Putting the Russian invasion into context

I wasn't going to belabor the points I made in "Russia moves into Ukraine" and "GOPers, shut up about Ukraine", but aside from John McCain's belated admission that U.S. military intervention would be a bad idea, Republicans still seem obsessed with taking advantage of the situation to (fail to) score political points. Lindsey Graham, for instance, is still ringing the George W. Bush Bell of Machismo, tweeting, "Putin basically came to the conclusion after Benghazi, Syria, Egypt - everything Obama has been engaged in - he's a weak indecisive leader". Another tweet defies any semblance of logic: "It started with Benghazi. When you kill Americans and nobody pays a price, you invite this type of aggression". Ted Cruz has a serious challenger for the post of "Senate's resident intestinal blockage".

In the admittedly faint hope of countering Republican stupidity, let me point you at an insightful essay in The Atlantic by Peter Beinart, "No, American Weakness Didn't Encourage Putin to Invade Ukraine". It provides historical perspective that is badly needed in order to understand Putin (and Russian leadership in general) as more than a simple power-hungry thug.

You really, really, really should read the whole thing. It's not that long. But if you need the thesis, here it is in Beinart's own words:

Geopolitically and ideologically, the West’s frontier has moved further east than almost anyone could have imagined a couple of decades ago. The bad news is that it has left the countries just beyond that frontier, the ones most eager to be connected to the West, terribly vulnerable. During the Cold War, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia shared that tragic fate. Today, Georgia and Ukraine do.

Republicans treat the invasion of Ukraine as if it were a point scored in a debate against the U.S. by Russia. Their attitude not only trivializes a very serious incident, but betrays a fundamental small-mindedness about foreign policy. Beinart reminds us that where we are today represents a huge victory for the West. Even if Ukraine is drawn back tightly into Russia's orbit, the U.S. and its Cold War allies will still be very much on the "profit" side of the geopolitical ledger, if you must view things from that standpoint. Republicans shooting off their mouths about "Obama's weakness" having led to the invasion willfully ignore history. They're not just petty, but stupid.

This isn't to excuse Russia. It wasn't entitled to hold the independent states that it swallowed into the Soviet Union, or the independent states it coerced into the Warsaw Pact. Russia under Stalin and his successors created the unfriendly attitude on the part of the non-Russian populations, causing them to race into Western Europe's (and America's) arms as soon as the Russians couldn't afford to intimidate them any more. The invasion of Ukraine was immoral and unjustifiable, and I hope the Ukrainians are able to achieve their formal independence from Russia. Even better, I hope the Russians can someday get over their wounded pride, their paranoia, their chauvinism and their dreams of domination so that they won't commit acts of aggression like this any more.

We mustn't lose ourselves in the delusion that Russia's invasion of the Crimea is all about us. This misses not just Russia's and Ukraine's messy entangled history, but Russia's current strategic concerns. So Republicans, stop trying to score cheap debating points. Grow up and help the administration to address the problem.

GOPers, shut up about Ukraine

Lindsey Graham, John McCain and Marco Rubio have all shot off their mouths about the Ukraine situation.

Graham: "Every time the president goes on national television and threatens Putin or anyone like Putin, everybody's eyes roll, including mine. We have a weak and indecisive president that invites aggression. President Obama needs to do something."

Yeah, because Russia would never have invaded a nation on its border whose leader was just deposed and which was on the verge of establishing closer ties to Europe (and which, in the past, has made noises about wanting to join NATO) if Obama hadn't made a weak-tea threat against Putin.

McCain:

Putin has made it clear many times he wants to restore the role of Russia, that means the near abroad ... and Ukraine is the crown jewel of that. So when Putin sees the President of the United States say, "We're going to act if they cross a red line" and we don't, and when he sees the President of the United States saying, "Tell Vladimir that when I'm reelected I'm going to be more flexible", when we are pushing the "reset" button, I think that Vladimir Putin, being the old KGB apparatchik that he is, does not have a belief that the penalty for this behavior will be very severe.

Earlier in this interview McCain also mentioned Putin taking advantage of what McCain called "the decline of the United States", demonstrated by, among other things, American reaction to Russian aggression against Georgia. What McCain left out is that the Georgian crisis occurred in 2008 on George W. Bush's watch.

