High-stakes Hilarity (the ongoing progression of)

NYT says PAK Taliban in talks with gov.

WaPo says PAK Taliban not in talks with gov.

While we are dealing with the region, Crocker articulates the tailored narrative regarding last week's attack against Shiites in Kabul.  Says we have no idea who did it.  But it wasn't the group claiming responsibility.  And that the attack won't spawn sectarian violence.  Ambassador psychic?  Wishful thinking?  Something else?

PS Scuttlebutt months ago was that a RQ-170 (equipped with science modules) was flown over Fukushima from a base in S. Korea.

Loved the ZH quip re the Iran flap: "The good news is we will all be able to buy a personal drone at Wal Mart in 6-9 months."

A review about a new book on George Kennan in The New Yorker

A long review of John Lewis Gaddis's new book on George Kennan is in the Nov 14 issue of The New Yorker.

The review starts off by establishing that Kennan did not much care for Americans (America yes, Americans no).  A number of examples illustrating how Kennan was a dick are included (this is not even the worst):

In January, 1944, when the end of the war was in sight, Kennan served in the American delegation to the European Advisory Commission, in London. Bohlen (who had been in Tokyo when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and was interned for six months) remembered Kennan returning to Washington “appalled by the behavior of American soldiers—their reading of comic books, their foul language, and their obsession with sex, among other things. He wondered whether the United States was capable of being a world power.”

Once we stipulate that Kennan had his flaws as a human being, we are able to get down to business.  A very good discussion of  The Long Telegram and "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" by "X" begins thusly:

In all his reports, Kennan’s repeated message to Washington was “Get real.” He didn’t just disapprove of idealistic policy talk. He deeply loathed it. Declarations about the self-determination of peoples or international economic coöperation—the kind of thing that Roosevelt and Churchill announced as Allied war aims in the Atlantic Charter—seemed to him not only utopian and unenforceable but dangerously restrictive on a government’s scope of action. If you tell the world that you are fighting to preserve the right of self-determination, then any outcome short of that makes you look hypocritical or weak. Concessions to Soviet national-security interests were going to be necessary in Eastern Europe; it was better to be frank about this, and to stop pretending that Moscow and Washington had the same goals and values. But for domestic political reasons the American government always wants to appear virtuous, Kennan thought; so it continued to call the Soviets comrades and allies even as they were clearly preparing to walk all over the Atlantic Charter.

(...)

Kennan was appalled when he read the draft of Truman’s speech [announcing the Truman Doctrine], and for the rest of his life he protested that he had meant containment to be a policy of selective confrontation, and its means to be diplomatic and economic, not military. But he was construed otherwise. Lippmann wrote a book, called “The Cold War,” in 1947, attacking Kennan and containment, on the assumption that the X article, which appeared four months after Truman’s speech, was meant as a justification of the Truman Doctrine. Lippmann had got Kennan completely wrong. Kennan was so upset that he wrote Lippmann a long letter explaining his mistake, but could never bring himself to send it.

Reviewer kinda goes off the rails when he suggests that Kennan's requirement to have suicide pills on hand when stationed in Moscow was so that he could make an honorable exit if his compulsive womanizing were to be discovered.  (The real reason is doubtlessly more prosaic.)  And Gaddis, the author of the book, does not endorse the reviewer's theory on this.

As the exemplification of a realist in international relations, Kennan drew criticism easily:

[I]n 1978, Alexander Solzhenitsyn attacked Kennan, by name, for refusing to apply moral values to politics. “Thus we mix good and evil, right and wrong, and make space for the absolute triumph of absolute Evil in the world,” he said.

Solzhenitsyn was right that Kennan was allergic to concepts that were important to Soviet dissidents, concepts like “human rights.” The reason Kennan considered the United Nations a bad idea was that it is an organization based on the pretense that every nation can subscribe disinterestedly to international legal principles—when nations are always, and rightly, interested primarily in preserving or extending their own power. He was horrified by the Nuremberg Trials. “Crimes against humanity” was just the sort of exalted legalism that he thought led to foreign-policy disaster. In any case, he believed that, once the United States accepted Stalin as an ally, it lost the moral authority to condemn Nazism. Kennan spent a good deal of his early life in Germany; in the two volumes of his memoirs, there is not a single mention of the Holocaust.

