Reason Magazine - Topics > Communism

How to Lose a War

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:00:00 EDT

When it comes to the war in Iraq and other foreign policy issues, Republicans like to harken back to the stalwart presidents of the Cold War. John McCain has invoked Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan as kindred spirits, and so has George W. Bush. Which raises the question: Why do they embrace those leaders while rejecting their policy?

The centerpiece of the U.S. approach to the Soviet Union was captured in a famous 1947 essay by American diplomat George Kennan, who rejected either war or retreat in favor of "a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."

Some conservatives, regarding this as appeasement, advocated "rollback" to liberate captive nations from oppression. But even resolute anti-communists like Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon saw the risks and costs were too high. They kept troops to guard Western Europe, built a robust nuclear deterrent and employed prudent measures to block Soviet expansion. That was containment.

But in the months before the Iraq war, it became a dirty word. "Containment is not possible," President Bush insisted, "when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies." The only remedy for such regimes lay in pre-emptive war. McCain agreed, saying the only option in Iraq was "disarmament by regime change."

Amid all the war hysteria, it was easy to forget containment worked against Stalin and Mao -- both unbalanced dictators with nuclear weapons. They were far more formidable tyrants with dreams of world domination. Yet we managed to preserve our security without pre-emptive war.

For that matter, containment had worked against Saddam Hussein. In the 12 years after the first Gulf War, we kept him in a box, where he was no threat to us or his neighbors. In 2002, he even had to accept the return of United Nations weapons inspectors -- who found no weapons of mass destruction because, thanks to our efforts, he had none.

But as Yale foreign policy scholar Ian Shapiro noted in his 2007 book "Containment: Rebuilding a Strategy Against Global Terror" (just published in paperback), the Bush administration was dissatisfied. One reason was its unfounded certitude that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz also complained that containing Iraq had cost a staggering $30 billion over those 12 years.

Today, that sounds like a bargain. The long-term cost of the Iraq war, according to an estimate by Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, will exceed $3 trillion -- or 100 times the cost lamented by Wolfowitz.
Ronald Reagan took a different approach. In response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he continued President Carter's covert aid to the rebels, but didn't send American troops. Likewise when a pro-Soviet regime gained power in Nicaragua. The key to containment was finding affordable means to constrain and weaken the enemy, without bleeding ourselves down in wars we didn't have to fight.

Our policy in Iraq has been just the opposite. And Iran could be the next mistake. McCain says Tehran cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons -- which implies he would go to war to prevent it, no matter what the price in blood or treasure.

The claim is that the Iranians are too crazy to be deterred from using nukes against Israel or giving them to terrorist groups to use against us. One common trait of governments and their leaders is an overriding desire to survive. If Iranian nukes are ever used for aggression, the regime can be sure Iran will be, as Hillary Clinton so vividly put it, "obliterated."

Shapiro told me he sees no evidence that Clinton or Barack Obama would return to containment. But the challenges we face are likely to push them toward it. Those dilemmas, after all, have prompted a reconsideration by none other than President Bush.

One member of the Axis of Evil, North Korea, has acquired a nuclear arsenal. Instead of launching a pre-emptive strike, the Bush administration has chosen to 1) live with it if we have to, 2) negotiate with Pyongyang to give it up, and 3) maintain strong defenses in South Korea.

That route is plainly the least bad option toward North Korea. But don't dare call it containment. And don't get the idea it could ever work anywhere else.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Giving Them the Rope to Hang Themselves

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Mon, 05 May 2008 10:32:00 EDT

Cato's Juan Carlos Hidalgo explains a possible nefarious motive behind Raoul Castro's recent reforms in Cuba.

(Update: Link fixed.)

May Day Remembered

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:31:00 EDT

For the past five years, the blog The Distributed Republic has commemorated May Day in the name of the victims of communism. The site's latest offering went up yesterday is well worth reading here.