In any case, McCain, like Graham, is hopelessly hung up on so-called perceptions of American weakness and how those perceptions govern world affairs. This perception of American decline, and the panic that arises from it, makes us a more dangerous nation as it encourages our elected leaders to see menace in every shadow. Ironically, it's also exactly the sort of wounded pride that fuels Russian nationalism.

Like many hawkish conservatives, McCain can't imagine that stuff happens in the world that has no relationship to the U.S. Putin didn't care what Bush thought in 2008 and he doesn't care (except for propaganda purposes) what Obama thinks now. Putin and the Russian government perceived Georgian unrest to be problematic for Russia in 2008 and they perceive Ukrainian unrest to be problematic for Russia today.

Then there was this McCainism in Time before Russian troops entered Crimea:

In response to reports of a Russian takeover in parts of Crimea, Arizona Senator John McCain said on Friday, “We are all Ukrainians.”...

Um, no we're not, John. Nor are we all Ugandans in spite of that nation's horrible new antigay law, nor Venezualans in spite of that nation's unrest against its elected leader, nor Syrians in spite of the horrific massacres in its civil war, nor ...

Rubio: "We know that the Russians have basically violated every major treaty they’ve ever entered into. We’ve seen how they’ve basically lied. Let’s call it what it is. They are lying and this government is a government of liars, the Russian government."

And we all know Russia's the only nation that has ever lied and broken a treaty. You should read a history book or two, Senator.

What these politicians' statements have in common are bellicosity and emptyheadedness. Even considering that these statements are really mile markers for the 2014 and 2016 elections, the impression they leave is just ... sad.

GOPers, do us all a favor: just shut up. I don't think you're morons ... but you sure as hell sound like that on Ukraine.

The West misled Ukraine

Salon's Patrick Smith has a sadly plausible take on the West's role in creating the current Ukraine situation. The U.S., and to some extent the E.U., indulged a reckless and irresponsible desire to play real-life Risk, to try to corral one more nation into the "capitalist democracy" column.

Having induced a convulsion to shake a nation loose, neither seems willing now to see through the undertaking. One suspects they recognized they had taken on more than they could manage the minute they got the prize. From the present vantage point, it looks as if Ukraine was never about Ukraine for the West, but about biting Putin on his backside.

One of Smith's most damning pieces of evidence is a quotation from a New York Times piece:

Turned off by what he saw as Mr. Bush’s crusading streak … Mr. Obama, aides said, was wary of being proactive in trying to change other societies, convinced that being too public would make the United States the issue and risk provoking a backlash. The difference, aides said, was not the goal but the methods of achieving it.

The goal didn't change. Many of us who voted for Obama in 2008 didn't think he could achieve anything like the unrealistic expectations his most starry-eyed supporters had for him, but we assumed that he at least didn't harbor the same delusion of changing the world that George W. Bush did. One didn't have to be as coldly practical as Henry Kissinger to think that the U.S.'s foreign policy badly needed a renewed emphasis on recognizing how complex the world is and how limited the U.S.'s power to change things really is. Moreover, as Iraq should have taught us in a punishingly blunt way, reckless change can bring disastrous consequences.

If Smith is right — and as I said, his take is uncomfortably persuasive — Barack Obama's exceedingly mixed foreign policy record isn't the result of naivete, as some of his detractors claim. To the contrary, his record is the result of the same inexplicable desire to make an idealized world as his predecessor. Indeed, to some degree Obama shares the same zeal for evangelizing democracy as virtually all of his predecessors going back to Woodrow Wilson.

I think that if people are free to choose how they govern themselves, that's a good thing. As such, democracy in the abstract is a good thing. However, democracy as enjoyed by many Western nations requires a citizenry that knows what to do with it and how to hold onto it. The people of a country have to be ready for it. As disingenuous as China's claims of a "Chinese form" of democracy are (the Chinese Communist Party obviously has a vested interest in creating the appearance of democratic rule without actually making itself vulnerable to genuine political challenges), it's true that cultures have to find their own way to self-governance.

