COLLAPSE

NAGASAKI AUGUST 9, 1945

February 22, 2025)- You may post on this article This week if you have posted on the other topics The Battle of Russia film (+ any Monday post). There is also a thread for posting on the article Next week if you need more time.

Note: this may seem like a lot of reading, but there are 3 big pay-offs: 1. Something from this will be on the Midterm– also Week 8, 2. There is a discussion thread that will be double credit, 3. My vanity tells me you might want to read something written by your professor that reflects his early 2000’s research!  Discussion thread moved to Week 8

I paste below my article WHY WE BOMB part of the Olson Grant I received in 2002. I hope this will stir up some controversy and that you can connect it to some of the issues in the chapter.. When you RESPOND to this article, I am providing this website link to the article so your comments on my article will not have the huge article underneath your post. Just read the article here and use this link and delete the pasted article in your comments message Week 6 or 7. The article is too large to include in your comments. Just use this link when you respond: https://progressivefutureusa.com/

NOTE: This post is a lot of reading, But: real appreciation and credit will be shown to students who get into their professor’s research, which has been presented in a number of countries. Also note, to minimize complication, it is better to read as much of the article as you can (if there is not time to read all of it) than not to read any of it!

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PROBLEMATIC ESSAY: “WHY WE BOMB”                        Frederick Shiels / Olson Project

  [Advanced draft/2015]              

                Following many years of intense interest in the subject of the United States’ impact on Third World countries, the events of the first three years of the 21^st Century prompted me to start a systematic study of civilian deaths resulting from U.S. military actions in the 20^th. These include wars, police actions, and other occupations. It might be asked: why not also study American deaths resulting from the aggression of others, such as the 9/11 attacks, Pearl Harbor, or the Lusitania sinking in 1915? This is work that needs to be done and has been done to a limited extent, and the roughly agreed-upon figure for such 20^th Cs. fatalities stands somewhere around 4000— nearly 2000 deaths at Pearl Harbor (three fourths of the dead) were military…

                Or why not study American military deaths caused by the political/ military hostility of Others? This, too, is a worthy scholarly mission , one that has been attempted, and the 20^th Cs. death count for Americans, mainly in two World Wars and the Korean and Vietnam wars, hovers at around 500,000. The military deaths on the other sides of American wars is harder to calculate, for reasons that will become apparent. To take but one example, American battles in the two world wars and, to a lesser extent, Korea and Vietnam, were fought alongside allies. But a fair estimate for such deaths in these wars— and a very conservative estimate–would be around 4 million.– half in Germany and Japan, half in Korea and Vietnam.

                For my study,  civilian casualties on the other side is the preferred focus, because:

1. Conservative estimates just for civilians in Japan, Germany, Korea and Vietnam would put the death toll at above 4 million,

2. The killing of civilians of any sort in a military action would have been appalling to  most Americans in the 1700s and 1800s with the exception of wars against  American Indians,

3. The killing of civilians in wars, declared or undeclared, is frowned upon in international law and the human rights literature regardless of which states are seen as  having started the hostilities, and

4. Americans, rightly or not, believe themselves to be”outside the curve of historical  imperialism” and generally to display more sensitivity to human life and safety and  welfare than, say, Germany, Russia, China or Japan, and perhaps, if one looks at Indochina and India, France and Britain.

                The argument to this point is not that Americans or their government like killing foreign civilians or even that they tolerate it casually, but rather that the American government, with the tacit approval of its citizenry, has killed civilians, mostly from altitudes of greater than 10,000 feet, often with considerable planning, and intentionally, with the use of carefully designed weapons and–less often– unintentionally.

So focusing for now on World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, we want to highlight several reasons given as justifications for treating non-military people as expendable in some measure and perhaps with some reluctance. Foreign civilians in these conflicts died in very large numbers, mostly from aerial bombs, which we will account for here, but also from chemical sprays, ground artillery fire, and as more or less innocent bystanders near the fields of battle.

                One of the most horrific aspects of the World Trade Center and Pentagon  killings of civilians was that they were so unexpected. No sense of danger attended the thousands of office workers heading into lower Manhattan and Arlington, Virginia on the morning of September 11, 2001. Many, though not all of the civilians in cities like  Dresden, Cologne, Berlin, Hamburg, Leipzig, Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, Nagoya, Hiroshima, Nagasaki–to name a few–and  Pyongyang and Hanoi and the numerous smaller towns and villages of North Korea and Vietnam did go through a prolonged awareness of danger, risk, and deprivation before meeting their ends. The loss of loved ones in firestorms and blast-collapsed structures was more or less anticipated as a possibility, sometimes over a period of years–say, 1943-45, 1950-53, or 1965-72.

                The broad reasons for the killing of civilians in Germany, Japan,  from bombs dropped over urban centers, might be summarized as follows:

(1) Germans and Japanese had the misfortune to live under governments, either unelected (Japan)or elected by a minority (Germany)that had launched aggressive wars in Europe and that had themselves taken millions of lives, military and civilian,

2. The United States had committed several million men, mostly between the ages of 18 and 30, to extract or help allies extract several million German and Japanese military men from places like France, Scandinavia, the USSR, China, the Philippines and Korea. To shorten the war and reduce the cost in America lives, it might be necessary to sacrifice an unspecified number of civilian lives, mostly in about 80 German and Japanese cities (each). This unspecified number turned out to be about 900,000 each in Germany and Japan– these are the most conservative estimates and focus largely on the air raids during the 2-year period mid-1943 to 1945.

3. A certain number of German and Japanese civilians, who perished and a similar number of those who were maimed for life, worked in factories, government offices and transportation networks vital to the Axis war effort. Also there were large numbers of doctors, postal employees, nurses, sanitation workers, firemen, and other civil personal who, while at the center of the war machine, were involved in keeping the war machine’s more active participants healthier, cleaner, safer and to be able to communicate better.

                Before breaking this reasoning down, we might anticipate a powerful question from the reader or audiences.: why devote so much attention to the populace in warring states so clearly devoted to the mass killing of others and conquest by force? To answer that “two wrongs don’t make a right” would be to oversimplify in more than one way. But in any case, before moral judgments are made, any national American project involving tens of thousands of bomber crew members under orders from career officers and civilians to carry out acts that result in a loss of life roughly equaling the combined populations of Baltimore, Boston, San Francisco and St. Louis, or the entire state of Oregon OR Connecticut or Oklahoma, is surely deserving of careful study. Such investigations  have been made– and some very good ones**– but mine is the only one that both focuses on civilian deaths and attempts to compare the way in which civilians died in at least seven different military conflicts.

                Return to the central question of why we bomb civilians. A breakdown of reasons for the official sanction of carefully planned actions leading to large numbers of deaths and injuries can proceed as follows:

                1. Following Sherman’s 1864 dictum that “war is all hell” and needs to be made as painful as possible, generations of strategists have used “Shorten The War” as a rationale for all sorts of war intensifying strategies. These have included: massive drafts to throw as many soldiers as possible against the enemy, development of terror weapons such as the machine gun, heavy naval vessels capable of devastating coastal shelling and, beginning in the 1930s, aircraft designed to drop explosives, or even deadly gas, onto masses of infantry, fortifications, and, finally, cities. In chilling words of Douhet, the Italian air-war theorist, depicting air attack:

First would come explosions, then fires, then deadly gases floating on the surface and preventing any approach to the stricken area. As the hours passed and night advanced, the fires would spread while the poison gas paralyzed all life. ** Schaffer 21, Douhet

                Politicians and generals on all sides in World War II spoke longingly of shortening the war and no doubt they were sincere.* More recently, the creation of “smart” bombs and “shock and awe tactics,” especially for use against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, provide an updated strategy of using highly accurate and very noisy bombs to cow the enemy into a faster surrender, while taking world public opinion sensibilities into account.

                                Even before World War Two, a US Army Air Corps tactical manual regarded air attack as “a method of imposing will by terrorizing the whole population.” It was, as Schaffer puts it, vastly preferable to long wars of attrition like the First World War[cite p 27]

                Proving that hammer blows against a foreign population can shorten a conflict has been more difficult. It has made intuitive sense to say that Germany and Japan might well have fought longer had they not lost so many cities and industrial cites to massive air attack. This is most dramatically illustrated in the hasty Japanese call for a cease fire after the second atomic bomb obliterated Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 and the little- known final devastating conventional bomb raid in Tokyo August 13^th.

                It has argued for example been argued, for example, that Hirohito’s speech coming shortly after the second atomic bomb, represented a consensus that the level of destruction had become intolerable:

[Surrender Speech by Japanese Emperor Hirohito, August 14, 1945 [five days after Nagasaki]

The surrender announcement, broadcast by radio, was the first time Japanese people had ever heard the voice of their leader.To our good and loyal subjects: After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in our empire today, we have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure. We have ordered our Government to communicate to the Governments of the United States, Great Britain, China and the Soviet Union that our empire accepts the provisions of their joint declaration.

Indeed, we declared war on America and Britain out of our sincere desire to insure Japan’’s self-    preservation and the stabilization of East Asia, it being far from our thought either to infringe upon the sovereignty of other nations or to embark upon territorial aggrandizement. But now the war has lasted for nearly four years. Despite the best that has been done by everyone——the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of our servants of the State and the devoted service of our 100,000,000 people——the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.

Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization. ** 

However there is also evidence that a little publicized final convention bombing raid on Tokyo, after Nagasaki on August 13, was decisive in bringing about surrender. On August 10, 1945, a day after Nagasaki,  Japanese leaders still disagreed on the desirability of surrendering according to the Potsdam unconditional surrender terms. Hirohito ordered that the surrender be accepted, provided he be allowed to retain the throne. The Americans responded on August 11 that they recognized the Emperor but could not guarantee his position. All bombing was suspended pending a definitive Japanese response. When none was received, Gen. Arnold ordered the largest conventional raid of the war, with over 1000 planes, which took place on August 13^th. The raid received little publicity and is little-mentioned in accounts of the war . The Emperor’s public statement of surrender (quoted above) followed the next day. It is not entirely clear whether further consideration of the implications of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the final Tokyo raid was decisive. Perhaps both together were. [See J. Smith and M. O’Connell, The Last Mission, Broadway Books, 2002]

                2. Save American lives- Although nobody likes a long war, Americans in particular have

placed a premium on speed and the use of machinery to shorten fighting time and perhaps transfer the human sacrifice (almost literally) that is war, from our side to theirs. High technology air and armed vehicle fighting tends to protect American– and other– combatants relative to the number of killed and injured on the other side, and the conflict shortened. It has been argued that not only American military lives would be saved and men transferred to the protection of high altitude aircraft and armored ground machines, but also, ultimately, many “enemy” lives–especially civilian–could be spared by the application of concentrated intense force.

