Our first serious outbreak of comment spam. Comments will be disabled until the forces of unrighteousness are suppressed...
A correspondent writes:
One piece of the puzzle I don't understand . . .
Richard Kinder is President and COO of Enron from 1990 to 1996. He leaves and takes over Kinder Morgan, which is a pipeline company. Then, it would appear, he successfully executes a strategy of building up from solid pipeline assets.
In other words, it (tentatively) looks like the guy who is really running Enron leaves in '96 and proceeds to successfully execute the strategy Enron avowed. It makes me suspect there really was a there there at Enron, but that Kenneth Lay allowed silly lieutenants like Skilling, Fastow, White, et cetera to start doing silly things--like overpaying for foreign assets and building up big trading infrastructures to trade in immature markets.
Paul Krugman muses on how very few people are willing to attempt a substantive defense of the Bush administration, on any front:
People are saying terrible things about George Bush. They say that his officials weren't sincere about pledges to balance the budget. They say that the planning for an invasion of Iraq began seven months before 9/11, that there was never any good evidence that Iraq was a threat and that the war actually undermined the fight against terrorism.
But these irrational Bush haters are body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freaks who should go back where they came from: the executive offices of Alcoa, and the halls of the Army War College.
I was one of the few commentators who didn't celebrate Paul O'Neill's appointment as Treasury secretary. And I couldn't understand why, if Mr. O'Neill was the principled man his friends described, he didn't resign early from an administration that was clearly anything but honest.
But now he's showing the courage I missed back then, by giving us an invaluable, scathing insider's picture of the Bush administration.
Ron Suskind's new book "The Price of Loyalty" is based largely on interviews with and materials supplied by Mr. O'Neill. It portrays an administration in which political considerations -- satisfying "the base" -- trump policy analysis on every issue, from tax cuts to international trade policy and global warming. The money quote may be Dick Cheney's blithe declaration that "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." But there are many other revelations.
One is that Mr. O'Neill and Alan Greenspan knew that it was a mistake to lock in huge tax cuts based on questionable projections of future surpluses. In May 2001 Mr. Greenspan gloomily told Mr. O'Neill that because the first Bush tax cut didn't include triggers -- it went forward regardless of how the budget turned out -- it was "irresponsible fiscal policy." This was a time when critics of the tax cut were ridiculed for saying exactly the same thing.
Another is that Mr. Bush, who declared in the 2000 campaign that "the vast majority of my tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum," knew that this wasn't true. He worried that eliminating taxes on dividends would benefit only "top-rate people," asking his advisers, "Didn't we already give them a break at the top?"
Most startling of all, Donald Rumsfeld pushed the idea of regime change in Iraq as a way to transform the Middle East at a National Security Council meeting in February 2001.
There's much more in Mr. Suskind's book. All of it will dismay those who still want to believe that our leaders are wise and good.
The question is whether this book will open the eyes of those who think that anyone who criticizes the tax cuts is a wild-eyed leftist, and that anyone who says the administration hyped the threat from Iraq is a conspiracy theorist.
The point is that the credentials of the critics just keep getting better. How can Howard Dean's assertion that the capture of Saddam hasn't made us safer be dismissed as bizarre, when a report published by the Army War College says that the war in Iraq was a "detour" that undermined the fight against terror? How can charges by Wesley Clark and others that the administration was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq be dismissed as paranoid in the light of Mr. O'Neill's revelations?
So far administration officials have attacked Mr. O'Neill's character but haven't refuted any of his facts. They have, however, already opened an investigation into how a picture of a possibly classified document appeared during Mr. O'Neill's TV interview. This alacrity stands in sharp contrast with their evident lack of concern when a senior administration official, still unknown, blew the cover of a C.I.A. operative because her husband had revealed some politically inconvenient facts.
Some will say that none of this matters because Saddam is in custody, and the economy is growing. Even in the short run, however, these successes may not be all they're cracked up to be. More Americans were killed and wounded in the four weeks after Saddam's capture than in the four weeks before. The drop in the unemployment rate since its peak last summer doesn't reflect a greater availability of jobs, but rather a decline in the share of the population that is even looking for work.
More important, having a few months of good news doesn't excuse a consistent pattern of dishonest, irresponsible leadership. And that pattern keeps getting harder to deny.
Brian C.B. notes a paragraph by James Fallows in the new Atlantic Monthly:
This is the place to note that in several months of interviews I never once heard someone say "We took this step because the President indicated..." or "The President wanted..." Instead I heard "Rumsfeld wanted," "Powell thought," "the Vice President pushed," "Bremer asked," and so on. One need only compare this with any discussion of foreign policy in Reagan's or Clinton's Administration--or Nixon's, or Kennedy's, or Johnson's... to sense how unusual is the absence of the President as prime mover. The other conspicuously absent figure was Condoleeza Rice.... It is possible that the President's confidants are so discreet that they have kept all his decisions and instructions secret. But that would run counter to the fundamental nature of bureaucratic Washington, where people cite a President's authority whenever they possibly can ("The President feels strongly about this, so...").
James Fallows's use of the word "unusual" is the most extreme use of understatement I have ever read or will ever read, no matter how long I should happen to live.
Let's give the microphone to Robert H. Jackson:
Of one thing we may be sure. The future will never have to ask, with misgiving, what could the Nazis have said in their favor. History will know that whatever could be said, they were allowed to say. They have been given the kind of a Trial which they, in the days of their pomp and power, never gave to any man.
But fairness is not weakness. The extraordinary fairness of these hearings is an attribute of our strength. The Prosecution's case, at its close, seemed inherently unassailable because it rested so heavily on German documents of unquestioned authenticity. But it was the weeks upon weeks of pecking at this case, by one after another of the defendants, that has demonstrated its true strength. The fact is that the testimony of the defendants has removed any doubt of guilt which, because of the extraordinary nature and magnitude of these crimes, may have existed before they spoke. They have helped write their own judgment of condemnation.
