Late start but I had the Civil War links, and added a couple more. Plus, for local color, let's start with Crowson's cartoon today:
By the way, babyfaced State Senator O'Donnell (R) happens to represent my district. You can read more about his bill in, well, The Guardian, or The Chicago Tribune. Jordan Weissmann looks at what welfare recipients actually spend money on here. One thing I haven't seen much discussion of is how this law is to be enforced. Will the state be assigning accountants to go over welfare recipients' books? Or will we expect movie ticket takers to rat out customers they suspect of being on welfare?
Gregory P Downs: The Dangerous Myth of Appomattox: When I was 10 years old the centennial of the Civil War seemed like such a big deal, whereas I hadn't noticed any 150th anniversaries until someone wrote that Lee's surrender at Appomattox should be a national holiday. Back in 1960 you could still practically taste the gunpowder residue. I knew, for instance, that my great-great-grandfathers had fought in that war -- on my father's side from Pennsylvania, a man who after the war homesteaded in western Kansas and named his first son Abraham Lincoln Hull; on my mother's side from Ohio, a man who then moved to northern Arkansas and became sheriff of Baxter County (in other words, one of those oft-villified "carpetbaggers"). Back then Kansas still identified with the North, and I saw enough of the South to reinforce my belief in civil rights, because by then the South had reconstituted its racist caste system as if their "war for independence" had won out. (Downs quotes Albion Tourgée saying that the South "surrendered at Appomattox, the North has been surrendering ever since.")
Over the course of the Civil War's Centennial the tide of surrender had shifted with the passage of landmark civil rights acts. Fifty years later we're more inclined to memorialize the 50th anniversary of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march than the 150th of Lee's surrender. Not that we shouldn't worry about erosion of voting rights. But one thing we don't worry about over is that the South will secede again -- indeed, when various Texans spout off to that effect, the usual reaction is "good riddance." But celebration of Appomattox has always been something of a ruse. As Downs points out, the war didn't really end there, nor has the reunification of the country gone smoothly. Indeed, one of the great ironies of American history is that the party of Lincoln -- the party my great-greats fought for -- has lately been captured by the sons of the Confederacy (often, amusingly enough, in the guise of adopted sons with names like Jindal, Cruz, Rubio, and Bush).
Meanwhile, Downs is more concerned with the problems the postwar occupation (aka reconstruction) ran into:
Grant himself recognized that he had celebrated the war's end far too soon. Even as he met Lee, Grant rejected the rebel general's plea for "peace" and insisted that only politicians, not officers, could end the war. Then Grant skipped the fabled laying-down-of-arms ceremony to plan the Army's occupation of the South.
To enforce its might over a largely rural population, the Army marched across the South after Appomattox, occupying more than 750 towns and proclaiming emancipation by military order. This little-known occupation by tens of thousands of federal troops remade the South in ways that Washington proclamations alone could not.
And yet as late as 1869, President Grant's attorney general argued that some rebel states remained in the "grasp of war." When white Georgia politicians expelled every black member of the State Legislature and began a murderous campaign of intimidation, Congress and Grant extended military rule there until 1871.
Meanwhile, Southern soldiers continued to fight as insurgents, terrorizing blacks across the region. One congressman estimated that 50,000 African-Americans were murdered by white Southerners in the first quarter-century after emancipation. "It is a fatal mistake, nay a wicked misery to talk of peace or the institutions of peace," a federal attorney wrote almost two years after Appomattox. "We are in the very vortex of war."
Downs has a book that sounds interesting: After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War. It is inevitable that any such book written these days will reflect the manifest failures of the US occupation of Iraq. One recalls that in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, Bush's intellectuals studied up on the post-WWII occupations of Germany and Japan -- held to be a model of enlightened reconstruction, although that conceit took a good deal of misreading both of history and of the current state of Bush politics to come to that cheery conclusion. But in all cases, the fiasco is the consequence both of poorly understood goals and corrupt practices.
Also worth reading: Christopher Dickey: The Civil War's Dirty Secret: It Was Always About Slavery. A sequel could be written on how racism went from being a rationale for slavery to becoming a proxy. In any case, the two are so inextricably linked that the iconography for one, like the continuing cult of the Confederacy, supports the other. That's why if you don't like the one, you shouldn't make excuses for the other.