3. Make war more “merciful”- A shorter war with less loss of life would certainly be more humane, if it could be demonstrated that it could be achieved. The argument has been used, as with the atomic bombing of Japan in 1945 and with the Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003. Of course such arguments are very difficult to prove: the best one can normally do is make a strong case. In the August, 1945 case of Japan, a sort of acceleration of the Japanese willingness to consider surrender occurred,  first privately and then quite openly, publicly, and quickly with the Emperor’s call to end the fighting after the Nagasaki bomb was dropped on 9 August. What might be easier to establish is that shortening wars through terror bombing can take place, that the loss of life might not be reduced overall, but may be transferred from U.S. forces to foreign civilians. The term “merciful” (Churchill’s term for the use of atomic weapons was “avert a vast, indefinite butchery”) in any universal sense seems inappropriate unless there is a way of demonstrating that more American military would have died in a drawn out land battle such as the Japanese “home island” invasion envisioned for the fall of 1945.

                The moral and strategic implications of these first three arguments for bombing are not simple. Even if it appears that a war has been shortened because of city-busting tactics (e.g., Japan, summer, 1945) it is very hard to demonstrate that fewer civilians would have died if the war continued with more ground fighting and less aerial destruction. Merciful to the American soldier probably, but merciful in  universal human terms, probably not. A World War Two with more intense aerial attacks on German and Japanese infrastructure outside of cities, or on concentration of German and Japanese military forces, say in Russia or the South Pacific islands, would have killed different civilians, but probably smaller numbers of civilians and certainly more uniformed military. Most would agree that reducing civilian deaths in favor of military would be desirable, except that many of the military were young draftees and a number of civilians were directly involved politically or economically with the war effort. There are some shades of gray here to be reckoned with. The classic account of the debate over the “necessity” of using atomic weapons is Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, updated 1996. **

4. Easier to demonstrate is that bombing campaigns dramatically reduced the production and output of “enemy” economic systems in Germany and Japan, and certainly North Korea, though to a lesser extent . Bombing damaged the North Vietnamese economy as well, although in a more limited way because of its less centralized and capital intensive infrastructure. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey published September 30, 1945, goes into great detail about the gradual destruction of  German and Japanese industries by U.S. (and in the case of Germany British) bombing sorties. Preferred targets were steel, machine tool, tank, aircraft, other munitions factories and oil refineries. There were many other target categories as well. During World War Two the kind of pinpoint bombing available in the 1980s and 1990s into the Twenty First Century was not an option. When the nearly 300,000 tons of bombs were dropped over the two Axis powers between 1943 and 1945, much of the targeting was industrial and infrastructure sites. However, as other parts of this essay relate, a significant minority of bombings took out largely residential areas and an additional percentage of bombings against the war related cites, especially urban took the lives of tens of thousands of civilians as “collateral damage.”

5.A more specific and quite interesting American argument about the assault on enemy populations is that bombing civilians –literally the “inhabitants of cities”– thins out the number of industrial workers and potential soldiers, “castrating” (in FDR’s memorable metaphor) the opposition and quite literally reducing the number of future war-makers. For Roosevelt it was weakening German society by reducing the number of war-prone Germans:

                                We either have to castrate the German people or you have got to treat them

in such a manner so they can’t just go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past…[Schaffer 88]

Ronald Schaffer goes on to cite Robert Dallek’s citation of Roosevelt’s comments to Secretary of War Henry Stimson that:

                                It is of the utmost importance that every person in Germany should realize

that this time Germany is a defeated nation. I do not want them to starve to death, but, as an example, if they need food to keep body and soul together beyond what they have, they should be fed three times a day with soup from Army soup kitchens…The fact that they are a defeated nation , collectively and individually must be so impressed upon them that they will hesitate to start any new war. **  [in Dallek, Roosevelt, 472-473]

6. Bombing cities is more simply an efficient way of destroying industry, infrastructure and human capital.  The problem with this reasoning is that attacks on cities destroyed much that was not directly involved in industrial production, although perhaps demonstrably involved in war-making indirectly: residential neighborhoods in non-industrial areas, urban targets of limited industrial value (e.g., Dresden and Nagasaki)  including also schools, churches, hospitals and small businesses. An important part of the literature on aerial bombardment examines these non-industrial targets and questions the need for their destruction much as military policy-makers debated the wisdom of such targeting during the wars under consideration here. ** [Michael Sherry’s and Ronald Schaffer’s books are especially good in short sections on non-industrial “psychological” urban targets and residential areas; also Werrell]

7. An early and more specialized motive for the bombing of German, Japanese, and–later– Korea and Vietnamese cities, especially toward the beginning of those conflicts, was to demonstrate the physical vulnerability of the civilian population and urban centers that could affect both popular and leadership morale. It was believed that the post-Pearl Harbor air raid on Tokyo led by Gen. James Doolittle in April, 1942 achieved a stunning morale victory for the U.S., even though damage was quite modest by later standards. Early raids on Berlin (Nov. 1941) had been costly for the British but symbolically important. These raids were suspended during 1942 (until 1943) because of the heavy anti-air defenses around the city.

8. Demonstration effect for non-enemy but rival powers- this is a curious but credible perspective that notes the desire of some generals directing attacks on eastern German cities to make a statement about U.S. air power to the Soviets occupying those regions in ever greater numbers as well as to the Germans themselves. Schaffer notes that the (British) Royal Air Force bomber command  was especially convinced that striking the heart of Berlin would impress the Russians with the “effectiveness of Anglo-American air power.” Schaffer quotes Air Force General David Schlatter, writing in his diary just before the Yalta conference:

I feel that our air forces are the blue chips with which we will approach the post-war treaty table and that [Operation THUNDERCLAP] will add immeasurably to their strength, or rather to Russian knowledge of their strength.” **[D.M. Schlatter Daily Diary, Jan 28, 1945, file 168.7052-5, 44/10/41-45/07/11, Alfred F. Simpson Historical Research Center, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, cited in Shaffer, p. 96]

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9. Self-preservation for pilots-Another reason to bomb German, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese cities thoroughly was to take out industries and military installations that would endanger bombers and crews (!) Through construction or emplacement of anti-aircraft equipment: guns, fighter planes, etc. [specify which cities had such factories and installations].

10. Terror bombing- related to many of the already mentioned reasons for air bombardment but worth focusing on as a special motive is the terror and morale-eroding effect of punishing air raids. This has been one of the most sensational and closely argued debates in the reconsideration of the value of city destruction, 1943-45, 1950-53, and 1965-72. In 1944 noted Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport sent out a survey, later forwarded to the Strategic Bombing Survey, asking “leading members of his profession” their views on the probable effects of bombing on German and Japanese morale. The responses reflected as much division on the question as their was in the upper ranks of the Air Force leadership.** [Schaffer, p. 90]

11. Dehumanization-    Related to and magnifying some of the effects of the rationale for bombing missions listed above, is the oft-commented on tendency of societies and their military forces to dehumanize the other side. This process starts with leaders: Hitler, the Kaiser, Tojo, Hirohito; extends to the enemy military forces: “Huns” “Storm Troopers” “cruel Japs” and finally, in an age of total war, to the Other Society itself. Amerindians become expendable, more modern foes need to be castrated, exterminated, etc. There is a great range of feelings within the societies: not all Germans had contempt for Jews and Slavs, too many did; not all Japanese had disregard for the lives of conquered Asians– too many did; not all Americans felt the large numbers of civilian deaths in Germany and Japan were acceptable, but many did.

There seems to be some correlation between the power and scope of “enemy conquest” and the degree to which the corresponding society is deemed evil and worthy of severe counter-blows. Racism and differentiated xenophobia, discussed below, certainly contribute to rationalizing mass counter-killing. But the success of Germany and Japan and the perceived direct threat they posed to the United States, made the massive onslaught against their cities in some ways easier than the less publicized air attacks on North Korea, and the much more criticized attacks on North Vietnam.

**This might be an opportune time for a short but needed digression from the flow of this presentation: [consider inserting this earlier in oral presentations]: by cataloguing the devastation inflicted by American bombing missions, we are not saying that the German, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese leadership and military were less than cruel or violent themselves. Atrocities abounded and excessive violence was not just “fallen into”, but carefully planned in some cases in substance if not in form and exact execution. And we are not saying that American allies do not share responsibility for helping get the U.S. involved and coordinating the attacks on enemy cities alongside the Washington leadership. The point is that the atrocities of enemies and shared brutality of Allies only partly absolves the U.S. from confronting fully the acts of collective destruction it has  practiced.

12. Racism and Differentiated Xenophobia- Fueling the “Anger and Revenge” motives for strikes against Japanese cities in particular was a long- standing American animus toward Asians (the “Mongol race”) and particularly the Japanese, who had never been colonized. A history of immigration restrictions, anti-Japanese laws in California, resentment in the 1930s as the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere became bigger and rougher, capped by the post Pearl Harbor internment of Japanese American civilians, raised the tolerance for total war against “the Japs.”

And when Allied prosecutors sitting in the gutted capital city of Japan in 1946 accused the country’s leaders of promoting the indiscriminate destruction of “men, women and children alike”, they still did so with little sense irony. Japan had merely reaped what it had sowed. ** Dower p. 41

 This was compounded by newsreels of Japanese atrocities in China and the Philippines. The Bataan Death March would establish a public opinion climate against Japan that would give license to the fiercest air assault on any nation, including Germany, in the history of warfare before or since. It is essential to note, however, that the public opinion contempt for Asian culture and the differences of its people predated the aggressive phase of Japanese expansion after 1931 and was reflected in US newspapers nearly  40 years before that time:

Some, like the Hearst newspapers, warned of a yellow peril led by Japan as early as the 1890s, and maintained an unwavering editorial policy of anti-Oriental polemics over the next half-century.**Dower, p. 157

In the war itself, the no surrender, no-prisoners policy of Japanese soldiers and officers in the island hopping campaigns of the Pacific reinforced the image of a people for whom life was cheap and sacrifice a given. One of many famous Japanese soldier/sailor poems reads:

                                                Across the sea, corpses soaking in the water

                                                Across the mountains heaped upon the grass

                                                We shall die by the side of our lord

                                                 We shall never look back. ** [Dower 25}

Dower and other scholars have also noted that the Japanese entertained many of their own racial stereotypes of effete Westerners, including Americans,  with their exaggerated noses and ears,  reflected in cartoons and drawings and in the press generally.

                The Pacific war has been characterized as “The War Without Mercy.” 1941-1945  was replete with surprise attacks, forced marches, torture of prisoners, island battles in which the dead outnumbered the square mileage of the island to a power of 10 or 20, aerial firebombing, and, ultimately, kamikaze and flame- throwers-in-caves attacks (Okinawa), capped off by two bombs 1000 times more powerful than any explosive ever dropped from an airplane.

                The race-based analysis that the atomic bomb was used against the Japanese but would not have been against the Germans is debatable. The first A-bomb was tested in New Mexico on July 21, 1945. Had Germany still been in the war, the chances of a sizeable bomb being used against a German city would have been high. I know of no memorandum or scholarly writing that indicates that the Manhattan Project was designed for Japan only.

