My new "Think Again" column is called "Think Again: A Chronicle of Journalistic Malfeasance" and it’s about the kerfluffle over the coverage of Black studies at the Chronicle of Higher Education. You can find it here.

My Nation column is called "Jazz Fest and the Ghosts of New Orleans" and you can read that here.

Joan Walsh reviewed The Cause in The American Prospect at some length here.

And if you ask me, that kind of seriousness is one of the reasons that I strongly recommend that you read this plea from TAP co-founder Bob Kuttner and then perhaps cough up some bucks. 

I’ll be speaking about The Cause, and its foreign policy implications, at a forum sponsored by World Policy Institute and Demos on May 23 220 Fifth Avenue, 5th Floor from 6-7:30.

Alter-reviews:
Petey and I were among the fortunate few who got to see the Beach Boys at the Beacon theater this week. What a joy that concert was. I’ve seen Brian Wilson at least half a dozen times in the past few years and I thought I was doing about as well as one could insofar as Beach Boy songs performed live—he had a crack band—but now that crack band is backing Brian and Mike Love and Al Jardine and Bruce Johnston along with a guy named David Marks who was apparently a member of the band for a while and is a really fine guitarist and the effect was not only musically much more exciting but also quite moving. (So too were the songs performed with videos of Dennis and Carl Wilson.) Anyway, they played an amazing number of songs—at least 40 of them—with no filler and no break and only one of them from the new album, but even that sounded warm and wonderful. (And they dedicated it to Pete Fornatele, which was also nice to hear.) Started with “Do It Again,” ended with “Fun, Fun, Fun.” Heard one after the other, the awesomeness—I hate that word but still—of the band, and particularly Brian Wilson’s achievement—was a wonder to behold and impossible not to love. To be honest, when I read Jon Pareles’ review in the Times, I decided I couldn’t do better than these paragraphs:

“In the concert’s most touching moment Mr. Wilson sang “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” a song from “Pet Sounds” about being an innovator who’s universally misunderstood: “Every time I get the inspiration to go change things around,” he sang, “No one wants to help me look for places where new things might be found.”

The chords and melody climbed, lingered, fell back; Mr. Wilson stayed with them, fighting his limitations, as the Beach Boys sang harmony. It was an aching memory and a heartbreaking vindication.”

Read all about it here.

Now here’s Reed:

The Dog That Ain’t Barking for Conservatives Who Oppose Same-Sex Marriage
by Reed Richardson
Sometimes it’s the arguments your opponents don’t make that do the most to undermine their cause. So, when President Obama finally (and let’s be candid, a bit too carefully) came out in support of same-sex marriage this week, what was most striking about the all-too-predictable gnashing of teeth from conservatives was their complete and utter failure to mention the cornerstone of this administration’s, as they so crudely put it, “homosexual agenda”—the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

Indeed, one could pore through the official statements, ominous op-eds, and angry tweets of every alleged family values organization and ‘pro-marriage’ right-winger over the past 24 hours and find nary a mention of something that, up until just six months ago, was being billed as nothing short of the ruination of our military. (If you think I’m exaggerating, I offer up this nicely compiled list of all their apocalyptic predictions.) Now, one would think that the similarities between DADT repeal and same-sex marriage would be a natural talking point for the right. After all, both, at their essence, are about allowing gays and lesbians to equally participate in an institution that has traditionally excluded them. And yet, from the right, nothing.

That the establishment media would miss this and other nuances of Obama’s ‘evolution’ is somewhat to be expected, I suppose. Day-one news stories naturally dwelled on the historic nature of a president endorsing this unprecedented position, especially since it came in the midst of a general election campaign and just one day after this regressive vote in North Carolina. (And while we’re talking about Tuesday, let me just say good-bye and good riddance to ‘moderate’ Republican Senator Dick Lugar, who folded like a cheap suit on DADT repeal.) Likewise, few, if any, in the press also picked up on the states rights’ dodge that Obama subtly pushed in his interview—a notion that is particularly troubling because it relies upon the same flawed, intellectual underpinnings that allowed state miscegenation laws to fester for nearly a century until the Supreme Court struck them down in Loving v. Virginia. 

Of course, the real reason the right has conveniently forgotten all about the repeal of DADT is because, six months later, it’s been such a clear policy success. All that wild speculation on the part of conservatives about servicemembers fleeing and recruiting shortfalls? Not happening. The dire predictions about the introduction of openly gay personnel corroding military culture? Nope. Even the Commandant of the Marines, who testified before Congress in opposition to the repeal has now come around. In short, conservatives were spectacularly wrong and gay rights supporters (and Obama) have been proven unquestionably right.

But allowing same-sex marriage is a totally different issue, one could argue. Except it isn’t. In fact, one can trace the newly evolved Obama from Wednesday directly back to the repeal of DADT. That’s because by granting gay and lesbian service men and women equal status under federal law, the government’s position vis-à-vis DoMA became untenable. Same-sex partner benefits couldn’t be both equal to heterosexual ones under the highest jurisdiction in the land and moot under another, lower one. Which is what led the Obama administration to take the perfectly logical position of abandoning DoMA’s defense on grounds that it was unconstitutional.

Even the bilious Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins backed into acknowledging this dialectic, although he was careful to leave out any mention of how the gays and lesbians in the military now openly defending his freedoms were the same people whose marriages Obama rightly decided deserve equal treatment under the law: 

The President's announcement today that he supports legalizing same-sex marriage finally brings his words in sync with his actions. From opposing state marriage amendments to refusing to defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DoMA) to giving taxpayer funded marriage benefits to same-sex couples, the President has undermined the spirit if not the letter of the law.

That “spirit” Perkins refers to is, by any other name, prejudice. As the aftermath of DADT has clearly demonstrated, the justifications for that policy and other ‘pro-marriage’ state amendments policies like it were and are little more than discrimination for discrimination’s sake. And though he’d never admit as much publicly, Perkins is essentially conceding this point by intentionally avoiding what should be the best test case for his same-sex marriage opposition but is instead the most powerful weapon against it. The silence, as they say, is deafening. Let’s hope more of the media begins to hear it.

Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com.

The Mail:

Frank Moraes
Santa Rosa
"Wehw!" I said, wiping the sweat from my brow with the back of my hand.

"When you weren't here on Friday, I thought you had abandoned me!"

"No grasshopper," Eric Alterman said. "I would never abandon my reading public."

"Even for a book tour?" I asked.

"Even for a book tour," he said.

And all was calm.

Editor’s Note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.

