Transcrevendo um comentário sincero, independente de quais sejam suas posições. Trata-se de um "intelectual" (ou algo próximo a isso) judeu, que não se sente representado por Israel e que está cançado do vitimismo para justificar o expansionismo israelense.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Não em meu nome
Marcelo Gruman (*)
[Recebido em 4/08/2014, de Maurício David]
Na minha adolescência, tive a oportunidade de visitar Israel por duas vezes, ambas na primeira metade da década de 1990. Era estudante de uma escola judaica da zona sul da cidade do Rio de Janeiro. As viagens foram organizadas por instituições sionistas, e tinham por intuito apresentar à juventude diaspórica a realidade daquele Estado formado após o holocausto judaico da Segunda Guerra Mundial, e para o qual todo e qualquer judeu tem o direito de “retornar” caso assim o deseje. Voltar à terra ancestral. Para as organizações sionistas, ainda que não disposto a deixar a diáspora, todo e qualquer judeu ao redor do mundo deve conhecer a “terra prometida”, prestar-lhe solidariedade material ou simbólica, assim como todo muçulmano deve fazer, pelo menos uma vez na vida, a peregrinação a Meca. Para muitos jovens judeus, a visita a Israel é um rito de passagem, assim como para outros o destino é a Disneylândia.
A equivalência de Israel e Disneylândia tem um motivo. A grande maioria dos jovens não religiosos e sem interesse por questões políticas realizam a viagem apenas para se divertir. O roteiro é basicamente o mesmo: visita ao Muro das Lamentações, com direito a fotos em posição hipócrita de reza (já viram ateu rezando?), ao Museu da Diáspora, ao Museu do Holocausto, às Colinas do Golan, ao Deserto do Neguev e a experiência de tomar um chá com os beduínos, ir ao Mar Morto e boiar na água sem fazer esforço por conta da altíssima concentração de sal, a “vivência” de alguns dias num dos kibutzim ainda existentes em Israel e uma semana num acampamento militar, onde se tem a oportunidade de atirar com uma arma de verdade. Além, é claro, da interação com jovens de outros países hospedados no mesmo local. Para variar, brasileiros e argentinos, esquecendo sua identidade étnica comum, atualizavam a rivalidade futebolística e travavam uma guerra particular pelas meninas. Neste quesito, os argentinos davam de goleada, e os brasileiros ficavam a ver navios.
Minha memória afetiva das duas viagens não é das mais significativas. Aparte ter conhecido parentes por parte de mãe, a “terra prometida” me frustrou quando o assunto é a construção de minha identidade judaica. Achei os israelenses meio grosseiros (dizem que o “sabra”, o israelense “da gema”, é duro por natureza), a comida é medíocre (o melhor falafel que comi até hoje foi em Paris...), é tudo muito árido, a sociedade é militarizada, o serviço militar é compulsório, não existe “excesso de contingente”. A memória construída apenas sobre o sofrimento começava a me incomodar.
Nossos guias, jovens talvez dez anos mais velhos do que nós, andavam armados, o motorista do ônibus andava armado. Um dos nossos passeios foi em Hebron, cidade da Cisjordânia, em que a estrada era rodeada por telas para contenção das pedras atiradas pelos palestinos. Em momento algum os guias se referiram àquele território como “ocupado”, e hoje me envergonho de ter feito parte, ainda que por poucas horas, deste “finca pé” em território ilegalmente ocupado. Para piorar, na segunda viagem quebrei a perna jogando basquete e tive de engessá-la, o que, por outro lado, me liberou da experiência desagradável de ter de apertar o gatilho de uma arma, exatamente naquela semana íamos acampar com o exército israelense.
Sei lá, não me senti tocado por esta realidade, minha fantasia era outra. Não encontrei minhas raízes no solo desértico do Negev, tampouco na neve das colinas do Golan. Apesar disso, trouxe na bagagem uma bandeira de Israel, que coloquei no meu quarto. Muitas vezes meu pai, judeu ateu, não sionista, me perguntou o porquê daquela bandeira estar ali, e eu não sabia responder. Hoje eu sei por que ela NÃO DEVERIA estar ali, porque minha identidade judaica passa pela Europa, pelos vilarejos judaicos descritos nos contos de Scholem Aleichem, pelo humor judaico característico daquela parte do mundo, pela comida judaica daquela parte do mundo, pela música klezmer que os judeus criaram naquela parte do mundo, pelas estórias que meus avós judeus da Polônia contavam ao redor da mesa da sala nos incontáveis lanches nas tardes de domingo.
Sou um judeu da diáspora, com muito orgulho. Na verdade, questiono mesmo este conceito de “diáspora”. Como bem coloca o antropólogo norte-americano James Clifford, as culturas diaspóricas não necessitam de uma representação exclusiva e permanente de um “lar original”. Privilegia-se a multilocalidade dos laços sociais. Diz ele:
As conexões transnacionais que ligam as diásporas não precisam estar articuladas primariamente através de um lar ancestral real ou simbólico (...). Descentradas, as conexões laterais [transnacionais] podem ser tão importantes quanto aquelas formadas ao redor de uma teleologia da origem/retorno. E a história compartilhada de um deslocamento contínuo, do sofrimento, adaptação e resistência pode ser tão importante quanto a projeção de uma origem específica.
Há muita confusão quando se trata de definir o que é judaísmo, ou melhor, o que é a identidade judaica. A partir da criação do Estado de Israel, a identidade judaica em qualquer parte do mundo passou a associar-se, geográfica e simbolicamente, àquele território. A diversidade cultural interna ao judaísmo foi reduzida a um espaço físico que é possível percorrer em algumas horas. A submissão a um lugar físico é a subestimação da capacidade humana de produzir cultura; o mesmo ocorre, analogamente, aos que defendem a relação inexorável de negros fora do continente africano com este continente, como se a cultura passasse literalmente pelo sangue. O que, diga-se de passagem, só serve aos racialistas e, por tabela, racistas de plantão. Prefiro a lateralidade de que nos fala Clifford.
Ser judeu não é o mesmo que ser israelense, e nem todo israelense é judeu, a despeito da cidadania de segunda classe exercida por árabes-israelenses ou por judeus de pele negra discriminados por seus pares originários da Europa Central, de pele e olhos claros. Daí que o exercício da identidade judaica não implica, necessariamente, o exercício de defesa de toda e qualquer posição do Estado de Israel, seja em que campo for.
Muito desta falsa equivalência é culpa dos próprios judeus da “diáspora”, que se alinham imediatamente aos ditames das políticas interna e externa israelense, acríticos, crentes de que tudo que parta do Knesset (o parlamento israelense) é “bom para os judeus”, amém. Muitos judeus diaspóricos se interessam mais pelo que acontece no Oriente Médio do que no seu cotidiano. Veja-se, por exemplo, o número ínfimo de cartas de leitores judeus em jornais de grande circulação, como O Globo, quando o assunto tratado é a corrupção ou violência endêmica em nosso país, em comparação às indefectíveis cartas de leitores judeus em defesa das ações militaristas israelenses nos territórios ocupados. Seria o complexo de gueto falando mais alto?
Não preciso de Israel para ser judeu e não acredito que a existência no presente e no futuro de nós, judeus, dependa da existência de um Estado judeu, argumento utilizado por muitos que defendem a defesa militar israelense por quaisquer meios, que justificam o fim. Não aceito a justificativa de que o holocausto judaico na Segunda Guerra Mundial é o exemplo claro de que apenas um lar nacional única e exclusivamente judaico seja capaz de proteger a etnia da extinção.
A dor vivida pelos judeus, na visão etnocêntrica, reproduzida nas gerações futuras através de narrativas e monumentos, é incomensurável e acima de qualquer dor que outro grupo étnico possa ter sofrido, e justifica qualquer ação que sirva para protegê-los de uma nova tragédia. Certa vez, ouvi de um sobrevivente de campo de concentração que não há comparação entre o genocídio judaico e os genocídios praticados atualmente nos países africanos, por exemplo, em Ruanda, onde tutsis e hutus se digladiaram sob as vistas grossas das ex-potências coloniais. Como este senhor ousa qualificar o sofrimento alheio? Será pelo número mágico? Seis milhões? O genial Woody Allen coloca bem a questão, num diálogo de Desconstruindo Harry (tradução livre):
- Você se importa com o Holocausto ou acha que ele não existiu?