                In addition to racial prejudice intertwining with other forms of resentment against Japan to fuel the deadly incendiary assault on its cities, there was an American public opinion history– by no means unique to this country– of what might be called differentiated xenophobia. As a relatively isolated power 3,000 miles from Europe and 8,000 from Asia, the Americans  had contact over the years with foreign cultures  mainly through immigrants coming into the U.S. and from foreign travel, mostly by the elite classes– at least until World War One. Although there was not the kind of distaste for foreign cultures found in, say Korea or Japan before 1870, Americans did share what might be called an Anglo-American disdain for non-white, but also in varying degrees, Latin based Cultures (American and European) and Slavic as well as Celtic cultures. This observation greatly oversimplifies, but does help explain a somewhat greater reluctance to participate in the city bombing of Germany than Japan and also the receptivity of Americans for assisting the British over the Germans. Political ideology and perceptions of who the aggressors were in the world wars thus accounts for a great deal.

13. Anger and Revenge- When returning to the central question of “Why We Bomb,” we can differentiate between two genera of mid- Twentieth Century bombing: A. the use of bombs in later campaigns against North Korea and North Vietnam in which strategic and racial factors blended together to break the will of Asian communist nations that were upsetting the geo-political equilibrium sought by the United States and B. the earlier use of air attack against cities to cripple the populations of states engaged in costly wars of regional conquest, namely Germany and Japan.

                North Korea had its urban landscape flattened because it tried to reunite all of Korea under its rule in 1950. No other country was involved in its real estate altering efforts. North Vietnam similarly attempted, ultimately successfully, to bring the South under its control in the late 1950s and 1960s, and the price of doing so was made higher by punitive U.S. air attacks.

                In the case of Germany there was successful annexation of the Low Countries, Austria, western Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the rest of Eastern Norway, Denmark and France, with threats of conquest for Greece, Britain, and Russia by made-late 1941. The brutality of Hitler’s attacks on those societies, including civilians and particularly ethnic minorities like the Jews and gypsies and whole ethnic majorities like Slavs (the contrast between treatment of Germans and and Slavs in Czechoslovakia was characteristic) is legendary: aerial bombardment of Dutch, Polish and British cities, concentration camps, execution of city officials wherever resistance was met and sometimes when it was not met. Japan’s equally unrestrained moves into China, Indochina, Malaya, the Philippines and much of the Western Pacific offended international human rights sensibilities (insofar as they were developed at the time) as well as the geopolitical status quo.

                I would argue that in any war, from medieval conflicts to religious and Amerindian wars in the 16^th and 17^th centuries to more modern wars, strategy has been colored in varying degrees by revenge and anger for past mistakes and slights. When the townsfolk of Puritan Massachusetts torched Wampanoag villages in King Philip’s War, they did so at first tentatively and later vigorously in response to attacks on Deerfield, Springfield, and other settlements. More to the current point, when the German Luftwaffe leveled Rotterdam, and parts of Warsaw and London, it mirrored the Nazi leadership and some of the German body politic’s loathing of  European neighbors that had A. humiliated the Germans after World War I (UK), B. stood between Germany and those foes (Netherlands, Belgium) and C. held substantial German populations under the rule of the Slavic kin of Russia and then the Soviet Union (Czechoslovakia, Poland). While conquests and economic motives drove part of Berlin’s war machine, the octane of the fuel that the machine was running on was heightened by feelings of settling a score, rationalized by perceived slights from London, the Hague, Brussels and the Slavic capitals to the East.

                When Japan launched its assaults on China between 1931 and 1938 and then moved against Hawaii, the Philippines, Indochina, the Dutch East Indies, it was for far more than the establishment of Tokyo’s hegemony over and economic exploitation of  those areas. The motives were, equally, contempt for Asian neighbors that had allowed themselves to be colonized and animus against the European and American hegemons defiling Asia. In a certain sense, when the bombs fell and shells flew and bayonets thrust, causing such agony in Shanghai, Nanking, Rangoon, and Manila, the collective contempt for lesser Asian peoples in the eyes of Japanese leaders and their soldiers was intensified by a national resentment of American, British and French slights—the U.S.’s pro-Russian mediation of the Russo-Japanese War was an early example– against the “People of the Rising Sun. “

                Right after the December 7, 1941 attack, General Leonard Gerow of the Army Chief of Staff’s planning office, had noted: “Perhaps the best way to offset this initial defeat is to Burn Tokyo and Osaka.” [Cited in Sherry, p. 115, note on p. 384]

                And as the war was moving toward a conclusion, top generals were mindful, in the wake of the first a-bomb attack, of how a score was being settled:

When General Leslie R. Groves , the director of the Manhattan Project, told [Gen. Henry] Arnold and General Marshall about the attack on Hiroshima, Marshall suggested that it would be a mistake to rejoice too much, since the explosion had undoubtedly caused a large number of Japanese casualties. Groves replied that he was not thinking as much about those casualties as about the men who had made the Bataan Death March. Afterwards, in the hallway outside Marshall’s office, Arnold slapped Groves on the back and exclaimed, ‘I’m glad you said that,–it’s just the way I feel.’” **[Schaffer, p. 154, also quoting  Groves in Now It Can be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project (New York, 1962) p. 324.

                 So it was, with different historical particulars, with the vast aerial counter-thrust against Germany and Japan. There was a need not simply to stop the Tokyo and Berlin juggernauts, but also to avenge the losses of innocents in the paths of the aggressors and to avenge the humiliation of London and Washington for the Blitz against London, Coventry, Liverpool, and the smashing into Pearl Harbor, Manila, and British Hong Kong, Rangoon, and Kuala Lumpur.

                British pilots over Dresden and Hamburg were well aware that those targets that were contributing to the war effort that had leveled sections of London, Manchester, and Belfast and  equally as acutely, had necessitated the enlistment of many thousands of British and, later, American soldiers who were dying because of German bellicosity. American pilots and bombing crews flew mass sorties that lit up Tokyo, Kobe, Osaka, and two dozen other Japanese cities of size with the knowledge that the targets below had spawned the soldiery that had laid waste to Chinese and Philippine cities and, far more centrally, brought hundreds of thousands of American farmers, businessmen, workers, and budding professionals overwhelmingly under 30 years of age into the path of harm and death in the Pacific.

                Because most accounts of bombing campaigns stress strategy, logistics, and statistical results: square mileage of flattened buildings, targets destroyed, civilians killed and injured, there is often not a clear way to gauge the extent to which the anger of leaders and the desire for revenge may shape these campaigns and their execution. The historian is forced to rely on anecdotal evidence: accounts of generals and politicians, memoirs of pilots and bombing crew-members, and– to a very limited extent– memoranda and journalistic pieces composed by players in the drama– in World War II men like Eisenhower, Arnold, Spaatz, Kuter, and even Roosevelt and Stimson. As with all of our motivation categories for the bombing of civilian areas, it would be valuable to have these sorts of recollections to leaven “the official record”. It would also be enlightening to compare these with memoirs of British, German and Japanese bombardiers.  Anger does not always bottle and age well, however, and there is no guarantee the recollections would translate what went through the minds of theater commanders, mission weary pilots and worried White House and Pentagon occupants.

                                CONCLUSION: AND WAS IT WORTH IT?

Here we seek to pull together the strands of motivation to engage in what must surely rank as one of the most weighty and morally debatable human endeavors in history: the destruction of several dozen cities and 4 million or so civilian lives as part of the effort to subdue four adversaries: Germany Japan, Korea and Vietnam between 1942 and 1972. The distinguished British military historian, Gen. J.F.C. Fuller, in his The Second World War, writing of the July 1943 raid on Hamburg in particular, as part of a general discussion of the bombing of German cities said:

Eyewitnesses described how the holocaust was so terrible that the air was sucked into it from outside of the perimeter of the fire. Many were suffocated or shriveled up by the intense heat. Others were drowned on throwing themselves into the canals that ran through the city. Days later, when the nearby cellars were opened, thousands were found to have perished as if cooked in an oven….These appalling slaughterings, which would have disgraced Attila, were justified on the plea of military necessity– only military objectives were attacked. In Britain, there were vindicated by the Archbishop of York, because they would shorten the war and save many thousands of lives. **[Fuller, 238]

It is widely agreed that the cost of city-blitzing was extremely high. The debate rests on whether the strategic and national humanitarian objectives achieved (save American lives) were met (by the cost extended to others) and the surprisingly difficult and closely related question, for many, of whether the cost was too high. This inward debate played itself out early within the minds of the bomber crews themselves and those who advised them:

Airmen especially criticized the long and dangerous raids on Berlin. Typical complaints in a June 1944 survey were that the city is not a military target and bombed mainly for “headlines.” and “I don’t believe in spite bombing.” Almost three quarters of veteran flyers stated they occasionally or “quite often” had undergone missions “not worth the cost.” **[Crane, 38]   and

One man was only able to keep his sanity by following his chaplain’s advice to “keep it impersonal and not to focus on what happened on the ground “He rationalized that he was doing his best to hit military targets, helping shorten the war and save lives in the long run. Yet he was still troubled throughout his tour by recurrent thoughts of an incident in which he had almost hit the city’s amphitheater with an errant bomb. [ibid.]

These perspectives, it must be emphasized, still represent a small sampling, a “minority report” of doubts set against an orthodox consensus that many of the life-saving, war-ending goals were met. Our thirteen ways of accounting for  city-bombing can be collapsed into four broad areas: A. “Taking lives to save other lives” B. “Help defeat the enemy by psychological and physical means” C. “The results of anger, revenge, sometimes  aggravated by racism and xenophobia, and

D. “Collateral damage”: that is, civilian lives lost in spite of an attempt to avoid taking them while aiming at other targets. For true believers, such as Gen. Curtis LeMay, architect of bombing strategies for both the ending German and Japanese war strategies, B & C melted together seamlessly:

                                We were going after military targets. No point in slaughtering civilians for the mere sake of slaughter. Of course there is a pretty thin veneer in Japan, but the veneer was there. All you had to do was visit one of those targets after we’d roasted it, and see the ruins of a multitude of tiny houses, with a drill press sticking up through the wreckage of every home. The entire population got in the act and worked to make those airplanes or munitions of war…men, women, children. We knew we were going to kill a lot of women and children when we burned that town. Had to be done. [LeMay with McKinlay Kantor, Mission with LeMay, Garden City, Doubleday, 1965, p. 384]

                                                SOURCES

Alperovitz, Gar. The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, Vintage Books, 1996

Crane, Conrad.  Bombing, Cities, and Civilians, U. Kansas Press, 1993

Dower, John. War Without Mercy, Pantheon, 1986

Fuller, J.F.C. . The Second World War, 1939-1945: Duell, Sloan and Pearce (NY), 1954

Keegan John. The Second World War, Penguin, 1990

Neillands, Robin. The Bomber War, Overlook, 2001

Schaffer, Ronald. Wings of Judgment, Oxford, 1988

Sherry, Michael. The Rise of American Air Power, Yale, 1987

Stokesbury, James. A Short History of World War II, William Morrow, 1980

Werrell, Kenneth. Blankets of Fire, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996

                Memoirs

Churchill, Winston, The Grand Alliance, Mariner Books (reissue), 1986

Le May, Curtis (with MacKinlay Kantor), Mission with Le May, Doubleday, 1965

Truman, Harry S. Memoirs, Smithmark reissue, 1995

From POLITICO: 6/21/23

Good luck with this one, Republicans!

