Policy Review, February & March 2011, No. 165

POLICYReview February & March 2011, No. 165, $6.
00
THE ROAD TO (AND FROM) THE 2010 ELECTIONS

DAVID W. BRADY, MORRIS P. FIORINA,
& R. DOUGLAS RIVERS
A CLIMATE POLICY FOR THE REAL WORLD

PAUL J. SAUNDERS & VAUGHAN TUREKIAN
THE PERSISTENCE OF GENOCIDE

DAVID RIEFF
PTSD’S DIAGNOSTIC TRAP

SALLY SATEL
ALSO: ESSAYS AND REVIEWS BY

MICHAEL GONZALEZ, GREGORY CONKO &
HENRY I. MILLER, JAMES KIRCHICK,
PETER BERKOWITZ, HENRIK BERING, YING MA,
DAVID R. HENDERSON
A P u b l i c a t i o n o f t h e H o ov e r I n s t i t u t i o n
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POLICY Review
F EBRUARY & M ARCH 2011, No. 165
Features
3 THE ROAD TO (AND FROM) THE 2010 ELECTIONS
What happened to the president and his party?
David W. Brady, Morris P. Fiorina, & R. Douglas Rivers
15 A CLIMATE POLICY FOR THE REAL WORLD

Less international negotiation, smarter domestic decisions
Paul J. Saunders & Vaughan Turekian
29 THE PERSISTENCE OF GENOCIDE

“Never Again,” again and again
David Rieff
41 PTSD’S DIAGNOSTIC TRAP

Locking some veterans into long-term dependence
Sally Satel
55 CUBA’S LOST HISTORY

Reclaiming the pre-Castro national character
Michael Gonzalez
69 THE RUSH TO CONDEMN GENETICALLY MODIFIED CROPS

Impractical regulations and nuisance lawsuits
Gregory Conko & Henry I. Miller
Books
83 THE CENTER-RIGHT HONORABLE TONY BLAIR
James Kirchick on A Journey: My Political Life by Tony Blair.
90 THINKING ABOUT TORTURE

Peter Berkowitz on Because it is Wrong: Torture, Privacy, and Presidential
Power in the Age of Terror by Charles Fried and Gregory Fried.
96 BRUTISH AND SHORT

Henrik Bering on Brute: The Life of Victor Krulak, U.S. Marine by
Robert Coram.
102 MARKET CAPITALISM, STATE-STYLE

Ying Ma on The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between
States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer.
108 HOME ECONOMICS

David R. Henderson on At Home: A Short History of
Private Life by Bill Bryson.
A P u b l i c a t i o n o f t h e H o ov e r I n s t i t u t i o n
stanford university
POLI CY Review
F e b r u a ry & M a r c h 2 0 1 1 , N o . 1 6 5
Editor
Tod Lindberg
Research Fellow, Hoover Institution
Consulting Editor
Mary Eberstadt
Managing Editor
Liam Julian
Office Manager
Sharon Ragland
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The Road to (and from)
the 2010 Elections
By David W. Brady, Morris P. Fiorina,
& R. Douglas Rivers
T
he 2008 elections gave the Democrats the House, the
presidency, and a “filibuster proof” Senate. Pundits spoke
of the election as a “game changer.” Evan Thomas wrote
that “Like Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 and Reagan in
1980, the Obama run of 2008 marks a real shift in real
time. It is early yet, but it is not difficult to imagine that we will, for years to
come, think of American politics in terms of Before Obama and After
Obama.”1 According to Borsage and Greenberg: “But election 2008 was
not simply a testament to the remarkable candidacy of Barack Obama, nor a
product of Bush’s catastrophic presidency. Rather, the results suggest that
this may not be simply a change election but a sea-change election . . . we
may be witness to the emergence of a new progressive majority, that con-
trary to conservatives’ claims, America is now a center-left nation.”2 Even
David W. Brady, Morris P. Fiorina, and R. Douglas Rivers are senior fellows of
the Hoover Institution and professors of Political Science at Stanford University.
February & March 2011 3 Policy Review

Brady, Fiorina & Rivers
James Carville’s 40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next
Generation did not seem as outlandish when published in early 2009 as it
does in the aftermath of the 2010 congressional elections.
This article examines what happened to the president and his party
between the electoral zenith of November 2008 and the nadir of November
2010. We begin by reviewing an analysis that appeared in these pages early
in 2009. Contrary to much commentary at the time, that analysis showed
that the Obama victory was less a reflection of an electorate that had moved
to the left than it was a negative judgment on the performance of the Bush
administration. We extend that analysis, showing that in 2009 and 2010
the public came to view the performance of the new administration increas-
ingly negatively, in part because of policies it pursued that did not enjoy
wide popular support. In particular, we show that the administration’s focus
on health care and, to a lesser extent, cap and trade probably cost the
Democrats their House majority. We conclude with brief speculations about
the prospects that the new Republican House can make progress on its
avowed goal of reducing government expenditures.
The road to 2008
A
s we pointed out in our earlier article, between 2004 and
2006, numerous public opinion polls reported a significant
increase in Democratic Party identifiers and a corresponding
decrease in Republican identifiers.3 Since these polls were cross-sectional
snapshots, however, the causes of the change were unclear. Thus, we com-
missioned YouGov/Polimetrix, an internet-based poll, to sample nearly
13,000 respondents who had been in their large database since 2004. This
allowed us to track change in party identification over the four-year period
and relate them to questions about the policies and performance of the Bush
administration.
Figure 1 shows that 2004 Republicans who stuck with their identifica-
tion in 2008 were much more likely to approve of the Bush administration’s
overall performance as well as its handling of the war in Iraq and the econo-
my than were stable independents and 2004 Republicans who had moved
to Independent in 2008. The latter in turn were more favorable to the
administration than stable Democrats and 2 0 0 4 Republicans and
Independents who had moved to the Democratic side in 2008.
1. Evan Thomas and the staff of Newsweek, A Long Time Coming: The Inspiring, Combative 2008
Campaign and the Historic Election of Barack Obama (Public Affairs Press, 2010).
2. Robert Borsage and Stanley B. Greenberg, “The Emerging Center-Left Majority,” American Prospect
(November 13, 2008), available at http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_emerging_center-
left_majority. (This and subsequent weblinks accessed December 17, 2010.)
3. David Brady, Douglas Rivers, and Laurel Harbridge, “The 2008 Democratic Shift,” Policy Review
152 (December 2008 & January 2009).
4 Policy Review
The Road to (and from) the 2010 Elections
figure 1
Evaluations of Bush administration performance, 2008
100% Republican Independent Democrat

90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
bush approval iraq economy
But while disapproval of the Bush administration was strongly associated

with movement away from the Republican Party, disapproval did not indi-
cate that voter sentiment was shifting to the left across a range of policy
issues. We used the same survey to examine public positions on a set of
issues where party differences were clearly evident: universal healthcare,
global warming, gay marriage, abortion rights, and illegal immigration. The
Republican response was coded as: oppose universal health care, think
effects of global warming are overstated, oppose any legal recognition of
same sex couples, allow no abortions or only in case of rape and incest, and
favor deportation of illegal immigrants. Figure 2 plots the percent taking the
Republican response for each of the three categories of respondents: stable
Republicans, stable and new independents, stable and new Democrats.
Large majorities of those who remained Republican between 2004 and
2008 favor the Republican position on these issues, but the opinions of
those in the independent category are much closer to the opinions of stable
Republicans than to the Democratic side. Thus, the battering the
Republicans experienced in 2006–2008 was much more a result of dissatis-
faction with the performance of the Bush administration than an indication
of a policy realignment in the electorate.
From 2008 to 2010
C o n t r a ry t o o u r 2 0 0 9 conclusion, many commentators

assumed that the 2008 elections had ushered in a new progressive
era. President Obama came to Washington with an ambitious poli-
cy agenda featuring a stimulus package, health care reform, energy and envi-
February & March 2011 5

figure 2
Issue positions, 2008
100%
Republican Independent Democrat
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
Health Care Global Warming Gay Marriage Abortion Illegal Immigration
figure 3
Health care bill approval
ronmental legislation, financial reform, and foreign policy change, among

other lesser goals. At first things went smoothly. The stimulus package
passed handily with the promise that it would keep unemployment at 8.2
percent or less. But the health care and environmental proposals faced
tougher sledding than the stimulus. The Democratic majority in the House
was more liberal than the Democratic majority in the Senate. In particular, it
6 Policy Review
was clear from the beginning that the single payer and public option plans
favored by the most liberal wing of the Democratic Party had no chance of
passing the Senate. After months of contentious politics, even a much weak-
er version of health care reform appeared doomed as late as February 2010.
But through a series of parliamentary procedures and House compromises,
the Democrats finally enacted the Patient Protection and Affordable Care
Act in March of 2010.
The story on cap and trade was simpler. The House passed it but Senate
Democrats representing coal producing states and states dependent upon
coal for energy joined with Republicans to prevent consideration. After a
lengthy process the two chambers agreed on a financial reform bill in July of
2010. All in all, despite the failure of cap and trade and the compromises
entailed in passing health care and financial reform, the Democrats had
enacted a stimulus package, a major health care bill, financial reform, and
other less significant legislation. From the standpoint of legislative produc-
tion, the 111th Congress excelled. For Joe Klein in Time, “the legislative
achievements have been stupendous,” and in the judgment of Doris Kearns
Goodwin, “I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like Obama since
Roosevelt.”4
From an electoral standpoint, however, this legislative productivity was a
different story. As Figure 3 shows, from the summer of 2009 to the election,
more Americans opposed the health care reform than favored it, although
parts of it were popular. The burst of legislative activity on multiple fronts
made middle-of-the-road voters receptive to Republican charges that federal
power and spending were out of control. Moreover, by summer 2010, the
claim that the stimulus would keep unemployment below 8.2 percent had
clearly proved wrong. The combination of a very slow and weak economic
recovery, concern about the deficit, and negative opinion toward the presi-
dent’s policies combined to bring the president’s approval ratings down. The
most significant drop in approval and increase in disapproval occurred dur-
ing the health care debate from late May 2009 through December. From
more than 70 percent approval at the time of his inauguration, the presi-
dent’s approval ratings fell below his disapproval ratings by the summer of
2010. Perhaps most significantly, approval among independents fell most
quickly; a plurality of them already disapproved by late summer of 2009
(Figure 4).
According to our YouGov/Polimetrix surveys, many Americans were
skeptical about their prospects under the new health care regime. By mid-
2009 about 40 percent said they would receive worse care if the bill passed
compared to slightly less than 20 percent who thought they would be better
off than before the bill. After passage the gap between worse and better care
4. Quoted in Howard Kurtz, “Beware the gop Coronation,” Daily Beast (October 31, 2010), available
at http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-10-31/republican-election-wins-will-draw-
glowing-press-just-like-obama-once-did/.

figure 4
Obama approval among independents
widened slightly, with 40 percent holding worse off and about 15 percent
better off. And on the cost side, Americans were skeptical about claims that
they would get improved care with less cost: Over 50 percent of those
polled believed that their costs for health care would increase compared to
10 percent or so who thought their costs would decrease.
Independents had moved very sharply to the Democrats in the 2006 con-
gressional elections — by a margin of 18 percentage points according to the
national exit polls. Thus, their growing disenchantment with the president
threatened Democratic prospects in 2010. In addition, the number of self-
professed independents had increased from about 31 percent in October of
2008 to over 36 percent in October 2010. The increase in Independents
came at the expense of Democrats who declined from about 36 percent to
about 32 percent. During the same period Republicans stayed at the same
level — about a quarter of the electorate.
The 2010 Democratic shellacking
T he preceding developments superimposed on a long, deep

drop in employment and a very slow recovery generated stiff head-
winds for Democrats in the 2010 elections. Democratic members
from moderate and conservative districts were left particularly vulnerable.
That condition proved fatal for many of them as Republicans targeted dis-
tricts where Obama had lost to McCain, as well as districts that had been
lost to Democrats in the previous two elections. In the election, eleven of 21
members of the class of 2006 lost their seats while 21 of 24 members of the
8 Policy Review
class of 2008 lost. In total Republicans gained 63 seats in the House, the
largest gain in a midterm election since 1938. Republicans also gained six
Senate seats, seven governorships, control of nineteen state legislative cham-
bers, and almost 700 new state legislative seats.
Exit polls revealed huge shifts to Republicans between the 2006 and
2010 midterms. Republicans turned an 18 point 2006 deficit among inde-
pendents into a 17 point lead in 2010. Rural voters, older voters, and
Catholics all showed four-year swings over 2 0 percentage points.
Republicans gained nearly as much among white voters and high school
graduates. They gained 13 percentage points over 2006 among those mak-
ing less than $50,000 and those above $250,000 in income. They gained
heavily in the Northeast and the Midwest. In 2010,
pluralities thought Republicans better able than As usual, post-
Democrats to handle the economy (+23%), spend- election analyses
ing (+27%), and taxes (+31%). In sum, voters,
almost across the board, turned away from the by pundits
Democrats. and party
As usual, post-election analyses by pundits and
party spokespersons differed according to their spokespersons
political orientation. For the most part Republicans differed
viewed the election as repudiation of Obama and his
according to
policies, while Democrats claimed they had not
properly communicated their policy achievements or their political
that Republicans had benefitted from illicit corpo- orientation.
rate contributions. Thus, the day after the election
Rush Limbaugh exulted that Nancy Pelosi, whom he referred to as “the
wicked witch of the West,” had a House fall on her.5 In contrast, in her day-
after column Maureen Dowd wrote, “Republicans out communicated a sil-
ver-tongued president who was supposed to be Ronald Reagan’s heir in the
communications department. They were able to persuade a lot of Americans
that the couple in the White House was not American enough, not quite
‘normal,’ too Communist, too radical, too Great Society.”6
In spite of the predictability of the responses to the election, the question
of what factors caused the Democratic debacle is an important one to
answer. In the remainder of this article we turn to an analysis of the election
results in an attempt to discern how much of the Democratic loss is attribut-
able to the economy and how much attributable to the choices made by
Obama and the Democratic congressional leadership.
The president’s party typically loses seats in midterm elections; the aver-
age loss for first term Democratic presidents in the postwar era is 30 seats.
A very poor economy and a president below 50 percent in approval by
5. See http://noisyroom.net/blog/2010/11/03/wipe-out-rush-limbaugh-celebrates-2010-election/. .
6. Maureen Dowd “Republican Party Time,” New York Times (November 3, 2010), available at
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/03/opinion/03dowd.html?ref=maureendowd.

themselves would generate significant losses for the incumbent party. But
political science forecasting models based on the “fundamentals” badly
under-predicted the Democratic seat loss — several even forecast that the
Democrats would easily retain their House majority.7 Our hypothesis is that
by pursuing a policy agenda to the left of the electorate’s comfort zone the
president and the House leadership exacerbated the problems for Democrats
from moderate to conservative districts — especially the districts captured in
the 2006 and 2008 elections. Three-quarters of the Democratic candidates
running in the 48 districts carried by McCain in 2009 lost. Tellingly, eight
of fifteen who voted no on both health care and cap and trade survived,
while only three of sixteen who voted yes on one or the other survived, and
all seven of those who voted yes on both bills lost.
The question By pushing highly controversial legislation, the
Democratic leadership in the House of
of what factors Representatives caused the party to lose significantly
caused the more seats than they would have from the poor
economy alone.
Democratic In the analyses that follow we have used standard
debacle is an statistical procedures to estimate the electoral harm
of the health care and cap and trade votes.8 These
important one
were not the only controversial votes that figured in
to answer. the campaign, of course, but tarp II had only ten
Democrats in opposition and the stimulus only
eleven. Moreover, several of these defectors did not seek reelection in 2008,
so there is simply not enough variation on these votes to analyze.
We use the vote cast for the member in 2008 to measure his or her elec-
toral vulnerability, and Obama’s 2008 vote in the district to measure district
support for Obama. We also include variables for members elected in 2006
and 2008. We expect that the more conservative the district, the more that
support for issues like health care and cap and trade hurt Democratic candi-
dates. Conversely, the more liberal the district the smaller the damage from a
vote in support of such issues, and in very liberal districts, of course, a yes
vote would be an electoral benefit.
We used four different statistical estimation procedures to insure the
robustness of our findings. Tables 1 and 2 report the results most favorable
and least favorable to our hypothesis.
From Table 1, yes votes on health care and cap and trade severely dam-
aged Democrats from marginal districts. In districts where Obama got only
45 percent of the vote and the Democratic incumbent voted yes on health
care, we estimate a 9 percent vote penalty. At the 50 percent Obama vote
7. See James E. Campbell, ed., “Forecasts of the 2010 Midterm Elections,” PS: Political Science &
Politics 43 (2010), 625–648.
8. See David W. Brady, Morris P. Fiorina, and Arjun Wilkins, “The 2010 Elections: Why Did Political
Scientists’ Forecasts Go Awry?,” forthcoming in PS: Political Science & Politics 44 (2011).
10 Policy Review
level, a yes vote hurts less than it did at 45 percent, but still carries about a 7
percent vote penalty. The more liberal the district, the less it costs to vote yes
on either bill. At 60 percent 2008 Obama support the penalty is less than 4
percent. The penalties for voting yes on cap and trade are smaller, and at 60
percent Obama support in 2008 a yes vote becomes a positive.
table 1
Vote share loss from yes v. no votes on health care and cap and trade
Health care Cap and trade
vote share vote share
Obama vote yes no yes no
.45 41.4 50.7 42.3 49.1
.50 46.4 53.9 47.2 51.9
.55 51.5 57.1 52.2 54.8
.60 56.6 60.3 57.1 57.7
The analysis underlying Table 1 examines the gain or loss in percentage

of the vote, but a drop in vote percentage does not automatically translate
into loss of a seat, so the analysis that underlies Table 2 examines the proba-
bility of winning versus losing a seat. The results are again instructive.
Democrats who came from districts where Obama won 45 percent of the
vote in 2008 and who voted yes on either health care or cap and trade had
almost no chance of reelection compared to a reelection probability of 40
percent or more if they voted no. At an Obama 2008 level of 50 percent
reelection probabilities are still two to three times higher for “nay” voters. A
“yea” vote on cap and trade becomes a positive factor as the 2008 vote for
Obama in the district nears 55 percent, and a health care vote becomes a
positive factor as Obama’s 2008 vote climbs from 55 to 60 percent.
table 2
Probability of defeat given district Obama vote and votes on
health care and cap and trade
Probability of winning contingent on vote
Health care Cap and trade
Obama vote yes no yes no
.45 .02 .45 .05 .40
.50 .20 .60 .27 .25
.55 .63 .74 .66 .69
.60 .93 .85 .92 .80
While there is something of a gap between these most favorable and least
favorable statistical analyses (this is not rocket science, after all), the preced-
ing results clearly indicate that Democrats coming from more conservative

districts were hurt by votes in favor of health care and cap and trade.
Democrats from districts that had given Obama a big majority in 2008
were helped by a yes vote on either health care or cap and trade, but they
were generally likely to win anyway.
How many seats did it cost the president and his party to push for health
care and cap and trade legislation? To suggest an answer to that question,
we take the statistical equations underlying Tables 1 and 2 and set all
Democratic votes on health care and cap and trade at no, which takes away
(as much as can be done) the effect of yes votes on health care and cap and
trade. In this counterfactual case, where every Democrat opposes these two
pieces of legislation, Democrats would have saved between 22 seats (from
Table 2) and 40 seats (from Table 1), probably allowing them to save their
majority.
Counterfactual exercises like that just reported are problematic in that
other things presumed to stay constant would not have stayed constant had
rank-and-file Democratic House members voted down health care and cap
and trade. In that event they might have provoked primary challenges
and/or defections from angry voters in the Democratic base. But this exercise
strongly suggests that members from more-conservative districts who sup-
ported health care and cap and trade, either out of personal belief or party
pressure or both, paid an electoral penalty. The economy and the president’s
middling ratings indicated that the Democrats would lose seats. But by
advancing controversial legislation the Democratic leadership appears to
have turned a probable big loss into one of historic proportions.
Implications for 2012
W hat does the Republican “shellacking” of Democrats in

2010 portend for 2012? If history is any guide, the answer is
not good news for Republicans, at least for the post-World War
II period. In 1946, the Republicans gained 55 seats in the house and 12 in
the Senate to take control of Congress for the first time in 16 years.
Democratic prospects for 1948 looked so poor that Senator Fulbright, a
Democrat, proposed that President Truman appoint a Republican secretary
of state (next in line for the presidency after Truman’s elevation), resign, and
cede the presidency to the Republicans. Contrary to expectations, Truman
campaigned against the “do-nothing” Republican Congress and won reelec-
tion. A generation later, after the 1994 elections gave Republicans control
of Congress for the first time in 40 years, some in the media wondered
whether a weakened President Clinton was still relevant. But after two gov-
ernment shutdowns Clinton was reelected overwhelmingly in 1996. The
key to understanding how these two new Republican Congresses managed
to reelect sitting Democratic presidents lies in the policy choices they made.
In the flush of a big victory they overreached.
12 Policy Review
In the 112th Congress, a key issue will be government spending. The one
common principle across all the Tea Party movements in states and localities
was that the country cannot afford our current deficits, let alone those loom-
ing in the not too distant future. Addressing the deficit problem involves
raising taxes, cutting spending, or some combination of the two. Thus far,
Republicans have been insistent on cutting spending while keeping the Bush
tax cuts in place and enacting no new taxes. In principle, very strong eco-
nomic growth could increase incomes sufficiently to increase revenue with-
out increasing the tax rate; however, few expect the economy to do this in
the near future. Given that the next election will occur before economic
growth can solve the problem, the key issue for Republicans is reducing gov-
ernment spending.
While the electorate in 2010 yelled a loud “no” to the policies of the
president and Democratic Congress, the negative verdict was by no means
carte blanche for Republicans to carry out their own wish list. Given the
centrality of spending issues, we conducted a YouGov/Polimetrix poll on six-
teen federal programs, asking whether spending on each should be
increased, decreased, or kept the same. Table 3 presents the results of this
poll.
table 3
Do you think federal spending on the following programs should be
increased or decreased or kept the same?
% % % %
Increase Keep the same Decrease Not sure
Social Security 42 42 9 8
National Defense 31 39 25 6
Medicare 40 42 12 6
Aid to the Poor 34 39 20 7
Medicaid 32 46 15 7
Veterans Benefits 52 39 4 6
Health Research 43 42 9 5
Education 53 30 12 5
Highways 28 53 13 6
Mass Transit 29 41 20 10
Foreign Aid 3 22 67 8
Unemployment Benefits 31 40 23 6
Science and Technology 36 45 12 7
Agriculture 23 44 24 9
Housing 21 42 30 7
The Environment 37 36 21 6

In fifteen out of sixteen programs, a majority of the public would like
spending to be increased or kept the same. The only program that a majority
of Americans would cut is foreign aid. Most importantly, in the large entitle-
ment programs, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, only small minori-
ties favor the cuts that must come if the budget deficit is to be brought under
control. Defense enjoys a similarly privileged status, with 70 percent favor-
ing either current spending or an increase. Even in agriculture and housing,
over 60 percent of Americans favor keeping expenditures where they are or
increasing them.
Data like these should inform the agenda of the new Republican House
majority. In 2 0 1 0 the country voted no on Democrats, not yes on
Republicans, and certainly not yes to across-the-board spending cuts. The
new majority faces the hard reality that, in general, voters want spending
reduced, but when it comes to specific programs, there are none that stand
out, save foreign aid, which, if eliminated entirely, would not dent the deficit
of the United States.
Leading the country on a new spending path will require skill and leader-
ship. The obvious place to start is to begin a serious effort to educate the
American public about both the seriousness and complexity of the problem.
Everything must be on the table. For example, Democrats can no longer
label any proposal to slow the growth rate of social security benefits as
“unacceptable.” And for their part Republicans must address Ron Paul’s
query about why the U.S. has more than 700 military bases overseas. In
recent days we have heard a lot about the need to have an “adult conversa-
tion” with the American public. That conversation must begin with some
serious political leadership.
14 Policy Review
A Climate Policy for
the Real World
By Paul J. Saunders &
Vaughan Turekian
G
overnment officials worldwide are trying to put the
best face on the 2010 United Nations climate change negotia-
tions in Cancun, especially after 2 0 0 9 ’s debacle in
Copenhagen. But the talks produced little real progress and
led many to wonder whether the two global climate meetings
represent a necessary, albeit somewhat sideways step in the long process
towards an eventual global treaty reducing greenhouse gases or, alternative-
ly, the gradual and unsurprising end to a nearly twenty-year effort to achieve
binding international mandates.
Advocates of a binding global treaty on greenhouse gas emissions are
divided over the importance of the new agreement coming out of Cancun.
For any who might harbor doubts, the Obama administration’s approach to
the negotiations is revealing: Neither the president nor the secretary of state
(nor the vice president, for that matter) traveled to Mexico, leaving the
Paul J. Saunders is executive director of The Nixon Center. Vaughan Turekian is

a non-resident fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution and holds a
Ph.D. in atmospheric geochemistry. They worked together on climate issues as
advisors to the under secretary of state for global affairs during the George W.
Bush administration.

negotiations in the hands of State Department Special Envoy Todd Stern.
Key congressional leaders also skipped this year’s talks.
The administration’s reduced emphasis on the un meetings, and continu-
ing international disagreements over climate change, demonstrate an uncom-
fortable fact for many greens: U.S. efforts to stem climate change thus far
have largely vindicated the Bush administration’s approach to global action
on climate change during its final years. The failures of the high-profile
Copenhagen talks — and of U.S. domestic legislation — reflect structural
political and economic realities that will be profoundly difficult to over-
come, if they can be overcome at all. Obama would do well to understand
the lessons of Copenhagen and cap-and-trade and move on to a more practi-
cal approach — especially after the 2010 midterm
elections.
The pragmatic
The pragmatic wing of the activist community
wing of the has cautiously praised the Cancun summit, which
activist, produced a deal that brought a voluntary interna-
tional climate agreement reached on the margins in
climate-change Copenhagen inside the un process and created a
community has fund to help poor developing countries reduce their
greenhouse gas emissions and manage the conse-
cautiously quences of a warming Earth. At the other end of the
praised the spectrum, the climate movement’s doctrinaire ideo-
Cancun summit. logues have denounced the talks’ failure to produce
a binding agreement on deep reductions. They are
all the more bitter after the Copenhagen fiasco,
years of resentment of the Bush administration’s approach, and earlier surety
that the Democrats controlling the White House and the Congress would
accomplish what the prior Republican president was unwilling to try. The
fact that they have no “Plan b” for addressing the climate problem — and
apparently cannot conceive of a solution other than unprecedented and
therefore very unlikely global regulation — only adds to their frustration.
Equally troubling to both of these camps is the Kyoto Protocol’s looming
expiration in 2012, with its results limited and no follow-on arrangements
in place. Since Kyoto’s modest emissions targets were secondary to its goal
of establishing a global system for deeper future reductions, supporters of
binding international targets and timetables for emissions are alarmed by the
relentless ticking of the clock.
Compounding activists’ worries is the refusal of key parties to the Kyoto
Protocol — including Japan and Russia — to agree to an extension through
a new so-called “commitment period.” Japan sensibly refuses to accept
deeper emissions reductions without commitments from the United States
and China. Russia — whose ratification brought Kyoto across the threshold
that made the pact legally binding — seems more interested in its ability to
sell emissions credits than in preventing climate change. Moscow was an
enormous beneficiary of Kyoto’s 1990 base year for measuring emissions
16 Policy Review
A Climate Policy for the Real World
reductions; the combination of the Soviet Union’s vast and highly inefficient
industrial base and Russia’s subsequent economic collapse meant that the
country did not have to do anything to meet its targets and could sell both
its natural gas and its leftover emissions to Europe.
With the most invested in Kyoto, European leaders may be particularly
eager to make a deal in the remaining time before 2012 — and they may
eventually do so. However, neither of the two options available is likely to
produce meaningful results. Efforts to negotiate a new global agreement will
force a choice. One option is to include the United States and China, the two
largest emitters, and India, where emissions are rising rapidly; but this
would weaken any deal because none will commit to significant emissions
reductions. The alternative is to exclude them, which would limit the impact
of an agreement by leaving out the nations together responsible for over 45
percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. It could be worse if Japan,
Russia, and others are unwilling to accept new limits without a comprehen-
sive deal. This makes a meaningful international agreement on climate
change very improbable.
The reasons for this are clear. While both developments were shocking to
many inside the echo chamber that surrounds climate change discussions,
the breakdown of the Copenhagen negotiations and the slow death of emis-
sion-limiting legislation in the United States were eminently predictable.
Moreover, while the Obama administration has clearly tempered its ambi-
tions, at least for the time being, there is little evidence that the president and
other senior officials have drawn necessary conclusions from their first two
years and reassessed U.S. climate change strategy. This is a mistake; the
United States needs new pragmatic and creative policies to address climate
change at the local, national, and international levels. But making these
changes requires clearly understanding what has happened so far.
What really happened in Copenhagen?
O
ne problem in the December 2009 Copenhagen climate summit
was that expectations had soared wildly beyond the limits of ratio-
nality, in part due to wholly unrealistic hopes tied to President
Barack Obama. As a result, the meetings evolved into a summit of heads of
state without adequate diplomatic preparation. Climate change is far too
complex an issue to resolve in negotiating sessions among national leaders if
the central parameters of the deal have not been resolved in advance. Absent
this, the administration allowed the United States to be drawn into a high-
stakes gamble that was very unlikely to succeed, especially in view of the
many other flaws in its approach to the talks.
The second problem was one of strategic sequencing. Since the adminis-
tration had not succeeded in passing climate legislation prior to Copenhagen,
it was trying to pursue an international agreement without a domestic con-

sensus on climate policy. Broadly speaking, this repeated the major error in
the Clinton administration’s decision to sign the Kyoto Protocol in the face
of clear Senate opposition. Thus, even if the administration succeeded in
reaching a deal that went beyond a political declaration, subsequent events
have demonstrated that it would not have been able to deliver at home.
Given this, the lack of a deal at Copenhagen — which the press and others
fortunately and accurately blamed as much on China’s reluctance as U.S.
policy paralysis — was probably the best outcome for the administration
itself. Reaching an agreement with major emitters in the developed and
developing world only to see it die in the Senate would have been a major
blow to American credibility and to Obama’s domestic leadership.
The third problem with the U.S. approach to
In Copenhagen, Copenhagen (a problem shared by the Europeans,
who often appeared to be observers rather than par-
Washington ticipants in the negotiations) was tactical and diplo-
and European matic. Washington and European capitals gave far
too much attention to China — which is admittedly
capitals gave central to any successful effort to reduce greenhouse
far too much gas emissions at a global level — thereby placing
Beijing in the driver’s seat and limiting American
attention to and Western negotiating leverage. This was especial-
China. ly damaging in the wake of the global financial cri-
sis, when China’s sense of indispensability was
already unprecedented (not to say inflated). China luxuriated in its
Copenhagen role, sending a second-tier diplomat to a negotiating session
among heads of state and repeatedly making them sit and wait during phone
calls to decision-makers.
The final two problems are fundamental structural weaknesses of the un
Framework Convention on Climate Change. One is that un-based negotiat-
ing processes inherently give all parties equal formal status (though obvious-
ly not equal influence). It is simply too difficult to negotiate a highly com-
plex agreement incorporating emissions limits, verification measures, devel-
opment support, and other components with 200 parties around the table.
While they are well-meaning and legitimately concerned and involved, the
vast majority of the delegates in such a conversation have little to contribute
beyond their grievances. Denmark’s weak chairmanship didn’t help this
already difficult situation.
A similarly deep underlying problem of the unfccc is the historically
and morally reasonable but impractical and unmanageable legal concept of
“common but differentiated responsibility,” the idea that all nations share
responsibility for managing climate change but that the developed world has
greater responsibility because of its past contribution to today’s greenhouse
gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, the climate problem is
well beyond the point at which it could be solved through even drastic mea-
sures by the U.S., Europe, and Japan alone. In fact, even if the U.S. became a
18 Policy Review
zero-emission economy by 2030, China’s expected new emissions — driven
by an economic engine increasingly important to global growth — would
expand to fill nearly all the gap, leaving the world with essentially no net
change in emissions.
The statistics tell the story. According to the Department of Energy’s
Energy Information Administration, the developing world’s portion of glob-
al carbon dioxide emissions has grown from 46.4 percent in 1990 to 57.0
percent in 2010, and is projected to reach 64.2 percent by 2030. China’s
share of global co 2 emissions have grown from 10.7 percent in 1990 to
23.4 percent in 2010, now somewhat exceeding the U.S. share, and is pro-
jected to hit 29.2 percent by 2030, close to double America’s expected
share at that time. It is not realistic for developed countries, now making up
significantly less than half the total global co 2 emissions, to make vast
reductions in their own emissions simply to allow developing countries more
room to increase emissions.
Separately, while the developed world’s past emissions may be fair game
in global negotiations, it is somewhat disingenuous to disconnect the devel-
oped world’s progress from developing nations. Setting aside the excesses of
the colonial era, during which emissions were still quite low, economic
growth in developed countries has in fact made a real difference to those liv-
ing in developing economies, providing export-oriented jobs as well as
improvements in public health, education, and other fields. This is perhaps
most spectacular in the case of China, where rapid growth in the last 30
years is substantially attributable to Western investment and perhaps exces-
sive consumer demand for cheap imports.
What happened to domestic