In this Sunday, April 22, 2012, photo, Israeli flags fly over the Ulpana neighborhood in the West Bank settlement of Beit El near Ramallah. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

Round Two

BDS: A Call for Solidarity and a Challenge to the Status Quo

Critics of BDS who call for a settlement-only boycott ignore the vast range of political and economic forces inside Israel that sustain and profit from the occupation.

by Lizzy Ratner, on May 25, 2012

Before tackling all the bluster and hysteria around Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions—before diving into critics’ knee-jerk manipulations and angry accusations—let’s start with the facts: the ugly ones, the undeniable ones, the ones that have been created on the ground over six brutally deliberate decades.

Let’s start, for instance, with Gaza, that locked-down, bombed-out latter-day ghetto where “refugee” has become a permanent category of existence and an endless, five-year siege has turned collective punishment into the daily norm. Let’s talk about East Jerusalem, where the native Palestinian residents are being forced from their homes to make way for Jewish settlers. In the West Bank, illegal Jewish-only settlements hulk over a landscape denuded of olive groves. Settlers guilty of violence against Palestinians go free, while Palestinians are hauled to jail for “stealing” their own water. More than 230 kilometers of segregated roadway, and 760 kilometers of the “Separation Wall,” have convinced even the most unlikely sources that something is desperately wrong. “While the world’s statesmen have dithered, Israel has created a system of apartheid on steroids,” wrote Stephen Robert, former CEO of Oppenheimer & Company and an “ardent Israel supporter,” in The Nation last year.

Finally, let’s talk about refugees, the ones who have been living in exile for decades, often in appalling conditions and have the right to return home under international law. And let’s talk about Israel itself—“democratic,” post-1948 Israel, where, despite their having the right to vote, Palestinian Israelis are subject to a dizzying concoction of discriminatory laws.

Let’s talk about all of this, because this is the reality for 11.2 million people—and this is the reality from which BDS has sprung.

“We have lived the past six decades going from one trauma to another, one tragedy, one slaughter, one theft to another…,” said author and human rights activist Susan Abulhawa in her address to the 2012 National Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Conference. “The boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign is our nonviolent response to this violence.”

In the frenzy to discredit BDS, it’s perversely easy for critics to forget these facts, to get lost in the abstraction (and sometimes distraction) of arguments about the uplifting effects of transnational corporations, the benevolence of 1948 Israel and the lurking anti-Semitism of the BDS agenda. These arguments are not just misleading but often downright dangerous and offensive; the anti-Semitism charge in particular is probably the most often cited and potent. So let’s be clear: vile and frightening anti-Semitism certainly exists, but BDS is not an example of it. As a nonviolent movement dedicated to human rights and nondiscrimination it is, in many ways, its opposite: the lesson of “Never Again” interpreted universally, a reminder that in the face of extreme horror, it is incumbent upon people of conscience to rally around the inalienable rights of the abused.

And there is more: while BDS remains a fundamentally Palestinian call, it nonetheless speaks to some of the best strains within Jewish tradition, from Rabbi Levi Yitzhak’s famed eighteenth-century matzo factory protest to the great, women-led kosher meat boycott of 1902 to some of the most potent phrases in Jewish religious texts. “Do not profit from the blood of your neighbor,” the words of the Leviticus 19:16 command. And another oldie but goodie, from the Talmud Bavli: “Whoever is able to protest the wrong doings of their community and doesn’t, it is as if they themselves did it and are punished for it.” And what about “Justice, Justice, shall you pursue?”

Sadly, these arguments haven’t stopped people from hurling accusations at BDS supporters, just as the Gordian knot of the Palestinian situation hasn’t stopped people from arguing that BDS should be weakened, diluted. Such is the case with Bernard Avishai’s essay, “BDS Abandons Progressive Israelis,” in which he argues that BDS should be toned down to avoid alienating enlightened Israelis living inside the Green Line. BDS, he says, is “too righteous to distinguish baby from bathwater.” So while he supports the idea of a narrow, settlement-only boycott, he condemns the full-throttle BDS effort as “confus[ing] anger with serious politics.”

And yet, it is precisely Avishai’s desire to force a distinction—to cordon off the outrages of the occupation, to separate reality from serious politics—that is the problem with his position.

Let’s start with Avishai’s own example, the narrow example of the settlements, since it demonstrates how quickly distinctions crumble. Though it would be convenient if settlements were simple, sui generis eruptions, the truth is that they don’t just pop up across the landscape like a new species of flower. They are seeded and sustained by an intricate system of political laws, government incentives, financial investments and military might—and this root system sprawls deep inside Israel’s pre-’67 borders. As Dalit Baum and Merav Amir of the Coalition of Women for Peace wrote in a 2010 essay, “Any clear-cut distinction between the Israeli economy as a whole and the economy of the occupation can no longer be justified. The Green Line border has all but disappeared from the corporate activity map. Even if we only look at the Israeli settlements, and then again only focus on settlement construction, we will discover that the major players in the Israeli economy are deeply complicit. For instance, our findings show that all major Israeli banks have funded and supervised construction projects in the settlements.”

As Baum and Merav’s work makes clear, the settlements will not be dislodged through boycotts of settlement goods alone (essential, righteous and important though such boycotts are). There is a vast economy at work in keeping the settlement enterprise alive—and not just the settlements but the whole infrastructure of inequality and control that stretches in varying degrees from the southern tip of Gaza to the northern tip of the Golan.

So the question must be asked, What is to be done? How do you bring justice to a system that in the last few years alone has given rise to Operation Cast Lead, the attack on the Mavi Marmara, the ongoing colonization of East Jerusalem and countless other outrages?

For those of us who support the call for BDS, the answer, or an answer, lies in the collective action of civil society. It lies in action that is nonviolent, rights-based, grassroots, galvanizing, targeted, tactical and capable of shaking Israelis from their torpor—because Israel won’t do it on its own, and our leaders won’t pressure them to do it either. The status quo is too cozy, too “desirable” from a “cost-benefit perspective,” as Israeli journalist Noam Sheizaf recently noted in an important column titled “Ending the Occupation: No Way Around Direct Pressure on Israel.”

And so, here is pressure—pressure that does not necessarily fill me glee, but that does give me hope. “It opens up a whole world for us of effective local action that adds up to movement building,” said Rebecca Vilkomerson, executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, which has initiated boycotts of companies like TIAA-CREF that profit from the occupation. “I believe that BDS as a tactic overall—not as the only one—is going to pressure Israel to change the status quo in a way that peace talks have not.”

This is where critics like Avishai once again chime in. Though it’s certainly fair to question the efficacy of BDS, Avishai makes the perplexing claim that in cutting off the salutary spigot of corporate capital, BDS risks alienating the very Jewish Israelis who are most primed to be sympathetic to Palestinians’ plight—namely, its “most educated and cosmopolitan people.” This is an odd formulation for several reasons, the most notable being the most obvious: Since when was morality the privilege of elites? And at what point did corporations become the avant-garde of enlightened behavior?