Those of us card-carrying neoliberals who pushed for large-scale opening of capital flows in the early 1990s had a particular vision of the future in our minds' eyes--a vision of the future did not come to pass. We looked at how extraordinarily strongly the world's system of relative prices was tilted against the poor: how cheap were the products that they exported, and how expensive were the capital goods made in the post-industrial core that they needed to import in order to industrialize and develop. "Why not free up capital flows and so encourage large-scale lending from the rich to the poor?" we asked. Such large-scale lending might cut a generation off the time it would take economies where people were poor to converge to the industrial structures and living standards of countries where people were rich. Certainly such large-scale borrowing and lending had played a key role in the economic development of the late-nineteenth century temperate periphery--Canada, the western United States, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and South Africa--more than a century ago.
But the future we saw did not come to pass. Instead of capital flowing from rich to poor, it flowed from poor to rich--and overwhelmingly in recent years into the United States of America, whose rate of capital inflow is now the largest of any country, anytime, anywhere. Central banks that sought to keep the values of their home currencies down so that their workers could gain valuable experience in exporting manufactures to the post-industrial core, first-world investors who feared sending their money down the income and productivity gap after the crises of Mexico '95, East Asia '97, and Russia '98, techno-enthusiasts chasing the returns of the American technology boom, the third-world rich who thought a large Deutsche Bank account would be a good thing to have in case something went wrong and they suddenly had to flee the country in the rubber boat (or the Learjet)--all of these fueled the flow of money into the United States, which was thus enabled to invest much more than it managed to save. The U.S. economy became, and remains, a giant vacuum cleaner, soaking up all the world's spare investible cash.
And so those of us who still wish to be card-carrying flag-waving advocates for international capital mobility are reduced to two and only two arguments. First, and most important, capital controls create the setting for large-scale corruption. People who badly want to move their capital across borders can't--unless they can find some complaisant bureaucrat. A well-functioning market economy needs to minimize the incentives and opportunities for corruption or it will turn into something worse. Second, perhaps the inflow of capital into America was and is justified: perhaps there is something uniquely valuable about investments in America today. (But in that case, if these investment opportunities are so great, why aren't Americans themselves saving more--both privately and publicly--to take advantage of them?)
1960-85 was the era in which development was to be financed by public institutions like the World Bank because market failures and distrust of governments made it very hard for poor countries to borrow on the private market. 1985-2000 has been the era in which development was to be financed by private lending to countries that had adopted the market-friendly and market-conforming policies that were supposed to lead to high returns and rapid growth. The first era was not one of unqualified success. And looking at the reverse inflow of capital into the United States, I cannot say that the second era has been one of unqualified success either. It is very nice that Mexican workers and entrepreneurs are gaining experience in export manufactures, and exporting enough to the U.S. to run a trade surplus. But the flip side of the trade surplus is the capital outflow. Should capital-poor Mexico really be financing a further jump in the capital intensity of the U.S. economy?
It is not possible for a card-carrying neoliberal like me to wish for any but the most minor of controls to curb the most speculative of capital flows. Capital markets can get the allocation of investment badly wrong, but governments are likely to get it even worse, and the incentives to corrupt bureaucrats do need to be kept as low as possible. But the hope for a repetition of the late nineteenth-century experience, in which core investors' money gave peripheral economies the priceless gift of cutting decades off the time needed for successful economic development, has--so far--proved vain.
Louis Uchitelle writes about the employment sitch:
Growth in Jobs Came to a Halt During December: Dropping out has been a characteristic of the recovery since June, reflecting the struggles of the unemployed amid companies' reluctance to add workers. As a result, the percentage of the working-age population participating in the labor force -- that is, employed or seeking employment -- fell to 66 percent in December from 66.5 percent in June, a withdrawal of roughly 1.1 million people. Reflecting this exodus, the employment-to-population ratio -- a measure of the percentage of the working-age population actually holding jobs -- has been dropping, as well. It has fallen nearly eight-tenths of a percentage point, to 62.2 percent, since the recession ended in November 2001, and 2.1 percentage points since the start of the recession in March of that year.
Federal Reserve policy makers consider this ratio an important indicator of how many jobs can be added without upward pressure on wages or inflation. Mr. Bernanke has cited the weakness in the ratio as an important reason for keeping interest rates low. The decline in the ratio has been particular sharp among young people, African-Americans and Hispanics, and economists say it may help to explain a deterioration in wages among workers in jobs below the level of manager or supervisor. These workers account for 80 percent of the 130.1 million people in the work force. Their average hourly earnings, which rose 3 cents, to $15.50, in December, are growing at an ever slower annual rate: 2 percent in December, down from 3.2 percent a year earlier.
"What we worry about is consumer spending in 2004," said Mr. Gault, the Global Insight economist. "We got a lot of help in 2003 from tax cuts and from mortgage refinancings. This year, however, we are counting on better employment gains to support consumer income growth and, in turn, consumer spending. If we don't get the jobs, we will have to worry about the consumer."...
Despite the mild job growth since August, total employment fell last year by 331,000 on top of a 1.5 million drop in 2002. The last time employment, as measured by the survey of 400,000 establishments, declined for two consecutive years was in 1944 and 1945 as war production wound down...
Edmund Andrews writes in the New York Times:
News Analysis: Bush Seeks Ways to Create Jobs, and Fast: The stage had been set to celebrate the revival of jobs. With a phalanx of women entrepreneurs at his side and a billboard covered with the word "Jobs!" behind him, President Bush proclaimed his confidence about the economy here on Friday. But he made only passing reference to the latest news about employment.
The reason was clear: Friday's report on unemployment in December was much weaker than either the administration or most independent economists had predicted. Job creation was virtually nil, and the unemployment rate declined only because the labor force shrank by 309,000 workers. Many of those were people who had simply become too discouraged to keep looking for work. The problem confronting Mr. Bush is that there is little he can do between now and the elections except wait and hope that the employment picture improves. And the administration is not likely to get much more help from the Federal Reserve, which has already reduced short-term interest rates to just 1 percent.
