Earlier today a bomb exploded on a crowded public bus outside the Jerusalem convention center, injuring more than 40 people. As Jennifer Rubin reports via Hareetz, this is the worst terrorist attack in the city in seven years, and given recent terrorist aggression against Israel out of Gaza, particularly disturbing.
The Obama administration response to this atrocity is stunning silence. Rubin also reports that no one has bothered to make contact with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The most recent messages on the State Department home page address World Water Day and Ending Violence Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity.
Gene Simmons is doing a better job of standing with Israel these days than the United States is. It is just pathetic.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
LETTERS
The Wall Street Journal
March 22, 2011
Documentation in Rumsfeld's Memoir Is Unprecedented
Peggy Noonan's strange outburst in the Journal's March 12 edition appears to be more about Ms. Noonan's unresolved personal issues with the Bush administration than about the substance of Donald Rumsfeld's book ("The Defense Secretary Who Let Bin Laden Get Away," Declarations). Bizarrely, she rails against the documentation in "Known and Unknown," claiming that "most memos prove nothing." Since Ms. Noonan does not like what the documents say, she has attempted to discredit them. As Mr. Rumsfeld's director of research, I would like to offer another and quite different view of this material, and how it was used in the memoir.
Mr. Rumsfeld decided when he embarked on this project in 2007 that his memoir would not be a collection of personal reminiscences, but rather a more substantive undertaking that would make use of his extensive records. A defining feature of the Rumsfeld collection is the original working function of the different types of documents. They were very much of their moment, written not for some abstract future history but to contend with the issues of the day.
While it is true as Ms. Noonan notes that some of these documents suggest Mr. Rumsfeld was not exclusively culpable for everything that went wrong in American foreign policy 2001-2006, they also fill other functions—for example to record his pride at supporting the 1964 Civil Rights legislation, his concerns over President Gerald Ford's refusal to meet with Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and the successful Bush administration efforts at military transformation. For those who recognize that such documents provide an important foundation for historical analysis, they play a critical—and fascinating—supporting role in this project.
Readers and other interested parties can review them by "Known and Unknown" endnotes, as well as browse more than 2,000 additional documents in the "Library" section on the website. Additional future releases are planned. The goal is to give the public the means to read the full documents—and not just those Mr. Rumsfeld cited in his book or the passages he selected for the text—to reach their own conclusions about the events he witnessed. The documents contain errors, typos and the occasional awkward observation. But Mr. Rumsfeld concluded it was worth risking possible misunderstandings to give readers the opportunity to review the same materials he did when preparing the book.
As an academic and historian, I do not find the liberal use of this material in "Known and Unknown" to be "disturbing" as Ms. Noonan does, but see it rather as an important and exciting advancement of the boundaries of archival research. External factors such as time and location have long restricted access to primary documents to specialists. Now this material can be freely shared, even though it might be unsettling to those in the media who are used to controlling the flow of information to the public. The results can be far more substantive and responsible than the emotion-driven narratives fueled by conventional wisdom that constitute many popular histories. It is to be hoped that serious readers of "Known and Unknown" will understand the Rumsfeld documents in this context.
Victoria Coates, Ph.D.
Director of Research
Office of Donald Rumsfeld
Washington
The Wall Street Journal
March 22, 2011
Documentation in Rumsfeld's Memoir Is Unprecedented
Peggy Noonan's strange outburst in the Journal's March 12 edition appears to be more about Ms. Noonan's unresolved personal issues with the Bush administration than about the substance of Donald Rumsfeld's book ("The Defense Secretary Who Let Bin Laden Get Away," Declarations). Bizarrely, she rails against the documentation in "Known and Unknown," claiming that "most memos prove nothing." Since Ms. Noonan does not like what the documents say, she has attempted to discredit them. As Mr. Rumsfeld's director of research, I would like to offer another and quite different view of this material, and how it was used in the memoir.
Mr. Rumsfeld decided when he embarked on this project in 2007 that his memoir would not be a collection of personal reminiscences, but rather a more substantive undertaking that would make use of his extensive records. A defining feature of the Rumsfeld collection is the original working function of the different types of documents. They were very much of their moment, written not for some abstract future history but to contend with the issues of the day.
While it is true as Ms. Noonan notes that some of these documents suggest Mr. Rumsfeld was not exclusively culpable for everything that went wrong in American foreign policy 2001-2006, they also fill other functions—for example to record his pride at supporting the 1964 Civil Rights legislation, his concerns over President Gerald Ford's refusal to meet with Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and the successful Bush administration efforts at military transformation. For those who recognize that such documents provide an important foundation for historical analysis, they play a critical—and fascinating—supporting role in this project.