But there is another problem, which is that the available evidence doesn’t seem to support the theory. During the years that capital has poured into Tel Aviv, nightlife may have boomed but anti-occupation protest has not. More to the point, one of the prime, historic examples of boycott and divestment—the international campaign to end apartheid in South Africa, which inspired BDS—was enormously effective, as both Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu have argued. (And they should know, to quote Omar Barghouti.)

Will BDS work this time around, in Israel? Israel’s leadership has certainly poured enough resources into stopping it to suggest they’re concerned. Still, we can only hope and try. Because amid all the uncertainty, the one thing we do know is that the time for dithering is long past, and the moment of peaceful, persuasive solidarity has arrived.

BDS’s Conditions Spell the End of Israel

By insisting on the right of return, proponents of BDS only undermine the progressive Israelis and Jews who would champion the Palestinian cause.

by Eric Alterman on May 25, 2012

As both a liberal and a pro-Zionist Jew, I’ll admit to feeling considerable trepidation whenever I check the news coming out of Israel and the occupied territories these days. There is no question that the most regressive, racist and anti-democratic elements of Israeli society have been on the upswing. Illegal settlements—judged by Israel’s own generous standards—are being justified in a hasty, ex-post-facto fashion. Laws are being introduced to reduce the freedom of debate and democratic discourse and to outlaw the work of peaceful NGOs and civil liberties organizations—who find themselves under attack by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman as alleged “collaborators in terror.” Journalists’ ability to report on these matters is being hampered by draconian new slander penalties. The Supreme Court is at risk of seeing its power curtailed, and respected religious figures are calling for explicitly racist actions to be taken against Israel’s Arab minority. For instance, not long ago, dozens of municipal rabbis issued an edict against renting or selling real estate to non-Jews, and a group of rabbis’ wives joined together to instruct Jewish women avoid all contact with Arab men.

What explains this destructive dynamic? Clearly a significant portion of it is driven by genuine threats combined with psychological and political factors that together produce an irrational reaction. For instance, Iran’s nuclear program, coupled with the hateful rhetoric of its leaders, has helped to empower the Holocaust-related psychosis among Jews, both inside and outside Israel, that lay barely beneath the surface of most Jewish discussions of Israel’s safety and security. According to a recent poll reported on in Haaretz, “about 40 percent of all Israelis believe the Holocaust could happen again, and 43 percent are reportedly concerned the State of Israel is in danger of being destroyed.” Another significant segment of the population are not interested in democracy or human rights but only in their extremely literalistic and restrictive interpretation of religious law. Yet another sector is comprised of right-wing nationalists who could care less about democracy and prefer to see Israel turned into a modern day Sparta.

Yet even allowing for the increasing influence of these segments of society, a majority of Israelis consistently tell pollsters that they would prefer a two-state solution to the current occupation and would welcome the opportunity to work out a compromise that would end the occupation and allow Palestinians to fulfill their national aspirations in the context of security guarantees for Israel and a genuine willingness to end hostilities. But they feel themselves to be without a credible partner in the peace process and hence don’t have sufficient confidence in the concept of political and territorial compromise to challenge the scare tactics of their internal political adversaries.

For this pro-peace majority to become politically empowered, Israel’s citizens must be able to trust that the Palestinians with whom they negotiate are able to enforce the agreements they reach. This is, literally, the only path to genuine Palestinian self-determination. No American president, much less Congress, will ever attempt to force Israel into a peace agreement against its will. Neither would the Europeans, who are actually irrelevant since they lack both the power and the means to do so. Terrorism aside, Palestinians have no credible military option vis-à-vis Israel. Their only hope can come by convincing Jewish Israelis that the risks and benefits of peace outweigh the risks and benefits of continued conflict.

It is true, of course, that Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinian people breeds hatred rather than a desire for cooperation with their oppressors. Even so, it cannot possibly serve the cause of peace and self-determination for the Palestinians for their spokespeople and supporters to demand that Israel, as currently constituted, commit suicide. They may think it just. They may think it right. They may think it fair or even ordained by God. But so long as they insist, as Omar Barghouti does, on the achievement of a set of goals that would mean the end of the Zionist project, then they will only strengthen those who seek to keep them in a permanent state of oppression and immiseration as they simultaneously undermine those who would champion their cause.

Barghouti claims that equal rights for Palestinians must include “at minimum, ending Israel’s 1967 occupation and colonization, ending Israel’s system of racial discrimination and respecting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their lands from which they were ethnically cleansed during the 1948 Nakba.” If so, there is really nothing to talk about. Six or seven million Palestinians cannot be reintegrated into Israeli society based merely on arithmetic, much less all of the obvious problems that would arise from the fact that the two populations happen to hate one another. Barghouti’s conditions demand that Israelis voluntarily forfeit their commitment to their history, their national identity and their understanding of Jewish history. He might as well insist that they convert to Scientology in the bargain.

Barghouti apparently thinks that the support of a food coop or an obscure pop singer somehow constitutes the beginning of Israel’s ultimate destruction. By talking in these terms and by employing the analogy of Israel not only to South Africa but also to Nazi Germany, as he has done in the past, he strengthens the case of Israel’s hardliners and actually helps to ensure the permanent oppression of the Palestinian nation. No less foolish is his mockery of those Jews who are committed to compromise, including those who support the notion of a “Zionist BDS.” By spitting in the face of the very people who are in the best position to help Palestinians progress toward the goal of statehood and self-determination, including those willing to put themselves on the line for the cause, he furthers demonstrates the disjunction between his hollow rhetoric and the political reality he allegedly seeks to influence.

Finally, while I genuinely despair for Israel’s future under this unhopeful scenario, as I also grieve for the victims of its occupation, I was, however, deeply impressed to learn that Barghouti, who in effect calls for Israel’s destruction, has earned a masters degree in philosophy from Tel Aviv University. Alas, it is impossible to imagine the situation in reverse: an outspoken, foreign-born Jew who called for the boycott and destruction of the Arab or Islamic nation in which he resided living long enough to see himself denounced in the next day’s newspaper. The near-complete lack of democratic practices within Israel’s neighbors in the Arab and Islamic world, coupled with their lack of respect for the rights of women, of gays, indeed, of dissidents of any kind—make their protestations of Israel’s own democratic shortcomings difficult to credit. This is not merely a debating point. This democratic deficit also calls into question the ability of a future Palestinian leadership’s to enforce a peace agreement that is opposed—as appears inevitable—by significant segments of its population. Unfortunately, the signs from Egypt, Syria and Lebanon in this regard are hardly encouraging.

