatos
ca

There are two major issues here that bother me. The first is that integrity seems not to matter only when it applies to marriage. What if David Petraeus' integrity failed when he was testifying before Congress or when he was paying his taxes or when he was reporting what happened in Benghazi? Why do we presume that a man who will go to such great lengths to lie to his wife and family will tell the truth in all other things?

Second, all those who wish to excuse his behavior forget that there are soldiers and civilians in the military and in the CIA who have to live by rules that Petraeus felt did not apply to him. I have known several people who also were "good" people but whose careers were nonetheless ruined because they violated the codes of conduct that some now wish to waive for Petraeus. It is unfair to the many who live by the rules to exempt him from them.



Mary Wickens
East Lansing MI

Eisenhower said beware of the military-industrial complex. While we are having these fiscal cliff discussions, maybe we should take a hard look at the value of this inflated military that thrives while soldiers and civilians are dying.




citizenk
New York

I think the officer class has always had a sense of privilege in our military. I'll never forget being re-assigned from training for almost a week to help clear a few acres of brush at my boot camp. Turns out it was for an extension of the officer's golf course.



Reid B
Takoma Park, Md

Good column, conclusion. Maybe all this foolishness will help take the shine off the machinery of our permanent warfare and point us in a more positive direction. One can only hope.



arthur
Arizona

Obama showed extremely bad judgment in appointing a military officer to head the CIA. Aside from Petraeus' personal mind-set and past attempts to subvert the Commander-in-Chief's policy in Afghanistan, the CIA should never be in the hands of the military. The CIA should be under civilian leadership as the military should be under civilian control. Petraus remained a military man with a military mind-set. Meanwhile, military intelligence had expanded dangerously during the Bush Administration, involving itself in non-military foreign affairs. We have an entrenched military-industrial complex resulting in unending wars in which our resources and treasury are depleted and our young men are dying.

While we fight in Afghanistan, the Chinese have bought the concession to a huge copper mine. While we involve ourselves militarily in Africa, the Chinese buy oil in Sudan and minerals wherever they can find them and engage in buying minds and hearts of Africans. Iraqi and Kuwaiti concessions did not go overwhelmingly to American companies. While we back the most reactionary forces in Latin America, the Chinese are signing contracts for minerals and engaging in "soft power". Meanwhile the Chinese own much of our foreign debt.

The only way to ease back on the militarization of America is to allow the "financial cliff" to become a reality. Afterwards, the Republicans dare not reinstate middle class tax cuts. But Obama doesn't have the guts.