Readers and other interested parties can review them by "Known and Unknown" endnotes, as well as browse more than 2,000 additional documents in the "Library" section on the website. Additional future releases are planned. The goal is to give the public the means to read the full documents—and not just those Mr. Rumsfeld cited in his book or the passages he selected for the text—to reach their own conclusions about the events he witnessed. The documents contain errors, typos and the occasional awkward observation. But Mr. Rumsfeld concluded it was worth risking possible misunderstandings to give readers the opportunity to review the same materials he did when preparing the book.
As an academic and historian, I do not find the liberal use of this material in "Known and Unknown" to be "disturbing" as Ms. Noonan does, but see it rather as an important and exciting advancement of the boundaries of archival research. External factors such as time and location have long restricted access to primary documents to specialists. Now this material can be freely shared, even though it might be unsettling to those in the media who are used to controlling the flow of information to the public. The results can be far more substantive and responsible than the emotion-driven narratives fueled by conventional wisdom that constitute many popular histories. It is to be hoped that serious readers of "Known and Unknown" will understand the Rumsfeld documents in this context.
Victoria Coates, Ph.D.
Director of Research
Office of Donald Rumsfeld
Washington
Friday, March 11, 2011
Bidding A Sad Farewell to Peggy Noonan
I have a few sad thoughts to add to this more thorough, magisterial deconstruction of Peggy Noonan’s column today on Donald Rumsfeld’s Known and Unknown.
Through the years I have tried to like Noonan, primarily because there are so few prominent female writers on major editorial pages, and even fewer conservatives. Also, as she frequently reminds us, she worked for Ronald Reagan and what is not to like about that?
Unfortunately, today's column is so far beyond the pale that even these powerful attractions cannot redeem her in my eyes. Noonan goes after Rumsfeld, who she declares devoid of "guts" and "brains," and his “stupid little” book too (I hope that "little" book didn't make too big of a hole in her plaster when she threw it at the wall, but I digress). Her main beef is that Rumsfeld failed both to capture Osama Bin Laden and to understand how the American psyche needed his capture after 9/11. Since as she again likes to remind us Noonan was in Manhattan on 9/11, she has claimed the mantle of Everyvictim and knows what all of us need, much more than Rumsfeld who after all was only in the Pentagon that day. We are treated to Noonan's OBL revenge fantasies, which involve scatological imagery and decapitation, and to her fury that Rumsfeld has not facilitated their satisfaction.
Noonan reserves, bizarrely, special vitriol for the documentation of Known and Unknown, and I may well take this part of the review personally since I have labored for some years in that particular salt mine. Noonan seems terribly put out that Rumsfeld has used a rich archive going back seven decades to document his book. She mocks and caricatures the effort--and darkly hints the memos might be falsified. She laments that "so many" Bush administration memoirs depend on primary documents (I can't think of another with even remotely comparable documentation--certainly not one that offers the reader the opportunity to freely consult the documents--but again, I digress). In the end she finds their presence so odious that she wants to physically dismember the book--to literally break its spine--for so oppressing her. These memos, she rages, "prove nothing."
I find all of this startling, since I generally consider it a good and useful exercise to go back to the original documents in order to build up thorough historical analysis. My complaints are reserved for those who selectively quote documents and then withhold the originals, so readers are forced to accept the writer's conclusions. Given the advances in digital technology, Rumsfeld has decided to challenge this construct and not only quote and cite the memos in his book, but also release thousands of them on a free-access website where they are available to readers made of sterner stuff than Noonan as links in a facsimile of the endnotes while the larger collection is browsable in a library-style section.
What is so gob-smackingly awful about this? Why ferociously attack an effort at rigorous scholarship and documentary transparency? Who does it hurt?
Upon reflection, it occurred to me that it hurts Peggy Noonan, who has been trading on her "insider" status in the Reagan administration for decades now. She is the source, in her parlance the witness, and if people take to releasing the actual documents, her fly-on-the-wall reminiscences drop precipitously in value, especially if God forbid the two conflict.
Perhaps not coincidentally, another potential victim of Rumsfeld's memo offensive is Noonan's fellow perennial insider, Bob Woodward, whose stock in trade is giving the impression of witnessing what should be hidden--accounts that generally confirm readers' vague suspicions about what must be going on in government--thus making the reader feel smart and in the know, and making Woodward's books sell.
