Overcome?
Florida's legislature formally apologized Wednesday for the state’s “shameful” history of slavery, joining five other states that have expressed public regret for what Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama recently called America’s “original sin.”
It's not to say we should forget the past, but an apology for slavery is a major distraction, given the dismal state of affairs -- lost jobs, home foreclosures, struggling minority students. Rather than apologize, we ought to do more about the plight of young African-American males, who seem more prone to crime, joblessness and hopelessness.
While some legislators sound supportive of the slavery apology resolution, it can easily be exploited by those on the fringe. It can be divisive. Already I can hear the arguments: "My ancestors never owned slaves. We didn't benefit from slavery, so we have nothing to apologize for. It's time for black folks to get over it."
They might be right this time. The timing is odd. Here we have a black man getting serious consideration for the White House. If Sen. Barack Obama were to become president, imagine how that might affect the wave of apologies for slavery. His election would mean so much symbolically to black people around the world, yet he has no ancestral link to slavery.
While some deride such moves as attempts to slough off responsibility or soothe the consciences of white liberals, James Campbell, who chaired the 2003-2006 Brown University effort to examine the school's ties to the slave trade, sees efforts to re-examine history as a step towards justice, not an end unto itself. "I believe that how we see the past matters," says Campbell, "because how we understand history helps shape the present matrix of political possibility."
To Cohen, who remembers attending segregated sports games in the South as a child, an apology for slavery and its legacy isn't about pointing fingers but coming to terms with a history that for too long has been elided.
"I didn't own slaves. My parents didn't own slaves," says U.S. Rep. Stephen Cohen. "But as a government for a century, we continued to perpetuate the racism that was at the root of slavery in this country," he says.
After a century of segregation and racial violence, he says, "This is an attempt to start the healing."
Withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq would be just the beginning.
Has the war in Iraq inspired a new isolationism in the United States? "America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy," John Quincy Adams famously said. "She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." After five years of hard fighting, some Americans are looking to Adams again as a guiding light.
In the heart of the most ardent internationalist there now grows the feeling that it might just be good for Europe or South Korea to defend itself -- and for once take the flak that concrete action, not armchair moralizing, invites. Americans of every persuasion are beginning to think that a reduction in our global profile might be both profitable for ourselves and also good medicine for our friends -- like when 30-something-year-old children are finally asked to move out of the house and make their own car payments.
Still, the new isolationists and protectionists do not answer how the Westernized world would deal with China without American leadership and power. Who would contain lunatic regimes rising in South America, or Islamic terrorism, or petro-rich Middle Eastern autocracies seeking the bomb? What would be the global consequences of curtailing the lucrative, wide-open American market for India, China, and other emerging powers?
But then isolationism and protectionism never do evoke such long-term worries. They have always followed short-term outbursts of emotion that may feel good in the here and now but are sorely regretted later.
As anyone familiar with George W. Bush's 2006 State of the Union Address knows, "isolationist" means "anyone who doesn't favor repeating the enormous blunders of the past six years." In that sense, the forces of isolationism really are growing, and one could even have imagined a President Romney or a President Huckabee turning out to be a closet "isolationist" once in office. But John McCain wanted a pointless and counterproductive policy of rogue state rollback before it was cool.
U.S. soldiers emerge from cover in Iraq.
Behind the Pentagon's closed doors, U.S. military leaders told President Bush Wednesday they are worried about the Iraq war's mounting strain on troops and their families. But they indicated they'd go along with a brief halt in pulling out troops this summer. The chiefs' concern is that U.S.
Have American forces been strengthened or broken by the War on Terror campaigns?
The Small Wars Journal summarizes a Center for a New American Security and Foreign Policy survey of more than active service and retired 3,000 officers with the rank of major and above across the services, 2/3 of whom had combat experience. According to the survey's website "The nonscientific survey was administered online from December 7, 2007, to January 15, 2008."
Interestingly the biggest identified constraint in prosecuting the War on Terror isn't the size of the Armed Forces, though that is certainly one of the respondent's top priorities. It's getting good intelligence, a desire supported by the sizeable number of respondents who thought it was a good idea to "increase the number of troops with foreign language skills."
Perhaps the most significant piece of long-term strategic data was where the respondents thought the increase in strength was going to come from. From the response they had all but counted out expecting reinforcements from the national elites.
Today's Army is stretched past its breaking point by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The sounds of its collapse may be faint enough for policymakers in Washington to ignore, but they are there. An exodus of junior and midlevel personnel illustrates the crisis. Their exit has forced the Army to apply tourniquets like "stop loss" to halt the hemorrhaging, and it has also dropped its standards for recruiting and retention.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has said that the only thing worse than a broken army is a defeated army. But this puts the cart before the horse, because in this case, the breaking of America's military will lead to defeat, both now and later. America cannot afford to send untrained, unready, or distracted troops into complex conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan.
A camera hangs with a street light, outside the U.S. Capitol.
Surveillance cameras already dot the streets of major American cities. Now Miami is taking it to the next level, preparing to launch camera-equipped drones -- like the ones used by the military overseas -- that will fly above the city to spy for crime below. That has raised concerns from civil liberties groups like the ACLU. Is the U.S. becoming a surveillance society?
Surveillance cameras do have forensic value that can help authorities catch suspects after crimes have already been committed. The problem with this is that, for obvious reasons, suicide attackers tend not to worry about being caught afterwards. Antiterrorism strategies should be geared towards prevention; that is how lives are saved. The U.K. contains over 4.2 million surveillance cameras — one for every 14 people — and the Glasgow attackers still eluded detection until it was too late. The only reason there were no fatalities was the attackers’ own amateurishness.
In a further blow to the perceived effectiveness of surveillance cameras, Clive Norris of the Sheffield University Centre for Criminological Research testified last year that researchers found that Glasgow crime did not decrease after cameras were installed city-wide. It actually increased by nine percent.
Senator Lieberman's proposal for stepping up surveillance has other problems besides ineffectiveness. Corruption could become an issue. This has already happened in a number of U.S. cities that have installed cameras at traffic intersections to deter drivers from running red lights.
"I do think that in this day and age, if you think that cameras aren't watching you, you are very naïve," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in October during a tour of London's massive surveillance-camera system. "We are under surveillance all the time. We live in a dangerous world and people want to have security cameras." Bloomberg added that everyone he had met in London was "thrilled" about the security cameras around the city.
The government has a long and storied history of abusing surveillance powers. The more powerful surveillance technology grows, the more Bill Brown gets concerned. "When consumer convenience merges with law enforcement, merges with the military-industrial complex, this is what I worry about. Not today, not tomorrow, but the day after."
