An argument with Jon Wilson---Bacevich, Krauthammer, and secret combinations

As Montaigne observes, "I quote others only in order the better to express myself". In like manner, Andrew Bacevich Sr. is hardly relying on Niebuhr. Bacevich is no ordinary Catholic or conservative---he graduated from Westpoint, is a Vietnam veteran, got his Ph.D. in diplomatic history from Princeton, is a former professor of history at West Point and then Johns Hopkins, is currently a professor of history at Boston University. Further, he lost his only son, 1 Lt. Andrew Bacevich Jr., to the war he publicly opposed from its beginning. If the truth of Bacevich's use of Niebuhr is not self-evident to you---if Krauthammer still seems more honest or accurate to you---I clearly need to look for a different starting point.

You mention "secret combinations", alluding to the Book of Mormon. Let's start there. The phrase "secret combinations" is often parsed, by unbelievers and also, unfortunately, by many believers, as if it were in the grand American tradition of conspiracy theories. Traditional conspiracy theories invariably demonize some internal or external Other---they are fingers of blame pointing outwards.

The Book of Mormon does just the opposite. After the Jaredites and outside Jersusalem, the secret combinations arise first, and flourish most greatly, among the Nephites. Even when they are established among Nephite dissenters and Lamanites, the Book of Mormon persists in naming them for, and they even name themselves for, Gadianton, a well-connected, political Nephite.

Their existence, their goals, even their methods, aren't really all that secret: "And it came to pass on the other hand, that the Nephites did build them up and support them, beginning at the more wicked part of them, until they had overspread all the land of the Nephites, and had seduced the more part of the righteous until they had come down to believe in their works and partake of their spoils, and to join with them in their secret murders and combinations." (Hel. 6:38) Their secrecy appears to lie mostly in their "secret works", their oaths and their operational particulars.

In the Book of Mormon, the fingers always point backwards. Consider the secret society of Gadianton led by Giddianhi, armed for war and occupying wilderness and mountains. The Nephite people wanted immediate military action, asking the Nephite commander Gidgiddoni to

Pray unto the Lord, and let us go up upon the mountains and into the wilderness, that we may fall upon the robbers and destroy them in their own lands. (3 Ne 3:20)

And what is Gidgiddoni's response to this call for preventive war, against an enemy they had already fought in the field?

The Lord forbid; for if we should go up against them the Lord would deliver us into their hands; therefore we will prepare ourselves in the center of our lands, and we will gather all our armies together, and we will not go against them, but we will wait till they shall come against us; therefore as the Lord liveth, if we do this he will deliver them into our hands. (v. 21)

What is the chief judge Lachoneus' program for fortifying these Nephites against their enemies? Gathering: "they did dwell in one land, and in one body," preaching: "and they did fear the words which had been spoken by Lachoneus, insomuch that they did repent of all their sins," and prayer: "and they did put up their prayers unto the Lord their God, that he would deliver them in the time that their enemies should come down against them to battle." (v. 25)

What is the result of Lachoneus's preparation of his people? "And they were exceedingly sorrowful because of their enemies." Among the emotions coming from the promoters of this war, I have heard triumphalism, I have heard entreaties for patience, I have heard vexed frustration. I have yet to hear sorrow. Such people are not to be trusted. I do see real sorrow in Bacevich, and in what he quotes of Niebuhr. From this, military preparations follow, emphasizing strength in defense:

And Gidgiddoni did cause that they should make weapons of war of every kind, and they should be strong with armor, and with shields, and with bucklers, after the manner of his instruction. (v. 25)

The Book of Mormon is remarkably consistent about who is to blame when the Nephites are beset by Gadianton robbers---it is the profligate Nephites themselves who are to blame, and repentance is the precondition of deliverance.

If the foreign Gadiantons are spawned by the Nephites, if the Nephite Gadiantons are capable of becoming popular within the Nephite church, what is the modern equivalent? Let us turn to a tiny, indirect bit of Gates---the man George W. Bush replaced Rumsfeld with as US Secretary of Defence and who continues in that position under Barack Obama---and a lot of Brzezinski, original at http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html :

The CIA's Intervention in Afghanistan
Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski,
President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser

Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998
Posted at globalresearch.ca 15 October 2001

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

B: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

B: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

Translated from the French by Bill Blum
Copyright, Le Nouvel Observateur and Bill Blum. For fair use only. [I believe this to be fair use.]