- Não, só eu sei que perdemos seis milhões, mas o mais apavorante é saber que recordes são feitos para serem quebrados.
O holocausto judaico não é inexplicável, e não é explicável pela maldade latente dos alemães. Sem dúvida, o componente antissemita estava presente, mas, conforme demonstrado por diversos pensadores contemporâneos, dentre os quais insuspeitos judeus (seriam judeus antissemitas Hannah Arendt, Raul Hilberg e Zygmunt Bauman?), uma série de características do massacre está relacionada à Modernidade, à burocratização do Estado e à “industrialização da morte”, sofrida também por dirigentes políticos, doentes mentais, ciganos, eslavos, “subversivos” de um modo geral. Práticas sociais genocidas, conforme descritas pelo sociólogo argentino Daniel Feierstein (outro judeu antissemita?), estão presentes tanto na Segunda Guerra Mundial quanto durante o Processo de Reorganização Nacional imposto pela ditadura argentina a partir de 1976. Genocídio é genocídio, e ponto final.
A sacralização do genocídio judaico permite ações que vemos atualmente na televisão, o esmagamento da população palestina em Gaza, transformada em campo de concentração, isolada do resto do mundo. Destruição da infraestrutura, de milhares de casas, a morte de centenas de civis, famílias destroçadas, crianças torturadas em interrogatórios ilegais conforme descrito por advogados israelenses. Não, não são a exceção, não são o efeito colateral de uma guerra suja. São vítimas, sim, de práticas sociais genocidas, que visam, no final do processo, ao aniquilamento físico do grupo.
Recuso-me a acumpliciar-me com esta agressão. O exército israelense não me representa, o governo ultranacionalista não me representa. Os assentados ilegalmente são meus inimigos.
Eu, judeu brasileiro, digo: ACABEM COM A OCUPAÇÃO!!!
(*) Marcelo Gruman é antropólogo.
Referências bibliográficas:
CLIFFORD, James. (1997). Diasporas, in Montserrat Guibernau and John Rex (Eds.) The Ethnicity Reader: Nationalism, Multiculturalism and Migration, Polity Press, Oxford
Mostrando postagens com marcador Guerra. Mostrar todas as postagens
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segunda-feira, 4 de agosto de 2014
quinta-feira, 31 de julho de 2014
Historia, 1894: a primeira guerra sino-japonesa, 120 anos atras
China’s Leaders Draw Lessons From War of ‘Humiliation’
Imagine China beset by
domestic and external menaces, its rulers and commanders complacent,
decadent and corrupt, humiliated by Japan in a war that pushes the once
indomitable power closer to collapse.
This image of China
from over a century ago, in the twilight of the Qing dynasty, remains a
potent nightmare for Communist Party leaders, and the 120th anniversary
of the start of a war with Japan has unleashed a spate of images, speeches and official commentary drawing lessons from the defeat.
The lessons from that time have become all the more pointed today, when Chinese-Japanese ties are tenser than they have been for decades, and President Xi Jinping of China has embarked on an ambitious program to overhaul the military and to curtail corruption throughout the military and the party.
“The victory of the
aggressors was a humiliation for the Chinese nation,” Chu Yimin, a
People’s Liberation Army general and political commissar, said in an interview
published on Monday in Study Times, a party newspaper. “The wounds are
increasingly healed over, but the scars remain, and what we need most of
all nowadays is to awaken an intense sense of humiliation, so that we
never forget the humiliation of our country and military, and turn
knowledge of this into courage.”
This Friday will mark
the anniversary of the formal start of the war, called the Jiawu War in
Chinese, and often called the First Sino-Japanese War in English.
“Jiawu” refers to the year in the 60-year cycle of the traditional
Chinese calendar; 2014 marks another Jiawu year, adding weight to the
anniversary.
As if to reinforce the
martial message, the Chinese military has announced exercises,
extending off the east coast of China, which the civilian aviation
authorities have indicated are already causing severe delays for commercial flights.
A professor from
China’s National Defense University, Gong Fangbin, said the disruption
of air traffic would be a test of citizens’ patriotic support for a
stronger military.
“It’s foreseeable
that, as long as the international threats to our country persist,
large-scale, and even larger-scale, military exercises will happen,” he wrote
on Monday in Global Times, a widely read tabloid. “Each time will be
yet another test of the public’s awareness of national defense and its
willingness to bear a burden.”
The clash between
Japan and China’s Manchu rulers started as a contest for dominance of
Korea. The Manchu court assumed its forces would overwhelm Japan, but
instead the Japanese naval and army forces humbled their opponents,
pushed into northeastern China, and isolated Taiwan.
The war ended in April
1895, when the Qing court agreed to a treaty that ended China’s hold
over Korea and ceded Taiwan and territory in northern China to Japan.
The humiliation exposed the brittleness of China’s military power, which
a bout of policy changes failed to overcome, and the dynasty collapsed
in 1911.
At the time, Chinese
advocates of bold change said the defeat showed the success of Japan’s
outward-looking Meiji Restoration, and the contrasting sclerosis of the
Qing court. But the Communist Party leadership has turned the
anniversary into a template for reinforcing its own theme of patriotic
revival and military readiness.
“2014 is another Jiawu year,” China’s main military newspaper, The People’s Liberation Army Daily, said
on its front page on Monday. It said the army was using the anniversary
to reinforce the need for readiness against any external threats.
“For China now, the
goal of national rejuvenation has never been closer, and the obstacles
to national rejuvenation have never been clearer,” said the paper.
“Around our country’s
periphery, hot spots are increasing and the ignition point is lower.
Certain major powers are fanning the flames in the Asia-Pacific region,
the ghost of Japanese militarism has stirred back to life,” it said,
also noting the territorial disputes in the South China Sea. “The
chances of chaos and war on our doorstep are growing.”
But not all the
lessons from the Jiawu War are directed abroad. Chinese textbooks
present the defeat of 1895 as the price of corruption and decadence that
fatally weakened Qing rule and left its military ill equipped and ill
trained. Mr. Xi has extended his campaign against graft into the high ranks of the military, and again the lessons of 120 years ago are not far away.
“For a military, corruption and defeat are twin brothers,” General Chu wrote in Study Times. “Corruption breeds fear of dying.”
segunda-feira, 23 de junho de 2014
Consequencias economicas da violencia e dos conflitos - Steve Killelea
Artigo
Um guia econômico para a Guerra e a Paz
Segundo Steve Killelea, os custos globais para conter a violência atingiram 9,5 trilhões de dólares — ou 11% do PIB mundial
Steve Killelea
Veja.com, 22/06/2014
Destruição em Londres após bombardeio alemão durante Segunda Guerra Mundial (Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
As notícias sobre conflitos enchem as manchetes dos jornais na atualidade: quer seja sobre a guerra civil na Síria, sobre os conflitos internos na Ucrânia, o terrorismo na Nigéria, ou a repressão policial no Brasil; o imediatismo espantoso da violência é realmente muito evidente. Mas, enquanto os comentaristas debatem sobre as questões geoestratégicas, a dissuasão, os conflitos étnicos, a situação desesperada dos cidadãos comuns capturados no meio desses conflitos, raramente o assunto de outro aspecto vital do conflito é abordado objetivamente - o seu custo econômico.
A violência também tem custos financeiros significativos. Os custos globais para conter a violência ou para o tratamento das suas consequências atingiram a incrível soma de 9,5 trilhões de dólares (11% do PIB mundial) em 2012. Este valor representa mais que o dobro do tamanho do setor agrícola a nível global e excede o total de gastos em ajuda externa.
Levando em conta esses montantes colossais, é crucial que os responsáveis políticos analisem devidamente onde e como esse dinheiro é gasto, e considerem maneiras de reduzir essa cifra. Infelizmente, tais questões são raramente analisadas com a devida seriedade. Esta situação deve-se, em grande medida, ao fato de as campanhas militares serem geralmente motivadas por preocupações de natureza geoestratégica e não de lógica financeira. Embora os opositores à guerra do Iraque possam acusar os Estados Unidos de cobiçar os campos de petróleo do país, a campanha foi, no mínimo, antieconômica. A Guerra do Vietnã e outros conflitos também foram verdadeiras catástrofes financeiras.
