In the interest of bringing discussions like this out of email and into the public, let me expand upon my argument and respond to some of Jeremy’s points. For brevity’s sake, I’ll keep it to two points.

Obama continues torture

“I’m under the impression that we have stopped waterboarding and most forms of enhanced interrogation.”

Jeremy’s impression is technically correct; President Obama signed an order on his first day in office to ban waterboarding and other techniques. But forces in the field can still employ prolonged isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation, and force-feeding, techniques which have been cited as cruel and unusual. Moreover, the rendition program, in which we transfer prisoners to other countries (like Libya) to be tortured, continues uninterrupted. Most troubling is a report that the CIA has a complex in Somalia, where it directly pays guards’ salaries, and to which it brings prisoners from all over the world, god help them.

Beyond the policies themselves, the fact that Obama gave a pass to the enablers and architects of the torture program means that those choices remain open to future administrations. Because he refused to prosecute them as crimes, they have now become policy positions, on which respectable people can disagree. You have a Republican field saying they would bring back waterboarding, but if Obama were honest about how hard and dirty he’s fighting the terrorists he’d win every red vote in the country. Which brings us to our next point.

Drone bombing continues

“I support the drones, mainly because I don’t want US troops on the ground.”

This presumes that we need to attack or invade any country in which a so-called “terrorist” is found. And it blindly ignores the fact that so many civilians, even children, are killed by these sky robots of death. It is a heartless and backward policy, which is bound to result in deadly blowback for America.

“You never come up with anything as an alternative to drone strikes, you only reply with the same tired bumper-sticker ideology of ‘killing a terrorist creates more’. How will you feel when [someone] succeeds in blowing up a truck bomb in Times Square?

Sadly, something terrible like this is very likely to occur as a result of these strikes. The failed Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, very nearly pulled off the trick, and cited American drone attacks in Pakistan as one of his motivations. The drones “don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody,” he said in court.

At a meeting last month, Pashtun tribal elders described the sounds of drones hovering over their villages during the day, and launching Hellfire missiles at night. A teenager who volunteered to gather evidence of civilian deaths was killed by a drone one week later. My “alternative” to drone strikes is the absence of drone strikes. I do not believe in a military solution to the problem of terrorism; I would point out that ten years of war in Afghanistan did not prevent Faisal Shahzad from acting, but 3 years of drone strikes compelled him to act.

These are some of the foreign policy failures of Barack Obama, a president who ran on a platform of restoring America’s reputation in the Muslim world. As Jeremy said, Obama’s election bought us much goodwill in the Middle East. But that has all been squandered by his policy decisions. The evidence shows a clear and steady decline. I would argue that these trends will eventually lead to more, not less, terrorist attacks against the US.

“I am really surprised there isn’t more outrage from Americans over the  Wikileaks releases,” said Joah. He meant the Apache helicopter video in particular. The soldiers in the video technically did follow the rules of engagement, but that’s just the point: war is by definition a suspension of the rules. War brings destruction, no matter how man tries to civilize it. “I believe,” said Trevor, “that video should be required viewing for every war supporter in the country.”

Iain piped in. “Diplomacy has required secrecy for thousands of years. It wasn’t just invented by Hillary Clinton. It goes back to the creation of the nation-state and even earlier. It is practically human nature. It is part of human culture. The really surprising thing was that more countries weren’t pissed off at the United States for allowing this info to leak.”

Is WL anti-statist? Are they anti-American?

“WL is for ‘us’,” said Russ. “It isn’t going to change anything in America.” In other words, these leaked documents are for the intellectual elite to mull over in their comfortable, wine-soaked evening discussions. Most Americans either don’t care or aren’t really aware of them.

“It is completely presumptuous and very arrogant for [Julian Assange] to think he knows better than career diplomats and foreign service personnel what ought and ought not to be classified,” said Pete. When questioned whether this wasn’t placing too much trust in the government, Pete emphasized the distinction between non-elected State Dept employees making careers in diplomacy, and unctuous politicians trying to get elected, blissfully unaware of the real workings of statecraft. “I would never trust an elected politician to make the right decision on any of this stuff,” he clarified. But things that can be revealed by these leaks, including the manner and method of US diplomacy, and the structure of the State Dept, are valuable and should be protected.

What about injured American pride? Isn’t there a sense of violation here, that our dirty American laundry has been hung out for the world to see? I think that is certainly part of the reason for the backlash against Wikileaks.

There must always be a balance between security and transparency. Between centralized power and democracy. Between honesty and lies. My own personal feeling is that, for too long, the balance has been skewed toward too much secrecy, and that a dose of exposure is necessary to right the balance. The media has been pathetic for at least a decade – and likely much longer – at acting as a check on government abuse of power. Wikileaks is upstaging them, and in the process showing them what is possible in investigative journalism based on primary source documents.

Jeremy said that we are entering a new era of transparency. Or perhaps a new era of journalism? Greg Mitchell, a writer at The Nation, has been live-blogging everything Wikileaks for nine weeks. He has also just put out a book, The Age of Wikileaks, which sounds like it’s about exactly this point.