Woodward, like Noonan, seems to feel threatened by Known and Unknown, and went after the book last week, calling Rumsfeld a liar for writing in Chapter 31 about a meeting with President Bush on September 26, 2001, in which Bush asked Rumsfeld to review the Iraq war plan then on the Pentagon shelf. Woodward's beef appears to be not with the wisdom of this order, but rather with the problematic fact that no account of it appears in Woodward's books on the Bush administration, and he had made a great show of re-tracing the definitive Iraq timeline. Ergo, the meeting did not happen, and even if it did, Iraq was not discussed.
Unfortunately for Woodward, Rumsfeld had made a handwritten note about the substance of his meeting on his calendar for that day, which he promptly released. It matches in all details the account in Known and Unknown. Woodward appeared to have given up this line of attack--wisely, for what else is there to say?--until the Noonan column appeared today to denigrate and dismiss Rumsfeld's documentation explicitly, and so to defend Woodward implicitly.
I have no insider information on a particular friendship between Noonan and Woodward, although she has been know to give Woodward's books pretty fulsome praise. All I have is the widely-available public knowledge that Noonan and Woodward are regular co-panelists on "Meet the Press." In late December, 2010, for example, they were on to discuss the general distastefulness that is Sarah Palin. Noonan had recently called Palin "ignorant" and a "nincompoop" for daring to tread where only Noonan is privileged to go--that is to discuss Ronald Reagan. Noonan could therefore be trusted to toe the MTP line, and she obligingly if revealingly referred to herself and her fellow panelists (Doris Kerns Goodwin, Tom Brokaw and Woodward) as people like us--people who are sophisticated enough to recognize Palin for what she is--while the rest of America who either admire her or don't care much either way are them.
So for Noonan, Woodward is "people like us," the special few who have the exclusive right to tell the rest of us what is really going on unhampered by things like proper documentation. In this context, no wonder she finds Rumsfeld's archive so distressing. It hits her where she lives, threatening to reveal that her shtick, like Woodward’s, is based on self-serving, selective and unsubstantiated memories and, even worse, forcing her to do her homework if she wants to be considered in the same league.
True, documentary research is hard. It involves tedious work sifting through many, many irrelevant documents to find the few of importance. It requires you to check your cherished preconceived notions at the door and let the information in the documents guide your analysis, even if you uncover things you do not expect--or want--to find. And it forces you to admit, as Rumsfeld has so famously done, that there are things you did not know. But as difficult as the exercise might be, the end goal of trying to pass on to future generations direct observations of historical events accompanied by relevant primary documentation is in my opinion a noble one and well worth the effort. I don't think I want to read anything else by someone so determined to discredit the attempt.
Good bye, Ms. Noonan, and good luck to you in this brave new world of history.
Through the years I have tried to like Noonan, primarily because there are so few prominent female writers on major editorial pages, and even fewer conservatives. Also, as she frequently reminds us, she worked for Ronald Reagan and what is not to like about that?
Unfortunately, today's column is so far beyond the pale that even these powerful attractions cannot redeem her in my eyes. Noonan goes after Rumsfeld, who she declares devoid of "guts" and "brains," and his “stupid little” book too (I hope that "little" book didn't make too big of a hole in her plaster when she threw it at the wall, but I digress). Her main beef is that Rumsfeld failed both to capture Osama Bin Laden and to understand how the American psyche needed his capture after 9/11. Since as she again likes to remind us Noonan was in Manhattan on 9/11, she has claimed the mantle of Everyvictim and knows what all of us need, much more than Rumsfeld who after all was only in the Pentagon that day. We are treated to Noonan's OBL revenge fantasies, which involve scatological imagery and decapitation, and to her fury that Rumsfeld has not facilitated their satisfaction.
Noonan reserves, bizarrely, special vitriol for the documentation of Known and Unknown, and I may well take this part of the review personally since I have labored for some years in that particular salt mine. Noonan seems terribly put out that Rumsfeld has used a rich archive going back seven decades to document his book. She mocks and caricatures the effort--and darkly hints the memos might be falsified. She laments that "so many" Bush administration memoirs depend on primary documents (I can't think of another with even remotely comparable documentation--certainly not one that offers the reader the opportunity to freely consult the documents--but again, I digress). In the end she finds their presence so odious that she wants to physically dismember the book--to literally break its spine--for so oppressing her. These memos, she rages, "prove nothing."