Just Sue Ellen Stories

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Thu, 01 May 2008 09:25:00 EDT

"How 'Dallas' Won the Cold War," the Nick Gillespie/me co-production in this weekend's Washington Post, drew some interesting testimonial responses. A sampling:

In 1987 [...] I visited Bukhara in Uzbekistan. At one point, we were invited into the living area behind a shop, where the owner took out a video cassette and played it for us. It was a grainy episode of "Dallas," dubbed in Finnish. (We learned later that Estonians would record the Finnish version of "Dallas"--and other Western TV shows also--off of Helsinki TV, easily seen Tallinn. These would then circulate throughout the USSR.) Our host grilled us intensely about each of the appliances in Miss Ellie's kitchen. Thus did visions of Southfork reach even unto Central Asia.
*
In the summer of 1983 I was traveling through Europe with my Brother. One of the countries we visited was Romania. I recall meeting [a] 20-30 year old Romanian male. His first question to me was "Who shot JR"? I was surprised to hear such a question. He said he watched the series however [the] episodes they see were a few seasons behind. It was unfortunate for I could not answer his question.
*
I was there when Dallas won the Cold War, with an American tour group, just after Dallas started running. Wherever we went--Moscow, St Petersburg, Odessa, Kiev, everywhere!--the touring day could not begin till after the morning episode was over, since neither the driver nor guide would stir till then. Same thing for the late-afternoon epidsode, the tour had to end before it began. And it was not only our driver and guide--auto and pedestran traffic just disappeared from the streets during those two hours. I think I remember being told it was Boris Yeltsin's party that sponsored the twice-a-day showing ... and ran political messages in the commercial breaks since they knew everyone in the, then, USSR, would be watching.
*
Do you remember a news story following the opening of Albania? Boat people from Albania started coming across to Italy and landing on the beaches in droves, causing a headache for the Italian police. One policeman reported that when he approached a group of Albanian boat people, they said, "Is this Dallas?"

*
In the late 80s, probably 1987, I was in Inverness, Scotland. My then wife and I went out to a pub. We walked in and saw the entire bar looking in our direction and up to a TV that was placed above the door. There was dead silence except for the American accents on the television. As we proceeded into the place and bellied up to the bar, we turned to look and on the screen was Dallas. The entire place was mesmerized.
*
It's probably the most important show ever, as ridiculous as that might sound. Its impact on the rest of the world was even more profound than its impact in the U.S.
I would propose that Baywatch continued the Dallas phenomenon in the late 80s and 90s. To people outside the U.S., and particularly in Germany, Baywatch symbolized the myth of California: A place to live freely and enjoy the abundance of the earth. Must have been very attractive to the East Germans who could get the program and wanted very much to travel, and to the West Germans who were sick of the whole big government, nanny state thing. When the Wall came down in 1989, David Hasselhoff (brilliantly) flew to Berlin right away to give a "Freedom" concert at the Brandenburger Tor.

Over in the comments at my personal blog, one of my favorite film writers, David Ehrenstein, adds:

The impact of Dallas cannot be underestimated. At heart it was little more than a louche retread of Sirk's Written on the Wind and Stevens' Giant but with the unabashed vulgarity of Russ Meyer thrown in for good measure.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder was obsessed with the show, assigning two of his most valuable boyfriends (Udo Kier and Raul Gimenez) all-important taping duties. He didn't want to miss a nanosecond. Needless to say Berlin Alexanderplatz is rather different in overall presentation. But its dark heart is much the same.

At Commentary magazine, Abe Greenwald searches for the new diverting Dallas in our modern twilight struggle, and comes up with ... Hillary vs. Obama! Still, my favorite response was probably this:

Good article, I enjoyed it but there is one failing. To wit: Contrary to popular belief, this is no evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald shot/killed JFK.

Some related nuggets from the reason vault: The Second Romanian Revolution Will Be Televised, and Charles Paul Freund's classic In Praise of Vulgarity.

Now Playing at Reason.tv: What We Saw at the Mortgage Bailout Demonstration

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:30:00 EDT

On April 16 in Washington, D.C., the Ad Hoc National Network to Stop Evictions & Foreclosures organized a demonstration outside a meeting of the Mortgage Bankers Associaton at the Washington Court Hotel.

reason.tv's Dan Hayes and Michael C. Moynihan checked out the demonstration and talked with some of the activists, who quickly changed the subject from home loans to Castro's Cuban paradise, the need to free Mumia Abu Jamal, forgiving student loans, the Rothschilds (!), Haitians eating a mixture of dirt and oil (!?!?), and much, much more. Approximately six minutes.

To view the video, click on the image below.

For the full song used in the intro and outro, go here.

The Singing Revolution in Washington, D.C., April 18-24

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 10:13:00 EDT

An excellent documentary about the Estonian revolt against Soviet domination, The Singing Revolution, is coming to Washington, D.C. The movie, lauded by The New York Times and others will be playing at the Landmark's E Street Cinema starting this Friday.

