Arm and Shame. By Thomas L. Friedman.

Arm and Shame. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, September 3, 2013.

Brutality of Syrian Rebels Posing Dilemma in the West. By C. J. Chivers.

Brutality of Syrian Rebels Posing Dilemma in the West. By C. J. Chivers. New York Times, September 5, 2013. Video. YouTube.

Savage Online Videos Fuel Syria’s Descent Into Madness. By Aryn Baker. NJBR, May 16, 2013.

Peace Through Profits? Palestinians Say No. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Peace Through Profits? Palestinians Say No. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, September 3, 2013.

Peace Through Profits? Inside the Secret Tech Ventures That are Reshaping the Israeli-Arab-Palestinian World. By Richard Behar. Forbes, July 24, 2013. From the August 12, 2013 issue.

Why So Many Palestinian High-Tech Entrepreneurs Hate My FORBES Cover Story. By Richard Behar. Forbes, August 28, 2013.


Tobin:

Journalist Richard Behar thought he had discovered the real road map to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. In the August 12 cover story of Forbes magazine, Behar wrote about the way Israeli high-tech businesses were striving to work with Palestinian counterparts. The result of this cooperation was not only helping to create much-needed development in the West Bank. It was also creating a larger potential constituency for peace. The relationships as well as the business ties that this movement was driving could help transform Palestinian politics, moving it away from confrontation and violence and giving rise to a middle class with an interest in peace. In particular, the efforts of companies like CISCO to bridge the gap between the two peoples in pursuit of a common business goal seemed to be a model that could be expanded upon that gives genuine hope for an end to the conflict.

 

But in the aftermath of the publication of his article, Behar has learned an interesting lesson. As he writes in a follow-up article in Forbes, Palestinian businessmen named in the piece as working with Israelis were horrified about what he had written. They were happy about their businesses being highlighted in a prestigious business magazine, but any mention of working with Israel or, even worse, promoting peace, was regarded as treason to the Palestinian cause. They were soon demanding that the piece be retracted or taken down from the Forbes website. The very idea of “Peace Through Profits,” as the original Forbes headline read, exposed these businesspeople to being ostracized as “collaborators” or even exposing them to violence. Ironically, rather than discovering the path to peace, Behar has illustrated why the chances for an agreement to end the conflict are virtually nonexistent right now. So long as the culture of Palestinian politics is focused almost entirely on hostility and hatred toward Israel, neither top-down negotiations nor economic cooperation will make it possible for leaders or businessmen to do anything to move the region toward peace.

 

This is sobering stuff for those Americans and Israelis who have clung to the vision of a “New Middle East” that Shimon Peres first promulgated 20 years ago at the height of the post-Oslo euphoria. The notion that the region could be transformed into another version of the Benelux countries was also more of a flight of a fancy than a fact-based economic or political plan. The gap between Israel’s Start-Up Nation economy and that of its neighbors was always too great for such plans to be viewed as realistic. But the idea that Israeli expertise could be used to help Palestinians transform their society remains seductive. As Behar reported, there is a genuine desire on the part of many Palestinians for more economic development as well as for releasing their national life from the iron grip of Palestinian Authority corruption and mismanagement.

 

But the allergic reaction of the Palestinian businessmen he wrote about to the word “peace” tells us all we need to know about the inability of the PA to ever sign an accord that would end the conflict with Israel. As Behar notes in his follow-up, 34 years after Anwar Sadat signed a peace treaty with Israel, Egyptian professionals and businesses still regard any dealings with Israelis as beyond the pale. That has made for an ice-cold peace between Israel and Egypt, but it is possible for the treaty to survive even in the absence of a breaking down of the wall of hatred toward Israel and Jews that exists in Egyptian society. But Egypt’s national identity exists outside of the context of anger against Israel’s existence. Not so for the Palestinians, whose national movement was born as a reaction to Zionism more than any other factor.

 

As Behar has learned, the debate among the Palestinians is not so much about peace as it is which tactics will be effective in pursuing their war against Israel. Those who say they reject violence are instead advocating for using economic boycotts and diplomatic isolation to bring Israel to its knees. In that context, cooperation with Israeli businesses undermines their cause even if it means helping to build a rational economy that would actually help ordinary Palestinians. Even those Palestinians who say they are willing to make a deal with Israel in order to force the Jewish state to give up land don’t want to give up their hate for it as part of the exchange.