Were Barghouti to ask American Jews to join him in pressuring Israel to come to its senses and negotiate a secure settlement based on the 1967 lines, with necessary adjustments on both sides and some sort symbolic (and perhaps financial) redress for Palestinians without the “right of return,” he might stand a chance of attracting significant support even among American Jews and within the Israeli peace camp. As his plan now stands, it is of a piece with the programs of Hamas and Hezbollah and with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent call for “the destruction of the Zionist regime” by peaceful means.

Good luck with that.

Round One

BDS for Palestinian Rights: ‘Equality or Nothing!’

The BDS movement is not asking for anything heroic from people of conscience. It is merely asking them to desist from complicity in oppression.

by Omar Barghouti on May 3, 2012

The Palestinian right to equality is neither negotiable nor relative; it is the sine qua non of a just peace in Palestine and the region. As Edward Said once said, “Equality or nothing!”

Anyone who supports Palestinian self-determination while calling only for ending the forty-five-year-old Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is only upholding most of the rights of just 38 percent of Palestinians while expecting the rest to accept injustice as fate. According to 2011 statistics, of 11.2 million Palestinians, 50 percent live in exile, many denied their UN-stipulated right to return to their homes of origin, and 12 percent are Palestinian citizens of Israel who live under a system of “institutional, legal and societal discrimination,” according to the US State Department. More than two thirds of Palestinians are refugees or internally displaced persons.

Equal rights for Palestinians means, at minimum, ending Israel’s 1967 occupation and colonization, ending Israel’s system of racial discrimination and respecting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their lands from which they were ethnically cleansed during the 1948 Nakba. The 2005 Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) call was endorsed by an overwhelming majority of Palestinians because it upholds all three. By appealing to people of conscience around the world to help end Israel’s three-tiered system of oppression, the BDS movement is not asking for anything heroic. It is merely asking people to desist from complicity in oppression.

Moreover, given the billions of dollars lavished by the United States on Israel annually, American taxpayers are subsidizing Israel’s violations of international law at a time when American social programs are undergoing severe cuts. Striving to end US complicity in the occupation is good for the Palestinians and for the 99 percent struggling for social justice and against perpetual war.

Building on its global ascendance, the BDS movement—led by the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society, the BDS National Committee (BNC)—is spreading across the United States, especially on campuses and among churches, scoring significant victories such as at the Olympia Food Co-op. Globally, trade union federations with millions of members have endorsed BDS. Veolia and Alstom, two corporations complicit in Israel’s occupation, have lost contracts worth billions of dollars. Deutsche Bahn, a German government-controlled rail company, pulled out of an Israeli project encroaching on occupied Palestinian land. The University of Johannesburg severed links with Ben Gurion University over human rights violations. World renowned artists—including, most recently, Cat Power and Cassandra Wilson—have canceled performances in Israel, heeding the cultural boycott and transforming Tel Aviv into the new Sun City.

BDS advocates equal rights for all and opposes all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism. This universalist commitment has won hearts and minds globally, triggering panic and over-the-top bullying attempts to crush BDS in the United States, as witnessed with the national BDS conference at the University of Pennsylvania and the Park Slope Co-op ballot on boycotting Israeli goods, where almost 40 percent voted for BDS. Perhaps provoked by the mainstreaming of BDS, President Obama attacked it for the first time in his recent AIPAC address, joining numerous US politicians whose vehement vilification of BDS puts them on a moral plane with those white Americans who opposed the Montgomery bus boycott and/or the boycott of apartheid South Africa.

With impressive successes in the economic and cultural fields, and with the increasing impact of its Israeli supporters, BDS is viewed by Israel’s establishment as a “strategic threat” to its system of oppression—namely occupation, colonialism and apartheid. This explains the Knesset’s passage of a draconian anti-boycott law last year that drops the last mask of Israel’s supposed democracy. But multimillion-dollar campaigns by Israel’s foreign ministry to counter BDS by “re-branding” through art, science and cynically using LGBT rights to “pinkwash” Israel’s denial of basic Palestinian rights have largely failed.

Among international supporters of BDS, Archbishop Desmond Tutu is among the most eloquent in arguing that Israel practices apartheid. The Russell Tribunal on Palestine in its recent Cape Town session determined that Israel is practicing apartheid against the entire Palestinian people. Similarly, South African Christian leaders have condemned Israel’s apartheid as “even worse than South African apartheid.” And the publisher of Haaretz, an influential Israeli daily, recently described a fanatic Israeli ideology of “territorial seizure and apartheid.”

With its continued siege of Gaza; its untamed construction of illegal colonies and the wall in the occupied West Bank; its “strategy of Judaization” in Jerusalem, the Galilee, the Jordan Valley and the Naqab (Negev); its adoption of new racist laws and its denial of refugees’ rights, Israel has embarked on a more belligerent phase in its attempt to extinguish the question of Palestine through literally “disappearing” the Palestinians, as Said would say.

Israel and its well-oiled lobby groups, who Thomas Friedman charges with buying allegiance in Congress, have been trying to delegitimize the Palestinian quest for equal rights by portraying the nonviolent BDS call’s emphasis on equal rights and the right of return as aiming to “destroy Israel.” If equality and justice would destroy Israel, what does that say about Israel? Did equality and justice destroy South Africa? Did they destroy Alabama? Justice and equality only destroy their negation, injustice and inequality. The BDS movement’s effective challenge to Israeli apartheid and colonial rule petrifies Israel and its lobbies.

Desperate to “save Israel,” essentially as an apartheid state, and motivated by genuine fear of the demise of Zionism, “liberal” Zionists are under exceptional duress given the fast spread of BDS. Cognizant of its appeal to an increasing number of younger Jewish activists, some are muddying the waters by suggesting a Zionist-friendly boycott to undermine the movement. But BDS is an ethically consistent, rights-based movement that cannot coexist with racism of any type, including Zionism. A “Zionist BDS” is as logical as a “racist equality”!

BDS addresses comprehensive Palestinian rights, not simply ending the Israeli occupation of some densely populated Palestinian territory in order to save Israel as a “purer” apartheid. Even those who seek ending the occupation only, disregarding the basic rights of most Palestinians, struggle to explain their opposition to a full boycott of Israel, the occupying power, which under international law bears full responsibility for the occupation and its manifestations. The BDS movement calls for boycotting Israel just as South Africa was the target of boycotts due to its apartheid regime, China due to its occupation of Tibet and Sudan due to its crimes in Darfur.