Yet if Smith is right, President Obama is as ignorant of — or more likely, as impatient with — that indisputable truth as most of his predecessors going back a full century.

If you're cynical you can chalk up all our presidents' zeal for nation-building (of other people's nations) to the overweening influence of big business. Major corporations have a long track record of insinuating themselves into newborn nations and it's easy to see why they'd like the U.S. Army to make the job easier. Pressure from big business seems more plausible as a driver of (dumb) U.S. foreign policy than a president's own supremely naive zeal for democracy.

Smith convincingly makes out the Ukrainians as the latest victims of Western duplicity — a desire for ideological victory without a realistic road map, and at heart without the will, to make it happen.

Russia moves into Ukraine

Per the New York Times:

As Russian armed forces effectively seized control of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula on Saturday, the Russian Parliament granted President Vladimir V. Putin the authority he sought to use military force in response to the deepening instability in Ukraine.

Raise your hand if you're surprised.

Russia has an important military base on the Black Sea in Crimea. Much of the population in eastern Ukraine is pro-Russian (though hardly all; Ukrainian and Russian sympathizers are much more intermingled throughout the country than popular accounts have suggested). Russia historically has regarded Ukraine and other bordering republics as vital to its security. Ardent Russian nationalists, like nationalists everywhere, want their country to flex its muscles on the world stage, and such nationalists are a vital domestic constituency for Putin. No doubt there are Russian military and political leaders who worry about the kind of unrest in Ukraine (and Chechnya, and Georgia, and ...) spreading to Russia if left unchecked; Putin himself is probably one of them.

Those are the pros I can think of off the top of my head. The cons? Well, let's see ... the afterglow from the Olympics wouldn't have lasted forever anyway; the NATO countries, individually and through the alliance itself, have absolutely no appetite for war and everybody knows it; Russia's seat on the U.N. Security Council ensures that no larger international response will be forthcoming; the only other great power, China, probably sympathizes with Russia, having done exactly this sort of thing in the past (Tibet, anyone?); and as the Times article points out, nobody has significant economic or political leverage over Russia anyway. Hell, Europe gets much of its natural gas from Russia.

Lots of pros, no cons. Russia's intervention was a foregone conclusion.

From a moral standpoint it's a wash, inasmuch as the U.S. — the only country that regularly gets its knickers in a knot about morality in international relations — has no leg to stand on here. Ukraine is well within what everyone knows is Russia's sphere of influence, whether we like it or not. The U.S., having for better or worse repeatedly invoked James Monroe's doctrine to keep other countries from intervening militarily in the U.S.'s so-called back yard, is rhetorically toothless to object to other "great powers" acting in their own best interests in their neighborhood.

Indeed, it boggled my mind that President Obama warned Russia that "there will be costs" to Russian military intervention in Ukraine. It's obvious the U.S. isn't just rhetorically toothless on this score, but militarily and politically, too. What on earth moved the president to speak out like that? Did he learn nothing from the fraught brinksmanship he engaged in on Syria (where Putin, be it remembered, humiliated him)? An anodyne request not to intervene would have sufficed for domestic consumption: nobody but the most arrogant and unreconstructed neocons would have demanded more. (Well, opportunistic Congressional Republicans have demanded more, but a wise leader doesn't heed self-interested blowhards.)

What will happen to Ukraine? I'm no expert, but if I had to guess I'd say partition is the best for which Ukrainian nationalists (and Europe sympathizers) can hope. I wouldn't count on even that, though. Russia wants a whole Ukraine, and it certainly doesn't want another Europe-influenced state on its border. Ukraine's economy isn't robust enough to withstand Russian pressure. If Ukrainian leaders paid any attention to the fate of Ukraine's onetime fellow Soviet state, Georgia, in 2008, they know better than to expect Western military intervention. One way or another, Russia will squash Ukraine's hopes for squirming out of the bear's grasp.

What does the Arizona veto mean?

As you almost certainly know by now, Arizona governor Jan Brewer vetoed SB 1062, the now-notorious bill that would have offered a defense to businesses that refused to serve people if serving them would have violated the business owner's sincerely held religious beliefs. Critics portrayed the bill as giving governmental cover to religious bigotry, particularly against gays: legislators made no secret of the fact that the bill was inspired (if that's the word) by a lawsuit filed against a baker in New Mexico who refused to provide a wedding cake for a gay couple's marriage ceremony.