 

Long before Peres dreamed of his new Benelux on the Med, Jews have dreamed about development being the path to peace. But today’s high-tech entrepreneurs aren’t being any more realistic than the Labor Zionist socialists who thought Palestinian workers and peasants would embrace peace once they realized the Jews wanted to build the country up for the benefit of all. Though even in his follow-up Behar still finds seeds of hope for cooperation, it must be understood that until a sea change occurs in Palestinian culture that turns away from hatred of Jews, this won’t lead anywhere.

 

Economics is important, but it doesn’t trump nationalism or religion. So long as Palestinians who work with Israeli businesses are branded as collaborators rather than innovators, peace negotiators are wasting their time and setting the region up for new disappointments and violence.

The Democrats’ “Smart Power” Lies in Ruins. By Jim Geraghty.

The Democrats’ “Smart Power” Lies in Ruins. By Jim Geraghty. National Review Online, September 3, 2013.

Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters. By Andrew Sullivan. The Atlantic, December 2007. Also here.

Michigan State Prof. William Penn’s First-Day Rant Against Republicans.

Old “cheap” Republicans “raped” America: Video captures award-winning professor’s anti-Republican rant. By Josiah Ryan and Caleb Bonham. Campus Reform, September 3, 2013. Video excerpt on YouTube. Full video on YouTube.

Michigan State prof’s first-day rant: “old,” “cheap” Republicans “raped” country.” By Eric Owens. The Daily Caller, September 4, 2013.

Michigan Professor Tells Creative Writing Class “Republicans Have Raped This Country.” By Noel Sheppard. NewsBusters, September 4, 2013.

Rush Limbaugh’s comments. RushLimbaugh.com, September 5, 2013.

Miley Cyrus and Ugly Sex. By Victor Davis Hanson.

Miley Cyrus and Ugly Sex. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, September 3, 2013.

Miley Cyrus, Steubenville, and Teen Culture Run Amok. By Richard Cohen. Real Clear Politics, September 3, 2013. Also at the Washington Post.

Miley Cyrus is young America. By Dr. Keith Ablow. FoxNews.com, September 10, 2013.

Miley Cyrus, VMAs, and “We the people.” By Omid Safi. What Would Muhammad Do? Religion News Service, August 26, 2013.

Trial by Twitter in Steubenville. By Ariel Levy. The New Yorker, August 5, 2013.

Rush Limbaugh on Miley Cyrus and Other Inanities of Popular Culture. RushLimbaugh.com, September 4, 2013.

Miley Cyrus on VMAs Twerking: We Made History. By Michael Rothman. ABC News, September 3, 2013.

Miley Cyrus Breaks Silence Over VMA Performance. By James Montgomery. MTV, September 3, 2013.

Miley Cyrus and the State of American Culture. NJBR, August 27, 2013.

Get More: Miley Cyrus, Musi News

Col. Ralph Peters Rips John McCain on the Laura Ingraham Show. By David Leeper.

Col. Ralph Peters Rips John McCain on the Laura Ingraham Show. By David Leeper. Western Free Press, September 3, 2013. Audio on YouTube.

The American Jewish Cocoon. By Peter Beinart.

The American Jewish Cocoon. By Peter Beinart. New York Review of Books, September 26, 2013. Also here.

The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment. By Peter Beinart. New York Review of Books, June 10, 2010. Also here.

Peter Beinart: American Jews willfully ignore the Palestinian perspective of the conflict. By Chemi Shalev. Haaretz, September 3, 2013.

Beinart’s Empathy Plea. By Y. Medad. My Right Word, September 3, 2013. Also at the Jerusalem Post.

Peter Beinart’s cocoon. The Elder of Ziyon, September 3, 2013. Also at The Jewish Press.

Beyond the Palestinian Empathy Movement. By Michael Perez. The Islamic Monthly, December 10, 2013.

Where We Orthodox Jews Have Gone Wrong –And How We Can Make Amends. By Charles H. Manekin. The Magnes Zionist, May 20, 2010.

Peter Beinart, Failures of the American Jewish Establishment, Liberal Zionism, and More. By David Brumer. Brumspeak, May 22, 2010.

No Direction Home. By Daniel Luban. Tablet, June 3, 2010.