For more background on The Singing Revolution (including clips, a Q&A presided over by reason Editor in Chief Matt Welch, and a great presentation by libertarian former Prime Minister Mart Laar from the conference Reason in Amsterdam), check out reason.tv's interview and more with co-director Jim Tusty. Click on the image below to view.

Soundbite: Can You Hear the People Sing?

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Most people of a certain age remember Poland’s anti-communist Solidarity movement of the early 1980s and the day the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989. Others may recall Czechoslovakia’s inspiring Velvet Revolution a few weeks later, or the bloodier Christmas Day executions of Romania’s odious Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. Yet when you tell people that the tiny Baltic country of Estonia engineered a Singing Revolution to cast off their Soviet oppressors, the typical response is a blank stare.

James Tusty, a commercial and corporate filmmaker whose father emigrated from Estonia in 1924, first started hearing about the ways Estonians used nationalist folk songs and modern rock to defy Moscow when he and his wife, Maureen Castle Tusty, taught a film course in the Estonian capital of Tallinn in 1999.

The Tustys realized they were in a unique position to tell the world an inspirational story it did not know. The result, a moving 90-minute documentary called The Singing Revolution, became the highest-grossing documentary in Estonian history and has drawn rave reviews upon its limited release in the United States. The film is scheduled to be shown April 18–19 at the Cleveland Museum of Art and April 18–24 at the E Street Cinema in Washington, D.C.

Editor in Chief Matt Welch spoke with James Tusty in January.

Q: How did songs become an essential part of the Estonian revolution?

A: Music has always been part of Estonian history. For thousands of years the Estonians have been singing folk songs. They have one of the largest collections of folk songs in the world, even though they’re a very small country. So it was very natural that music would become part of the weapon that they would use to fight the Soviets. They have this song festival every five years called Laulupidu, which is 30,000 singers coming on stage to sing in harmony. And it’s not any 30,000 people who want to sing; these people audition, so it’s the best 30,000 singers.

Well, in 1947 Stalin had already come in and occupied Estonia. He declared the song festival a “bourgeois tradition,” and he declared the first annual Soviet Song Festival, making the Estonians sing songs in Russian that glorified Lenin and Stalin and Marx. But the Estonians snuck one by. That song became the unofficial national anthem in Estonia, and for the next 50 years they always sang it to close the Song Festivals.

Q: So what happened in the late ’80s?

A: In June of 1988, there was a rock concert with, I don’t know how many, tens of thousands of youth who were there singing into the night. The Soviet authorities got worried, and they shut down the concert. So the people walked three miles to an open field to continue singing, and they sang until five or six in the morning. And it went on for a week. Every night more and more people came until there were maybe 100,000 to 150,000 people singing these rock ’n’ roll songs, as well as some traditional songs. The Soviet police saw this, but they didn’t know what to do. And the Estonians just kept on pushing that envelope, until eventually they contributed significantly to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Q: What broader lesson did you learn from this story?

A: What this film is about is humankind’s indomitable drive for independence. If there’s a reason to see the film, it’s to start understanding liberty and freedom at a base level. I reduce freedom to this reality: I don’t want my neighbor telling me what color to paint my living room. Let’s get it down to that, and then let’s move out from that slowly, and talk about what political systems give us all the individual freedom we need.

This is not a political film. This is a story. And you will cry in the beginning and feel uplifted in the end, I promise.

Attention DC-area Reasonoids: The Singing Revolution is coming to Washington, D.C, playing at the Landmark's E Street Cinema starting this Friday. Check here for showtimes in other cities.

Friday Fun Link: Haiku Day Edition

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:20:00 EDT

In North Korea
Sex is really fantastic
Or so says this clip:

Havana Con Cojones

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 11:04:00 EDT

Speaking of Cuba, this New York Times piece on dissident bloggers and cell-phone users in Havana -- made known to me by a Bill Moyers producer, I might add -- is a very heartening surprise. Not because it's in the New York Times, but because nine years ago it cost upwards of $600 a month to have a cell-phone in Cuba, never mind an Internet connection.