I find all of this startling, since I generally consider it a good and useful exercise to go back to the original documents in order to build up thorough historical analysis. My complaints are reserved for those who selectively quote documents and then withhold the originals, so readers are forced to accept the writer's conclusions. Given the advances in digital technology, Rumsfeld has decided to challenge this construct and not only quote and cite the memos in his book, but also release thousands of them on a free-access website where they are available to readers made of sterner stuff than Noonan as links in a facsimile of the endnotes while the larger collection is browsable in a library-style section.
What is so gob-smackingly awful about this? Why ferociously attack an effort at rigorous scholarship and documentary transparency? Who does it hurt?
Upon reflection, it occurred to me that it hurts Peggy Noonan, who has been trading on her "insider" status in the Reagan administration for decades now. She is the source, in her parlance the witness, and if people take to releasing the actual documents, her fly-on-the-wall reminiscences drop precipitously in value, especially if God forbid the two conflict.
Perhaps not coincidentally, another potential victim of Rumsfeld's memo offensive is Noonan's fellow perennial insider, Bob Woodward, whose stock in trade is giving the impression of witnessing what should be hidden--accounts that generally confirm readers' vague suspicions about what must be going on in government--thus making the reader feel smart and in the know, and making Woodward's books sell.
Woodward, like Noonan, seems to feel threatened by Known and Unknown, and went after the book last week, calling Rumsfeld a liar for writing in Chapter 31 about a meeting with President Bush on September 26, 2001, in which Bush asked Rumsfeld to review the Iraq war plan then on the Pentagon shelf. Woodward's beef appears to be not with the wisdom of this order, but rather with the problematic fact that no account of it appears in Woodward's books on the Bush administration, and he had made a great show of re-tracing the definitive Iraq timeline. Ergo, the meeting did not happen, and even if it did, Iraq was not discussed.
Unfortunately for Woodward, Rumsfeld had made a handwritten note about the substance of his meeting on his calendar for that day, which he promptly released. It matches in all details the account in Known and Unknown. Woodward appeared to have given up this line of attack--wisely, for what else is there to say?--until the Noonan column appeared today to denigrate and dismiss Rumsfeld's documentation explicitly, and so to defend Woodward implicitly.
I have no insider information on a particular friendship between Noonan and Woodward, although she has been know to give Woodward's books pretty fulsome praise. All I have is the widely-available public knowledge that Noonan and Woodward are regular co-panelists on "Meet the Press." In late December, 2010, for example, they were on to discuss the general distastefulness that is Sarah Palin. Noonan had recently called Palin "ignorant" and a "nincompoop" for daring to tread where only Noonan is privileged to go--that is to discuss Ronald Reagan. Noonan could therefore be trusted to toe the MTP line, and she obligingly if revealingly referred to herself and her fellow panelists (Doris Kerns Goodwin, Tom Brokaw and Woodward) as people like us--people who are sophisticated enough to recognize Palin for what she is--while the rest of America who either admire her or don't care much either way are them.
So for Noonan, Woodward is "people like us," the special few who have the exclusive right to tell the rest of us what is really going on unhampered by things like proper documentation. In this context, no wonder she finds Rumsfeld's archive so distressing. It hits her where she lives, threatening to reveal that her shtick, like Woodward’s, is based on self-serving, selective and unsubstantiated memories and, even worse, forcing her to do her homework if she wants to be considered in the same league.
True, documentary research is hard. It involves tedious work sifting through many, many irrelevant documents to find the few of importance. It requires you to check your cherished preconceived notions at the door and let the information in the documents guide your analysis, even if you uncover things you do not expect--or want--to find. And it forces you to admit, as Rumsfeld has so famously done, that there are things you did not know. But as difficult as the exercise might be, the end goal of trying to pass on to future generations direct observations of historical events accompanied by relevant primary documentation is in my opinion a noble one and well worth the effort. I don't think I want to read anything else by someone so determined to discredit the attempt.
Good bye, Ms. Noonan, and good luck to you in this brave new world of history.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
A box is in the eye of the beholder
On December 11, 2005 former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright went on "Meet the Press" to opine that the Iraq war had been a mistake--worse than that it had de-railed the successful pre-war program of sanctions and a no-fly zone, which had contained the paper tiger:
"It worked." And so, we can assume, it would have kept on working had the Bush administration only had the wisdom to continue the Clintonian policy of containment.