Maybe American liberal Zionism simply isn’t worth saving.

On Being Smeared by Fellow Jews. By David Harris-Gershon.

On Being Smeared by My Fellow Jews. By David Harris-Gershon. Tikkun Daily Blog, September 1, 2013.

Husband heals during quest to meet wife’s bomber. By Talia Lavin. The Times of Israel, August 30, 2013.

Levinomics for America. By Peter Ferrara.

Levinomics for America. By Peter Ferrara. The American Spectator, August 29, 2013.

Obama Unleashes Horror in Jerusalem. By David Horovitz.

Obama unleashes horror in Jerusalem. By David Horovitz. The Times of Israel, September 1, 2013.

Exiting the Middle East Labyrinth. By Joschka Fischer.

Exiting the Middle East Labyrinth. By Joschka Fischer. Project Syndicate, December 28, 2010.

Ana Marie Cox on Mark Levin.

1776 and all that: the mysterious appeal of Mark Levin’s originalist fantasy. By Ana Marie Cox. The Guardian, September 4, 2013.

Levin: “Ana Marie Cox, Dumb as They Get.” By Ben Shapiro. Breitbart, September 4, 2013.

Welcome Back to School, Girls. And Mind Those Breasts! By Nancy L. Cohen.

Welcome back to school, girls. And mind those breasts! By Nancy L. Cohen. The Guardian, September 3, 2013.

The Other 99 Percent of Syrian Casualties. By Barry Rubin.

The other 99 percent of Syrian casualties. By Barry Rubin. Jerusalem Post, September 1, 2013.

Striving to Survive Beyond Urban Elites’ Horizons. By Salena Zito.

Striving to Survive Beyond Urban Elites’ Horizons. By Salena Zito. Real Clear Politics, September 2, 2013.

Indian Country. By Robert D. Kaplan.

Indian Country. By Robert D. Kaplan. Wall Street Journal, September 21, 2004. Also here.

Kaplan:

An overlooked truth about the war on terrorism, and the war in Iraq in particular, is that they both arrived too soon for the American military: before it had adequately transformed itself from a dinosauric, Industrial Age beast to a light and lethal instrument skilled in guerrilla warfare, attuned to the local environment in the way of the 19th-century Apaches. My mention of the Apaches is deliberate. For in a world where mass infantry invasions are becoming politically and diplomatically prohibitive – even as dirty little struggles proliferate, featuring small clusters of combatants hiding out in Third World slums, deserts and jungles – the American military is back to the days of fighting the Indians.

 

The red Indian metaphor is one with which a liberal policy nomenklatura may be uncomfortable, but Army and Marine field officers have embraced it because it captures perfectly the combat challenge of the early 21st century. But they don’t mean it as a slight against the Native North Americans. The fact that radio call signs so often employ Indian names is an indication of the troops’ reverence for them. The range of Indian groups, numbering in their hundreds, that the U.S. Cavalry and Dragoons had to confront was no less varied than that of the warring ethnic and religious militias spread throughout Eurasia, Africa and South America in the early 21st century. When the Cavalry invested Indian encampments, they periodically encountered warrior braves beside women and children, much like Fallujah. Though most Cavalry officers tried to spare the lives of noncombatants, inevitable civilian casualties raised howls of protest among humanitarians back East, who, because of the dissolution of the conscript army at the end of the Civil War, no longer empathized with a volunteer force beyond the Mississippi that was drawn from the working classes.

 

* * *

 

Indian Country has been expanding in recent years because of the security vacuum created by the collapse of traditional dictatorships and the emergence of new democracies – whose short-term institutional weaknesses provide whole new oxygen systems for terrorists. Iraq is but a microcosm of the earth in this regard. To wit, the upsurge of terrorism in the vast archipelago of Indonesia, the southern Philippines and parts of Malaysia is a direct result of the anarchy unleashed by the passing of military regimes. Likewise, though many do not realize it, a more liberalized Middle East will initially see greater rather than lesser opportunities for terrorists. As the British diplomatist Harold Nicolson understood, public opinion is not necessarily enlightened merely because it has been suppressed.

 

I am not suggesting that we should not work for free societies. I am suggesting that our military-security establishment be under no illusions regarding the immediate consequences.