An insightful AP article by Bog Christie describes Gov. Brewer's meetings with interested parties prior to deciding what to do with SB 1062. The insight that caught my eye was:

Lawyers from across the political spectrum say much of the opponents' arguments that the bill opens the door to discrimination are overblown, but that has not eased the pressure on Brewer to act decisively.

I hadn't heard that business of opponents' fears being overblown, so I looked up the bill's text. (I've linked to what the Arizona legislature calls the "Senate Engrossed Version", which is different from — and to my untrained eye, slightly clearer than — what the legislature calls the introduced version.) Here's how state law would have read if the bill had been signed into law (you can find the exact changes in the online versions to which I linked):

41-1493.01. Free exercise of religion protected; definition

A. Free exercise of religion is a fundamental right that applies in this state even if laws, rules or other government actions are facially neutral.

B. Except as provided in subsection C of this section, state action shall not substantially burden a person's exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability.

C. State action may substantially burden a person's exercise of religion only if the government or nongovernmental person seeking the enforcement of state action demonstrates that application of the burden to the person's exercise of religion in this particular instance is both:

1. In furtherance of a compelling governmental interest.

2. The least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.

D. A person whose religious exercise is burdened in violation of this section may assert that violation as a claim or defense in a judicial proceeding, regardless of whether the government is a party to the proceeding.

E. A person that asserts a violation of this section must establish all of the following:

1. That the person's action or refusal to act is motivated by a religious belief.

2. That the person's religious belief is sincerely held.

3. That the state action substantially burdens the exercise of the person's religious beliefs.

F. The person asserting a claim or defense under subsection D of this section may obtain injunctive and declaratory relief. A party who prevails in any action to enforce this article against a government shall recover attorney fees and costs.

G. For the purposes of this section, the term substantially burden is intended solely to ensure that this article is not triggered by trivial, technical or de minimis infractions.

H. For the purposes of this section, "state action" means any action, except for the requirements prescribed by section 41-1493.04, by the government or the implementation or application of any law, including state and local laws, ordinances, rules, regulations and policies, whether statutory or otherwise, and whether the implementation or application is made by the government or nongovernmental persons.

One big change would have been the term "state action", which would have replaced the term "government" and which would have described a broader range of activities and actors. The biggest change, though, would have been Section E, which, along with Sections F and H, were new. And undoubtedly the thorniest part of E would have been part 2. How would you establish "sincere belief"? As far as I can tell, the bill's authors said nothing to guide implementation of the would-be law on that score. That seems problematic, to put it mildly. How are you supposed to judge sincerity? (The Great Pumpkin apparently can, but the Great Pumpkin is fictional.)

The less heralded but no less consequential change the bill would have made would have been to the definitions of "exercise of religion" and, you might be surprised to learn, "person". (I haven't quoted these definitions here but they're available at the aforementioned links.)

"Exercise of religion" would have been expanded to include "the practice or observance of religion". I don't understand the implication of this change since the existing definition seems quite broad and the proposed change looks superfluous; however, legislators don't word-smith for the fun of it so I assume I'm missing an important detail here.

The revised definition of "person" would have been quite drastic, understandable since it would have been central to the bill's purpose. Currently "person" is defined as

a religious assembly or institution

but the revised definition would have been

any individual, association, partnership, corporation, church, religious assembly or institution or other business organization.

If you've been paying attention to the challenge to the Affordable Care Act by Hobby Lobby, et al., you may have noticed the relevance of the revised definition of "person". Hobby Lobby, a privately-owned for-profit business, would have been covered by SB 1062. It wouldn't have helped Hobby Lobby vis-a-vis federal law, but as has often been observed, the states are where legislative experimentation is supposed to take place.

I think Republicans at the state level are floating bills like SB 1062 as trial balloons that can serve as model legislation for Congress. They're trying to work out the bugs in their legal language in the fifty states so they'll have solid, unchallengeable wordings by the time they recapture the Senate and with it, Congress (the House is likely to stay Republican for a while).

