The last time Spain faced the Netherlands in a really big match they were wearing cuirasses and carrying swords.  Nobody will be killed at Sunday’s World Cup match, but the Dutch will sing the same anthem—Het Wilhelmus—that they sang in 1573 at the siege of Haarlem and in 1577 when the Prince of Orange’s forces defeated the Spanish army and marched triumphantly into Brussels.   It is the world’s oldest national anthem. (Since you asked, yes, Japan’s national anthem, the Kimigayo, is technically older, but it was not set to its present music until 1880, when Japan felt the need to have a national anthem. The longest is the Greek, weighing in at 158 stanzas.  Well, you know how Greek poetry is…)

The William of the title, Het Wilhelmus, refers to William the Silent, the prince who led the armies of the Dutch Revolt against the King of Spain. So it is a more than a little puzzling to find William singing,

To the king of Spain I’ve granted
A lifelong loyalty.

The Dutch Revolt was the first modern war of national liberation. So why is one of the fathers of the Republic professing loyalty to the King of Spain?

The Wilhelmus, like the American Declaration of Independence, was written in the middle of a shooting war to justify armed rebellion. The participants in both wars needed to persuade themselves that they were not rebels, but loyal men forced to rebel by unendurable tyranny.  And they also needed to persuade the world.   It adds something to the match if you think of the Dutch fans with their faces painted orange as propounding Calvinist resistance theory. Set to music.

The great triumph of the Dutch is not that a small people succeeded in defeating the mightiest European Empire of the era, though that was a remarkable feat. What sets the Dutch Republic apart is that it introduced the modern era of nation states governed as liberal democracies.

I don’t know what the Hapsburg armies sang during the decades they spent trying to put down the Dutch Revolt, but I do know that they won’t be singing their national anthem on Sunday.

Actually, the question of the Spanish anthem is an interesting one. Spain does have at least half a national anthem. The music is a handsome eighteenth century march. What the Spanish can’t agree on are the lyrics.  Writing lyrics to a national anthem pretty much requires you to identify the nation you are writing about.   There is a committee working on it, and the members have my sincere sympathies as they attempt to write lyrics that will satisfy everyone without offending Basque, Catalan or Galician national sensibilities.

But on Sunday I will be rooting for the Dutch, because it was the Dutch who blazed a path out of the wars of religion that led to religious tolerance and liberal democracy. And because you have got to love the weirdly medieval lyrics that will be belted out by Dutch fans:

William of Nassau, scion
Of a Dutch and ancient blood,
I dedicate undying
Faith to this land of mine.
A prince am I undaunted,
Of Orange, ever free,
To the king of Spain I’ve granted
A lifelong loyalty.

Diana Muir Appelbaum is working on a book on nationalism.  She is the author of Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England.

The Washington Post reported this week that a number of Arizona politicians, both Republican and Democratic, are deeply concerned over their state’s developing reputation for intolerance and bigotry. One interviewee, Grant Woods, a Republican former state attorney general, lamented the current state of affairs: “To be an Arizonan is to be a part of Mexico. It’s to be a part of the various Native American tribes. That’s part of our culture, the diversity. I think the people’s hearts are there, but the leaders don’t always respect that.”

While Attorney General Woods was speaking in reference to Arizona’s now-infamous immigration law, his statement is just as salient to HB 2281, a controversial new statute that bans K-12 ethnic studies programs throughout the state. Woods’ plaintive observation leapt out at me as I was in the midst of examining Arizona’s public school history standards in light of the education legislation—and discovering that the standards omit most of the last 150 years of Hispanic-American history.

In the aftermath of HB 2281’s passage Arizona public school superintendent Tom Horne defended the new law on CNN, telling interviewer Anderson Cooper that “what I’m opposed [to] is dividing kids up so they have Raza studies for the Chicano kids….African-American studies for the African-American kids, Asian studies for the Asian kids.”  Horne went on to assure Cooper that Arizona’s educational standards “require that all social studies classes teach different cultures. We want all kids to be exposed to a lot of different cultures.” As a professional historian I became curious about how “Arizona’s Academic Standards for Social Studies” deals with the rich subject of Hispanic-American history.

After a careful review of Arizona’s K-12 benchmarks, I can attest to the accuracy of Superintendent Horne’s assertion, with one glaring exception: the Hispanic-American historical experience from the latter half of the 19th century onward. In this case the omissions are egregious, to the point of appearing nothing short of pathological.

We need to pause here and note that the main target of Superintendent Horne’s ire is the Tucson Unified School District’s K-12 Mexican American Studies program, whose Website informs visitors that among its goals is to provide “a counter-hegemonic curriculum” and “[a]dvocate for and provide curriculum that is centered within the Mexican American/Chicano cultural and historical experience.” Oy. The Tucson program embodies the academically dubious mission of consciousness-raising: the celebration of unique virtues and parochial monofocus embedded in the intellectual DNA of identity studies programs (although there are many individual scholars whose work is admirably rigorous).