"In terms of big levers to pull, they don't have anything," said Pierre Ellis, a senior economist at Decision Economics, a forecasting company.... Both the White House and the Fed are confronted by a recovery unlike any other in modern history. Economic growth has been soaring for months, corporate profits have shot up and the stock market has regained much of its old ebullience. Yet job creation has been slower than in almost any previous recovery, and wage growth has slowed to a crawl. That appears to reflect another big new element that lies entirely outside the president's control: the enormous increases in productivity, which have made it possible for companies to squeeze more output from each worker.
"The evidence is powerful that we can have 4 or 5 percent growth without hiring much," said John Makin, a senior economist at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Makin has long been among the more pessimistic economic forecasters, but the employment and wage data on Friday came in far worse than even he had expected. "I was stunned, quite frankly," he said. It is not unusual for presidents to undertake actions to straighten out the economy and then do little but hope and pray they work - and in time. Jimmy Carter appointed Paul A. Volcker as chairman of the Fed, and he increased interest rates to stem inflation. The first President Bush reluctantly raised taxes to deal with a ballooning budget deficit. In each case, those actions helped the economy recover, but not in time to earn Mr. Carter or Mr. Bush a second term...
The most puzzling thing about Andrews's story is that Andrews appears to have no memory at all. A year ago--remember--the administration was having an internal debate over economic policy. And the administration decided to use the concern about employment as fuel to pass a dividend tax cut--not a tax cut that would get lots of money to those likely to spend it and so boost employment, but a tax cut that would enrich the well-off five, ten, twenty years from now.
The thinking inside the administration was (i) we want to tilt the distribution of wealth in favor of the rich this way, (ii) the current worries about unemployment give us an opportunity to do so if we claim that the dividend tax cut is really a jobs program, and (iii) employment will probably recover on its own anyway so we really don't need an actual jobs program.
That was the administration's thinking: pass the dividend tax cut rather than a real stimulus program and bet that job growth would accelerate on its own. It was a risky bet to make. They made it. They now appear to have crapped out.
Why isn't this backstory worth including in the article?
Is Dan Froomkin allowed to call the White House Briefing he has started doing for the Washington Post a "weblog"? It is an extraordinarily fine one. I have only one question: what is the URL for its archives going to be?
It is truly a wonderful world we live in, in which someone as smart and energetic as Dan Froomkin is functioning as my personal pre-processor for White House-related news...
I was never a fan of Paul O'Neill as a Treasury Security. He never figured out how to deploy or listen to his professional staff, both making himself infinitely less effective and leading to serious personnel losses that will damage the Treasury as an institution for decades to come. He did not do a good job at marshalling opposition to the steel tariff. He did nothing to raise the level of the administration's pronouncements on economics. He let himself get rolled at the start of the administration by not drawing a line in the sand and requiring a tax cut focused on improving incentives rather than getting money to the rich. He shared the Bush administration bias against even talking to our allies. He never learned that even his most thoughtless words were taken seriously--and that he should try hard to keep from using his big mouth to amplify Brazil's economic problems. He would rather spend time touring Africa with Bono than trying to nail down AIDs funding in the budget. He never seems to have bothered to learn about monetary policy. Such rhetorical gems as his attempt to trash Bob Rubin for going to Singapore and having a falling stock price.
I could go on...
But today we have another, much bigger reason to be un-fans of Paul O'Neill. If as much as one-fifth of what he says about Bush administration decision making is true--and I assure you that much more than one-fifth of it is--he had a duty to the country to submit his resignation from the post of Treasury Secretary and to tell the American people why no later than June 21, 2001:
Wall Street Journal: Suskind: Mr. O'Neill began to view Mr. Lindsey as a partisan for deep tax cuts rather than an honest broker.... He marched to Mr. Cheney's office. "Dick, I think we need to talk," Mr. O'Neill said. He reasoned that Mr. Cheney would understand the importance of establishing sound processes.... Mr. O'Neill said that he was concerned that Mr. Lindsey was masquerading as the honest broker and was anything but.... The need to really "run the traps" on every potential presidential move was more important for this Bush than for his father or Gerald Ford, both of whom had vast experience in the federal government. God knows, Mr. Cheney would understand that as well as anyone.... O'Neill sketched some notes for another serious talk he wanted to have with Mr. Cheney about effective process -- a way to handle decision making so that policy didn't get served half-baked and larded with political calculations. In his personal experience, the president didn't appear to have read even the short memos he sent over. During his weekly one-on-one with Mr. O'Neill, Mr. Bush sat, often for an hour, offering no response. He rarely asked questions in meetings. "The only way I can describe it is that, well, the president is like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people," Mr. O'Neill said. "There is no discernible connection."...
Mr. O'Neill thought about how to add fiber to the policy process in this White House, and about how to persuade Mr. Cheney to take the lead. "I realized it would be hard to find things we did with Nixon or Ford that would be applicable for this president," Mr. O'Neill said later. He recalled Mr. Bush's unresponsiveness in large and small meetings. "This president was so utterly different from those men."... "We need to be better about keeping politics out of the policy process. The political people are there for presentation and execution, not for creation." As before, Dick nodded. He thanked Paul, as always, "for his sharp insights."....