Existem perguntas semelhantes em termos de gastos em armas em tempo de paz. Poderíamos, por exemplo, questionar a lógica financeira da recente decisão tomada pela Austrália de gastar 24 bilhões de dólares na aquisição de problemáticos aviões de caça enquanto, simultaneamente, prepara o país para os mais rigorosos cortes orçamentários registados em décadas.
Leia também:
Jaswant Singh: Uma nova visão para a Índia
George Soros: A boia de salvamento ucraniana da Europa
Martin Feldstein: O rápido crescimento econômico dos Estados Unidos
Jaswant Singh: Uma nova visão para a Índia
George Soros: A boia de salvamento ucraniana da Europa
Martin Feldstein: O rápido crescimento econômico dos Estados Unidos
Os gastos desnecessários relacionados com a violência não são apenas uma questão de guerra ou dissuasão. Por exemplo, as campanhas de “ordem pública”, duras e dispendiosas, embora sejam atrativas para os eleitores, geralmente, têm pouco efeito sobre as taxas de criminalidade subjacentes. Quer seja uma situação de guerra mundial ou de policiamento local, os conflitos envolvem sempre um aumento acentuado nos gastos públicos. A questão é saber se essa despesa vale a pena.
É evidente que gastar dinheiro a fim de conter a violência nem sempre é uma coisa ruim. A presença da polícia, dos serviços militares, policiais ou segurança pessoal são, muitas vezes, uma presença muito bem-vinda e necessária. Se for devidamente aplicada, conduzirá, em longo prazo, à economia do dinheiro dos contribuintes. A questão pertinente é se o montante gasto em cada caso é adequado.
Certamente, poucos países alcançaram um bom equilíbrio ao abordar a questão da violência e o fizeram mediante custos relativamente baixos; isto prova que existem formas de reduzir as despesas desnecessárias. A utilização mais eficiente de fundos pode ser conseguida mediante um trabalho minucioso sobre a prevenção. Sabemos como se sustentam as sociedades pacíficas: a distribuição equitativa de renda, o respeito pelos direitos das minorias, padrões de elevada qualidade no ensino, baixos níveis de corrupção e um ambiente de negócios atrativos.
Além disso, quando os governos gastam demais para conter a violência, desperdiçam dinheiro que poderia ser investido em outras áreas mais produtivas, como a infraestrutura, o desenvolvimento de negócios, ou a educação. A maior produtividade resultará em consequência, por exemplo, com a criação de escolas em lugar de prisões, melhoraria o bem-estar dos cidadãos e, consequentemente, diminuiria a necessidade de investir na prevenção da violência. A isso eu dou o nome de “ciclo virtuoso de paz”.
Comparemos, por exemplo, os quase 10 trilhões de dólares gastos em 2012 no mundo para conter a violência com os custos globais da recente crise financeira mundial. Mark Adelson, o ex-diretor de crédito do Standard & Poors, estima que a crise tenha originado perdas totais globais no valor de 15 trilhões de dólares no período entre 2007 e 2011, o que representa a metade do valor derivado para fins de contenção da violência durante o mesmo período. Se os responsáveis pelas diretrizes políticas gastam o mesmo tempo e dinheiro para prevenir e conter os conflitos, o benefício, em termos de menos violência e de um crescimento econômico mais rápido, poderia ser enorme.
Os governos poderiam começar por reavaliar as suas despesas em matéria de auxílio. Em termos globais, o valor gasto em contenção da violência já é 75 vezes maior que em ajuda total combinada para o desenvolvimento. Além disso, não é coincidência que os países com maior despesa com violência (em relação ao PIB) figuram também entre os mais pobres do mundo - a Coreia do Norte, a Síria, a Libéria, o Afeganistão e a Líbia, para nomear alguns entre muitos outros. Poderia esse dinheiro ser melhor direcionado para investimentos destinados a reduzir ou a prevenir conflitos?
Além das razões humanitárias óbvias de que é preciso se investir na paz, especialmente no âmbito de estruturas de desenvolvimento internacionais estabelecidas, tal investimento tornar-se visível também uma das formas mais rentáveis de desenvolver a economia e equilibrar o orçamento. É por essa razão que vale a pena discutir este tema.
Steve Killelea é presidente do Instituto de Economia e Paz
(Tradução: Roseli Honório)
© Project Syndicate 2014
segunda-feira, 5 de maio de 2014
Vietnam 1954: a guerra quase virou nuclear (BBC)
Could Vietnam have been nuked in 1954?
BBC, May 4, 2014, 20:35 GMT-3
Sixty years ago this week, French troops were defeated by Vietnamese forces at Dien Bien Phu. As historian Julian Jackson explains, it was a turning point in the history of both nations, and in the Cold War - and a battle where some in the US appear to have contemplated the use of nuclear weapons."Would you like two atomic bombs?" These are the words that a senior French diplomat remembered US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles asking the French Foreign Minister, Georges Bidault, in April 1954. The context of this extraordinary offer was the critical plight of the French army fighting the nationalist forces of Ho Chi Minh at Dien Bien Phu in the highlands of north-west Vietnam.
The battle of Dien Bien Phu is today overshadowed by the later involvement of the Americans in Vietnam in the 1960s. But for eight years between 1946 and 1954 the French had fought their own bloody war to hold on to their Empire in the Far East. After the seizure of power by the Communists in China in 1949, this colonial conflict had become a key battleground of the Cold War. The Chinese provided the Vietnamese with arms and supplies while most of the costs of the French war effort were borne by America. But it was French soldiers who were fighting and dying. By 1954, French forces in Indochina totalled over 55,000.
At the end of 1953, French commander in chief Gen Navarre had decided to set up a fortified garrison in the valley of Dien Bien Phu, in the highlands about 280 miles from the northern capital of Hanoi. The valley was surrounded by rings of forested hills and mountains. The position was defensible providing the French could hold on to the inner hills and keep their position supplied through the airstrip. What they underestimated was the capacity of the Vietnamese to amass artillery behind the hills. This equipment was transported by tens of thousands of labourers - many of them women and children - carrying material hundreds of miles through the jungle day and night. On 13 March the Vietnamese unleashed a massive barrage of artillery and within two days two of the surrounding hills had been taken, and the airstrip was no longer usable. The French defenders were now cut off and the noose tightened around them.
It was this critical situation which led the French to appeal in desperation for US help. The most hawkish on the American aide were Vice-President Richard Nixon, who had no political power, and Admiral Radford, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Also quite hawkish was the US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who was obsessed by the crusade against Communism. More reserved was President Eisenhower who nonetheless gave a press conference in early April where he proclaimed the infamous "domino theory" about the possible spread of Communism from one country to another.
"You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly," he said. "So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences."
Saturday 3 April 1954 has gone down in American history as "the day we didn't go to war". On that day Dulles met Congressional leaders who were adamant they would not support any military intervention unless Britain was also involved. Eisenhower sent a letter to the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill warning of the consequences for the West if Dien Bien Phu fell. It was around this time, at a meeting in Paris, that Dulles supposedly made his astonishing offer to the French of tactical nuclear weapons.
In fact, Dulles was never authorised to make such an offer and there is no hard evidence that he did so. It seems possible that in the febrile atmosphere of those days the panic-stricken French may simply have misunderstood him. Or his words may have got lost in translation.
"He didn't really offer. He made a suggestion and asked a question. He uttered the two fatal words 'nuclear bomb'," Maurice Schumann, a former foreign minister, said before his death in 1998. "Bidault immediately reacted as if he didn't take this offer seriously."
According to Professor Fred Logevall of Cornell University, Dulles "at least talked in very general terms about the possibility, what did the French think about potentially using two or three tactical nuclear weapons against these enemy positions".
Bidault declined, he says, "because he knew… that if this killed a lot of Viet Minh troops then it would also basically destroy the garrison itself".
In the end, there was no American intervention of any kind, as the British refused to go along with it.