However, part of the reason these programs emerged is because scholars were slighting minority groups’ historical experiences both in research and in the classroom. To their credit, historians have gone a long way over the past several decades toward redressing this record of scholarly omission, including Hispanic-American history, while generally avoiding the sort of feel-goodism or polemics that vex Tom Horne and other conservatives.

So if Arizona tosses out Hispanic/Mexican-American studies, what exactly is left?

It should be noted that the Arizona guidelines are actually quite good overall, marked by both breadth and admirable specificity throughout. For example, there are no fewer than six enumerated factors for teachers to cover in the seventh grade guidelines alone concerning the causes leading to the Civil War. The coverage concerning the Hispanic dimension of American history from the early Spanish colonization through the 1820s is consonant with other study areas during the same time period. Guidelines for the 1846-48 Mexican-American War are far less specific and encompassing than those for the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. But there is still room for sufficiently motivated (and well-informed) teachers to provide an adequate overview of the conflict and its controversies.

But from the post-Civil War period through the 20th century, Hispanics become virtually invisible in the Arizona standards. The result is a virtual blotting out of the historical experience of Hispanic Americans in both Arizona and the United States overall from the late 1800s through the present.

For example, when the standards deal with the emergence of the modern United States between 1875-1929, one of the guidelines meticulously deals with “changing patterns in Immigration (e.g., Ellis Island, Angel Island, Chinese Exclusion Act, Immigration Act of 1924).” But mysteriously absent is any mention of the importation of thousands of Mexican laborers to help build the Southern Pacific and Santa Fe railroad networks.  The guidelines also neglect to mention the movement of almost 900,000 Mexicans across the U.S. border into Arizona and other Southwestern states in the midst of the Mexican Revolution. They fail to touch on the Mexican emigrants’ subsequent settlement in the US as legal residents. Indeed, there’s nothing on the Mexican Revolution itself in either the United States or world history standards, an astounding oversight considering Arizona’s proximity and the conflict’s spillover effects. Finally, the Arizona standards skirt the anti-Hispanic nativist reaction that led to the establishment of the U.S. Border Patrol and efforts to limit cross-border migration.

In dealing with the Great Depression and the Second World War, there’s not a word in the standards on the mass deportations of Hispanics from Arizona and elsewhere in the Southwest under the euphemistically named “Mexican Repatriation Program”—in which upwards of 60 percent of those pushed out were U.S. citizens—or of the admission during World War II of hundreds of thousands more Mexicans to the region under the Bracero workers program. There’s a vague reference for fourth grade to “Native American and Hispanic contributions” to the war effort, but that’s as far as it goes (see below for more on American Indian versus Hispanic Arizona standards coverage). There’s nothing on the wartime anti-Mexican hostility in the Southwest that led, for example, to the “zoot suit” riots that occurred in neighboring California during the war. And it is notably odd that there is no mention of the FDR-era “Good Neighbor Policy” toward Mexico and the rest of Latin America—including why it was necessary as a corrective to previous policies in the first place.

As for the Civil Rights era, the Arizona standards duly mention Jim Crow laws, non-violent protests, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the like. But again there is nothing on the Hispanic-American experience, save for three brief references to agricultural union organizer Cesar Chavez, who led a march to the U.S.-Mexico border in 1969 to protest American growers’ use of illegal immigrants as strike breakers. (Chavez’s act has become a conservative talking point on the issue of immigration control.) The standards offer nothing on the 1954 “Operation Wetback,” the Immigration and Naturalization Service agency’s roundup of over a million illegal Mexican immigrant laborers in the Southwest, including many thousands in Arizona. They evince no awareness of the long history of the segregation of Hispanic children in Arizona’s public schools. Concomitantly, there’s no guidance concerning the court rulings that brought about the end of Hispanic school segregation, such as California’s Méndez v. Westminster (1946) and particularly the Arizona’s Federal District Court’s Gonzales v. Sheely (1951), which was the direct legal antecedent of Brown v. Board of Education.

Especially curious is the yawning gap between the Arizona standard’s coverage of Hispanic American and Native American history from the Civil War era through the early 20th century. Concerning the latter, the guidelines include the Indian Wars and the American government’s removal policies and establishment of reservations in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The list of notable Native-American figures in Arizona during this period includes the likes of Chiefs Geronimo, Manuelito and Cochise. Contrast this with the complete absence of historically prominent Hispanic Arizonans like Henry Garfias, the first marshal of Phoenix, and Estevan Ochoa, the first Hispanic mayor of Tucson. (Unsurprisingly, contemporaneous Anglo-Arizonans like Charles Poston, the Arizona territory’s first Congressional delegate, and Sharlot Hall, the first woman officeholder in Arizona are listed in the standards.)