CONGRESS

House GOP’s latest fracture: How fast to try to impeach Biden

Conservative hardliners are racing to force doomed votes hitting the president, frustrating battleground-seat members and causing a new headache for Republican leaders.

House Republicans respond to resolution to impeach BidenSharePlay Video

By OLIVIA BEAVERS, NICHOLAS WU and SARAH FERRIS

06/21/2023 11:59 AM EDT

House GOP hardliners have found a new tactic to push their party further rightward — and cause heartburn for Speaker Kevin McCarthy: forcing doomed votes on impeaching President Joe Biden.

The rush to impeachment votes comes after first-term Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) found success on her second try at forcing the House to censure Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) for his lead role in investigating former President Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. Luna is expected to prevail against Schiff on Wednesday using what’s called a “privileged resolution,” one that requires a speedy floor vote. And Luna’s maneuver appears to have inspired her fellow conservatives to go much further against their favorite Democratic target.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), another House Freedom Caucus firebrand, is pushing forward with her own privileged resolution that would impeach Biden. At least two other Freedom Caucus members, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), told POLITICO they are pursuing separate impeachment resolutions.

Marjorie Taylor Greene to introduce articles of impeachment against BidenSharePlay Video

It adds up to a new headache for McCarthy, just two weeks after roughly a dozen conservatives held the House floor hostage out of fury over the California Republican’s debt deal with Biden. McCarthy privately told his members during a closed-door meeting Wednesday that now isn’t the time for an impeachment vote, and some of his allies got more critical in public.

“Things like impeachment are one of the most awesome powers of the Congress. It’s not something you should flippantly exercise in two days,” said Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), one of McCarthy’s biggest sounding boards in the conference.

Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a battleground-district Republican, called the impeachment race among conservatives frustrating and described it as “a person thinking about themselves versus the team. Impeachment is a serious thing. It should go through committee. They got to make the case, find the facts.”

Luna revised her resolution to censure Schiff after her first attempt failed to garner enough GOP support over concerns it violated the Democrat’s constitutional rights. While her second edition is poised to pass on Wednesday, winning over even swing-seat Republicans like Bacon, the same can’t be said for impeachment resolutions like Boebert’s.

Any quick resolution to impeach Biden is likely to fail, with Democrats only needing a few Republicans to join them as opponents in the narrowly divided House. And nudging less-hardline Republicans to vote against impeachment puts those members in an uncomfortable position, exposing them to criticism from the party’s fired-up, pro-Trump base — not to mention offering Biden a fundraising boon.

The president only has to look to Schiff as a model: His censure at the hands of Luna and the House GOP is giving him an opening to rake in cash as he runs for Senate.

But the risks of pushing for quick impeachment may not matter to the conservatives who are lining up to take their whacks at Biden.

After Luna’s first anti-Schiff measure failed, right-wing pundits like Steve Bannon used their platforms to condemn the 20 GOP members who voted against it, posting those Republicans’ office phone numbers and attacking the members’ conservative bona fides. The former House Intelligence Committee chair is still a potent punching bag for the right thanks to his role in the Trump-era Russia probe — but most of the 20 Republicans opposed to Luna’s first censure plan questioned the $16 million fine that she could have imposed upon Schiff.

A fine that size, some Republicans feared, would amount to a form of expulsion from Congress because Schiff would have to resign to have the levy dropped. Under the Constitution, expulsion from office requires support from two-thirds of the House.

Luna’s revised censure pitch won the co-sponsorship of Biden-district Rep. Mike Garcia (R-Calif.). Asked if there is a political risk in backing her now, Garcia replied: “Standing up for what’s right is never going to hurt us, regardless of what color the district is.”

As for a Biden impeachment resolution, however, Garcia is a clear no: “That’s ridiculous. That’s literally what they did to then-President Trump. And we all looked at that knowing it was absurd. There was no testimony. There’s no evidence. There was no due process.”

Garcia added that conservative claims of cause to impeach Biden may prove “valid, but there’s a process to get to that point of substantiation and validity. And we’re not, in my opinion, there yet.”

Ogles said on Tuesday that he has already filed another privileged impeachment resolution against Biden related to unproven allegations the president and his family are involved in a bribery scheme, as well as Biden’s handling of the southern border.

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“I think people want some accountability and to know that there’s not a two-tier justice system. And so this is a step in that direction. So whether you’re moderate or conservative or somewhere on the spectrum, I don’t think it should be a tough vote,” Ogles said. “There’s a process for impeachment, but [people want] at least a vote, regardless of the outcome. So that’s what we’re looking at.”

Greene said Tuesday night — after Boebert introduced her impeachment resolution — that she, too, is moving forward with five previously floated impeachment resolutions that target Biden as well as Cabinet secretaries like Attorney General Merrick Garland and Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Greene also signaled a hint of annoyance that Boebert went forward with a separate resolution: “I had introduced articles of impeachment on exactly all the same reasons, and she didn’t co-sponsor mine. So then she did her own and introduced them on the floor. I don’t know why. I’d asked her to co-sponsor. But I support it,” Greene said.

The Georgian, also a close ally of the speaker, insisted that she’s not trying to flout leadership’s wishes.

“Mine is not against leadership at all. And I don’t see it that way. It’s me following through with the promises that I made to my district,” Greene said, praising McCarthy.

During Trump’s term, House Democrats used the same strategy to circumvent their leaders — with mixed results.

Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) roiled his party when he forced the House to consider articles of impeachment against Trump as recently as 2019, before there was strong Democratic support for the move. (Republicans, who held the majority the first time Green offered an impeachment resolution, tabled the proposal each time and got some Democratic backing.)

Schiff, meanwhile, has deluged his supporters with fundraising solicitations related to the House GOP censure. And the Republican rush to impeachment votes is also handing Democrats a political cudgel that they see as a boost to their hopes of reclaiming the House in 2024.

Biden’s party is already eager to paint the measures as proof that the Republican fringe is more interested in fealty to Trump than in engagement on policy. Democratic Caucus Chair Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) told reporters Wednesday that Republicans’ allegiance to Trump “time and time again” is evidence of “how extreme they are.”

Despite her rivalry against Schiff in next year’s Senate race, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said it was “outrageous” for Republicans to punish him.

“I think that they need to figure out how they can serve their constituents and represent their constituents,” Lee said, “rather than trying to attack somebody who’s trying to preserve our democracy.”

A POLITICO investigation finds that Russian companies have declared hundreds of thousands of rounds obtained from Western suppliers.

BY SERGEY PANOV, SARAH ANNE AARUP AND DOUGLAS BUSVINE

JUNE 19, 2023 5:23 AM CET

>10 MINUTES READ

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Voiced by artificial intelligence.

As gear reviews go, it was a glowing one: In a 60-second video clip posted on Telegram, a masked sniper sporting the death’s-head insignia of the Wagner mercenary army sings the praises of the Russian-made Orsis T-5000 rifle.

“The equipment comes very well recommended,” the soldier, pictured in the charred interior of a building, tells a war reporter from the Zvezda TV channel run by the Russian Ministry of Defense.

Pulling out the clip of the weapon at his side, he continues: “It uses Western .338 caliber ammunition. It works very well. It can penetrate light cover if the enemy is behind it. And, in the open, it can strike the enemy at a range of up to 1,500 meters.”

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The Orsis T-5000 is made by a company based in Moscow called Promtekhnologiya that has been sanctioned by the United States.

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And the “Western” ammunition?

Filings obtained by POLITICO indicate that Promtekhnologiya and another Russian firm called Tetis have acquired hundreds of thousands of rounds made by Hornady, a U.S. company that trademarks its wares as “Accurate. Deadly. Dependable.” Hornady, founded in 1949, sums up its philosophy with the phrase: “Ten bullets through one hole.”

The findings add to a growing body of evidence that supplies of lethal and nonlethal military equipment are still reaching Russia despite the West’s imposition of unprecedented sanctions in response to President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last year. The exigencies of war have exposed Russia’s lack of capacity to manufacture high-end sniper rounds, say defense experts, and that is fueling a flourishing black market for Western ammunition.

Information on the procurement of such gear is hiding in plain sight: Details of deals — importers, suppliers and product descriptions — can be found online by anyone with access to the Russian internet and a grasp of international customs classification codes.

Anything but bulletproof

In a “declaration of conformity” filed with a Russian government registry and dated August 12, 2022, Promtekhnologiya stated that it planned to source a batch of 102,200 Hornady lead bullets for the assembly of “hunting cartridges” used in “civilian weapons with a rifled barrel.” The specifications — .338 Lapua Magnum bullets weighing 285 grains — match those of a product in the Hornady catalog.

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A second declaration bearing the same date is for a batch of “uncapped cartridge cases for assembling civilian firearms cartridges” made by Hornady with the same .338 Lapua Magnum specification.

The description is misleading: The .338 Lapua Magnum isn’t a “hunting cartridge;” it’s a high-powered, long-range projectile that was developed by Western militaries in the 1980s and used by their snipers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Reached by POLITICO, Steve Hornady, CEO of the family company based in Grand Island, Nebraska, denied selling ammunition to Russia in wartime.

“The instant Russia invaded Ukraine, we were done,” Hornady said in a brief telephone call.

Hornady declined at first to elaborate and, when asked to review the evidence, requested that it be sent by fax or courier as he did not use email. He eventually responded after POLITICO sent written requests for comment with supporting documentation by courier.

“We categorically are NOT exporting anything to Russia and have not had an export permit for Russia since 2014,” he replied. “We do not support any sale of our product to any Russian son-of-a-bitch and if we can find out how they acquire, if in fact they do, we will take all steps available to stop it.” 

Populist Autocrat

What the opposition did and how Erdoğan managed to escape outright defeat.

By Murat Somer and Jennifer McCoy

May 2023 

Turkey’s hotly contested May 14 presidential and parliamentary elections saw a record turnout of 88.9 percent. Heading into the election, polls had given opposition candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, who was supported by two alliances of opposition parties, a slight edge over President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Erdoğan, who has been in power for two decades, was seeking yet another term despite Turkey’s declining economy and the government’s poor response to a catastrophic earthquake earlier this year. He seemed more vulnerable going into the election than ever before.

By the end of the night, however, Erdoğan (with 49.5 percent) had just missed the 50 percent threshold to win outright and will head into the May 28 runoff nearly 5 points ahead of Kılıçdaroğlu (who won 44.9 percent). A third candidate, ultranationalist Sinan Oğan, won 5.2 percent of the vote, and his endorsement could tip the balance in either direction. The president’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its allies have for now retained their majority in parliament. However, allegations of election irregularities could lead to some seats being reallocated to the opposition.