Still, BDS is not a dogmatic or centralized movement—it is all about context sensitivity and creativity. BDS supporters in any particular context decide what to target and how to mobilize and organize their local campaigns. So long as they uphold the basic rights of all Palestinians, international partners may decide to selectively target companies implicated in Israel’s occupation or colonies only out of pragmatic considerations rather than approval of Israel’s other injustices.

A movement that dwells in citizens’ consciences, that is rooted in an oppressed people’s heritage of struggle for justice, and that is inspired by the rich and diverse legacies of Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr. cannot be defeated or co-opted.

Our South Africa moment has arrived.

BDS Abandons Israeli Progressives

A boycott of Israel’s settlements makes sense, but a broader boycott will most hurt those forces inside Israel that are best poised to change Israeli state policy.

by Bernard Avishai on May 3, 2012

The American response to Peter Beinart’s New York Times op-ed calling for an economic boycott of Israel’s West Bank settlements—what he calls, usefully, “non-democratic Israel”—will strike Israeli liberals as just a little melodramatic. Not very much is produced in the settlements, which are largely bedroom communities. Most liberal Israelis have been boycotting products from the settlements for years: Dead Sea creams, organic eggs, boutique wines and spices.

Recently, various scholars, artists and scientists signed statements announcing our refusal to cooperate with, or even visit, the college established in the settlement of Ariel, between Ramallah and Nablus; a college originally established by Bar-Ilan University, but now applying—with the support of Netanyahu’s government, and in the face of considerable opposition from the Council of Higher Education—to be upgraded to an independent university. A couple of years ago, writing against the BDS movement against Israel as a whole in these pages, I called for just such a boycott myself.

The settlers have, let us say, a problem with boundaries. Boycotting their products is simple, direct and clearly targeted: if a settler business loses customers, its settlement may prove less viable. This is a way of using obvious market freedoms to manifest our dissent or opposition to the settlement project as a whole. (For their part, and by the same token, most settlers don’t subscribe to the liberal daily Haaretz—in effect, they boycott the newspaper, and want it to go away.)

And Beinart is right to want the boycott of settlements to be international. Presumably, this will pressure Israeli companies, too, into dissociating themselves from the settlements and, in some cases, proving that they are not using settlement components or raw materials. The Israeli right wants to establish facts to erase the boundary between Israel and the occupied territories. A boycott of settlements establishes counter-facts that reinforce an eventual boundary: about a fifth of Israel’s GDP is from exports, and any serious Israeli company is global.

But the settlement boycott has another virtue, which is to bring into relief the kind of boycott that should not be entertained, namely, a general boycott of all Israeli products and institutions. That boycott would erase another boundary, between the Israeli state per se—the country and its civil society—and the state apparatus under particular elected leaders.

Erase that boundary, and you erase the discrete facts of Israeli politics; you repudiate the idea that a more moderate government could ever be elected again, though polls show that a split in the Shas party, or the emergence of a charismatic centrist, or a shift in Israeli Arab electoral strategies (all of which, or none of which, may happen this year), would tip the Knesset and government back to what it was under Ehud Olmert, who just attended the J Street conference, by the way.

Israel, in other words, is a complicated place. Its democracy is certainly more than what produced the occupation of Palestine. Imagine European officials, intellectuals etc., reading grim headlines about America’s invasion of Iraq, and concluding that the war was the product (as it was to some degree) of America’s imperial political structure and peculiar concepts of liberty. Imagine their advocating a boycott of everything American, from Google, to The Nation, to Berkeley—in effect, an end to the United States as we know it, including Bush’s internal opposition. Would this have been thought sane?

To be sure, Israeli democracy is not what it could be. I defer to no one in having risked what writers risk to tell hard truths about it. I wrote in The Tragedy of Zionism, nearly thirty years ago, that settlements were only the most vivid proof of Israel’s democratic deficiencies; that some of its legal structures amounted to discrimination against Israeli Arabs and valorization of religious orthodoxy—more precisely, reflected the absence of a liberal social contract needed to allow all citizens to meet as equals. And, yes, Israeli state agencies and the IDF have been instrumental in making the occupation what it is.

Still, Israel is also a place of progressive and creative forces, concentrated in Israeli elites: again, artists and scholars, but also entrepreneurs and professionals. BDS aims to hit global companies doing business with Israeli ones. But, as a group, international companies are the most important allies Israeli liberals have. These companies are learning and teaching organizations: Intel’s impact on Israel is like MIT’s on Cambridge. Opposing the bloc of parties favoring Greater Israel is a (somewhat weaker) bloc working toward Global Israel. What would BDS do to the latter, the very people in Israel whom the liberal world needs to strengthen?

You see, the implicit premise of BDS is that the occupation flows from the fact of Israel itself: that Israel is inherently a kind of occupation machine, beginning with 1948 and followed by 1967. In effect, BDS advocates accept the grotesque view of settlers and Hamas both, that the claim of Jews to Hebron in 2012 is exactly like the claim to Degania in 1912. It is not: the actions of a desperate movement are not to be copied by a triumphant state; after he became mayor, Jean Valjean did not keep stealing candlesticks. On the other hand, BDS advocates argue that the stock of global companies making things used by occupation forces—United Technologies makes IDF helicopters, for example—should be divested, as if companies are big collaboration machines. But the same company’s air-conditioners may be cooling a school in Afula—or Gaza. In both cases, looking at Israel, or at companies, we need to up the magnification.

Some will say, fine, force the implosion of Israel’s private sector and this will finally force Israeli elites to seek political change more urgently. This is mechanistic and shortsighted thinking. Economic implosion, which a fully implemented BDS would bring about rather quickly, will cut the ground out from under Israel’s most educated and cosmopolitan people. It will not just pressure them, it will destroy them—ruin their lives, force the emigration of their children. Settlers and their ultra allies, in contrast, have no problem with Israel turning into a poorer, purer, Jewish Pakistan. Do we really want to cause Israel’s private sector to collapse or its universities to be isolated?

I suppose what offends me most about BDS is that it confuses anger with serious politics. It is something like the Tea Party, mad at “government,” too righteous to distinguish baby from bathwater.

What we need, rather, is a vibrant, globalizing Israel, businesses, universities, etc. that expect to be part of the world and show the way to it; people who find Greater Israel an embarrassment and, indeed, will see an international boycott of settlements as a way of selling their case for compromise. Such people will be strengthened not by BDS but by a general, persistent anxiety about the conflict’s “opportunity cost”: the conviction that Israel’s manifestly improving quality of life will be a far cry from what it could be with peace.