We’re left to wonder what these omissions of Hispanic Arizona and Hispanic-American history are all about. The most charitable reading is that they signify an honest—if terribly unfortunate—historiographic blind spot, rather than Anglo-Arizonan sub-nationalism, or Texas-style conservative dogmatism, or a blatant manifestation of anti-Hispanic sentiment, or rank state Republican primary politics.

In the spirit of charity, let’s assume it’s the former, rather than any of the unpleasant latters. The solution for Arizona’s public school social studies standards is thus straightforward: add in what is missing, as non-ideological historical narrative and analysis, not as polemic or ethnic esteem-building exercise. Over to you, Superintendent Horne.

Finally, the question of how to effectively integrate Hispanic-American history into social studies curricula is not merely a Southwest regional issue, but a national one. Hispanics make up over 15 percent of the total US population. There are substantial Hispanic populations in formerly unlikely states: they comprise over four percent of the population in Iowa and Minnesota, over five percent in Arkansas, and over seven percent in North Carolina, and a slightly higher percentage in Wyoming (Wyoming!), where Hispanics outnumber African-Americans, American Indians and Asians put together. There are more Hispanics than Asians in Washington State (9.8 versus 6.7 percent, respectively) and more Hispanics than blacks in Alaska (6.1 versus 4.3 percent).

Arizona’s problems dealing with the Hispanic historical experience in the United States should spur all of the states to review their history standards on the subject. Hispanic-American history is American history, and all of the nation’s public school students, and concomitantly the American commonweal, will benefit from a straightforward, nuanced examination of the subject and its complexities. Hispanic schoolchildren across the country will have an enhanced context for their residency and citizenship, which in turn can only aid the acculturative and assimilative process that some worry is inhibited in the Hispanic community. Just as important, they and all other students will add significantly to their understanding of America’s grand, tortuous, ongoing story of E Pluribus Unum.

Neal M. Rosendorf, Ph.D. is an independent scholar based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has taught U.S. history and international relations at Harvard University, the University of Queensland, and Long Island University.

On Thursday, March 25, the newspapers announced on their front pages a U.S.-Russian nuclear arms agreement. A slow news day, maybe, I thought. This sort of thing would have deserved front page coverage before 1991; now it may still, but that’s not so evident. During the Cold War, strategic arms control was bound up with a very serious and dangerous competition. Now it isn’t. That’s why, too, since politics always trumps hardware in subjects like this, we could only have real arms control when it was politically marginal, and when it was not politically marginal we couldn’t have it. The way the Cold War ended proved this, but a lot of people do not seem interested in that proof. They prefer their earlier illusions about arms control. Some habits die hard, and America’s leading journalists apparently have not got the message, or learned the lesson. That seems to apply, too, to the Obama Administration.

The Washington Post‘s coverage was noteworthy for its balmy idiocy. The writers, in this case someones named, Mary Beth Sheridan and Philip P. Pan, wrote, inter alia, that: “The pact appeared to represent President Obama’s first victory in his ambitious agenda toward a nuclear-free world.” It is no such thing. If the editor told the reporters to go find something to praise Obama for, to help save his otherwise disastrous foreign policy, OK, one can understand that. But to link this agreement to this nutty, bumper-sticker slogan of a non-policy is just silly.

The actual reporting also made, just by the way, no sense. The article went on, “Each side will reduce its most dangerous nuclear weapons–those deployed for long-range missiles–from a ceiling of 2,200 to between 1,500 and 1,675. And the two militaries will make relatively small cuts in the number of jets and land- or submarine-based missiles that carry nuclear warheads and bombs.” No number was given.

This sentence is so screwed up that it will now take me several sentences so show how.

First of all, nuclear weapons are not dangerous unless they go off–i.e., are detonated, and it’s not at all likely that any U.S. or Russian weapons will be detonated, now or probably ever. It’s just as sensible, more so really, to describe a nuclear weapon as potent as it is to describe one as dangerous. Ms. Sheridan driving her car while talking on her cell phone is actually more dangerous than a nuclear weapon for any practical purpose.

Next, a weapon is not more dangerous because it is long-range. If a tac-nuke goes off near someone, they are going to be very dead, just as dead as if they were hit by something bigger from farther away. Long-range weapons may be more strategically consequential in some respects (and not in others), but that is quite a different matter. The nucs most likely ever to be used are tactical nuclear weapons, of which the Russians still have a whole damned lot in Europe. These are arguably more dangerous precisely because they are more apt to be used. The treaty does not cover them, at all.

And the language used!! Er, “warheads deployed for long-range missiles. . .”?! How about “deployed on” maybe? Jets? I think some of our bombers actually make their way across the sky with propellers. The Russians have been concerned with nukes on an F-18?

Next, the statement makes it seem as though what has been agreed is mainly a reduction of warheads, not launchers. It’s sure news to me if these negotiations have done that. It is not possible to verify warhead reductions. These sorts of negotiations, going back 40 years, have always been about numbers of warheads married to deployed delivery vehicles. So what is this article even talking about?