The last weeks of the battle of Dien Bien Phu were atrociously gruelling. The ground turned to mud once the monsoon began, and men clung to craters and ditches in conditions reminiscent of the battle of Verdun in 1916. On 7 May 1954, after a 56-day siege, the French army surrendered. Overall on the French side there were 1,142 dead, 1,606 disappeared, 4,500 more or les badly wounded. Vietnamese casualties ran to 22,000.
In this year marked by two other major anniversaries - the centenary of the outbreak of World War One and the 70th anniversary of D-Day - we should not forget this other battle that took place 60 years ago. In the history of decolonisation it was the only time a professional European army was decisively defeated in a pitched battle. It marked the end of the French Empire in the Far East, and provided an inspiration to other anti-colonial fighters. It was no coincidence also that a few weeks later a violent rebellion broke out in French Algeria - the beginning of another bloody and traumatic war that was to last eight years. The French army held so desperately on to Algeria partly to redeem the honour it felt had been lost at Dien Bien Phu. So obsessed did the army become by this idea that in 1958 it backed a putsch against the government, which it believed was preparing what the generals condemned as a "diplomatic Dien Bien Phu". This putsch brought back to power Gen de Gaulle who set up the new presidential regime that exists in France today. So the ripples of Dien Bien Phu are still being felt.
A memorial in Dien Bien Phu commemorates the French soldiers who died there
It was also in 1954 that France began working on its own independent nuclear deterrent.
For the Vietnamese, however, Dien Bien Phu, was only the first round. The Americans, who had refused to become directly involved in 1954, were gradually sucked into war - the second Vietnam War - during the 1960s.
Listen to The Siege of Dien Bien Phu written and presented by Julian Jackson on the BBC iPlayer
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sábado, 21 de setembro de 2013
Guerra e paz na historia - Deepak Lal
The dove and the wolf
Deepak Lal
Business Standard (New Delhi), September 20. 2013
A recent meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society I organised in the Galapagos Islands on the theme of "evolution, thehuman sciences and liberty" brought together some of the world's leading neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists, geneticists and social scientists to discuss what answer recent advances in these human sciences provide to the fundamental question, "what is human nature?".
One session was on the human animal as a warrior. Richard Wrangham provided an excellent summary of evidence on the evolutionary origins of human violence following his path-breaking book (with Dale Peterson), Demonic Males. He argued persuasively that war is part of our evolutionary psychology (particularly in males). His Harvard colleague Steven Pinker accepts this but argues that because of a complex set of social and cultural factors war may now be defunct. This was the view I disputed in my own paper.
I read Professor Pinker's monumental door-stopper of a book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, in my study in New Delhi in May. I could not help thinking that I was about six minutes flying time away from nuclear missiles from Pakistan to my west, and that to my north the heavily armed People's Liberation Army had just made an illegal incursion 12 miles into Ladakh. This made it difficult to believe that Professor Pinker's "better angels" were about to take over the world.
My own view of human nature was heavily influenced by David Hume, who wrote: "There is some benevolence, however small ... some particle of the dove kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf and serpent." From Professor Pinker's comprehensive survey of the mounting neuroscientific and socio-biological evidence, it is clear that the genial Scot, sitting in his study contemplating his fellow creatures, had got it right.
Where Professor Pinker has gone wrong is in attributing what he terms the Long Peace to the various social processes he discusses at length; they have allowed the dove to tame the wolf and the serpent in at least the developed countries. In my own book on war and peace, In Praise of Empires, I developed a framework that emphasised the importance of empires (or global hegemons) - the equivalent of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan in international affairs - in maintaining global order and thereby peace in an otherwise anarchical society. I surveyed the rise and fall of empires since antiquity to show how they provided the order needed to pursue the elementary and universal goals that David Hume maintained any society must pursue for any social life to exist. These are: first, to secure life against violence that leads to death or bodily harm; second, that promises once made are kept; third, the stabilisation of possessions through rules of property. Through their Pax, these empires maintained peace and prosperity, and their decline and fall led to both domestic disorder and the disintegration of the enlarged economic spaces they had created.
True, these ancient empires did not seek to end various barbarous violent practices that were very much part of their "cosmological beliefs", and Professor Pinker is right in stating the importance of what he calls the "civilising and humanitarian processes", whose evolution I also traced in myUnintended Consequences. But nevertheless these have been insufficient to tame the instincts of the wolf in all civilisations, and the role of empires in maintaining peace and prosperity in their domains cannot be gainsaid.
Thus, despite its abhorrent cultural practices by the standard of contemporary norms, the Roman Empire had, through its Pax Romana, brought unprecedented peace and prosperity to the inhabitants of the Mediterranean littoral for nearly a millennium. When it collapsed, the ensuing disorder and the destruction of the imperial economic space led to a marked fall in the standards of living of the common people inhabiting the fallen empires.
One session was on the human animal as a warrior. Richard Wrangham provided an excellent summary of evidence on the evolutionary origins of human violence following his path-breaking book (with Dale Peterson), Demonic Males. He argued persuasively that war is part of our evolutionary psychology (particularly in males). His Harvard colleague Steven Pinker accepts this but argues that because of a complex set of social and cultural factors war may now be defunct. This was the view I disputed in my own paper.
I read Professor Pinker's monumental door-stopper of a book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, in my study in New Delhi in May. I could not help thinking that I was about six minutes flying time away from nuclear missiles from Pakistan to my west, and that to my north the heavily armed People's Liberation Army had just made an illegal incursion 12 miles into Ladakh. This made it difficult to believe that Professor Pinker's "better angels" were about to take over the world.
My own view of human nature was heavily influenced by David Hume, who wrote: "There is some benevolence, however small ... some particle of the dove kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf and serpent." From Professor Pinker's comprehensive survey of the mounting neuroscientific and socio-biological evidence, it is clear that the genial Scot, sitting in his study contemplating his fellow creatures, had got it right.
Where Professor Pinker has gone wrong is in attributing what he terms the Long Peace to the various social processes he discusses at length; they have allowed the dove to tame the wolf and the serpent in at least the developed countries. In my own book on war and peace, In Praise of Empires, I developed a framework that emphasised the importance of empires (or global hegemons) - the equivalent of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan in international affairs - in maintaining global order and thereby peace in an otherwise anarchical society. I surveyed the rise and fall of empires since antiquity to show how they provided the order needed to pursue the elementary and universal goals that David Hume maintained any society must pursue for any social life to exist. These are: first, to secure life against violence that leads to death or bodily harm; second, that promises once made are kept; third, the stabilisation of possessions through rules of property. Through their Pax, these empires maintained peace and prosperity, and their decline and fall led to both domestic disorder and the disintegration of the enlarged economic spaces they had created.
True, these ancient empires did not seek to end various barbarous violent practices that were very much part of their "cosmological beliefs", and Professor Pinker is right in stating the importance of what he calls the "civilising and humanitarian processes", whose evolution I also traced in myUnintended Consequences. But nevertheless these have been insufficient to tame the instincts of the wolf in all civilisations, and the role of empires in maintaining peace and prosperity in their domains cannot be gainsaid.
Thus, despite its abhorrent cultural practices by the standard of contemporary norms, the Roman Empire had, through its Pax Romana, brought unprecedented peace and prosperity to the inhabitants of the Mediterranean littoral for nearly a millennium. When it collapsed, the ensuing disorder and the destruction of the imperial economic space led to a marked fall in the standards of living of the common people inhabiting the fallen empires.
Thus, during the post-medieval period since 1500, with the consolidation of European nation-states, religious wars were fought to a stalemate. They only ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. But after a brief lull of peace, they resumed their conflicts in wars for the mastery of Europe - till, with its victory in the Napoleonic Wars, Britain established its global imperium in 1820. But by 1870 Britain's long imperial decline had begun. Challenged by the emerging great powers, Germany and the US, and temporarily Russia, the British were willing but unable to maintain their hegemony.
The US, which became a partner rather than a competitor of Britain in the First World War, thereafter turned inwards and was unwilling to take over or share Britain's imperial responsibility for maintaining global order. This led to the global disorder of the interwar years. It lasted till after the Second World War, when a duopoly of empires (the US and the Soviet Union) succeeded in maintaining some global order - with the mutual assured destruction of nuclear weapons preventing a direct war between the two superpowers, and their continuing competition being limited to proxy wars. With the implosion of the Soviet Union, the US became the sole superpower, and the era of warfare depicted in Professor Pinker's graph came to an end.