A growing underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital cameras and clandestine Internet hookups has been mounting some challenges to the Cuban government in recent months, spreading news that the official state media try to suppress.
Last month, students at a prestigious computer science university videotaped an ugly confrontation they had with Ricardo Alarcón, the president of the National Assembly.
Mr. Alarcón seemed flummoxed when students grilled him on why they could not travel abroad, stay at hotels, earn better wages or use search engines like Google. The video spread like wildfire through Havana, passed from person to person, and seriously damaged Mr. Alarcón's reputation in some circles.

Here's Alarcón's be-flummoxing:

How do the kids get connected in a totalitarian economy? Through its partnerships with foreign (non-American) investors:

People who have smuggled in satellite dishes provide illegal connections to the Internet for a fee or download movies to sell on discs. Others exploit the connections to the Web of foreign businesses and state-run enterprises. Employees with the ability to connect to the Internet often sell their passwords and identification numbers for use in the middle of the night.
Hotels catering to tourists provide Internet services, and Cubans also exploit those conduits to the Web.

Imagine what would happen if you let U.S. companies invest, and U.S. citizens to both travel and send remittances freely?

Bonus NYT-Cuba story -- a Cuban-American New Yorker performs a one-woman middle finger aimed at her Fidel-apologist neighbors:

"[T]he longer I live here, the more I realized, they don't care." [...]

"They would rather keep their little pop revolution instead of saying it is a dictatorship," Ms. Peláez said. "I had somebody come to me after a show and say, 'Don't ruin Cuba for me!' Well, why not? They're holding on to a fantasy."

Come to reason's Cuba event, starring Rep. Jeff Flake, this Wednesday!

Like the Coen Brothers, the Castro Brothers March Deep into Oscar Night...

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 07:09:00 EST

Earlier on Sunday, before the grand Oscar hoopla started, Raul Castro, the Jerry Van Dyke of communist tyranny, officially took charge of the revolution in Cuba, thus ensuring at least a few more years of despotism and poverty for the unfortunate people of that misbegotten island:

Cuba marked a historic milestone in its revolution Sunday as Raul Castro took over as president from his brother Fidel, defying the United States with pledges not to abandon the communist path.

"Fidel is irreplaceable; the people will continue his work when he is no longer with us physically, though his ideas always will be here," Raul Castro, 76, told lawmakers in his acceptance speech.
"I accept the responsibility I have been given with the conviction I have repeated often: there is only one Commander in Chief of the Cuban Revolution: Fidel is Fidel and we all know it well."...
Raul Castro vowed to be on guard against its powerful northern neighbor the United States, saying "we have taken note of the offensive and openly meddling declarations by the Empire (as Cuba refers to Washington) and some of its closest allies."

More here, via AFP.

There's no question in my mind that the U.S. embargo/boycott of Cuba is not only immoral and misguided but ineffective at its stated goal of bringing the Castro regime tumbling down. Here's hoping that policy changes, and changes quickly.

But as Michael C. Moynihan pointed out just last week (and as reason has over the years in its coverage of Castro and Cuba), the Castro Bros. deserve a special place in hell for the horrors that they have brought to the land they've governed for the past 40-odd years. And the brothers' defenders in the free world deserve a long time in purgatory, at the very least.

The odd Oscar connection: Perhaps it's a harbinger of true change that the winner of the Academy Award for supporting actor, Javier Bardem, was previously nomnated for an Oscar for his portrayal in Before Night Falls of Cuban poet-prisoner Reinaldo Arenas.

Bonus Oscar connection: former reasoner Tim Cavanaugh looks at the Big Gummint pretext for the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which involves among other things the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Castro's Reading List

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 08:12:00 EST

As Fidel Castro turns power over to his younger brother Raul (the Ozzie Canseco of totalitarianism), questions abound: Did Castro resign to have more time with his families? So he could travel outside his open-air island prison a bit more easily? So he could have more time to catch up on his reading?

The Competitive Enterprise Institute's Ivan Osorio presents this picture and asks: "For nearly all of the Castro era, analyzing Cuban politics has involved Kremlinology-style reading of tea leaves. So I wonder what seasoned Cuba watchers will make of this photo?"

If his Greenspan jones keeps going, who knows, maybe next on his nightstand is Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal?

More here.

reason on Castro and Cuba here.

Che-bama?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:26:00 EST

Hey Che, how many Obama supporters did you sign up today?

This pic of a Houston-based Obama group originates with a Fox affiliate broadcast. (See the video here--as a real Che hater, I swear to Raul Castro that the talking dog in the car dealership ad right before the vid is far scarier than this mashup of the Cuban flag).