The review wraps up on a high note:

Still, buried within Kennan’s realism there is a moral view: that in relations of power, which is what he thought international relations ultimately are, people can’t be trusted to do the right thing. They will do what the scorpion does to the frog—not because they choose to but because it’s their nature. They can’t help it. This is an easy doctrine to apply to other nations, as it is to apply to other people, since we can always see how professions of benevolence might be masks for self-interest. It’s a harder doctrine to apply to ourselves. And that was, all his life, Kennan’s great, overriding point. We need to be realists because we cannot trust ourselves to be moralists.

The Hiroshima Files

This Sunday's NYT Magazine will publish for the first time AFAIK some of the pictures of Hiroshima taken by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey.

Picture #1 I have seen before. But none of the rest.

Two months after an atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey commissioned by President Harry S. Truman began to study the extensive structural damage done to the city, from the reinforced-concrete buildings at its center to the traditional wooden ones on its outskirts. Truman’s goal was to collect information that would help U.S. architects and civil engineers design structures able to withstand a nuclear attack. The secretive report included 700 images of Hiroshima. Robert L. Corsbie, executive officer of the Physical Damage Division, which conducted the survey, kept the prints until his death, in 1967; their odyssey afterward included being rescued by a neighbor from the curb after being put out with the trash, eventually ending up at the International Center of Photography in New York in 2006. On May 20, the center is opening a three-month exhibition of the work. The government’s caption to slide No. 4 (above) refers to ‘‘air zero,’’ the site of the blast, and says, ‘‘Shows partly burned coat of boy who was in open near City Hall (Building 28) 3,800 feet from AZ.’’  [NYT]

"At the instant it happened, the pale Virgin was rising in the east, head, shoulders, breasts, 17° 36' down to her maidenhead at the horizon. A few doomed Japanese knew of her as some Western deity. She loomed in the eastern sky gazing down at the city about to be sacrificed. The sun was in Leo. The fireburst came roaring and sovereign...."  [Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow. pp.707-708]

Our Game - Diplo-Blowback at Pearl Harbor

SIXTY-EIGHT years ago tomorrow, Japan attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. In the brutal Pacific war that would follow, millions of soldiers and civilians were killed. My father — one of the famous flag raisers on Iwo Jima — was among the young men who went off to the Pacific to fight for his country. So the war naturally fascinated me. But I always wondered, why did we fight in the Pacific? Yes, there was Pearl Harbor, but why did the Japanese attack us in the first place?

In search of an answer, I read deeply into the diplomatic history of the 1930s, about President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policy on Asia, and his preparation — or lack thereof — for a major conflict there. But I discovered that I was studying the wrong President Roosevelt. The one who had the greater effect on Japan’s behavior was Theodore Roosevelt — whose efforts to end the war between Japan and Russia earned him the Nobel Peace Prize.

When Theodore Roosevelt was president, three decades before World War II, the world was focused on the bloody Russo-Japanese War, a contest for control of North Asia. President Roosevelt was no fan of the Russians: “No human beings, black, yellow or white, could be quite as untruthful, as insincere, as arrogant — in short, as untrustworthy in every way — as the Russians,” he wrote in August 1905, near the end of the Russo-Japanese War. The Japanese, on the other hand, were “a wonderful and civilized people,” Roosevelt wrote, “entitled to stand on an absolute equality with all the other peoples of the civilized world.”

Roosevelt knew that Japan coveted the Korean Peninsula as a springboard to its Asian expansion. Back in 1900, when he was still vice president, Roosevelt had written, “I should like to see Japan have Korea.” When, in February 1904, Japan broke off relations with Russia, President Roosevelt said publicly that he would “maintain the strictest neutrality,” but privately he wrote, “The sympathies of the United States are entirely on Japan’s side.”

In June 1905, Roosevelt made world headlines when — apparently on his own initiative — he invited the two nations to negotiate an end to their war. Roosevelt’s private letter to his son told another story: “I have of course concealed from everyone — literally everyone — the fact that I acted in the first place on Japan’s suggestion ... . Remember that you are to let no one know that in this matter of the peace negotiations I have acted at the request of Japan and that each step has been taken with Japan’s foreknowledge, and not merely with her approval but with her expressed desire.”