That is the vision a re-elected President Obama should be preparing to bring: for Israel’s security everything, for Israel’s occupation nothing. That is the vision he tried to bring before 2010’s electoral reversals spooked all Democrats into the arms of AIPAC. With the Palestinian Authority on the brink of collapse, and successive Centcom commanders warning of a mean turn in the Arab street if the settlements are not stopped, is it too much to hope that the embrace is not permanent?

My "Think Again" column is called “Jews Are Still Liberal” and it’s here.

I’ve got a piece in the Times Arts and Leisure section on Joseph Alsop called “A Newsmaker in Every Sense of the Word” and it’s here.

In other Alterman-related news, The Daily Beast had nice things to say about The Cause, here, and forbes.com published an interesting response to the Springsteen excerpt published in The Nation here.

Bill Moyers also put up a clip from our interview, which will run this weekend, here.

And should you wish to listen to my talk with WNYC’s Leonard Lopate, that’s here.

If you want to say hello and you live near either LA or DC.

Los Angeles 
Los Angeles Times Book Festival, April 21, 4:30 PM
Panel: The Boys on the Bus: Covering Decision 2012.

Washington, DC.
Politics & Prose 5015 Connecticut Avenue in Washington, April 25 at 7:00 
The Center for American Progress, 1333 H Street, lunch served at 11:30, panel with John Halpin and Michael Kazin at noon. 

(I’ll also be at the NOLA Jazz fest this weekend for Bruce’s second appearance there, in case there’s some place you think I absolutely need to go…)

Reed is away this week, so I will entertain you with this excerpt from The Cause, which I originally pulled for Mike Allen, who did so much to make Kabuki Democracy a success, but has apparently become less enamored with my work as he chose not to post any of the below, nor mention the book’s publication, alas. Thanks for reading…

$32.95 but only $19.76 from Amazon right now, 576 pages.

The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama
After clinching the Democratic nomination in June 2008, Barack Obama had stood before an excited group of supporters in St. Paul, Minnesota, and declared:

“We will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.”

But if ever a president was to prove Mario Cuomo’s adage that candidates “campaign in poetry” but “govern in prose,” it was Barack Obama. As Marshall Ganz, a community organizer and academic who helped play a large role in the campaign, explains, “‘Transformational’ leadership engages followers in the risky and often exhilarating work of changing the world, work that often changes the activists themselves. Its sources are shared values that become wellsprings of the courage, creativity and hope needed to open new pathways to success. ‘Transactional’ leadership, on the other hand, is about horse-trading, operating within the routine, and it is practiced to maintain, rather than change, the status quo.” Obama, Gans conceded, “entered office wrapped in a mantle of moral leadership” but ceded it without a struggle. He never recovered from abandoning the bully pulpit of moral argument and public education and embracing the politics of compromise over those of advocacy.

Barack Obama, as Jesse Jackson might have put it, was a deal maker, not a world shaker. His rhetoric, together with his legislative strategy, was always oriented toward inclusiveness, consensus building, and preemptive offers of compromise.

Whatever political calculation may have lain behind it—and countless supporters found it baffling—Obama’s approach failed to take into account some fundamental changes that American politics had undergone during the Bush years, most particularly the radicalization of the Republican Party. Republicans circa 2009 were no longer interested in bipartisan solutions to America’s problems. Then-Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell told The National Journal, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”  Senator Jim DeMint famously promised health care reform could be used to “break” Obama from day one. “We’re the party of ‘Hell, no!’ ” cried Sarah Palin to a crowd of cheering southern Republicans in April 2010.

By the time of Obama’s election, the moderate wing in the Republican Party had been purged virtually out of existence, and in its place was a faction dominated, according to the moderately conservative commentator, Fareed Zakaria, by “Conservatives [who] now espouse ideas drawn from abstract principles with little regard to the realities of America’s present or past.”

The result, as New Republic editor John Judis described it, was a party that had “transformed [itself] from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. . . . If there is an earlier American precedent for today’s Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to, and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery.” In the fall of 2011, Mike Lofgren, recently retired after twenty-eight years as a congressional staffer, serving sixteen of these as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees, went so far as to describe the party for which he had labored so long as “becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy than an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of twentieth century Europe.”  Democrats, meanwhile, were divided between what one pundit called their “sitting pretty faction” and “the more fragile ‘scaredy cat’ faction that could be carried off by even the gentlest of anti-incumbent breezes.” The latter voted more often like Republicans than with their president.

Asked what he wished for in 2011 during the 2010 holiday season, Obama reportedly replied, “All I want for Christmas is an opposition I can negotiate with.” He never got one. As a longtime student and frequent defender of Congress—the American Enterprise Institute’s Norman Ornstein—observed in an article he titled “Worst. Congress. Ever.”:

Republicans, having been thrashed at all levels in 2008, did not respond to the voters’ rebuke by cooperating with the majority or trying to find common ground. Instead, repeating a tactic employed with great political success by Republicans in 1993 and 1994 against a newly elected President Bill Clinton, they immediately united fiercely and unremittingly against all the Obama and Democratic congressional initiatives. In the Senate they used delay tactics—the filibuster and the hold—in an unprecedented fashion, to block a large number of Obama administration nominees for executive branch positions and draw out debate to clog the legislative process and make an already messy business even messier.

Republicans refused to agree to approve appointments to the federal bench, even to crucial government posts, many of which remained vacant for Obama’s entire term. Following the passage of the financial reform bill creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, they intimidated the president into not even nominating the Democrats’ most popular choice, Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren, and then proceeded to refuse to schedule hearings on Obama’s alternative choice, former Ohio attorney general Richard Cordray, after Obama caved in.

Republican willingness to threaten to filibuster just about every Democratic initiative successfully frustrated liberal priority after liberal priority. The labor movement’s key issue, passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, received only tepid administration or congressional support. Nothing was done to reform America’s broken (and deeply exploitative) immigration policies. (The pace of deportations actually increased during Obama’s presidency by roughly 20 percent above that of an equivalent period during the Bush administration’s tenure.) Reproductive rights for women were actually narrowed. Money grew more powerful both in politics and in society, as campaign finance laws were weakened and the Bush-era tax cuts extended, worsening the previous era’s explosion in inequality, despite the unpopularity with the public of both of these policies. These were all clear breaks from past practices. Journalist Michael Tomasky compared eight key priorities of presidents Bush and Obama in the autumn of 2011 and found, on average, 41.1 percent of Democrats tended to support Bush’s legislation, while the corresponding number for Republicans under Obama was just 5.75 percent.

What Richard Hofstadter had written of the extremely business-friendly Democrat Grover Cleveland turned out to be eerily true of Obama as well:

“With his stern ideas of purity, efficiency, and service, he was a taxpayer’s dream, the ideal bourgeois statesman for his time: out of heartfelt conviction he gave to the interests what many a lesser politician would have sold for a price.”