It also makes it seem that more weapons will be taken down than launchers. Though I have not yet seen the treaty text, that is not my understanding of the agreement or, as you’ll see in a moment, that of the New York Times. I think deployed weapons are down to 1,550 or thereabouts, and launchers down to 800. The latter is not “a relatively small cut.” It is significant.

There is also an intimation here that a warhead and a bomb are two different things. They are not. Yes, some warheads can be independently guided even after leaving their delivery vehicles. But they are still just bombs; they fall, because they have no engines.

It is hard not to conclude that Ms. Sheridan and Mr. Pan do not know what they are talking about, and neither does their editor. Shame on the Washington Post for getting a front page, top-of-the-fold story so messed up.

Compare the New York Times. The NYT describes the agreement this way: “. . .the two sides agreed to lower the limits on deployed strategic warheads by more than one-quarter and launchers by half. . .” Now, since there can be more than one warhead per launcher, this makes sense. Compare it to the Washington Post‘s language, above, which, as I have said, makes no sense. But the NYT, true to form, this time under the bi-line of Peter Baker and Ellen Barry, claims that the deal represents “perhaps the most concrete foreign policy accomplishment for Mr. Obama since he took office 14 months ago and the most significant result of his effort to `reset’ the troubled relationship with Russia.”

Wow, what an editorial.

First, it’s not really a foreign policy achievement; if it’s anything, it’s a national security policy achievement. Except that it isn’t, because the agreement is almost meaningless. The Administration thinks it will help the upcoming NPT Review Conference achieve something practical, but it won’t because the Review Conference itself can’t achieve anything practical, not at a time when real proliferation threats are being left unaddressed in practice. It’s nice to have the deal done before the NPT Review Conference, yes; not to have it done would be embarrassing, like not having an energy bill before Copenhagen, for example.

But we’ll have to wait to see what the Administration had to pay for that accomplishment. Just agreeing to negotiate these reductions with the Russians, and letting the Russians know we needed it done before a date certain (in May), gave Moscow free leverage over the terms, and they have dragged it out for many months just to screw with us and take advantage at the margins. The fact that the Russians announced the deal and the White House was taken by surprise is also a little worrisome; it suggests that perhaps this was another Russian pressure ploy to get their way on a few remaining details at the last minute. The Russians cannot resist this kind of gamesmanship against a weak and clueless White House. I think it may even be genetic. Well, we’ll see how the story plays out; maybe I am being cynical. But maybe not; stay tuned to this blog.

The real problem here is the Administration’s decision to privilege arms control in the relationship with Russia. I can see a reason for this, of course; it makes the Russians feel our equal, for this is the only area in which they are, more or less, our equal. It salves their wounded imperial pride. The idea seems to have been, OK, we play nice with them here and they’ll be more agreeable in other areas. I think the Administration believed that finishing the deal would be quick and easy, since there wasn’t really that much left to do.

Ah, but the Administration’s Russia policy, I hear tell, refuses to play the linkage game. Well, this use of arms control in the Russia reset business seems sort of contradictory then. Maybe they’re only saying this now because the deal took much longer and was much harder to do than they thought. In any event, if the promotion of arms control to the top of the U.S.-Russia agenda was meant to cause pliancy in Moscow, where is that pliancy? Where have the Russians been agreeable at all? With regard to Iran? Georgia? Search me. The Administration is right; there’s been no linkage, at least not in our direction.

I would rather have made reductions in the U.S. arsenal unilaterally, and invited the Russians to undertake a parallel unilateral action. We are capable of deciding how many of these things we need without all the pomp and circumstance of formal negotiations, and we know that Russian numbers are going to come down anyway for financial and technical reasons. There was no reason to negotiate any of this, except for symbolic purposes. Indeed, the number I would have chosen isn’t too far off from 1,550 deployed warheads and 800 launchers. For reasons I’d rather not write about in public, I’d say 1,200/750 would be OK, but 1,550/800 is close, so let’s not be picky. Too much lower than that and we might tempt third parties we would be foolish to tempt, and hence, by the way, one aspect of the idiocy of the nuclear-free world stuff, and one more reason why this agreement is NOT a step in that direction. (If the deal had taken both sides down to, say, 500/300, that would have been such a step and that would have been dangerously bad.)

The Administration is also claiming a major advance in verification protocols. We’ll see if that turns out to be true once the text is available for public inspection. Even if it is true, that could have been negotiated separately from the numbers.

So let’s for a moment credit, just for the sake of argument, the NYT view that this post-START II deal is the Obama Administration’s most important achievement in foreign policy. Now what does that say? A superfluous agreement whose manner of negotiation negated the diplomatic impact it was supposed to have on Russian behavior is the most important foreign policy achievement of the Administration?! Yikes. And gosh, maybe it is!