These outcomes came as a surprise and disappointment to many. So we must ask: How did Erdoğan escape defeat? And how did the opposition come so close in the first place?

Three factors explain Erdoğan’s stronger-than-expected first-round performance. First, intense polarization and negative partisanship kept voters from switching from pro-Erdoğan to anti-Erdoğan blocs, even when they were unhappy with the government’s performance. Erdoğan’s use of political rhetoric demonizing the opposition, identity politics, and fear-mongering disinformation helped him to keep most of his base despite the distresses of high inflation (estimated to be at 80 percent) and the February earthquake. Meanwhile, Kılıçdaroğlu had the backing of opposition parties that had fielded separate presidential candidates in 2018, yet he failed to improve on their combined total from five years ago.

Second, it is exceedingly difficult to defeat elected autocrats. One need only look at Vladimir Putin in Russia, Hugo Chávez and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, and, more recently, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Aleksandar Vučić in Serbia—both of whom won landslide elections last year, dashing hopes for change. Still, Erdoğan was facing his biggest challenge ever, given his mismanagement of the economy, his government’s inadequate response to the earthquake, and years of corruption. To compensate, he not only secured major loans from Saudi Arabia and Russia so that he could entice votes with handouts such as free gas for a year, but he also engaged in more electoral manipulation and discrimination.

Third, Erdoğan put to full use the “Frankenstate” he has constructed over the years to promote himself and stifle his opponents. He has politicized state television and, through his oligarchs, taken over most private mass media, allowing him to deny or control coverage of the opposition (for example, producing uneven, discrediting, and at times demonizing portrayals of opponents) for up to 80 percent of voters. Erdoğan also may have received Russian help with a deep-fake video that aired at his closing campaign rally and depicted terrorist PKK (Kurdistan Worker’s Party) members singing the opposition’s campaign song. He jailed leftist pro-Kurdish leaders and potential candidates, and convicted popular opposition figure Ekrem Imamoğlu, now mayor of Istanbul, of “insulting” the election commission following shenanigans in Imamoğlu’s 2019 mayoral race, threatening to disqualify him from running for president.

Crucially, Erdoğan’s compliant parliament changed the rules this year for seat allocations in that body, requiring parties in an alliance to agree on a single list of candidates if they wanted to receive the full benefit of forming an electoral alliance. This task was guaranteed to be a challenge for an alliance of six opposition parties. In the end, the opposition did better in large cities such as Istanbul and Ankara, but the ruling People’s Alliance won in rural areas where gaining a seat requires fewer votes. Thus the governing alliance won 53.5 percent of seats with just 48.4 percent of the vote, while the two opposition alliances together won 46 percent of seats with 45.5 percent of the vote.

The Opposition’s Innovations

Democratic oppositions often are ideologically fractured and helpless against autocrats’ democracy-eroding tactics, which over time tilt the playing field so dramatically that beating them becomes nearly impossible. Perhaps just as damaging, many opposition groups lack a vision for addressing fears and grievances that bring autocrats to power in the first place. They are not offering the people realistic, democratic alternative solutions to their problems. Turkey’s opposition, in contrast, has made significant and innovative advances on both fronts—electoral competition and governing strategies—in recent years. This, in large part, is why the opposition alliance was narrowly favored going into the election. And it did hold its own against great odds, ultimately keeping Erdogan’s presidential vote under 50 percent for the first time in his three presidential contests. Whether or not the opposition prevails on May 28, it has acted creatively and made strides in organization and mobilization that will serve it in the future. Its strategies and tactics could provide valuable lessons for oppositions worldwide. Here are seven of them:

1) Unite: Turkish opposition parties understood that they could not win on their own against an autocrat viciously using its powers to divide, discredit, and disempower the opposition. So they joined together, forming two major coalitions: the Nation Alliance (also known as Table of Six) and the Labor and Freedom Alliance. These coalitions jointly endorsed Kılıçdaroğlu as president. Oğan, the third presidential candidate, is now trying to play kingmaker.

Although the Nation alliance strategically coordinated electoral lists for some parliamentary districts, it should have created more united lists. It also failed to coordinate at all with the leftist Freedom and Labor Alliance for parliamentary seats, which helped Erdoğan’s alliance in the parliamentary vote. Turkey’s electoral system has a high threshold for party entry (7 percent) and uses the D’Hondt formula to distribute seats (benefiting larger parties). That, combined with the government’s ability to gerrymander the 87 electoral districts, at least to some degree means that Turkey’s is not a pure proportional-representation system, making it more imperative for opposition parties to join together.

2) Depolarizing messages: Erdoğan has long used polarizing politics to demean and vilify his opponents and to keep his voters loyal, whether they like the government or not. The more voters dislike or fear the opposition, the more hesitant they’ll be to punish the regime at the ballot box. To disarm or at least neutralize that strategy, the Turkish opposition formed left-right alliances that cannot be pinned to any single identity, ideology, or legacy. This was so effective that Erdoğan had to resort to unprecedented levels of disinformation and hate speech to demonize the opposition.

The opposition so far has mostly avoided the temptation to respond in kind and risk further polarizing Turks. Instead, it has proposed a new Turkey—one of tolerance and diversity that respects religious freedoms. Most surprising perhaps, is the viral “Alevi” video, in which Kiliçaroğlu put his own minority Alevi Muslim religious identity front and center and called on young people to embrace diverse identities. Although such positive tactics can be, and have been, effective, we must still recognize that it is hard to defeat negative sentiments of fear, anger, and hate.

3) Consensus-seeking and program-based politics: Rather than simply presenting an anti-incumbent message or offering an alternative strongman (a common approach), Turkey’s opposition alliances have focused on their programs and policies. They have stressed that Kılıçdaroğlu is seeking votes for his alliance and its program, not for himself, and they have signed detailed documents laying out their agreed-upon reforms. The agreements detailed in the Nation Alliance’s 244-page memorandum of understanding have injected an unprecedented programmatic depth into Turkish politics and lend credence to the opposition’s claim that it has a bigger agenda than simply ousting Erdoğan.

4) Conflict resolution: Turkey’s opposition alliances have developed an agree-to-disagree culture to back up their promise to rebuild the country’s democracy with a broad-based consensus. Nonetheless, they have not been immune from disagreements and infighting. In the most serious instance, Good Party leader Meral Akşener left the Nation Alliance only to return two days later. For the most part, however, the constituent parties have shown a commitment to keep talking until they reach some kind of agreement.

5) Extraordinary tactics disarming the autocrat: The opposition has used creativity and humor to counter the government’s heavy-handed tactics. The opposition’s clever use of social media has helped it to overcome the incumbent’s extensive informational advantages. Kılıçdaroğlu’s nightly videos from his humble kitchen, which contrasts sharply with Erdoğan’s flamboyant presidential palace, are a good example. Creativity comes in handy, especially for frustrating the government’s strategic repression. Erdoğan has weaponized a politicized judiciary to selectively cripple his most promising political rivals—for example, by bringing charges against İmamoğlu when he rose in the polls as a potential presidential candidate. Kılıçdaroğlu has declared İmamoğlu as his running mate, together with Mansur Yavaş, Ankara’s equally popular mayor, and the five other party leaders who make up his alliance. This creates not only a supremely representative leadership team, but also a clear obstacle to Erdoğan sidelining individual rivals.

6) Looking to the future with concrete proposals: Autocrats promise to navigate their countries through troubled times and address pressing problems such as climate change, immigration, and inequality with a strong hand. In reality, they hollow out democratic institutions, talk tough, and implement policies that exploit but do not solve these global problems. A week before Turkey’s pivotal twin elections, Erdoğan was not campaigning on promises of social equality, price stability, or food security. Instead, he was boasting about his assertive foreign policy and the country’s flourishing arms industry, huge parts of which are owned by members of his own family. This may swell national pride and bump up Turkey’s ranking in the global military pecking order, but it will not make Turkey or any of its neighbors more secure.

Many democratic oppositions fail to propose realistic solutions to the problems plaguing society beyond returning to the past that voters rejected in the first place. The Turkish opposition has been trying to change that. It is far from reaching consensus on many issues that divide parties of the right and left. But it is offering a program for the future while trying hard not to alienate supporters of its constituent parties, a problem that has stymied oppositions in Hungary, Serbia, and Venezuela. The opposition’s platform includes economic proposals, such as restoring the independence of the Central Bank, as well as far-reaching reforms, such as signing the Paris Climate Convention, promoting a green economy, and addressing poverty and high youth unemployment with a universal basic income for lower-class families and 18-to-25-year-olds. Perhaps most important, the opposition wants to replace Erdoğan’s oppressive hyperpresidential system with a democratic and consensus-based “reformed” parliamentary system more amenable to discussing issues freely and inclusively.

7) Collective leadership: In Turkey’s hyperpresidential system, the opposition has taken the extraordinary step of proposing a collective leadership team, with two popular mayors and the leaders of the other five parties joining Kılıçdaroğlu as proposed vice-presidents. Although vice-presidents are not elected in Turkey, this promise of a leadership team representative of all the parties in the Nation Alliance demonstrates its commitment to remaining united in a new government and implementing its agreed-upon program.

No Effort Is Wasted

None of these innovations guarantees success for the opposition. The limits to its ability to overcome the hurdles of an entrenched, energetic, and charismatic strongman were on full display on election night. But the opposition still has a chance to win. The runoff will be a battle for turnout, and the opposition must motivate demoralized voters to go to the polls. Kılıçdaroğlu will have to explain that he will be able to govern stably with a legislature dominated by the AKP and its allies. He will also need to find a way to secure Oğan’s endorsement, perhaps by finding common ground on policies of immigration and secularism. These are major challenges.

Whether the Turkish opposition wins this time around or not, its strategies and proposals will be highly informative. It may not yet be able to unseat Turkey’s autocrat, but it has managed to keep opposition support more alive than ever and forced Erdoğan to keep radicalizing his policies and alliances in order to survive. These same strategies can benefit other oppositions challenging autocrats and would-be autocrats. Beyond that, political parties and civil society groups in democracies worldwide can use these strategies as they try to confront urgent challenges in contexts of deep inequality, divided societies, and democratic backsliding.

Murat Somer is professor of political science at Koç University, Istanbul.  He is coeditor, with Jennifer McCoy, of “Polarization and Democracy: A Janus-faced Relationship with Pernicious Consequences,” a special volume of American Behavioral Scientist (2018) and author of Return to Point Zero: The Turkish-Kurdish Question and How Politics and Ideas (Re)Make Empires, Nations and States (2022). Jennifer McCoy is Regent’s Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University, nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and visiting researcher at Koç University in Istanbul. She is coeditor, with Murat Somer, of “Polarizing Polities: A Global Threat to Democracy,” a special volume of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2019).

Blogger’s note: A few surprises here. Can Anyone really know Chris Christy? Smart guy like him or not. Very hard to pin hown. Changes stories a lot, but can “take you in.”