Before the evening’s discussion split into its separate paths, Iain raised a question which I intend to explore in future posts: Can we stack the actions of Wikileaks, and the results of its releases, against the goals and ideals of the organization, and what will that show? It’s still early days, but I myself am looking forward to seeing how that question is answered.

Tuesday, February 1st, 8:30pm
DOC Wine Bar, 83 N. 7th St. in Williamsburg. (Cash bar only)

“The Vanishing City” is a great documentary about real estate in Manhattan over the last 30 years. It covers the changes in zoning laws, pushed by developers and adopted by politicians, which have turned New York into a city of “luxury”. Among other exposures, it casts light on the mayor’s plan to build a convention center in Willets Point, seizing via eminent domain laws the property of businesses employing 15,000 people.

Dec. 15, 8pm. The National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South (E. 20th St.) Admission is free.

DeRosa was commenting on the possible irony that we had gathered to watch his film in a so-called “luxury condo” development. Eighty Metropolitan was built on the site of an old mustard factory in Williamsburg, and DeRosa said that he actually thought it was pretty tastefully done. Sure, it has a lap pool, but the building is only six stories, and it kind of resembles a factory in this old industrial neighborhood. Perhaps he was being diplomatic, but I found him sincere. His thoughts also closely resemble my own feelings about the building.

What he and Senko do have a problem with is “the city funding these changes”, and favoring the rich at the expense of the poor and middle-class. They set out to make the film because they noticed their own neighborhood changing, with locally-owned shops going out of business. “It was originally supposed to be a nostalgia piece,” DeRosa said. “But as we got deeper into it, we started learning things that really pissed us off.”

A common refrain from developers is that they are catering to the free market, and supplying a demand. “Well, if that’s true, then what’s city planning for?” asked DeRosa. “Our tax dollars are subsidizing these efforts which may eventually push us all out of our own city.” He was referring to the $500 million in annual tax abatements now granted to certain developers of high-priced residential and commercial property, a result of the shift in the 1970s toward accommodating businesses in the FIRE industries (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate). Although the film criticizes Bloomberg, his PlaNYC, and his conception of New York itself as a “luxury product,” it says he is only the latest NYC mayor to embrace this development philosophy, which unfairly targets working-class and lower-class neighborhoods for re-zoning.

Cities never stand still, nor should zoning.
—NYC Dept of City Planning

The Equitable Building sparked the first zoning law in NYC

The key to everything is zoning, a concept first introduced to New York City with the rise of the Equitable Building, at 120 Broadway. Built in 1915, the Equitable replaced a 7-story building that burned down in 1912, and the new construction dwarfed the old; at 40 stories, it rose over 500 feet in the air and each floor was built out to the full extent of the foundation, i.e., it had no “setbacks”, and cast a 7-acre shadow across the city.

Much like today, the city fathers viewed such development as progress. John Purroy Mitchel, the “Boy Mayor of New York”, personally laid the cornerstone of the Equitable’s foundation, the first time a mayor had done so for a building erected solely with private financing. In a short speech, he compared the building to the city itself, its owners to public servants. However, he seemed to already anticipate the public reaction to come. He congratulated the builders for “having, what I feel may possible be, the last of these cities within a city – but that is a problem for tomorrow.”

The Equitable set off a public outrage. People worried that such enormous towers would deprive the streets of light and air, making the city a dark and gloomy place. This led to the city’s first zoning ordinance, the Zoning Resolution of 1916, which limited not the height of buildings, but the amount of mass at certain heights – builders had to include setbacks which slimmed the buildings as they rose. These regulations spurred the design of Art Deco buildings like the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building.

The zoning resolution was updated again in 1961, with provisions mandating parking lots and encouraging open spaces. This is the period when the modernist Robert Moses was advocating the leveling of neighborhoods and the construction of highways like the Cross Bronx Expressway. Jane Jacobs famously opposed the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have connected the Holland Tunnel to the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges via an 8-lane elevated highway, displacing in the process some 2,000 families and 8,000 businesses.

Today the organization of the city depends on the involvement of its residents more than ever. As someone states in the film, the traditional process has been that “the board creates a plan, and then the community has to fight the plan.” It’s important to remember that the city will change no matter what. We can do nothing, and allow other forces to shape our city in their own image, or we can speak up and demand that the character of our neighborhoods be preserved in city planning.

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.
—Jacques Barzun

Is that still true? I don’t think so. I’ve said elsewhere that it’s football you have to understand to get Americans, even if Jeremy might feel otherwise. When George Carlin did his famous number on football vs baseball, he was not only pointing out the differences between a farmer’s pastime and an allegory for war, he was explaining the evolution of America over the last 100 years. We have become a more precise, more aggressive people. We have lost our sense of nuance.

But whether it’s football or baseball that defines us, we can still learn a bit about ourselves through inspection. Our heroes have fallen mightily, so many revealed as juicers that it is no longer a surprise to hear the latest confession. The atmosphere clearly encouraged the use of steroids through a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude, and we, the fans, have been largely willing to just give everyone a pass.