Hence, the Long Peace is the result of the empires established by Britain in the 19th century and by the US in the late 20th century. With the West again turning inwards, and the current global order being threatened by the rising power of China, there is an emerging struggle for the mastery of Asia. India is at the centre of this coming maelstrom. It cannot afford to believe that the dove in our nature has now replaced the wolf in international relations.
quinta-feira, 2 de agosto de 2012
Empires strike in the future: USA vs USA - Washington Post
U.S. model for a future war fans tensions with China and inside Pentagon
Greg Jaffe,
When President Obama called on the U.S. military to shift its focus to Asia earlier this year, Andrew Marshall, a 91-year-old futurist, had a vision of what to do.
Marshall’s small office in the Pentagon has spent the past two decades planning for a war against an angry, aggressive and heavily armed China.
No one had any idea how the war would start. But the American response, laid out in a concept that one of Marshall’s longtime proteges dubbed “Air-Sea Battle,” was clear.
Stealthy American bombers and submarines would knock out China’s long-range surveillance radar and precision missile systems located deep inside the country. The initial “blinding campaign” would be followed by a larger air and naval assault.
The concept, the details of which are classified, has angered the Chinese military and has been pilloried by some Army and Marine Corps officers as excessively expensive. Some Asia analysts worry that conventional strikes aimed at China could spark a nuclear war.
Air-Sea Battle drew little attention when U.S. troops were fighting and dying in large numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now the military’s decade of battling insurgencies is ending, defense budgets are being cut, and top military officials, ordered to pivot toward Asia, are looking to Marshall’s office for ideas.
In recent months, the Air Force and Navy have come up with more than 200 initiatives they say they need to realize Air-Sea Battle. The list emerged, in part, from war games conducted by Marshall’s office and includes new weaponry and proposals to deepen cooperation between the Navy and the Air Force.
A former nuclear strategist, Marshall has spent the past 40 years running the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, searching for potential threats to American dominance. In the process, he has built a network of allies in Congress, in the defense industry, at think tanks and at the Pentagon that amounts to a permanent Washington bureaucracy.
While Marshall’s backers praise his office as a place where officials take the long view, ignoring passing Pentagon fads, critics see a dangerous tendency toward alarmism that is exaggerating the China threat to drive up defense spending.
“The old joke about the Office of Net Assessment is that it should be called the Office of Threat Inflation,” said Barry Posen, director of the MIT Security Studies Program. “They go well beyond exploring the worst cases. . . . They convince others to act as if the worst cases are inevitable.”
Marshall dismisses criticism that his office focuses too much on China as a future enemy, saying it is the Pentagon’s job to ponder worst-case scenarios.
“We tend to look at not very happy futures,” he said in a recent interview.
China tensions
Even as it has embraced Air-Sea Battle, the Pentagon has struggled to explain it without inflaming already tense relations with China. The result has been an information vacuum that has sown confusion and controversy.
Senior Chinese military officials warn that the Pentagon’s new effort could spark an arms race.
“If the U.S. military develops Air-Sea Battle to deal with the [People’s Liberation Army], the PLA will be forced to develop anti-Air-Sea Battle,” one officer, Col. Gaoyue Fan, said last year in a debate sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a defense think tank.
Pentagon officials counter that the concept is focused solely on defeating precision missile systems.
“It’s not about a specific actor,” a senior defense official told reporters last year. “It is not about a specific regime.”
The heads of the Air Force and Navy, meanwhile, have maintained that Air-Sea Battle has applications even beyond combat. The concept could help the military reach melting ice caps in the Arctic Circle or a melted-down nuclear reactor in Japan, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, the U.S. chief of naval operations, said in May at the Brookings Institution.
At the same event, Gen. Norton Schwartz, the Air Force chief, upbraided a retired Marine colonel who asked how Air-Sea Battle might be employed in a war with China.
“This inclination to narrow down on a particular scenario is unhelpful,” Schwartz said.
Privately, senior Pentagon officials concede that Air-Sea Battle’s goal is to help U.S. forces weather an initial Chinese assault and counterattack to destroy sophisticated radar and missile systems built to keep U.S. ships away from China’s coastline.
Their concern is fueled by the steady growth in China’s defense spending, which has increased to as much as $180 billion a year, or about one-third of the Pentagon’s budget, and China’s increasingly aggressive behavior in the South China Sea.
“We want to put enough uncertainty in the minds of Chinese military planners that they would not want to take us on,” said a senior Navy official overseeing the service’s modernization efforts. “Air-Sea Battle is all about convincing the Chinese that we will win this competition.”
Like others quoted in this article, the official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.
A military tech ‘revolution’
Air-Sea Battle grew out of Marshall’s fervent belief, dating to the 1980s, that technological advancements were on the verge of ushering in a new epoch of war.
New information technology allowed militaries to fire within seconds of finding the enemy. Better precision bombs guaranteed that the Americans could hit their targets almost every time. Together these advances could give conventional bombs almost the same power as small nuclear weapons, Marshall surmised.
Marshall asked his military assistant, a bright officer with a Harvard doctorate, to draft a series of papers on the coming “revolution in military affairs.” The work captured the interest of dozens of generals and several defense secretaries.
Eventually, senior military leaders, consumed by bloody, low-tech wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, seemed to forget about Marshall’s revolution. Marshall, meanwhile, zeroed in on China as the country most likely to exploit the revolution in military affairs and supplant the United States’ position as the world’s sole superpower.
In recent years, as the growth of China’s military has outpaced most U.S. intelligence projections, interest in China as a potential rival to the United States has soared.
“In the blink of an eye, people have come to take very seriously the China threat,” said Andrew Hoehn, a senior vice president at Rand Corp. “They’ve made very rapid progress.”
Most of Marshall’s writings over the past four decades are classified. He almost never speaks in public and even in private meetings is known for his long stretches of silence.
His influence grows largely out of his study budget, which in recent years has floated between $13 million and $19 million and is frequently allocated to think tanks, defense consultants and academics with close ties to his office. More than half the money typically goes to six firms.
Among the largest recipients is the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense think tank run by retired Lt. Col. Andrew Krepinevich, the Harvard graduate who wrote the first papers for Marshall on the revolution in military affairs.
In the past 15 years, CSBA has run more than two dozen China war games for Marshall’s office and written dozens of studies. The think tank typically collects about $2.75 million to $3 million a year, about 40 percent of its annual revenue, from Marshall’s office, according to Pentagon statistics and CSBA’s most recent financial filings.
Krepinevich makes about $865,000 in salary and benefits, or almost double the compensation paid out to the heads of other nonpartisan think tanks such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Brookings Institution. CSBA said its board sets executive compensation based on a review of salaries at other organizations doing similar work.
The war games run by CSBA are set 20 years in the future and cast China as a hegemonic and aggressive enemy. Guided anti-ship missiles sink U.S. aircraft carriers and other surface ships. Simultaneous Chinese strikes destroy American air bases, making it impossible for the U.S. military to launch its fighter jets. The outnumbered American force fights back with conventional strikes on China’s mainland, knocking out long-range precision missiles and radar.
“The fundamental problem is the same one that the Soviets identified 30 years ago,” Krepinevich said in an interview. “If you can see deep and shoot deep with a high degree of accuracy, our large bases are not sanctuaries. They are targets.”
Some critics doubt that China, which owns $1.6 trillion in U.S. debt and depends heavily on the American economy, would strike U.S. forces out of the blue.
“It is absolutely fraudulent,” said Jonathan D. Pollack, a senior fellow at Brookings. “What is the imaginable context or scenario for this attack?”
Other defense analysts warn that an assault on the Chinese mainland carries potentially catastrophic risks and could quickly escalate to nuclear armageddon.
The war games elided these concerns. Instead they focused on how U.S. forces would weather the initial Chinese missile salvo and attack.
To survive, allied commanders dispersed their planes to austere airfields on the Pacific islands of Tinian and Palau. They built bomb-resistant aircraft shelters and brought in rapid runway repair kits to fix damaged airstrips.