Mr. O'Neill and Mr. Greenspan both made the case that the largely bipartisan consensus on free trade was one of the great victories of the last decade; that the president would confuse many constituencies by flouting that consensus. Mr. O'Neill explained that tariffs would do little to offer long-term support to the U.S. steel industry. Mr. Greenspan pointed out that tariffs might actually violate certain World Trade Organization agreements. Mr. Cheney didn't show his hand. Mr. O'Neill left concerned that the meeting was largely tactical -- that the vice president had already made up his mind.... Mitch Daniels, the budget director, then blurted out, "If you can't do the right thing when you're at 85% approval, then when can you do the right thing? I think it's time to say no [to steel tariffs]." Everyone looked with surprise at Mr. Daniels, who had a way of expressing what others are thinking but won't say. His comment seemed to tip the room. Is there any point, Mr. Daniels's outburst implied, when the political team says they have enough advantage that they are satisfied with their franchise and not constantly twisting the arm of policy? Mr. O'Neill wondered about this as he broke his silence, which was so out of character it was drawing notice. "Well," he said, "certainly, there should be a high hurdle before we take this step" of imposing tariffs. Soon the meeting was a free-for-all. "I think we have a split here," Ms. Rice said. "Do we take this to the president?" This is what Mr. Cheney had been hoping to avoid -- a split. In fact, it was anything but a split. Nearly everyone seemed on one side; Mr. Cheney and Mr. Zoellick were on the other. A consensus on sound policy was colliding with a political favor. Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke. "Why are we thinking about doing this?" he asked in frustration. "I have heard good reasons today not to do it, but I haven't heard one good reason to move forward with tariffs. We can't even say this will improve our steel industry." Finally, it came back to Mr. Cheney. He mumbled that "imports are, in fact, way down from the surge. ... Our minimills are competitive," all arguments against tariffs. But then he added that whatever we do, the tariff-empowering statute says "we can review this in 18 months." In other words, if what we do now is go with tariffs, it will be political bait, and in 18 months -- after the 2002 midterm elections -- we can effect the switch. Meeting over....
Cheney had shown up at a few of the regular meetings of the economic team.... Now, the group was meeting on the vice president's turf. As the meeting in Mr. Cheney's office progressed, it became clear that the vice president was ready to weigh in on what the president should do to bolster the economy, and his standing with voters worried about the economy, as the second half of his term began. A package of tax proposals, led by a 50% cut in the individual tax on dividends, had been all but buried since Mr. O'Neill took his stand against it in early September.... Cheney mentioned them again, how altering the double taxation of dividends would provide some economic stimulus. Mr. O'Neill jumped in, arguing sharply that the government "is moving toward a fiscal crisis" and then pointing out "what rising deficits will mean to our economic and fiscal soundness." Mr. Cheney cut him off. "Reagan proved deficits don't matter," he said. Mr. O'Neill was speechless, hardly believing that Mr. Cheney -- whom he and Mr. Greenspan had known since Dick was a kid -- would say such a thing. Mr. Cheney moved to fill the void. "We won the midterms. This is our due." Mr. O'Neill left Mr. Cheney's office in a state of mild shock. Yes, he knew Mr. Lindsey believed this brazen ideology. And Mr. Rove, and others. But to hear it from the vice president seemed to stop the world turning. The inscrutable Mr. Cheney had finally shown himself...
Interesting how in this telling of the story it is Cheney who shows up as the heavy, uninterested in domestic policies that are good for the country and uninterested in running the kind of honest process that Cheney ran so well for Gerald Ford. (Of course, Cheney would probably say, "With this president, why bother running an honest policy development process? Do you think you would be doing anybody a favor giving this guy the honest options and making him choose one of them?"
From this morning's Wall Street Journal:
In the book, Mr. O'Neill, who held senior positions in the White House budget office in the administrations of former presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford before beginning a 23-year business career that took him to the top of Alcoa Inc., describes his conversations with the president as a "monologue" and said the president rarely asked questions in meetings. "The president is like a blind man in a room full of deaf people," he says. "There is no discernible connection." The chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers took issue with that assessment. "That's not my experience at all," Gregory Mankiw said on CNN. "The president understands the economy. He comes from a business background."
Greg: It's too late to convince anyone that George W. Bush understands the issues that come before him at the level that a president should. We know that he didn't read Paul O'Neill's or Glenn Hubbard's two-pagers. You know whether or not he reads yours. You're not helping George W. Bush's reputation. And you're harming your own.
Israeli historian Benny Morris looks forward to the day when Israel will be able to expel Arabs--all Arabs--Palestinians and Israeli Arabs alike--from the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Israel itself, and so complete the task that David Ben-Gurion began in 1948 before he got "cold feet":
Survival of the fittest (cont.):
You went through an interesting process. You went to research Ben-Gurion and the Zionist establishment critically, but in the end you actually identify with them. You are as tough in your words as they were in their deeds.
"You may be right. Because I investigated the conflict in depth, I was forced to cope with the in-depth questions that those people coped with. I understood the problematic character of the situation they faced and maybe I adopted part of their universe of concepts. But I do not identify with Ben-Gurion. I think he made a serious historical mistake in 1948. Even though he understood the demographic issue and the need to establish a Jewish state without a large Arab minority, he got cold feet during the war. In the end, he faltered."
I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying that Ben-Gurion erred in expelling too few Arabs?
"If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job. I know that this stuns the Arabs and the liberals and the politically correct types. But my feeling is that this place would be quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once and for all. If Ben-Gurion had carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country - the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River. It may yet turn out that this was his fatal mistake. If he had carried out a full expulsion - rather than a partial one - he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations."
I find it hard to believe what I am hearing.
"If the end of the story turns out to be a gloomy one for the Jews, it will be because Ben-Gurion did not complete the transfer in 1948. Because he left a large and volatile demographic reserve in the West Bank and Gaza and within Israel itself."
In his place, would you have expelled them all? All the Arabs in the country?
"But I am not a statesman. I do not put myself in his place. But as an historian, I assert that a mistake was made here. Yes. The non-completion of the transfer was a mistake."
And today? Do you advocate a transfer today?