The price of a night at the ballgame is now beyond the reach of your average working-class family, and the stadiums themselves – built at great taxpayer expense – have been neatly divided into class-oriented strata. Customers are more apt to buy a season package from their TV provider than season tickets, and this is partly because today’s fan is likely more driven by his fantasy league than by his hometown team. The new dream is to be not Derek Jeter, but George Steinbrenner. As Robert Lipsyte says, the ballplayers themselves have become mere monopoly pieces. “Teddy Roosevelt’s hero, ‘the man who is actually in the arena,’ has been replaced with the Gekko bonus baby who owns the arena.”

Fantasy leagues define our country today. Isn’t the lesson of America that it is better to own than to work?

• Iran is the dominant power in the Middle East. This was a historical fact for a long time before Saddam Hussein’s Iraq became a check on Iran’s power—and now the US has removed that check. While Israel and Saudi Arabia are America’s allies in the region, Iran could take both of them, as it had indeed already defeated Israel in Lebanon. Even the US could not really take over Iran. We could bomb them into submission and take Tehran, but we would not be able to hold the country against the guerrilla threat they represent.
• Iran has the power to make the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan untenable, and indeed they have already done this to some degree. They have become experts at proxy warfare, and at this point they are able to determine the level of violence that US forces have to deal with in certain parts of both countries.
• All of this, it is important to note, does not require that Iran possess nuclear weapons. Indeed we (America) are quite powerless to stop them acquiring nukes if they are determined to have them. Sanctions won’t work; military attacks won’t work. Iran has the power to drive oil prices through the roof, by mining the Strait of Hormuz or launching missiles at tankers, which would make life in America very painful.
• Given all this, the best option is for America to reach some kind of settlement with Iran. This would involve giving Iran a formal role in maintaining the security of Iraq, which would likely end up partitioned. We would share responsibility for security of the Strait of Hormuz, because both countries have an interest in keeping the oil flowing. Trade and talk would increase as sanctions were lifted and diplomatic ties restored, and Iran would agree to stop arming Hezbollah and Hamas. America would stop talk of regime change and guarantee Iran’s security, in order to foster closer ties and stop the Iranians inching closer to Russia and China. In short, the US would balance its strategic alliances in the region.

There was some controversy in my words, because Jarrod came in right off the bat to challenge my first point, saying that Iran, in the wake of last year’s elections and subsequent protests, had never been weaker. And while it seems the mullahs aren’t going anywhere yet, I would concede that they might feel a bit restricted right now. Jarrod came back later in the evening, twice, on the point on nuclear weapons: the concern is not that Iran will use them, but that they will give them to others who will. “If a white light flashes over Israel, then that’s it, and Iran can say they had nothing to do with it.” Alex contended this forcefully, saying the uranium traces (or something) after an explosion would definitively prove where the bomb was made. So it seems Iran wouldn’t be able to get away with it, although that provides little comfort to Israel, since they are too small to absorb a nuclear explosion and still viably exist.

A lot was made of Ahmedinejad’s words towards Israel; although I argued that he didn’t have the final say in Iran, Noah said convincingly that he obviously spoke for the leadership. But Alex reminded us all that the fact is that there is no evidence Iran is pursuing nukes—citing the most recent intelligence reports. Noah claimed otherwise, mentioning the articles we have been seeing on our front pages for so long. But we also read a lot about Iraq’s weapons programs in the newspapers, I said, which turned out to be bluster.

We debated whether we could know the character of the Iranian people. Is there a “red/blue” divide, similar to America’s, with rural people more supportive of Ahmedinejad’s populism and jingoism, and urban “elites” more inclined towards cosmopolitanism and internationalism? Some argued in general support of this idea, although my conclusion was that we generally know very little of the Iranian people, despite the seeming ease of false labels.

The conversation broke into pieces several times during the evening, which was great. There were 10 people there, so it was inevitable that mini-convos would break out here and there. Of course I couldn’t follow everything that happened at once.

My most contentious point may have been the partitioning of Iraq. Some participants, Noah most vocally, said this would be crazy, that after spending so much blood and treasure we should “lose” Iraq. My point was that it was inevitable without American troops on the ground: should we stay forever? “Well, we’re still in Germany, we’re still in Korea,” Noah said. This is true of course, but it worries me. I don’t foresee a day when American soldiers are not being attacked in Iraq, or Afghanistan. I don’t think Korea and Germany are good models (in fact, I don’t think we should have troops in those countries, anyway). I argued that Iran already had some de facto control over southern Iraq, and that they would take it over when we left, anyway. But Noah seemed to think that we could leave a strong Iraqi government behind. This I doubt, and so it seemed we would not reach any agreement here.

Mark said something which put everything in perspective. Over the last 15-20 years (and I would argue, even longer), when the US has seen a geopolitical problem in the world, it has resolved to do something about it. We have gone into countries, or engaged with countries, in a way which we determined would solve the problem. We’ve taken decisive action. But most of the time, there have been unforeseen consequences that have either made the original problem worse, or created wholly new problems to deal with. Perhaps, in the future, we should endeavor to do less, to be more passive, and to let things play out before we act.

***

What are your thoughts? If you were there, fill in my account with points I missed. If you weren’t, what would you have added?