The president showed little willingness to use the powers of his office to counter the hardball tactics that were strangling his agenda, such as making recess appointments when Congress was out of session or issuing executive orders to ensure that his will was done regardless of Republican filibusters or delaying efforts. Instead he simply curtailed his appointments and left many key positions unfilled. The old joke about the liberal who showed up for a gunfight with a library book was no longer so funny.

Editor’s Note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.

My new "Think Again" column is called "John Bolton and the Problem with On-the-One Hand Objectivity." Read it.

By way of introduction to Reed’s post, I was up at Yale last week to give a talk to Jewish students there and it happened to be the day when the International Relations program through which I got my master’s there was celebrating its reception of Henry Kissinger’s papers, which I assume must have been inspired either by a great deal of money or by Henry’s desire to poke Harvard in the eye. John Lewis Gaddis (who appeared deeply unhappy to see me) talked about how great Henry was and then Henry moderated a panel on China with Robert Rubin, Jonathan Spence (its only China expert) William Burns, deputy secretary of state; Michael Mullen, former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What was said during conference was off the record, it was repeatedly announced, but the let the record show that the words “democracy” and “human rights” were not spoken a single time until I was invited to ask a question from the audience. I see this as legitimate to mention because 

a) I am not reporting on anything that was actually said at the conference;

b) When I did raise the question, asking Kissinger to comment on his own record in this regard and to speak freely since we were off the record, he responded that he would be happy to respond “on the record” and then said what he has always said on the topic.

But the actual reason I am bringing this up was because I had a nice talk with Mike Mullen at the reception and we talked about the “other one percent”; those Americans with family members in the military and the disjunction between their lives and the rest of us. I brought up the sign I had seen at Springsteen in Philly the night before. “Please play Thundercrack for my dad in Iraq.” He brought up Rachel Maddow, and had some quite complementary things to say about her work.

That’s all. Here’s Reed. Happy Passover and Easter and two Bruce Garden shows. Let’s, um, go Mets. 

A Military Policy Adrift
by Reed Richardson
On June 1, 1784, General Henry Knox commanded a mere 700 men, the remainder of the Continental Army that had finally wrested America’s independence from the vast British Empire less than a year before. Congress took one look at this paltry force and decided that its size was completely unacceptable. Indeed, for them, it was much too large. So the next day, Congress summarily disbanded the army, leaving this new nation with only 80 privates as the sum total of its active-duty force. (Their lone duty was to guard the weapons stores at Fort Pitt and West Point.)

This adversarial attitude toward a large peacetime military was no mere afterthought. It was born out of the early colonial citizens’ deep-seated displeasure of bearing the costs and burdens of the large British garrisons that had been stationed among them. After ridding themselves of the British yoke, the Framers’ visceral distaste for any future empire building on the part of the United States manifested itself in the Constitution, where the military was clearly placed under civilian control and war-making powers were specifically vested with the Congress. This new American take on liberalism had little interest for the dangerous instruments of imperialism, and as Thomas Jefferson wrote during the early Constitutional debates: “Such an instrument is a standing army.”

That this historical context—as well as this Jefferson quote—shows up early on in “Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power” (Crown publishing, $25), is your first cue that that Rachel Maddow’s new book is no mere talking-points polemic tossed off to build brand synergy with her on-air MSNBC persona. Instead, as befits someone with a doctorate in politics from Oxford, “Drift” is a considered, if sometimes smirking, exploration of an oft-ignored political predicament now confronting our democracy. When it comes to building up our ability to wage war, it seems America just can’t stop itself anymore.

This wasn’t the case until recently, Maddow points out. For most of our nation’s history, our warfighting capability relied heavily upon the occasional call-up—and, once hostilities ended, rapid demobilization—of citizen-soldiers. Though commonly traced back to the Revolutionary War’s Minutemen, the most notable of these reluctant warrior archetypes dates back more than 2,500 years, to the Roman farmer Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. Cincinnatus, the story goes, famously accepted the role of Roman dictator for six months to lead a successful defense of the city against foreign invaders. Then, sixteen days after achieving victory, Cincinnatus voluntarily resigned his powerful position and went back to happily tending his farm.

It was this great disruption that war inflicted upon the lives of Cincinnatus and the Roman Republic’s polity that informed the Framers’ thinking when crafting their new nation’s laws. They, too, wanted the choice to go to war to have such a momentous political and societal impact that it would necessarily be a rare one for their new nation. In their minds, America should either be at war or at peace, either stand an army or go without—mixing and matching these scenarios were just not acceptable options. 

But as Maddow asserts in “Drift,” the built-in constitutional governors that men like Jefferson and Madison intended to act as a brake on our nation’s engine of war-making have broken down. These days, “we the people” rarely enjoy a real policy debate before a president (of either party) decides to engage our military in yet another mission of dubious value to the “national interest.” Indeed, the book’s core argument can be boiled down to this passage:

Rational political actors, acting rationally to achieve rational (if sometimes dumb) political goals, have attacked and undermined our constitutional inheritance from men like Madison. For the most part, though, they’ve not done it to fundamentally alter the country’s course but just to get around understandably frustrating impediments to their political goals. The ropes we had used to lash down presidential war-making capacity, bindings that by design made it hard for an American president to use military force without the nation’s full and considered buy-in, have been hacked at with very little appreciation about why they were put there in the first place.

Where did we start to lose our way, to think that our nation could prosecute a war and that most Americans wouldn’t really notice (or care)? The book traces the roots of this phenomenon back to President Lyndon Johnson’s fateful decision—against the advice of his Defense Secretary and Joint Chiefs of Staff—not to call up the National Guard and Reserves to fight in Vietnam. This strategy, Maddow eloquently explains, effectively cleaved the interests of the American people from that of the military for the first time. And the psychic wound to the nation that resulted, one could argue, has never fully healed.

Still, it’s not that lessons weren’t learned there. From the ugly injustice of granting exceptional exemptions to people of a certain social station (included among them a future Speaker of the House, Vice President, and two Presidents) and instead forcing mostly poor draftees to fight this war, the modern, all-volunteer professional military arose. And at the policymaking level, post-Vietnam strategizing arrived at the Total Force Policy—also known as the Abrams Doctrine—which restructured the military to make it much more difficult to avoid fully involving the Reserves and, by proxy, the American people, in the next war.

Almost as quickly as these fixes were put in place, however, they began to unravel. And the reason why, Maddow successfully argues, can be answered in two words: Ronald Reagan.