"If you are asking me whether I support the transfer and expulsion of the Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and perhaps even from Galilee and the Triangle, I say not at this moment. I am not willing to be a partner to that act. In the present circumstances it is neither moral nor realistic. The world would not allow it, the Arab world would not allow it, it would destroy the Jewish society from within. But I am ready to tell you that in other circumstances, apocalyptic ones, which are liable to be realized in five or ten years, I can see expulsions. If we find ourselves with atomic weapons around us, or if there is a general Arab attack on us and a situation of warfare on the front with Arabs in the rear shooting at convoys on their way to the front, acts of expulsion will be entirely reasonable. They may even be essential."
Including the expulsion of Israeli Arabs?
"The Israeli Arabs are a time bomb. Their slide into complete Palestinization has made them an emissary of the enemy that is among us. They are a potential fifth column. In both demographic and security terms they are liable to undermine the state. So that if Israel again finds itself in a situation of existential threat, as in 1948, it may be forced to act as it did then. If we are attacked by Egypt (after an Islamist revolution in Cairo) and by Syria, and chemical and biological missiles slam into our cities, and at the same time Israeli Palestinians attack us from behind, I can see an expulsion situation. It could happen. If the threat to Israel is existential, expulsion will be justified."
Benny Morris, sometime dove. My estimate of the chances that Tel Aviv, Cairo, and Damascus will vanish beneath mushroom clouds sometime in the next fifty years has just doubled, from 10% to 20%.
Benny Morris, in the month ahead the new version of your book on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem is due to be published. Who will be less pleased with the book - the Israelis or the Palestinians?
"The revised book is a double-edged sword. It is based on many documents that were not available to me when I wrote the original book, most of them from the Israel Defense Forces Archives. What the new material shows is that there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought. To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape. In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor of the IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves.
"At the same time, it turns out that there was a series of orders issued by the Arab Higher Committee and by the Palestinian intermediate levels to remove children, women and the elderly from the villages. So that on the one hand, the book reinforces the accusation against the Zionist side, but on the other hand it also proves that many of those who left the villages did so with the encouragement of the Palestinian leadership itself."
According to your new findings, how many cases of Israeli rape were there in 1948?
"About a dozen. In Acre four soldiers raped a girl and murdered her and her father. In Jaffa, soldiers of the Kiryati Brigade raped one girl and tried to rape several more. At Hunin, which is in the Galilee, two girls were raped and then murdered. There were one or two cases of rape at Tantura, south of Haifa. There was one case of rape at Qula, in the center of the country. At the village of Abu Shusha, near Kibbutz Gezer [in the Ramle area] there were four female prisoners, one of whom was raped a number of times. And there were other cases. Usually more than one soldier was involved. Usually there were one or two Palestinian girls. In a large proportion of the cases the event ended with murder. Because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg."
According to your findings, how many acts of Israeli massacre were perpetrated in 1948?
"Twenty-four. In some cases four or five people were executed, in others the numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are spotted walking in a field - they are shot. A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shot. There are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a column entered the village with all guns blazing and killed anything that moved.
"The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir Yassin (100-110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70). There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tantura, but war crimes were perpetrated there. At Jaffa there was a massacre about which nothing had been known until now. The same at Arab al Muwassi, in the north. About half of the acts of massacre were part of Operation Hiram [in the north, in October 1948]: at Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Eilaboun, Arab al Muwasi, Deir al Asad, Majdal Krum, Sasa. In Operation Hiram there was a unusually high concentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a well in an orderly fashion.
"That can't be chance. It's a pattern. Apparently, various officers who took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take to the roads. The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered up for the officers who did the massacres."
What you are telling me here, as though by the way, is that in Operation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicit expulsion order. Is that right?
"Yes. One of the revelations in the book is that on October 31, 1948, the commander of the Northern Front, Moshe Carmel, issued an order in writing to his units to expedite the removal of the Arab population. Carmel took this action immediately after a visit by Ben-Gurion to the Northern Command in Nazareth. There is no doubt in my mind that this order originated with Ben-Gurion. Just as the expulsion order for the city of Lod, which was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, was issued immediately after Ben-Gurion visited the headquarters of Operation Dani [July 1948]."
Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for a deliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion?
"From April 1948, Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transfer. There is no explicit order of his in writing, there is no orderly comprehensive policy, but there is an atmosphere of [population] transfer. The transfer idea is in the air. The entire leadership understands that this is the idea. The officer corps understands what is required of them. Under Ben-Gurion, a consensus of transfer is created."
Ben-Gurion was a "transferist"?
"Of course. Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist."
I don't hear you condemning him.
"Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here."
Benny Morris, for decades you have been researching the dark side of Zionism. You are an expert on the atrocities of 1948. In the end, do you in effect justify all this? Are you an advocate of the transfer of 1948?
"There is no justification for acts of rape. There is no justification for acts of massacre. Those are war crimes. But in certain conditions, expulsion is not a war crime. I don't think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands."
We are talking about the killing of thousands of people, the destruction of an entire society.
"A society that aims to kill you forces you to destroy it. When the choice is between destroying or being destroyed, it's better to destroy."
There is something chilling about the quiet way in which you say that.
"If you expected me to burst into tears, I'm sorry to disappoint you. I will not do that."
So when the commanders of Operation Dani are standing there and observing the long and terrible column of the 50,000 people expelled from Lod walking eastward, you stand there with them? You justify them?
"I definitely understand them. I understand their motives. I don't think they felt any pangs of conscience, and in their place I wouldn't have felt pangs of conscience. Without that act, they would not have won the war and the state would not have come into being."
You do not condemn them morally?
"No."
They perpetrated ethnic cleansing.
"There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide - the annihilation of your people - I prefer ethnic cleansing."
And that was the situation in 1948?
"That was the situation. That is what Zionism faced. A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on."
The term `to cleanse' is terrible.
"I know it doesn't sound nice but that's the term they used at the time. I adopted it from all the 1948 documents in which I am immersed."
What you are saying is hard to listen to and hard to digest. You sound hard-hearted.
