Harper's Review of the Week

I am tweeting this for the record in the sure and certain knowledge that even the smallest detail of our American experience should be recorded and remembered. 

Hope you enjoy. 

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May 2, 2017 By Joe Kloc          U.S. president Donald Trump, who once hosted a radio show on which he discussed how there was "no question about it" that Britney Spears had "gone down" in sexiness because she got married, gave himself an "A" for his performance in his first 100 days in office, a time period during which he implied Frederick Douglass was still alive at a breakfast celebrating the start of Black History Month; said on the eve of Martin Luther King, Jr., Day that Georgia representative and Freedom Rider John Lewis was "all talk"; commented at the National Prayer Breakfast that he wanted to "pray for" Arnold Schwarzenegger's "poor ratings" on The Celebrity Apprentice; accused former president Barack Obama of "wiretapping" Trump Tower in Manhattan, which the FBI had legally surveilled for two years as part of an investigation into the money-laundering ring of a Russian mafia boss known as "Little Taiwanese"; ordered the launching of 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles valued at $60 million at an airfield in Syria, which he described as an attack on Iraq that he carried out while eating "the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake" and which his secretary of commerce, Wilbur Ross, referred to as "after-dinner entertainment" that "didn't cost the president anything"; and played golf more than twice as often as the previous three presidents combined, despite having once criticizing Obama for golfing "while America goes down the drain." "I don't stand by anything," Trump said. Trump told interviewers that he thought being president "would be easier," and that the constitutional system of checks and balances is "a really bad thing for the country." Reince Priebus, Trump's chief of staff, said that Trump, who has tweeted that the media is "the enemy of the American people," was considering abolishing the First Amendment. Trump, a former casino owner who once paid $1 million for an ad campaign alleging that the Mohawk people were cocaine traffickers and on another occasion claimed he "might have more Indian blood than a lot of the so-called Indians," said that his campaign for president was "most like" the "very mean and nasty campaign" of former president Andrew Jackson, a slave owner and frequent cockfighting gambler who signed legislation that forcibly removed indigenous tribes from the southeastern United States. Trump praised as a "smart cookie" North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who has executed hundreds of people for offenses such as slouching and having a bad attitude, and invited to the White House Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte, who has been accused of ordering the extrajudicial killings of 8,000 people. "I am tied up," responded Duterte, who added that he had already made plans to visit Russia, the government of which the FBI and both houses of Congress are currently investigating for interfering in the 2016 presidential race in order to elect Trump, whose Las Vegas steakhouse was once shut down for serving customers two-week-old tomato sauce and a five-month-old duck. "We," said Press Secretary Sean Spicer, "want to start talking about the next 100 days."  Sources are footnoted at the permanent URL  for this Weekly Review. Comments, clarifications, and corrections are always welcome at harpers-weekly@harpers.org. Please note that your letter may be included in next week's mailing and on Harpers.org. © 2017 Harper's Magazine Foundation

We must carry on

I do not remember any period in my 84 plus years when so many innocent people in America and elsewhere who were simply out and about enjoying themselves were deliberately killed. We are living in an age of terrorism for which there seems no ready solution compatible with decency, civil liberties and, in the United States especially, constitutional freedoms. 

The enemy seems almost invisible. The killers are themselves being killed during their rampages. After the fact investigations reveal the perpetrators  with at least psychological ties or sympathies with ISIS. 

To us in the West, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) is a terrorist group trying to re-create a political state (the Caliphate) to exert control over the Islamic world. They want to turn the pages back to the seventh century time of Muhammad and ignore fourteen centuries of growth and progress.  

Wether the leaders of this movement and the perpetrators of the recent carnage done in the name of ISIS are actually connected is practically impossible to establish. The link to ISIS can be psychological only, and what sets the perpetrator off on his killing rampage is unknown. This doesn’t stop ISIS from honoring the perpetrators as “soldiers of the caliphate.”

ISIS basks in the terror and inspires wanton acts of violence and carnage. ISIS recently reminded the world that vehicles could be a weapon. Result,  the tractor trailer truck being driven through crowds of people in Nice, France, killing at least 84 people. 

We will learn more about the driver of this truck in the days ahead. That is always the way.

Where the next terrorist act will occur is unknown. Vigilance is required. Nevertheless, we must go about our lives in the hope and promise of better days to come. 

"Shut up, your dirty Baathist"

My nominee for Judge of the Week is Iraq's chief judge Mohammed Oreibi al Khalifa who this week told a defendant he had just sentenced to death to "Shut up, you dirty Baathist," referring to Saddam's Sunni-dominated Baath Party.

The judge's order was directed to a former Baath party official Abdul-Ghani Abdul-Ghafur, who shouted "Down with Persian-U.S. occupation" and "Welcome to death for the sake of Arabism and Islam" as the judge read his sentence of death, according to the Associated Press.

In America, we are accustomed to mainly tolerant judges who hold their tongues under difficult circumstances. It is refreshing - for at least a vicarious moment - to see one speak his mind.

Patriotism and getting the message across

Two lawyers for the ACLU, Steven Watt and Ben Wizner, write in a letter in The Wall Street Journal (June 19, 2007, pg A15) that "defending human rights...is not an act of disloyalty in a nation committed to the rule of law" and that recent Supreme Court decisions squarely repudiate the government's position in three 'war on terror' cases. These are not cases involving mere legal technicalities but violations of American core values, according to the writers.

Americans are pre-occupied with salesmanship. Case in point. Gen. David Petraeus, the Army's top man in Iraq, says that sending military officers to civilian universities for Ph.D study opens their mind to four or five sides of an argument. A retired Lt. Colonel says anything beyond a Masters degree risks hurting an officer's battlefield judgement. He says such training led another Lt. Colonel to leave out of a counterinsurgency manual what he felt was an effective tactic: strapping dead insurgents to the front of tanks for locals to see.

Faced with defeat GOPers will desert

A group of 11 moderate Republican congressmen went to the White House yesterday and told President Bush and some of his closest advisors the war in Iraq is hurting GOP chances at the polls in November 2008. Unless the situation improves by late summer or early fall he will begin to lose big support in the House of Representatives, they said. The one cardinal rule all politicians follow is "survival." You can bet your best underwear that any Republican congressman being challenged in November will jump off the ship in a heartbeat when faced with voter disfavor over continued support for a civil war. If the Iraqi assembly takes two months off this summer it is a foregone conclusion the situation in the fall will be no better than it is now: miserable. Our SC 1st district congressman, Rep. Henry E. Brown, was not among the moderates at the meeting. He has been issuing press releases accusing Democrats of undermining the troops in Iraqi by refusing to give President Bush another $100 million without strings. He ignores the fact that the Pentagon has enough money to keep things going well into July and a bi-partisan deal is in the works to provide funding through September when the next appraisal of the war will be made.

Food probably lousy, but bombing?

A bomb exploded in the Iraqi Parliament's cafeteria in a stunning assault in the heart of the heavily fortified, U.S.-protected Green Zone Thursday, killing eight people including three lawmakers.
The attack came hours after a suicide truck bomb blew up a major bridge in Baghdad, collapsing the steel structure and sending cars tumbling into the Tigris River, police and witnesses said. At least 10 people were killed.