THE ATLANTIC

APRIL 22, 2023, 7:30 AM ETSHARE

SAVED STORIESSAVE

“How many different ways are you gonna ask the same fucking question, Mark?” Chris Christie asked me. We were seated in the dining room of the Hay-Adams hotel. It’s a nice hotel, five stars. Genteel.

Christie’s sudden ire was a bit jolting, as I had asked him only a few fairly innocuous questions so far, most of them relating to Donald Trump, the man he might run against in the presidential race. Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, was visiting Washington as part of his recent tour of public deliberations about whether to launch another campaign.

Color me dubious. It’s unclear what makes Christie think the Republican Party might magically revert to some pre-Trump incarnation. Or, for that matter, what makes him think a campaign would go any better than his did seven years ago, the last time Christie ran, when he won exactly zero delegates and dropped out of the Republican primary after finishing sixth in New Hampshire.

But still, color me vaguely intrigued too—more so than I am about, say, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson. If Christie runs again in 2024, he could at least serve a compelling purpose: The gladiatorial Garden Stater would be better at poking the orange bear than would potential rivals Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, and Nikki Haley, who so far have offered only the most flaccid of critiques. Over the past few months, Christie has been among the more vocal and willing critics of Trump. Notably, he became the first Republican would-be 2024 candidate to say he would not vote for the former president again in a general election.

Read: Just call Trump a loser

Christie makes for an imperfect kamikaze candidate, to say the least. But he does seem genuine in his desire to retire his doormat act and finally take on his former patron and intermittent friend. Which was why I found myself having breakfast with Christie earlier this week, eager to hear whether he was really going to challenge Trump and how hard he was willing to fight. Strangely, he seemed more eager to fight with me.

It was a weird breakfast. Shortly after 8 a.m. on Wednesday, Christie strolled through the ornate dining room of the Hay-Adams, where he had spent the previous few nights. He was joined by his longtime aide Maria Comella. We sat near a window, with a view of the White House across Lafayette Square, and about 100 feet from the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church, where Trump had staged his ignominious Bible photo op three springs ago.

I started off by asking Christie about his statement that he would not vote for Trump, even if the former president were the Republican nominee. “I think Trump has disqualified himself from the presidency,” Christie said.

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So what would Christie do, then—vote for Joe Biden? Nope. “The guy is physically and mentally not up to the job,” Christie said.

Just to be clear, I continued, this hellscape he was currently suffering under in Biden’s America would be as bad as whatever a next-stage Trump presidency would look like?

“Elections are about choices,” Christie said, as he often does. So whom would he choose in November 2024, if he’s faced with a less-than-ideal choice? “I probably just wouldn’t vote,” he said.

Interesting choice! I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a politician admit to planning not to vote, but it’s at least preferable to that cutesy “I’m writing in Ronald Reagan” or “I’m writing in my pal Ned” evasion that some do.

I pressed on, curious to see how committed Christie really was to his recent swivel away from Trump, or whether this was just his latest opportunistic interlude before his inevitable belly flop back into the Mar-a-Lago lagoon. Say Trump secures the nomination, and most of his formal “rivals”—and various other “prominent Republicans”—revert to doormat mode. (“I will support the nominee,” “Biden is senile,” etc.) What’s Christie going to be saying then, vis-à-vis Trump?

We were exactly seven minutes into our discussion, and my mild dubiousness seemed to set Christie off. His irritation felt a tad performative, as if he might be playing up his Jersey-tough-guy bit.

From the July/August 2012 issue: Jersey boys

“I’m not going to dwell on this, Mark,” Christie said. “You guys drive me crazy. All you want to do is talk about Trump. I’m sorry, I don’t think he’s the only topic to talk about in politics. And I’m not going to waste my hour with you this morning—which is a joy and a gift—on just continuing talking, asking, and answering the Donald Trump question from 18 different angles.”

I pivoted to DeSantis, mostly in an attempt to un-trigger Christie. Christie has made a persuasive case that DeSantis has been a disaster as an almost-candidate so far, especially with regard to his feud with Disney. But would Christie support DeSantis if he were to somehow defeat Trump and become the nominee?

“I have to see how he performs as a candidate,” Christie said. “I really don’t know Ron DeSantis all that well … I’m going to be a discerning voter,” Christie added. “I’m going to watch what everybody does, and I’m gonna to decide who I’m gonna vote for.” (Reminder: unless it’s Trump or Biden.)

Read: Just wait until you get to know Ron DeSantis

I had a few more follow-ups. “So, I know you don’t want to talk about Trump …”

“Here we are, back to Trump again,” Christie said, shaking his head.

Trump, I mentioned, has been the definitional figure in the Republican Party for the past seven or eight years, and probably will remain so for the next few. Not only that, but Christie’s history with Trump—especially from 2016 to 2021—was pretty much the only thing that made him more relevant than, say, Hutchinson (respectfully!) or any other Republican polling at less than 1 percent.

This was when Christie lit into me for asking him “the same fucking question.” Look, I said, at least 40 or 50 percent of the GOP remains very much in thrall to Trump, if you believe poll numbers.

Christie questioned my premise: “No matter what statistics you cite, what polls you cite, that’s a snapshot in the moment, and I don’t think those are static numbers.”

“It’s been true for about seven years,” I replied. “That’s pretty static.”

“But he’s been as high as 85 to 90 percent,” Christie said, referring to Trump’s Republican-approval ratings in the past. There will always be variance, he argued, but those approval ratings would be much smaller now. Christie then accused me of being “obsessed” with Trump.

Read: Why won’t Trump’s Republican rivals just say it?

At this point, Christie was raising his voice rather noticeably again, an agitated wail that brought to mind Wilma Flintstone’s vacuum. I was becoming self-conscious about potentially disturbing other diners in this elegant salle à manger.

A waiter came over again and asked if we wanted any food. Christie, who was sipping a cup of hot tea, demurred, and I ordered a Diet Coke and a bowl of mixed berries. “What a fascinating combination,” Christie marveled.

I told Christie that I hoped that he would in fact run, if only because he would be better equipped to be pugilistic than the other milksops in the field. Obviously, it would have been better if Christie had taken his best shots at the big-bully front-runner seven years ago instead of largely standing down, quitting the race, and then leading the GOP’s collective bum-rush to Trump. But he has grown a lot and learned a lot since then, Christie assured me.

“I certainly won’t do the same thing in 2024 that I did in 2016,” Christie said. “You can bank on that.”

“Well, I would hope not,” I said. This seemed to reignite his pique.

“What do you mean, I hope?” Christie snapped. He took umbrage that I would question the sincerity of his opposition to Trump: “How about just paying attention to everything I’ve said over the last eight weeks?”

I told him that I had paid attention to what he said about Trump over the past eight years. Christie nodded and seemed to acknowledge that maybe I had a point, that some skepticism might be warranted.

Read: Chris Christie says his new book isn’t an act of revenge

I asked Christie if he had any regrets about anything.

“I have regrets about every part of my life, Mark,” he said.

Whoa.

“And anybody who says they don’t is lying.”

That said, Christie added, he would not change anything about his past dealings and relationship with Trump. He is always reminding people that he and Trump were friends long before 2016; that they went way back, 22 years or so. Christie told me that he and Trump have not spoken in two years. Did he miss Trump?

“Not particularly,” he said.

Do you think he misses you?

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“I do,” Christie said.

“Has he called, or tried to reach out?”

“No, that wouldn’t be his style,” Christie told me. “That would be too ego-violative.” (I made a mental note that I’d never before heard the term ego-violative.)

“But I do think he misses me, yeah. I think he misses people who tell him what the truth is. I think he misses that.”

Christie had another meeting scheduled at nine at the Hay-Adams, this one with Congressman John James, a freshman Republican from Michigan. From Washington, he would head to New Hampshire, where he had a full two-day schedule planned—a town hall, a few campaignlike stops, some meetings. He told me he would make a decision in the next few weeks whether to run.

Before I left the hotel, I asked Christie whether his wife, Mary Pat, thought he should run. “My wife affirmatively wants me to do it, which is different than 2015 and 2016,” Christie told me. “She thinks I’m the only person who can effectively take on Donald Trump.”

That’s kind of what I think, I told him—that he could at least play the role of a deft agitator. Good, Christie said, but Mary Pat’s vote counted for more than mine. “I sleep with her every night,” he explained. I told him I understood.

“Have fun in New Hampshire,” I said as Christie shook my hand and pirouetted out of the dining room. He seemed to be no longer mad, if he ever was.

Mark Leibovich is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

EUROPE NEWS

COMMENTS

Ukraine is asking Western allies to step up deliveries of 155mm artillery shells.   –  Copyright  Alex Brandon/Copyright 2022 The AP. All rights reserved.

By Jorge Liboreiro  & Alice Tidey & Efi Koutsokosta  •  Updated: 21/04/2023 – 16:15

How European should European weapons be?

That is the question currently occupying the minds of diplomats in Brussels, who continue haggling about the technical details of a €1-billion initiative to jointly buy ammunition for Ukraine.

Despite a political agreement reached one month ago, the novel proposal finds itself stuck in negotiations, a delay that stands in stark contrast with the brutal developments on the battlefield.

Patience in Kyiv is wearing thin: in an unusually harsh rebuke, Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Minister Dmytro Kuleba openly deplored the protracted stalemate as “frustrating.”

“For Ukraine, the cost of inaction is measured in human lives,” Kuleba said on Thursday.

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The comment prompted a phone call the following day with Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, who pledged the bloc would “do its utmost to deliver, and deliver fast.”

At the core of the ongoing dispute is the ideal of “strategic autonomy,” a policy concept that posits the European Union should become more independent and self-reliant, particularly in matters of defence, where an alliance with the United States has for decades set the terms.

This concept, which for the time being remains a theoretical aspiration rather than a political reality, has made its way into the €1-billion procurement scheme Brussels devised earlier this year to collectively purchase 155mm-calibre artillery shells, and possibly missiles, to help Ukraine resist the advance of Russian troops.

Ukraine has asked the EU to provide over 250,000 rounds of this kind per month, whose cost ranges between €2,000 and €4,000 per unit.

The initial EU deal foresaw that participating countries, together with Norway, would buy the ammunition only from defence companies based across the bloc, effectively excluding the arms industry of democratic partners such as the US, the UK, Israel and South Korea.

But in recent days, the exact contours of this “Made in Europe” label have caused a split among member states, who are required by law to agree by unanimity on any foreign policy measure.

Speaking on condition of anonymity to express their opinions in a franker manner, diplomats painted a picture of conflicting narratives with one country at the epicentre: France, one of the fiercest, if not the fiercest, proponents behind the concept of “strategic autonomy.”

According to the version described by several diplomats from different member states, France is asking for the supply chain of ammunition production to be entirely European, including the sourcing of key components needed to build the artillery shells.

“They want 100% EU supply chain,” one diplomat told Euronews, regretting what was described as “French never-ending amendments.”

But these claims have been described as “rubbish” and “impossible” by another diplomatic source who insisted no such plan to renege on the current agreement that takes into account the current limitations of European industry in terms of supply chains has been brought forward. 