It is an irony that his daughter Mika Brzezinski, a New York television news anchor, covered 9/11 live only a few years later.

Or, closer to home, look at this, from http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3340101/, on the 1998 embassy bombing in Nairobi, (Michael Moran, NEW YORK, Aug. 24, 1998) :

Indeed, to this day, those involved in the decision to give the Afghan rebels access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry continue to defend that move in the context of the Cold War. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee making those decisions, told my colleague Robert Windrem that he would make the same call again today even knowing what bin Laden would do subsequently. “It was worth it,” he said.

“Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union,” he said.

What Dr. Brzezinski and Sen. Hatch are proud of is stirring up a war that killed more than a million Afghans, disabled more than a million more Afghans, and displaced about two million Afghans internally and caused about 5 million Afghans to migrate to Iran or Pakistan.

Even the generally truthful Carter called it "Soviet agression". Reagan, who vastly expanded the Carter/Brzezinski initiative, castigated the Soviets for invading Afghanistan, calling them evil and expansionary, and called the Soviets liars for telling the truth---which is that the United States actively helped provoke the war, and the Soviets only reluctantly entered after being asked to by the Afghan government. (How reluctant only came out later---the Afghan government implored the Soviets many times over a period of months before the Soviet government reluctlantly acquiesced.)
I am old enough to remember Reagan saying such things, and I believed him at the time on this---after all what else had I been led to expect from the Soviet government? But Reagan, like Carter before him, was lying through his teeth, and the Soviets were telling the truth.

What do you call it when someone sitting in Nevada steers a drone somewhere in the Middle East to kill someone, and usually a number of innocent bystanders as well, without trial, without a chance to hear and answer charges? Where is thy glory, for it is darkness unto me!

Lies, murder on a massive scale, secret operations and accompanying oaths---thought they certainly exist elsewhere, do you really think that you need to look beyond the United States conducting business as usual to find them?

I should mention the oaths, which are always there in the Book of Mormon accounts of secret combinations. We can overlook the shenanigans of the highly respectable Skull and Bones for the time being---in any case, since Skull and Bones started admitting woman, they seem to have stopped sharing sexual histories as a way of bonding.

Do you not know that the security services of the US, as elsewhere, use entrapment and prostitution as well as killing and torture? They have a history of trading in illegal weapons and illegal drugs---you have to avert your eyes not to see it. Do you not understand that they, as elsewhere, use levels and compartments to manage secrets---and that each level, each compartment is secured by its own oath?

If you can't see these instrumentalities of government as secret combinations in their own right, I am going to have to think of another starting point. That they are popular among members of the church---well, that is hardly an argument, in the Book of Mormon context, that they are NOT secret combinations?

Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage

The following review also seems relevant to what happens when the definition of marriage changes... ---ATW



Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage

Book by Kathryn Edin

Kathryn Edin (Author)

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and Maria Kefalas

Review by Richard Gibson, original at

http://www.amazon.com/Promises-Can-Keep-Motherhood-Marriage/product-reviews/0520248198/ref=cm_cr_dp_all_helpful?ie=UTF8&coliid=&showViewpoints=1&colid=&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

at December 10, 2007.

This book examines why poor women have children prior to being married. The authors did a years-long, very intense, ethnographic study of dozens of poor women of all races in some of the worst neighbrhorhoods of Philadelphia.

The book is good. It is easy to read, and it maintains a nice balance between academic depth -- the authors are well read in their area, but are low key about it -- and engagement with their subjects. The authors care about these women, and that comes across.

The book has a number of conclusions, which are all, to some degree, unexpected.

First, the authors do not believe that the problem is poverty. Obviously, life for these women is more difficult, because they are poor, but that is not whey they have kids before they marry. After all, we have always had poor people, and, in the not so-distant past, the vast majority married before they had kids. No, the authors conclude, the fundamental reason why the poor have children before marriage is a massive cultural shift. Quite simply, marriage has been re-defined. It used to be that one could not have sex, have kids or be accepted as an adult, without being married. Now, marriage has been disconnected from all of these things. The authors see this shift as not being limited to the poor; indeed, they believe that the poor are simply following the middle class in this regard.