 

In Indian Country, it is not only the outbreak of a full-scale insurgency that must be avoided, but the arrival in significant numbers of the global media. It would be difficult to fight more cleanly than the Marines did in Fallujah. Yet that still wasn’t a high enough standard for independent foreign television voices such as al-Jazeera, whose very existence owes itself to the creeping liberalization in the Arab world for which the U.S. is largely responsible. For the more we succeed in democratizing the world, not only the more security vacuums that will be created, but the more constrained by newly independent local medias our military will be in responding to those vacuums. From a field officer’s point of view, an age of democracy means an age of restrictive ROEs (rules of engagement).

 

The American military now has the most thankless task of any military in the history of warfare: to provide the security armature for an emerging global civilization that, the more it matures – with its own mass media and governing structures – the less credit and sympathy it will grant to the very troops who have risked and, indeed, given their lives for it. And as the thunderous roar of a global cosmopolitan press corps gets louder – demanding the application of abstract principles of universal justice that, sadly, are often neither practical nor necessarily synonymous with American national interest – the smaller and more low-key our deployments will become. In the future, military glory will come down to shadowy, page-three skirmishes around the globe, that the armed services will quietly celebrate among their own subculture.

 

The goal will be suppression of terrorist networks through the training of – and combined operations with – indigenous troops. That is why the Pan-Sahel Initiative in Africa, in which Marines and Army Special Forces have been training local militaries in Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Chad, in order to counter al-Qaeda infiltration of sub-Saharan Africa, is a surer paradigm for the American imperial future than anything occurring in Iraq or Afghanistan.

 

In months of travels with the American military, I have learned that the smaller the American footprint and the less notice it draws from the international media, the more effective is the operation. One good soldier-diplomat in a place like Mongolia can accomplish miracles. A few hundred Green Berets in Colombia and the Philippines can be adequate force multipliers. Ten thousand troops, as in Afghanistan, can tread water. And 130,000, as in Iraq, constitutes a mess that nobody wants to repeat – regardless of one’s position on the war.

 

In Indian Country, the smaller the tactical unit, the more forward deployed it is, and the more autonomy it enjoys from the chain of command, the more that can be accomplished. It simply isn’t enough for units to be out all day in Iraqi towns and villages engaged in presence patrols and civil-affairs projects: A successful FOB (forward operating base) is a nearly empty one, in which most units are living beyond the base perimeters among the indigenous population for days or weeks at a time.

 

Much can be learned from our ongoing Horn of Africa experience. From a base in Djibouti, small U.S. military teams have been quietly scouring an anarchic region that because of an Islamic setting offers al Qaeda cultural access. “Who needs meetings in Washington,” one Army major told me. “Guys in the field will figure out what to do. I took 10 guys to explore eastern Ethiopia. In every town people wanted a bigger American presence. They know we’re here, they want to see what we can do for them.” The new economy-of-force paradigm being pioneered in the Horn borrows more from the Lewis and Clark expedition than from the major conflicts of the 20th century.

 

In Indian Country, as one general officer told me, “you want to whack bad guys quietly and cover your tracks with humanitarian-aid projects.” Because of the need for simultaneous military, relief and diplomatic operations, our greatest enemy is the size, rigidity and artificial boundaries of the Washington bureaucracy. Thus, the next administration, be it Republican or Democrat, will have to advance the merging of the departments of State and Defense as never before; or risk failure. A strong secretary of state who rides roughshod over a less dynamic defense secretary – as a Democratic administration appears to promise – will only compound the problems created by the Bush administration, in which the opposite has occurred. The two secretaries must work in unison, planting significant numbers of State Department personnel inside the military's war fighting commands, and defense personnel inside a modernized Agency for International Development.

 

The Plains Indians were ultimately vanquished not because the U.S. Army adapted to the challenge of an unconventional enemy. It never did. In fact, the Army never learned the lesson that small units of foot soldiers were more effective against the Indians than large mounted regiments burdened by the need to carry forage for horses: whose contemporary equivalent are convoys of humvees bristling with weaponry that are easily immobilized by an improvised bicycle bomb planted by a lone insurgent. Had it not been for a deluge of settlers aided by the railroad, security never would have been brought to the Old West.

 

Now there are no new settlers to help us, nor their equivalent in any form. To help secure a more liberal global environment, American ground troops are going to have to learn to be more like Apaches.

U.S. Intervention in Syria: War for Virtue. By Henry Allen.