Stealthy bombers and quiet submarines waged a counterattack. The allied approach became the basis for the Air-Sea Battle.
Think tank’s paper
Although the Pentagon has struggled to talk publicly about Air-Sea Battle, CSBA has not been similarly restrained. In 2010, it published a 125-page paper outlining how the concept could be used to fight a war with China.
The paper contains less detail than the classified Pentagon version. Shortly after its publication, U.S. allies in Asia, frustrated by the Pentagon’s silence on the subject, began looking to CSBA for answers.
“We started to get a parade of senior people, particularly from Japan, though also Taiwan and to a lesser extent China, saying, ‘So, this is what Air-Sea Battle is,’ ” Krepinevich said this year at an event at another think tank.
Soon, U.S. officials began to hear complaints.
“The PLA went nuts,” said a U.S. official who recently returned from Beijing.
Told that Air-Sea Battle was not aimed at China, one PLA general replied that the CSBA report mentioned the PLA 190 times, the official said. (The actual count is closer to 400.)
Inside the Pentagon, the Army and Marine Corps have mounted offensives against the concept, which could lead to less spending on ground combat.
An internal assessment, prepared for the Marine Corps commandant and obtained by The Washington Post, warns that “an Air-Sea Battle-focused Navy and Air Force would be preposterously expensive to build in peace time” and would result in “incalculable human and economic destruction” if ever used in a major war with China.
The concept, however, aligns with Obama’s broader effort to shift the U.S. military’s focus toward Asia and provides a framework for preserving some of the Pentagon’s most sophisticated weapons programs, many of which have strong backing in Congress.
Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Cornyn (R-Tex.) inserted language into the 2012 Defense Authorization bill requiring the Pentagon to issue a report this year detailing its plans for implementing the concept. The legislation orders the Pentagon to explain what weapons systems it will need to carry out Air-Sea Battle, its timeline for implementing the concept and an estimate of the costs associated with it.
Lieberman and Cornyn’s staff turned to an unsurprising source when drafting the questions.
“We asked CSBA for help,” one of the staffers said. “In a lot of ways, they created it.”
Julie Tate contributed to this report.
segunda-feira, 11 de junho de 2012
Este dia na Historia: Acordo de ajuda EUA a URSS em 1942
De fato, a ajuda que os Estados Unidos deram à Grã-Bretanha, pelos land-lease agreements de agosto de 1941, junto com a declaração das "nações unidas", seguidas, pouco depois, pela ajuda que ambos os países começaram a dar à União Soviética, invadida pela Alemanha hitlerista em junho de 1941, foram essenciais, eu diria mesmo absolutamente indispensáveis para retornar o curso da guerra na Europa entre 1941 e 1942. Sem essa ajuda, a Grã-Bretanha talvez tivesse sucumbido ao poder nazista e a URSS também talvez tivesse deixado de existir, em face da mais formidável máquina de guerra criada pelo homem até aquele instante.
A URSS deve sua sobrevivência, ou seja, o regime comunista, unicamente à ajuda ocidental, sem a qual ela teria sucumbido e desaparecido nas dobras da história. Teria sido um mundo diferente, mas talvez um mundo dominado durante muito mais tempo pelo III Reich, que se teria tornado assim mestre absoluto da Eurásia, o continente duplo que domina o mundo. Mesmo os EUA teriam dificuldade em vencer alemães e japoneses sozinhos, ou levariam muito mais tempo, e a um custo humano inimaginável.
Falando em custos humanos, a única coisa, repito, a única coisa de que Stalin poderia dispor, à sua livre disposição, eram homens, que ele não hesitou em sacrificar terrivelmente. Basta ver, por exemplo, o diferencial de mortos DE GUERRA, entre a Alemanha e a URSS: 5,2 milhões, para a primeira, e 27 milhões para a segunda, de um total geral da guerra que chega a 62 milhões de mortos (dos quais "apenas" 273 mil para os EUA).
Em todo caso, esses acordos de ajuda, abaixo comentados, significaram a derrota do nazismo, em 3 anos, e a sobrevivência do comunismo soviético por mais 50 anos, ou duas gerações que tiveram de suportar um regime de escravidão humana quase tão desumana quanto o nazismo...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
U.S., Soviet Agree
Russian, Here Secretly, Maps War Action in 1942 With President
Lease Pact Signed
Provides Reciprocal Aid and Plans for a 'Better World'
U.S., Russia Agree On Actions In War
A URSS deve sua sobrevivência, ou seja, o regime comunista, unicamente à ajuda ocidental, sem a qual ela teria sucumbido e desaparecido nas dobras da história. Teria sido um mundo diferente, mas talvez um mundo dominado durante muito mais tempo pelo III Reich, que se teria tornado assim mestre absoluto da Eurásia, o continente duplo que domina o mundo. Mesmo os EUA teriam dificuldade em vencer alemães e japoneses sozinhos, ou levariam muito mais tempo, e a um custo humano inimaginável.
Falando em custos humanos, a única coisa, repito, a única coisa de que Stalin poderia dispor, à sua livre disposição, eram homens, que ele não hesitou em sacrificar terrivelmente. Basta ver, por exemplo, o diferencial de mortos DE GUERRA, entre a Alemanha e a URSS: 5,2 milhões, para a primeira, e 27 milhões para a segunda, de um total geral da guerra que chega a 62 milhões de mortos (dos quais "apenas" 273 mil para os EUA).
Em todo caso, esses acordos de ajuda, abaixo comentados, significaram a derrota do nazismo, em 3 anos, e a sobrevivência do comunismo soviético por mais 50 anos, ou duas gerações que tiveram de suportar um regime de escravidão humana quase tão desumana quanto o nazismo...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Soviet And Britain Sign War And Peace Pact; Molotoff And Roosevelt Plan For 2D Front; Army Fliers Blasted Two Fleets Off Midway
U.S., Soviet Agree
Russian, Here Secretly, Maps War Action in 1942 With President
Lease Pact Signed
Provides Reciprocal Aid and Plans for a 'Better World'
U.S., Russia Agree On Actions In War
By W.H. LAWRENCE
Special to The New York Times, June 12, 1942
Molotoff's London-U.S. Trip Was Best-Kept War Secret No Secret In Pact, British Are Told:Commons Cheers the News of Open Treaty--Agreement Is Hailed as Peace Safeguard Big Bombers Won:Routing Japanese Task Force June 4 Vital in Pacific Victory: Carriers Targets: Enemy's Invasion Ships Met and Pounded First Far West of Island 'Gas' Ration Unit Is Doubled To Tide Over 2 Weeks More:Emergency Period Is Extended From June 30 to July 15--OPA Says Time Is Needed to Train for Permanent Plan: Jones Beach Buses Not Curbed by ODT House Committee Raises Travel Tax:Doubles Transport Impost, Adds to Cigarette and Cigar Levies--125 Million Gained Young Deck Crew Destroys U-Boat:Freighter Gets 3d, Perhaps 5th, Raider Sunk in Caribbean--2 Allied Vessels Lost Bir Hacheim Falls to Axis in Libya; Free French Retire After 16 Days If in Doubt, Put It Out War News Summarized |
Washington, Friday, June 12--The United States and Russia have reached a full understanding on the "urgent tasks of creating a second front in Europe in 1942," and have signed a master lease-lend agreement providing reciprocal defense aid and designed to create "a new and better world" after victory is won, it was announced officially yesterday.
A White House announcement at midday was the first public revelation that Vyacheslaff M. Molotoff, Soviet Foreign Commissar, had flown secretly to the United States and in several conferences with President Roosevelt and other political and military leaders of the United States Government between May 29 and June 4 had achieved unity on these three main propositions:
1. The urgent tasks of creating a second front in Europe in 1942.
2. Measures for increasing and speeding up the supplies of planes, tanks and other kinds of war materials from the United States to the Soviet Union.
3. Fundamental problems of cooperation of the Soviet Union and the United States in safeguarding peace and security to the freedom-loving peoples after the war.
"Link in Solidarity Chain"
At midnight the State Department announced that Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Maxim Litvinoff, the Soviet Ambassador, had signed a master lease-lend pact, which was described as "an additional link in the chain of solidarity being forged by the United Nations in their twofold task of prosecuting the war against aggression to a successful conclusion and of creating a new and better world."
