New Search

If you are not happy with the results below please do another search

797 search results for: MG Turner

737

Iran and Iraq–Deja Vu All Over Again?

/1 Comment/in

I find that Daily Beast/Newsweek columnist Peter Beinart is writing some of the most incisive commentary on the Middle East these days. His views on Israel, coming from a committed American Jew who is able to see flaws in the current Israeli government policies and rhetoric, is a welcome tonic for this committed American Jew. One column of his last week was especially apt, Experts Say Iran Attack is Irrational, Yet Hawks are Winning Debate. There is a disturbing deja vu in the campaign to attack Iran being mounted by some elected officials and coming from some quarters of the American opinion establishment–whether the attack would be done by Israel or the U.S.  Beinart, author of a forthcoming book called The Crisis of Zionism, is determined to slow the momentum toward war. I was especially appreciative of the penultimate paragraph in last Tuesday’s column:

“And who are the hawks who have so far marginalized the defense and intelligence establishments in both Israel and the U.S.? They’re a collection of think-tankers and politicians, most absolutely sincere, in my experience. But from Rick Santorum to John McCain to Elliott Abrams to John Bolton, their defining characteristic is that they were equally apocalyptic about the threat from Iraq, and equally nonchalant about the difficulties of successfully attacking it.The story of the Iraq debate was, in large measure, the story of their triumph over the career military and intelligence officials—folks like Eric Shinseki and Joseph Wilson—whose successors are now warning against attacking Iran.”

To recap, General Eric Shinseki was punished and sidelined by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld after he had the temerity to testify to Congress that stablizing Iraq after Saddam’s fall would take “several hundred thousand soldiers.” And in the case of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, it should be remembered that before his wife’s CIA identity was revealed by multiple members of the Bush Administration, he had published numerous op-eds and given many interviews urging that the U.S. not invade Iraq. His background and experience–which included his key role as the last U.S. diplomat in Baghdad during Operation Desert Shield, before the beginning of the first Gulf War–informed his opposition to the 2003 invasion, not a reluctance to be tough with Saddam. Both Shinseki and Wilson, and it must be said, Valerie Plame, were caught up in the Bush Administration’s mania for war with Iraq, and the whole country, indeed the whole world, has been paying the price ever since. I see that the two situations–the Iraq situation and the one with Iran–are dissimilar in important ways, but I still believe we must ask what costs may an attack on Iran exact from the U.S. and the rest of the world? I’m glad that a well-informed Peter Beinart is asking this question.

**Full disclosure: I edited and published The Politics of Truth–A Diplomat’s Memoir: Inside the War that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity by Ambassador Joseph Wilson (Carroll & Graf, 2004)

738

Original Bretton Woods Transcript Found

/2 Comments/in

A pretty amazing discovery: an original transcript of the 1944 Bretton Woods economic conference has surfaced. Evidently, all accounts since the end of WWII have relied on second-hand sources and recollections, but an 800-page transcript of the summit that viewed the wreckage from the war and set the course for the postwar financial structure–when the World Bank and the IMF were set up–has now been found in the US Treasury Library. The transcript would be of tremendous value to historians and scholars in an annotated edition, and I’ve contacted the Daily Telegraph‘s business commentator Jeremy Warner who broke this story to see if he’d be interested in developing a book with me and the people who discovered the transcript.

In the attached black & white photo, US Treasury Secretary is seated on the right next to John Maynard Keynes. In his Daily Telegraph blog Warner has written about the discovery of the transcript and observes that:

“Those who have seen it say it is hard to point to any outright revelation about the talks, in which for Britain, the economist John Maynard Keynes was a leading player. But the level of intellectual debate is said to have been extraordinarily impressive, with exactly the same arguments as to voting rights and undue Western influence at the IMF and World Bank as exist today. The Indian delagation is said to have been particularly outspoken, despite the fact that India was still then a colony of the UK. It was at Bretton Woods that Keynes identified one of the key problems at the heart of international economics – that imbalances in trade are next to impossible to resolve in a fixed exchange rate system without surplus countries accepting that they have as much of an obligation to do something about them as the offending deficit countries. As the eurozone is demonstrating all over again, the lessons have plainly not be learned.”

I’ve been fascinated by the conference for a long time, not least because it was held at the majestic Mt. Washington Hotel, near where I went to college in New Hampshire, at Franconia College. Bretton Woods is an alternate name for the hotel, and the moniker has also always been used to describe the historic conference. Useful histories of the hotel and the conference can be found here and here.