"I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a hard tragedy. I feel sympathy for the refugees themselves. But if the desire to establish a Jewish state here is legitimate, there was no other choice. It was impossible to leave a large fifth column in the country. From the moment the Yishuv [pre-1948 Jewish community in Palestine] was attacked by the Palestinians and afterward by the Arab states, there was no choice but to expel the Palestinian population. To uproot it in the course of war.
"Remember another thing: the Arab people gained a large slice of the planet. Not thanks to its skills or its great virtues, but because it conquered and murdered and forced those it conquered to convert during many generations. But in the end the Arabs have 22 states. The Jewish people did not have even one state. There was no reason in the world why it should not have one state. Therefore, from my point of view, the need to establish this state in this place overcame the injustice that was done to the Palestinians by uprooting them."
And morally speaking, you have no problem with that deed?
"That is correct. Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history."
And in our case it effectively justifies a population transfer.
"That's what emerges."
And you take that in stride? War crimes? Massacres? The burning fields and the devastated villages of the Nakba?
"You have to put things in proportion. These are small war crimes. All told, if we take all the massacres and all the executions of 1948, we come to about 800 who were killed. In comparison to the massacres that were perpetrated in Bosnia, that's peanuts. In comparison to the massacres the Russians perpetrated against the Germans at Stalingrad, that's chicken feed. When you take into account that there was a bloody civil war here and that we lost an entire 1 percent of the population, you find that we behaved very well."
The next transfer
You went through an interesting process. You went to research Ben-Gurion and the Zionist establishment critically, but in the end you actually identify with them. You are as tough in your words as they were in their deeds.
"You may be right. Because I investigated the conflict in depth, I was forced to cope with the in-depth questions that those people coped with. I understood the problematic character of the situation they faced and maybe I adopted part of their universe of concepts. But I do not identify with Ben-Gurion. I think he made a serious historical mistake in 1948. Even though he understood the demographic issue and the need to establish a Jewish state without a large Arab minority, he got cold feet during the war. In the end, he faltered."
I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying that Ben-Gurion erred in expelling too few Arabs?
"If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job. I know that this stuns the Arabs and the liberals and the politically correct types. But my feeling is that this place would be quieter and know less suffering if the matter had been resolved once and for all. If Ben-Gurion had carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country - the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River. It may yet turn out that this was his fatal mistake. If he had carried out a full expulsion - rather than a partial one - he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations."
I find it hard to believe what I am hearing.
"If the end of the story turns out to be a gloomy one for the Jews, it will be because Ben-Gurion did not complete the transfer in 1948. Because he left a large and volatile demographic reserve in the West Bank and Gaza and within Israel itself."
In his place, would you have expelled them all? All the Arabs in the country?
"But I am not a statesman. I do not put myself in his place. But as an historian, I assert that a mistake was made here. Yes. The non-completion of the transfer was a mistake."
And today? Do you advocate a transfer today?
"If you are asking me whether I support the transfer and expulsion of the Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and perhaps even from Galilee and the Triangle, I say not at this moment. I am not willing to be a partner to that act. In the present circumstances it is neither moral nor realistic. The world would not allow it, the Arab world would not allow it, it would destroy the Jewish society from within. But I am ready to tell you that in other circumstances, apocalyptic ones, which are liable to be realized in five or ten years, I can see expulsions. If we find ourselves with atomic weapons around us, or if there is a general Arab attack on us and a situation of warfare on the front with Arabs in the rear shooting at convoys on their way to the front, acts of expulsion will be entirely reasonable. They may even be essential."
Including the expulsion of Israeli Arabs?
"The Israeli Arabs are a time bomb. Their slide into complete Palestinization has made them an emissary of the enemy that is among us. They are a potential fifth column. In both demographic and security terms they are liable to undermine the state. So that if Israel again finds itself in a situation of existential threat, as in 1948, it may be forced to act as it did then. If we are attacked by Egypt (after an Islamist revolution in Cairo) and by Syria, and chemical and biological missiles slam into our cities, and at the same time Israeli Palestinians attack us from behind, I can see an expulsion situation. It could happen. If the threat to Israel is existential, expulsion will be justified."
Cultural dementia
Besides being tough, you are also very gloomy. You weren't always like that, were you?
"My turning point began after 2000. I wasn't a great optimist even before that. True, I always voted Labor or Meretz or Sheli [a dovish party of the late 1970s], and in 1988 I refused to serve in the territories and was jailed for it, but I always doubted the intentions of the Palestinians. The events of Camp David and what followed in their wake turned the doubt into certainty. When the Palestinians rejected the proposal of [prime minister Ehud] Barak in July 2000 and the Clinton proposal in December 2000, I understood that they are unwilling to accept the two-state solution. They want it all. Lod and Acre and Jaffa."
If that's so, then the whole Oslo process was mistaken and there is a basic flaw in the entire worldview of the Israeli peace movement.
"Oslo had to be tried. But today it has to be clear that from the Palestinian point of view, Oslo was a deception. [Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat did not change for the worse, Arafat simply defrauded us. He was never sincere in his readiness for compromise and conciliation."
Do you really believe Arafat wants to throw us into the sea?
"He wants to send us back to Europe, to the sea we came from. He truly sees us as a Crusader state and he thinks about the Crusader precedent and wishes us a Crusader end. I'm certain that Israeli intelligence has unequivocal information proving that in internal conversations Arafat talks seriously about the phased plan [which would eliminate Israel in stages]. But the problem is not just Arafat. The entire Palestinian national elite is prone to see us as Crusaders and is driven by the phased plan. That's why the Palestinians are not honestly ready to forgo the right of return. They are preserving it as an instrument with which they will destroy the Jewish state when the time comes. They can't tolerate the existence of a Jewish state - not in 80 percent of the country and not in 30 percent. From their point of view, the Palestinian state must cover the whole Land of Israel."
If so, the two-state solution is not viable; even if a peace treaty is signed, it will soon collapse.