It's making the round of right-wing websites ranging from Captain's Quarters (aye, aye, Cap'n Ed!) to National Review to Newsbusters.

Sadly, the Fox affiliate has robbed most of the juice from this one by noting on its website: "The office featured in this video is funded by volunteers of the Barack Obama Campaign and is not an official headquarters for his campaign."

Hit & Runners, what say you? Righteous commie outrage or phoney right-wing fooferaw?

reason on Che.

Update: NRO's Jim Geraghty is reporting that the Obama campaign has stressed this rag not a flag aint' in an "official" office (scare quotes are NRO's) and the candidate's people have called the flag "inappropriate," which moves Geraghty to write, "I'm mildly surprised that Team Obama called the Che flag, 'inappropriate' instead of merely 'controversial' or some milquetoast term."

Why Are Russian Women So Hot?

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 13:29:00 EST

Anne Applebaum says thank the free market!

To put it bluntly, in the Soviet Union there was no market for female beauty. No fashion magazines featured beautiful women, since there weren't any fashion magazines. No TV series depended upon beautiful women for high ratings, since there weren't any ratings. There weren't many men rich enough to seek out beautiful women and marry them, and foreign men couldn't get the right sort of visa. There were a few film stars, of course, but some of the most famous—I'm thinking of Lyubov Orlova, alleged to be Stalin's favorite actress—were wholesome and cheerful rather than sultry and stunning. Unusual beauty, like unusual genius, was considered highly suspicious in the Soviet Union and its satellite people's republics.
This doesn't mean there weren't any beautiful women, of course, just that they didn't have the clothes or cosmetics to enhance their looks, and, far more important, they couldn't use their faces to launch international careers. Instead of gracing London drawing rooms, they stayed in Minsk, Omsk, or Alma Ata. Instead of couture, they wore cheap polyester. They could become assembly-line forewomen, Communist Party bosses, even local femmes fatales, but not Vogue cover girls. They didn't even dream of becoming Vogue cover girls, since very few had ever seen an edition of Vogue.

Applebaum concludes:

Beauty is a matter of luck, but the same could be said of many other talents. And what open markets do for beautiful women they also do for other sorts of genius. So, cheer up next time you see a Siberian blonde dominating male attention at the far end of the table: The same mechanisms that brought her to your dinner party might one day bring you the Ukrainian doctor who cures your cancer or the Polish stockbroker who makes your fortune.

Hotel Terminus

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 10:03:00 EST

Esquire's pick for the Worst Building in the History of Mankind:

A picture doesn't lie -- the one-hundred-and-five-story Ryugyong Hotel is hideous, dominating the Pyongyang skyline like some twisted North Korean version of Cinderella's castle. Not that you would be able to tell from the official government photos of the North Korean capital -- the hotel is such an eyesore, the Communist regime routinely covers it up, airbrushing it to make it look like it's open -- or Photoshopping or cropping it out of pictures completely.

Even by Communist standards, the 3,000-room hotel is hideously ugly, a series of three gray 328-foot long concrete wings shaped into a steep pyramid. With 75 degree sides that rise to an apex of 1,083 feet, the Hotel of Doom (also known as the Phantom Hotel and the Phantom Pyramid) isn't the just the worst designed building in the world -- it's the worst-built building, too. In 1987, Baikdoosan Architects and Engineers put its first shovel into the ground and more than twenty years later, after North Korea poured more than two percent of its gross domestic product to building this monster, the hotel remains unoccupied, unopened, and unfinished.

Update: Peter Hitchens wrote about the abandoned hotel in the Daily Mail last October:

Brooding over the deranged cityscape is the ugliest building in the universe, a 1,000ft pyramid, already a ruin though it has never been finished and never will be, perhaps because the money has run out, perhaps because it is so jerry-built that nobody would ever have dared stay in it.

Official guides pretend not to notice it though it is by far the tallest structure in Pyongyang.

This symbol of overweening ambition is by a strange coincidence the exact shape and size of the Ministry of Truth, the chief source of official lies in George Orwell's prophecy of just such a state, and just such a city, in 1984.

It is almost as if North Korea's rulers have taken Orwell's novel as a handbook rather than a warning.

But where Orwell's ministry was a glittering white, the abandoned Ryugyong Hotel is a dingy dun-brown, its hundreds of glassless windows like sockets gazing at what its maker, the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, has wrought.