It is appropriate, I think, to pause and reflect when a death finally brackets a part of one’s life. I briefly worked for Alexander Haig back in 1979-80, just before he became Secretary of State. I was a junior aide only, and he did not invite me, fresh out of graduate school as I was at the time, to go with him to Washington, as he did my friend and mentor Harvey Sicherman, six years my senior. I did not press the matter. Indeed, I neither asked nor even hinted, perhaps because I felt myself less than entitled: I was not a Republican, after all, and had not voted for Ronald Reagan in November 1980.

Nor did I have any other claim on his loyalty. I was never in the Army, or on Haig’s staff when he was Supreme Allied Commander of U.S. forces in Europe (SACEUR), bivouacked in Brussels. And certainly I did not know him when he was Richard Nixon’s White House chief-of-staff in the early 1970s–I was a just an undergraduate college student at the time. All I knew of the Haig family came some years before that, with my occasional encounter with a younger Alex and his sister Barbara at Yorktown High School in Arlington, Virginia. Their father and mother I never met at the time.

I knew Al Haig and saw him fairly regularly only in 1979-80, during the time between his retirement from the Army and his appointment as Secretary of State by President Reagan. During those 18 or so months he was president of United Technologies and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, where I was working at the time. This was also a time when he had triple-bypass surgery, and I remember being deeply impressed by the difference between how he looked and acted before the operation and after. Before, Haig had almost preternaturally sparkling steel blue eyes, and he looked right at you with them. Afterwards, the twinkle was dulled, and I never saw it fully return, though he did otherwise recover his energy and most of the spring in his step before very long.

I did not do a great deal for him in those days; I was, as I have said, just a junior aide. I helped him write an essay for a magazine called Strategic Review. (Actually, I wrote it; he read it, approved it, made a few minor changes.) I did up a few research memoranda he asked for on various topics. Most of all, and most memorable of all for me, I helped coach him through his appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the matter of the SALT II Treaty.

As it happened, I had been seconded from Philadelphia to Washington at the time (for a second time; I’d gone before in 1977 for a little while) to help Senator Henry Jackson and, with him, Senator John Tower to interrogate that draft treaty. It was the habit, directed by Senators Jackson and Tower, and implemented by their staffers Richard Perle and Bud MacFarlane, to help prepare friendly witnesses for their testimonies when they came to town. I was instructed to help Haig.

He needed my help, too, through no fault of his own. He had nearly been blown up by terrorists on his way back from Brussels. He had arrived stateside only about 48 hours before his testimony, and had not had time to actually read the treaty carefully, let alone fully study it. It was a complicated business, too. I will say this: Haig was a very quick study, a superb gamesman with the Senators (not least a young fellow named Joe Biden…..), and generally a lot of fun to hang around with. I sat behind him in the Senate Caucus room during his testimony, passed him notes in tight spots a few times, and just generally hung around, trying to be helpful if needed. During a break, and this is something I could not forget even if I tried, John Stennis came up to me and complimented my “slick wrist action” in passing those notes. And he actually winked at me. So much for the gentleman from Mississippi; that’s the first and last conversation we ever had.

All through the testimony and after Haig was ever gracious, appreciative and altogether personable. At the age of 28, I guess you could say I found the whole deal very entertaining, and even a bit gratifying.

For a certain part of this period Haig was testing out his own bid for President, which never got too far, but which touched off what I thought then and still think of now as some pretty hilarious episodes. Some of these episodes intersected with my time with Haig in Washington; others took place in Philly. I may sit down and relate these onto paper at some point or other, just for the record, and to get them off my chest in the sheer fun of story-telling. But for now, I will note only one in brief, in passing, so to speak.

One afternoon I was designated as a driver to take Haig and a man named, I think, Dixie Walker (not the old Brooklyn Dodger baseball player and not the former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, but a third person) from the offices of the Foreign Policy Research Institute near Penn in West Philly out to the Philadelphia International Airport. Mr. Walker was an associate of Adolph Coors, and Haig was clearly trying to raise some money for his campaign from Coors. I put the two of them in the back seat of the only car I owned at the time, a 1952 Cadillac — a Fleetwood, so thankfully a 4-door — which I had owned for about a year. It takes about a half hour, maybe a little less depending on traffic, to drive from 36th and Market Streets out to the airport, and during that time driving Haig and Walker were talking politics and campaigns and money. They got on pretty well, it seemed to me. Their assumption, or their choice of a proper assumption for purposes of that discussion (not at all the same thing, of course), was that “when Reagan faltered”, that was the exact language they both used, Haig would be “well positioned to make his move.”

I said nothing, of course. I just drove.

When we got to the airport, I drove out — you could in those days — to the private area where the Lear jets were waiting. One was fueled up, waiting to take the two of them to Houston for a fundraiser. Walker was sitting behind me on the left side of the back seat; Haig on the right. I remember this because when I shut off the Caddy’s engine and got out, I opened the door for Walker. I was too slow to get around the back to open the right rear door for Haig. He opened it himself, got out, and slammed the door closed a little too hard, sending the window glass off its track and down inside the body of the door with a loud clunk. Thank God, it did not break.