climate legislation?
T he failure in Copenhagen was both a contributor to and a

consequence of the breakdown in domestic action attempted
before and after the meeting. It was a consequence of the Obama
administration’s strategic decision to use its then-large congressional majori-
ties to push health care reform as its top priority in the months leading up to
the summit. Given the rancor associated with this debate — especially severe
during the summer of 2009 — this had an immediate impact on the
prospects for climate legislation. That impact was compounded by earlier
polarizing debates on the economic stimulus package and continuing weak
growth after the stimulus.
Simultaneously and unsurprisingly, the administration, Senator John
Kerry, and others behind the cap-and-trade bill faced considerable skepti-
cism from fellow Democrats representing coal-producing and coal-using
states in the Senate. These Democrats were quite concerned about the effects

the legislation could have on coal producers and utilities or, in other words,
on jobs and energy prices. In an already bitter political environment, and
against the background of a growing grass roots Tea Party movement ener-
gized by attempts at federal government intervention, Senate Republicans
not passionately committed to the climate issue had little reason to be more
accommodating than these Senate Democrats.
After Copenhagen, with no real deal to trumpet, the argument for a cli-
mate bill forcing significant emissions cuts was dramatically weakened by
the fact that developing countries, especially China, had not made a commit-
ment to take any new emissions-limiting measures they were not previously
expected to take. Congressional concern about China’s emissions had
already been a major concern when the Kyoto
After Protocol was negotiated and signed, as reflected in
the 1997 Byrd-Hagel Resolution. Approved 95–0
Copenhagen,
prior to the Clinton administration’s decision to sign
the argument for Kyoto, Byrd-Hagel explicitly expressed the sense of
a U.S. climate the Senate that “the exemption for Developing
Country Parties [in the un Framework Convention
bill forcing on Climate Change] is inconsistent with the need for
significant global action on climate change and is environmen-
tally flawed” and stated that the United States
emissions cuts should not undertake any commitment to reduce its
was weakened. own emissions without “new specific scheduled
commitments” by developing countries.
The interrelationship between the domestic and international levels of the
climate issue through China’s role may actually prevent action in either
arena by creating a catch-22. In brief, Congress won’t approve strong emis-
sions limits without a commitment from China — and China won’t make a
commitment before the United States does (if Beijing will make a commit-
ment at all, which is subject to question). Climate bill advocates knew before
Copenhagen that they would need to defend themselves against charges that
the plan was not only costly domestically, but could further weaken U.S.
competitiveness vis-à-vis China during a recession, and senators backing the
cap-and-trade bill tried to avoid the catch-22 by attempting to demonstrate
sufficient support for the bill without actually passing it. They sought to
strengthen the administration’s negotiating position, hoping that an agree-
ment in the Copenhagen talks would in turn provide the momentum they
needed to get cap-and-trade through the Senate. This was far too complex a
strategy to work in practice.
With nothing to show from China in the wake of Copenhagen, Senate
Democrats were in a weaker substantive position and unable to give the cli-
mate bill sustained attention as the 2010 midterm elections approached.
After courting Republican Senator Lindsey Graham before and after the
summit, in mid-2010 Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid alienated him by
sidelining climate legislation in favor of immigration reform, to strengthen
20 Policy Review
his own struggling reelection campaign. Either legislation would have been
quite difficult to pass in an election year, but Senator Reid’s decision effec-
tively killed the most prominent and promising bipartisan negotiations on a
climate bill.
Underlying all of the back-and-forth on Capitol Hill was the biggest
obstacle to climate change legislation: the fact that the American people
were never truly behind emissions limits. Public support for cap-and-trade
was basically illusory: Though 66 percent supported emissions limits in
principle in Pew Research Center polling in the summer of 2010, only 32
percent viewed climate change as a “priority” — compared to 81 percent
who focused on jobs and 67 percent on energy needs. Thus, while the idea
of emissions reductions had some appeal, most peo-
ple subordinated it to other concerns, and legislation The biggest
that appeared either to put jobs at risk or to raise
obstacle to
energy costs had little support. Climate bill advo-
cates were well aware of this problem, which was climate change
one of the factors behind proposals to create “green legislation: the
jobs,” but they were never able convincingly to
overcome it in the public eye. American people
In fact, though they have tried many different were never
arguments, climate advocates have thus far largely
failed in making a sufficiently strong case for emis- truly behind
sions limits on any basis. While the scientific case for emissions limits.
climate change is solid, the “approaching calamity”
argument about its expected consequences hasn’t gained traction. This
appears partially due to good public relations by climate skeptics (helped
recently by foolish and highly-publicized emails among a handful of scien-
tists) and to record-high snowfall throughout the United States in the winter
of 2009-10 that was consistent with climate change modeling but confused
many Americans.
The moral argument for action to save indigenous peoples, animals, and
glaciers is closely related to the calamity argument and often has a greater
emotional appeal. However, despite support from some evangelical
Christian groups focused on humanity’s stewardship of God’s creation, this
has also fallen short.
Some conservatives have been attracted to two different national security
arguments for measures that address climate change. One has highlighted
the possible security consequences of floods, droughts, and refugee flows in
failed and failing states and has been promoted by former senior military
officers. The other has targeted reductions in oil consumption to improve
energy security, usually combined with dubious claims that lower American
oil imports will deny revenue to hostile regimes or groups.
These arguments appear insufficient largely because most people see the
benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions as long-term, abstract, and
distant, while they see the costs as immediate, concrete, and personal. As a

result, strong limit-based policies are almost inherently impractical in demo-
cratic societies or, indeed, authoritarian systems that are not prepared to
impose them without regard to public reaction.
Actually, without inexpensive and widely applicable new technologies to
break the link between energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions,
the effectiveness of any limits is inversely proportional to their popularity.
Making emissions limits more effective requires making energy more expen-
sive, with public support for the policy declining as it becomes more effec-
tive. Conversely, making limit-based policies sufficiently popular to win pub-
lic support and legislative approval requires either making them ineffective,
by restricting energy price increases, or extremely costly, by providing offset-
ting subsidies. The fate of the U.S. climate bill is
Even in Europe, telling in this regard in that its emission reductions
of 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 were
whose public more modest even than the reductions the Clinton
seems to embrace administration accepted under Kyoto — and the bill
still failed.
climate policies, Even in Europe, where climate policies are seem-
much of the ingly embraced by the public, much of the reduction
in greenhouse gas emissions is in a sense artificial.
reduction in
The European Union’s population growth rate has
greenhouse gas been half America’s rate over the last decade, some-
emissions is in a thing that in itself sharply slows emissions growth in
comparison to the United States and other countries
sense artificial. with more rapidly increasing populations, requiring
less effort to make emissions cuts measured from a
common baseline year. Europe also benefits from accounting rules that com-
pare current emissions to years when emissions were artificially high, espe-
cially by combining emissions for West Germany and East Germany in
1990 and comparing them with today’s united Germany, in which many of
East Germany’s highly inefficient power plants and factories no longer exist
for economic reasons. According to Eurostat, Germany represented around
20 percent of Europe’s total emissions in 2008, but accounted for 43 per-
cent of the decline in emissions since 1990. Finally, Europe (and Germany in
particular) is in a sense outsourcing greenhouse emissions through its exten-
sive use of Russia’s natural gas rather than domestic coal, even as Moscow
substitutes its own coal for gas internally to maintain export revenues.
Europe seems likely to confront America’s same dilemmas moving for-
ward and may, in fact, already be facing them. For while citizens in most
European countries are accustomed to higher gasoline and electricity prices
— and, for that matter, higher taxes — it is not the absolute level of these
costs that excites public opinion but rather the changes up and down. So
while Europeans may tolerate higher costs, it is far from assured that they
would accept considerable new increases. Moreover, at the level of the
European Union, European advocates of steep emission reductions face a
22 Policy Review
problem similar to that of the Senate Democrats but more severe: They need
to accommodate coal-dependent national governments, rather than coal-
dependent senators. After bailing out Greece and Ireland, how much will
Germans be willing to pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Poland,
Hungary, and other new members of the European Union? And how much
will the eu and its member states be able to pay while implementing austeri-
ty packages to address calamitous deficits?
At the deepest level, it is so difficult to make climate policy because it is
not really climate policy at all, but a back door to energy policy. And energy
is one of the most politically sensitive issues in modern society, because it is
so intimately intertwined with so many other issues, both economically and
in daily life. In America, energy policy intersects with life in countless ways,
from how people get to work (and, in fact, whether they have a job in some
cases) to how comfortable they are in their homes, how much they pay for
energy, and how much they have left over for other things. As a result, mak-
ing energy policy is an extremely dangerous pursuit for politicians: It carries
within it scores of potential booby traps, any of which might end a career in
elected office. From a political perspective, trying to pass climate change leg-
islation is like trying to walk through a minefield with a blindfold — and a
dozen different sleeve-tugging guides, each of whom is sure that his path is
the safe one.
Climate change lessons
W ith this in mind, the first climate policy lesson for the
Obama administration is that the climate issue simply does not
and in the foreseeable future cannot provide a sufficiently broad
political base to make the policy changes necessary to address climate
change successfully. What America really needs is more effective and focused
economic policy, including energy policy, driven by America’s economic
needs but sensitive to climate concerns. Trying to make economic policy or
even energy policy via climate policy puts the politics upside down and will
not succeed in preventing climate change.
The second and related lesson is that even seemingly minor yet still bind-
ing international commitments will be difficult if not impossible to ratify
within the United States, especially in a more closely divided Senate. Many
have discussed a compromise solution for the climate negotiations, under
which countries would sign a treaty codifying their existing domestic poli-
cies. While this appears to be noncontroversial on its face (and limited in its
impact), even this outcome is unlikely in view of America’s domestic political
realities. In view of the attention to the economy — and to China — during
the 2010 election campaign, virtually any U.S. climate legislation, even a
further watered-down domestic cap-and-trade bill, would have a minimal
chance to overcome a Senate filibuster with 60 votes, let alone win the 67

votes required by the Constitution to ratify a treaty and internationalize
such a policy. The door to a global treaty involving the United States is all
but shut.
A third lesson is that China, like the United States, is making decisions
based on its domestic needs rather than any particular sense of global oblig-
ation to reduce climate change impact in more vulnerable countries. This sit-
uation is even less likely to change in China than in America, because of dif-
ferences between what leaders in the two countries might reasonably fear.
The president, his cabinet, senators, and House members might lose their
jobs as a result of costly policies that slow growth, but many of them would
probably move quickly into new jobs with higher pay. China’s leaders have
considerably more at stake: They fear that a slowing
China, like the economy could produce widespread protests, politi-
cal instability, or even the collapse of the
United States, is Communist Party’s control. China’s climate policy
making decisions will be driven by its leaders’ need to maintain
exports and create jobs as well as their interest in
based on its reducing energy consumption as a matter of eco-
domestic needs nomic policy and energy security rather than special
environmental concern.
rather than any Another lesson, the fourth, is that U.S. climate
particular sense policy cannot be disconnected from America’s
of global broader national interests. The sharp reductions in
China’s emissions that advocates seek would likely
obligation. require a foreign investment effort on the scale of
the Marshall Plan — something difficult to reconcile
with America’s economic and security interests vis-à-vis China at a time
when Beijing is already becoming increasingly assertive and when China’s
prosperity is in large measure attributable to U.S. policy in the first place.
The massive transfers of wealth some advocates seek from the United States
and Europe to China and other developing nations are totally impractical.
Even if it materializes, the $100 billion per year by 2020 envisioned under
the Cancun agreement will make only a modest difference due to the scale of
investment required.
The administration should not need to learn that un-based processes are
often ineffective, but this must be the fifth lesson. The two most important
participants in un climate talks — the United States and China — are
unlikely to accept un-mandated emissions limits, especially limits sufficient-
ly tough to avert climate change impacts. (Still, each will probably do much
more than it is prepared to promise.) The most committed participants, in
Europe, don’t produce a sufficiently large share of global emissions for even
drastic cuts to succeed on their own. And the most anxious participants, in
poorer developing countries, can do little more than watch the process with
diminishing hope, while trying to extract compensation payments from
wealthier economies.
24 Policy Review
The sixth and final lesson is the central role of technology. The history of
international climate talks shows that governments and societies will gener-
ally commit only to limits that they believe to be economically viable, which
from a policymaking perspective means limits that nations can reasonably
expect to satisfy on the basis of existing technologies and expected improve-
ments — which we already know will be inadequate to prevent climate
change. At the same time, if we achieve a technological breakthrough that
makes radical emissions reductions economically attractive, binding limits
will not be necessary to produce the required action.
What to do?
T aken together these lessons force a broad conclusion that

must be the basis for any successful policy: It is very unlikely that
humanity will be able to stop or considerably slow climate change
by relying on binding emissions limits, whether domestic or international.
At the international level, this has several policy implications. The first is
that emissions-reduction discussions should focus on action-oriented dia-
logue among major emitters, the top 21 of which accounted for 79 percent
of global emissions in 2007, according to the International Energy Agency.
un-based processes create the illusion of action, consuming considerable
time and energy in the process (as well as producing a lot of co 2 to bring
delegates to international conferences), but are secondary to solving the cli-
mate challenge. Like in Cancun, the United States should reduce its diplo-
matic commitment and presence at future unfccc meetings, concentrating
on using the sessions for coordination and information-sharing rather than
negotiation..
While the Bush administration made plenty of mistakes early on, theatri-
cally pulling out of Kyoto when it could just as easily have allowed it to lan-
guish in the Senate, as it surely would have, and vocally denying the science
of climate change, it eventually saw the need to address climate change
through discussion with major emitters. Combined with an apparent preex-
isting bias against the United Nations, this led President Bush to launch the
Major Economies Meeting, bringing together the world’s largest economies
to discuss energy technology and related issues. The Obama administration
re-branded this effort as the Major Economies Forum on Energy and
Climate.
Secondly, rather than trying to cajole or shame China into taking on bind-
ing commitments in international negotiations, which will not produce
important results, America should focus on encouraging further Chinese
action to reduce emissions. This could include offering expanded economic,
scientific, and technical cooperation with China (while protecting U.S. eco-
nomic interests, including intellectual property rights) to accelerate its
efforts. Simultaneously, the United States should underscore to Beijing the

climate change impacts predicted in major studies and how associated
extremes in weather would be especially problematic for China, with its
lower per capita gdp and less resilient political, economic, and social sys-
tems. This should not be a public message, but it can be a clear one.
In the realms of diplomacy and global public opinion, the United States
should cede no ground, working to prevail in rhetorical battles and to win
over media and thought leaders. Tactics in these areas could include working
with delegations from smaller developing countries to shift the onus of
action (and blame) to China by demonstrating an American commitment to
taking real and measurable steps to reduce emissions. Already committed to
the principle of common but differentiated responsibility with respect to
their own actions, poor developing nations are
In the realms increasingly accepting the notion that not all devel-
oping countries have equal obligations and might at
of diplomacy a minimum deprive China of their public support.
and global The U.S. appeared to make some headway in this
public opinion, direction at Cancun. Realistically, these efforts will
probably have little impact on Chinese policy; for
the United States many if not most of these governments, concerns
should cede over climate change impacts are long-term and sec-
ondary to their immediate hopes for economic
no ground. growth, infrastructure projects, and the political
benefits of both. Chinese investment can make a key
contribution to achieving these objectives. Chinese investment can make a
key contribution to achieving these objectives
What is important is to recognize that there is a difference between China
and other developing economies, and even between China and other large
developing economies like India and Brazil. The difference is a matter of
scale; one can credibly refer to the United States and China as a g2 because
their combined economies — and greenhouse gas emissions — are so large.
India’s emissions are one-fifth to one-quarter of U.S. or Chinese emissions,
and are growing at two-thirds the rate of China’s emissions. China, India,
Brazil, and other developing nations all share an emphasis on development
rather than emissions reductions and an unwillingness to accept binding
international limits on their emissions, but they do not have equal responsi-
bility for projected growth in emissions from developing economies or equal
abilities to reduce emissions or address their consequences.
Domestically, the United States should focus on energy policy rather than
climate policy, recognizing that altering energy consumption patterns takes
quite some time and seeking both incremental improvements in efficiency
and breakthroughs. The central goal of such a policy would be to orient
American energy policy to serve broader national economic and security
goals, by increasing efficiency and therefore productivity, contributing to
economic growth and creating jobs, maintaining and extending America’s
global leadership in science and technology, and limiting our exposure to
26 Policy Review
volatile commodity prices. New technologies also require an adept and
technically literate society, which in turn requires education reform.
President Obama’s efforts to build support for a new economic growth
strategy based on developing new products rather than new financial instru-
ments are constructive.
Taking political facts of life into account, policies that focus on incentives
to develop new technologies rather than applying penalties to existing tech-
nologies will be much more likely to succeed, though in an environment of
increasing concern about deficits, it will not be easy to establish and maintain
incentives. The highest priority in this approach must be investment in
research and development as well as measures to speed the commercialization
and implementation of successful new technologies.
Public-private investment funds could be one option The general
in accelerating the deployment of new technologies.
argument that
At the international level, new collaborative
research programs, intensified exchanges of existing climate change
best practices, and expanded technology-sharing will requires a
be important. Protecting intellectual property rights
will be essential to stimulating the innovation neces- response on
sary to produce breakthroughs. While some exotic national security
technologies, such as geo-engineering (attempting to
reduce temperatures by increasing the atmosphere’s grounds has
reflectivity, dissipating more of the sun’s energy into been ineffective.
space), seem fraught with problems, it would be
irresponsible for the policymaking and scientific communities to ignore
them. Further study of the technologies and their political and economic
implications is important.
A greater focus on concrete national-security-related issues could also be
helpful. The general argument that climate change can lead to greater insta-
bility and requires a response on security grounds has been ineffective. Yet it
is clear that the U.S. military’s reliance on fossil fuels — and the supply
chains they demand — is a real vulnerability when American forces are in
the field; the frequent destruction of U.S. and nato fuel tankers in Pakistan
(and earlier in Iraq) illustrates this. Use-based research seeking to solve spe-
cific problems like this one, in this case developing low-emission alternative
energy technologies that do not require massive distributed infrastructure,
can lead to important progress toward both security and climate goals.
Such research is often more suited to bipartisan support than broad, ambi-
tious, and controversial programs. Moreover, given the track record of mili-
tary-origin technologies adapted and commercialized for civilian use, these
investments might eventually contribute to economy-wide reductions in
emissions over the longer term.
The Obama administration should also look at innovative programs to
encourage state and local measures. In the absence of federal action during
the Bush administration, states launched a number of creative efforts to meet

climate and energy goals. As the incubators for ideas, in constant competi-
tion with their neighbors for population and economic vitality, states are
well-placed to develop practical solutions that respond to their varied cir-
cumstances. The Department of Education’s “Race to the Top” competition
for federal funds might serve as a model to catalyze new ideas; one can
imagine a similar program of incentives that encourages states (or groups of
states) to compete to formulate the best emissions reduction strategies in tar-
geted sectors, such as transportation, electricity, or commercial or residential
buildings. Effective approaches could be implemented on a wider scale.
Finally, recognizing that the world is unlikely to stop climate change,
America will need to intensify research on climate change impact and begin
federal, state, and local assessments of the policies needed to adapt to the
most likely domestic consequences. While important steps can and will be
taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, any country, industry, or commu-
nity that does not increase its understanding of the impact of climate change
and build up resilience is putting itself at considerable risk.
28 Policy Review
The Persistence of
Genocide
By David Rieff
A
c c o r d i n g t o t h e great historian of the
Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, the phrase “Never Again”
first appeared on handmade signs put up by inmates
at Buchenwald in April, 1945, shortly after the
camp had been liberated by U.S. forces. “I think it
was really the Communists who were behind it, but I
am not sure,” Hilberg said in one of the last interviews he gave before his
death in the summer of 2007. Since then, “Never Again” has become kind
of shorthand for the remembrance of the Shoah. At Buchenwald, the hand-
made signs were long ago replaced by a stone monument onto which the
words are embossed in metal letters. And as a usage, it has come to seem
like a final word not just on the murder of the Jews of Europe, but on any
great crime against humanity that could not be prevented. “Never Again”
has appeared on monuments and memorials from Paine, Chile, the town
Author David Rieff is a New York-based writer and policy analyst who has writ-
ten extensively about humanitarian aid and human rights. He is the author of
eight books, including A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis and At
the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention, and is current-
ly writing a book on the global food crisis.

David Rieff
with proportionately more victims of the Pinochet dictatorship than any
other place in the country, to the Genocide Museum in Kigali, Rwanda. The
report of conadep, the Argentine truth commission set up in 1984 after
the fall of the Galtieri dictatorship, was titled “Nunca Mas” — “Never
Again” in Spanish. And there is now at least one online Holocaust memorial
called “Never Again.”
There is nothing wrong with this. But there is also nothing all that right
with it either. Bluntly put, an undeniable gulf exists between the frequency
with which the phrase is used — above all on days of remembrance most
commonly marking the Shoah, but now, increasingly, other great crimes
against humanity — and the reality, which is that 65 years after the libera-
tion of the Nazi concentration camps, “never
Since 1945, again” has proved to be nothing more than a
promise on which no state has ever been willing to
“never again”
deliver. When, last May, the writer Elie Wiesel, him-
has meant, self a former prisoner in Buchenwald, accompanied
essentially, President Barack Obama and Chancellor Angela
Merkel to the site of the camp, he said that he had
“Never again always imagined that he would return some day and
will Germans kill tell his father’s ghost that the world had learned
from the Holocaust and that it had become a
Jews in Europe “sacred duty” for people everywhere to prevent it
in the 1940s.” from recurring. But, Wiesel continued, had the
world actually learned anything, “there would be
no Cambodia, and no Rwanda and no Darfur and no Bosnia.”
Wiesel was right: The world has learned very little. But this has not
stopped it from pontificating much. The Obama administration’s National
Security Strategy Paper, issued in May 2010, exemplifies this tendency. It
asserts confidently that “The United States is committed to working with
our allies, and to strengthening our own internal capabilities, in order to
ensure that the United States and the international community are proactive-
ly engaged in a strategic effort to prevent mass atrocities and genocide.” And
yet again, we are treated to the promise, “never again.” “In the event that
prevention fails,” the report states, “the United States will work both multi-
laterally and bilaterally to mobilize diplomatic, humanitarian, financial, and
— in certain instances — military means to prevent and respond to genocide
and mass atrocities.”
Of course, this is not strategy, but a promise that, decade in and decade
out, has proved to be empty. For if one were to evaluate these commitments
by the results they have produced so far, one would have to say that all this
“proactive engagement” and “diplomatic, financial, and humanitarian
mobilization” has not accomplished very much. No one should be surprised
by this. The U.S. is fighting two wars and still coping (though it has fallen
from the headlines) with the floods in Pakistan, whose effects will be felt for
many years in a country where America’s security interests and humanitari-
30 Policy Review
The Persistence of Genocide
an relief efforts are inseparable. At the same time, the crisis over Iran’s
imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons capability is approaching its cul-
mination. Add to this the fact that the American economy is in shambles,
and you do not exactly have a recipe for engagement. The stark fact is that
“never again” has never been a political priority for either the United States
or the so-called international community (itself a self-flattering idea with no
more reality than a unicorn). Nor, despite all the bluff talk about moral
imperatives backed by international resolve, is there any evidence that it is
becoming one.
And yet, however at variance they are with both geopolitical and geoeco-
nomic realities, the arguments exemplified by this document reflect the con-
ventional wisdom of the great and the good in America across the “main-
stream” (as one is obliged to say in this, the era of the tea parties) political
spectrum. Even a fairly cursory online search will reveal that there are a vast
number of papers, book-length studies, think tank reports, and United
Nations documents proposing programs for preventing or at least halting
genocides. For once, the metaphor “cottage industry” truly is appropriate.
And what unites almost all of them is that they start from the premise that
prevention is possible, if only the “international community” would live up
to the commitments it made in the Genocide Convention of 1948, and in
subsequent international covenants, treaties, and un declarations. If, the
argument goes, the world’s great powers, first and foremost of course the
United States, in collaboration with the un system and with global civil soci-
ety, would act decisively and in a timely way, we could actually enforce the
moral standards supposedly agreed upon in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
If they do not, of course, then “never again” will never mean much more
than it has meant since 1945 — which, essentially, is “Never again will
Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s.”
T he report of the United States Institute for Peace’s task force

on genocide, chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright and former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, is among
the best of these efforts. As the report makes clear, the task force undertook
its work all too painfully aware of the gulf between the international consen-
sus on the moral imperative of stopping genocide and the ineffectiveness to
date of the actual responses. Indeed, the authors begin by stating plainly that
60 years after the United Nations adopted the Genocide Convention and
twenty years after it was ratified by the U.S. Senate, “The world agrees that
genocide is unacceptable and yet genocide and mass killings continue.” To
find ways to match words and “stop allowing the unacceptable,” Albright
and Cohen write with commendable candor, “is in fact one of most persis-
tent puzzles of our times.”
Whether or not one agrees with the task force about what can or cannot
be done to change this, there can be no question that sorrow over the
world’s collective failure to act in East Pakistan, or Cambodia, or Rwanda is

David Rieff
the only honorable response imaginable. But the befuddlement the authors
of the report confess to feeling is another matter entirely. Like most thinking
influenced by the human rights movement, the task force seems imbued with
the famous Kantian mot d’ordre: “Ought implies can.” But to put the mat-
ter bluntly, there is no historical basis to believe anything of the sort, and a
great deal of evidence to suggest a diametrically opposing conclusion. Of
course, history is not a straitjacket, and the authors of the report, again
echoing much thinking within the human rights movement, particularly
Michael Ignatieff’s work in the 1990s, do make the argument that since
1945 there has been what Ignatieff calls “A revolution of global concern”
and they call a “revolution in conscience.” In fairness, if in fact they are bas-
ing their optimism on this chiliastic idea, then one
better understands the degree to which the members
“Preventing
of the task force came to believe that genocide, far
genocide is a from being “A Problem From Hell,” as Samantha
goal that can be Power titled her influential book on the subject, in
reality is a problem if not easily solved then at least
achieved with the susceptible to solution — though, again, only if all
right institutional the international actors, by whom the authors mean
the great powers, the un system, countries in a
structures, region where there is a risk of a genocide occurring,
strategies, and and what they rather uncritically call civil society,
partnerships . . .” make it a priority.
Since it starts from this presupposition, it is hard-
ly surprising that the report is upbeat about the
prospects for finally reversing course. “Preventing genocide,” the authors
insist, “is a goal that can be achieved with the right institutional structures,
strategies, and partnerships — in short, with the right blueprint.” To accom-
plish this, the task force emphasizes the need for strengthening international
cooperation both in terms of identifying places where there is a danger of a
genocide being carried out and coordinated action to head it off or at least
halt it. Four specific responses are recommended, one predominantly infor-
mational (early warning) and three operational (early prevention, preventive
diplomacy, and, finally, military intervention when all else has failed). None
of this is exactly new, and most of it is commonsensical from a conceptual
standpoint. But one of the great strengths of the report, as befits the work of
a task force chaired by two former cabinet secretaries, is this practical bent
— that is to say, its emphasis on creating or strengthening institutional struc-
tures within the U.S. government and the un system and showing how such
reforms will enable policymakers to respond effectively to genocide.
However, this same presupposition leads the authors of the report to write
as if there were little need for them to elaborate the political and ideological
bases for the “can do” approach they recommend. Francis Fukuyama’s con-
troversial theory of the “End of History” goes unmentioned, but there is
more than a little of Fukuyama in their assumptions about a “final” interna-
32 Policy Review
tional consensus having been established with regard to the norms that have
come into force protecting populations from genocide or mass atrocity
crimes. It is true that there is a body of such norms: the Genocide
Convention, the un’s so-called Responsibility to Protect doctrine, adopted by
the World Summit (with the strong support of the Bush administration) in
2005, and various international instruments limiting impunity, above all the
Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court. And, presum-
ably, it is with these in mind that the report’s authors can assert so confidently
that the focus in genocide prevention can now be on “implement[ing] and
operationalizing the commitments [these instruments] contain.”
It is here that doubt will begin to assail more skeptical readers. Almost
since its inception, the human rights movement has
been a movement of lawyers. And for lawyers, the
establishment of black-letter international law is
Almost since
indeed the “end of the story” from a normative its inception, the
point of view — an internationalized version of stare human rights
decisis, but extended to the nth degree. On this
account such a norm, once firmly established movement has
(which, activists readily admit, may take time; they been a movement
are not naifs), can within a fairly short period there-
after be understood as an ineradicable and unchal- of lawyers.
lengeable part of the basic user’s manual for interna-
tional relations. This is what has allowed the human rights movement (and,
at least with regard to the question of genocide, the members of the task
force in the main seem to have been of a similar cast of mind) to hew to
what is essentially a positivist progress narrative. However, the human rights
movement’s certitude on the matter derives less from its historical experience
than it does from its ideological presuppositions. In this sense, human rights
truly is a secular religion, as its critics but even some of its supporters have
long claimed.
Of course, strategically (in both polemical and institutional terms) the
genius of this approach is of a piece with liberalism generally, of which, in
any case, “human rights-ism” is the offspring. Liberalism is the only modern
ideology that will not admit it is an ideology. “We are just demanding that
nations live up to the international covenants they have signed and the rele-
vant national and international statutes,” the human rights activist replies
indignantly when taxed with actually supporting, and, indeed, helping to
midwife an ideological system. It may be tedious to have to point out in
2010 that law and morality are not the same thing, but, well, law and
morality are not the same thing. The problem is that much of the task force
report reads as if they were.
An end to genocide: It is an attractive prospect, not to mention a morally
unimpeachable goal in which Kantian moral absolutism meets American can
do-ism, where the post-ideological methodologies (which are anything but
post-ideological, of course) of international lawyers meet the American