739

#Fridayreads/Feb. 24–“Something Fierce”

/0 Comments/in ,

#Fridayreads Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter, Carmen Aguirre’s chronicle of her upbringing in flight from Pinochet’s Chile, winner of the 2012 Canada Reads: True Stories competition. Aguirre’s family first fled to Canada after Allende’s fall, but her firebrand mother moved them to Bolivia, on the doorstep of their homeland, so she could participate in the revolutionary struggle to liberate their country. When Carmen turns 18, she becomes an active member of the struggle. Gripping and good.
Also, finishing John D. MacDonald’s the chiller, The Executioners, the 1957 novel on which the movie “Cape Fear” would be based.

740

Book Camp–Fostering Innovation Since 2010

/4 Comments/in , , ,

Book Camp on Sunday, February 12 was a spirited ‘unconference,’ a confab of experimentally-inclined publishing people enjoyed enormously by the 150 + plus in attendance, including me.

If you’ve never taken part in an ‘unconference’–and I never had until the first NY Book Camp in 2010–these gatherings are deliberately unplanned and unprogrammed up to the moment they begin. Book Camp is very much opposite to the two big digital publishing conferences held each year, Digital Book World and Tools of Change. As scripted and prepped as speakers are at those events, the presentations at Book Camp are informal, casual, and exploratory. Here, people aren’t sure what they think about a publishing question until they’ve had a chance to say it aloud, or listened to a colleague talking about it. / / more. . .

742

#Fridayreads/Feb. 17–‘Ex Libris’ by Ross King

/2 Comments/in

#Fridayreads Ex Libris, terrific novel of 17th C. London by Ross King, best known for his art historical nonfiction (‘Judgment of Paris’). Protagonist is Isaac Inchbold, a bookseller on the trail of an esoteric manuscript.

Next book up: ‘Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter’ by Carmen Aguirre, winner of the 2012 Canada Reads: True Stories competition.

743

An Unspeakable Affront to Personal Autonomy

/0 Comments/in

Like a horrible nightmare that comes true the morning after, a bill mandating violation of a pregnant woman’s bodily autonomy has been passed by the Virginia legislature and VA Governor McDonnell has indicated he will sign it into law. If carried out as its proponents intend, it will unquestionably infringe on human rights, women’s rights, and doctors’ rights. I hope and imagine Planned Parenthood and other organizations will immediately file suit to prevent its implementation, but meantime it will be on the books, threatening every woman in the state, and every decent-thinking Virginian, female or male. For a political party that purportedly believes in keeping government out of the lives of citizens this legislation by Virginia Republicans is a breathtaking violation of its supposed principles. Dahlia Lithwick’s excellent column in Slate explains what is at stake, as does Michael Tomasky’s Newsweek/Daily Beast piece.

744

“A Crass Attempt at Mass Identity Theft from the Deceased”

/1 Comment/in

Elie Wiesel has plaintively requested that Mitt Romney intervene with the Mormon church to insist that the organization finally end the barbaric and creepy practice of posthumous so-called “conversions” of non-Mormon decedents, including many Holocaust victims. Wiesel was interviewed tonight on “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell,” where he explained that notwithstanding a mid-1990s agreement that was supposed to have ended the practice, a former Mormon researcher–Helen Radkey, who was also interviewed by O’Donnell–had informed Wiesel that the practice has never stopped. Wiesel learned that among those whose have been posthumously ‘claimed’ were the parents of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, and weirdly, breaking with their own practice of claiming the deceased, Wiesel himself, and his wife.

Last October I wrote a blog post, “Hitchens’ Book of Mormon-ism,” after Christopher Hitchens published “Mitt Romney’s Mormon Problem” in Slate. Hitch’s piece, one of his last before he died in December, included a reference to a terrific book that I’d republished in 1995. By Facebook friend Alex Shoumatoff, The Mountain of Names is a superb study of human kinship and genealogy. As I wrote then, the Shoumatoff book’s “title is a direct reference to the bank of names that Mormons, at least until the mid-90s, kept in the rocky innards of a private peak in Utah. . . . In his inimitable way, Hitch tartly dubs this ‘a crass attempt at mass identity theft from the deceased.’” Now we learn that the harvesting of names didn’t end then, and evidently has still not ceased. It’s a pity Hitch isn’t around to inveigh against this all the more.

A theology that envisions its modern day believers accruing some kind of divine credit for baptizing the dead is to me a bizarre and arrogant faith.
Feb. 16 update from a 2007 Newsweek interview with Mitt Romney:

“When asked by NEWSWEEK if he has done baptisms for the dead—in which Mormons find the names of dead people of all faiths and baptize them, as an LDS spokesperson says, to ‘open the door’ to the highest heaven—he looked slightly startled and answered, ‘I have in my life, but I haven’t recently.'”