Mark Mazzetti/Helene Cooper: Sale of US Arms Fuels the Wars of Arab States: Even if we overlook Israel, the most intensely militarized nation in the world, the Middle East has long been a bonanza for arms dealers -- and not just for American ones, although the US remains by far the largest purveyor of lethal hardware. And to paraphrase Madeleine Albright, what's the point of having this magnificent military technology if you never use it? That's been a conundrum for many years, but more and more nominal US allies like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, even Egypt, are discovering targets they can safely attack: the ad hoc militias of destabilized neighbors like Yemen, Libya, and Syria. All they have to do is to pin a label like Al-Qaeda, ISIS, or Iran, and the US blesses them with further supplies. For example:
Saudi Arabia spent more than $80 billion on weaponry last year -- the most ever, and more than either France or Britain -- and has become the world's fourth-largest defense market, according to figures released last week by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks global military spending. The Emirates spent nearly $23 billion last year, more than three times what they spent in 2006.
Qatar, another gulf country with bulging coffers and a desire to assert its influence around the Middle East, is on a shopping spree. Last year, Qatar signed an $11 billion deal with the Pentagon to purchase Apache attack helicopters and Patriot and Javelin air-defense systems. Now the tiny nation is hoping to make a large purchase of Boeing F-15 fighters to replace its aging fleet of French Mirage jets. Qatari officials are expected to present the Obama administration with a wish list of advanced weapons before they come to Washington next month for meetings with other gulf nations.
American defense firms are following the money. Boeing opened an office in Doha, Qatar, in 2011, and Lockheed Martin set up an office there this year. Lockheed created a division in 2013 devoted solely to foreign military sales, and the company's chief executive, Marillyn Hewson, has said that Lockheed needs to increase foreign business -- with a goal of global arms sales' becoming 25 percent to 30 percent of its revenue -- in part to offset the shrinking of the Pentagon budget after the post-Sept. 11 boom. [ . . . ]
Meanwhile, the deal to sell Predator drones to the Emirates is nearing final approval. The drones will be unarmed, but they will be equipped with lasers to allow them to better identify targets on the ground.
If the sale goes through, it will be the first time that the drones will go to an American ally outside of NATO.
There's very little here to keep these wars from spinning out of control. The US has allied itself with dictatorial oligarchs, and enabled them to suppress all manner of popular movements, including peaceful demonstrations for democracy. And when the most violent of those movements blowback against the US, that just reinforces the war mentality. Sure, some worry about putting US troops in harm's way, but we're pretty cavalier about getting Arabs to kill other Arabs, especially when Arabs are paying us for the gear -- think of all those "good jobs" proxy wars will create. Invading Iraq in 2003 was still a hard sell, but spinning up ISIS as an enemy was a breeze. Also see Richard Silverstein's comment on this article, War is America's Business.
Justin Logan: Iraq 2.0: The REAL Reason Hawks Oppose the Iran Deal:
Let's be honest for a second: 90-plus percent of supporters of the Iran framework would have supported any framework the Obama administration produced (this author included). Close to 100 percent of the opponents of the framework would have opposed any framework it produced.
What's going on here? Why are we having this kabuki debate about a deal whose battle lines were established before it even existed? At Brookings, Jeremy Shapiro suggests that "the Iranian nuclear program is not really what opponents and proponents of the recent deal are arguing about."
Shapiro says the bigger question is about what to do regarding "Iran's challenge to U.S. leadership" in the countries surrounding Iran and whether to "integrate Iran into the regional order."
One could put this more baldly: anti-agreement hawks want to preserve a state of belligerency (non-cooperation at the very least) between the US and Iran; agreement supporters want to defuse the state of belligerency, ultimately by normalizing relations between the two countries. One reason the hawks have is the profits from arms sales generated through the Middle East's growing set of proxy wars (see the Mazzetti/Cooper article above). It's also likely that oil profits would skyrocket if there was any disruption of Persian Gulf exports -- something which may matter more than usual given how invested US oil companies are in expensive sources (like shale and offshore oil). But there's also a more basic ideological reason: right-wingers believe in a world where conflict, like hierarchy, is inevitable and brutal, whereas left-wingers believe that conflicts can be resolved and people can cooperate to level up everyone's standard of living.
After torching Palestinian cafe and painting 'Revenge' on its door, 4 Israeli teens get community service; Before prayers finished Friday, Israeli military began firing teargas canisters and rubber-coated bullets; A 22-year-old Palestinian dies after imprisonment, then his cousin, 27, is killed at his funeral: 'Passover siege' in Hebron: Palestinians endure military lockdown so Israelis can enjoy holiday in occupied West Bank: more of Kate's remarkable compilations of Israeli news reports. Also see Alice Rothchild: The most massive child abuse int he world: "Not a single house has been rebuilt in Gaza since the end of the devastating war 9 months ago, UNRWA reports."