Years later, a Japanese emissary to Roosevelt paraphrased the president’s comments to him: “All the Asiatic nations are now faced with the urgent necessity of adjusting themselves to the present age. Japan should be their natural leader in that process, and their protector during the transition stage, much as the United States assumed the leadership of the American continent many years ago, and by means of the Monroe Doctrine, preserved the Latin American nations from European interference. The future policy of Japan towards Asiatic countries should be similar to that of the United States towards their neighbors on the American continent.”

In a secret presidential cable to Tokyo, in July 1905, Roosevelt approved the Japanese annexation of Korea and agreed to an “understanding or alliance” among Japan, the United States and Britain “as if the United States were under treaty obligations.” The “as if” was key: Congress was much less interested in North Asia than Roosevelt was, so he came to his agreement with Japan in secret, an unconstitutional act.

(...)

Roosevelt had assumed that the Japanese would stop at Korea and leave the rest of North Asia to the Americans and the British. But such a wish clashed with his notion that the Japanese should base their foreign policy on the American model of expansion across North America and, with the taking of Hawaii and the Philippines, into the Pacific. It did not take long for the Japanese to tire of the territorial restrictions placed upon them by their Anglo-American partners.

Japan’s declaration of war, in December 1941, explained its position quite clearly: “It is a fact of history that the countries of East Asia for the past hundred years or more have been compelled to observe the status quo under the Anglo-American policy of imperialistic exploitation and to sacrifice themselves to the prosperity of the two nations. The Japanese government cannot tolerate the perpetuation of such a situation.”

In planning the attack on Pearl Harbor, Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto was specifically thinking of how, 37 years earlier, the Japanese had surprised the Russian Navy at Port Arthur in Manchuria and, as he wrote, “favorable opportunities were gained by opening the war with a sudden attack on the main enemy fleet.” At the time, the indignant Russians called it a violation of international law. But Theodore Roosevelt, confident that he could influence events in North Asia from afar, wrote to his son, “I was thoroughly well pleased with the Japanese victory, for Japan is playing our game.”

It was for his efforts to broker the peace deal between Russia and Japan that a year and a half later Roosevelt became the first American to win the Nobel Peace Prize — and one of only three presidents to do so while in office (the other two are Woodrow Wilson and President Obama, who will accept his prize this week). No one in Oslo, or in the United States Congress, knew the truth then.

But the Japanese did. And the American president’s support emboldened them to increase their military might — and their imperial ambitions. In December 1941, the consequence of Theodore Roosevelt’s recklessness would become clear to those few who knew of the secret dealings. No one else — including my dad on Iwo Jima — realized just how well Japan had indeed played “our game.”

-NYT

Some WWII Revisionism From Japan

The timing of the release of this historical tidbit is doubtlessly related to current domestic Japanese political considerations, particularly the tendency of recent PM's (especially the new one) to refuse to embrace the expected guilt trip for their WWII-era belligerence.

Somebody must have figured that the hawkishness isn't playing too well with the neighbors.

Emperor Hirohito, in whose name Japanese soldiers fought in World War Two, was reluctant to start a war with China in 1937 and had believed in stopping it earlier, media reported on Friday, citing a diary by his former chamberlain.

The revelation comes after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe angered Asian neighbors with controversial remarks about Japan's wartime actions, and as Tokyo and Beijing prepare for an expected April visit to Japan by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.

According to the diary by Kuraji Ogura, the late Hirohito also said Japan had underestimated China's military strength, adding that experts in the Imperial Army had failed to correctly forecast the war in China.

"Japan underestimated China. It is most wise to end the war quickly and seek to build up our national strength for the next ten years," the diary quotes Hirohito as saying in January 1941, according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

Japan and China entered full-scale war following the Marco Polo Bridge incident in 1937.

In December 1942, a year after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Hirohito is quoted as saying that the timing for ending a war is important and that war should be fought to the best of one's ability.

"Once you start (a war), it cannot easily be stopped in the middle ... What's important is when to end the war," the diary quotes him as saying.

"One should be cautious in starting a war, but once begun, it should be carried out thoroughly."

Hirohito's remarks may provide insight into the monarch's war responsibility, which academics say has never been fully pursued in Japan largely due to a decision by U.S. Occupation authorities to keep him on the throne and turn the emperor into a symbol of a newly democratic Japan.