Instead, they point the finger at Poland, a country known for its hardline stance against Russia, as one of the hold-outs behind the blockage, an accusation that Warsaw vehemently denies. 

The diplomat also suggested that some member states may be trying to go back on the original deal to buy only from EU manufacturers. 

France’s position remains ambiguous in the eyes of other capitals but is said to have gained the tactful backing of Greece and Cyprus, although their support is not absolute, Euronews understands.

“The majority of member states are for speed, in contrast to ‘buy only in EU’. It’s more about France, with Greece and Cyprus, against all others, with some small exceptions,” said a third diplomat.

In response to the alleged French demand, countries from Northern and Eastern Europe are making the case for pragmatism so as to deliver artillery shells to Ukraine as fast as materially possible.

Although there is a general consensus that European industry should be prioritised, the diverging views on value chains, which in many cases entail materials imported from countries like South Africa and Australia, are complicating the drafting of the final legal text and forcing lawyers to attempt different wordings that can please all 27 states.

“We don’t have an agreement and that’s disappointing,” said a senior diplomat, who noted the opposition stemmed from “one or three countries who are not happy with the text.”

“In a broader sense, it’s crucial that we strengthen the European defence industry. But we should not lose sight of what we’re doing here and that is to help Ukraine. Everything else is secondary.”

The French-led faction contests these claims, pointing to the original political agreement that introduced the EU-based requirement for defence contractors and bemoaning “elements of dramatisation” that suggest the bloc will fail to deliver the promised ammunition on its own.

“This ‘self-defeatism prophecy’ is always the thing that some Europeans like to indulge in, saying we’re never going to get there,” said a senior diplomat, insisting the “European war economy” will not only provide Ukraine what it needs to defend itself but would bring benefits for all 27 member states.

“Let’s believe in ourselves, please.”

The European Commission, which designed the joint procurement scheme, has said that, as things stand today, the gap between placing an order for weapons and the actual delivery is around 12 months due to an intricate combination of supply bottlenecks, lack of access to raw materials, insufficient skilled personnel and slow permitting processes.

The executive is working to pool EU funds to ramp up the production of artillery shells by the bloc’s defence industry, estimated to be spread across 15 facilities in 11 member states. The plans, including a concrete amount of cash, are expected to be unveiled in the coming days.

”We understand (Dmytro) Kuleba’s anxiety and the incredible pressure he’s under, but his tweet doesn’t reflect the reality of EU military support,” said a senior EU official, who spoke of ”lively” discussions among member states.

“A solution is very near. We’re all interested in helping Ukraine.”

If diplomats fail to resolve the issue over the weekend, the debate on “Made in Europe” will be passed on to foreign affairs ministers themselves, who are scheduled to meet in Luxembourg on Monday.

MAUREEN DAUT THE NEW YORKER

What’s the Path Forward for Haiti?

As the international community contemplates another armed intervention, a reckoning with history is long overdue.

As the international community contemplates another armed intervention, a reckoning with history is long overdue.

By Marlene L. Daut THE NEW YORKER

March 18, 2023

“What happened to the Creole pigs is a cancer for Haiti,” a woman explains in “Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy,” a documentary from 2009. Creole pigs—animals indigenous to the island of Hispaniola, which is home to both Haiti and the Dominican Republic—once served as bank accounts for Haitian families. By raising and selling a healthy, fattened pig, the woman says, a family could pay for food, clothing, and education. This all changed in 1981. An outbreak of swine fever in the Dominican Republic had spread to Haiti, and U.S. officials feared that the disease, which is harmless to humans but highly contagious and deadly among pigs, might reach the United States. A powerful consortium of foreign governments and institutions, including the U.S.D.A. and the International Development Bank, required Haitian farmers to kill every pig in the country. Farmers were promised compensation through U.S.A.I.D. and replacement pigs from North American farms.

“They could have saved a small reserve of pigs,” Yolette Etienne, of the National Campaign Against Violence, a Haitian nonprofit, says, in the film. “But the American government demanded total and complete eradication of the entire race of pigs that we had.” Foreign pigs arrived in Haiti, but they were vulnerable to disease and ill-suited to the climate, and proved unable to survive. The country’s pork industry was effectively destroyed, and the Creole pig went extinct. The effect of all this on the country was profound. Many rural families, facing starvation, flocked to Port-au-Prince to seek scarce factory jobs. The population of the capital swelled, causing mass unemployment and a housing crisis. Many Haitians became consumers rather than producers of food, relying on imports from abroad for sustenance.

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Governmental interventions in Haiti have a terrible track record—even ones that respond to natural disasters, such as the 2010 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince. That year, the United Nations sent two thousand troops and fifteen hundred police officers to Haiti to support the nine thousand peacekeepers already on the ground and help provide emergency relief, including food, water, and medical care. But some of those troops brought cholera with them, creating an overlapping disaster when an outbreak killed at least ten thousand Haitians and sickened hundreds of thousands more. The mission was also plagued by allegations of rape and sex trafficking; during the same period, U.S. families hastily adopted more than a thousand Haitian babies and children, as the U.S. government temporarily did away with routine screening protocols. Foreign N.G.O.s operating in Haiti have not fared much better. In 2018, media accounts revealed that Oxfam Great Britain covered up an investigation into the hiring of sex workers for orgies by its staff. The Haitian government responded by banning Oxfam from Haiti. A few years earlier, an investigation by ProPublica showed that the American Red Cross, which raised a half billion dollars for aid in Haiti after the quake, had squandered the money, building only six permanent homes.

Today, we’re again talking about intervention in Haiti. Since the assassination of the country’s President, Jovenel Moïse, in July, 2021, armed groups have taken over its capital and brought daily life to a standstill. Gangs have repeatedly cut off access to roads, the airport, and fuel supplies; they have also kidnapped for ransom numerous prominent members of Haitian society, and are charged with murdering people indiscriminately, with babies and children sometimes caught in the crossfire. Schools have closed, and travelling to hospitals, banks, and markets has become treacherous, if not impossible. Food and water are increasingly hard to obtain, and doctors are seeing a dangerous resurgence of cholera.

In October, the Biden Administration helped draft a U.N. resolution authorizing the deployment of international troops to Haiti. In an attempt to distance itself from the previous U.N.-led occupation, the resolution proposed a non-U.N. mission led by a “partner country.” António Guterres, the U.N.’s Secretary-General, had earlier proposed the dispatch of a multinational “rapid action force.” The resolution that was ultimately adopted by the U.N. makes no mention of foreign troop deployments. Still, the Canadian government has not ruled out participating in a foreign deployment, if there’s “a consensus across political parties in Haiti.” Ariel Henry, the acting Prime Minister and acting President of Haiti, and eighteen top-ranking Haitian officials (most of whom are no longer in office), previously requested the deployment of foreign troops, too.

But Haiti’s government is not a proper stand-in for its people. Headlines such as “Haiti calls for help” are misleading. Thousands of Haitians across the country have protested the idea of foreign intervention, rejecting Henry’s request and demanding his resignation. “Life is not going to get better with an international force,” Marco Duvivier, an auto-parts manager who took part in the protests in Port-au-Prince, told a reporter for the Associated Press. Widlore Mérancourt, the editor-in-chief of the Haitian news outlet AyiboPost, was more measured when he told me that, though sending foreign troops to Haiti might halt violence and temporarily restore basic governance, it would only be “a Band-Aid, not a long-term solution”; such an intervention, he said, wouldn’t address the “root causes” of a “social structure” that cyclically produces gang leaders who lead mass uprisings that largely comprise Haiti’s youth, resulting in government overthrows that lead to the deployment of foreign troops.

Haiti appears to be stuck between two bad options. To many foreigners, and to those in power in Haiti, intervention seems necessary to halt the current gang violence—and yet history and the Haitian people themselves tell us it’s a bad idea. Meanwhile, international intervention is already occurring without foreign soldiers, both discretely—the United States and Canada have repeatedly sent armored vehicles to the Haitian police—and through an ongoing process of economic and political interference. How can Haiti, and the world, move forward and out of the present crisis without repeating the mistakes of the past? How can the world do right by a nation it’s so often wronged?

The current crisis began in 2018, when Haitians took to the streets to protest the theft, by Moïse and other members of his political party, of money from a development fund linked to PetroCaribe, a now defunct Venezuelan program that sold oil to countries in the Caribbean and Central America. An investigation by the Haitian senate found that 1.7 billion U.S. dollars disbursed over eight years had been grossly mismanaged or stolen. Moïse faced criticism through the rest of his term, which, according to Haiti’s constitutional calendar, should have ended in February, 2021. But, instead of holding an election, he stayed in office, leading to further protests. Amid the chaos, armed gangs sidelined the Haitian National Police, jockeying for position while terrorizing the populace.

After Moïse’s assassination, the confusion and the conflicts deepened. Ordinarily, Claude Joseph, the acting Prime Minister, would have assumed power after Moïse’s death. But just a few days before his assassination, during his fifth year in office and after his term had technically expired, Moïse appointed Ariel Henry, a seventy-one-year-old neurosurgeon, to the position. Since Henry hadn’t yet been officially sworn in, Joseph prepared to take office, with the backing of the Haitian military and national police. But the Core Group—a body comprising ambassadors from Germany, Brazil, Canada, Spain, the United States, France, and the European Union, and representatives from the United Nations and the Organization of American States, who are supposed to promote democracy in Haiti—intervened by issuing a statement, urging Joseph to step down and Henry to take power. Many Haitians and Haitian Americans decried the statement, which resulted in Henry’s ascension, as yet more international interference.

There was a viable alternative to the Core Group’s solution. In August, 2021, community and institutional leaders representing disparate parts of the Haitian population, with the shared mission of finding a “Haitian solution to the crisis,” drafted the Montana Accord. Writers of the accord insisted that the international community refrain from intervening in their country’s politics, and called for elections to be held no later than 2023. They also demanded that the United States, the Core Group, and the U.N. cease all support for Henry’s government, because of its ties to the PetroCaribe scandal and other forms of corruption. In collaboration with more than four hundred civil and political bodies in Haiti, the writers of the accord identified an interim President and Vice-President who could preside over the government until elections could be held. “The Haitian people want to redefine their future outside of this state administered mainly by local and foreign actors,” they declared. The next month, Daniel Foote, the U.S. special envoy to Haiti, resigned, citing ongoing U.S. support for Henry’s administration. “The hubris that makes us believe we should pick the winner—again—is impressive,” Foote wrote. “This cycle of international political interventions in Haiti has consistently produced catastrophic results.”

The cycle of interventions began at the country’s founding, in 1804, when Haiti declared independence from France. After the Haitian Revolution—a twelve-year-long struggle led by formerly enslaved people against their enslavers—Haiti determined its own form of government and enjoyed robust trade with Britain, the U.S., and other nations. But France continued to pursue reconquest, and President Thomas Jefferson, caving to pressure from the French, instituted a trade embargo. Economic sanctions against Haiti reached an apex in 1825, when France, under King Charles X, forced Haiti’s President, Jean-Pierre Boyer, to agree, under threat of invasion, to a disastrous indemnity of a hundred and fifty million francs; the amount was later reduced to ninety million, but after tariffs, interest, and other fees, Haiti ultimately paid a hundred and twelve million francs. Even after the agreement, the United States and other Atlantic slave powers refused to recognize Haitian independence.

