The Israel-Hamas War: Is Peace at Hand?

 On October 27, 1972, Henry Kissinger told the nation that “peace is at hand” in Vietnam. He was premature to say the least. We now have announcements from Israel, Hamas, and various Arab states that they are on board with President Trump’s 20-point plan to settle the Israel-Hamas War. Discussions will begin tomorrow in Egypt with Hamas already agreeing to release all of the hostages, both dead and alive, that they hold. A reason to be optimistic is that unlike in 1972 when the North Vietnamese Army was standing strong, Hamas is sitting on the brink of military defeat.

 

However, the hostage release is not the be all and end all to the conflict. The critical sticking points that remain is whether or not Hamas will disarm as required and that Hamas will have no role in the future governing body of Gaza. Both of those conditions Hamas has yet to agree to. Further complicating the situation is that Israel attempted to assassinate Khalil Al-Hayya, Hamas’ lead negotiator in Doha, an attack in which his son was killed.

 

My belief, or hope, is that these obstacles will be overcome. Why? Simply put, the correlation of forces is such that Hamas’ choice is to accept the terms or be “obliterated” using President Trump’s term. An early sign of progress will be the speed at which the Israeli hostages are being released. Of course, all of Israel will be looking at the physical condition of the alive hostages being released which will obviously affect Israel’s negotiating posture. Meantime, the ball is in Hamas’ court.

My Amazon Review of Scott Anderson's "The Quiet Americans: Four Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War..........."

 

The CIA: Present at the Creation

 

Scott Anderson describes the history of the CIA from 1946-1956 through the eyes of four of its founding officers. They are Michael Burke who would go on to be the general manager of the NY Yankees, Peter Sichel an émigré from Nazi Germany who would return to his family’s wine business, Frank Wisner, who become Deputy Director and Edward Lansdale who would be the model for Graham Greene’s “The Quite American.”  All of them previously served with great distinction in the OSS during World War II.

 

Burke and Sichel ran agents into Communist Eastern Europe to no avail. The police states were too strong to allow the infiltrations to work and most died. Wisner witness the horrors of Soviet occupation of Romania and East Berlin which made him a lifelong antagonist to Communism. Lansdale would make his bones as an advisor to a young Filipino congressman who ultimately become its president, Ramon Magsaysay. From there he would go on to advise President Diem in South Vietnam, who unlike Magsaysay would become an autocrat.  Interestingly Lansdale supported the planned Vietnam referendum believing that Diem would actually beat Ho Chi Minh.

 

Anderson is critical of the CIA’s role in the coups in Iran and Guatemala in 1954 which at the time were viewed as great successes. According to Anderson by cozying up to dictators of the Right, America lost its moral authority in the world. Likely true, but what was the alternative?

 

The villains in this piece are President Eisenhower, his secretary of state John Foster Dulles, F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover, and surprisingly, liberal hero George Kennan. He views Kennan as the architect of the secret war against the Soviets which the CIA would play a leading role. He goes after Hoover as bureaucratic enemy of both the OSS and the CIA along with his role in fomenting the red scare and the attack on gays in the government.

 

Most of his vitriol is directed against Eisenhower and Dulles who fail to see an opening to the Soviets first after the death of Stalin and later after Khrushchev’s speech denouncing him. Who knows, maybe the Cold War could have been cut short, not likely in my opinion. He also attacks the “New Look” policy of massive nuclear retaliation as opposed to a gradual response. Well, Kennedy tried a gradual response in Vietnam, and it didn’t work out all that well.

 

Wisner became incensed after the U.S. failed to act in support of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. After years of calling for rebellion, the U.S. sat idly by as the rebels were slaughtered by Soviet tanks. However, what could the U.S. actually do in the Soviet sphere of influence short of World War III.

 

I would note two intriguing morsels in the book. First, Dulles wanted to provoke a rebellion in East Berlin during a four-power conference that would have led to the slaughter of thousands of innocents. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. Second, he discusses how successful Soviet spy Kim Philby was in inveigling himself into the U.S. power structure as the MI-6 liaison to both the CIA and FBI.

 

Anderson tells a great story about the pure physical heroism of his four protagonists and how they did their jobs under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. I only wish he were more nuanced about his policy conclusions.

For the full Amazon URL see: The CIA: Present at the Creation (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of George Packer's "Our Man:Richard Holbrooke and The End of the American Century"

A Man in Full

George Packer knows how to write. His 600 page (in print edition) biography of diplomat Richard Holbrooke kept my full attention throughout my reading, no mean feat. Packer fully benefited from Holbrooke’s papers given to him by Katie Marton, Holbrooke’s third wife and more than 200 interviews that put you into the room of a host of very important conversations that affected American foreign policy in every Democratic administration from Kennedy to Obama. Needless to say watching the sausage being made is very messy where personality too often dominates over policy.

Holbrooke was blessed by having met Dean Rusk as a college student through a friendship with his son and had the Harrimans, both Averell and Pamela Harriman as a patron early in his career and Hillary Clinton later on. His goal was to become secretary of state; he never achieved it, but you can find his foot prints on American policy from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

We see Holbrooke in the bush taking fire in 1960’s Vietnam as a young Foreign Service officer, where he realizes early on that the war was unwinnable and again see him taking fire in the Balkans in the 1990s and Afghanistan in 2010. He certainly had raw physical courage. He also knew how to dominate a room. Through the force of his personality he basically brokers the end of the Bosnian civil war with what became known as the Dayton Accords.