U.S. intervention in Syria: War for virtue. By Henry Allen. Washington Post, September 1, 2013. Also here.

Why do we ignore the civilians killed in American wars? By John Tirman. Washington Post, January 6, 2012.


Allen:

Where were the smiles, the flowers? We’d expected, in a modest way, to be greeted as liberators.

 

This was many years ago, Chu Lai, South Vietnam, 1966, in one of the early disasters of the United States’ post-World War II attempts to fight wars for virtue. People in the villages refused to meet our eyes, and they only smiled if they were selling us something.

 

How disappointing. The war was young then, and so were we, but not so young that we hadn’t seen newsreel footage of the cheers from the giddy urchins of Naples, the French doing their tiptoe waves.

 

But not the Vietnamese. It seemed that in Chu Lai, at least, the beneficiaries of our liberation and largesse hated us, or were too scared to show they liked us.

 

But why? Weren’t we fighting a war of liberation, another good war in the American tradition of good wars? Wasn’t my Marine civic action team giving candy to children, the same SweeTarts you could buy in American movie theaters?

 

The giveaway lasted two days.

 

“SweeTart numbah ten!” shouted the kids who swarmed our truck on the second day. “Numbah ten” meant the worst. They flung the SweeTarts back at us. We flung them back at them, no doubt losing a heart here, a mind there. The Battle of the SweeTarts. At the end of the day you’d have to say we lost it, another case of American virtue unrewarded.

 

The good war, the virtuous war. We believe in it. We have to believe in it or we wouldn’t be Americans.

 

As John Updike wrote: “America is beyond power, it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible.”

 

The United States doesn’t fight for land, resources, hatred, revenge, tribute, religious conversion — the usual stuff. Along with the occasional barrel of oil, we fight for virtue.

 

Never mind that it doesn’t work out — the Gulf of Tonkin lies, Agent Orange, waterboarding, nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the pointless horrors of Abu Ghraib, a fighter plane wiping out an Afghan wedding party, our explanation of civilian deaths as an abstraction: “collateral damage.”

 

Just so. We talk about our warmaking as if it were a therapeutic science — surgical strikes, precision bombing, graduated responses, a homeopathic treatment that uses war to cure us of war. “Like cures like,” as the homeopathic slogan has it; “the war to end all wars” as Woodrow Wilson is believed to have said of World War I. We send out our patient bombers in the manner of piling on blankets to break a child’s fever. We launch our missiles and say: “We’re doing it for your own good.”

 

After World War II, I was taught in school that humankind, especially Americans, hate war and love peace. The United Nations rose on New York’s East River, a foundry beating swords into plowshares. We renamed the Department of War as the Department of Defense. We had Atoms for Peace, CARE packages, UNICEF boxes at Halloween and the Berlin Airlift instead of a war against the Soviet Union.

 

The problem here is that humankind doesn’t hate war, it loves war. That’s why it fights so many of them. The New England Indians were so devoted to fighting each other that they couldn’t unite to drive the European settlers into the sea in King Philip’s War.

 

What better explains all of recorded history with its atrocity, conquest, pillage and extermination? Our love of war is the problem. War is an addiction, maybe a disease, the chronic autoimmune disease of humanity. It erupts, it subsides, but it’s always there, waiting to cripple and kill us. The best we can do is hope to keep it in remission.

 

And yet Americans still believe in the idea of the good and virtuous war. It scratches our Calvinist itch; it proves our election to blessedness.

 

Thus God is on our side. Strangely enough, though, we keep losing. Since World War II, we have failed to win any land war that lasted more than a week: Korea (a stalemate), Vietnam, little ones like Lebanon and Somalia, bigger ones like Iraq and Afghanistan. Ah, but these were all intended to be good wars, saving people from themselves.

 

The latest target of opportunity for our patient bombers is Syria. The purity of our motives is unassailable. We would fire our missiles only to punish sin, this time in the form of poison gas. No land grab, no oil, not even an attempt to install democracy.

 

Oscar Wilde said: “As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.” He didn’t foresee a United States that would regard war as virtuous.

 

What a dangerous idea it is.


Tirman:

Why the American silence on our wars’ main victims? Our self-image, based on what cultural historian Richard Slotkin calls “the frontier myth” — in which righteous violence is used to subdue or annihilate the savages of whatever land we’re trying to conquer — plays a large role. For hundreds of years, the frontier myth has been one of America’s sturdiest national narratives.