"Ideologically, I support the two-state solution. It's the only alternative to the expulsion of the Jews or the expulsion of the Palestinians or total destruction. But in practice, in this generation, a settlement of that kind will not hold water. At least 30 to 40 percent of the Palestinian public and at least 30 to 40 percent of the heart of every Palestinian will not accept it. After a short break, terrorism will erupt again and the war will resume."
Your prognosis doesn't leave much room for hope, does it?
"It's hard for me, too. There is not going to be peace in the present generation. There will not be a solution. We are doomed to live by the sword. I'm already fairly old, but for my children that is especially bleak. I don't know if they will want to go on living in a place where there is no hope. Even if Israel is not destroyed, we won't see a good, normal life here in the decades ahead."
Aren't your harsh words an over-reaction to three hard years of terrorism?
"The bombing of the buses and restaurants really shook me. They made me understand the depth of the hatred for us. They made me understand that the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim hostility toward Jewish existence here is taking us to the brink of destruction. I don't see the suicide bombings as isolated acts. They express the deep will of the Palestinian people. That is what the majority of the Palestinians want. They want what happened to the bus to happen to all of us."
Yet we, too, bear responsibility for the violence and the hatred: the occupation, the roadblocks, the closures, maybe even the Nakba itself.
"You don't have to tell me that. I have researched Palestinian history. I understand the reasons for the hatred very well. The Palestinians are retaliating now not only for yesterday's closure but for the Nakba as well. But that is not a sufficient explanation. The peoples of Africa were oppressed by the European powers no less than the Palestinians were oppressed by us, but nevertheless I don't see African terrorism in London, Paris or Brussels. The Germans killed far more of us than we killed the Palestinians, but we aren't blowing up buses in Munich and Nuremberg. So there is something else here, something deeper, that has to do with Islam and Arab culture."
Are you trying to argue that Palestinian terrorism derives from some sort of deep cultural problem?
"There is a deep problem in Islam. It's a world whose values are different. A world in which human life doesn't have the same value as it does in the West, in which freedom, democracy, openness and creativity are alien. A world that makes those who are not part of the camp of Islam fair game. Revenge is also important here. Revenge plays a central part in the Arab tribal culture. Therefore, the people we are fighting and the society that sends them have no moral inhibitions. If it obtains chemical or biological or atomic weapons, it will use them. If it is able, it will also commit genocide."
I want to insist on my point: A large part of the responsibility for the hatred of the Palestinians rests with us. After all, you yourself showed us that the Palestinians experienced a historical catastrophe.
"True. But when one has to deal with a serial killer, it's not so important to discover why he became a serial killer. What's important is to imprison the murderer or to execute him."
Explain the image: Who is the serial killer in the analogy?
"The barbarians who want to take our lives. The people the Palestinian society sends to carry out the terrorist attacks, and in some way the Palestinian society itself as well. At the moment, that society is in the state of being a serial killer. It is a very sick society. It should be treated the way we treat individuals who are serial killers."
What does that mean? What should we do tomorrow morning?
"We have to try to heal the Palestinians. Maybe over the years the establishment of a Palestinian state will help in the healing process. But in the meantime, until the medicine is found, they have to be contained so that they will not succeed in murdering us."
To fence them in? To place them under closure?
"Something like a cage has to be built for them. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another."
War of barbarians
Benny Morris, have you joined the right wing?
"No, no. I still think of myself as left-wing. I still support in principle two states for two peoples."
But you don't believe that this solution will last. You don't believe in peace.
"In my opinion, we will not have peace, no."
Then what is your solution?
"In this generation there is apparently no solution. To be vigilant, to defend the country as far as is possible."
The iron wall approach?
"Yes. An iron wall is a good image. An iron wall is the most reasonable policy for the coming generation. My colleague Avi Shlein described this well: What Jabotinsky proposed is what Ben-Gurion adopted. In the 1950s, there was a dispute between Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett. Ben-Gurion argued that the Arabs understand only force and that ultimate force is the one thing that will persuade them to accept our presence here. He was right. That's not to say that we don't need diplomacy. Both toward the West and for our own conscience, it's important that we strive for a political solution. But in the end, what will decide their readiness to accept us will be force alone. Only the recognition that they are not capable of defeating us."
For a left-winger, you sound very much like a right-winger, wouldn't you say?
"I'm trying to be realistic. I know it doesn't always sound politically correct, but I think that political correctness poisons history in any case. It impedes our ability to see the truth. And I also identify with Albert Camus. He was considered a left-winger and a person of high morals, but when he referred to the Algerian problem he placed his mother ahead of morality. Preserving my people is more important than universal moral concepts."
Are you a neo-conservative? Do you read the current historical reality in the terms of Samuel Huntington?
"I think there is a clash between civilizations here [as Huntington argues]. I think the West today resembles the Roman Empire of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries: The barbarians are attacking it and they may also destroy it."
The Muslims are barbarians, then?
"I think the values I mentioned earlier are values of barbarians - the attitude toward democracy, freedom, openness; the attitude toward human life. In that sense they are barbarians. The Arab world as it is today is barbarian."
And in your view these new barbarians are truly threatening the Rome of our time?
"Yes. The West is stronger but it's not clear whether it knows how to repulse this wave of hatred. The phenomenon of the mass Muslim penetration into the West and their settlement there is creating a dangerous internal threat. A similar process took place in Rome. They let the barbarians in and they toppled the empire from within."
Is it really all that dramatic? Is the West truly in danger?
"Yes. I think that the war between the civilizations is the main characteristic of the 21st century. I think President Bush is wrong when he denies the very existence of that war. It's not only a matter of bin Laden. This is a struggle against a whole world that espouses different values. And we are on the front line. Exactly like the Crusaders, we are the vulnerable branch of Europe in this place."
The situation as you describe it is extremely harsh. You are not entirely convinced that we can survive here, are you?
"The possibility of annihilation exists."
Would you describe yourself as an apocalyptic person?