Second, although the authors see the poor as having the same basic values as the middle class, they believe that these values play out differently for the poor. The middle class generally gets married, prior to having children, because middle class women have alot to lose. They have careers. They have futures. Having kids, outside marriage, threatens all of this. Since the paramount goal is individual fulfillment, middle-class women do not threaten all of the good things in their lives by having children without any male support.

The poor, on the other hand, say our authors, basically have nothing in their lives which having children would threaten. They do not have a career. They work at lousy low-wage jobs, to which they can return after having kids, because what difference does it make. The authors portray their women as having so little in their lives that they see no downside to having kids by themselves. On the contrary, the authors report that poor women value children, and see the children as adding a great deal to their lives. Many of the subjects report that their lives were an out of control mess -- drinking, drugging, partying -- until they had kids, which is often reported as turning them around.

Third, this book reports a very bleak landscape between the sexes among the poor. Men are just no damm good, virtually all of the women in this book say. Men will not grow up, do not support their kids, chase other women, are often violently abusive and often wind up in jail. While most women report having a child as turning their lives around, and making them into responsibile adults, most of the men involved can not handle the responsibility and run away. It is deeply depressing to read how bitterly these women distrust the men in their lives. (I found that the account rang true, but, to be fair, the authors only spoke to poor women; they did not speak to poor men, who might give a different version.)

In the end, the book describes this odd paralled universe, in which poor women want children and marriage, but see children as easy to get and marriage as an impossible dream.

Very eye-opening book, and very depressing.

Against same-sex marriage---a reply to Matt Riddle

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/profile.php?id=647612425&ref=nf

thread beginning June 6 at 2:54am

...

It seems to me that support for same-sex marriage correlates strongly---not perfectly---with disbelief in the law of chastity, the idea that sex should be confined to marriage. Believers in the law of chastity tend to take marriage itself much more seriously. It is therefore vexing to have people who on the whole have been rather dismissive of marriage trying to change its character for those who of us who have taken it seriously all along. Another correlation is support for gay marriage and support for abortion. It is also rather vexing that a class for whom breeding is not a central occupation, and that usually supports those who prefer to abort rather than bear and adopt, now wish as a class to be considered equally valid adoptive parents, perhaps even irrespective of the wishes of the birth parent.

If the law changed to allow the marriage of same-sex couples, I concede that I am little more worried than you are for how our generation conducts itself. What most worries me most would probably take about two generations to really set in: widespread bisexual opportunism, increasing selfishness, increasing misery. A world in which it is particularly bad to be poor, or powerless, or a child.

An image of this is the roving band of male chimpanzees, who keep their testosterone levels up by homosexual activity. On meeting a female, they each try to persuade her to wander off alone for a few days for a consortship. If all are unsuccessful at persuasion, they take turns anyway. Think of what happens in prisons! You never really did answer my question as to why three or a dozen gay men should not be permitted to marry.

Among the relatively well-protected parts of the social order where we are, perhaps there will be little change. Our subculture was not immune to heightened divorce levels in the late seventies after the enactment of no-fault divorce, and it seems to be highly susceptible to internet porn right now. But perhaps we'd be okay at first. It would probably hit the less protected parts of our society first, and possibly with more ferocity than the no-fault divorce laws ever did.

Or maybe what will really smash things up is a nasty movement propelled into power in a kind of culture-war countercoup. I still can't really tell the extent to which fascism and nazism were reactions to, or heirs of, the campy permissiveness of impotent Weimar. Probably they were both.

In the short run, though, things would be pretty normal. I've lived elsewhere, Matt. I spent much of my teenage years in a subdivision in Auckland where many of the surrounding families where headed by single woman who counted themselves lucky if they could drag some sorry thing back home from the disco on a Friday night, and maybe keep him for a day or two. I've lived in Sydney, in Canberra, in Melbourne. I am well aware how easily Chicken Little arguments are offered here for things that work reasonably well elsewhere---single payer health care, national curriculum, national education funding, government regulators with teeth, family support transfer payments, vastly smaller military budgets, vastly smaller prison systems.

Even in the short run, however, and even in the judgment of those most directly affected, I do not believe that the effect of the change you propose would be entirely positive.