 

When the challenges from communism in Korea and Vietnam appeared, we called on these cultural tropes to understand the U.S. mission overseas. The same was true for Iraq and Afghanistan, with the news media and politicians frequently portraying Islamic terrorists as frontier savages. By framing each of these wars as a battle to civilize a lawless culture, we essentially typecast the local populations as theIndians of our North American conquest. As the foreign policy maven Robert D. Kaplan wrote on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page in 2004, “The red Indian metaphor is one with which a liberal policy nomenklatura may be uncomfortable, but Army and Marine field officers have embraced it because it captures perfectly the combat challenge of the early 21st century.”

 

Politicians tend to speak in broader terms, such as defending Western values, or simply refer to resistance fighters as terrorists, the 21st-century word for savages. Remember the military’s code name for the raid of Osama bin Laden’s compound? It was Geronimo.

 

The frontier myth is also steeped in racism, which is deeply embedded in American culture’s derogatory depictions of the enemy. Such belittling makes it all the easier to put these foreigners at risk of violence. President George W. Bush, to his credit, disavowed these wars as being against Islam, as has President Obama.

 

Perhaps the most compelling explanation for indifference, though, taps into our beliefs about right and wrong. More than 30 years ago, social psychologists developed the “just world” theory, which argues that humans naturally assume that the world should be orderly and rational. When that “just world” is disrupted, we tend to explain away the event as an aberration. For example, when encountering a beggar on the street, a common reaction is indifference or even anger, in the belief that no one should go hungry in America.

 

This explains much of our response to the violence in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. When the wars went badly and violence escalated, Americans tended to ignore or even blame the victims. The public dismissed the civilians because their high mortality rates, displacement and demolished cities were discordant with our understandings of the missions and the U.S. role in the world.

The Scared Worker. By Robert J. Samuelson.

The Scared Worker. By Robert J. Samuelson. Real Clear Politics, September 2, 2013. Also at the Washington Post.

Tours of Duty: The New Employer-Employee Contract. By Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh. Harvard Business Review, June 2013.


Samuelson:

On this Labor Day, American workers face a buyers’ market. Employers have the upper hand and, given today’s languid pace of hiring, the advantage shows few signs of ending. What looms, at best, is a sluggish descent from high unemployment (7.4 percent in July) and a prolonged period of stagnant or slow-growing wages. Since 2007, there has been no gain in average inflation-adjusted wages and total compensation, including fringes, notes the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.

 

The weak job market has a semi-permanence unlike anything seen since World War II, and the effects on public opinion extend beyond the unemployed. “People’s expectations have been really ratcheted down for what they can expect for themselves and their children,” says EPI economist Lawrence Mishel. There’s a sense “that the economy just doesn’t produce good jobs anymore.” Possible job loss becomes more threatening because finding a new job is harder. Says Paul Taylor of the Pew Research Center: “Security is valued more than money because it’s so fragile.”

 

What’s occurring is the final breakdown of the post-World War II job compact, with its promises of career jobs and something close to “full employment.” The dissolution of these expectations compounds stress and uncertainty.

 

Over the past century, we’ve had three broad labor regimes. The first, in the early 1900s, featured “unfettered labor markets,” as economic historian Price Fishback of the University of Arizona puts it. Competition set wages and working conditions. There was no federal unemployment insurance or union protection. Workers were fired if they offended bosses or the economy slumped; they quit if they thought they could do better. Turnover was high: Fewer than a third of manufacturing workers in 1913 had been at their current jobs for more than five years.

 

After World War II, labor relations became more regulated and administered — the second regime. The Wagner Act of 1935 gave workers the right to organize; decisions of the National War Labor Board also favored unions. By 1945, unions represented about a third of private workers, up from 10 percent in 1929. Health insurance, pensions and job protections proliferated. Factory workers laid off during recessions could expect to be recalled when the economy recovered. Job security improved. By 1973, half of manufacturing workers had been at the same job for more than five years.

 

To avoid unionization and retain skilled workers, large nonunion companies emulated these practices. Career jobs were often the norm. If you went to work for IBM at 25, you could expect to retire from IBM at 65. Fringe benefits expanded. Corporate America, unionized or not, created a private welfare state to protect millions from job and income loss.