"The whole Zionist project is apocalyptic. It exists within hostile surroundings and in a certain sense its existence is unreasonable. It wasn't reasonable for it to succeed in 1881 and it wasn't reasonable for it to succeed in 1948 and it's not reasonable that it will succeed now. Nevertheless, it has come this far. In a certain way it is miraculous. I live the events of 1948, and 1948 projects itself on what could happen here. Yes, I think of Armageddon. It's possible. Within the next 20 years there could be an atomic war here."
If Zionism is so dangerous for the Jews and if Zionism makes the Arabs so wretched, maybe it's a mistake?
"No, Zionism was not a mistake. The desire to establish a Jewish state here was a legitimate one, a positive one. But given the character of Islam and given the character of the Arab nation, it was a mistake to think that it would be possible to establish a tranquil state here that lives in harmony with its surroundings."
Which leaves us, nevertheless, with two possibilities: either a cruel, tragic Zionism, or the forgoing of Zionism.
"Yes. That's so. You have pared it down, but that's correct."
Would you agree that this historical reality is intolerable, that there is something inhuman about it?
"Yes. But that's so for the Jewish people, not the Palestinians. A people that suffered for 2,000 years, that went through the Holocaust, arrives at its patrimony but is thrust into a renewed round of bloodshed, that is perhaps the road to annihilation. In terms of cosmic justice, that's terrible. It's far more shocking than what happened in 1948 to a small part of the Arab nation that was then in Palestine."
So what you are telling me is that you live the Palestinian Nakba of the past less than you live the possible Jewish Nakba of the future?
"Yes. Destruction could be the end of this process. It could be the end of the Zionist experiment. And that's what really depresses and scares me."
The title of the book you are now publishing in Hebrew is "Victims." In the end, then, your argument is that of the two victims of this conflict, we are the bigger one.
"Yes. Exactly. We are the greater victims in the course of history and we are also the greater potential victim. Even though we are oppressing the Palestinians, we are the weaker side here. We are a small minority in a large sea of hostile Arabs who want to eliminate us. So it's possible than when their desire is realized, everyone will understand what I am saying to you now. Everyone will understand we are the true victims. But by then it will be too late."
Impeach George Bush and Richard Cheney. Impeach them now. We are the United States of America. We do not do things like this.
Christopher Pyle writes about the Maher Arar case:Torture by proxy / How immigration threw a traveler to the wolves: On Sept. 26, 2002, U.S. immigration officials seized a Syrian-born Canadian at Kennedy International Airport, because his name had come up on an international watch list for possible terrorists. What happened next is chilling.
Maher Arar was about to change planes on his way home to Canada after visiting his wife's family in Tunisia when he was pulled aside for questioning. He was not a terrorist. He had no terrorist connections, but his name was on the list, so he was detained for questioning. Not ordinary, polite questioning, but abusive, insulting, degrading questioning by the immigration service, the FBI and the New York City Police Department.
He asked for a lawyer and was told he could not have one. He asked to call his family, but phone calls were not permitted. Instead, he was clapped into shackles and, for several days, made to "disappear." His family was frantic.
Finally, he was allowed to make a call. His government expected that Arar's right of safe passage under its passport would be respected. But it wasn't. Arar denied any connection to terrorists. He was not accused of any crimes, but U.S. agents wanted him questioned further by someone whose methods might be more persuasive than theirs.
So, they put Arar on a private plane and flew him to Washington, D.C. There, a new team, presumably from the CIA, took over and delivered him, by way of Jordan, to Syrian interrogators. This covert operation was legal, our Justice Department later claimed, because Arar is also a citizen of Syria by birth. The fact that he was a Canadian traveling on a Canadian passport, with a wife, two children and job in Canada, and had not lived in Syria for 16 years, was ignored. The Justice Department wanted him to be questioned by Syrian military intelligence, whose interrogation methods our government has repeatedly condemned.
The Syrians locked Arar in an underground cell the size of a grave: 3 feet wide, 6 feet long, 7 feet high. Then they questioned him, under torture, repeatedly, for 10 months. Finally, when it was obvious that their prisoner had no terrorist ties, they let him go, 40 pounds lighter, with a pronounced limp and chronic nightmares.
Why was Arar on our government's watch list? Because "multiple international intelligence agencies" had linked him to terrorist groups. How many agencies? Two. What had they reported? Not much.
The Syrians believed that Arar might be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Why? Because a cousin of his mother's had been, nine years earlier, long after Arar moved to Canada. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police reported that the lease on Arar's apartment had been witnessed by a Syrian- born Canadian who was believed to know an Egyptian Canadian whose brother was allegedly mentioned in an al Qaeda document.
That's it. That's all they had: guilt by the most remote of computer- generated associations. But, according to Attorney General John Ashcroft, that was more than enough to justify Arar's delivery to Syria's torturers.
Besides, Ashcroft added, the torturers had expressly promised that they would not torture him.
Our intelligence agencies have a name for this torture-by-proxy. They call it "extraordinary rendition." As one intelligence official explained: "We don't kick the s -- out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the s -- out of them."
This secret program for torturing suspects has been authorized, if that is the right word for it, by a secret presidential finding. Where the president gets the authority to have anyone tortured has never been explained.
It is time someone asked. What our government did to Maher Arar is worse than anything the British did to our Colonial forefathers. It was worse than anything J. Edgar Hoover did to alleged Communists, civil rights workers and anti-war activists during his long program of dirty tricks.
According to the Bush administration, we are at "war" with al Qaeda. If so, then delivering a suspect to torturers is a war crime and should be prosecuted as such. But first, we need to know who was responsible, and that will not be easy -- unless there is a firestorm of protest.
Isn't it time to condemn torture by proxy and demand prosecution of the persons responsible? Isn't it time to question how these watch lists are assembled and used, before more of us fall victim to secret detentions and brutal interrogations based on guilt by computerized associations?