David Rieff
elite’s faith, which goes back at least to Woodrow Wilson if not much earlier
in the history of the republic, that we really can right any wrong if only we
commit ourselves sufficiently to doing so. Unfortunately, far too much is
assumed (or stipulated, as the lawyers say) by the report’s authors. More dis-
mayingly still, far too many of the concrete examples either of what could
have been done but wasn’t are presented so simplistically as to make the
solutions offered appear hollow, since the challenge as described bears little
or no resemblance to the complexities that actually exist.
Darfur is a good example of this. The report mentions Darfur frequently,
both in the context of a nuts and bolts consideration of the strengths and
weaknesses of various states and institutions such as the un and the African
Union, which have intervened, however unsatisfac-
The calls for an torily, over the course of the crisis, and as an exam-
ple of how the mobilization of civil society can influ-
intervention in ence policy. “In today’s age of electronic media com-
Darfur reached munication,” the report states, “Americans are
increasingly confronted in their living rooms — and
their height after even on their cell phones — with information about
the moral and images of death and destruction virtually any-
where they occur. . . . The Internet has proven to be
imperative for
a powerful tool for organizing broad-based respons-
intervention had es to genocide and mass atrocities, as we have seen
started to in response to the crisis in Darfur.”
The problem is not so much that this statement is
dissipate. false but rather that it begs more questions than it
answers, and, more tellingly still, that the report’s
authors seem to have no idea of this. There is no question that the rise in
2005 and 2006 of a mass movement calling for an end to mass killing in
Darfur (neither the United Nations nor the most important relief groups pre-
sent on the ground in Darfur agree with the characterization of what took
place there as a genocide) was an extraordinarily successful mobilization —
perhaps the most successful since the anti-Apartheid movement of the
1970s and 1980s. Beginning with the activism of a small group of college
students who in June 2004 had attended a Darfur Emergency Summit orga-
nized by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and addressed by Elie
Wiesel, and shortly afterwards founded an organization called Save Darfur,
the movement rapidly expanded and, at its height, included the U.S.
Congressional Black Caucus, right-wing evangelicals, left-leaning campuses
activists, mainline human rights activists, and American neoconservatives.
But nowhere does the task force report examine whether the policy recom-
mendations of this movement were wise, or, indeed, whether the effect that
they had on the U.S. debate was positive or negative. Instead, the report pro-
ceeds as if any upsurge in grassroots interest and activism galvanized by cat-
astrophes like Darfur is by definition a positive development.
In reality, the task force’s assumption that any mass movement that sup-
34 Policy Review
ports “more assertive government action in response to genocide and mass
atrocities” is to be encouraged is a strangely content-less claim. Surely,
before welcoming the rise of a Save Darfur (or its very influential European
cousin, sos Darfour), it is important to think clearly not just about what
they are against but what they are for. And here, the example of Save Darfur
is as much a cautionary tale as an inspiring one. The report somewhat short-
changes historical analysis, with what little history that does make it in
painted with a disturbingly broad brush. Obviously, the task force was well
aware of this, which I presume is why its report insists, unwisely in my view,
that it was far more important to focus on the present and the future more
than on the past. But understanding the history is not marginal, it is central.
Put the case that one believes in military intervention in extremis to halt
genocide. In that case, intervening in late-2003 and early-2004, when the
killing was at its height, would have been the right thing to do. But Save
Darfur really only came into its own in late 2005, that is, well after the bulk
of the killing had ended. In other words, the calls for an intervention
reached their height after the moral imperative for such an intervention had
started to dissipate. An analogy can be made with the human rights justifica-
tion for the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein. As Kenneth Roth, the head
of Human Rights Watch, has pointed out, had this happened during
Baghdad’s murderous Anfal campaign against the Kurds in 1988, there
would have been a solid justification for military intervention, whether or
not Human Rights Watch would have agreed with it. But to intervene fifteen
years later because of the massacre was indefensible on human rights
grounds (though, obviously, there were other rationales for the war that
would not have been affected by such reasoning).
If you want to be a prophet, you have to get it right. And if Save Darfur
was wrong in its analysis of the facts relevant to their call for an internation-
al military intervention to stop genocide, either because there had in reality
been no genocide (as, again, the un and many mainstream ngos on the
ground insisted) or because the genocide had ended before they began to
campaign for intervention, then Save Darfur’s activism can just as reason-
ably be described in negative terms as in the positive ones of the task force
report. Yes, Save Darfur had (and has) good intentions and the attacks on
them from de facto apologists for the government of Sudan like Mahmood
Mamdani are not worth taking seriously. But good intentions should never
be enough.1
In fairness, had the task force decided to provide the history of the Darfur,
or Bosnia, or Rwanda, in all their frustrating complexity, they would have
1. Under attack from a number of quarters, the leadership of Save Darfur has claimed that they were
never calling for a military intervention to overthrow the Bashir regime in Khartoum but rather for an
international protection force to protect the people of Darfur. Leaving aside whether, in practical terms,
this is a distinction without a difference (i.e., that the latter would have required the former, as other pro-
Darfur activists like Eric Reeves and Gerard Prunier had the courage to acknowledge), the record of their
statements belies this claim.

David Rieff
produced a report that, precisely because of all the nuance, the ambiguity,
the need for “qualifiers,” doubtless would have been of less use to policy-
makers, whose professional orientation is of necessity toward actionable
policies. But when what is being suggested is a readiness for U.S. soldiers (to
be sure, preferably in a multilateral context) in extreme cases to kill and die
to prevent genocide or mass atrocity crimes, then, to turn human rights
Kantianism against them for a change, it is nuance that is the moral impera-
tive. Again, good intentions alone will not do. Qui veut faire l’ange, fait la
bete, Pascal said. Who wishes to act the angel, acts the beast.
History, in all its unsentimentality, is almost always the best antidote to
such simplicities. And yet, if anything, the task force’s report is a textbook
case of ahistorical thinking and its perils. The authors emphasize that, “This
task force is not a historical commission; its focus is on the future and on
prevention.” The problem is that unless the past is looked at in detail, not
just conjured up by way of illustrations of the West’s failures to intervene
that the task force hopes to remedy, then what is being argued for, in effect,
are, if necessary, endless wars of altruism. To put it charitably, in arguing for
that, I do not think the authors have exactly established their claim to occu-
pying the moral high ground. If they had spent half the time thinking about
history in as serious a way as they did about how to construct the optimal
bureaucratic architecture within the U.S. government, then what the task
force finally produced would have been a document that was pathbreaking.
Instead, they took the conventional route, and, in my view, will simply add
their well-reasoned policy recommendations to the large number that came
before and, indeed, as in the case of the recent initiative of the Montreal
Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies on the so-called Will to
Intervene, have already begun to come after.
With the best will in the world, what is one to make of arguments made
at the level of generalization of the following?
Grievances over inequitable distribution of power and resources appear

to be a fundamental motivating factor in the commission of mass vio-
lence against ethnic, sectarian, or political groups. That same inequality
may also provide the means for atrocities to be committed. For example,
control of a highly centralized state apparatus and the access to econom-
ic and military power that comes with it makes competition for power
an all-or-nothing proposition and creates incentives to eliminate com-
petitors. This dynamic was evident in Rwanda and Burundi and is seri-
ous cause for concern in Burma today.
The fact is that, vile as they are, there is actually very little likelihood of the
butchers in Rangoon committing genocide — their crimes have other char-
acteristics. It is disheartening that the members of the task force would allow
the fact that they, like most sensible people, believe that Burma is one of the
worst dictatorships in the world, to justify their distorting reality in this way,
36 Policy Review
when they almost certainly know better. And since they do precisely that, it
is hard not to at least entertain the suspicion — whose implications extend
rather further than that and beg the question of what kind of world order
follows from the task force’s recommendations — that consciously or (and
this is worse, in a way) unconsciously they reasoned that if they could identi-
fy the Rangoon regime as genocidal, this would make an international inter-
vention to overthrow it far more defensible. If this is right, then, if imple-
mented, the report (again, intentionally or inadvertently) would have the
effect of helping nudge us back toward a world where the prevention of
genocide becomes a moral warrant for other policy agendas (as was surely
the case with Saddam Hussein in 2003, and was the case with General
Bashir in Khartoum until the arrival of the Obama administration).
I write this in large measure because the task force’s description of why
mass violence and genocide occur could be a description of practically the
entire developing world. Analysis at that level of generalization is not just
useless, it is actually a prophylactic against thought.
It gets worse. The authors write:
It is equally important to focus on the motivations of specific leaders and
the tools at their disposal. There is no genocidal destiny. Many countries
with ethnic or religious discrimination, armed conflicts, autocratic gov-
ernments, or crushing poverty have not experienced genocide while oth-
ers have. The difference comes down to leadership. Mass atrocities are
organized by powerful elites who believe they stand to gain from these
crimes and who have the necessary resources at their disposal. The
heinous crimes committed in Nazi-occupied Europe, Cambodia, and
Rwanda, for example, were all perpetrated with significant planning,
organization, and access to state resources, including weapons, budgets,
detention facilities, and broadcast media.
There are also key triggers that can tip a high-risk environment into
crisis. These include unstable, unfair, or unduly postponed elections;
high-profile assassinations; battlefield victories; and environmental con-
ditions (for example, drought) that may cause an eruption of violence or
heighten the perception of an existential threat to a government or
armed group. Sometimes potential triggers are known well in advance
and preparations can be made to address the risk of mass atrocities that
may follow. Poorly planned elections in deeply divided societies are a
commonly cited example, but deadlines for significant policy action,
legal judgments, and anniversaries of highly traumatic and disputed his-
torical events are also potential triggers that can be foreseen.
I tax the reader’s patience with such a long quotation to show how
expertise can produce meaninglessness. For apart from the mention of
poorly planned elections — a reference to Rwanda that is perfectly correct
as far as it goes — the rest of this does not advance our understanding one

David Rieff
iota. To remedy or at least alleviate these vast social stresses, the task force
recommends “effective [sic] early prevention”! The authors themselves
were obliged to admit that, “Such efforts to change underlying social, eco-
nomic, or political conditions are difficult and require sustained investment
of resources and attention.” Really, you think? But about where these
resources, as opposed to institutional arrangements, are to come from, they
are largely silent, apart from emphasizing the need to target with both
threats and positive inducements leaders thought likely to choose to com-
mit such crimes. But the authors know perfectly well that, as they them-
selves put it, “early engagement is a speculative venture,” and that “the
watch list of countries ‘at risk’ can be long, due to the difficulty of antici-
pating specific crises in a world generally plagued by instability.” Surely,
people like Secretary Albright and Secretary Cohen know better than any-
one that such ventures are never going to be of much interest to senior poli-
cymakers, just as the global Marshall Plan that would be required to effec-
tively address the underlying causes of genocidal wars is never going to be
on offer.
T o a great power, and to the citizens of great power, powerless-

ness is simply an unconscionable destiny. The task force report,
with its strange imperviousness to viewing historical tragedy as
much more than an engineering problem, is a perfect illustration of this.
Unsound historically, and hubristic morally, for all its good intentions, the
task force report is not a blueprint for a better future but a mystification of
the choices that actually confront us and between which we are going to
have to choose if we are ever to prevent or halt even some genocides. My
suspicion is that the reason that the very accomplished, distinguished people
who participated in the task force did not feel obliged to face up to this is
because the report gives as much weight to the national interest basis for
preventing or halting genocide as it does to the moral imperative of doing
so. As the report puts it:
First, genocide fuels instability, usually in weak, undemocratic, and cor-

rupt states. It is in these same types of states that we find terrorist
recruitment and training, human trafficking, and civil strife, all of which
have damaging spillover effects for the entire world.
Second, genocide and mass atrocities have long-lasting consequences

far beyond the states in which they occur. Refugee flows start in border-
ing countries but often spread. Humanitarian needs grow, often exceed-
ing the capacities and resources of a generous world. The international
community, including the United States, is called on to absorb and assist
displaced people, provide relief efforts, and bear high economic costs.
And the longer we wait to act, the more exorbitant the price tag. For
example, in Bosnia, the United States has invested nearly $15 billion to
38 Policy Review
support peacekeeping forces in the years since we belatedly intervened to
stop mass atrocities.
Third, America’s standing in the world — and our ability to lead — is

eroded when we are perceived as bystanders to genocide. We cannot be
viewed as a global leader and respected as an international partner if we
cannot take steps to avoid one of the greatest scourges of humankind.
No matter how one calculates U.S. interests, the reality of our world
today is that national borders provide little sanctuary from international
problems. Left unchecked, genocide will undermine American security.
A core challenge for American leaders is to persuade others — in the

U.S. government, across the United States, and around the world — that
preventing genocide is more than just a humanitarian aspiration; it is a
national and global imperative.
Again, apologies for quoting at such length. but truthfully, is one meant
to take this seriously? There is absolutely no evidence that terrorist recruit-
ing is more promising in failed states than, say, in suburban Connecticut
where the (very middle-class) Faisal Shahzad, son of a retired Pakistani Air
Force vice-marshal, plotted to explode a car bomb in Times Square. Nor, in
the U.S. case is there any basis for concluding that the main source of immi-
gration is from places traumatized by war. To the contrary, most of our
immigrants are the best and the brightest (in the sense not of the most edu-
cated but most enterprising) of Mexico, the Philippines, India, and China.
The proportion of migrants from Sudan or Somalia is small by comparison.
As for the costs of peacekeeping, are the authors of the report serious?
Fifteen billion dollars? The sum barely signifies in the rubric of the military
budget of the United States. And lastly, the report’s claim that the U.S. won’t
be viewed as a global leader and respected as an international partner if it
doesn’t take the lead to stop genocide is absurd on its face. Not respected by
whom, exactly? Hu Jintao in Beijing? Merkel in Berlin? President Felipe
Calderon in Mexico City? To put it charitably, the claim conjures up visions
of Pinocchio, rather than Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson.
The report calls for courage, but courage begins at home. Pressed by
Armenian activists at one of the events held to launch the report as to why
they had both earlier signed a letter urging the U.S. not to bow to Armenian
pressure and formally recognize the Armenian genocide, Secretary Cohen
and Secretary Albright refused over and over again to characterize the
Armenian genocide as, well, a genocide. It is true that the Armenian activists
had come looking for a confrontation. But there can be little question that
both secretaries did everything they could to avoid committing themselves
one way or the other. “Terrible things happened to the Armenians,”
Secretary Albright said, refusing to go any further. The letter, she explained,
had been primarily about “whether this was an appropriate time to raise the
issue.” For his part, Secretary Cohen, emphasized that angering the Turks

David Rieff
while the Iraq war was raging could lead to Turkish reactions that would
“put our sons and daughters in jeopardy.” And, in any case, the task force
was not “a historical commission.”
This is a perfectly defensible position from the perspective of prudential
realpolitik. The problem is that what the task force report constantly calls
for is political courage. And whatever else they were, Secretaries Albright
and Cohen’s responses were expedient, not courageous. There will always be
reasons not to intervene — compelling pressures, I mean, not trivial ones.
Why should a future U.S. government be less vulnerable to them than the
Bush or Obama administrations? About this, as about so many other sub-
jects, the task force report is as evasive as Secretary Albright and Secretary
Cohen were at the press conference at which the Armenian activists con-
fronted them. Doubtless, they had to be. For the solutions they propose are
not real solutions, the history they touch on is not the actual history, and the
world they describe is not the real world.
40 Policy Review
PTSD’s Diagnostic Trap
By Sally Satel
M
ilitary history is rich with tales of war-
riors who return from battle with the horrors of
war still raging in their heads. One of the earli-
est examples was enshrined by Herodotus, who
wrote of an Athenian warrior struck blind
“without blow of sword or dart” when a soldier
standing next to him was killed. The classic term — “shell shock” — dates
to World War I; “battle fatigue,” “combat exhaustion,” and “war stress”
were used in World War II.
Modern psychiatry calls these invisible wounds post-traumatic stress dis-
order (ptsd). And along with this diagnosis, which became widely known
in the wake of the Vietnam War, has come a new sensitivity — among the
public, the military, and mental health professionals — to the causes and
consequences of being afflicted. The Department of Veterans Affairs is par-
Sally Satel is a psychiatrist, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise

Institute, and a lecturer at Yale University School of Medicine.

Sally Satel
ticularly attuned to the psychic welfare of the men and women who are
returning from Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.
Last July, retired Army General Eric K. Shinseki, secretary of Veterans
Affairs, unveiled new procedures that make it easier for veterans who believe
they are disabled by wartime stress to file benefit claims and receive compen-
sation.“[Psychological] wounds,” Shinseki declared, “can be as debilitating
as any physical battlefield trauma.”
This is true. But gauging mental injury in the wake of war is not as
straightforward as assessing, say, a lost limb or other physical damage. For
example, at what point do we say that normal, if painful, readjustment diffi-
culties have become so troubling as to qualify as a mental illness? How can
clinicians predict which patients will recover when a veteran’s odds of recov-
ery depend so greatly on nonmedical factors, including his own expectations
for recovery; social support available to him; and the intimate meaning he
makes of his distress? Inevitably, successful caregiving will turn on a clear
understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder.
One of the most important and paradoxical lessons to emerge from these
insights is that lowering the threshold for receipt of disability benefits is not
always in the best interest of the veteran and his family. Without question,
some veterans will remain so irretrievably damaged by their war experience
that they cannot participate in the competitive workplace. These men and
women clearly deserve the roughly $2,300 monthly tax-free benefit (given
for “total,” or 100 percent, disability) and other resources the Veterans
Administration offers. But what if disability entitlements actually work to
the detriment of other patients by keeping them from meaningful work and
by creating an incentive for them to embrace institutional dependence? And
what if the system, well-intentioned though it surely is, does not adequately
protect young veterans from a premature verdict of invalidism?
Acknowledging and studying these effects of compensation can be politically
delicate, yet doing do is essential to devising reentry programs of care for the
nation’s invisibly wounded warriors.
What is ptsd?
T h e m o s t r e c e n t edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical

Manual (dsm IV) of the American Psychiatric Association defines
ptsd according to symptoms; their duration; and the nature of the
“trauma” or event. Symptoms fall into three categories: re-experiencing
(e.g., relentless nightmares; unbidden waking images; flashbacks); hyper-
arousal (e.g., enhanced startle, anxiety, sleeplessness); and phobias (e.g., fear
of driving after having been in a crash). These must persist for at least 30
days and impair function to some degree. Overwhelming calamity — or
“stressor,” as psychiatrists call it — of any kind, such as a natural disaster,
rape, accident, or assault, can lead to ptsd.
42 Policy Review
Notably, not everyone who confronts horrific circumstances develops
ptsd. Among the survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing, for example,
34 percent developed ptsd, according to a study by psychiatric epidemiolo-
gist Carol North. After a car accident or natural disaster, fewer than 10 per-
cent of victims are affected, while among rape victims, well over half suc-
cumb. The reassuring news is that, as with grief and other emotional reac-
tions to painful events, most sufferers get better with time, though periodic
nightmares and easy startling may linger for additional months or even
years.
In contrast to the sizeable literature on ptsd in civilian populations and
in active-duty soldiers, data on veterans are harder to come by. To date, the
congressionally mandated National Vietnam
Veterans Readjustment Study (nvvrs) remains
the landmark analysis. Data were collected during According to the
1986 and 1987 and revealed that 15.2 percent of Columbia
a random sample of veterans still met criteria for
reanalysis, the
ptsd. Yet, a number of scholars found those
estimates to be improbably high (e.g., if roughly psychological
one in six Vietnam veterans suffered from ptsd, as cost of Vietnam
the nvvrs suggests, this would mean that virtually
each and every soldier who served in combat — a was 40 percent
ratio of 1 combatant to every 6 in support special- lower than the
ties — developed the condition). To help clarify
the picture, a team of researchers from Columbia original estimate.
University undertook a reanalysis of the nvvrs.
After their results appeared in Science in 2006, it became impossible
for responsible researchers to consider the original findings of nvvrs as
definitive.
According to the Columbia reanalysis, the psychological cost of the war
was 40 percent lower than the original nvvrs estimate — that is, 9.1 per-
cent were diagnosed with ptsd at the time of the study. The researchers
arrived at this prevalence rate by considering information — collected by the
original nvvrs investigators but not used — on veterans’ functional impair-
ment (i.e., their ability to hold a job, fulfill demands of family life, maintain
friendships, etc). However, the Columbia team used a rather lenient defini-
tion of “impairment,” stipulating that even veterans with “some difficulty”
but who were “functioning pretty well” despite their symptoms had ptsd.
This spurred yet another reanalysis. In a 2007 article in the Journal of
Traumatic Stress, Harvard psychologist Richard McNally took the defini-
tion of impairment up a notch so that only veterans who had at least “mod-
erate difficulty” in social or occupational functioning could qualify as hav-
ing ptsd. In doing so, he further reduced the estimate of affliction to 5.4
percent. If nothing else, this analytic sequence — from the nvvrs, to the
Columbia reevaluation, and to the McNally recalibration — serves as an
object lesson in the definitional fluidity of psychiatric syndromes.

Sally Satel
From the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, researchers have collected data
on thousands of active-duty servicemen, but very little on veterans of those
conflicts. The most rigorous evaluation to date appeared in the Archives of
General Psychiatry last summer. It was conducted by investigators at the
Walter Reed Army Institute of Research who applied rigorous and uniform
diagnostic standards. This distinguished their work from other studies on
the current Gulf wars, which were deficient in one or more ways: failure
to perform in-depth diagnostic assessments; use of broad sampling that did
not distinguish combat from support personnel; or assessment by snapshot
rather than longitudinal follow-up. The Walter Reed team assessed over
18,000 army soldiers in infantry brigade combat teams at three points:
pre-deployment (to establish a baseline); three months after deploy-
ment; and at twelve months post-deployment. After three months the rate
of ptsd (symptoms accompanied by “serious impairment”) was 6.3 per-
cent higher than the pre-deployment baseline. At a year, it was 7.3 percent
higher.
The new va rule
O
n july 12, 2010, General Shinseki penned an op-ed in USA
Today (“For Vets with ptsd, End of an Unfair Process”) announc-
ing a new Veterans Administration rule making it easier for veterans
suffering from ptsd to file disability claims. Part of the rule was straightfor-
ward: The va would no longer require that a veteran provide documenta-
tion of his exposure to combat trauma, seeing how such paperwork is often
very difficult for veterans to obtain. Streamlining the lumbering claims
bureaucracy is one thing, and welcome it is, but the new rule does not end
there. It also establishes that noninfantry personnel can qualify for ptsd dis-
ability if they had good reason to fear danger, such as firefights or explo-
sions, even if they did not actually experience it. “[If] a stressor claimed by a
veteran is related to the veteran’s fear of hostile military or terrorist activity,
he is eligible for a ptsd benefits,” according to the Federal Register. This is
a strikingly novel amendment. The idea that one can sustain an enduring
and disabling mental disorder based on anxious anticipation of a traumatic
event that never materialized is a radical departure from the clinical — and
common-sense — understanding that traumatic stress disorders are caused
by events that actually do happen to people.1 However, this is by no means
1. The new rule is actually quite confusing. See the Federal Register, 75:133 (July 13, 2010), 39847,
available online at http://www.thefederalregister.com/d.p/2010-07-13-2010-16885. (This and subse-
quent weblinks accessed December 13, 2010.) While the Federal Register states that a diagnosis of ptsd
cannot be made “in the absence of exposure to a traumatic event,” in keeping with the formal psychiatric
conception of ptsd, it also says, apparently contrarily, that “constant vigilance against unexpected
attack” can constitute a stressor and that ptsd can result from “veteran’s fear of hostile military or ter-
rorist activity.”
44 Policy Review
the first time that controversy and ambiguity have swirled around the diag-
nosis of ptsd.
During the Civil War, some soldiers were said to suffer “irritable heart”
or “Da Costa’s Syndrome” — a condition marked by shortness of breath,
chest discomfort, and pounding palpitations that doctors could not attribute
to a medical cause. In World War I, the condition became known as “shell
shock” and was characterized as a mental problem. The inability to cope
was believed to reflect personal weakness — an underlying genetic or psy-
chological vulnerability; combat itself, no matter how intense, was deemed
little more than a precipitating factor. Otherwise well-adjusted individuals
were believed to be at small risk of suffering more than a transient stress
reaction once they were removed from the front.
In 1917, the British neuroanatomist Grafton In the summer
Elliot Smith and the psychologist Tom Pear chal-
lenged this view. They attributed the cause more to of 1972, the
the experiences of war and less to the character or New York Times
fiber of soldiers themselves. “Psychoneurosis may be
produced in almost anyone if only his environment ran a front-page
be made ‘difficult’ enough for him,” they wrote in story on
their book, Shell Shock and Its Lessons. This trig-
gered a feisty debate within British military psychia-
“Post-Vietnam
try, and eventually the two sides came to agree that Syndrome.”
both the soldier’s predisposition to stress and his
exposure to hostilities contributed to breakdown. By World War II, then,
military psychiatrists believed that even the bravest and fittest soldier could
endure only so much. “Every man has his breaking point,” the saying went.
The story of ptsd, as we know it today, starts with the Vietnam War. In
the late 1960s, a band of self-described antiwar psychiatrists — led by
Chaim Shatan and Robert Jay Lifton, who was well known for his work on
the psychological damage wrought by Hiroshima — formulated a new diag-
nostic concept to describe the psychological wounds that the veterans sus-
tained in the war. They called it “Post-Vietnam Syndrome,” a disorder
marked by “growing apathy, cynicism, alienation, depression, mistrust, and
expectation of betrayal as well as an inability to concentrate, insomnia,
nightmares, restlessness, uprootedness, and impatience with almost any job
or course of study.” Not uncommonly, the psychiatrists said, these symp-
toms did not emerge until months or years after the veterans returned home.
Civilian contempt for veterans, according to Messrs. Shatan and Lifton, fur-
ther entrenched their hostility and impeded their return.
This vision inspired portrayals of the Vietnam veteran as a kind of
“walking time bomb,” “living wreckage,” or rampaging loner, images
immortalized in films such as “Taxi Driver” and “Rambo.” In the summer
of 1972, the New York Times ran a front-page story on Post-Vietnam
Syndrome. It reported that 50 percent of all Vietnam veterans — not just
combat veterans — needed professional help to readjust, and contained

Sally Satel
phrases such as “psychiatric casualty,” “emotionally disturbed,” and “men
with damaged brains.” By contrast, veterans of World War II were heralded
as heroes. They had fought in a popular war, a vital distinction for under-
standing how veterans and the public give meaning to their wartime hard-
ships and sacrifice.
Historians and sociologists note that the high-profile involvement of civil-
ian psychiatrists in the wake of the Vietnam War was another feature that
set those returning soldiers apart. “The suggestion or outright assertion was
that Vietnam veterans have been unique in American history for their psy-
chiatric problems,” writes the historian Eric T. Dean Jr. in Shook over Hell:
Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War. As the image of the psy-
chologically injured veteran took root in the national conscience, the psychi-
atric profession debated the wisdom of giving him his own diagnosis.
ptsd becomes official
I n 1980, the American Psychiatric Association adopted post-trau-

matic stress disorder (rather than the narrower post-Vietnam syn-
drome) as an official diagnosis in the third edition of its Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual. A patient could be diagnosed with ptsd if he expe-
rienced a trauma or “stressor” that, as dsm described it, would “evoke sig-
nificant symptoms of distress in almost everyone.” Rape, combat, torture,
and fires were those deemed to fall, as the dsm III required, “generally out-
side the range of usual human experience.” Thus, while the stress was
unusual, the development of ptsd in its wake was not.
No longer were prolonged traumatic reactions viewed as a reflection of
an individual’s constitutional vulnerability. Instead, stress-induced syn-
dromes were a natural process of adapting to extreme stress. With the intro-
duction of ptsd into the psychiatric manual, the single-minded emphasis on
the importance of one’s pre-morbid state in shaping response to crisis gave
way to preoccupation with the trauma itself and its supposed leveling effect
on human response. Surely, it was wrong of earlier psychiatrists to attribute
war-related pathology solely to the combatant himself, but the dsm III defi-
nition embodied an equal but opposite error: It obliterated the role of an
individual’s own characteristics in the development of the condition. Not
surprising, perhaps, this blunder served a political purpose. As British psy-
chiatrist Derek Summerfield put it, the newly minted diagnosis of ptsd
“was meant to shift the focus of attention from the details of a soldier’s
background and psyche to the fundamentally traumatic nature of war.”
Shatan and Lifton clearly saw ptsd as a normal response. “The place-
ment of post-traumatic stress disorder in [the dsm] allows us to see the poli-
cies of diagnosis and disease in an especially clear light,” writes combat vet-
eran and sociologist Wilbur Scott in his detailed 1993 account The Politics
of Readjustment: Vietnam Veterans Since the War. The diagnosis of ptsd is
46 Policy Review
in the dsm, Mr. Scott writes, “because a core of psychiatrists and Vietnam
veterans worked conscientiously and deliberately for years to put it there . . .
at issue was the question of what constitutes a normal reaction or experience
of soldiers to combat.” Thus, by the time ptsd was incorporated into the
official psychiatric lexicon, it bore a hybrid legacy — part political artifact of
the antiwar movement, part legitimate diagnosis.
Over the years, the major symptoms of ptsd have remained fairly
straightforward — re-experiencing, anxiety, and phobic avoidance — but
what counted as a traumatic experience turned out to be a moving target in
subsequent editions of the dsm. In 1987, the dsm III was revised to
expand the definition of a traumatic experience. The concept of stressor now
included witnessing harm to others, such as a horrific car accident in
progress. In the fourth edition in 1994, the range of “traumatic” events was
expanded further to include hearing about harm or threats to others, such as
the unexpected death of a loved one or receiving a fatal diagnosis such as
terminal cancer oneself. No longer did one need to experience a life-threat-
ening situation directly or be a close witness to a ghastly accident or atrocity.
As long as one experienced an “intense fear, helplessness, or horror” in
response to a catastrophic event (e.g., after watching the September 11 ter-
rorist attacks on television, or being in a minor car accident) he could con-
ceivably qualify for a diagnosis of ptsd if symptoms of re-experiencing,
arousal, and phobias persisted for a month.
There is pitched debate within the field of traumatology as to whether a
stressor should be defined as whatever traumatizes a person. True, a person
might feel “traumatized” by, say, a minor car accident — but to say that a
fender-bender counts as trauma alongside such horrors as concentration
camps, rape, or the Bataan Death March is to dilute the concept. “A great
deal rides on how we define the concept of traumatic stressor,” says Richard
J. McNally. In the civilian realm, he says, “the more we broaden the catego-
ry of traumatic stressors, the less credibly we can assign causal significance
to a given stressor itself and the more weight we must place on personal vul-
nerability.” In the context of war, too, while anticipatory fear of being thrust
in harm’s way could conceivably morph into a crippling stress reaction, this
will almost surely be more likely among individuals who struggled with anx-
iety-related problems prior to deployment. Surely, their distress merits treat-
ment from military psychiatrists, but the odds that such symptoms persist
after separation from the military, let alone harden into a serious, lasting
state of disablement, are probably very low.
The troubled va disability system
S ecretary shinseki’s move to reduce the bureaucratic hurdles

to the va disability system and broaden eligibility for ptsd will add
to the already accelerating stream of veterans who are applying to