 

But in some ways, the guarantees were too rigid and costly. They started to unravel with the harsh 1981-82 recession (peak monthly unemployment: 10.8 percent). As time passed, companies faced increasing competition from imports and new technologies. Pressure mounted from Wall Street for higher profits. In some industries, labor became uncompetitive. Career jobs slowly vanished as a norm; managers fired workers to cut costs. Unions provided diminishing protection. In 2012, they represented only 6.6 percent of private workers. Old organized sectors (steel, autos) have shrunk. New sectors, from high tech to fast food, have proved hard to organize. Companies have ferociously resisted. (Public unionization is 36 percent, but that’s another story.)

 

Now comes the third labor regime: a confusing mix of old and new. The private safety net is shredding, though the public safety net (unemployment insurance, Social Security, anti-poverty programs, anti-discrimination laws) remains. Economist Fishback suggests we may be drifting back toward “unfettered labor markets” with greater personal instability, insecurity — and responsibility. Workers are often referred to as “free agents.” An article in the Harvard Business Review argues that lifetime employment at one company is dead and proposes the following compact: Companies invest in workers’ skills to make them more employable when they inevitably leave; workers reciprocate by devoting those skills to improving corporate profitability.

 

“The new compact isn’t about being nice,” the article says. “It’s based on an understanding that a company is its talent, that low performers will be cut, and that the way to attract talent is to offer appealing opportunities.”

 

Workers can’t be too picky, because their power has eroded. Another indicator: After years of stability, labor’s share — in wages and fringes — of non-farm business income slipped from 63 percent in 2000 to 57 percent in 2013, reports the White House Council of Economic Advisers. But an even greater decline in 22 other advanced countries, albeit over a longer period, suggests worldwide pressures on workers. Take your pick: globalization; new labor-saving technologies; sluggish economies. Workers do best when strong growth and tight markets raise real wages. On Labor Day 2013, this prospect is nowhere in sight.

The Eternal Truth That Sets America Apart. By Janet Daley.

The eternal truth that sets America apart. By Janet Daley. The Telegraph, August 31, 2013.

Daley:

If the US loses its sense of historic purpose, then what is it? Just a place to go to get rich?

 

There is only one winner in the ongoing shambles of the West’s policy on Syria, and it is not Bashar al-Assad. Mr Assad and his regime are now locked into the familiar slow suicide march of the modern dictatorship which ends eventually in execution or exile. That will come later rather than sooner because of the shameful political gamesmanship of the countries on which his victims should have been able to rely, but – count on it – it’s just a matter of time. No, the grand-slam, record-breaking, knock-out winner of the past week has been Vladimir Putin, who graciously thanked the British Parliament on Friday for its support in his quest for global domination. Surely every British and American politician who declares that military intervention would be acceptable only with the permission of the United Nations must know that he is handing Mr Putin – with his blocking vote on the Security Council – the power to run the world? Or at least, to determine the fate of some of the most oppressed parts of it.

 

Yes, the broken-backed nation that is post-communist Russia – so degraded in its economic and military stature that many commentators are ready to write it out of the world script altogether – has checkmated the “winners” of the Cold War. For a defunct power, it is proving remarkably competent at protecting its client states and maintaining its regional influence. Our side may be learning a critical lesson: a dying superpower is more dangerous than it was at its zenith because it has less to lose. Its leaders (particularly the present one) will take wild risks to prove that they are still in the game. Russia must now be regarded as a potentially unstable, irresponsible rogue state which will fling itself against the might of the West for the sheer bombastic joy of it.

 

Which brings us to the current clear loser: the West, and all of those who believed in its capacity to defend humane values and the rule of law. Even assuming Barack Obama gets Congress to agree to his minimalist no-regime-change, no-nation-building, in-and-out-in-a-couple-of-days intervention (maybe with a teeny-tiny bit of help from France), what sort of impact will the leader of the free world have made on the criminal Syrian regime? It is difficult to know precisely what effect he intends his carefully circumscribed and meticulously pre-announced actions to have. Short of providing the precise date and time of his rocket launches, and a map of the exit routes from proposed targets, he could scarcely have been more helpful to the Syrian government in keeping the damage to a minimum. If the White House sees this elaborate warning arrangement as a way of avoiding civilian casualties, then it is very naive: ruthless dictatorships are more likely to plant civilians in the proposed target areas for propaganda purposes, than to remove them to safety.