I once worked for a non-profit that had its office in a United Methodist Church building complex that somewhat resembled an LDS stake center. Apart from a few differences in dress code and dietary laws, and the fact that their church ran a day care, these people had between them much of the social feel of an LDS ward, and were even similar in racial compostion. I did not my self see anyone who was manifestly homosexual, but this particular parish, led by its chief pastor, dissented from the mainline UMC view that deprecated same-sex relationships. A major part of my job back then was conducting brief interviews with a variety of people. Some of the people I interviewed were members of that parish.

I remember one woman, in particular, who was getting ready to move out of the "retirement palace"---her words---that she had built with her husband, so that they could sell it. A few years earlier, the husband had decided, after two decades of marriage and the raising of a daughter together, that he was gay. So this couple separated and divorced, but still they continued attending this parish. Within a year of separating, the ex-husband was living with a male partner he had found. She described coming to their church for Christmas Eve services, to see her ex-husband and his new partner both singing in the choir. I wondered what their daughter thought about all this, but it appears she turned out to be "accepting" of all this. This woman had lost her intended future, and was of an age when she would likely remain single for life. She came across not bitter, not angry, just sad. Her ex had thought it would be a great idea for their daughter, her, him, and his new partner to all have Thanksgiving together. She was struggling with this a bit, but it was not a forgone conclusion that she would reject the idea. She was trying to be as accepting as she could be, and succeeding about as well as possible I suppose. In a way, she was a model of what her parish thought a Christian should be under such circumstances. I, on the other hand, left that interview with heightened appreciation for LDS church discipline.

All that occured under current law, of course, and it is even possible that broader availability of same-sex options might have prevented that particular marriage in the first place. I find it unlikely, however, that the change you propose would lower the number of such cases. This is where it really matters that the incidence of bisexuality in practice is higher than the incidence of exclusive homosexuality, and that self-perceived orientation can drift or remain broad over a lifespan.

Still, there are troubling glimmers even now of new insolence. What gives some bureaucrat who runs the Provo City Pool or Utah Transit the right to decide how large a 'family' may reasonably be? Why is it that it now not uncommon to find self-described feminists who consider pornography okay, even liberating? The feminist old guard would have burned to the ground the offices of the on-campus porno magazines that Ivy League schools now openly harbor.

At present, I have little problem with polygyny, or even polyandry. For each of those, I can find at least some historical cases when they seem to work. Maybe they make sense now, at least in some settings.

I am not holding up our current system of marriage as perfect. From my mid-teens until marriage lasted just over two decades for me, and I never really liked being single or childless during any of that time: I simply accepted with regret that I did not yet have a wife, did not yet have children. That acceptance did me some good and no harm. I remember a bishop once telling me that about 30% of faithful LDS women would not get the chance to marry a faithful LDS man in their lifetime. Long-term singleness or childlessness are simply not things I would wish on any adult capable of treating a spouse or children with consistent decency. I do not wish that on my single LDS friends and relatives. I do not wish it on other decent adults either.

Several years ago, in Glen Burnie, Maryland, I took my family to a sandwich bar for a rare treat. My two eldest children were eyeing rubber balls in vending machines---we had little left after paying for the food, and the price looked a little steep, in any case, so we said no when they asked. A little later, the two eldest were each playing with such a ball. At the next table were the only other people in the room, a clearly lesbian couple. One if these women was enjoying my children's pleasure in their new acquisitions. My wife and I are extremely careful who gets access to our children and under what conditions. We are careful, insistent, even loud, about who is permitted to take pictures of our children. Under most circumstances, someone who furtively slipped gifts to our children would invite incandescent wrath. But not here. The couple stayed a little longer, and then left, never glancing in the direction where my wife and I sat. I am far from sure that that couple would make bad parents.

Nevertheless, and here is where allowing same-sex marriage starts to really bite: if my wife and I were to die tomorrow, and if no married sibling could take them, their faithful LDS aunts would nevertheless rate ahead in our eyes of any unmarried couple or same-sex couple we could imagine, however decent and resourceful. I am not averse to having other parents choose differently for their children---with agreement of the adults involved it is already possible under current law for a child to be sent by its parents to a gay friend or relative, complete with an affidavit that essentially confers guardianship. But I would want our wishes for our own children to be respected, and not second-guessed by a court, the way it would likely be if same-sex couples are permitted to marry.

Frankly, issue is the issue. If it weren't for the bearing and rearing of children, what real need is there for marriage?