Sally Satel
enter it. Thus, it is imperative that the va turn its attention to that system
itself. Two overarching problems need remedies. The first is the culture of
clinical diagnosis. Some disability evaluators now use a detailed interview
checklist to gauge the degree to which daily function is impaired, but its
implementation is uneven across medical centers. Thus, it is still easy for
clinicians — especially those whose diagnostic skills were honed during the
Vietnam era — to label problems such as anxiety, guilt over comrades who
died, and chronic sleep disturbance mental illnesses. This is facile, of course,
as symptoms splay out along a continuum ranging from normal, if painful,
readjustment difficulties to chronic, debilitating pathology. Further, not all
symptoms of distress in someone who has been to war reflexively signal the
presence of ptsd, as some clinicians seem to think.
Among veterans whose problems are indeed war-
The distinction related, however, the distinction between reversible
between and lasting incapacitation matters greatly when the
veteran is seeking disability status. And this brings
reversible and
us to the second matter: the inadvertent damage that
lasting disability benefits themselves can sometimes cause.
incapacitation Imagine a young soldier wounded in Afghanistan.
His physical injuries heal, but his mind remains tor-
matters greatly mented. Sudden noises make him jump out of his
when the veteran skin. He is flooded with memories of a bloody fire-
fight, tormented by nightmares, can barely concen-
is seeking trate, and feels emotionally detached from every-
disability status. thing and everybody. At 23 years old, the soldier is
about to be discharged from the military. Fearing
he’ll never be able to hold a job or fully function in
society he applies for “total” disability (the maximum designation, which
provides roughly $2,300 per month) compensation for ptsd from the va.
This soldier has resigned himself to a life of chronic mental illness. On its
face, this seems only logical, and granting the benefits seems humane. But in
reality it is probably the last thing the young soldier-turning-veteran needs
— because compensation will confirm his fears that he is indeed beyond
recovery.
While a sad verdict for anyone, it is especially tragic for someone only in
his twenties. Injured soldiers can apply for and receive va disability benefits
even before they have been discharged from the military — and, remark-
ably, before they have even been given the psychiatric treatment that could
help them considerably. Imagine telling someone with a spinal injury that
he’ll never walk again — before he has had surgery and physical therapy. A
rush to judgment about the prognosis of psychic injuries carries serious
long-term consequences insofar as a veteran who is unwittingly encouraged
to see himself as beyond repair risks fulfilling that prophecy. Why should I
bother with treatment? he might think. A terrible mistake, of course. The
months before and after separation from the service are periods when men-
48 Policy Review
tal wounds are fresh and thus most responsive to therapeutic intervention,
including medication.
Told he is disabled, the veteran and his family may assume — often incor-
rectly — that he is no longer able to work. At home on disability, he risks
adopting a “sick role” that ends up depriving him of the estimable therapeu-
tic value of work. Lost are the sense of purpose work gives (or at least the
distraction from depressive rumination it provides), the daily structure it
affords, and the opportunity for socializing and cultivating friendships. The
longer he is unemployed, the more his confidence in his ability and motiva-
tion to work erodes and his skills atrophy. Once a patient is caught in such a
downward spiral of invalidism, it can be hard to throttle back out. What’s
more, compensation contingent upon being sick often creates a perverse
incentive to remain sick. For example, even if a veteran wants very much to
work, he understandably fears losing his financial safety net if he leaves the
disability rolls to take a job that ends up proving too much for him. This is
how full disability status can undermine the possibility of recovery.
What to do: Treatment first
F or many veterans, the transition between military and civilian

life is a critical juncture marked by acute feelings of flux and dislo-
cation. Recall the scene in The Hurt Locker (one of the few scenes,
incidentally, that former soldiers have deemed realistic) in which Sergeant
William James stares at the wall of cereal boxes in the supermarket, disori-
ented by the tranquil and often trivial nature of the civilian world. As
Sebastian Junger wrote in his powerful book War, “Some of the men worry
they’ll never again be satisfied with a ‘normal life’ . . . They worry that they
may have been ruined for anything else.”
Returning from war is a major existential project. Imparting meaning to
the wartime experience, reconfiguring personal identity, and reimagining
one’s future take time. Sometimes the emotional intensity can be overwhelm-
ing — especially when coupled with nightmares and high anxiety or depres-
sion — and even warrants professional help. When this happens, the veteran
should receive a message of promise and hope. This means a prescription for
quality treatment and rehabilitation — ideally before the patient is even per-
mitted to apply for disability status. However, under the current system,
when a veteran files a disability claim, a ratings examiner is assigned to
determine the extent of incapacitation, irrespective of whether he has first
received care.
As part of the assessment, the examiner requests a psychiatric evaluation
with a psychiatrist or a psychologist to obtain a diagnosis. If the veteran is
diagnosed with ptsd by the clinician, the ratings examiner then assigns a
severity index to his disability. The Veterans Benefits Administration recog-
nizes different levels of disability. As detailed in the Code of Federal

Sally Satel
Regulations, a ten percent severity rating for a mental illness denotes “mild
or transient symptoms which [affect] occupational tasks only during periods
of significant stress.” A patient assigned 30 percent disability has “intermit-
tent periods of inability to perform occupational tasks although generally
functioning satisfactorily.” A 50 percent rating begins to denote significant
deficits including “difficulty in understanding complex commands” and
reduced reliability and productivity. The most severe level, 100 percent, cor-
responds to “total occupational and social impairment.”
Something is terribly wrong with this picture. To conclude that a veteran
has dismal prospects for meaningful recovery before he or she has had a
course of therapy and rehabilitation is premature in the extreme.2 To be
sure, the va is trying hard to make treatment accessible, but administrators,
raters, and clinicians cannot require patients to accept it as a condition of
being considered for disability compensation. Absent a course of quality
treatment and rehabilitation, evaluators simply do not have enough evidence
to make a determination. Unwittingly, this policy has set in motion a grow-
ing dependence on the va and disincentive to meaningful improvement. In
2008, former Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, then the ranking
member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, sought a limited remedy.
He introduced the Veterans Mental Health Treatment First Act. The purpose
of this bill was to induce new veterans to embark upon a path to recovery.
Any veteran diagnosed with major depression, post-traumatic stress disor-
der, or other anxiety disorders stemming from military activity would be eli-
gible for a financial incentive (which Burr called a “wellness stipend”) to
adhere to an individualized course of treatment and agree to a pause in
claims action for at least a year or until completion of treatment, which ever
came first. The bill died in committee.
Don’t fight the same war twice
M ental health experts have learned a lot about how not to

treat veterans from our experience during the Vietnam era. I
speak from my experience as a psychiatrist at the West Haven
Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Connecticut from 1988 to 1992, a time
of blossoming interest in ptsd within both the va and the mental-health
establishment. Good intentions were abundant, but, in retrospect, much of
2. Studies of Vietnam veterans have found that 68 to 94 percent of claimants seeking treatment for the
first time are also applying for ptsd disability benefits; for review see B. Christopher Frueh, et al.,
“Disability compensation seeking among veterans evaluated for posttraumatic stress disorder,”
Psychiatric Services 54 (January 2003), 84–91. According to Nina Sayer and colleagues, “most
claimants reported seeking disability compensation for symbolic reasons, especially for acknowledgement,
validation and relief from self-blame; see Nina Sayer, et al., “Veterans seeking disability benefits for post-
traumatic stress disorder: Who applies and the self-reported meaning of disability compensation,” Social
Science & Medicine 58:11 (June 2004), 2133–43. I could not find comparable studies on oie and oif
veterans, but the Compensation and Pension examiners I interviewed suggest that the “disability first”
approach is not uncommon.
50 Policy Review
our treatment philosophy was misguided. For example, clinicians tended to
view whatever problem beset a veteran as a product of his war experience.
In addition, therapists spent too much time urging veterans to experience
catharsis by reliving their war experiences in group therapy, individual thera-
py, art therapy, and theatre reenactments. Groups of twenty or so veterans
were admitted to the hospital and stayed together, platoonlike, for four
months. This practice took them out of their communities and away from
their families. I remember some of the men coming back from a day’s leave
from the hospital ward with new war-themed tattoos and combat fatigues
— not exactly readjustment! It is clear, in retrospect, that instead of fostering
regression, we should have emphasized resolution of everyday problems of
living, such as family chaos, employment difficulties,
and substance abuse. Some clinicians,
The good news is that most of these inpatient
programs are now shuttered. Studies showed them
myself included,
to be largely ineffective. What followed over the would even
years was a wholesale shift away from cathartic
like to see
reenactment of war trauma and a growing emphasis
on forward-looking rehabilitation and evidence- the diagnosis
based treatments such as cognitive therapy, behav- of PTSD
ioral desensitization (some techniques involving vir-
tual reality recreations of combat scenarios), and downplayed
medication if needed. The va does appear to be altogether.
making serious efforts to ensure that all mental
health clinics are equipped to offer state of the art treatment for ptsd.
Some clinicians, myself included, would even like to see the diagnosis of
ptsd downplayed altogether in favor of trying to understand patients’
symptoms in context. As Texas psychiatrist Martha Leatherman puts it,
“behaviors such as easy startling, hypervigilance, and sleep disturbance that
are common in combat situations are normal, survival mechanisms,” she
says. Unfortunately, when they return, veterans are told that these symptoms
mean p t s d . “This stirs up visions of Vietnam veterans living under
bridges,” Leatherman says, “and then, in a panic, they apply for disability
compensation for p t s d so that they won’t end up homeless too.”
Regrettably, the legacy of Vietnam era ptsd haunts the current generation
of veterans. “It has been very troubling to me to see oef/oif veterans who
truly need mental health treatment refuse it because it would mean having
an illness that is associated with Vietnam-era chronicity and thus is incur-
able.” The clinicians’ job, of course, is not to incite morbid preoccupations,
but to dispel misconceptions about Vietnam veterans (the vast majority of
whom went on to function well) and steer veterans, as early as possible, to
healthier interpretations of their symptoms. Early intervention also leverages
the well-established fact that prognosis after trauma greatly depends on
what happens to the individual in its immediate wake. That is why serious
attention must be paid to the everyday problems that beset many veterans

Sally Satel
during the readjustment period, such as financial stress, marital discord, par-
enting strains, occupational needs.3
Finally, the balkanization of the veteran’s services complex demands
attention. The federal Veterans Benefits Administration (vba) and the
Veterans Health Administration (vha) tend to operate in separate universes.
The vba is geared toward helping veterans maximize benefits and gives little
to no attention to improving their clinical situation. On the other hand, the
vha is focused on treatment, as it should be, but doesn’t extend its expertise
to helping veterans with the financial hardships they face. (These can be the
kinds of problems that might lead a patient to turn to disability compensa-
tion — not because he is incapable of work but because the reliable check is
a rational solution to his financial woes.) County-
For those who based Veterans Service Officers actively help veter-
ans file for disability — not necessarily a bad thing
never regain at all, but because they are advocates, their job is to
their civilian get a veteran what he wants, which is not necessarily
footing despite in his best clinical interest. Lastly, the Veteran
Service Organizations which, as a matter of princi-
the best ple, are driven to funnel largesse to their con-
treatment, full stituents, tend to be extremely suspicious of pro-
posed reforms of the disability system, as they were
and generous of Senator Burr’s proposal. With the missions of
disability both agencies and the agendas of pressure groups all
working at cross purposes, disability reform is a
compensation is daunting challenge indeed.
their due. Anyone who fights in a war is changed by it, but
few are irreparably damaged. For those who never
regain their civilian footing despite the best treatment, full and generous dis-
ability compensation is their due. Otherwise, it is reckless to allow a young
veteran to surrender to his psychological wounds without first urging him to
pursue recovery.
Over the last hundred years or so, psychiatry has taken very different per-
spectives on war stress: from an overly harsh, blame-the-soldier stance in
World War I, to the healthy recognition in World War II that even the most
psychologically healthy individual can develop war-related symptoms, to the
misguided expectation in the wake of Vietnam that lasting ptsd was rou-
tine. The new va rule, which expands ptsd disability eligibility to noncom-
3. The problem of fraud, too, cannot be overlooked. See B. Christopher Frueh, et al., “US Department of
Veterans Affairs disability policies for ptsd: Administrative trends and implications for treatment, reha-
bilitation, and research,” American Journal of Public Health 97:12 (December 2007), 2143–2145; see
also Gail Poyner, “Psychological Evaluations of Veterans Claiming ptsd Disability with the Department
of Veterans Affairs: A Clinician’s Viewpoint,” Psychological Injury and Law 3:2 (2010), 130–2. Poyner,
who had received praise from va personnel for her careful diagnostic evaluations, was told by the va in
2009 that her services were no longer needed after she began using approved psychological tests to dis-
tinguish between veterans who were claiming to have ptsd when they did not and those whose com-
plaints were clinically authentic.
52 Policy Review
batants who have experienced the dread of harm but have not had an actual
encounter with it, alters the meaning yet again. What should have been a
welcome bureaucratic reform by the va — waiving documentation that
might be difficult or impossible to obtain — ended up distorting the diagno-
sis. Add to this the practice of conferring disability status upon a veteran
before his prospects for recovery are known, and the long journey home will
now be harder than it already is.

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Cuba’s Lost History
By Michael Gonzalez
W
hen i was a child and the communist authorities
would send a volunteer worker to inquire why I had
not yet joined the Pioneros or generally was not going
along with the rhetoric of the Cuban Revolution, my
grandmother would react in a way I found puzzling.
She would show the visitor, usually a woman, to the sitting room my family
used for people with whom we were not intimate, and then serve coffee in
the good china (not the chipped and weathered cups used with family and
friends). Then she invariably would launch into a version of the same rou-
tine.
Abuela would employ an exceedingly cordial but distant manner, with
none of the comfortable banter that Cubans with bonds of friendship use
with one another — though she was careful to drop here and there a well-
calibrated cubanismo, to display her roots in the native soil.
A cold smile fixed on her lips, she would get around to informing our vis-
itor that “this family has been in these parts for many generations — cen-
turies.” Yes, she would go on, “we’ve noticed there is a Revolution going on
Michael Gonzalez, a former journalist, is vice president of communications at

The Heritage Foundation (www.heritage.org) in Washington, D.C.

Michael Gonzalez
outside. The important thing to us is that we’re a familia cubanisima. And
what was it that you said about my grandson again? Oh, no, he won’t take
part in that civic event Sunday morning. He will be at church, you see. He’s
an altar boy there. Our family built that church, by the way, the one you
saw on the way here. Yes, our name is on the first brick was laid there.”
Why on earth Abuela wanted to share these things with these visitors, I
always wondered. Today, four decades on, I know why she proclaimed we
were a corner stone.
We had memories of a time past, and history put things in context. From
earliest childhood I was taught that my father’s family’s roots in Cuba ran
deep. “Childhood” is perhaps too quaint a word for what was a daily
anomaly: Outside raged the Revolution, with such
Our knowledge foreign visitors as Angela Davis and Stokely
of the past Carmichael descending on Havana to join Fidel in
marches, sloganeering, and taunting counterrevolu-
amounted to tionaries; inside our walls, laden with portraits of
more than just ancestors, angels, and saints, we had ourselves,
books, and hallways that echoed of La traviata and
the point of pride
Cavalleria rusticana, emanating from my father’s
that people take record player and prized 78-rpm record collection.
in their family Our knowledge of the past amounted to more
than just the point of pride that people take in their
histories in stable family histories in stable countries. History gave us
countries. a sense of permanence that assured us of our daily
survival, just as oaks can withstand gale force winds
because of deep tap roots.
The people of Cuba today need that permanence, that stability and sense
of belonging. This may jar those who have visited Cuba and seen a deprived
but proud people. Yet, as the Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez has written,
“Most young people’s eyes are looking to the outside, because they see that
they cannot make change in their country. They desire to take a plane to
Miami or Europe and in ten hours change their lives completely.”
Convincing them that they have a future on the island will require wholesale
change: massive amounts of capital, a huge infusion of technical know-how,
and restoration of the rule of law (respect for private property, for
starters).But even these major fixes won’t be sufficient to secure the island’s
revival. As the Cuban writer Jose Azel recently observed, “Post-Castro Cuba
will need to rebuild much more than its economy; it will need to rebuild its
national identity.”
That is because wiping out that identity — one that had grown organical-
ly through the centuries and had produced an enterprising and creative
national character — was Job One for the Revolution; it was a necessity,
even an obsession, to communists intent on imposing an alien blueprint on
the people of Cuba. “Cubanism” had to be wrung out of the people’s con-
sciousness so that the much-touted “revolutionary consciousness” could be
56 Policy Review
installed in its place. Timeless habits had to be changed, ways of thinking
rewired, history rewritten.
One of the myriad ways the Revolution’s henchmen and apparatchiks
went about doing that was to completely reorder the way history was
imparted, teaching it — when at all — through a political prism that deni-
grated the past and explained why it had to lead to Castro’s Marxist experi-
ment. To ensure that Cubans could not henceforth have access to history
books that did not comport to the Marxist view, Cuba’s communists resort-
ed to the same instruments their counterparts have used everywhere from
Moscow to Beijing: strict censorship. Books that laid out a different view
were confiscated and taken out of circulation. The island was hermetically
shut. Since 1959, Cubans have not had access to a
non-Marxist version of current or historical events Since 1959,
about the outside world or about themselves. Today
Cubans have not
most Cubans are barred from accessing the internet.
Much attention is paid to the economic failure had access to a
and political repression that end up being the sine non-Marxist
qua non of Marxism, but relatively little notice is
taken of the attendant necessity to wipe out a cul- version of current
ture and the deleterious effect this destruction con- or historical
tinues to have on a nation even after the communists
have had their guns taken away. China is slowly events about the
regaining a 5,000-year-old culture that was ruth- outside world.
lessly suppressed during the Cultural Revolution;
Russia is working through difficulties in that arena. Regaining memory will
be important for freedom itself. The reason is simple. As British historian
Simon Schama puts it, “History and memory are not the antithesis of free
will but the condition of it.” Memory allows humans to contrast different
events and outcomes, a freedom which any dictator intent on enforcing a
blueprint must eradicate. “And because history is the enemy of tyranny,”
Schama notes, “oblivion is its greatest accomplice.”
To be sure, the roots for what went wrong in Cuba can also be traced to
flaws in the Cuban character and identity. Given Cuba’s penurious state, the
task of sifting through the historical record to have some sense for what
these flaws are is urgent. Cuba, after all, wasn’t reduced to impoverished
incarceration by Martians arriving on flying saucers. Something Cuban, very
Cuban, allowed this situation to emerge. What character flaw was there and
how might some future government go about ameliorating its effects?
In the case of Cuba, one flaw was obviously the institution of slavery and
its pernicious generational impact. Another was very probably a strong class
consciousness, one that was much more like Europe’s than what one finds in
the U.S. Both provided some tinder for the revolutionary match to light. But
we should also look at the strengths of the Cuban character that are prod-
ucts of the cauldron of history. They help explain Cuba’s success prior to
Fidel Castro’s revolution. A review of the historical record helps us under-

Michael Gonzalez
stand Cubans’ innate attachment to private property, entrepreneurial spirit,
cosmopolitanism, and pursuit of individual freedom and self-government, all
characteristics anathema to the Marxist ideal. Such a review would help
explain why those who have tried to impose the foreign ideology of
Marxism, with its initiative-killing collectivism, arbitrary and resentful divi-
sion of the world between north and south, and political repression would
out of necessity seek to quash a previous understanding of history. Imposing
communism in Cuba required wiping the historical record and wringing
Cuban-ness from each individual, especially since every element of
Marxism’s New Man was diametrically opposed to the Cuban tempera-
ment. This is why Grandma acted as she did. She was registering her impa-
tience with revolutionaries coming to her babbling about “revolutionary
consciousness.” Her message was simple: Please don’t tell us about out
national character; we have been refining it for centuries.
I saw the toll that the imposition of this unfamiliar ideology took on my
family, how it eventually drove my grandmother insane, killed my father and
tore my family asunder. The oak was shaken.
But the end of this bizarre experiment is now within sight — after a very
long half-century, the displacement of hundreds of thousands, and the ruina-
tion of the once-stately Havana and the countryside. The revolutionary lead-
ers have become gerontocrats. It is time now to peer into the historical
record and understand the roots of Cuba’s character, so that Cubans them-
selves can start rediscovering why it is that they think a certain way and can
start responding to ancient instincts once the shackles are removed. In this,
America can be a model, because it especially has been well-served by a deep
understanding of its history, of the Constitution, its earliest settlers and its
founding generation, but also of how it has dealt with its problems, and
how all have informed the American character. This has been a guarantee of
its freedom and prosperity.
Recalling a national character
A
n anniversary upon us should spark interest in an often
overlooked period of Cuban history. This year, 2011, marks half
a millennium of Cuba’s existence.
In early 1511 (historians are not sure about the exact date, but they think
it was in January), nearly a century before the settlement of Jamestown, a
group of Spanish knights clad in heavy armor arrived on boats to conquer
the island and recreate their medieval ways in the Caribbean. They couldn’t
have been more unlike the Pilgrims, but like them, they sowed the seeds of
success. Some have placed the spark that ignited Cuba’s identity at other
times. Historian Hugh Thomas, for instance, places it at 1762, when the
British invaded Havana. Others say 1898, when Spain lost to the U.S. in the
Spanish American War; or 1902, when the U.S. left and the Republic began
58 Policy Review
(Castro obviously believes Year Zero is 1959, when he took over). I believe,
however, that the markers the conquistadors put down led directly to the
formation of the Cuban character, though they are not often given credit.
Placing the genesis of the Cuban nation at this Spanish landing is not
meant to deny the existence of Indian nations, some of which had inhabited
the island for centuries (others had come to Cuba only a few decades before
the Spanish, hopping around the West Indies, island to island, all the way
from the basin of the Orinoco River). But unlike with Peru, Mexico or, say,
Ireland, in Cuba the population in place before the imperial power’s arrival
left relatively little trace.
The Indians bequeathed the cultivation of some tasty tubers, the enjoy-
ment of the hammock and, much more famously,
the use of tobacco. But the country with the culture, It is time now
ethnicities, language, religions, customs, and com-
for Cubans to
mon history that it has today (in short, with all the
attributes that make a nation) had its moment of peer into the
birth at the point of the conquistadors’ landing. As historical record
soon as these Spaniards arrived, they started putting
down the pillars on which the Cuban economy, cul- and understand
ture, and national character were built. The leaders the roots of
of the conquistadors came mostly from the landless
gentry of Castile and especially Andalusia in south- their nation’s
western Spain — on whose dialect Cuban Spanish is character.
based. They cut through the serpentine island in a
matter of months, subduing the natives. In four years they established the
seven villages from which Cuba sprang. The seven foundational villages —
Baracoa, Bayamo, Santiago, Trinidad, Sancti Spiritus, Puerto Principe, and
Havana — are all cities today.
A quick historical review, guided by the ghosts of abuela’s ancestors, sug-
gests why Cuba was once a success, why Cubans still tend to thrive outside
communism, and — most important of all — why the country has its pre-
sent problems.
Within decades of their arrival, the conquistadors thrust Cuba into a
global trading system which produced conditions for wealth creation for
centuries to come and gave Cubans a cosmopolitan outlook that allowed
them to think of themselves as the equals of Europeans and North
Americans. The conquistadors also laid the foundations of representative
government. Yes, the conquistadors could be implacable, even sadistic. One
of abuela’s ancestors — one Vasco Porcallo de Figueroa, a native of
Extremadura, as were Cortes, Pizarro, and many other leading conquista-
dors — is said by many historians to have been among the cruelest. He had
a hand in founding four of the first seven towns. He also reportedly mutilat-
ed and castrated many natives — and had children with scores more (it is to
one of these “cross-cultural” encounters that my children and I owe our
existence).

Michael Gonzalez
These first settlers were infamous for self-dealing in land, introducing the
roots of the corruption and the strong sense of class consciousness that
marked the island for centuries. They did this through the Havana Council
(El Cabildo), which they took over early on. Conquistadors of noble birth
got the best land, followed by those of baser origin, followed by simple set-
tlers who hadn’t fought the Indians and shed blood, then followed by mixed-
bloods and, finally, Indians and blacks. There’s no doubt that this created a
wedge the communists were able to expand and exploit centuries later.
The identification of family honor with private property by these first
Cubans did, however, prove a boon to Cuba for centuries to come, assuring
its economic success. In ignoring edicts from Madrid to establish commons,
they avoided the near fatal mistake of Jamestown
Within and Massachusetts, where land was at first held
jointly. In the English colonies commons led to
decades of penury, as they do everywhere. Luckily for Virginia
their arrival, the and Massachusetts, settlers switched to private hold-
ings in time to avoid starvation. By disobeying
conquistadors Madrid and apportioning land among themselves,
had thrust Cuba the Cuban conquistadors eluded “the tragedy of the
commons.”
into a global The primacy of private property rights was finally
trading system. encoded into legislation in the first decade of the
19th century, in a law that condemned “all govern-
ment intervention in the management and development of private capital.”
The revolution’s early historian, Manuel Moreno Fraginals, in his 1964
work The Sugar Mill, decried the fact that with this legislation, the Cuban
“sugarocracy won its greatest legal victory.” Respect for private property
lasted in Cuba from Vasco to Fidel, surviving numerous corrupt regimes.
Abuela’s husband, my grandfather, Luis Miguel Gonzalez, fought against the
dictators Machado and Batista in the 1930s and ’40s. Sometimes he had to
flee to the countryside for weeks, to escape arrest. My father Miguel Angel
was likewise thrown in prison by Batista in the 1950s. But never were their
houses confiscated.
And this organic Cuban attachment to one’s own patch of land explains
why the strongest rejection of the revolution’s “Agrarian Reform” — the
expropriation of people’s property — came from the guajiros (which is
translated as “peasants” by leftists and as “ranchers” by everyone else), not
from the upper classes.
On this foundation of private property, success was built. Soon the
descendants of the conquistadors were planting sugarcane, using technology
brought to the island by merchant Genoese families. In a matter of decades,
Havana was linked to different ports throughout the world, via Seville and
the Canary Islands, honing the enterprising spirit that is one of Cuba’s most
enduring traits. As the new Cuban expert at the University of Pittsburgh, the
bright historian Alejandro de la Fuente, has documented in Havana and the
60 Policy Review
Atlantic in the 16th Century, by the early 1600s, Havana had become a
prime center in the Atlantic and the Caribbean web of distribution and
commerce.
As de la Fuente puts it, the key was making Havana the nodal point of
the Spanish colonial fleet system (la Carrera de Indias), which gave the port
city “the ability to redistribute European products among colonial markets
in the circum-Caribbean area.” He continues:
Through this constant flow of vessels and commodities local merchants
and residents got access to a large variety of goods. These goods came
from production centers all over the world, from Amsterdam to Ceylon,
and they were part of life in Havana and other Atlantic port cities. Local
merchants, residents, and transients consumed and traded these com-
modities, shifting them from one sea route to another depending on the
available information about local, regional, and distant markets and
demands. (Italics added.)
In making full use of this world system, Cuba was soon producing the
coffee, sugar, and tobacco that fueled the democratic explosion of the 1680s
in London’s coffee houses, the incubators of Britain’s Glorious Revolution
(whose understanding of freedoms informed the American Revolution).
This trading spirit was in full swing at the dawn of the 1700s, and made
its adherents feisty enough to battle an empire. In the 1720s, the newly
installed Bourbon dynasty in Madrid, in the person of Philip V, brought sta-
tist French ways. In France itself, of course, within 60 years this statism
would lead to the French Revolution and the beheadings of the French
Bourbons. In Cuba, the Spanish Bourbon king forced Cuban farmers to sell
their tobacco to a state monopoly. The tobacco farmers rebelled, albeit
unsuccessfully. Defeated, many of abuela’s ancestors fled to western Cuba —
through sheer luck happening upon Vuelta Abajo, the best land in the world
for growing the weed. Soon they were selling tobacco and other wares to
privateers from Holland, France, and England.
Cubans, indeed, traded with all comers, often breaking the law if they
had to. Many of the legal cases in the Archivo de Indias in Seville have to do
with the authorities’ taking reprisals against smugglers. Pirates were so wel-
come from the start of the colony that the Cuban historian Levy Marrero
quotes a 1603 letter from Bishop Juan de las Cabezas to Philip III in which
he laments that the island was so lost to the pirate trade that there was even
a man “who has not wanted to baptize a son until a pirate could be his
Godfather.” Commercial liberty had to come amid constant attempts by the
crown to regulate trade, just as the conquistadors ignored Madrid’s edicts on
setting aside commons land. The settlers found different means to get their
way on trade. As de la Fuente wrote, one of the ways “to circumvent legal
limits and prohibitions was to falsify cargo registries.”
This commercial spirit gave the island a great deal of prosperity, especially
after the British takeover in 1762, which lasted only a few months but

Michael Gonzalez
which transformed Cuba by making trade with the entire world possible.
After that, Seville and the Canary Islands could no longer be the only gate-
ways to Europe, as they had been up to that point. As the British historian
Hugh Thomas writes, Cuba in the 19th century became “the richest colony
in the world.”
By the mid-20th century, as the Cuban-American business historian
Oscar A. Echevarria has written in Cuba’s Builders of Wealth Prior to
1959, “Cuba’s entrepreneurial and managerial class was disproportionally
large.” He concludes that it was not just good soil and proximity to the U.S.
that accounted for Cuba’s economic and social success, but its entrepreneur-
ial know-how. This resolve to trade freely with one another, defying authori-
ty when the law was an ass, was alive even under
the revolution. In 1960s Havana, it propelled my
The resolve to
poor father (and countless others) to risk prison by
trade freely with trading in the black market, so he could secure food
one another, for our family. Throughout my childhood, this high-
ly illegal barter system was the only sector of the
defying authority Cuban economy that I saw function.
when the law Politically, too, the conquistadors made the first
strides in electoral politics, with lasting conse-
was an ass, was quences, and, as it happens, another of abuela’s
alive even under ancestors played a part. They were not all rogues
the revolution. like Vasco, but included also such pious Christian
men as Manuel de Roxas, an early governor who in
the 1520s made a point of complaining to the court
in Madrid about the cruelty being meted out to Indians, and about the incip-
ient licentiousness in the colony. Unsurprisingly, given de Roxas’s moral rec-
titude, he also secured for the fledgling Cuban colony a level of political self-
determination and, yes, democracy, that Madrid ended up denying the
towns and cities in the Iberian Peninsula itself. These embryonic political
developments show that a desire for representative government — one quite
at odds with what Cubans have now — has existed in Cuba from the very
beginning and was culturally ingrained before Castro’s half-century experi-
ment in Marxist oppression.
De Roxas’s achievements have been chronicled by a few historians, but
the most comprehensive look I have seen was by the great chronicler of
Cuba’s early years, the intrepid American Irene Aloha Wright, in her 1916
classic, An Early History of Havana. The key event, according to Wright,
came in a communication to the Emperor Charles I in 1528, in which de
Roxas requested for the fledgling Cuban settlement the same privileges for
which European towns and guilds were fighting at the time. The gist of the
request was that the 17-year-old colony be able to elect its own judges and
legislators. After some consideration, Charles did accede to a mixed system:
Some judges and legislators would be appointed by the crown — but some
would be elected by the settlers in Cuba. The suffrage was limited to
62 Policy Review
landowning heads of households, to be sure, but, lest we forget, this was the
case in the United States and Britain as late as the 1800s. Local elections
continued throughout most of the colonial period, albeit with limited suf-
frage.
It was only with the arrival of Governor Miguel Tacon in 1834 that
Madrid began to take back the degree of autonomy that landowning Cuban
families had enjoyed for three centuries. Tacon canceled local elections in
1836, expelled the archbishop of Santiago and even engaged in something
as silly as attempting to delay the installation of railways in Cuba so tracks
they could be laid in Spain first. Needless to say, such a power grab alienated
Cubans, leading to their insurrection, and eventually to the Spanish-
American War and the defeat of Spain in 1898.
The Cubans colonials who likewise had economic In 1834, Madrid
and some political freedoms saw themselves as very
began to take
much a part of Spain and the rest of Europe, and
they felt their lives were interwoven with events on back the degree
the other side of the ocean. A copy in my possession of autonomy that
of the 1817 will and testament of Matias Jose
Duarte, the brother of abuela’s great-great grandfa- landowning
ther, shows that among the legacies he left to Cuban families
churches, relatives, and slaves, he also worried about
Napoleon’s victim’s in Spain and left 1,000 pesos had enjoyed for
“to Europe so it can distributed at the rate [of] 10 three centuries.
pesos for each poor person who lost a husband or a
father in the wars that they have had with France.” It is important to note
that Matias Jose Duarte was a fifth-generation Cuban. It is also noteworthy
that this will was written seven years after Mexico had declared its indepen-
dence from Spain, and while Simon Bolivar, Jose de San Martin, and their
peers were fighting to liberate the South American continent from Spain.
Until Tacon, the majority of white Cubans had wanted no part of this inde-
pendence.
To be sure, the privileges of Cuba’s cities and towns in the colonial period
were not as far-reaching as the rights that American colonists in Virginia,
Massachusetts, and the Carolinas enjoyed in the 1700s. It is important,
however, to lay out a predicate for representative government in Cuba.
And free elections were part of Cuba all the way to the 1902–1959
republic. Abuela’s father was elected in free elections of 1902 to the first
Havana Cabildo in the republic, and my grandfather ran for the
Constitutional Assembly in 1940 (he lost). Much is made of dictators
Machado and Batista in the 1930s and 1950s, and rightly so, but there
were more democratically elected presidents than dictators during those six
decades.
In the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, economic freedom was
reserved for the free, white or black. Excluded were the island’s slaves, until
slavery was abolished in the 1880s, and anyone who goes looking for the