In fact, if this book has anything approaching a single antagonist, our 40^th president undoubtedly fills the bill. First appearing on page 29, Ronald Reagan spends the next 100 or so pages under Maddow’s unblinking gaze, as she lays out a devastating indictment of his zeal for demagoguing foreign policy issues, trampling upon our Constitution, flaunting due process, and the violating international laws of war on everything from the Panama Canal treaty to Iran-Contra.

To understand Reagan’s first real taste of acting first and thinking later when using our military, Maddow expends an entire chapter detailing the bungled debacle that was our 1983 invasion of Grenada. Despite its macho, Hollywoodesque codename, Operation Urgent Fury actually played out more like Operation Fuzzy Urges thanks to paranoid and poorly-thought-out planning on the part of the White House. Maddow weaves together the invasion’s numerous intelligence failures, misguided operational assumptions, and unnecessarily risky gambits to paint a vastly different picture than the one portrayed to the public by a fawning press corps. (I vividly remember my first encounter with this disconnect a decade after the fact, when my Airborne school instructor, a former Ranger who was shot in the back by friendly fire amidst the chaos that reigned during the jump into Pt. Salines airfield, succinctly summed up the operation using one military acronym—FUBAR.) 

Sadly, “Drift” makes no mention of one of the most important legacies of the botched Grenada invasion—the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols reforms. Ostensibly passed to lessen the often petty inter-service rivalries of the military, these reforms streamlined the Pentagon’s operational command structure but also had the unintended effect of strengthening our military leadership’s hand vis-à-vis its civilian overseers. This phenomenon has, no doubt, only exacerbated the Pentagon’s ability to get almost whatever it wants from Congress and the president. 

This growing power imbalance, whereby military leaders enjoy a bully pulpit that equals or exceeds their funders and commander-in-chief has set a dangerous precedent. For example, while then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Colin Powell was basking in high Q ratings and rumors of becoming a possible presidential contender, his savvy political maneuverings against intervention in Haiti and Bosnia as well as implementation of gays into the armed forces received a much less rosy reception among those who study civil-military affairs. In 1993, a Journal of Military History article boldly claimed that no general since McClellan “has ever resisted civilian proposals as consistently, systematically, and as successfully as General Powell.” A year later, military historian Richard Kohn concurred in a National Interest essay—with the not-so-subtle headline “Out of Control”—that included these notable observations:

The U.S. military is now more alienated from its civilian leadership than at any time in American history, and more vocal about it.

[…]

At the Army's elite Command and General Staff College, a respected Congressman was ‘jeered’ by the class when he ‘repeatedly lectured officers’ about Congress's role and powers—and was greeted by ‘catcalls’ at the mention of the President.

Bringing the growing political influence of our military leaders to heel has hardly been a priority of the intervening Congresses or administrations. But this idea that American military power has, at least in part, become unmoored from civilian oversight because that’s precisely how it wants it doesn’t really get any attention in Maddow’s book, unfortunately. For the most part, she treats the military as impartial, dutiful actors under the willing thumb of an executive branch calling all the shots. (The lone exception being her brief fisking of the canonization of David Petraeus and his impossibly costly counterinsurgency doctrine.)

This is one of two primary (albeit minor) disappointments with “Drift.” While its sweep of history is vast, it is, by the very nature of its 252 pages (and small pages at that), somewhat shallow in places. Perhaps this is due to her deliberate authorial pace—in the opening sentence of her acknowledgements she says: “I’m the slowest writer on earth.” 

Still, I can’t help but think about the book that might have been, the longer one that dug deeper into the military’s own active role in drifting toward our current state of almost perpetual war. Or the chapter on how the media has continually enabled this drift through, by turns, incurious reporting, relentless cheerleading, and an almost wholesale organizational retreat from foreign coverage. In addition, one would think that a more comprehensive book would lend itself to more insightful and satisfying policy remedies than the ones she concludes with. To wit: “If we are going to use drones to vaporize people in Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia, the Air Force should operate these drones, and pull the trigger. And we should know about it.” Or, you know, maybe we should stop doing this altogether, since no matter what part of the U.S. government does it, it’s arguably still illegal, immoral, and counter-productive in the long run.

Granted, faulting a book for what it doesn’t have in it can be an exercise in intellectual misdirection. And Maddow deserves credit for avoiding that same trap herself. “Drift” offers up a readily accessible tone to its readers and lets Maddow’s sarcastic wit artfully color the sometimes absurd nature of the subject matter. Yes, these punch lines, at times, resemble either the worst of a Borscht Belt comic from 50 years ago or the vacuous ruminations of a bored teenager, but they’re easily overlooked if they’re not your cup of tea.

Her methodology for sourcing facts and citing them, on the other hand, is a bit harder to brush aside. With nary a footnote, the book settles for breezy, conversational-style endnotes that “are not intended to be comprehensive.” As a result, when a striking fact appears—“In the past decade, the US Army has lost more soldiers to suicide than to enemy fire in Afghanistan”—the end notes provide no way to easily check this or even learn more about why. (Unsurprisingly, the Army’s latest report shows that more deployments closely correlate with more suicides.)

To be clear, I’m not impugning the book’s veracity. Maddow’s writing style, though cheeky and light-hearted at points, nonetheless conveys a mastery of the subject at hand. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in her discussion of the massive privatization of our nation’s warfighting capabilities, which she spends the last third of the book unpacking. (As it happens, the National Magazine Award finalists were announced this past week. Among those listed in the Public Interest category was Sarah Stillman, whose powerful New Yorker exposé from last summer, “The Invisible Army,” detailed yet another part of the private contractor archipelago where fraud, abuse, and exploitation are brazenly conducted in our country’s name and thanks to our tax dollars.)

To illustrate the frightening degree to which our military is now beholden to these third-party warfighters she cites example after example, but it was a recent quote from the current Director of National Intelligence that sent shivers up my spine: “If all the contractors failed to come to work tomorrow, the intelligence community would stop.”

This is where we are now, as a country. Maddow’s book makes for a compelling argument to change directions.

In the end, calling her book ‘Creep’ might have been a more obvious choice for Maddow, as ‘mission creep’ has long been the favorite phrase to describe a military plan gone astray. But I prefer her choice of ‘Drift.’ That’s because besides describing the broader unmooring of American military power, drift also has a very narrow military definition that brings with it a powerful symbolism. When firing at a target that can’t be directly viewed, artillery units must account for types of drift—spin, wind resistance, the rotation of the earth—in their plotting lest they miss badly and hit something else. And as the size of the projectile grows ever larger, the potential drift that can push a round off-target increases as well—almost to the point where it’s hard to tell what you’re really aiming at anymore.

Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com.

Editor’s Note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.