Inside the
Committee that Runs the World
By David J. Rothkopf
Foreign Policy
September 11,
2001, was a catalytic event that revealed the core character of
the Bush administration’s national security team. As rival
factions fought for the president’s ear, the transformative
ideals espoused by the neocons gained ascendancy—triggering
a rift that has split the Republican foreign-policy establishment
to its foundations.
The inner circles
of the U.S. national security community—members of the National
Security Council (NSC), a select number of their deputies, and a
few close advisors to the president—represent what is probably
the most powerful committee in the history of the world, one with
more resources, more power, more license to act, and more ability
to project force further and swifter than any other convened by
king, emperor, or president.
At the same
time, the political party controlling that committee has a grip
on power in Washington unprecedented in recent history. For the
first time in nearly eight decades, the Republican Party has won
control of the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives
in two consecutive elections. Yet, despite this political monopoly,
the elites who exert the most influence on this little-understood,
shadowy committee are being buffeted and pulled apart by forces
from within.
An increasingly
bitter philosophical debate pits the supporters of the policies
of former President George H.W. Bush and many of his one-time team
of foreign-policy experts, led by former National Security Advisor
Brent Scowcroft, against those who back views embraced by President
George W. Bush and his team, led by Vice President Dick Cheney,
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice. What Scowcroft calls the “traditionalists” of the
Bush 41 team are pitted against the “transformationalists”
of the Bush 43 team, pragmatists vs. neocons, internationalists
vs. unilateralists, the people who oversaw the end of the Cold War
against those who oversaw the beginning of the War on Terror. Of
course, the irony is that many of these people were not too long
ago seen as parts of a whole. All are or once were close. What happened?
Inside
the Committee that Runs the World is continued here
Tests of
faith
Religion may be a survival mechanism. So are we born to believe?
By Ian Sample
The Guardian
First for some
figures. Last year, an ICM poll found 85% of Americans believe that
God created the universe. In Nigeria, 98% claimed always to have
believed in God, while nine out of 10 Indonesians said they would
die for their God or religious beliefs. Last month, a survey by
the market research bureau of Ireland found 87% of the population
believe in God. Rather than rocking their faith, 19% said tragedies
such as the Asian tsunami, which killed 300,000 people, bolstered
their belief. Polls have their faults, but if the figures are even
remotely right they illustrate the prevalence of faith in the modern
world.
Faith has long
been a puzzle for science, and it's no surprise why. By definition,
faith demands belief without a need for supporting evidence, a concept
that could not be more opposed to the principles of scientific inquiry.
In the eyes of the scientist, an absence of evidence reduces belief
to a hunch. It places the assumptions at the heart of many religions
on the rockiest of ground.
So why do so
many people believe? And why has belief proved so resilient as scientific
progress unravels the mysteries of plagues, floods, earthquakes
and our understanding of the universe? By injecting nuns with radioactive
chemicals, by scanning the brains of people with epilepsy and studying
naughty children, scientists are now working out why. When the evidence
is pieced together, it seems that evolution prepared what society
later moulded: a brain to believe.
One factor in
the development of religious belief was the rapid expansion of our
brains as we emerged as a species, says Todd Murphy, a behavioural
neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Canada. As the frontal
and temporal lobes grew larger, our ability to extrapolate into
the future and form memories developed. "When this happened,
we acquired some very new and dramatic cognitive skills. For example,
we could see a dead body and see ourselves in that position one
day. We could think 'That's going to be me,'" he says. That
awareness of impending death prompted questions: why are we here?
What happens when we die? Answers were needed.
Tests
of faith is continued here
Money and
Politics in the Land of Oz
By Quentin P. Taylor
The Independent Review
“The story
of ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ was written solely to
pleasure children of today.” So wrote L. Frank Baum in the
introduction to his popular children’s story published in 1900.
As fertile as his imagination was, Baum could hardly have conceived
that his “modernized fairly tale” would attain immortality
when it was adapted to the silver screen forty years later. Though
not a smash hit at the time of its release, The Wizard of Oz soon
captured the hearts of the movie-going public, and it has retained
its grip ever since. With its stirring effects, colorful characters,
and memorable music (not to mention Judy Garland’s dazzling
performance), the film has delighted young and old alike for three
generations. Yet, as everyone knows, The Wizard of Oz is more than
just another celluloid classic; it has become a permanent part of
American popular culture.
Is Oz, however,
merely a children’s story, as its author claimed? For a quarter
of a century after its film debut, no one seemed to think otherwise.
This view would change completely when an obscure high school teacher
published an essay in American Quarterly claiming that Baum’s
charming tale concealed a clever allegory on the Populist movement,
the agrarian revolt that swept across the Midwest in the 1890s.
In an ingenuous act of imaginative scholarship, Henry M. Littlefield
linked the characters and the story line of the Oz tale to the political
landscape of the Mauve Decade. The discovery was little less than
astonishing: Baum’s children’s story was in fact a full-blown
“parable on populism,” a “vibrant and ironic portrait”
of America on the eve of the new century.
In supporting
this thesis, Littlefield drew on Baum’s experience as a journalist
before he wrote Oz. As editor of a small newspaper in Aberdeen,
South Dakota, Baum had written on politics and current events in
the late 1880s and early 1890s, a period that coincided with the
formation of the Populist Party. Littlefield also indicated that
Baum was sympathetic to the Populist movement, supported William
Jennings Bryan in the election of 1896, and, though not an activist,
consistently voted for Democratic candidates. (In 1896, the Populists
joined the Democrats in backing Bryan’s bid for the presidency.)
Finally, Littlefield noted Baum’s penchant for political satire
as evidenced by his second Oz tale, which lampoons feminism and
the suffragette movement.
Money
and Politics in the Land of Oz is continued here
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