Michael Gonzalez
roots of Cuba’s present-day ills must stop and consider slavery’s pernicious
and lasting influence. And how could it be otherwise? Here in the United
States, the New England Yankee John Adams worried about the colonies in
the American South and wondered how people who deny liberty to others
could ever obtain it for themselves. Slavery existed in Cuba from 1511.
Because it associated personal degradation with one race, it led directly to
racism. It runs as deeply in the Cuba of today as it ever has, in ways that the
revolution’s starry-eyed supporters often fail to grasp. One of its most lasting
and corrosive political impacts may have been a toleration of subjugation,
which was accepted by all races, the subjugated and the subjugators. Cuba
having had slavery till the 1880s, the folk memory of an institution that
lasted for centuries can reach across the generations.
But it is important to remember that racism did
The republic
not prevent free blacks from having private proper-
succeeded in the ty. There are records in the Archivo de Indias in
20th century Seville of blacks and mixed race individuals receiv-
ing grants of land from the Havana Cabildo as early
because it was a as the 1560s. A history of slavery and racism also
descendant of the does not condemn a society (if it did, the whole
world would be doomed). During the 20th century,
colonial center of Cuba was so prosperous that it attracted hundreds
commerce from of thousands of immigrants from Europe. Four of
these 20th century European immigrants were my
the 1500s.
mother’s grandparents. They came penniless to
Cuba. Yet one generation later, my mother was
graduating law school.
The 20th century republic succeeded because it was a direct descendant
of the colonial center of commerce incubated in the 1500s. Cubans’ sense of
enterprise was sharpened over the centuries; it became part of the national
character. Cubans were ferociously competitive, and international competi-
tion sharpened on the island global managerial best practices. United
Nations statistics for 1959, the year Castro took over, bear this out. In
infant mortality, Cuba’s 32 deaths per 1,000 live births was well ahead of
Japan, West Germany, Luxembourg, Ireland, France, Italy, and Spain (40,
36, 39, 33, 34, 50, and 53 respectively) among other nations. In terms of
calories per day, Cuba was ahead all of Latin America except beef producers
Argentina and Uruguay. In cars per 1,000 inhabitants, Cuba’s 24 was
ahead of everyone in Latin America expect oil-producing Venezuela (27).
And so on. In most vital statistics, Cuba was on a par with Mediterranean
countries and Southern U.S. states.
One reason for Cuba’s economic and (to a lesser degree) political success
in the 1 9 0 2 – 5 9 republican period was the beneficial impact of the
1899–1902 U.S. occupation, and the strong role the U.S. continued to play
in the island during the first half of the twentieth century. That is, of course,
not something that you will find in the history books read in Cuba today.
64 Policy Review
But Cuba in 1898 was prostrate after three decades of war with Spain, and
the U.S. occupation not only made it possible to have a transition to an
elected government, but also considerably fixed other ills such as public san-
itation. One of the first things Governor Leonard Wood did was set up a
sanitation commission, which was led by abuela’s father, the surgeon and
sociologist Ramon Maria Alfonso.
Reclaiming a history
D iscussion of the Cuban national character often emphasizes

other aspects than I have — individualism being a positive one,
informality one less so — and places the historical formative
period of national character during the independence wars fought against
Spain in 1868–78 and 1895–98. Castro’s Revolution emphasizes these
wars of independence in its teachings of history, and reinterprets them as
proto-Marxist events.
The wars of independence have been purposely left out of my treatment,
which has concentrated on the roots of such Cuban characteristics as attach-
ment to private property, an entrepreneurial spirit, an international cos-
mopolitanism, and the pursuit of freedom (the latter of which was the title
of Hugh Thomas’s classic work on Cuban history). I posit that the seeds for
these traits were laid in those early years of the conquest. My use of personal
events, from my life and my family’s past, are meant simply to demonstrate
the always implicit contract between the dead, the present generation, and
those to still be born.
Today, the overwhelming majority of Cubans have been denied any of
this history. A global trading system and wealth creation not being part of
the socialist grand plan, virtually all pre-revolutionary history has been deni-
grated in Castro’s Cuba. Castroite ideologists especially spurn what they call
the “pseudo-republic” of the 20th century — the state that was the land of
promise to my four Spanish maternal great grandparents. Yet, it should be
clear to all that the revolution’s victory in 1959 reversed the flow of human-
ity; after that event people stopped coming in and began to exit en masse. To
think that Europeans today would immigrate to Cuba is risible, whereas I,
like hundreds of thousands of other sons and daughters of Cuba, have had
to go elsewhere to make a good life and find happiness.
Castro knew he had to smash Cuba’s old identity, smear its old pride, and
degrade its traditions in order to create the “new man” called for in the
bizarre 19th century collectivist cult — Marxism — that he forced the poor
Cubans to embrace. The British writer Theodore Dalrymple even theorizes
that Castro needed to wipe out the physical evidence of the previous culture,
and that that is why the Revolution purposely destroyed Havana and its
once stately architecture and left it to crumble. Dalrymple is not optimistic
about what it will take to rebuild Havana, that symbol of Cuban identity:

Michael Gonzalez
The terrible damage that Castro has done will long outlive him and his
regime. Untold billions of capital will be needed to restore Havana; legal
problems about ownership and rights of residence will be costly, bitter,
and interminable; and the need to balance commercial, social, and aes-
thetic considerations in the reconstruction of Cuba will require the high-
est regulatory wisdom. In the meantime, Havana stands as a dreadful
warning to the world — if one were any longer needed — against the
dangers of monomaniacs who believe themselves to be in possession of a
theory that explains everything, including the future.
In that way — and other ways — Castro has been just another banal dic-
tator. Every tyrant from Hitler to Pol Pot has tried to restart the clock in
order to put in place their plans. And like all of them, Pol Pot and Hitler
included, Castro has found useful idiots outside to parrot his denigration of
his country’s previous history.
The historian Manuel Moreno Fraginals’s own trajectory brings to light
the revolution’s distaste for history. He started out as a darling to some, and
Che Guevara even praised The Sugar Mill for its “rigorous Marxist analytic
method.” But the revolution’s men quickly decided that Fraginals was writ-
ing too much history. As the American Historical Association puts it in its
entry on Fraginals, The Sugar Mill “was not sympathetically received by
Cuban official historians, who claimed at the time that Marxist historians
should apply themselves to reinterpret the past, not to reconstruct it using
new evidence and methodology.” Poor Fraginals fell into disfavor quickly;
the Revolutionary government in fact never allowed him to teach at the
University of Havana. He ended up dying in exile in Miami in 2001.
To convince young Cubans today that there are better goals than becom-
ing a foreigner, as a wry Havana joke puts it, Cubans will need to look at
the whole vista of the past 500 years, and put the past half century in that
context.
That process can start today, up to a point, by adding more cultural and
historical content to American transmissions to Cuba. Radio Martí, despite
its many problems, has a following on the island and could certainly be
improved. The concept is good even if the implementation may sometimes
fall short. But the real heavy lifting will need to come after the Castros have
passed from the scene and a real transition to freedom is under way. The
transitional administration should give high priority to celebrate Cuba’s her-
itage, all of it, with honesty.
History and culture, from Vasco to Castro, needs to be taught again.
Cuba’s zarzuela, “Cecilia Valdes,” needs to play at Havana’s main theater
again. This cultural recapturing is a process that was undertaken in Eastern
Europe after it regained its freedom. Not for nothing was the first president
of a free Czech Republic a novelist. America will unquestionably play a role
in post-Castro Cuba. The only question is whether America will be well pre-
pared to accept this responsibility or will be dragged unwillingly into it. It
66 Policy Review
will be the latter only if the U.S. government accepts that it is a force for
good in the world — that it already has been that in Cuba — and has a deep
understanding of the challenge at hand.
I have a cousin who lives in Europe. He and I have led parallel lives. I left
Cuba almost 40 years ago, when I was twelve. He left seven years ago in his
mid-30s, and knows little of Cuba’s history, except the skewed version the
revolution taught him. Of Vasco, the centuries in between, and the presi-
dents of the republic, he knows next to nothing and, honestly, doesn’t much
care. He also thinks it pretty bizarre that I like guajiro music from the coun-
tryside. He would not go anywhere near it, and prefers Lady Gaga. I get
him. After being force-fed Cuba as “revolutionary consciousness” for
decades, he wants to turn the page.
But if Cuba is to have a shot at being as successful as it was before, the
Cubans who will make a go of the country need to know what came before
them. They need to understand what abuela intuited.
My grandmother, that great transmitter of culture, knew what she was
doing . Her father, husband, brother, and many of her ancestors were all
involved in the making of Cuba to one degree or another. My grandmother’s
whole life had been about history, the present and, through me, the future.
Her attachment to Cuba and its survival was personal.
And that’s where national identity and character must be felt — at the
personal level. Without the romanticism of culture, life becomes purely
transactional and not worth living. And only by transmitting to present-day
Cubans the importance of the contract between the generations that are
dead and those not yet born can Cuba hope to survive.

New
Ne From
om Hoover
Fro Hoo er Institution
IInstit tion Press
P
Healthy, Wealthy,
Healthy, Wealthy, and
d Wise
Wise
Five Steps
Five Steps to
to a B etter Health C
Better are System
Care System
Edition
2nd Edition
By John F.
F. Cogan,
ogan R.
Cogan,
o R Glenn
Glenn Hubbard,
ard, and
Hubba
P. Kessler
Daniel P. Kesssler
Health ccare
Health are iin
n the
the U nited States
United States has
has m ade remarkable
made r mar k able
re
a d v a n ce s d
advances uring the
during the past
past forty
for ty years.
years. Y et our
Yet our h ealth care
health care
system
system aalso lso has
has sseveral
everal well-known
well-known problems:
problems: highhigh ccosts,
osts,
significant n
significant umbers of
numbers of p eople without
people without iinsurance,
nsurance, and
and
glaring
glaring gaps
gaps in in qquality
uality and
and eefficiency—and
fficiency—and tthe he Patient
Patient
Protection and
Protection and A ffo
ffordable Care
Affordable Care A ct o
Act off 2010
2010 is
is not
not tthe
he
answer. The
answer. The second
s e co n d e dition o
edition off Healthy,
Healthy, Wealthy,
Wealthy, and
and W ise
Wise
details a better
details better approach,
approach, offering
off
ffe
ering ffundamental
undamental reform
reform
alternatives ccentering
alternatives entering on on tax
tax changes,
changes, insurance
insurance market
mar ket
changes, and
changes, and re designing Medicare
redesigning Medicare aand nd Medicaid.
Medicaid.
The book
The book proposes
proposes five
five sspecific
pecific reforms
reforms tto
o iimprove
mprove tthe he
ability of
ability of m arkets tto
markets o create
create a llower-cost,
ower-cost, h i g h e r- q u a l i t y
higher-quality
health care
health care system
system tthat
hat is
is responsive
responsive toto the
the needs
needs o off
individuals, iincluding
individuals, ncluding iincreasing
ncreasing individual
individual iinvolvement,
nvolvement,
deregulating insurance
deregulating insurance markets
markets and and redesigning
redesigning Medi- M edi-
care and
care and Medicaid,
Medicaid, iimproving
mproving availability
availability and
and quality
qualit y
of iinformation,
of nformation, e nhancing ccompetition,
enhancing ompetition, and
and reform-
reform-
ing the
ing the malpractice
malpractice system.
system. The
The authors
authors sshow
how that,
that, by by
promoting ccost-conscious
promoting ost-conscious behavior
behavior aand
nd competition
competition iin n
both private
both p r i v a te m arkets aand
markets nd government
government programs
programs such such as as
Medicare aand
Medicare nd Medicaid,
Medicaid, we ccan an slow
slow the
the rrate
a te ooff growth
growth
of h
of ealth ccare
health are ccosts,
osts, e xpand access
expand access to
to high-quality
high-quality health health
care, aand
care, nd slowslow down
down rrunaway
unaway spending.
spending.
F. C
John F. ogan is the Leonard
Cogan Leonard and ShirleyShirley Elyy Senior
Senior
Fellow at
Fellow at the Hoover
Hooover Institution,
Institution, Stanford
Stanfford Un niversity.
University.
Glenn Hubbard
R. Glenn Hubbarrd is the Dean
Dean and Russell L.. Carson
Carson
Proffessor of Finance
Professor Finan
nce and Economics,
Economics, Graduate
Graduaate S chool
School
of Business,
Business, and a professor
proffessor of economics
economics at at Columbia
Columbia
University. Daniel
University. el P.
Danie P. Kessler
Kessler is a professor
proffessor of economics,
economics,
law,
law, and policy
policy at
at the Stanford
Stanfford University
University Graduate
Gradua
a School
te S chool
of Business and a senior fellow
ellow aatt the Hoo
ffello Hoover
ver Institution.
Institution.
March 2011, 130

March 130 pages
978-0-817
79-1064-8 $19.95, cloth
ISBN: 978-0-8179-1064-8 h
To order,
To o rder, ccall
all 800.621.2736
800.621.2736
Hoover
H oover IInstitution
nstitution Press,
Press, Stanford
Stanford University,
University, S
Stanford,
tanford, C
California
alifornia 9
94305-6010
4305-6010
www.hooverpress.org
wwww.hooverpress.org
The Rush to Condemn
Genetically Modified
Crops
By Gregory Conko &
Henry I. Miller
I
n spite of more than twenty years of scientific, humani-
tarian, and financial successes and an admirable record of
health and environmental safety, genetic engineering applied
to agriculture continues to be beleaguered by activists.
Gene-spliced, or so-called genetically modified, crop plants
are now grown on nearly 150 million acres in the United
States alone, helping farmers to increase yields, reduce pesticide spraying,
and save topsoil — and without injury to a single person or damage to an
ecosystem. But this remarkable record hasn’t kept radical environmentalists
from condemning and obstructing the technology. When they can’t sway
public opinion with outright misrepresentations or induce regulators to
reject products, activists have resorted to vandalism of field trials and, final-
ly, to harassment with nuisance lawsuits.
Environmental activists succeeded in alarming the American public about
gene-spliced crops and foods for a time during the 1990s and the early part
Gregory Conko is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in

Washington, D.C. Henry I. Miller, a physician and fellow at Stanford
University’s Hoover Institution, was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of
Biotechnology.

of last decade, but they cried wolf so often in the face of an unbroken string
of successes that the public began to tune them out. More recently, the
activists have had to dig deeper into their bag of tricks and revive a proven
strategy for obstructing progress: litigation that challenges the procedural
steps government agencies take when approving individual gene-spliced
crops. Since 2007, a coalition of green activist groups and organic farmers
has used the courts to overturn two final approvals for gene-spliced crop
varieties and the issuance of permits to test several others. At least one addi-
tional case is now pending.
The nepa process
U nder the national Environmental Policy Act (nepa), which

took effect in 1970, all federal government agencies are required
to consider the effects that any “major actions” they take may
have on the “human environment.” Agencies can exempt whole categories
of routine or repetitive decisions, but most other decisions — such as the
issuance of a new regulation, the siting of a new road, bridge, or power
plant, or the approval of a new agricultural technology — trigger the nepa
obligation to evaluate environmental impacts. If the regulatory agency con-
cludes that the action will have “no significant impact” (a legal term of art),
it issues a relatively brief Environmental Assessment explaining the basis for
that decision. If the environment is likely to be affected significantly, howev-
er, the agency must prepare a comprehensive Environmental Impact
Statement, which typically requires thousands of man-hours, details every
imaginable effect, and runs to hundreds (or even thousands) of pages.
The obligation under nepa is wholly procedural, which means that even
significant environmental effects do not prohibit the agency from ultimately
taking the proposed actions. Its purpose is merely to force government agen-
cies to consider the possibility that their actions may result in environmental
effects, but courts have interpreted the law broadly and expanded its impact,
requiring a comprehensive review of every imaginable effect on the “human
environment.” This category now encompasses not only harm to the natural
ecology but also economic, social, and even aesthetic impacts. It has become
easy, therefore, for agencies to miss some tangential matter and be tripped
up by an irresponsible litigant who alleges that the environmental review
was incomplete. And even when regulators actually do consider a potential
impact but reject the concern due to its unimportance or improbability, they
can run afoul of nepa by failing to extensively and comprehensively docu-
ment their reasoning. That is exactly what happened with the challenges to
approvals of gene-spliced crops.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has approved 74 different gene-
spliced crop varieties for commercial-scale cultivation, including dozens of
varieties of corn, cotton, canola, potato, soybean, and tomato, as well as a
70 Policy Review
The Rush to Condemn Genetically Modified Crops
handful of other crop species. In each case, the Department’s Animal and
Plant Health Inspection Service (aphis) reviewed copious amounts of data
from several years’ worth of controlled field trials that evaluated the vari-
ety’s agronomic and environmental effects. And because each one of these
plants is highly similar to conventionally-bred varieties already grown
throughout the United States — differing only in the addition of, at most, a
few genes that introduce useful and well-characterized traits — aphis con-
cluded that they would have no significant environmental impact.
Bad-faith activism
B ut anti-biotechnology activists never permit facts or the

judgments of experts to get in the way of their antagonism, so a
coalition of environmental groups organized by the radical
Center for Food Safety joined with a handful of organic farmers to sue in
federal court to halt the planting of alfalfa, sugar beets, and turf grass modi-
fied for resistance to the herbicide glyphosate (better known by its trade
name, Roundup). The plaintiffs were unable to make any substantive argu-
ments that these crops were unsafe but instead claimed that aphis’s envi-
ronmental assessment was legally — that is, procedurally — insufficient.
They argued that a comprehensive environmental impact statement should
have been prepared instead.
What were the supposedly significant environmental impacts that aphis
allegedly failed to account for in its environmental analysis? The plaintiffs
made two claims: First, that the widespread adoption of gene-spliced, herbi-
cide-resistant crops could accelerate the development of herbicide-resistant
weeds and force farmers to switch to other, less safe herbicides. Second, they
claimed that cross-pollination by gene-spliced crops could jeopardize the cer-
tification for nearby organic crops (because organic farming prohibits the
use of gene-spliced plants).
These are hardly the kinds of ecological impacts that Congress had in
mind when it enacted nepa, but the scope of that law has been expanded
beyond all recognition by judges who interpret the term “human environ-
ment” to include effects that are largely economic or social. Moreover, the
judges in all three cases ignored the fact that the development of herbicide-
resistant weeds is not unique to gene-spliced crops but occurs commonly in
all crops exposed to herbicides. The usda is well aware of the phenomenon
and considers it routinely when making an approval decision. Worse still,
cross-pollination by gene-spliced plants does not, in fact, jeopardize the
organic certification of those crops.
Opponents have long argued that use of gene-spliced crops poses an eco-
nomic threat to organic farmers, who are not permitted to use gene-spliced
varieties. Pollen is disseminated by the wind, and it has been argued that
plants on an organic farm cross-pollinated by a neighbor’s gene-spliced

crops would no longer be organic and therefore would be denied the higher
price such foods command in the marketplace. This argument is without
foundation, however, because it ignores the way that “organic” is defined.
The usda’s rules for organic production are based on process, not out-
comes. As long as organic growers adhere to permissible practices and do
not intentionally plant gene-spliced seeds, unintentional cross-pollination by
a gene-spliced plant (or for that matter, the drift of a prohibited pesticide
onto their crops) does not cause those crops to lose their organic status.
The possibility that weeds could eventually become resistant to herbicides
at least has some basis in reality — but again, the phenomenon is a natural
one and it should never have risen to the level of a cognizable environmental
harm that triggers the need for an Environmental
Anti- Impact Statement. Just as bacteria are known to
develop innate resistance to certain antibiotics, it is
biotechnology
well-known to farmers that weeds and pests will,
activists never over time, become resistant to individual herbicides
permit facts or and pesticides, respectively. The biochemical mecha-
nisms that produce resistance vary from species to
the judgments of species but typically rely on subtle genetic variations
experts to get in in a small population that affords those microorgan-
isms, insects, or weeds a selective advantage. Corn,
the way of their wheat, and rice plants are naturally resistant to the
antagonism. herbicide atrazine, for example, so the herbicide is
useful to control weeds when those crops are culti-
vated. But after repeated use of atrazine, resistant weeds began to appear
just a decade after it was first introduced in 1958, long before the tech-
niques of gene-splicing were even invented. (Selective pressure from a herbi-
cide induces resistance, just as exposure to antibiotics eventually causes the
appearance of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.)
Similarly, all plants — whether crops or weeds — already possess the bio-
logical precursors necessary to develop resistance to the herbicide
glyphosate, which disrupts the accumulation of chlorophyll by degrading a
protein that all plants make naturally. Gene-spliced, glyphosate-resistant
crops are simply modified to produce more of that protein, which over-
whelms the effects of the glyphosate and prevents the plants from being
killed. For a glyphosate-resistant weed to emerge, it merely takes a few wild
plants to evolve over time to produce more of the protein; with that selective
advantage, they survive, reproduce, and become prevalent.
usda scientists know all of this, of course, and they understand that her-
bicide-resistant weeds are nothing new. And although they can be problem-
atic for farmers, weeds that have become resistant to a given herbicide can
be combated simply by switching to a different one.
Moreover, there is nothing particularly novel about herbicide-resistant
crop plants; breeders have been introducing herbicide-resistant varieties for
decades. Indeed, many more such varieties have been developed using a
72 Policy Review
“conventional” method called mutation-breeding than with gene-splicing.
With the former method, breeders use x-rays, gamma radiation, or muta-
genic chemicals to randomly damage the plant’s dna to create mutations —
that is, new genetic variants. Mutation-breeding has been in common use
since the 1950s, and more than 2,250 known mutant varieties of dozens of
different crops and ornamental plants have been bred in at least 50 coun-
tries, including France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United
States.
While seed companies like Monsanto, Pioneer, and Syngenta have been
busy producing gene-spliced crop varieties, chemical giant basf has used
chemical mutagenesis extensively to produce an entire line of varieties,
including wheat, rice, and canola that are resistant to various basf herbi-
cides. And during the four decades preceding the usda’s approval of
glyphosate-resistant alfalfa, sugar beet, and turf grass, plant breeders in a
number of countries worldwide developed at least sixteen known mutant
varieties of those same three crop species. It is worth repeating that induced
mutation is considered to be a conventional breeding method, so its use is
not opposed by environmental activists nor is it subject to any kind of regu-
lation in most of the world. Still, scientists agree that the gross, crude modi-
fication of plant genetic material inherent in induced-mutation and other
conventional breeding methods make those varieties less predictable and
arguably less safe than gene-spliced plants.
Discrimination against gene-splicing
F rom a nepa perspective, the only thing that makes gene-spliced

herbicide-resistant plants unique is that they are regulated by a fed-
eral government agency and that approval to commercialize them
constitutes, in nepa-speak, a “major action.” Even though plant scientists
are virtually unanimous that gene-splicing is an extension, or refinement, of
earlier techniques and that it is far safer and more predictable than mutation
breeding, only the former are subject to the kind of government approval
that triggers the eis obligation. In other words, simply the use of gene-splic-
ing technology to create a plant is the trigger for, literally, an extraordinary
regulatory regime.
It is ironic that the safer, gene-spliced crop varieties, whose development
and environmental impacts are carefully scrutinized by the usda, are sub-
ject to the extra burden of a compulsory Environmental Impact Statement,
while the potentially less-safe mutant varieties and new genetic hybrids are
subject to neither pre-market assessment nor the nepa rules. This violates
two fundamental principles of regulation: that similar things should be regu-
lated in a similar way, and that the degree of regulatory scrutiny should be
proportional to expected risk. usda’s approach (as well as that of the
Environmental Protection Agency, which also subjects only gene-spliced

plants to a pre-market approval regime) gets it exactly backward: The
amount of scrutiny, delay, and expense are inversely proportional to risk!
This eis obligation for gene-spliced crop approvals could have been
avoided if the usda and other federal regulatory agencies had heeded the
advice of the scientific community some 25 years ago and chosen not to
subject the products of biotechnology to special, discriminatory govern-
ment regulation. As long ago as 1987, the U.S. National Academy of
Sciences (nas) studied the then-emerging field of recombinant dna tech-
nology (the technical name for gene-splicing) applied to plants and found
that using these techniques to introduce new traits into crop plants posed
no unique hazards — that is, that the risks of gene-spliced organisms are
the same in kind as those associated with the introduction of unmodified
organisms and organisms modified by so-called conventional breeding
methods. Consequently, the nas concluded that there is no scientific justifi-
cation for regulating gene-spliced crops any differently than conventional
ones, which are not subject to any pre-market assessment or approval
requirements at all.
The Academy has reiterated that recommendation in at least four subse-
quent studies, the most recent of which was published in 2004, as have
countless other scientific bodies around the world, including the American
Medical Association, the United Kingdom’s Royal Society, and the un’s
Food and Agriculture Organization and World Health Organization. Indeed,
many of these more recent studies have suggested that gene-spliced crop
plants are often safer than their conventional counterparts because the tech-
niques are more precise and their effects more predictable.
Nevertheless, bowing to pressure from environmental activists, big
agribusiness companies, and the packaged food industry, the usda and the
epa established a set of complex, excessive, expensive, and scientifically
unjustified testing and approval regulations that applied only to gene-spliced
plants. Had the regulators instead followed the scientific consensus, they
would not have been tripped up by the National Environmental Policy Act’s
paperwork requirement because, in the absence of an approval process for
gene-spliced plants, there would be no “major actions” to trigger the eis
obligation.
The environmental impact subterfuge
I t comes as no surprise to legal analysts steeped in environmental

law that the scope of nepa’s coverage has experienced continuous
creep. Through a combination of prodding by environmental
activists and judicial overreach, the meaning of the statute’s term “human
environment” has been expanded to include not just tangible ecological
harms that affect people and human communities, but also impacts that are
economic, social, cultural, historical, and aesthetic, according to a decision
74 Policy Review
of the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Another decision, by a federal
district court in Minnesota, illustrates how liberally the statute has been
interpreted:
Relevant as well is whether the project will affect the local crime rate,
present fire dangers, or otherwise unduly tap police and fire forces in the
community . . . the project’s impact on social services, such as the avail-
ability of schools, hospitals, businesses, commuter facilities, and parking
. . . harmonization with proximate land uses, and a blending with the
aesthetics of the area . . . [and a] consideration of the project’s impact on
the community’s development policy . . . [such as] urban blight and
decay [and] neighborhood stability and growth.
In other words, almost any possible effect that anyone can imagine may
constitute a significant impact under nepa if a sympathetic judge agrees.
Even wholly outlandish claims can be sufficient to scuttle an agency’s
decision. In the first ever nepa lawsuit precipitated by a gene-spliced prod-
uct, environmental activist Jeremy Rifkin successfully challenged a 1984
decision by the National Institutes of Health, which had regulatory juris-
diction at the time, to permit the field testing of gene-spliced bacteria modi-
fied to help protect crop plants from frost damage. Researchers at the
University of California had discovered that Pseudomonas syringae, a
harmless bacterium found on many plants, contains an “ice nucleation”
protein that helps to initiate the growth of ice crystals that damage grow-
ing crops. These scientists removed the gene sequence that produces the
ice-nucleation protein in the hope that spraying the resulting “ice minus”
variants on plants could inhibit ice crystal formation and thereby reduce
frost damage.
Rifkin’s Foundation on Economic Trends sued to stop the tests, arguing
that the nih did not sufficiently consider, among other things, the possibility
that spraying the modified bacteria might alter wind circulation patterns and
interfere with aircraft flying overhead. Not surprisingly, the nih had dis-
missed such a ridiculous theory out of hand because the proposal was for a
single small, well-circumscribed field trial. Perhaps more important,
Pseudomonas syringae bacteria with a missing or nonfunctioning ice-nucle-
ation gene were known to arise spontaneously in nature due to natural
mutations, but they produced none of these hypothetical dangers.
Remarkably, without a shred of credible evidence, or even a plausible the-
ory for such effects to occur, both a federal district court and federal appeals
court allowed the challenge and overturned the nih decision. The district
court found in Rifkin’s favor, and the appeals court held that “the National
Institutes of Health, in approving an experiment planned by scientists at the
University of California, had not adequately assessed its environmental
impact, nor had the experiment met the standard of environmental review
necessary before an agency by law may decline to prepare a formal
Environmental Impact Statement.” However, because Rifkin had neither