"The agreement reaffirms this country's determination to continue to supply in ever- increasing amounts aid to the Soviet Union in the war against the common enemy," the State Department announcement said. "The agreement also provides for such reciprocal aid as the Soviet Union may be in a position to supply. But no matter how great this aid may prove to be, it will be small in comparison with the magnificent contribution of the Soviet Union's armed forces to the defeat of the common enemy."
Washington's two agreements with the Soviet Union were disclosed shortly after similar pacts between the Russians and the British had been announced to the House of Commons by Anthony Eden, British Foreign Secretary, with whom Mr. Molotoff had negotiated secretly before visiting the United States. The Anglo-Soviet agreements included an identical reference to the establishment of a second front and a twenty-year mutual assistance pact against "Hitlerite Germany."
Japan Not Mentioned
Neither announcement in Washington mentioned discussions of Russian cooperation in the war of the United States and Great Britain against Japan, with whom Soviet Russia remains at peace, but it was pointed out that no announcement would have been likely under the circumstances even if discussions had taken place. But the master lease-lend agreement, making no mention of the fact that Russia was warring against the Germans and not the Japanese, provided that "the government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics will continue to contribute to the defense of the United States of America and the strengthening thereof and will provide such articles, services, facilities or information as it may be in a position to supply."
Neither Washington nor London indicated just how soon an American-British expeditionary force could be expected to make a landing on the Nazi-held Continent of Europe to recapture lost territory from the Germans and provide a "diversion front" to which German troops, now pressing against Russia, would have to be sent.
The White House also said that the President and Mr. Molotoff had agreed on measures "for increasing and speeding up the supplies of planes, tanks and other kinds of war materials from the United States to Soviet Russia." It was learned on good authority that Mr. Molotoff carried back to Moscow a new schedule of American lease-lend shipments, replacing the Moscow protocol, which expires June 30.
It was understood that the new aid schedule placed greater emphasis on finished military mat & eacute;riel, especially tanks and bombers, than the agreement negotiated in October by the Harriman-Beaverbrook mission, which provided primarily for supplies of raw materials.
Looking toward victory over the Axis, the President and Mr. Molotoff also found unity on "the fundamental problems of cooperation of the Soviet Union and the United States in safeguarding peace and security to the freedom-loving peoples after the war."
An important feature of the master lease-lend pact was its acceptance of Secretary Hull's battle for the principle of free world trade as an important means of preventing future wars.
Article VII of the Russian-American agreement, substantially like that signed earlier by Great Britain and China, was as follows:
"In the final determination of the benefits to be provided to the United States of America by the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in return for aid furnished under the Act of Congress of March 11, 1941, the terms and conditions thereof shall be such as not to burden commerce between the two countries, but to promote mutually advantageous economic relations between them and the betterment of world-wide economic relations.
"To that end they shall include provision for agreed action by the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, open to participation by all other countries of like mind, directed to the expansion, by appropriate international and domestic measures of production, employment and the exchange and consumption of goods, which are the material foundations of the liberty and welfare of all peoples; to the elimination of all forms of discriminatory treatment in international commerce and to the reduction of tariffs and other trade barriers; and, in general, to the attainment of all the economic objectives set forth in the Joint Declaration made on Aug. 14, 1941, by the President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the basic principles of which were adhered to by the government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Sept. 24, 1941.
"At an early convenient date conversations shall be begun between the two governments with a view to determining, in the light of governing economic conditions, the best means of attaining the above-stated objectives by their own agreed action and of seeking the agreed action of other like-minded governments."
Other Provisions of Pact
Other provisions of the lease-lend pact were:
1. The United States will continue to supply the Soviet Union with war articles, war services and war information authorized by the President.
2. The Soviet Government will reciprocate with as much aid "as it may be in a position to supply."
3. The Soviet Government will not transfer lease-lend aid to another country or permit its use by non-Soviet officials or employes without the permission of the President.
4. The Soviet Government will pay American patent holders when asked to do so by the President.
5. The Soviet Government will return to the United States lease-lend military equipment desired by this government after the war.
6. The Soviet Government will receive credit for the war aid it has given this government in determining after the war the benefits it is to provide the United States for lease-lend held.
7. The agreement supersedes all previous lease-lend agreements between the two countries.
Nye Cool to Second Front
Congressional reaction to the agreement between the United States Government and Russia generally was good, although the pre-war leaders in opposition to the President's foreign policy urged caution in opening a second front in Europe, and one of them, Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, chided "others of our allies" for not opening "a second front before this time." Senator Nye added that "we've got a front or two of our own that we are needing to devote ourselves to most energetically."
Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, another opponent of the President, said he hoped that "we don't attempt an invasion until we're prepared," but he was in favor of doing "everything we can to get war tools and tanks to Russia now that she's our ally in this war."
Senator Tom Connally of Texas, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who was among the few officials invited to meet with Mr. Molotoff while he was here, spoke approvingly of the agreement, declaring that the United States must give Russia "every possible aid and assistance in defeating the enemy." He said that Mr. Molotoff's visit here "was very helpful in creating unity between our countries in the prosecution of the war." He said the closest contact and understanding in regard to military operations, "including the ultimate establishment of a western front," was of vast importance to both countries.
Tydings for Project
Other comment included:
Senator Millard E. Tydings of Maryland: "If the military people deem it wise, it certainly looks sensible to me."
Senator William H. Smathers of New Jersey: "I think a second front ought to be opened immediately--the quicker the better. I don't see any sense in having our troops and the British sitting on the British Isles. I'm in favor of opening a second front as soon as the military experts think it advisable."
Representative Carl Vinson of Georgia, chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee: "This is good news; it is to be earnestly hoped that the United Nations can at the earliest possible date open a second front in Europe. I have been of the opinion for some time that the combined resources of England and the United States should be hurled against the Axis by opening up a second front. It is imperative that this be done immediately, for I am of the opinion it will insure victory to the Allied nations."
Senator Lister Hill of Alabama: "The most momentous and critical place in the whole world battle line is the war on the Russian front. The Molotoff agreement is extremely gratifying."
Senator Carl A. Hatch of New Mexico: "I am in hearty agreement with supplying all the equipment we can to our Allies. I want a second front opened just as quickly as possible, consonant with military preparedness."
Wheeler Asks About Peace
Senator Wheeler: "I feel we should do everything we can to get war tools and tanks to Russia now that she's our ally in this war. I am glad to note that the President and Mr. Molotoff have come to an understanding in helping to maintain peace after the war. What the people would be interested to know is what steps, if any, have been taken to bring about peace. I hope the President and Mr. Molotoff come to an agreement similar to the one that Russia and England entered into--that Russia was not asking territorial aggrandizement and would not in the future interfere with the internal affairs of other nations, as Eden says. I hope that the United States will not attempt an unsound invasion of Europe. I hope we don't attempt an invasion until we're fully prepared. The people of the United States want no Dunkerques."
Senator Richard B. Russell of Georgia: "A second front is going to have to come to win the war. We should open it as soon as it is possible from a military point of view--without the possibility of a second Dunkerque."
domingo, 29 de abril de 2012
Obama: um belicoso Premio Nobel da Paz - Peter Bergen (NYT)
Warrior in Chief
By PETER L. BERGEN
THE president who won the Nobel Peace Prize less than nine months after his inauguration has turned out to be one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades.
Liberals helped to elect Barack Obama in part because of his opposition to the Iraq war, and probably don’t celebrate all of the president’s many military accomplishments. But they are sizable.
Mr. Obama decimated Al Qaeda’s leadership. He overthrew the Libyan dictator. He ramped up drone attacks in Pakistan, waged effective covert wars in Yemen and Somalia and authorized a threefold increase in the number of American troops in Afghanistan. He became the first president to authorize the assassination of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and played an operational role in Al Qaeda, and was killed in an American drone strike in Yemen. And, of course, Mr. Obama ordered and oversaw the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
Ironically, the president used the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech as an occasion to articulate his philosophy of war. He made it very clear that his opposition to the Iraq war didn’t mean that he embraced pacifism — not at all.
“I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people,” the president told the Nobel committee — and the world. “For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man, and the limits of reason.”