Haig seemed alarmed, however. “I’m sorry, Adam,” he said.

“Oh never mind, sir,” I answered, “It does that sometimes; no big deal.” I got their luggage out of the trunk, shook Haig’s hand and said, “Have a good trip, sir.”

In fact, the window had never done that before, and has never done it again since. I still have the car.

I saw Haig from time to time in the years that followed his short stint as Secretary of State. He was always friendly and cordial to me. The last time I saw him was already some time ago, in the fall of 2002, I think it was. It was at the annual dinner of The National Interest magazine, which I was editing at the time. Haig was to my right at the table, and to his right his old boss Henry Kissinger. The other two or three people at our table I do not recall. We talked about this and that, though given the layout of the table I mostly listened to the crosstalk. But I remember toward the end of the evening Haig turned and asked me, “Hey, Adam, you still have that old Cadillac?” And I answered, “Yep, and it runs just fine, and the rear-right window is fine, too, even though you once tried to break it.” “Yes indeed,” he answered, “and I tried and failed to get some money out of that guy in Colorado, too”–all accompanied by a friendly chuckle.

And that is how I remember Al Haig — quick with a smile, easy with an assuring hand on the shoulder. Rest in peace, sir.

Update: The event, co-hosted with the New America Foundation, has already concluded. Thank you to everyone who attended, asked questions and participated. Below is a video recording of the event for your convenience.

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Just a few selected comments on this weekend’s newspaper reading, as it were.

First, in the New York Times “Week in Review” section under the headline “Our Decade of Deluded Thinking,” an unsigned author makes some astonishing comments, one astonishingly good but most astonishingly bad. First the good: the article admits that Mossadegh did not fall in 1953 owing mainly to the intrigues of U.S. intelligence. That’s of course right, and the same can be rightly said about Allende in Chile in the early 1970s. It’s nice to see this in the NYT, and it may come in handy one day when the common reverse view shows up there, as it certainly will. But the piece starts, “It is not often that large-scale crises are due to intellectual error…” Oh yes they are: They are more than often so; they are almost invariably so. Thus Auguste Comte: “Intellectual confusion is at the bottom of every historical crisis.” Score one for Comte; the NYT is wrong. And last, at the bottom of the second paragraph, Francis Fukuyama is once again, for the umpteenth time, vulgarized into holding the view, twenty years ago, of the very modernization theorists with whom he has always disagreed—that all modernization is of a piece and leads to Westernization. That’s not what he meant by the phrase “end of history”, but it’s his own fault for using a philosophical concept and expecting that most people—journalists certainly not excepted—would ever understand what he meant. If a typical Washington-beat journalists ever sits down and actually reads Hegel, I am sure the world will suddenly come to an end. But I am not worried about that happening

Second, Joshua Kurlantzick, in the “Outlook” section of the Washington Post, front page, under the title “A Nobel Winner who went wrong on rights,” takes the President to task for deemphasizing democracy and human rights. He contrasts the Nobel speech, the best speech by far the Preisdent has given while in office, with the Administration’s prior policy choices, as best he can make them out. The Administration is right; Kurlantzick, and all the other people who like to wear human rights on their sleeves—and who have no understanding at all of Samuel Huntington’s “democracy paradox”—are wrong. The best way to advance human rights and democracy is slowly, steadily, in the context of other dimensions of policy, and with full understanding of the opportunities and limits afforded by political culture. It is not by sounding like the mother-in-law of the world. And it is not by presuming the ridiculous argument that realism and its interests—like preventive mass violence, preserving civil and interstate order and the principles that order enables to become reality, and so forth—have no moral implcations. The President was channeling Reinhold Niehbur in Oslo. He could do a lot worse, and Kurlantzick should do some reading.

Third, Ed Begley’s new book, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters (Yale), reviewed in this week’s New York Times Book Review, carries a thesis that sounds very much overstated but that is, in any case, not original: that the sins of the French government against Dreyfus resembled the “crimes” of the George W. Bush Administration. I can prove it isn’t original. Just read the AI essay by the historian Paul Schroeder, “Mirror, Mirror on the War,” Spring 2006—that’s more than three years ago. I commissioned that essay, and while I do not agree with parts of it (and did not at the time, either), I think it’s a brilliant essay. I wonder if Begley’s book is as good. Naturally, I also wonder, but cannot expect to ever find out, where he got his idea.

Tensions flared Friday at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen as China’s Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei, using unusually blunt language, described U.S. Chief Negotiator Todd Stern as “irresponsible”, according to an AP report. The Chinese official was responding to comments Stern made at the conference yesterday regarding the possibility of Western aid to the developing world as a form of reparations for the developed world’s historically higher carbon emissions.

In the January-February 2007 issue of The American Interest, Stern, along with co-author William Antholis, proposed the creation of an environmental E-8 to parallel the existing, economics-focused G-8.