The United States finally recognized Haiti in 1862, a year after the U.S. Civil War began. All the same, it repeatedly encroached on Haitian territory, using gunboat diplomacy to seek territory for naval bases. From 1915 to 1934, the U.S. staged a full-blown occupation of Haiti—its longest military operation until the Vietnam War. Although U.S. diplomats framed the occupation as a response to the assassination of Haiti’s President, Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, its fundamental goal was to force Haiti to pay loans and fees associated with the French indemnity, in which American banks had a fiduciary interest. The United States impounded all Haitian government revenue to insure that payments were made.

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Haitians, naturally, protested the presence of U.S. forces. In 1919, the Haitian nationalist Charlemagne Péralte led a rebellion against the occupiers. U.S. soldiers responded with a harsh crackdown, killing Péralte and afterward circulating a picture of his body positioned in a crucified pose as a warning. During the occupation, more than fifteen thousand Haitians were killed by U.S. soldiers. The violent quashing of all protest was widely viewed by Haitians as a decisive turning point away from the country’s revolutionary principles of freedom and independence and toward autocratic rule. In 1929, the Haitian historian and diplomat Dantès Bellegarde told President Herbert Hoover that many Haitians now had a “general scorn” for the law, obeying it only “in order to escape its severe sanctions, decreed and applied by brutal force.” The economist Emily Greene Balch, who later received the Nobel Peace Prize, led a delegation to Haiti in 1926 and observed that “the Americans are training not police, but soldiers.” She wondered what the effect of such a force would be after American withdrawal. Haitians were soon to find out.

During the occupation, U.S. soldiers helped establish the puppet Presidency of the pro-U.S. politician Philippe Sudré Dartiguenave, paving the way for the United States to play a role in installing or deposing every subsequent Haitian President. François Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, was elected in 1957, allegedly by a landslide; as the writer Patrick Bellegarde-Smith has shown, however, four times as many Haitians voted for his opponent, Louis Déjoie. The U.S. supported the election because Duvalier was anti-Communist. In 1964, following another sham election, Duvalier declared himself “President for life.” The infamous brutality perpetrated by his henchmen, the Tontons Macoutes, is perhaps best summed up by Duvalier’s “Catechism of the Revolution,” widely circulated in the capital: “Our Doc who art in the National Palace for life, hallowed be Thy name by present and future generations. Thy will be done in Port-au-Prince and in the countryside. Give us this day our new Haiti, and never forgive the trespasses of those traitors who spit on our country each day. Lead them into temptation, and poisoned by their own venom, deliver them from no evil.”

Duvalier unleashed a reign of terror, censoring the press and imprisoning or killing his rivals along with journalists, academics, and students. When he died suddenly in 1971, his nineteen-year-old son, Jean-Claude, known as Baby Doc, inherited the dictatorship. Hardly less brutal than his father, he reigned until February, 1986, when a popular uprising known as déchoukaj, or uprooting, forced him out of office. As many as thirty thousand people were killed by the Duvalier regimes. Baby Doc fled to France, where he enjoyed protection and lived in exile for the next quarter century; meanwhile, a violent military junta came to power in Haiti. Most of its leaders had received U.S.-funded paramilitary training.

The junta left power in 1991, when Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former priest, took office, winning nearly seventy per cent of the vote. Aristide, Haiti’s first popularly elected President, was known for sharp criticisms of the U.S. He accused Haiti’s economic élite of exploiting the poor, and took the military to task for its human-rights abuses. After only eight months in power, his administration was toppled by the Haitian military in a 1991 coup. Even as he took refuge in the United States, Aristide publicly blamed the U.S. and the U.N. for much of Haiti’s economic and political turmoil. At the U.N. General Assembly, he criticized foreign leaders to their faces in a famous “ten commandments” speech known as the “Diskou Aristide.” His fifth commandment: “What belongs to us is ours. Ours is not yours.”

Aristide spent three years under the protection of the U.S. government, until he was reinstalled in 1994, through an initially popular military mission called Operation Uphold Democracy. But Aristide’s sudden reliance on U.S. intervention signalled a change in his loyalties. He was reëlected in 2000 amid allegations of election fraud and soon began using armed groups called Chimè to threaten, silence, and kill his critics. His regime lasted until February, 2004, and was followed by a U.N. peacekeeping mission that continued until 2017. Depending on whose version of the story one believes, Aristide either asked the U.S. government for help fleeing the country when his ouster again seemed imminent or was kidnapped by a coalition from the United States, Canada, and France, who colluded to remove him from office.

Many Haitians believe that the French government orchestrated Aristide’s removal because, in 2003, he engaged an international cadre of lawyers to study the nineteenth-century independence indemnity. They calculated that France owed Haiti twenty-one billion dollars in reparations—a number recently confirmed by an independent investigation at the New York Times. Speaking to the Times, Thierry Burkard, who was France’s ambassador to Haiti in 2004, acknowledged that Aristide’s removal was effectively “a coup,” orchestrated in part by France. It was, he said, “probably a bit about” the Haitian President’s request for reparations.

This is the history of neocolonial Haiti. Kwame Nkrumah, the former President of Ghana, has defined neocolonialism as the “last stage of imperialism.” A country subjected to neocolonialism “has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty,” he went on, but “in reality its economic system and its political policy is directed from outside.” Neocolonial foreign policies create continuous cycles of dependency.

Without a doubt, neocolonial Haiti is a spectacularly failed state—a shadow Haiti, unable to provide the basic necessities of life for its people. At the same time, its economy and elections have largely been controlled by foreign banks and the world powers. This is why the Haitian historian and anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot once referred to Haiti as “the longest running neo-colonial experiment in the west.”

Part of what makes neocolonialism so intractable is that, as a state fails, more neocolonialism becomes the only imaginable cure for the ills created by it in the first place. The United States’ Haitian policy has never been primarily directed toward the humanitarianism it touts; during the Cold War, the U.S. was first and foremost concerned with anti-Communism, and since the fall of Duvalier its main goal has been to prevent Haitian “boat people,” who flocked to Miami in droves during the Duvaliers’ dictatorships, from reaching the continent. Less than five per cent of Haitian asylum seekers in the U.S. are granted asylum, the lowest rate of any nationality for which data are available. More often, Haitian migrants have been brutally expelled. In September, 2021, for example, the U.S. began the process of deporting back to Haiti thousands of people sheltering near the Rio Grande—even as instability in Haiti, caused in large part by U.S. foreign policy, was the reason the migrants had fled.

What Haiti needs, above all, is a definitive rupture from the cycle of forced dependency kept in motion by foreign governments and international institutions. How does a shadow state like Haiti achieve decolonization from neocolonialism? As a first step, the U.S. and other U.N. member states must stop hailing elections to be organized by Haiti’s current leadership as the best route to future stability and security. In the words of James North, a longtime political correspondent covering Haitian politics, the gangs running rampant over the capital today are “largely paramilitary allies” of Henry’s (formerly, Moïse’s) ruling party, which has “dominated Haiti for the past decade with a combination of election fraud and violence.” Second, and most important, the international community needs to commit to charting a new path. Payments are part of that path: Haiti should receive compensation from France, the U.S., and the U.N. for damages related to the indemnity, the U.S. occupations, and other abuses.

Skeptics and critics often cite the corruption of Haitian leaders in arguing that Haitians are not as worthy of restorative justice as other victims of mass atrocities. Yet this argument is another neocolonial fallacy. “Oppression justifies itself,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, in “Colonialism and Neocolonialism.” “The oppressors produce and maintain by force the evils which, in their eyes, make the oppressed resemble more and more what they would need to be in order to deserve their fate.” It would be the job of a freely and fairly elected Haitian government to take on the work of appropriately managing the rebuilding of Haitian infrastructure with any reparations awarded to the Haitian people.

How do we get from the current crisis to a scenario in which elections and reparations are possible? One critical step might be to move the government away from the overcrowding and structural problems of Port-au-Prince. Although Port-au-Prince is the capital of Haiti, it is not Haiti itself; meanwhile, nearly half of the country’s estimated two hundred gangs are concentrated there. As Vadim Rossman has shown in his book “Capital Cities: Varieties and Patterns of Development and Relocation,” new capitals can play an important role in conflict resolution. Establishing an interim government in Cap-Haïtien, for example, a city two hundred kilometres to the north, might destabilize the gangs by forcing them to physically disperse and divide. Okap, as Haitians call Cap-Haïtien, has an international airport and other existing infrastructure, such as hotels, for meetings between foreign officials and diplomats; it also has a large port capable of handling both imports and exports. The economist Tyler Cowen has cited moving the capital to Okap as a promising idea. It might encourage migration out of Port-au-Prince, a city built for two hundred thousand people, which is currently home to nearly three million. (Bernard Ethéart, the director of Haiti’s National Institute for Agrarian Reform, also suggested moving the capital after the 2010 earthquake, for seismological reasons.)

Moving the capital and decreasing the population of Port au-Prince will not eradicate the gang problem on its own—there are smaller gangs in other cities, including in Cap-Haïtien. But, coupled with infrastructure projects that will create jobs, it could play a key role in engaging the youth of Haiti in work, education, and even governance. Clarens Renois, a coördinator for the National Union for Integrity and Reconciliation, a nonviolent political party, insisted in an interview with the New Humanitarian that Haitians do not need a “military solution; the solution is social, economic, and it’s about justice.” One gang member who joined when he was just fourteen echoed this sentiment when he remarked that, if given the opportunity, “the youth would wake up to work—not fight—because they [would be] making money.” Removing neocolonial barriers placed in front of Haitian agriculture—such as subsidies for U.S. farmers that have put Haitian rice farms out of business—could help make the countryside a viable place for Haitians to thrive. Supporting small-scale farming and micro-lending programs, such as those utilized by Haiti’s famous Madan Sara—market women who bring food produced in the countryside into the cities—is essential for Haiti’s future economic stability, too.

January, 2023, marked the two hundred and nineteenth anniversary of the declaration of Haitian independence. The United States, like Europe, needs to finally attend to the gaping wounds created by its colonial crimes. These wounds must be exposed to an uncomfortably bright light, so that they can be properly treated. If the West continues to repeat the past—sending and then withdrawing foreign troops, and showering Haiti with vast amounts of ineffective “aid”—then true Haitian independence will never be restored, and the world will continue to be morally and materially culpable for a humanitarian and political disaster it has spent centuries creating. There must be, and there is, another way, and just as in 1804 at Haiti’s founding, it will be Haitian-led. The path that leads to a once again sovereign Haiti will not be easy, familiar, or common sense; it will require daring, imagination, trust, and respect on all sides. But it is the only path that can produce something good. If the world truly wants what is best for Haiti and Haitians, then there is no choice but to take it–