 

So what would Mr Obama’s foray into the military assault business – assuming it goes ahead – be designed to accomplish? The President and his spokesmen take a rather different tone from that of Secretary of State John Kerry, who has made very eloquent statements indeed about the abomination of the Assad regime and the moral imperative to prevent further atrocities. Mr Obama himself speaks as if he were engaged in a public-relations war rather than a shooting one: the US intervention (when it happens) will be all about “sending a signal” to the Syrian government that its use of chemical weapons is unacceptable, blah, blah. Sending a signal? As I write, the US is lining up its warships: they will be sending missiles, not signals. If they are properly informed and aimed, the missile systems will eliminate stores of chemical weapons and the Syrian government’s capacity to use them: the White House is now describing its plan as a “deter and degrade” mission. So this would be an act of war, not a “signal” or a gambit in a moral debate.

 

What does the president think he is doing when he talks misleading spin-doctor gobbledegook? He has clearly been told by his own intelligence advisers that it is absolutely necessary for America to step up and do what it has done before, whether willingly or reluctantly: accept responsibility for being the world power whose role is to defend the idea, as the founding documents say, that all men are born with unalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. As every American schoolchild is taught, those rights are to be regarded as universal and not simply the birthright of one nation. What would an America be like that did not expect to be called upon to support and defend oppressed people? A haven – within its own borders – for the persecuted and the dispossessed? A land of opportunity for economic migrants? Maybe.

 

But its citizens have always been educated to see themselves as more than this: not just the fortunate residents of a lucky country but bearers of an eternal truth – a model for the world of how men should live. The United States was the embodiment of the Enlightenment concept of natural rights. Its citizens took part in a conscious social contract in which they accepted the rule of law in return for a guarantee of personal liberty. And that agreement implied a commitment to the belief that this arrangement – this set of civil values – was one to which all the peoples of the world were entitled. The reason that the US always ends up repenting of its isolationist phases (which is what the Obama administration is in the process of doing) is because an America that does not see itself as a model for the world can not make sense of its own identity. In his statement on Friday, Mr Kerry said, “We are the country that tries to honour [the] universal values around which we organise our lives . . . This is who we are.”

 

If America loses that sense of its historic purpose, what is it? Just a place where people go in the hope of getting rich? No president – particularly not this one – wants to speak of the country in anything less than idealistic terms. It is startling to European ears to hear the endless references in US politics to the Founding Fathers and to the greatness of the American system. Whether you find this admirable or embarrassing, it is fundamental to the way the country and its leaders understand their global obligations. For the past few years we have had a glimpse of what a world would be like without that sense of obligation: in which Americans became just one more self-preserving, inward-looking populace obsessed with entitlements and welfare programmes like so many cynical war-weary Europeans.

 

That was the Obama brand of isolationism: what Europe used to call the “peace dividend” was to be spent on building a social democratic order at home. The idealistic values would be purely for domestic consumption. But the vacuum that was left by America’s retreat has been filled by cowardice and prevarication. The United States is going to have to step up again.

Liberal Education in Authoritarian Places. By Jim Sleeper.

Liberal Education in Authoritarian Places. By Jim Sleeper. New York Times, August 31, 2013.

New York University’s campus in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, opened in 2010.

Obama’s Bread and Circuses. By Caroline Glick.

Obama’s Bread and Circuses. By Caroline Glick. Real Clear Politics, September 1, 2013. Also at the Jerusalem Post.

One Great Big War in the Middle East. By David Brooks.

One Great Big War. By David Brooks. New York Times, August 29, 2013.

Containing the Fire in Syria. By Ryan Crocker. YaleGlobal, July 23, 2013.

Syrian Update. By Lisa Daftari.

Syrian Update by Lisa Daftari. Video. America Live. Fox News, August 30, 2013. YouTube.

Is Potential U.S. Action in Syria About “Obama’s Image?”

Is Potential U.S. Action in Syria About “Obama’s Image?” Video. Ralph Peters, Tom Bevan, and Judith Miller. America Live. Fox News, August 30, 2013. YouTube. YouTube excerpt.

Ralph Peters: Most Phenomenally Stupid Misuse of Our Military I’ve Seen. Video. Real Clear Politics, August 30, 2013.