I found President Obama’s speech on Afghanistan policy remarkable. The speech itself, looked at as an object of art, is brilliant. Some of the formulations in it, not just rhetorical but also conceptual, are among the best presidential speechmaking I’ve heard in my lifetime—far superior to anything that we’ve heard in the last three administrations. You really have to go back all the way to President John F. Kennedy (and Mr. Ted Sorensen), to find conceptual and rhetorical arts of this caliber–remarkable stuff. I don’t know who wrote it—how much the president had to do with it, how much his chief speechwriter had to do with it—but they’ve finally turned the corner. This is, again, just in terms of the arts of speechwriting, qualitatively better than anything they’ve done before, including the Cairo speech.

Once you get past the soaring rhetoric, however, there are some serious problems with the underlying policy assumptions.

I’ve taken the liberty of annotating a full text copy of the speech and posting it here. I’ve highlighted certain phrases and passages, and if you mouse over them my annotation will pop up in a gray box. While some of my gripes are stylistic, others are substantive. I think it’s a good exercise to go through a speech like this carefully, line-by-line. It focuses the mind on the matters being discussed in a way that merely talking about it doesn’t.

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President Barack Obama’s speech of 1 December 2009, delivered at West Point

Good evening. To the United States Corps of Cadets, to the men and women of our armed services, and to my fellow Americans: I want to speak to you tonight about our effort in Afghanistan—the nature of our commitment there, the scope of our interests, and the strategy that my Administration will pursue to bring this war to a successful conclusion.Note the absence of the word victory anywhere in this speech. To some, this is a flaw, because that is what the U.S. military fights to achieve, and without a sense that the Command-in-Chief seeks victory and is dedicated to achieving it, morale flags. To others, this is a virtue, because no reasonable definition of victory is achievable at reasonable cost and in a reasonable and politically sustainable timeframe in Afghanistan. Better not to raise expectations that cannot be met. I am of the latter view. It is an honor for me to do so here—at West Point—where so many men and women have prepared to stand up for our security, and to represent what is finest about our country.Amen, and well said.

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I am probably the only person in the United States who actually likes the fact that President Obama set an 18 month timetable for the beginning of a drawdown of US forces in Afghanistan in his speech on Tuesday night.  Republicans have been attacking it because they say that it sends a signal of weak resolve, and that the Taliban now know that they only have to wait us out.  Opponents of our engagement ask why the drawdown can’t begin immediately, and wonder whether the deadline isn’t just a sop to them to make the escalation decision more palatable.  It has all the hallmarks of a political compromise rather than a thought-out strategy.

I think that setting a date for the beginning of a withdrawal actually sends a good signal, but to very different audiences than either the Taliban on the one hand, or to dovish Americans on the other.  The two most important targets are the US commanders on the ground, and the Afghan government.

The whole problem with the US approach to counterinsurgency, not just in Afghanistan but stretching all the way back to Vietnam and before, was the fact that the US has never sufficiently emphasized training indigenous forces as the core of what they are to do in a military intervention.  There are a number of reasons for this, most importantly the fact that no US commander will ever want to fight an enemy with poorly trained and resourced indigenous forces when he could use American troops.  But in the end, no counterinsurgency war will ever be won with foreign forces taking the lead. Nor will there ever be an exit for the US from the conflict other than humiliating defeat unless there is an indigenous government and army to eventually carry the burden.

One of the reasons that we are in our current Afghan pickle is the fact that we never invested enough in training high quality Afghan forces from the moment we toppled the regime in Kabul back in 2001.  The Afghan National Army (ANA) is by all accounts reasonably well trained, but is ridiculously small in comparison to the job they must shoulder.  The police on the other hand have been a disaster from the beginning.  Police training was first delegated to the Germans, and then to contractors like Dyncorp, and greatly under-resourced.   Most Afghans run the other way when they see a policeman coming, such is their reputation for corruption and brutality.  We now have commanders in the theater who understand the importance of training, but they will still have incentives to rely on American forces if the latter are readily available.

Setting a timetable for the withdrawal of US forces puts both US commanders and the Afghan government under the gun (so to speak) to get sufficient indigenous forces in place to fill in behind departing US troops.  It will also motivate them to get very creative in persuading as many Pushtun tribesmen as possible to switch sides, or to at least cease supporting the Taliban.  The Afghan government has been less than serious about shouldering its part of the burden as well, because it has been able to take US backing for granted.

During the civil war in El Salvador during the 1980s, the Democrats in Congress put very sharp ceilings on the number of active duty US service personnel who could serve there—some 57 in total, if my memory serves.  I remember being outraged at the time that Congress was meddling to this degree and depriving US commanders of what they thought was necessary to fight the war.  But in the end it proved to be a very good move.  The low ceiling on American combat forces compelled the commanders there to get fully serious about training and equipping the Salvadorian army, who in any event had better local knowledge who and what they were fighting.  The army reversed the tide and put the FMLN under heavy pressure, which then paved the way for the eventual accord that ended the war.