What far-right conservatives have discovered (not just in Arizona, but across the country) is that the concept they're pushing — expanded "religious freedom" — is all too easily painted as bigotry. They may see Gov. Brewer's veto as further proof that the devout are in need of protection from persecution, protection very much in the spirit of SB 1062.

Another thing far-right conservatives will have discovered is that money speaks louder than morality. The bill's future seemed bright before its critics started reminding business leaders of prior retrograde Arizona laws that led would-be visitors, including the NFL (for a Super Bowl, no less), to avoid the state. Cancellations and boycotts cost Arizona hundreds of millions of dollars and I'm convinced the very real threat that things could be worse this time around was the key factor in Brewer's veto.

Must business be a foe of more robust defenses for religious freedom? Only if the far right's legislative agenda continues to draw so much negative attention. It's theoretically possible for a legislature to pass controversial bills in the dead of night, figuratively speaking, but in this day and age it's unlikely that such a sweeping change as SB 1062 could be hidden. Even so, other states may not rely so much on tourist and convention dollars and their business community may be less inclined to take sides.

Still, even the neutrality of business interests hasn't been enough to salvage bills similar to Arizona's in other states. In most, maybe all, of them, the legislature itself killed the bill before it could be voted on. That, I think, is a reflection of how successfully "greater religious freedom" has been portrayed as a flimsy excuse for discrimination.

Having said all that, opponents of SB 1062 and its ilk shouldn't gloat too much over the fates of the proposed legislation so far. The modern age is moving too quickly for a substantial minority of people and their response — fundamentalism — means that the tug-of-war between greater acceptance of non-heterosexuals and a restoration of older morés will continue.

[EDIT: reworded summary of SB 1062's effects in first paragraph because the original wording was awful.]

Reich on target

Unsurprisingly, economist Robert Reich understands exactly what's wrong with our no-holds-barred, ever more efficiently-seeking-the-bottom-line economy.

Productivity keeps growing, as do corporate profits. But jobs and wages are not growing. Unless we figure out how to bring all of them back into line – or spread the gains more widely – our economy cannot generate enough demand to sustain itself, and our society cannot maintain enough cohesion to keep us together.

Unfettered capitalism is not going to be our society's savior, people. It is a blind mechanism for building wealth, but wealth alone isn't what makes a society strong. That wealth has to sustain people.

We have the wealth. What we don't have is an agreement on how that wealth should sustain people.

At some point the well-off have to understand that while they aren't responsible for giving us food and shelter, they share the country with us. If they don't want forced redistribution, they'd better help to figure out a way to make this economy work for everyone, not just themselves.

What is it about this album?

David Rice's "You ruined Neutral Milk Hotel: Nostalgia, millennials and the return of Jeff Mangum" in Salon is about whether his onetime boiling-hot obsession with Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea can survive seeing NMH's guiding spirit, Jeff Mangum, live in concert.

More so than anything else I can point to, the album holds the power of genuine mythology. It’s not just mythic in scope, theme and reputation; it feels like a body of mythic experience, animated by some original energy from before the Common Era. Whoever or whatever authored the album feels as remote in time and space as the Big Bang, and as omnipresent.

I, too, was captivated by this album when I first heard it in 1998. Yet to this day, I can't quite figure out why. Rice's explanation doesn't cut it for me, as it seems to be more about the lyrics than the music itself. The words wash over me, comprehensible (Mangum is the farthest thing from a mumbler one can imagine) yet not really delivering a message that my mind registers.

If it's purely the sound, what is it about the sound? Am I a huge horn slut (the brass is quite prominent)? Is the musical saw the equivalent of heroin? Some of the songs, like "Holland, 1945", give me the same pleasure as Phil Spector's "wall of sound" production; that could be a factor.

I don't get why this album gets under other people's skins, either. I don't go out of my way to bring this album up in conversation, but it seems like whenever I do (among musicphiles, anyway), the other person has heard it. Not just heard of it, but heard it. And the loves/not-loves ratio is high.

There hasn't been a Neutral Milk Hotel album since In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Maybe that's because Mangum doesn't quite know why it works, either.