If those on the left were listening, they didn’t seem to care. The left, which had loudly condemned George W. Bush for waterboarding and due process violations at Guantánamo, was relatively quiet when the Obama administration, acting as judge and executioner, ordered more than 250 drone strikes in Pakistan since 2009, during which at least 1,400 lives were lost.
Mr. Obama’s readiness to use force — and his military record — have won him little support from the right. Despite countervailing evidence, most conservatives view the president as some kind of peacenik. From both the right and left, there has been a continuing, dramatic cognitive disconnect between Mr. Obama’s record and the public perception of his leadership: despite his demonstrated willingness to use force, neither side regards him as the warrior president he is.
Mr. Obama had firsthand experience of military efficacy and precision early in his presidency. Three months after his inauguration, Somali pirates held Richard Phillips, the American captain of the Maersk Alabama, hostage in the Indian Ocean. Authorized to use deadly force if Captain Phillips’s life was in danger, Navy SEALs parachuted to a nearby warship, and three sharpshooters, firing at night from a distance of 100 feet, killed the pirates without harming Captain Phillips.
“GREAT job,” Mr. Obama told William H. McRaven, the then vice admiral who oversaw the daring rescue mission and later the Bin Laden operation in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The SEAL rescue was the president’s first high-stakes decision involving the secretive counterterrorism units. But he would rely increasingly upon their capacities in the coming years.
Soon after Mr. Obama took office he reframed the fight against terrorism. Liberals wanted to cast anti-terrorism efforts in terms of global law enforcement — rather than war. The president didn’t choose this path and instead declared “war against Al Qaeda and its allies.” In switching rhetorical gears, Mr. Obama abandoned Mr. Bush’s vague and open-ended fight against terrorism in favor of a war with particular, violent jihadists.
The rhetorical shift had dramatic — non-rhetorical — consequences. Compare Mr. Obama’s use of drone strikes with that of his predecessor. During the Bush administration, there was an American drone attack in Pakistan every 43 days; during the first two years of the Obama administration, there was a drone strike there every four days. And two years into his presidency, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning president was engaged in conflicts in six Muslim countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Libya. The man who went to Washington as an “antiwar” president was more Teddy Roosevelt than Jimmy Carter.
Consider the comparative speed with which Mr. Obama and his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, opted for military intervention in various conflicts. Hesitant, perhaps, because of the Black Hawk Down disaster in Somalia in 1993, Mr. Clinton did nothing to stop what, at least by 1994, was evidently a genocidal campaign in Rwanda. And Bosnia was on the verge of genocidal collapse before Mr. Clinton decided — after two years of dithering — to intervene in that troubled area in the mid-1990s. In contrast, it took Mr. Obama only a few weeks to act in Libya in the spring of 2011 when Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi threatened to massacre large portions of the Libyan population. Mr. Obama went to the United Nations and NATO and set in motion the military campaign — roundly criticized by the left and the right — that toppled the Libyan dictator.
None of this should have surprised anyone who had paid close attention to what Mr. Obama said about the use of force during his presidential campaign. In an August 2007 speech on national security, he put the nation — and the world — on alert: “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will,” he said, referring to Pervez Musharraf, then president of Pakistan. He added, “I will not hesitate to use military force to take out terrorists who pose a direct threat to America.”
That’s about as clear a statement as can be. But Republicans and Democrats blasted Mr. Obama with equal intensity for suggesting that he would authorize unilateral military action in Pakistan to kill Bin Laden or other Al Qaeda leaders.
Hillary Rodham Clinton, then a Democratic rival for the presidential nomination, said, “I think it is a very big mistake to telegraph that.” Mitt Romney, vying for the Republican nomination, accused Mr. Obama of being a “Dr. Strangelove” who is “going to bomb our allies.” John McCain piled on: “Will we risk the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate who once suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan?”
Once in office, Mr. Obama signed off on a large increase in the number of C.I.A. officers on the ground in Pakistan and an intensified campaign of drone warfare there; he also embraced the use of drones or covert military units in places like Syria and Yemen, where the United States was not engaged in traditional land warfare. (Mr. Bush, who first deployed C.I.A.-directed drones, did not do so on the scale that Mr. Obama did; and Mr. Obama, of course, had the benefit of significantly improved, more precise, drone technology.)
Nothing dramatizes Mr. Obama’s willingness to use hard power so well as his decision to send Navy SEAL Team 6 to Abbottabad, to take out Bin Laden. Had this risky operation failed, it would most likely have severely damaged Mr. Obama’s presidency — and legacy.
Mr. Obama’s advisers worried that a botched raid would disturb — or destroy — the United States-Pakistan relationship, which would make the war in Afghanistan more difficult to wage since so much American matériel had to travel through Pakistani airspace or ground routes.
The risks were enormous. A helicopter-borne assault could easily turn into a replay of the debacle in the Iranian desert in 1980, when Mr. Carter authorized a mission to release the American hostages in Tehran that ended with eight American servicemen dead and zero hostages freed.
SOME of Mr. Obama’s top advisers worried that the intelligence suggesting that Bin Laden was in the Abbottabad compound was circumstantial and much too flimsy to justify the risks involved. The deputy C.I.A. director, Michael J. Morell, had told the president that in terms of available data points, “the circumstantial evidence of Iraq having W.M.D. was actually stronger than evidence that Bin Laden was living in the Abbottabad compound.”
At the final National Security Council meeting to consider options connected to Bin Laden’s possible presence in the Abbottabad compound, Mr. Obama gave each of his advisers an opportunity to speak. When the president asked, “Where are you on this? What do you think?” so many officials prefaced their views by saying, “Mr. President, this is a very hard call,” that laughter erupted, providing a few moments of levity in the otherwise tense, two-hour meeting.
Asked his view, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said, “Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go.”
For the president, however, the potential rewards clearly outweighed all risk involved. “Even though I thought it was only 50-50 that Bin Laden was there, I thought it was worth us taking a shot,” he said. “And I said to myself that if we have a good chance of not completely defeating but badly disabling Al Qaeda, then it was worth both the political risks as well as the risks to our men.”
The following morning, on Friday, April 29, at 8:20 a.m. in the White House Diplomatic Reception Room, Mr. Obama gathered his key national security advisers in a semicircle around him and told them simply, “It’s a go.”
Three days later Bin Laden was dead.
The Bin Laden mission will surely resurface in the coming election; the campaign has already produced a 17-minute documentary that showcases the raid. This, combined with Mr. Obama’s record of military accomplishment, will make it hard for Mitt Romney to convince voters that Mr. Obama is a typical, weak-on-national-security Democrat. And, if Mr. Romney tries to portray Mr. Obama this way, he will very likely trap himself into calling for a war with Iran, which many Americans oppose.
Mr. Obama plans to be in Chicago for the NATO summit meeting in late May, just as the election campaign heats up. He’ll arrive knowing that the United States and Afghanistan have already agreed to a long-term strategic partnership that is likely to involve thousands of American soldiers in Afghanistan, in advisory roles, after combat operations end in 2014. (The details of the agreement are still being negotiated.) This should inoculate the president from would-be Romney charges that he is “abandoning” Afghanistan.
None of this suggests that Mr. Obama is trigger-happy or that, when considering the use of force, he is more likely to trust his gut than counsel provided during structured, often lengthy, deliberations with his National Security Council and other advisers. In instances in which the risks seem too great (military action against Iran) or the payoff too murky (some form of military intervention in Syria), Mr. Obama has repeatedly held America’s fire.
This said, it is clear that he has completely shaken the “Vietnam syndrome” that provided a lens through which a generation of Democratic leaders viewed military action. Still, the American public and chattering classes continue to regard the president as a thinker, not an actor; a negotiator, not a fighter.
What accounts for the strange, persistent cognitive dissonance about this president and his relation to military force? Does it stem from the campaign in which Mrs. Clinton repeatedly critiqued Mr. Obama for his stated willingness to negotiate with Iran and Cuba? Or is it because he can never quite shake the deliberative tone and mien of the constitutional law professor that he once was? Or because of his early opposition to the Iraq war? Whatever the causes, the president has embraced SEAL Team 6 rather than Code Pink, yet many continue to see him as the negotiator in chief rather than the warrior in chief that he actually is.
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