In this respect the added 30,000 troops now going to Afghanistan could prove to be a real trap, if they are seen as anything other than a temporary bridge while we build indigenous capacity and make the appropriate political deals.  It is not clear whether this will work, but we will have a better idea in a couple of years.  If it doesn’t, then we will need to figure out how to make an exit in any event.

Anyone who thinks that the Taliban are now suddenly encouraged by the administration’s announcement of a timetable needs to engage in a little reality check.  The American public is simply not going to support a large, open-ended commitment to fight in Afghanistan.  So we are either bluffing or kidding ourselves if we say today that we will bear any burden in this fight.  Our interests there are simply not great enough to merit that.  It is true that Afghans will not side with us if they know in advance we are leaving.  But what is much worse is pretending to them that we will stick it out over the long haul, and then leaving anyway because we actually didn’t mean it.  In the history of our foreign policy we have unfortunately made these kinds of hollow promises far too often.

I doubt that the Obama administration has justified its strategy to itself in the terms I just laid out.  Among other reasons is the fact that they continue to set an unreasonably low limit on how many indigenous ANA forces they intend to train and equip.  My main hope is that they will stumble upon the right strategy by the logic of events.  The process has not looked pretty up to this point, but that does not preclude the possibility of a good outcome.

Today’s headline in the Washington Post tells us that our Ambassador in Kabul, Karl W. Eikenberry, opposes the sending of more U.S. and allied troops to Afghanistan, putting him at odds with the commanding general in that war, General Stanley McChrystal. Eikenberry happens to be a general, too—3-star instead of 4-star, but who’s counting?

The point is that this sort of public disagreement—arguably worse than “dithering” but likely to contribute to it—was bound to happen thanks to the way in which the decision structure over the Afghanistan/Pakistan portfolio was peopled in the first place: Too many Chiefs, not enough Indians. I wrote about this in my blog, The Newest Dealer, on February 9, and warned about the consequences. Since no one reads my blog—true enough, I don’t make it particularly easy to read it—I thought I’d quote a bit from what I wrote a little more than nine months ago. As you’ll see, I predicted a train wreck if the lines of authority over this policy area were not sorted out carefully and clearly.  Oh, it’s so much fun to be able to say, “See, I told you so!”  I just wish it were possible these days to predict good outcomes as often as bad ones.

In Sunday’s Washington Post (Feb. 8, 2009), front page on the right above the fold–in other words, the Post‘s Sunday lead–there appeared an article by Karen DeYoung entitled “Obama’s NSC Will Get New Power.” You can read what General Jim Jones has in store, evidently with the President’s approval, for yourself. What you can’t read in the Washington Post is about where these ideas came from. They came, in the main, from a two-year Congressionally funded commission called the Project on National Security Reform (PNSR). . . .

We’ll see how this new NSC design works out. . . but one thing is already clear: The transition to a stronger, more authoritative NSC is not likely to be a smooth one. The system in transition has already scored one doozy of a boner.

Jones apparently offered General Tony Zinni the post of U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, replacing Ambassador Crocker who is leaving real soon. Possibly seeing this as a power grab, Secretary Hillary scotched the notion, apparently arguing that it wasn’t a good idea to have military guys in both Baghdad and Kabul (General Karl Eikenberry, a 3-star, is headed there). So Chris Hill got that job instead–Chris Hill of the Six-Power Talks negotiations. . . .

Anyway, this was pretty embarrassing, obviously. Jones then reportedly apologized to Zinni for the mix-up and asked him if he’d wanted to be our man in Riyadh instead.  Zinni, again reportedly (heck, I certainly wasn’t there), general to general, Marine to Marine, told Jones where he could shove that job. Boy, isn’t gossip fun, especially when it has that strong, musky odor of verisimilitude about it?

You can see why Hillary Clinton felt as she did, assuming she did and this was not just an innocent start-of-administration communications mix-up. The Arab-Israeli portfolio has been rented out to George Mitchell, the Afghan-Pak portfolio to Richard Holbrooke. Vice-President Biden has staked a claim to policy on Russia and NATO. What does she get to do? Stare down Hugo Chávez?

But maybe she’s lucky. Look what these folks have drummed up for Afghanistan alone. You’ve got a 4-star in Washington at Centcom, General Petreaus, with overall authority on the security side. You’ve got another 4-star in the field there, Gen. McKiernan. You’ve got a 3-star soon in the Embassy, Gen. Eikenberry. You’ve got Richard Holbrooke as special representative of the President. You’ve got the lurking Joseph Biden, who has taken a special interest in Afghanistan for some time, and one of his longtime aides, Tony Blinken, in a hot seat with a joystick at the NSC. Someone down there is the Assistant Secretary of State for Central Asia, too, presently Richard Boucher but probably not for long. Secretary Gates? He counts also. And so the question: Who the hell is in charge?!  Beats me. Hillary is wise to stay out of the way until this gets sorted out…..if it ever does get sorted out.