Holbrooke’s problem was that many of the coalitions he built were against him. Simply put, all too many people couldn’t stand him. Too be sure they respected his intellect and insights, but he had a way of annoying his best of friends. President Obama made him our Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2009, yet after appointing him he refused to meet with him or even be in the same room with him. Even Hillary Clinton, his principal sponsor, grew tired of him. In fact he suffers a fatal heart attack in Clinton’s office while he was arguing for a negotiated solution to with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Holbrooke’s life was focused on foreign policy to the exclusion of practically everything else. Packer makes it clear that it was no easy task to be one of his spouses, where he had numerous affairs including with his best friend’s wife. That best friend was Tony Lake, who became national security adviser to Bill Clinton and a lifelong bureaucratic adversary.

His personal faults aside Holbrooke cared about our country and wanted our foreign policy to reflect the best of our ideals. He became a full-throated supporter of humanitarian intervention in Bosnia and he understood coercive diplomacy had a role in formulating foreign policy. Holbrooke was tough on our enemies and too often he was tough on his friends. He was truly a man in full and Packer’s writing brings that out.

The full amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/review/RQG5BWHYE8NK3/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon review of Bret Baier's and Catherine Whitney's "Three Days in January: Dwight Eisenhower's Final Mission"

I Like Ike

Fox news anchor Bret Baier and Catherine Whitney have written a carefully researched hagiographic biography of President Dwight Eisenhower with a focus on his last three days in office. The bookends are Eisenhower’s farewell “military-industrial complex” speech and President Kennedy's inaugural “Ask not..” speech. Baier’s Eisenhower is a highly organized leader who is deliberate and recognizes the importance of processes and teamwork. After all he did lead the D-Day invasion and had a very successful presidency. Under Eisenhower the Korean War was ended, a war in Vietnam was avoided, civil rights moved forward and the interstate highway system was started. Perhaps more importantly the nuclear genie was kept in the bottle as he dealt with the post-Stalin era Soviet Union.

Eisenhower was most concerned about presidential transition and he wanted to make sure that President-elect Kennedy got off to a good start.  He actually spent a year thinking about is farewell address perhaps thinking that the “missile gap” was a creature of election year politics. Kennedy later acknowledged that there was no gap. Unfortunately, like too many of today’s politicians, Kennedy and his crew thought they knew it all. That led to the fiasco at the Bay of Pigs early in his administration.

I wonder after writing this biography how Baier as a Fox news anchor can report on Donald Trump without puking. If ever there were an opposite of Dwight Eisenhower it is Donald Trump. 

For the Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R3BICR836NES47/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

My Amazon Review of Rick Perlstein's, "The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan"

Rick Perlstein has written a long book, perhaps too long. “The Invisible Bridge…” is really three books: a biography of Ronald Reagan, a political history with an emphasis on the continued rise of the Republican Right and a social history of the mid-1970s. This book follows his two prior books, “Before the Storm…” and “Nixonland…” on the emergence of the Republican Right. Perlstein is a man of the Left, but he tries to understand the motivations behind the success of the Right. In some respects he succeeds, but in others he doesn’t fully emphasize that the period he discusses was one of retreat abroad and recession at home. With the latter along with virulent inflation ends the Keynesian consensus that ruled economics in the postwar period up to that time. Thus the way was open for a politician who offered hope to a nation where it seemed there was only despair. That politician was Ronald Reagan.

Pearlstein enabled me to relive the period that I remember all too well. It seemed that the wheels were falling off the train of history. For example the 1973-76 period encompassed the following:

   *Watergate

   * Defeat in Vietnam

   * CIA scandals

   * The rise of OPEC which triples gasoline prices

   * Assassination attempts on Jerry Ford

   * Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army

   * The widespread distribution of porn

   * The bankruptcy of New York City

   * The growth of weird self-improvement groups like est.

Into this milieu comes the former actor and former governor of California who offers what appears to be simplistic solutions to the liberal elite, but to a yearning public he offers hope and a return to the greatness of America that as Perlstein notes resonates with the 1976 Bi-Centennial. Always under-rated by the pundits Ronald Reagan was far smarter and cannier a politician than his critics realized. And boy did he know how to give a speech.

Perlstein spends a great deal of time on the 1976 Republican convention where Reagan almost rests the nomination from Jerry Ford. Much of this ground was covered by Craig Shirley’s very pro-Reagan, “Reagan’s Revolution.” In fact Shirley has sued Pearlstein for infringing on his material. Shirley’s book is a good read and I recommend it.

What Perlstein gets wrong is his treatment of Reagan’s failed attempt to pass Proposition 1 his tax and spending limitation initiative in 1973. He highlights what he perceives to be its radical nature. In my opinion had Proposition 1 passed the far more “radical” Proposition 13 of 1978 might never have seen the light of day. Pearlstein also get wrong the notion that California coastal development was banned in 1973; not true. What actually happened was new permitting regime under Proposition 20.

Although he opens his book the the return of the Vietnam POWs, he doesn't really deal with the moral crisis associated with the treatment of the returning veterans. To the Right they were drug crazed losers and to the Left they were war criminals. The resentment that this engenders adds fodder to the growth of the Right later in the decade.

One last point Perlstein should remember Eric Ambler’s maxim in “A Coffin for Demitrios,”  “In a dying (although I would use “threatened”) civilization political prestige is the reward goes not to the shrewdest diagnostician, but to the man with the best bedside manner.” Most dour liberals fail to understand this while an optimistic liberal like Bill Clinton knows this in his guts.

All told for readers who have the time for this very long book, it very well worth the read.

The Amazon review appears at the following url:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R5X8PKXC2JNGO