proved his allegations nor was required to do so, the appellate court also
ruled that the nih could authorize such experiments in the future if their
environmental effects were properly evaluated.
With such history, it is little wonder that federal courts subsequently
would recognize the possibility of agronomic impacts as the basis to chal-
lenge the approval of gene-spliced crop plants or that they would respond by
invalidating the approvals and requiring usda to prepare an Environmental
Impact Statement before they can be reapproved.
nepa’s effect on farmers
A
lthough unsurprising, the resolution of these lawsuits
has been a nightmare for American plant breeders and farmers. In
one case that involved glyphosate-resistant turf grass, the plain-
tiffs challenged usda’s decision to permit the Scott’s garden products com-
pany to test its seeds outside a greenhouse in order to generate sufficient
data to support an application for full commercial approval. Another case
involved usda field trial permits to four different seed companies to grow
small, geographically isolated plots of corn and sugarcane that had been
genetically modified to produce proteins that would be used in medical
products. The cases of the glyphosate-resistant alfalfa and sugar beet were
particularly vexing to farmers, however, because the lawsuits were filed after
usda had approved the varieties for commercial release and farmers had
already begun to cultivate the seeds.
The alfalfa case involves the usda’s 2005 approval of a glyphosate-resis-
tant variety, sold under the trade name Roundup Ready by its co-developers
Monsanto and Forage Genetics. To secure approval, the firms conducted
nearly 300 usda-monitored field trials over a period of eight years. aphis
scientists evaluated the data generated from these trials to determine the like-
ly environmental impacts of an approval — called “deregulation” in agency
parlance — and of widespread use of Roundup Ready alfalfa by American
farmers.
Since 1996 the same genetic trait already had been incorporated into
dozens of approved varieties of corn, soybeans, canola, and other crop
plants grown in the United States. Therefore, aphis was quite familiar with
the glyphosate-resistance trait’s likely effects, not just from the field tests
needed to secure approval but also from a decade of real-world experience.
Regulators also considered hundreds of public comments on the proposed
approval and concluded that deregulating the crop would not have any sig-
nificant environmental impact because the introduction of the glyphosate-
resistance gene is harmless to humans and other animals and was already in
common use in American agriculture. Therefore, usda prepared a shorter
Environmental Assessment explaining its “finding of no significant impact”
and, accordingly, deregulated Roundup Ready alfalfa.
76 Policy Review
Using herbicides to control weeds — especially in the initial growing
stages — is vital to the health of a crop, because weeds can compromise
yield by out-competing immature plants for water, nutrients, sunlight, and
space. For alfalfa growers, weed control is especially important. The crop is
usually grown to be harvested as hay, which is fed to dairy cows throughout
the country. If the feed hay is laden with weeds, its nutritional value plum-
mets and both the alfalfa grower and dairy farmers lose money.
Consequently, a ban on Roundup Ready seeds would not stop growers from
using herbicides; they would just shift to different ones. In fact, they would
be forced to use more of them, and more often. Experience with other
Roundup Ready crops, for example, shows that growers typically only need
to apply glyphosate herbicide once or twice, while
conventional crops usually require repeated applica- The potentially
tions of several different herbicides throughout the
growing season in order to achieve the same level of negative impacts
weed control. of approving
Roughly 5,500 farmers across the United States
had planted more than a quarter million acres of
Roundup Ready
Roundup Ready alfalfa by 2007 when a federal dis- alfalfa are
trict judge in San Francisco issued his opinion. After
minimal and
studying the plaintiffs’ arguments, Judge Charles
Breyer determined that u s da ’s Environmental manageable.
Assessment was legally insufficient and he issued an
injunction revoking the approval and prohibiting new seeds from being sold
until usda completed a full Environmental Impact Statement to evaluate
concerns about glyphosate-resistant weeds and the possible impacts on
organic farmers.
Preparing the eis took usda another three years, but in December 2010
it issued the final document and solicited public comments. Unsurprisingly,
the eis concluded what agency scientists and the scientific community
already knew: Cross-pollination with and gene flow into non-gene-spliced
alfalfa is unlikely because the crop is almost always harvested before it
matures enough to grow seeds and pollen, so this kind of out-crossing
would happen less than once in every 100,000 plants. And as discussed
above, unintentional cross-pollination does not affect the organic status of a
neighboring farmer’s crops. Finally, because breeders have for decades used
conventional methods to develop herbicide-resistant crop varieties, farmers
long ago developed common sense methods for delaying the development of
herbicide-resistant weeds and they know how to cope with them when they
do arise. The potentially negative impacts of approving Roundup Ready
alfalfa are therefore minimal and manageable, and they are in any event far
outweighed by the crop’s many substantial benefits.
usda must now reapprove the crop, a decision eagerly awaited by tens of
thousands of alfalfa growers. But even though the substantive work on the
eis is complete, the administrative process of moving to final reapproval

could take many additional months and probably will not be completed in
time for new Roundup Ready alfalfa seed to be grown for planting by farm-
ers in the spring of 2011. Worse still, usda announced that it will consider
reapproving the variety with geographical planting restrictions intended to
protect organic farmers from a risk of cross-pollination that the eis con-
cluded was remote, and which would not be particularly damaging if it did
occur. Such an unscientific and unwarranted decision would set a bad prece-
dent for future approvals, and it could eventually prevent hundreds of thou-
sands of American farmers from planting demonstrably safe and beneficial
crop varieties. Fortunately, the original 5 , 5 0 0 farmers who planted
Roundup Ready alfalfa when it was first approved were permitted to contin-
ue growing and then harvest that initial crop. They
In August 2010, constitute only a small percentage of the country’s
alfalfa growers, so the overall impact on the nation’s
another federal alfalfa farmers for the next growing season will be
judge in San limited. A far worse fate is in store for America’s
sugar beet growers.
Francisco In August 2010, another federal district court
revoked the judge in San Francisco revoked the usda’s approval
of gene-spliced sugar beet seeds. That decision by
USDA’s
Judge Jeffrey White has sown monumental confu-
approval of sion among sugar beet farmers, who have enthusias-
gene-spliced tically embraced the new seeds. An estimated 95
percent of the sugar beets currently in the ground
sugar beet seeds. are the gene-spliced Roundup Ready variety. As was
the case with Roundup Ready alfalfa, the court’s
injunction will permit the already planted crops to be harvested and
processed. But before usda may reapprove the variety so new seeds can be
sold and planted, a full Environmental Impact Statement will be necessary.
The process will take years, leaving farmers in regulatory limbo in the mean-
time. Perhaps the biggest problem arising from this decision, however, is a
looming shortage of non-gene-spliced sugar beet seeds for next spring’s
planting.
About 10,000 farmers grow a total of more than one million acres of
sugar beets in the United States every year, accounting for about half the
refined sugar produced here (with the rest coming from sugar cane).
Because the Roundup Ready variety so quickly became popular with
American beet growers (which is typical generally of gene-spliced prod-
ucts), seed companies cut back on their production of inferior, non-gene-
spliced seed. According to Duane Grant, chairman of the Idaho-based
Snake River Sugar Co., which produces about 20 percent of the nation’s
beet sugar, many growers fear they will have nothing to plant in 2011.
“There has been no incentive, no market, no demand for conventional seed
since 2008, and we believe there is not enough conventional seed available
for our growers to plant a full crop in 2011,” Grant told the New York
78 Policy Review
Times. All this is thanks to bad-faith litigation initiated by invidious
activists and to a myopic jurist.
Seed companies are, of course, rapidly trying to ramp up production of
conventional sugar beet seed, and it may be possible to import some from
other countries, but it seems likely that the court’s decision will nevertheless
result in an actual shortage of sugar beet seed next year. Such a scenario
would be troubling in any circumstances, but may be particularly acute now
because sugar production has fallen substantially worldwide during the past
few years as a result of harsh weather and poor harvests. U.S. beet growers
were poised to capitalize on the global sugar shortage by expanding acreage.
But with seeds in short supply next year, consumers will surely feel the pinch
of sharply rising prices — wholesale prices increased 55 percent between
August and November last year, largely as a result of the nepa litigation —
and farmers and others who care deeply about protecting the environment
will actually be denied the proven beneficial effects of these crops until they
are restored to the marketplace.
The usda had issued permits so that four breeders could continue planti-
ng Roundup Ready beets under tightly confined circumstances in the hope
of preserving a supply of seed for use after the eis is prepared. In December
2010, however, the judge ordered those plants dug up and destroyed even
though usda insisted that doing so would cause “substantial harm” to seed
companies and beet growers, and although the department’s lawyers
observed that “not a single piece of evidence has been put forward to sug-
gest that these fields could cause harm.” Judge White wrote in the court
order that “the legality of [usda’s and the plant breeders’] conduct does not
even appear to be a close question. It appears clear that [usda and the
breeders] were merely seeking to avoid the impact of the Court’s prior
order.” Thus, even the strictly controlled cultivation of a small number of
perfectly safe plants was sufficient to violate the gratuitous paperwork
obligation.
nepa’s one-sided analysis
W hat the courts’ nepa decisions fail to take into considera-

tion is that gene-spliced herbicide-resistant crop varieties have
been a huge boon to farmers, consumers, and the natural envi-
ronment. For farmers, the most important benefit of Roundup Ready vari-
eties seems to be the relative simplicity and efficacy of weed control provid-
ed by use of the herbicide-tolerant seeds. They produce higher yields with
lower inputs and reduced environmental impacts. They enable more envi-
ronment-friendly, no-till farming practices that prevent topsoil erosion,
reduce runoff into streams and lakes, and release less carbon dioxide into
the atmosphere. Furthermore, because glyphosate is not harmful to anything
but plants and biodegrades quickly once it’s sprayed on crops, even the

Environmental Defense Fund has called it one of the most ecologically
benign herbicides ever developed. Merely switching from older herbicides to
glyphosate therefore yields substantial environmental benefits. These are just
a few of the reasons why farmers have made biotech crops the most rapidly
adopted farming technology in history. Gene-spliced varieties with herbicide
resistance and other traits are now grown on over 300 million acres by
more than thirteen million farmers in 25 countries.
The fact that gene-spliced crops have clearly delivered substantial environ-
mental benefits is irrelevant to the outcome of an Environmental Impact
Statement, however, because agency actions are presumed to have some ben-
efits. Otherwise, why would the agency take them? Ironically, even without
such offsetting benefits, the National Environmental Policy Act would not
forbid the government from taking actions that would on balance degrade
the environment. The only function of nepa is to ensure that agencies con-
sider whether their actions may harm the environment. As the influential
U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has noted,
Congress’s enactment of nepa “did not establish environmental protection
as an exclusive goal; rather, it desired a reordering of priorities, so that the
environmental costs and benefits will assume their proper place with other
considerations.”
On the rare occasions in which an agency decided to take an action when
the environmental impacts were likely to be great and the benefits of the
project small, activists could challenge the decision as arbitrary and capri-
cious under the Administrative Procedure Act. Generally, however, the
statute’s purposes are transparency and inclusiveness. It requires agencies to
consider all possible environmental impacts, consider alternative approaches
that would lessen the impact on the environment, and then state explicitly
the justification for moving forward with a project. The public can then bet-
ter judge the appropriateness of the final decision and reward or punish the
president and members of Congress at the polls. Unfortunately, the presence
of offsetting environmental benefits is not enough to save the project from a
court’s injunction. Courts are empowered to reverse the agency decision
until all the impacts are reconsidered and discussed in the form of a lengthy
and often superfluous Environmental Impact Statement.
Time for nepa reform
T he goal of transparency is a laudable one, but it is manifestly

not the intention of most nepa litigation. Instead, the statute has
been hijacked by environmental activists in order to slow down or
prevent government agencies from taking actions they do not like. Since the
law requires agencies to consider almost any conceivable ecological, eco-
nomic, social, or aesthetic impact, it is literally impossible for nepa to be
followed to the letter. No matter how meticulous the agency is in preparing
80 Policy Review
an Environmental Assessment or eis, the statute offers fertile ground for
bad-faith, obstructionist litigation.
The National Environmental Policy Act is therefore a recipe for stagna-
tion, a particular problem when “gatekeeper” regulatory agencies must
grant approvals before a product can be tested or commercialized. It seems
clear, then, that something must be done to change the system. But what?
Short of substantive reform of the underlying statute by Congress — the
preferable solution — agencies themselves can take some minor steps to mit-
igate the law’s worst effects.
Under the nepa statute itself and accompanying regulations promulgated
by the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, every agency may
establish a set of “Categorical Exclusions” that
exempt whole classes or types of activities from the The goal of
eis obligation. These may include routine or repeti-
transparency is
tive actions that, based on past experience, do not
involve significant impacts on natural, cultural, a laudable
recreational, historical, or other resources, and those one, but it is
that do not otherwise, either individually or cumula-
tively, have any significant environmental impacts. manifestly not
Indeed, for these very reasons, the usda has already the intention of
categorically excluded most small-scale field trials of
gene-spliced plants from both the Environmental most NEPA
Impact Statement and Environmental Assessment litigation.
requirements. The exclusion stipulates that all large-
scale field tests, as well as any field release of gene-spliced organisms involv-
ing unusual species or novel modifications, still generally require an ea or
eis, but any of these features could be modified if there were sufficient sci-
entific justification for the change.
The crafting of categorical exclusions for certain actions is not trivial. It
must be accomplished via notice-and-comment rulemaking in which the
agency sets forth the complete analysis and rationale for excluding the activ-
ity — which is essentially tantamount to the drafting of a comprehensive eis
for the entire class of future actions. Nevertheless, given the usda’s two
decades of pre-commercial and commercial experience with Roundup Ready
crop plants, one could easily imagine that a decision to exempt all future
glyphosate-resistant varieties could be defended scientifically. Still, even
when a class of activities may appear to meet the criteria for a categorical
exclusion, courts are authorized to second-guess the decision to exempt
them. Therefore, no matter how scientifically sound the decision to categori-
cally exclude Roundup Ready varieties as a class may be, it would only take
an aggressive plaintiff and a sympathetic judge to render the entire effort
moot on the grounds that some supposedly relevant impact was not taken
into consideration when preparing the exclusion.
The most reasonable and definitive approach would be simply to elimi-
nate the agency action that triggers the nepa obligation in the first instance

— namely, case-by-case reviews of virtually all field trials and the commer-
cialization of gene-spliced plant varieties. That would offer the dual advan-
tages of relieving aphis’s nepa difficulties and also making regulators’
approach to gene-splicing more scientifically defensible and risk-based.
The activists’ strategy is reminiscent of the old courtroom dictum: When
the facts are on your side, pound the facts; when the facts are against you,
pound the table. Because there is no scientific evidence to support allegations
about negative effects of genetic engineering they are pounding the table,
resorting to scare tactics and wholly unfounded assertions. Nowhere in the
peer-reviewed studies or monitoring programs of the past 30 years is there
persuasive evidence of health or environmental problems stemming from
genetically engineered seeds or crops. Quite the opposite: The technology
used to produce these seeds is a paragon of agricultural progress and benefit
to the natural environment.
These obstructionist lawsuits have prevented the marketing of products
that offer palpable, demonstrated benefits to the environment and to the
welfare of farmers and consumers. Nuisance lawsuits intended to slow the
advance of socially responsible technologies are abusive, irresponsible, and
antisocial. And so are those who file them. It is long past time for nepa’s
burdensome paperwork requirements to be lifted from such an important
and beneficial technology.
82 Policy Review
Ghostwriter, a commercially successful
2010 film directed by Roman Polanski
(based on a novel by Robert Harris), a
suave, handsome ex-prime minister is
Books not only shown to be an unctuous lap-
dog to the American imperium, the
most frequent charge leveled at Blair.
He is also alleged to be in the
The Center- Americans’ pay, through the con-
nivance of his shrewish, Lady MacBeth
Right of a wife.
Blair shares an important trait with
Honorable his American counterpart, George W.
Bush: He inspires the most zealous feel-
Tony Blair ings in people. In 2005, as Blair reveals
in his colloquial and enjoyable memoir,
A Journey, he sat for a presentation by
By James Kirchick
a pollster who had surveyed the British
public’s attitudes towards their prime
Tony Blair. A Journey: My Political minister. He “had never conducted
Life. Knopf. 720 Pages. $35.00. research on a person and seen such
strong feelings aroused,” Blair writes,
with the pollster analogizing the British
A
s i d e f r o m George W. people’s relationship with Blair as “like
Bush, has any other a love match or a marriage.” In the
Western political leader in 1997 British general election, Blair
modern times been so reviled and sav- won the greatest single-party majority
aged by the intellectual elite, media, or in British history, largely due to his
his own people than Tony Blair? As the own persona and promise of reforms.
targets of novelists, satirists, and Ten years later he left office with dis-
polemicists, democratically elected mal approval ratings and nary a sup-
politicians have been portrayed in some porter in the media that had once
very unflattering ways, but rarely as so fawned over him.
callous as to orchestrate the murder of To comprehend the full extent of
their own colleagues. So loathed is the Blair’s transformative role in British
former British prime minister that he politics — and why he elicits such pas-
was recently depicted, albeit in fictional sionate emotions — it is first necessary
form, as doing just that. In The to understand the state of the Labor
Party when he took the reins as leader
in 1994. At the time, the Labor move-
James Kirchick is writer at large with ment was still dominated by the coun-
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and
try’s trade unions, which had historical-
a contributing editor of the New
Republic. He worked for a Labor ly played a fundamental, though dis-
Minister and Member of the House of proportionate, part in its decision-mak-
Commons in 2005. ing. Prominent leaders were still talking

Books
of the “class enemy,” advocating a poli- dominance, Labor had become “a
cy of unilateral nuclear disarmament party of protest, not of government.”
and the eviction of American military With a determined band of young
bases from the British Isles, and cling- allies, Blair brought a massive wrecking
ing hard to a clause in the party consti- ball to Labor and refashioned it in his
tution calling for the “common owner- own image. One of the first things he
ship of the means of production, distri- did was to abolish Clause IV of the
bution and exchange.” In 1 9 8 1 , a party’s constitution, the one commit-
small but influential group of mps, dis- ting Labor to common ownership,
traught over the hard left’s domination which he describes as nothing less than
over Labor, broke away to form the a “graven image, an idol.” Gone was
Social Democratic Party (which later the class war rhetoric; in came policies
merged with the Liberals to form that recognized the legitimate economic
today’s Liberal Democrats). In prepara- aspirations of the working class with-
tion for the 1 9 8 3 general election, out attacking the wealthier echelons of
Labor produced a manifesto which, in society. These moves obviously infuriat-
the words of one rueful mp, amounted ed both the party’s intellectual classes
to “the longest suicide note in history.” and militant trade unionists, who had
Several years later, the party purged sentimental and practical motives to
members of an entryist sect called the oppose anything that had the whiff of
“Militant Tendency,” a “party within a public sector reform.
party” founded by former members of A question which arises at this point
the Revolutionary Communist Party. of the book is why Blair ever joined the
Labor’s 1983 election defeat — as Labor Party in the first place, what
decisive a loss as its 1945 win was a with his instincts, temperament, and
victory — was an edifying experience policy preferences falling more com-
for Blair. To most neutral observers, it fortably within the Tory paradigm.
was pretty clear that a party that was Blair did not come from a traditional
forced to fend off a conspiracy by Labor household; indeed, his father, a
Marxist infiltrators, called for abject self-made lawyer, had ambitions to run
surrender in the face of mounting for parliament as a Conservative but
Soviet aggression, and supported wide- was foiled by a stroke. The buzzword
ly unpopular industrial actions by pub- “modernization,” which Blair uses
lic sector unions that threatened to par- countless times to describe his reform
alyze the country was not fit to govern agenda, was essentially a campaign to
a modern democracy. Yet to Blair’s make the Labor Party more conserva-
astonishment, his fellow party members tive. Some of Blair’s left-wing critics
almost universally informed him that (and not a few of his right-wing admir-
the reason why Labor lost the election ers) argue that he chose Labor as it
was because it was not left-wing provided a better vehicle for his politi-
enough. “Progressive parties are always cal ambitions given the fact that it
in love with their own emotional couldn’t sink any lower and had a
impulses,” he writes. Under a long line dearth of young political talent.
of leaders who headed the party for The greatest revelation to come
nearly two decades of Conservative from this book is the one his enemies
84 Policy Review
Books
on the left always threw at him and blinking into Downing Street that dur-
which he still denies: that he is ulti- ing my time in office I would commit
mately a man of the center-right. “New Britain to fight four wars, I would have
Labor,” despite all of Blair’s attempts to been bewildered and horrified.” This is
market it as anything but, is essentially the sort of observation frequently made
a reformed, more family-friendly con- by, and about, American presidents,
servatism. On issues from education, to who enter office with grand domestic
the provision of health care and other agendas only to face the ineluctable
public services, to immigration and the pull of the outside world. For Blair, his
recent swarm of asylum-seekers, Blair’s “awakening” was the Serbian cam-
instinct has been to cast aside the paign of ethnic cleansing against
trendy notions expounded by the intel- Albanian Kosovars. And without
lectual left and trade unions in favor of Blair’s insistence, it is unlikely that Bill
policies that are more market-friendly Clinton would have made the decisive
and jibe with a commonsense consen- push for American intervention.
sus. Indeed, the entire New Labor pro- Blair is unapologetic about the most
ject was to shred the party’s Old Left controversial and momentous decision
nostrums, while simultaneously stealing he made as prime minister: to take
the best ideas from the Tories and mak- Britain into war against Saddam
ing them more palatable to the general Hussein’s Ba’athist regime alongside
public. He introduced choice and com- the United States. He reminds readers
petition into realms once marked sacro- that repeated inquiries into pre-war
sanct by the left as preserves of the intelligence have absolved the British
state. As to crime, Blair “hated the lib- government of manipulating informa-
eral middle-class attitudes towards it” tion to make the case for war. One of
and adopted tough policies under the the most fearsome claims included in
slogan, “tough on crime, tough on the an intelligence report — that Iraq had
causes of crime,” citing Rudy Giuliani the ability to deploy weapons of mass
as his inspiration. With regards to for- destruction within 45 minutes of an
eign policy, however, he frequently order to do so — was later pounced
expresses befuddlement that the term upon by war opponents and the media
“neoconservative” is applied to a view as a textbook case of the Blair govern-
of interventionism which he sees, not ment’s deception. But the dossier in
without justification, as arising from which the (latterly-proven) false esti-
old-fashioned left-wing notions of mate was published had been authored
international solidarity and humanitari- by the Joint Intelligence Committee,
anism. not Downing Street, and was never
Blair admits that he had never cited by Blair in his own arguments.
thought deeply about foreign policy or Blair admits that, regarding the
Britain’s role in the world until after he choice between, on the one hand, a
assumed the office of prime minister. realist foreign policy of maintaining the
Though Blair is now remembered status quo with rogue regimes, or deal-
mostly for his international role, he ing with them forcefully, he “had
admits that “if you had told me on that become a revolutionary.” One gets the
bright May morning as I first went feeling that Blair, emboldened by his
February & march 2011 85

Books
domestic political success (“I felt a radical as they were necessary, but it is
growing inner sense of belief, almost of a legacy with which Blair never serious-
destiny,” he writes about his years ris- ly grapples.
ing through the ranks of the Labor In passages that will make him even
Party) carried that confidence over to more unpopular with British and
the foreign realm, where he sought to American liberals, Blair frequently
make Britain a world power that was defends George W. Bush from charges
equally comfortable maintaining both of dangerous Manichaeism, not
the “special relationship” with the because it is the polite thing for an ex-
United States and a no less productive statesman to do in service to a fellow
one with the continent. At the same former leader, but because he shares
time, Blair is glib on the question of Bush’s view of the world. Blair’s clear-
Europe; while rightfully attacking the eyed and moralistic understanding of
more extreme anti-European senti- Islamism, and the force of arms and
ments of the British right, he never fully ideas he believes must be married to
confronts the arguments that a deeper defeat it, is of the sort that’s frequently
relationship with Europe might threat- ridiculed by Britain’s chattering classes
en his cherished alliance with America. (Blair would be criticized as hyperbolic
And so the man who entered Downing by most Labor members and intellectu-
Street giving nary a thought to foreign als not only for comparing the threat
policy left admitting that he “would posed by militant Islamism with that of
have loved to” overthrow Zimbabwean “revolutionary Communism,” but for
tyrant Robert Mugabe, yet desisted his casting the latter as anything we
from doing so only because “it wasn’t ought to have been seriously worried
practical.” about in the first place). As prime min-
In the context of British politics, ister, Blair’s closest political relation-
there is nothing particularly “conserva- ships were formed not with his fellow
tive” about Blair’s foreign policy inter- members of the Socialist International
ventionism. There has always been a but European conservatives: Germany’s
strong, antitotalitarian wing of Labor, Angela Merkel, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi,
and a significant bloc within the Spain’s José María Aznar, and France’s
Conservative Party has long been isola- Nicolas Sarkozy, all of whom he fre-
tionist and patronizing towards quently praises throughout the memoir.
American power. Yet as Blair is forced Even former Israeli Prime Minister
to admit, his strong support for Ariel Sharon, a man more despised by
American global primacy and a robust European leftists than perhaps any
uk-U.S. alliance finds few followers in political leader in recent times, wins
the mainstream left today. Indeed, for praise from Blair. Bill Clinton, who
all of his eloquence and passion, Blair emerges from this book as a godlike
left behind a Britain that is far more figure, came from the right wing of the
anti-American, pacifistic, and inert on Democratic Party and essentially gov-
the world stage than it was when he erned as a moderate Republican.
became prime minister in 1 9 9 7 . In the final chapter, which addresses
Maybe that was the inevitable conse- the major global events that have taken
quence of a set of policies that were as place since he left office, Blair confirms
86 Policy Review
Books
himself as a man of the center-right, at party coup. Still, keeping Brown
least on economic questions. “I pro- around meant that he became a major
foundly disagree with the statist, so- distraction and impediment, and Blair’s
called Keynesian response to the eco- hesitance to fire him over his conspir-
nomic crisis,” he writes. The schaden- ing is one his most widely acknowl-
freude visible in left-wing quarters over edged failures.
the supposed collapse of capitalism One is struck by Blair’s magnanimi-
must be addressed head-on with the ty; the arrows shot at Brown are an
argument that “‘the market’ did not exception rather than the rule when it
fail.” Blair writes that “The role of gov-
ernment is to stabilize and then get out Brown, who served as
of the way as quickly as is economical-
ly sensible.” Setting the retirement age
chancellor of the
at 60 is an idea he finds “absurd; horri- exchequer throughout
fying, in fact.” These prescriptions may
Blair’s decade in
sound insufficiently libertarian to the
American Tea Party right, but they are office, was always
outright heresies in European left-of- more of a Labor man
center politics.
Obsessive followers of the Tony than Blair, which is
Blair-Gordon Brown relationship will why he wasn’t suited to
find much here to pore over. Brown,
who served as chancellor of the exche-
lead the party out of
quer throughout Blair’s decade in the wilderness.
office, was always more of a Labor
man than Blair, which is precisely why comes to enemies and irritants.
he wasn’t suited to lead the party out of Although the media have relished these
the wilderness at its most desperate barbs (which, in light of the men’s dis-
moment. The two men began as friend- putatious relationship, are remarkably
ly colleagues, with a relationship that mild, not to mention prescient), A
soon turned difficult (“we were like a Journey is not the prototypical, score-
couple who loved each other, arguing settling political memoir. Tony Benn,
whose career should come first”), then one of the most prominent, far-left fig-
utterly sour, with long stretches of pas- ures in 20th century British politics,
sive aggressive (and sometimes openly who frequently attacked Blair as a liar
aggressive) hostility. That there existed and war criminal, “is something of a
a prolonged situation in which the national treasure.” To dismantle the
prime minister and chancellor of the uk’s nuclear deterrent, a move Blair
exchequer would literally not speak to obviously opposed, “would not have
one another is one of the debilitating been stupid.” Blair’s high-minded atti-
peculiarities of the British parliamen- tude is best evinced when he deals with
tary political system; if Blair had sacked Clare Short, a minister for international
Brown, he would remain in parliament development who quit the cabinet over
on the backbenches as at best an irri- the Iraq War and later went on to dis-
tant, at worst an organizer of an intra- parage her former boss repeatedly and

Books
mercilessly in the media. “She thought Vladimir Putin of being anything other
people who disagreed with her were than a ruthless kgb thug on more than
wicked rather than wrong — a com- one occasion, writing that he “had
mon failing of politicians — and when prosecuted the war in Chechnya with
she turned sour, she could be very bitter vigor and, some said, brutality.” Some
indeed,” Blair writes, with hardly a said?
trace of what must surely be his own As to the prose, Blair sprinkles his
bitterness at her betrayal. “But we memoir with colloquialisms and honest
should be proud of our aid record and observations about family and political
she of her part in it.” If only those who life that demonstrate the common
disagreed with Blair showed him the touch he had with voters, a connection
same charity that he has shown them. that, though short-lived, was nonethe-
less unprecedented in British politics.
T h e c o n v e n t i o n a l wis-
dom on Blair is that he,
along with aide de camp
Alistair Campbell, introduced “spin” to
British politics. This always seemed
“Your average Rottweiler on speed can
be a lot more amiable than a pensioner
wronged,” he writes of an elderly
woman at a public event holding a sign
labeling Blair an unprintable name. “I
exaggerated; double-talk and outright like to have time and comfort in the
lying are hardly recent phenomena in loo,” he declares. Rupert Murdoch
human nature, never mind political life. “had balls.” Deputy Prime Minister
Yet there are several instances in this John Prescott, a burly, former ship
book which make one doubt Blair’s sin- steward who acted as Blair’s muscle in
cerity, and where his overwrought piety dealing with the old Labor Party guard,
gets the better of him. For instance, had a knack for sniffing out young
Blair insists that it’s “the honest truth” smart-alecks “like a pig with a truffle.”
that he “was never desperate to be On children, Blair observers, “from
prime minister or to stay as prime min- about age three onwards, they get
ister.” Such an avowal, expressed by interesting and remain like that up to
many a politician, is better left in one’s around twelve, when the dark mists of
head, no matter how sincerely he may hell envelop them.” He writes self-dep-
actually think he believes it. Elsewhere, recatingly of his initially awkward
Blair denies any impropriety in the interactions with the royal family:
Bernie Ecclestone affair, in which a ₤1 “Had it been a dry event, had the
million donation to the Labor Party by Queen been a teetotaler or a temper-
the head of Formula One Racing was ance fanatic, I don’t believe I could
curiously followed by the British gov- have got through the weekend.”
ernment’s attempt to exempt the league Most frustrating to Blair’s detractors
from a ban on tobacco advertising in — on left and right — was his uncanny
sports. (Ecclestone, Blair writes credu- ability to read the British mood. Even
lously, “had genuinely never made a when he knew he was swimming
linkage, not even implicitly” between against the tide (as on, say, Iraq), he
his massive donation and the proposed was cognizant of the divide between his
loophole.) Blair strangely absolves views and those of the public, never
Russian President (now Prime Minister) deluding himself that he had main-
88 Policy Review
Books
tained the popular support that was so Blair’s genuine fear that Brown
apparent in the aftermath of Labor’s would not continue through with the
1997 landslide victory. Blair persisted reforms he championed persuaded him
because he thought he was in the right, to remain in the top office for so long,
and he admits here that he was willing a decision which served only to height-
to lose his premiership over Iraq if his en the poison between the two men.
party or the electorate so decided. It Blair warned Brown not to abandon
was perpetually confounding that a the policies he had implemented over
man so loathed by so many people, and the course of ten years in Downing
whose decision to take his country to
war in Iraq soon became almost univer- Even when he knew
sally unpopular, could still win a mas-
sive electoral majority in 2005. Blair
he was swimming against
has his own explanation for why the the tide, Blair was
voters were willing to give him and his
cognizant of the divide
party an unprecedented third term:
“they had a keener appreciation of how between his views
tough it was to decide the issue [of and those of the public,
Iraq] than the black-and-white
predilection of the media.” Blair makes never deluding
repeated mention of the strange himself that he had
alliance between Britain’s reactionary
right-wing press (embodied by the “lit-
maintained the
tle England” tabloid Daily Mail), and popular support.
the highbrow, left-wing outlets (the
Guardian, Independent, and b b c ), Street, telling his successor that “there
which united against him over his deci- was no alternative vision” to that of
sion to take Britain to war. Yet despite New Labor, a conscious invocation of
their best efforts to portray him as a Margaret Thatcher’s catchphrase
man who misled the country (the dif- emphasizing the indispensability of lib-
ference between Guardian editorials eral economic policies to a modern
decrying Blair’s alleged mendacity and economy.
posters at antiwar protests screaming At its annual conference in late
“bliar!” was a matter of articulacy, September, the Labor Party chose Ed
not reason), attempts by Blair’s enemies Miliband — a longtime ally of Brown
to destroy his political career were a and a rising star on the Labor left — as
complete failure. It says something its next leader. Ed defeated his older
about Blair’s instincts that the one issue brother David, a Blairite and former
where his “emotional intelligence” was foreign secretary, for the job, and did
completely off-base was on the matter so thanks to the support of the unions,
of fox hunting, a practice about which which, despite Blair’s best efforts, still
Blair too readily assumed the political- maintain a disproportionate role in
ly correct prejudices and class resent- party affairs thanks to an outdated
ments that he usually saw as misin- electoral college system. When the
formed. results came in, a trade union delegate