Of course what Secretary Albright failed to mention was the terrible price Saddam's people paid since they shared that box with him--especially those who almost exactly 20 years ago were being slaughtered by his henchmen in the months before the no-fly zone was established. We did nothing to help them when they attempted to rise up and claim their freedom, an inertia that cost many thousands of lives and resulted in the ecological and humanitarian catastrophe that was the draining of the Iraqi marshes--not to mention the subsequent no-fly zone stalemate that resulted in the second war.
Two decades later we are watching the same tragedy play over in slow motion. In Libya a disenfranchised, oppressed generation has rebelled against their obviously unstable and tyrannical dictator and enjoyed some success. Encouraging words have come from the west, but precious little has been forthcoming in terms of actual support. A no-fly zone has been proposed to at least make a token effort at stopping Gadhafi from mowing these people down from the skies.
But this time the Democrat Secretary of State says not so fast. Hillary Clinton spoke out today against a no-fly zone in congressional testimony:
This from a woman who has been staunch in her opposition to the Iraq war ever since she voted to authorize it, and whose husband was Commander in Chief for eight years of that no-good no-fly zone.
I have a theory to suggest that might help clear up the confusion between Secretary Albright and her "partner" Secretary Clinton regarding the efficacy of the Iraqi no-fly zone, and help us as we plot a path ahead with Libya. No-fly zones and sanctions, be they smart or otherwise, are not a solution in themselves in perpetuity after a popular uprising has failed. They can however be strategically deployed to hamper and harass a dictator when he is back on his heels, giving opposition forces the actual support--not just the encouragement--that they need.
If Gadhafi does indeed turn the tables on the Libyan insurgents over the next days and weeks, it seems unlikely he will be any more gentle with the rebels than Saddam was. In short, I wonder if 20 years from now we will be looking back at March, 2011 the way we look back at March, 1991 and shake our heads over how much trouble we could have saved--with perhaps as little as one of Secretary Albright's no-fly zones.
And what we did was to keep Saddam Hussein in a box by using diplomacy, sanctions and force, with bombing in the no-fly zone. It worked. And what is evident from the CIA reports is that it did work. The sanctions worked.
"It worked." And so, we can assume, it would have kept on working had the Bush administration only had the wisdom to continue the Clintonian policy of containment.
Of course what Secretary Albright failed to mention was the terrible price Saddam's people paid since they shared that box with him--especially those who almost exactly 20 years ago were being slaughtered by his henchmen in the months before the no-fly zone was established. We did nothing to help them when they attempted to rise up and claim their freedom, an inertia that cost many thousands of lives and resulted in the ecological and humanitarian catastrophe that was the draining of the Iraqi marshes--not to mention the subsequent no-fly zone stalemate that resulted in the second war.
Two decades later we are watching the same tragedy play over in slow motion. In Libya a disenfranchised, oppressed generation has rebelled against their obviously unstable and tyrannical dictator and enjoyed some success. Encouraging words have come from the west, but precious little has been forthcoming in terms of actual support. A no-fly zone has been proposed to at least make a token effort at stopping Gadhafi from mowing these people down from the skies.
But this time the Democrat Secretary of State says not so fast. Hillary Clinton spoke out today against a no-fly zone in congressional testimony:
I want to remind people that, you know, we had a no-fly zone over Iraq. It did not prevent Saddam Hussein from slaughtering people on the ground, and it did not get him out of office.
This from a woman who has been staunch in her opposition to the Iraq war ever since she voted to authorize it, and whose husband was Commander in Chief for eight years of that no-good no-fly zone.
I have a theory to suggest that might help clear up the confusion between Secretary Albright and her "partner" Secretary Clinton regarding the efficacy of the Iraqi no-fly zone, and help us as we plot a path ahead with Libya. No-fly zones and sanctions, be they smart or otherwise, are not a solution in themselves in perpetuity after a popular uprising has failed. They can however be strategically deployed to hamper and harass a dictator when he is back on his heels, giving opposition forces the actual support--not just the encouragement--that they need.
If Gadhafi does indeed turn the tables on the Libyan insurgents over the next days and weeks, it seems unlikely he will be any more gentle with the rebels than Saddam was. In short, I wonder if 20 years from now we will be looking back at March, 2011 the way we look back at March, 1991 and shake our heads over how much trouble we could have saved--with perhaps as little as one of Secretary Albright's no-fly zones.
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