Books
leaned over to former Labor leader Polemos: From Being to Politics. The
Neil Kinnock and said, “We’ve got our father voted for George W. Bush in
party back.” That may very well be the 2000 and supported the war in Iraq;
case. But the chances of the Laborites the son opposed Bush and “only reluc-
getting the country back grow slimmer tantly” backed the Iraq war. The con-
the more they distance themselves from versations in question arose out of
the legacy of Anthony Charles Lynton shared concerns about the dangers
Blair. posed to the United States by those
who attacked the country on 9/11 and
about the legality and morality of mea-
sures adopted by the Bush administra-
Thinking tion to defend the nation.
Father and son found that their
About conversations increasingly focused
Torture on two controversial tactics in the

war against the terrorists — brutal
interrogations of suspected terror-
By Peter Berkowitz ists abroad and pervasive electronic
surveillance at home — tactics used
to get desperately needed intelli-
C h a r l e s F r i e d a n d G r e g o ry
gence about a hidden and unfamil-
Fried. Because it is Wrong: Torture,
iar enemy. What we realized they
Privacy, and Presidential Power in the
shared was the question of whether
Age of Terror. W. W. N o r to n &
an executive has the right to break
Company. 222 Pages. $24.95.
the law in a time of crisis, for both
were indeed illegal.
T h i s i n m a n y ways
admirable book was “born
of conversations” between
father and son. The father, Charles
Fried, a professor at Harvard Law
To assess whether Bush administra-
tion interrogation and surveillance poli-
cy were nevertheless proper, the Frieds
examine the meaning of torture and the
significance of suffering and inflicting
School, is the author of many works on it; the sphere of privacy and the cost to
legal and political philosophy, and liberty when government invades it;
served as solicitor general of the United and the conditions under which execu-
States under President Ronald Reagan. tives may honorably and justly break
The son, Gregory Fried, is chair of the the law.
Philosophy Department at Suffolk Despite their political differences,
University and author of Heidegger’s father and son succeed in producing a
single voice and, up until their final
pages, a single line of argument. They
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and
diverge on what to do about the Bush
Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institution, Stanford administration officials implicated in
University. His writings are posted at the use of harsh interrogation tech-
www.PeterBerkowitz.com. niques that, they assert unequivocally,
90 Policy Review
Books
broke domestic and international law rather, for “fellow citizens, and particu-
prohibiting torture. The younger Fried larly for those engaged in public ser-
believes that Bush administration offi- vice, be it in the military or the govern-
cials should be prosecuted to the full ment, who find themselves running up
extent of the law, while the older Fried against those limits in the crisis we now
believes the extraordinary circum- face and may continue to face in new
stances under which they acted and the and unexpected forms.” Indeed, among
need in a democracy for winners in the impressive features of the book is
elections to refrain from using their the way in which the force of the
power to pursue their defeated rivals Frieds’ analysis, in its graceful move-
counsel forbearance. They articulate ment between a more philosophic per-
their difference of opinion in the same spective and a more political perspec-
lucid tones and restrained terms that tive, compels them to run up against
characterize even their most uncompro- limits to their own view and at the end
mising claims. to call into question the cogency and
At the same time, their argument is morality of their central contention
marked by evasions, equivocations, and that torture is absolutely wrong.
rash conclusions. The evasions and The Frieds recognize, as so many
equivocations begin with their failure critics do not, that Bush administration
to state clearly that the genuinely hard authorization of harsh interrogation of
questions they laudably confront arose enemy combatants and use of super
not in the struggle against terrorists of computers to scan electronic communi-
all kinds but in a battle against Islamic cations for hints of terrorist activities
extremists who have chosen terror as sprang from legitimate concerns.
their tactic and are determinedly seek- Intelligence, they emphasize, while criti-
ing weapons of mass destruction to kill cal in all military operations, is even
vast numbers of American civilians and more so in the struggle against terror-
strike crippling blows against the ists, because “governments know so lit-
United States. Prominent among their tle about where the enemy is or even
rash conclusions are the two most dra- who he is.” In this context they might
matic in their book: the philosophical have added the still greater demand for
opinion that torture is “absolutely intelligence against jihadists whose lan-
wrong,” and the legal and political guage, history, culture, religion, griev-
claim that in ordering the use of harsh ances, and goals were virtually
interrogation and warrantless electron- unknown in the United States in 2001
ic surveillance the Bush administration and remain today poorly understood in
brazenly, if on behalf of the national and out of government.
interest as the president and his team While examining the implications of
understood it, defied the law. what they regard as the Bush adminis-
Although scholars of law and poli- tration’s trampling on the law is an
tics will profit from their book, which important objective of their book, the
draws on art, philosophy, moral and Frieds also seek to expand the debate
political theory, history, and legal about post-9/11 terror and surveillance
analysis, it was not in the first place policy beyond what they regard as the
written for specialists. It is intended, “weirdly legal terms” in which it has

Books
largely been conducted. To deepen and torture should remain illegal, they
refine the issues, they pose, and pursue respect but reject his unblinking pro-
answers to, “basic human questions” posal that since torture may neverthe-
implicated in our judgments about tor- less be necessary in extreme circum-
ture and surveillance. These questions stances, officials who order it should be
concern our rights and responsibilities prepared to face the legal consequences
as citizens and human beings, and in in court and, if extreme circumstances
the Frieds’ book they culminate with an did warrant its use, judges should be
exploration of whether “our leaders prepared to show leniency.
[are] bound by the same rules as the The Frieds certainly understand that
rest of us? Or because they are respon- law is coercive. And they know that
sible for all of us, may they do things war, which can be necessary and law-
(and order things to be done) that the ful, is brutal. But torture — an act
rest of us must not?” Even where their which, as a first approximation, is
answers fall short, their book demon- designed to elicit information or punish
strates that answers to the hard legal and which inflicts acute physical or
questions raised by 9/11 depend on an mental pain in order to destroy the
inquiry that is at once moral, political, prisoner’s will — in their view is differ-
strategic, and philosophical. ent. The difference is grounded, they
Take torture. The Frieds argue that contend, in the sacred character of
it is not merely “intrinsically bad” but every individual human life.
absolutely wrong — everywhere,
A
always, and no matter what the cir- ccording to the Frieds,
cumstances. The use of violence to torture is absolutely wrong
obtain information cannot be justified, because human beings are
they argue, when the police have good created in the image of God and torture
reason to believe a criminal suspect desecrates the divine image in man. It is
under their control has information a bold step for these two philosophical-
that could lead to saving the life of a ly minded professors to invoke the
kidnapped child. The use of violence in beautiful and tremendously significant
interrogations cannot be justified even teaching in the Bible’s first chapter that
in ticking-time-bomb scenarios, in God created man, male and female (as
which a terrorist may possess informa- the Bible emphasizes, Genesis 1:27) in
tion that might save tens or hundreds His image. Deriving an absolute prohi-
of thousands of lives or more. The bition from it, however, is beset with
Frieds respect but reject Alan problems.
Dershowitz’s sober view that in That human beings are created in
extreme circumstances, when officials God’s image signifies, the Frieds con-
conclude that the balance of considera- tend, that in all human beings there is
tions favors using torture, they should something “of a value and significance
be able to go to a court for permission. than which nothing is greater.” Set
And while they share Richard Posner’s aside the philosophical and theological
opinion that since the use of courts problem that the image would seem to
would routinize torture and implicate be of less value than the original.
the whole system in an immoral act, Strangely, given that they wish to rest
92 Policy Review
Books
an absolute prohibition on it, they deny Moreover, even if, as the Bible teach-
that the notion that man is created in es, human beings are created in God’s
God’s image rests on belief in God, image, what justifies an absolute prohi-
since secularists “have similarly cele- bition of torture? The Frieds accept
brated the sacredness of the human that it is just to kill in self-defense, both
person.” That’s true but begs the ques- for individuals threatened by criminals
tion. At issue is whether secularists can and for nations facing enemies. And
coherently and convincingly affirm the they know that under the laws of war
sacredness, or transcendent value, of doctrine of proportionality, while inno-
the human person while denying God’s cent civilians must not be targeted, in
existence. The words of Hamlet the pursuit of legitimate military objec-
(Hamlet Act 2 , Scene 2 , lines tives soldiers may, if their actions are
319–323) comparing man’s actions to not excessive, incidentally injure or kill
those of angels and man’s understand- civilians without committing a crime.
ing to that of God that they cite to sup- Why then, if the information gained
port the idea that secularists can believe might save hundreds of thousands, or
in the sacredness of individual human hundreds, or tens of innocent lives,
life may suggest the inescapability of shouldn’t an enemy combatant, in
religious belief for finding absolute extreme and extraordinary circum-
value in humanity. But Hamlet’s speech stances, be harshly interrogated? Isn’t
does nothing to show that it is coherent placing an absolute prohibition on the
or convincing for nonbelievers to use of violence in interrogations —
affirm the absolute significance of declaring it not just morally and legally
human life. wrong but absolutely forbidden under
More to the point — if it was philo- all conceivable circumstances — tanta-
sophical clarity rather than affirmation mount to playing God?
of a secular faith that they were after — In part, the Frieds’ reply is that tor-
would have been addressing Nietzsche’s ture generally is absolutely wrong not
powerful argument that our modern merely because of the pain and humili-
morality of freedom and equality is a ation inflicted on the victim, but
descendant of biblical faith, and col- because of the degradation to his
lapses with the collapse of the belief in humanity suffered by the torturer. To
God. Instead, the Frieds weakly assert commit torture “is to become the agent
that “nothing is lost in the logic of our of ultimate evil no matter how great
argument (though perhaps something the evil we hope to avert by what we
of its force) if we substitute the human- do.” The Frieds’ powerful examination
ist for the religious conception of this of the experience of torture will leave
sacredness.” But if the logic of the few doubting that it is vicious and cruel
argument for an absolute prohibition to the victim and corrupting to the tor-
on torture depends on the premise that turer. And yet their argument arouses
human beings are composed of a divine rather than stills concern that it would
element, then allowing that the premise be an act of selfishness, in some cases
is true only in a metaphorical sense monstrous selfishness, to permit a hun-
substantially diminishes the force of the dred thousand innocents to die terrible
argument’s logic. deaths — or perhaps one innocent to

Books
perish — in order to keep one’s own tude, by constantly seeking and receiv-
hands clean and conscience clear. ing legal opinions and ultimately com-
In moving from the morality of tor- plying when its lawyers said no and
ture to the conduct of the Bush admin- when courts said no, the Bush adminis-
istration, the Frieds show a good deal tration demonstrated its determination
more appreciation of the moral and to adhere to the law.
political complexity of the context in Accordingly, it is a grave mistake to
which administration officials acted present the Yoo and Bybee memo,
than most of their academic colleagues, which went so far as to suggest that
but on the question which requires the under the Constitution the commander
greatest care they cannot contain a in chief could not be bound by torture
propensity to rush to judgment. They law, as somehow emblematic of the
treat as uncontroversial, indeed they Bush administration view. The Frieds
assert without the slightest legal argu- bury in a footnote that Bush adminis-
ment, the conventional progressive wis- tration Assistant Attorney General Jack
dom that in authorizing enhanced or Goldsmith, who replaced Bybee as the
harsh interrogation the Bush adminis- head of the Office of Legal Counsel in
tration committed torture and know- 2 0 0 3 , withdrew the controversial
ingly and clearly broke the law. Bybee and Yoo memo. Nor, in leveling
Astonishingly, however, the lawyer and the charge of lawlessness against the
law professor father and the philoso- Bush administration, do the Frieds give
phy professor son never perform the sufficient consideration to the unprece-
elementary work of analyzing the delib- dented involvement in military matters
erately ambiguous legal definition of in the midst of war that the Supreme
torture. Court undertook after 9/11 through a
In fact, one of the striking features series of cases concerning the rights of
of the Bush administration war effort enemy combatants. And when, with
rendered invisible by the Frieds’ the military campaign against al Qaeda
account was that even in adopting and affiliates far from over, the
extreme measures it sought and Supreme Court ruled against it — in
obtained legal authorization. To be 2004 in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Rasul
sure, the legal reasoning employed by v. Bush, and in 2006 in Hamdan v.
Deputy Assistant Attorney General Rumsfeld — the Bush administration
John Yoo and his boss in the Office of did not hesitate to comply with the
Legal Counsel, Assistant Attorney Court’s rulings, and thereby powerfully
General Jay Bybee, in their 2 0 0 2 demonstrated a core respect for the rule
memo which provided the initial legal of law.
basis for the use of enhanced interroga- As with harsh interrogation, the
tion techniques, including waterboard- Frieds probe beneath the legal contro-
ing, was overbroad and sloppy. But versy over the government’s massive
that is hardly the end of the story, or efforts to glean information about ter-
even the crux of the matter. Despite rorists’ activities from the constant flow
pressing for interpretations of the through cyberspace of immense
Constitution that gave the executive amounts of electronic communications
wide and arguably unprecedented lati- to bring into focus the human ques-
94 Policy Review
Books
tions. We value privacy, they observe, find no reason to doubt that in
because we fear that information about responding to 9/11 President Bush was
the personal details of our lives will be moved by a “a sense of honor, the sense
used, particularly by the government, of an unexpected, awesome responsibil-
to harm us, and because part of our ity, and the imperative to do his duty.”
notion of personal autonomy is that we And like wartime Presidents Jefferson
and not others should decide what is and Lincoln, Bush, the Frieds maintain,
publicly known about our lives. Laws “thought that the crisis he faced
aimed at securing individual freedom required him to break the law.” In
necessarily put a premium on safe- 1807, Jefferson on his own authority
guarding privacy, contend the Frieds, spent money to fortify U.S naval vessels
but unlike the prohibition on torture, against British attacks, even though
the prohibition on invading privacy, Article I, section 9 , clause 7 of the
they argue, is not absolute. Constitution makes clear that funds
Invasions of privacy are a lesser evil from the Treasury must be appropriat-
in part because the boundaries of priva- ed by Congress. And in 1861, at the
cy are conventional. It is also partly outbreak of the Civil War, Lincoln
because the Constitution’s central unlawfully suspended the writ of
promise of privacy (a term actually not habeas corpus, ultimately imprisoning
found in the document) in the Fourth between 1 0 , 0 0 0 and 1 5 , 0 0 0
Amendment is limited: “the right of the Maryland citizens without due process
people to be secure in their persons, of law. To make sense of executive
houses, papers, and effects” is not pro- power in emergency circumstances, and
tected absolutely but against “unrea- to vindicate Jefferson’s and Lincoln’s
sonable searches and seizures” (empha- exercise of it, the Frieds provide a
sis added) and “probable cause” is suf- thoughtful discussion of seminal expla-
ficient to justify the issuance of a war- nations that Aristotle, under the name
rant that allows the police to examine of equity, and Locke, under the name
intimate details of one’s life. Although of prerogative, give for the need when
they are certain that the Bush adminis- the law fails in its purpose to correct it
tration’s expansive interpretations of its by completing or even acting against it.
authority to conduct warrantless elec- But according to the Frieds, Bush’s
tronic wiretapping violated the 1978 conduct in the wake of 9/11 was “a
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act radical departure from the behavior of
(fisa) — the Frieds again do not pause Jefferson and Lincoln in a time of cri-
to examine the Bush administration sis.” In contrast to Bush, Jefferson and
argument that it operated within the Lincoln
law — the Frieds insist that drawing
the boundaries depends on “precedent both openly recognized the danger
and practical wisdom” and “conven- in their own actions, and acknowl-
tion and historical practice.” edged that they had violated the
Despite their condemnation of his Constitution, seeking ratification
decision to authorize harsh interroga- by Congress after the fact. Bush
tions and their criticism of his electron- and his administration insisted that
ic surveillance programs, the Frieds the power of the president to vio-

Books
late the law was an entailment of hands, tragic choices, and “a sadder
presidential authority to act in his but wiser prudence.” The Frieds even
capacity as commander in chief in a permit themselves the daunting
time of war and emergency, allow- thought, at odds with their conclusion
ing Congress only so much over- that torture is absolutely wrong and an
sight as he could not avoid or ultimate evil, that “the most costly kind
evade. of moral heroism” may be a political
leader’s “ultimate responsibility to be
Their own formulation, however, sug- prepared to lose even his soul in a
gests that while there was an impor- cause that all can understand.”
tant difference between Bush and his Contrary to their signature con-
great predecessors, the Frieds misun- tention that torture is absolutely
derstand it. wrong, father and son seem to be
Unlike Jefferson and Lincoln, Bush acknowledging that even the firmest
insisted that he did not break the law. and finest principles must yield to the
Indeed, in contrast to Jefferson and judgments of practical wisdom.
Lincoln, his administration went to
considerable lengths to show that all of
its actions were authorized by the
Constitution, properly understood. To Brutish and
the detriment of the judicious analysis
to which they laudably aspire and for
the most part achieve, the Frieds
Short
throughout their book blur the differ- By Henrik Bering
ence between proceeding in defiance of
the law and proceeding on the basis of Robert Coram. Brute: The Life of
controversial, dubious, or even weak Victor Krulak, U.S. Marine. Little,
but nevertheless recognizably legal B r ow n a n d C o m p a n y. 3 5 9
rationales. Pages. $27.99.
In their final chapter, perhaps as a
result of their intervening reflections on
the need for practical wisdom to cor-
rect the inherent limitations of law, the
Frieds exhibit a certain anxiety about
the moral and political implications of
an absolute prohibition on torture.
S mall men were never the
Marine Corps’ target audience
in its recruitment drives: The
world has yet to see a Marine poster
calling for “a few tiny men.” But it just
While they disapprove of the distinctive so happens that one of the Corps’ true
combination of good humor and cold- legends was the smallest man ever to
bloodedness with which Machiavelli in graduate from Annapolis. When Victor
The Prince advises rulers “to learn how “Brute” Krulak faced the Medical
not to be good” and to use goodness or Examination Board back in 1933, he
conventional morality according to the measured only 5’4” and weighed some
dictates of necessity, they recognize that
the great Florentine had a point.
Political responsibility brings dirty Henrik Bering is a writer and critic.
96 Policy Review
Books
116 pounds — two inches too short Cuba during the night, tracked down
for commission as an officer. One of the elusive Garcia in the mountains and
the stories he told of passing the exami- handed him the message. This was
nation was how he paid one of his Krulak’s idea of a resourceful officer,
friends to whack him over the head and countless copies were handed out
with a plank so that the resulting knot to his staff officers.
would add the extra inches. Other ver- Occasionally, he would reveal a
sions have him gaining height by sheer more human aspect: During a parade, a
willpower. Actually, according to his major accidently knocked off his own
biographer Robert Coram, he received “cover,” his hat, during the sword
a waiver, because one of his classmates salute. Afterwards he was ordered to
had gotten one, and thus a precedent pick up the sorry remains, by now
had been established. ground into the dust by marching feet.
As to his nickname, just as cynics Humiliated, the major did not show up
will name their pet Chihuahua Tyson, at a party at Krulak’s place that same
Krulak got his when a huge upperclass- evening. A note arrived at the major’s
man had surveyed him contemptuously house, stating that another officer had
and asked “Well, Brute?” Meant as an once had a similar experience without
insult, Krulak instead embraced the it harming his career. The same thing
name and set out to fill it. What he had happened to Krulak himself.
lacked in size, he made up for in ambi- Krulak had less admirable sides,
tion and energy. He failed to make though. Throughout his life, he careful-
commandant of the Corps only because ly kept his Jewish roots hidden. From a
of lbj’s vengefulness, but his impact on career point of view, this is understand-
the Corps and the way it fights is able, given the bias against Jews and
immense, as documented by Robert blacks at the time, but it caused pain to
Coram’s splendidly entertaining biogra- his family. Worse, not content with the
phy, Brute. Coram sees Krulak as “the truth, he constantly felt the need to
most important officer in the history of improve on reality, which is odd, given
the Marine Corps.” all his achievements. Much of it was
Krulak’s leadership style was cer- harmless, Coram notes, but as he
tainly colorful. Among his standard reminds us, according to the Corps’
observations was, “This place needs an honor code, a Marine is not supposed
enema,” and the phrase became part of to lie.
Marine argot. It was not unusual for
colonels to take early retirement rather
than serve under him. His bible was a
book called A Message to Garcia.
During the Spanish-American War, a
lieutenant was told to deliver a message
B ac k i n 1 9 2 0 , a Marine
Corps intelligence officer,
Lieutenant Colonel Earl
Ellis, published a report predicting a
future war with Japan. Entitled
to an insurgent leader in Cuba, whose “Advanced Base Operations in
whereabouts were unknown. No fur- Micronesia,” it is, Coram notes, “one
ther instructions were given. of the most prescient military studies
Undeterred, the lieutenant got himself ever written.” In order to gain points of
off to Florida, landed a small boat on support and airfields from which Japan

Books
could be reached, America would have tunnel, and how the bottom had two
to leapfrog its way across the Pacific. skegs, stabilizing it.
This necessitated amphibious landings Krulak’s copious notes and pho-
on defended coasts, which ever since tographs formed the basis of his report,
the British disaster at Gallipoli were “Japanese Landing Operations Yangtze
deemed “almost impossible,” in the Delta Campaign,” which he forwarded
words of the influential British military to the Navy in the naïve belief that they
theorist Liddell Hart. The Marines dis- would act on it immediately. When
agreed; in their view, Gallipoli had Krulak came to Washington to check
failed because of poor planning and on its progress, a Navy lieutenant final-
lack of coordination between the ser- ly locating the report in some dusty
vices. The Corps set about developing cabinet. On the cover was scrawled a
the concept of amphibious landings, note: “Prepared by some idiot out in
which was to prove the war winner in China.” The navy still operated with
World War II, both in the Pacific and in versions of Atlantic fishing boats.
Europe. Resolutely, he returned to Quantico
What the Marines lacked was the and produced a wooden balsawood
right kind of landing craft. While sta- model which incorporated the revolu-
tioned in San Diego as a young lieu- tionary Japanese features, and took it
tenant, Krulak was tasked with moni- to his superior, General Holland Smith,
toring the trials of the various experi- who set up a briefing with the Marine
mental craft, none of which worked. commandant. The outcome was that
Because of their exposed propellers, Krulak became the Corps’ “boat man.”
they would get stuck in the sand if they Krulak tested and suggested improve-
got too close to the beach, which meant ments to Donald Roebling’s Alligator,
that the Marines would often plop in which had tracks enabling it to negoti-
where they could not reach the bottom. ate coral reefs, and which became
The high gunwale did not make things known as the Amtrac. And he aggres-
easier. sively promoted the Higgins boat,
A 1937 transfer to China brought which incorporated the drop bow and
the solution, and ironically, Coram which in trials blew the Navy’s entrants
notes, it came courtesy of the Japanese. out of the water.
When the Japanese during the attack As Coram notes, it is normally
on Shanghai staged an amphibious Holland Smith who is credited with the
flanking movement from the sea, development of the Higgins boat, but it
Krulak as a military observer got him- was Krulak who was point man in
self a U.S. tugboat and sailed it in right developing the landing craft.
among the Japanese warships. From his
tug, he got a good look at the Japanese
landing craft, whose flat bow would
open and form a ramp when hitting the
beach. At a later stage, he also got a
view of the bottom of the craft, which
I n world war II, Krulak got
his baptism by fire leading a
diversionary attack on
Choiseul in the Solomon Islands. The
object was to trick the Japanese into
were being repaired on land, revealing believing that the main attack would
how the propeller was protected in a come there rather than on Bougainville.
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As regards vegetation, Choiseul was the caught him, probably, suggests Coram,
most inhospitable of the islands, and of because, unlike the Marines, Army offi-
course it was infested with Japanese cers insisted on wearing insignia.
snipers. To make it harder for the
snipers, who fire on officers first, he
ordered all insignia removed, and only
first names used. “If any of you call me
Colonel, I will reply loudly, ‘Yes,
General.’ ”
R elations between the
Marines and the other ser-
vices have always been
tense, and Brute is as much a book
about the Marines’ constant bureau-
Because Krulak’s targets were far cratic battle for survival. The tension
apart, he had to divide his force. The goes all the way back to Belleau Wood
second force ran into a Japanese battal- in World War I, the spot where the
ion and had to be extracted at night by Marines blocked Ludendorff’s offensive
two pt boats, one of which was driven and the German drive for Paris. Not
by John F. Kennedy — their own only did the Marines block the German
Higgins boats having been destroyed advance, they pushed them back.
by mistake by friendly aircraft. Krulak’s Afterwards, the Army jealously refused
own force fought on, destroying food the Marines a memorial plaque in
and ammunition dumps. Altogether, his Belleau Wood, a situation that was not
men racked up 7 2 confirmed kills rectified until 1955.
before getting taken off the island. He In World War II, for the Marines,
lost only six men and was awarded the Guadalcanal became the equivalent of
Navy Cross. Belleau Wood. But though in Coram’s
On Okinawa, he again showed great view General Holland Smith and his
courage, coordinating attacks on the Marines achieved as much in the cen-
front lines. He suggested to the overall tral Pacific as the Army did in the west-
commander, General Buckner, that the ern Pacific, at the surrender, MacArthur
Marines make an amphibious landing could not find it in himself to invite the
on the southeast coast of the island, commandant of the Marine Corps to
which would force the Japanese to be present during the ceremony.
divert forces away from the main front; There was similar bad blood
Buckner, an Army man, turned down between the Navy and the Marines.
the proposal. “General Buckner did not Immediately after the Marines’ landing
like the water. We liked the water. It is at Guadalcanal, Admiral Frank
a very useful route to get from a to b,” Fletcher had declared his aircraft carri-
Krulak observed, and he later wrote in er short on fuel and had left them to
the Marine Corps Gazette, “For the fend for themselves. As to when the
force that has the skill and the courage Marines will forgive this, Coram
to use it, the ocean is an immense tacti- quotes a recent editor of the Marine
cal ally.” Clearly, writes Coram, Gazette: “the 12th of Never.” And at
Krulak’s words were “a slap at the Iwo Jima, the Navy had been asked for
army.” nine days of pre-invasion bombard-
Incidentally, Buckner died when ment, but only delivered three.
inspecting a Marine position on A direct threat to the Corps’ exis-
Okinawa. A Japanese artillery barrage tence emerged towards the end of the

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war, when George Marshall launched a battalion of 1,200 men and a rein-
plan for “a single department of war in forced regiment of 3,600 men respec-
the post-war period,” i.e., a German- tively could be ready to sail. His boss
type staff system with a single, military being on holiday, Krulak’s answer was:
chief of staff controlling all branches. “48 hours” for the battalion, while the
The proposal would weaken the con- larger force would take “five days,
trolling powers of Congress and it including a Marine aircraft group.” As
would reduce the Marine Corps to a Coram notes, this was a key moment in
mere Navy police force. As a member Marine history: Krulak had no idea if
of the Chowder Society, Krulak was in he could deliver, but he knew that “If
the forefront of the successful efforts to we can’t, we’re dead.” The Corps need-
defuse Marshall’s scheme. The society ed to demonstrate its indispensability.
got its name from a comic strip, And the Marines met the challenge.
Barnaby, whose main character Sailing from Hawaii, they were the first
belonged to a social club called “The troops to arrive from America.
Elves, Leprechauns, Gnomes, and Little Here they found MacArthur and his
Men’s Chowder and Marching troops about to be pushed into the sea
Society,” which an officer had tacked at Pusan, and their first feat was to sta-
on the wall with the last six words bilize the Pusan perimeter.
underlined and an arrow pointing to Subsequently the First Marine Division
Barnaby. Instead of Barnaby, the officer led the assault at Inchon, and pushed
had written Krulak. north. The war looked as good as won,
The society fought tooth and nail for when the Chinese hordes came pouring
the survival of the Corps. Among across the border, something
Krulak’s efforts was the script for a film, MacArthur had said would not happen
Bombs over Tokyo, which made it plain and which left the First Marine
that Japan could not have been bombed Division completely surrounded. In the
if it hadn’t been for the Marines. An breakout from the Chosin Reservoir —
exasperated Truman at one point about which their commander, General
accused the Marines of having “a pro- O.P. Smith, stated that the Marines
paganda machine that is almost equal were not retreating, they were just
to Stalin’s,” a comment for which the attacking in a different direction — the
president had to apologize. Marines again proved their mettle,
killing more than 3 7 , 5 0 0 Reds,
A
s coram notes, America’s against 4,418 casualties of their own.
mistrust of a standing army In all three places — at Pusan,
leaves it dismally unpre- Inchon, and Chosin — Krulak distin-
pared when war is forced upon it, as guished himself. He was all over the
the case of Korea amply illustrates. battlefield in his helicopter, issuing
When the North Koreans attacked, orders left and right and reporting back
MacArthur rushed in garrison troops to headquarters. As Coram notes, the
from Japan, but getting combat-ready helicopter introduced a new element in
Army troops on the way from America warfare: It performed reconnaissance
would take weeks. The Marines were duties, dropped supplies, and evacuated
asked how soon a Marine reinforced the wounded; most significantly, the
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war saw the first helicopter assault in drowned during a typhoon, he laid out
history in October 1951. the facts immediately.) Krulak started
This was very much a result of the long process of reforming recruit
Krulak’s vision back in 1948, when the training methods by issuing new guide-
helicopter was still in its infancy. Kulak lines for drill instructors and seeing to
saw its potential to add an extra it that several got fired. You want
dimension to the attack, as “a cavalry tough hombres as drill instructors in
of the sky” that “would carry men into the Marine Corps. You do not want
combat from all directions.” “The evo- sadists.
lution of the set of principles cannot
wait for the perfection of the craft
itself, but must proceed concurrently
with that development,” he wrote, and
he set about creating the doctrine for
what was to become known as “verti-
U nder john f. Kennedy,
Krulak became special
assistant for counterinsur-
gency and special assistant for special
activities, i.e., covert action. These were
cal envelopment.” key positions, given the administra-
The 1950s also saw the two most tion’s emphasis on guerilla warfare,
embarrassing cases to hit the Marine which meant he wielded influence way
Corps. One was the Schwable case: beyond his two-star rank. From a vari-
Colonel Frank Schwable’s plane had ety of sources, he put together the
been shot down in 1952 by the North country’s counterinsurgency doctrine
Koreans, and in order not to give away — how it was essential to gain the trust
the nuclear targeting details, to which of the population, and where the pro-
he had had access when working for tection of the locals is priority one.
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he instead said During the presidential campaign,
the U.S. had conducted germ warfare, a he shamelessly puffed up his relation-
real propaganda windfall for the North ship with jfk, telling how Kennedy
Koreans. To make pows less suscepti- had rescued him with his pt boat in the
ble to brainwashing techniques, Krulak Pacific; how after the rescue he had
instituted training reforms with partic- promised Kennedy a bottle of Three
ular emphasis on American history and Feathers, the rotgut whiskey consumed
values. by World War II troops; and how, after
The other was an exercise at Ribbon Kennedy had won, he had dropped in
Creek in 1956, where a drunken Parris on the new president in the White
Island drill instructor ordered a bunch House with a bottle of the stuff. All this
of recruits out on an unauthorized was pure invention. “The truth is that
night march and six of them drowned Krulak and Kennedy never met in the
in the creek. The drill sergeant had Pacific,” Coram writes, as it was the
made no attempt to recover the bodies. other part of his force Kennedy had
Unwisely, the Marine Corps tried to rescued, and he refers to an addendum
downplay the incident, with the pre- to Krulak’s oral history at the Kennedy
dictable result that the media went into Library where Krulak admits they
a frenzy. (By comparison, after a freak never met until after Kennedy became
accident on Okinawa under Krulak’s president. The addendum was to be
command, in which eleven soldiers read only after Krulak’s death.

Books
As the Vietnam War intensified, ment as commandant of the corps for
Krulak’s clashes with General William which he had been regarded as a shoo-
Westmoreland, the commander in chief in. He was not fired either, just left to
in Vietnam, were unavoidable. As a dangle, in a classic example of lbj’s
conventional army general, trained to vindictiveness. But while Krulak never
fight in Europe, Westmoreland did not made commandant, his legacy out-
buy any of this newfangled counterin- weighs most of those who did.
surgency stuff: Forget about hearts and
minds, Westmoreland preferred raw
firepower. What was particularly
hard to accept for Krulak was Market
Westmoreland’s use of the Marines in a
traditional battle of attrition at Khe
Sanh, a place of no strategic value. So
Capitalism,
as regards counterinsurgency, Coram
rates Krulak’s efforts to get his message
State-Style
across “an abject failure.”
By Ying Ma
Krulak’s run-ins with journalists
David Halberstam, Stanley Karnow,
Peter Arnett, and Morley Safer over Ian Bremmer. The End of the Free
their strong anti-military bias were Market: Who Wins the War Between
equally bitter. Safer’s famous sequence States and Corporations? Portfolio.
with the Marines setting fire to a hut 240 Pages. $26.95.
with a Zippo lighter particularly
angered Krulak. What Safer convenient-
ly left out, Krulak noted in a subsequent
internal paper, was that the Marines
had been under automatic fire from the
village, which was crisscrossed by
trenches and booby traps. Coram cites
I an bremmer believes that
the free market is worth
defending. Though market cap-
italism has taken a severe beating in the
recent global financial crisis, he insists
Chicago Daily News reporter Keyes that it remains the best model for creat-
Beech, who was present at the time, in ing wealth, promoting growth, and
support of Krulak’s version. delivering prosperity worldwide. Yet, as
In the end, Kulak’s outspokenness he explains in his new book, The End
was his downfall. Kulak told Lyndon of the Free Market, market capitalism
Johnson to his face how men were now faces a major threat from within
being needlessly killed because of his capitalism itself.
approach, the only senior general with That threat is state capitalism, and
the guts to do so, Coram writes. A pho- around the world it appears to be the
tograph shows Krulak lecturing new fad. Its adherents range from pow-
Johnson with pointed finger and erful former communist countries like
Johnson looking hugely uncomfortable. Russia and China, to Arab monarchies
The meeting ended with Johnson pro-
pelling him out of the Oval Office. As a Ying Ma is a visiting fellow at the
result, Krulak did not get the appoint- Hoover Institution.
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of the Persian Gulf, such as Saudi the free market lost much respectabili-
Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, ty, and the United States, the source of
to energy-rich authoritarian states like the financial crisis and the market’s
Iran and Venezuela. Democracies such most vocal champion, lost a great deal
as India and Mexico showcase ele- of its global economic swagger.
ments of state capitalism too, and Nonetheless, state capitalism is not
vibrant emerging markets such as the way to go, according to The End of
Brazil flirt with it. the Free Market. The book describes the
The governments may be different, nature and appeal of the state capitalist
but the underlying logic is the same. model, the distortions it creates in the
According to The End of the Free free market, and the challenges it poses
Market, state capitalism is a system in to global prosperity. The author exhorts
which the government acts “as the market capitalists to defend their eco-
dominant economic player and uses nomic model — and its virtues —
markets primarily for political gain. against the encroachments of an
The ultimate motive is not economic increasingly attractive alternative. To
(maximizing growth) but political that end, two important possibilities
(maximizing the state’s power and the could hinder state capitalism’s power
leadership’s chances of survival).” grab: political liberalization in state cap-
State presence in the economy, how- italist countries and sustained economic
ever, does not automatically make a renewal in free-market economies. Yet
country state capitalist. After all, the Bremmer fails to recognize the former
global financial crisis that began in and pays insufficient attention to the
2008 has made clear that even market latter. As such, this book offers a
capitalist governments, under dire cir- thought-provoking read but paints an
cumstances, will not hesitate to carry incomplete map of the way forward.
out massive interventions in their
economies. The distinction between
them and state capitalists, says
Bremmer, is that the latter see govern-
ment intervention not as a “temporary
series of steps meant to rebuild a shat-
S ince the end of the Cold
War, one authoritarian coun-
try after another — from Asia
to the Middle East, from Russia to
Latin America — has embraced capital-
tered economy or to jump-start an ism. The trend took place not because
economy out of recession” but as a authoritarian rulers believed in free
“strategic long-term policy choice.” For markets or free peoples but because
state capitalists, markets function “pri- they believed they could keep a leash
marily as a tool that serves national on both. By the time that President
interests, or at least those of ruling Obama strode into office, state capital-
elites, rather than as an engine of ism was proudly holding court in
opportunity for the individual.” Moscow, Beijing and elsewhere.1
Unfortunately for market capitalism,
the great crash of 2008 has greatly 1. For an in-depth discussion of the appeal of
burnished state capitalism’s credentials. authoritarian countries that pursue economic lib-
eralization while shunning political reform, see
As the excess of unfettered capitalism Ying Ma, “The Fate of the Freedom Agenda,”
wreaked havoc and chaos worldwide, Wall Street Journal Asia (August 1–2, 2008).

Books
The End of the Free Market paints a countries such as China, the United
troubling picture of the current condi- Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and
tion of state capitalism. Already, three Russia. Concerns abound over how the
quarters of global crude oil reserves are more opaque funds, such as the China
owned by national oil companies con- Investment Corporation, might make
trolled by state capitalist countries. investments based on political rather
Privately owned oil companies, like than financial objectives.
Chevron and bp, produce only ten per-
cent of the world’s oil and hold just
three percent of its reserves. State-
owned oil and gas giants outcompete
their privately-owned counterparts by
relying on state-backed support to pay
D espite sharing various
common, troubling charac-
teristics, state capitalist
countries are not all equal. The End of
the Free Market devotes much (perhaps
above-market prices, or by doing busi- too much) time to identifying countries
ness with repressive regimes that pri- — ranging from Algeria to South
vate multinationals avoid. Worse yet, Africa to the Ukraine — that are state
the state capitalist home base may out- capitalist or exhibit state capitalist ten-
right deny energy to other countries for dencies. Some of these countries are not
thinly veiled political reasons. Russia that state capitalist while others are not
did exactly that when Gazprom turned that significant. As Bremmer himself
off gas supplies to neighboring Ukraine admits, powerful regimes such as Saudi
in the winter in 2006 and 2009. Arabia, Russia, and China ultimately
As national oil companies lock up give state capitalism its glow because of
natural resources, another agent of state their significant global economic clout.
capitalism, state-owned enterprises In the 2 0 th century, Arab states
(soes), dominate domestic industries demonstrated through oil embargoes
ranging from mining to petrochemicals their willingness to wield rich oil sup-
to telecommunications to steel produc- plies as a political weapon. In the 21st
tion. They are complemented by pri- century, the rising power of China and
vately-owned entities designated as Russia has given state capitalism much
national champions, which receive from of its new shine. Both former commu-
the state heavy subsidies, tax breaks, nist regimes have built viable and siz-
contracts and low-interest loans. As a able economies. Though they give no
result, soes and national champions can thought to a return to the socialist,
gobble up or compete against foreign command policies of the past, leaders
competitors, both at home and abroad, in Moscow and Beijing show every
with resources and advantages often not interest in keeping a leash on their
available to private companies that do respective economies in order to main-
not enjoy state backing. tain a monopoly on political power.
Meanwhile, a number of state capi- Of course, no country can rival
talist governments further sharpen their China as the granddaddy of state capi-
economic edge with yet another tool, talism today. Since it embraced market
sovereign wealth funds. A vast majority reforms three decades ago, the country
of the world’s sovereign wealth fund has drastically expanded its economy
assets are controlled by state capitalist and offered its people improved living
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standards that were previously unbridled capitalism that underpins the
unimaginable. China’s explosive financial woes in the Western world.”
growth makes the case that state capi-
talism not only works but can work
miracles. As the country emerges from
the global financial crisis relatively
unscathed, the aura of its state capital-
ism has only intensified.
B remmer is not the only
one who has noticed the ris-
ing power of autocratic
regimes that have embraced state capi-
talism. He is, however, one of the few
Beijing, for its part, has not been who argues that economic freedom is
hesitant to tout the success of its politi- worth defending for its own sake.
cal-economic model. In May 2009, Often, when noneconomist policy
China’s vice foreign minister, He Yafei, types talk about the rising economic
asked Bremmer and a small group of influence of China or Russia, they pre-
economists and scholars, “Now that fer to discuss this phenomenon’s ramifi-
the free market has failed, what do you cations for democracy or power politics
think is the proper role for the state in or its offensiveness to political freedom.
the economy?” In many ways, China Some scholars, like Robert Kagan of the
had already formulated its own Carnegie Endowment for International
answer. At the height of the financial Peace, prefer to think of China and
crisis in 2008, Chinese Premier Wen Russia as part of an “informal league of
Jiabao explained on c n n ’s Fareed dictators” that challenges a U.S.-led
Zakaria GPS that China’s resounding world order and opposes U.S. priorities
economic success came from the like preventing a nuclear Iran. Others,
important thought that “socialism can like certain unimaginative neoconserva-
also practice market economy” and tives and left-wing activists, see the pro-
that the formulation of China’s eco- motion of global trade and business
nomic policy “give[s] full play to the with nondemocratic regimes as inher-
basic role of market forces in allocat- ently unjustified when it conflicts in any
ing resources under the macroeconom- way with human rights.
ic guidance and regulation of the gov- For these observers, the free market
ernment.” is merely a sidekick in the game of
Within China, the national govern- power or the pursuit of universal politi-
ment takes a much less polite, or sub- cal freedom. While the protection of
tle, approach. As Willy Lam has writ- U.S. power and the promotion of
ten in the Jamestown Foundation’s American ideals have a central place in
China Brief, in the wake of the finan- U.S. foreign policy, policymakers and
cial crisis Beijing made the exaltation of analysts who mouth foreign policy pri-
the China model the theme of a nation- orities often overlook the fact that the
wide ideological campaign. The cam- free market — and the economic free-
paign lauded the government’s wisdom dom that it ensures — undergirds U.S.
of balancing “between growth and sta- power and ideals, and is worth defend-
bility — and between market initiatives ing for its own sake.
and state control.” The point was to The End of the Free Market provides
emphasize the virtues of a model that precisely that defense. In fact, the book
can serve as “an antidote to the kind of is animated by the belief that state capi-

Books
talism’s biggest threat is the affront to cially oil and gas supplies, better than
market capitalism. As Bremmer points the preeminence of U.S. military power.
out, state capitalism practitioners, who These and Bremmer’s other recom-
are mainly autocratic, could decide to mendations make plenty of sense. He
disrupt the global market when politi- forgets, however, that the future of the
cally necessary or convenient, whether free market depends not just on how
by thwarting foreign competition or free-market countries and state capital-
fostering heavy protectionism. Instead ist countries interact with each other
of letting markets create greater wealth but also on what they do internally. In
and prosperity for all, state capitalism that regard, political liberalization in
fosters a world in which “politics state capitalist countries and sustained
trumps efficiency, entrepreneurship and economic renewal in free-market
innovation.” economies could thwart or even end
To some extent, this is already hap- the influence of state capitalism.
pening. For example, China suspended
A
the export of rare earth minerals to lthough The End of the
Japan for two months in late 2010 as Free Market makes it abun-
a result of a dispute over islands dantly clear that state capi-
claimed by both countries. China mines talism finds itself most at home in
95 percent of the world’s rare earth autocracies, the book refuses to take
minerals, which are crucial for the the next logical step: Acknowledge that
manufacturing of high-tech products peaceful liberalization or democratiza-
such as iPhones, wind turbines, and tion of autocracies could lead to an
hybrid gasoline-electric cars. Though it unraveling of the state capitalist system
is certainly not alone, Beijing has said that they run. Though democratic
loud and clear that it will not hesitate regimes are not immune to elements of
to use trade as a political weapon. state capitalism and the absence of
To counter the negative global effect democracy does not prevent the forma-
of state capitalism, Bremmer warns tion of a free-market economy, liberal
first and foremost against protection- democracy and its attributes — the rule
ism. Practitioners of market capitalism of law, fair elections, civil society, free
should allow the market to do what it press, and other checks on state power
does best: offer a free and open place — make it difficult for state capitalism
for global competition. This means to take root. Autocrats, on the other
keeping the door open to trade, foreign hand, can intervene in their economies
investment, and immigration, even if with far greater latitude.
state capitalist countries refuse to do As such, internal political reforms
the same or populist sentiments can play a big role in undermining or
demand otherwise. After all, those who changing the authoritarian nature of
wish to defend the free market would regimes as well as the state capitalism
do well to uphold market principles. that they practice. This does not mean
Bremmer also recommends that the that the United States should forcibly,
United States continue to invest in hard surreptitiously, or carelessly try to
power. Nothing will safeguard the free democratize state capitalist autocracies,
flow of goods around the world, espe- or act as if freedom would materialize
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as long as the United States mouths it between Obama’s vision and one that
fervently enough. Rather, it means that favors a freer marketplace and more
pursuing wise and workable efforts to responsible spending habits. The 2010
promote political freedom in politically sovereign debt crises that hit Europe
unfree countries could pay dividends offer a fine example of the dreadful
for economic freedom. Unfortunately, future in store for the United States
this is something that The End of the should it continue down the path, as
Free Market does not recognize. charted by President Obama and many
Of course, state capitalist autocracies in his political party, that favors chron-
could survive for a long, long time with- ic lack of fiscal discipline and crushing
out succumbing to internal or external deficits.
pressures for political liberalization. To his credit, Bremmer urges
This makes it all the more useful to keep Democrats, who tend to prefer a
in mind another important element that greater role for government interven-
Bremmer glosses over in his prognosis: tion in the economy, to speak up for
It matters whether leading free-market free markets, but the problem requires
economies like the United States can get much more than political rhetoric. The
their economic groove back. choice between Obama’s vision and
If the dynamism of China’s economy small, limited government is not just
has done more than anything else to one that snotty East Coast liberal elites
enhance state capitalism’s luster, then a regularly dismiss as the paranoia of Tea
return to growth, vibrancy, and innova- Party activists who need an excuse to
tion in the American economy will be vent their racism against America’s first
an unambiguous indication of market black president. It has a whole lot to do
capitalism’s dominance. The United with the battle between the free market
States cannot force state capitalist and state capitalism, too. As it turns
countries down a more liberal or out, those in America who advocate
enlightened political path, but it can do unprecedented new powers for the U.S.
a whole lot to make sure that its own government to regulate the private sec-
economic system is sound and its pri- tor and direct private initiatives are also
vate sector is competitive. Bremmer the very people who have taken to
agrees, but then avoids saying much ogling state capitalism.
about this country’s heated internal As a presidential candidate, Obama
debate about how best to move for- tipped his hat to Chinese state capital-
ward economically. ism when he bemoaned the crumbling
Bremmer argues that President infrastructure of his home country and
Obama is not a state capitalist but noted that China’s state-directed infra-
ignores the implications of Obama’s structure spending has produced ports,
policies: higher tax burdens, more trains, and airports that were “vastly
intrusive government regulations, high- the superior” to those in America.
er costs for doing business, and grander When Senator John Kerry introduced
ambitions to fund programs that the comprehensive climate change legisla-
United States cannot afford. To emerge tion in May 2010, he exhorted the
victorious from the global financial cri- U.S. government to heavily subsidize
sis, America will have to choose green technology in part because “The

Books
Chinese aren’t waiting around” and erode the dominance of the free market
have “surpassed us in renewable energy model in the world.
investment.” Stagnant growth, bloated govern-
Those who are predisposed to wor- ment, out of control deficits, uncom-
shipping government intervention in petitive businesses — all have resulted
the economy see state capitalism, espe- from the policies of President Obama,
cially as successfully practiced by who Bremmer defends as a market cap-
China, as overflowing with authoritari- italist. Though the president has
an chic.2 These big-government types, maligned the free market less since the
like Obama and his allies, would not American people roundly rebuked him
dare to turn the United States into a and his political party in the midterm
state capitalist country, but as the congressional elections of 2010, it
Chinese economy hums along remains unclear whether he will in fact
with three decades of explosive growth change course. Unless he does, or is
under its belt and emerges relatively forced to do so by the new Congress,
unscathed from the global financial cri- his policies could do a whole lot to
sis, they increasingly believe that the make the title of Bremmer’s book a
U.S. must adopt certain Chinese, or more imminent reality.
state capitalist, characteristics to be
competitive in the 21st century.
That certainly is not what Bremmer
supports. Unlike big government types, Home
he believes that state capitalism is “bur-
dened by . . . shortsighted, short-term
thinking, especially when powerful
Economics
players within the system have their By David R.
own set of incentives for earning short-
term rewards.” In the long term, he is Henderson
confident that the free-market system
will prevail because “virtually all peo- B i l l B rys o n . At Home: A Short
ple value an opportunity to create pros- History of Private Life. Doubleday.
perity for themselves and for their fami- 497 Pages. $28.95
lies and because free markets have
proven again and again that they
can empower virtually anyone.”
Unfortunately, though, Bremmer fails
to adequately acknowledge in his book
that the choices the United States
makes could induce or impede econom-
I h av e l o n g e n joy e d Bill
Bryson’s books on travel. He
has a rare ability to both enter-
ic recovery, which would ensure or David R. Henderson is a research fel-

low with the Hoover Institution and
an associate professor of economics
2. For a discussion about the ogling of Chinese at the Graduate School of Business
authoritarian chic in America’s climate change
debate, see Ying Ma, “China’s View of Climate
and Public Policy at the Naval
Change,” Policy Review 1 6 1 (June & July Postgraduate School. He blogs at
2010). www.econlog.econlib.org.
108 Policy Review

Books
tain his readers, often with side-split- forty-five gallons, all of which had
ting humor, and get them interested in to be heated in the kitchen and
the history of the places he travels. My brought up in special cans — and
favorite, in part because of the humor, there might be two dozen or more
is In a Sunburned Country, his book baths to fill of an evening.
on Australia. But if I were to judge his
books solely on the importance of the Nor did servants seem to get much
history he uncovers, my favorite, by far, appreciation from their mistresses.
would be his latest, At Home: A Short Although Bryson specifies too infre-
History of Private Life. quently the time periods of which he
Bryson has pulled off a marvelous writes, one gets the impression that this
feat. He devotes almost every chapter to attitude to servants lasted into the 20th
a room in his Victorian house in century. He quotes two 20th-century
England. He then considers why the mistresses’ complaints about servants.
room is the way it is and what preceded Virginia Woolf said that servants were
it. In doing so he produces an important as irritating as “kitchen flies,” and Edna
economic history, only some of which St. Vincent Millay stated, “The only
will be familiar to economic historians people I really hate are servants. They
and almost all of which will be unfamil- are really not human beings at all.”
iar to pretty much everyone else. A large Bryson describes, in detail, one of
percentage of it is important, for two the toughest jobs — that of the laundry
reasons: One, you get to pinch yourself, maid. One highlight of that description
realizing just how wealthy you are; and is what she (yes, Ms. Millay, they actu-
two, you get a better understanding ally were human beings) needed to do
than you’ll get from almost any high to get stains out. The way to deal with
school or college history textbook of stained linens was to steep them in stale
the economic progress that made you urine or a diluted solution of poultry
wealthy. Not surprisingly, given that I’m dung.
an economist and Bryson isn’t, I have a
few criticisms of places where he mis-
leads by commission or omission. But
At Home’s net effect on readers is likely
to be a huge increase in understanding
and appreciation of how we got to
B ry s o n l e a d s o f f his
chapter on the drawing
room with a discussion of
the words “comfort” and “comfort-
able.” Until 1770, he writes, the idea
where we are. of being comfortable at home “was so
One of Bryson’s most striking unfamiliar that no word existed for the
descriptions is about the life of a ser- condition.” “Comfortable” meant sim-
vant when houses had two stories but ply “capable of being consoled.” But
no running water. The worst days for by the early 19th century, it was quite
the servant were when family members common for people to talk about hav-
or guests wished to take a bath. Bryson ing a comfortable home or making a
writes: comfortable living. “The history of pri-
vate life,” writes Bryson, “is a history
A gallon of water weighs eight of getting comfortable slowly.” In other
pounds, and a typical bath held words, standards of living increased

Books
gradually due to the many labor-saving Because At Home is about various
inventions that — though they reduced rooms in the home, not all of it is
the demand for servants — made even about technological change. Some of it
the lives of servants easier. is simply about how people’s consump-
Indeed, improvements in technology tion patterns changed as Britain indus-
were so important that the one chapter trialized and became wealthier, and it is
Bryson devotes to something other than no less interesting for that. In a chapter
a room in the house or a physical area titled “The Cellar,” for example,
in or around the house is his chapter on Bryson details the enormous increase in
the fuse box. Electricity truly revolu- coal usage for heating British homes.
tionized life. Bryson writes, “The world By 1842, he notes, Britain alone used
at night for much of history was a very “two-thirds of all coal produced in the
dark place indeed.” A good candle, he Western world.” Coal burning became
adds, “provides barely a hundredth of a bigger problem in cities as the cities
the illumination of a single 100-watt grew: During Queen Victoria’s lifetime,
lightbulb.” Although Bryson makes a writes Bryson, the population of
good case for how important lighting London alone rose from one million to
was and is, he would have made an seven million. It would have been nice
even stronger case had he drawn on the to see Bryson lay out how many people
pathbreaking work by Yale University were saved from death by the switch
economist William D. Nordhaus. In a from coal in fireplaces to coal burning
study done in 1996, Nordhaus found in electricity generation and to oil, nat-
that failure to adjust appropriately for ural gas, and nuclear power for heat-
the plummeting cost of light has led ing. But, as I noted, that’s not his point.
economic historians to dramatically Bryson wants to detail how his early
understate the growth of real wages 19th-century house contains a lot of
over the last 2 0 0 years. That one history.
invention, plus many others, led to a Bryson occasionally breaks with the
burgeoning middle class. pattern by using a room as an excuse to
The term “middle class,” writes discuss interesting technological devel-
Bryson, was coined only in 1745. By opments that had little to do with the
the early 19th century, of course, the room. No matter — his discussion is
middle class was substantial. always illuminating. A chapter called
Something that fueled this growth, “The Study,” for example, doesn’t real-
besides labor-saving inventions such as ly deal with the study but does discuss
running water and light, was the mice, mousetraps, rats, plagues (natu-
increasing globalization of production rally), mites, bedbugs, and germs. I will
through free trade. Take wood. Before never put my head on a pillow in a
the British engaged in extensive inter- hotel room again without remembering
national trade, they used only one kind that ten percent of the weight of a six-
of wood in their furniture: oak. But year-old pillow (six years, says Bryson,
Bryson notes that the British started is the average age of a pillow) is made
getting (he doesn’t say when) walnut up of “sloughed skin, living and dead
from Virginia, tulipwood from the mites, and mite dung.” On a somewhat
Carolinas, and teak from Asia. more comforting note, Bryson points
110 Policy Review

Books
out a positive change in the insect seem to understand much about germ
world: the disappearance of locusts a theory. Bryson writes that when
little over a century ago. We are so used President James Abram Garfield was
to hearing about a species disappearing shot in 1881, he wasn’t killed by the
because of man’s activity that we some- bullet but by doctors “sticking their
times forget to notice that the disap- unwashed fingers in the wound.”
pearance of some species is a welcome One shortcoming of the book is that
development. It turns out that the Bryson doesn’t seem to have much
locusts hibernated and bred every win- appreciation for — or maybe it’s just a
ter in the high plains east of the Rocky lack of interest in — how wealth is cre-
Mountains. When new farmers there ated. This comes out most strikingly in
plowed and irrigated a little over a cen- his discussion of “Commodore”
tury ago, they killed the locusts and Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt, writes
their pupae. Bryson, “had a positively uncanny gift
It is impossible to read Bryson’s for making money.” True. But then he
chapter on the bedroom without tells the reader of Vanderbilt’s immense
emerging with an appreciation of eco- wealth without saying anything about
nomic growth and modern medicine. how he acquired it. The story that
At inns, strangers often shared beds Bryson leaves out is that Vanderbilt
into the 19th century, and “diaries fre- made a large part of his wealth by mak-
quently contain entries lamenting how ing steamship travel relatively cheap for
the author was disappointed to find a many Americans in the New York area,
late-arriving stranger clambering into in the process challenging a monopoly
bed with him.” He tells of a squabble that the New York legislature had
in 1776 between Benjamin Franklin unconstitutionally granted to Robert
and John Adams when they shared a Fulton. In other words, Vanderbilt cre-
bed in New Brunswick, New Jersey. ated wealth for himself by also creating
The issue disputed was not the role of wealth for consumers.
the federal government. It was the far Bryson also accepts many of the
more important question of “whether myths about the evils of child labor
to have the window open or not.” that various defenders of the aristocra-
With increasing wealth, people no cy and advocates of socialism propa-
longer had to share beds. gated in the 19th century as part of
Bryson tells just how primitive med- their opposition to British industrializa-
ical knowledge was before 1850 and tion. Bryson does what virtually every
sometimes even later than that. For opponent of child labor in factories has
example, virtually all doctors were done: discuss the horrible conditions of
men, and it was not considered proper work in mines and factories — they
for men to examine a woman’s private really were horrible — without com-
parts. The American Medication paring them to the even worse condi-
Association expelled a gynecologist tions in agriculture, which is where
named James Platt White for allowing these same children would have been
his students to observe a woman giving employed had they not worked in
birth, even though the woman had mines and factories. Bryson’s work is
given them permission. Nor did doctors so well researched generally that it’s a

Books
pity that he didn’t come across econo- many of these treasures to be sold off.
mist William H. Hutt’s careful refuta- The law I refer to is the British govern-
tions of the critics of child labor. (See ment’s death duty — in the United
his “The Factory System of the Early States, it is called an estate tax. This tax
Nineteenth Century” in the Hayek- started in the late 19th century at a
edited 1954 book Capitalism and the modest eight percent rate on estates
Historians.) valued at one million pounds or more.
But by 1939, the rate was a hefty 60
S o , w h e r e a r e these old
Victorian houses and the huge
mansions that the newly rich
built in the 19th century? Many of
them, notes Bryson, were torn down
percent. By the 1950s, writes Bryson,
the stately homes were disappearing at
the rate of about two a week.
There is so much more in At Home
than I’ve discussed here. One thing
after their contents were sold. And the Bryson does often, for example, is tell
reason so many of them disappeared is the price of various goods and services
ironic given the author’s criticism of at various points in time. Many of
property rights. On the one hand, these prices were very high relative to
Bryson chides 19th-century critics of wages. Realizing this gives the reader
historical preservation laws, who saw still another way of understanding and
such laws as “an egregious assault on appreciating the awesome wealth creat-
property rights.” Just two pages later, ed for all economic classes — in Britain
on the other hand, he details the legal and the United States — by two cen-
attack on property rights that caused turies of economic growth.
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112 Policy Review

New from Hoover Institution Press
Skating on Stilts
Why we aren’t stopping tomorrow’s terrorism
BY STEWART A. BAKER
“A most unusual memoirist, Baker is a government bureaucrat

with a philosopher's bent. This tough-minded, candid work is a
cautionary tale to those who claim that we do not have to make
choices between our values and our security. As Baker points out,
security is a value, and those who pretend otherwise—be they
business interests, privacy advocates, or international groups—
put Americans at risk.”
General Michael Hayden,
Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2006–9)
and Director of the National Security Agency (1999–2005)
“Stewart Baker was one of the leading thinkers in developing the

architecture for Homeland Security. His insights and experience
provide a unique perspective on our national security challenges.”
Michael Chertoff, former Secretary of Homeland Security
In this book Stewart A. Baker examines the technologies we love—jet travel,

computer networks, and biotech—and finds that they are likely to empower new
forms of terrorism unless we change our current course a few degrees and
overcome resistance to change from business, foreign governments, and privacy
advocates. He draws on his Homeland Security experience to show how that was
accomplished in the case of jet travel and border security but concludes that
heading off disasters in computer networks and biotech will require recognition
that privacy must sometimes yield to security, especially as technology increases
the risks to both.
Stewart A. Baker was the first Assistant Secretary for Policy at the United States
Department of Homeland Security and the former General Counsel of the
National Security Agency.
June 2010, 370 pages

ISBN: 978-0-8179-1154-6
$19.95, cloth
To Order...
call 800.621.2736 or visit hooverpress.org
HOOVER INSTITUTION
. . . ideas defining a free society
HOOVER INSTITUTION, Stanford University Toll-free: 877.466.8374 Fax: 650.723.1687
info@hoover.stanford.edu www.hoover.org

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POLICYReview February & March 2011, No. 165, $6.

THE ROAD TO (AND FROM) THE 2010 ELECTIONS

A CLIMATE POLICY FOR THE REAL WORLD

THE PERSISTENCE OF GENOCIDE

PTSD’S DIAGNOSTIC TRAP

ALSO: ESSAYS AND REVIEWS BY

The Hoover Institution’s overarching purposes are:

Ideas have consequences, and a free flow of competing ideas leads

In the words of President Hoover:

15 A CLIMATE POLICY FOR THE REAL WORLD

29 THE PERSISTENCE OF GENOCIDE

41 PTSD’S DIAGNOSTIC TRAP

55 CUBA’S LOST HISTORY

69 THE RUSH TO CONDEMN GENETICALLY MODIFIED CROPS

90 THINKING ABOUT TORTURE

96 BRUTISH AND SHORT

102 MARKET CAPITALISM, STATE-STYLE

108 HOME ECONOMICS

Policy Review ® (issn 0146-5945) is published bimonthly by the

Subscription information: For new orders, call or write the

February & March 2011 3 Policy Review

The road to 2008

100% Republican Independent Democrat

But while disapproval of the Bush administration was strongly associated

From 2008 to 2010

C o n t r a ry t o o u r 2 0 0 9 conclusion, many commentators

February & March 2011 5

ronmental legislation, financial reform, and foreign policy change, among

February & March 2011 7

The 2010 Democratic shellacking

T he preceding developments superimposed on a long, deep

February & March 2011 9

The analysis underlying Table 1 examines the gain or loss in percentage

February & March 2011 11

Implications for 2012

W hat does the Republican “shellacking” of Democrats in

February & March 2011 13

Paul J. Saunders is executive director of The Nixon Center. Vaughan Turekian is

February & March 2011 15 Policy Review

What really happened in Copenhagen?

February & March 2011 17

What happened to domestic

T he failure in Copenhagen was both a contributor to and a

February & March 2011 19

February & March 2011 21

Climate change lessons

February & March 2011 23

T aken together these lessons force a broad conclusion that

February & March 2011 25

February & March 2011 27

February & March 2011 29 Policy Review

T he report of the United States Institute for Peace’s task force

February & March 2011 31

February & March 2011 33

February & March 2011 35

Grievances over inequitable distribution of power and resources appear

February & March 2011 37

T o a great power, and to the citizens of great power, powerless-

First, genocide fuels instability, usually in weak, undemocratic, and cor-

Second, genocide and mass atrocities have long-lasting consequences

Third, America’s standing in the world — and our ability to lead — is

A core challenge for American leaders is to persuade others — in the

February & March 2011 39

Sally Satel is a psychiatrist, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise

February & March 2011 41 Policy Review

T h e m o s t r e c e n t edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical

February & March 2011 43

Policy Review, February & March 2011, No. 165

Policy Review, February & March 2011, No. 165