On Monday evening the BBC Radio Five Live’s program “Pods and Blogs” has invited me on the air to discuss the five-year anniversary of the attacks which took place on September 11th, 2001 in NYC, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania. Anyone interested can listen here at 9p.m. EST/6p.m. PST ( I will probably be on ~20 minutes into the program).
The truth is that I don’t yet know what I am going to talk about or what profound statement I can possibly make in my minute of air time. There is just so much that has occurred in these past five years that to draw any kind of grand conclusion or offer a sagacious reflection seems impossible. From a federal government facility I watched (like many of you) my federal government and its citizens get attacked on that day. Later I learned that a friend had perished in New York. If I had to condense all of my thoughts five years later down to a single word it would be…”disappointment.”
On September 11th, 2001 I believe that our nation was handed, hidden beneath the shock, the sadness, and the loss, an opportunity to lead. Our generation was given a chance to become the greatest generation. In the 1940s, faced with the threat of a fascist and racist power bent on world domination, the United States and its men and women rose up to defend much of that world, not only through our arms but through our thoughts and ideas. Our allies admired us because of our spirit and our tenacity. They admired us for our can-doism and they admired us for our morality. That admiration lasted through the Cold War and past the end of communism. On September 11th we showed everyone why America was, decades later, still worthy of that admiration:
A California man identified as Tom Burnett reportedly called his wife and told her that somebody on the plane [United 93] had been stabbed.
“We’re all going to die, but three of us are going to do something,” he told her. “I love you honey…” [Link]
You can wade through all of these interview files for additional reminders of how Americans responded when called upon to lead. Even the President got it right at first:
I can hear you, the rest of the world can hear you and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon. [Link]
However, shortly after is where my disappointment begins. Five years later can it be said that anyone (even our closest allies) really “hears us?” Can it be said that America is admired for how it responded in the years following the attacks? Does anyone feel safer? I am disappointed because we have not honored the memories of those who perished by living up to the examples that they set for us. Sacrifice and inner strength and not blind fury or angry words were the weapons that Americans used on that day.
In her op-ed piece about the five-year anniversary, Peggy Noonan admires the concise last words uttered by many that died that day and notes that “crisis is a great editor.” If that is true then it is a shame that these days we seem to waste so much time with empty rhetoric and actions which divert our nation ever farther from our chance at greatness.
I thought a good place to start reflecting upon the past five years would be to first take a look at where we stand at the present:
A majority of Canadians believe U.S. foreign policy was one of the root causes that led to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, and Quebecers are quicker to criticize the U.S. administration for its international actions than other Canadians, a recent poll suggests.
Those conclusions are found in a newly released poll conducted by Leger Marketing for the Association for Canadian Studies.
The poll suggests that 77 per cent of Quebecers polled primarily blame American foreign policy for the Sept. 11 attacks. The results suggest 57 per cent in Ontario hold a similar view. [Link]
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p>Within a year our closest strategic ally will have a new leader:
According to a poll released yesterday by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, British support for American leadership in foreign affairs has never been lower — a policy whose poster boy is Tony Blair. This summer, even some of Blair’s Cabinet loyalists were upset when he once more forcefully backed a deeply unpopular Bush policy: refusing to criticize Israel’s strategy or tactics in Lebanon or call for an immediate cease-fire. Blair’s transformation today into official lame duck means all the European leaders who backed the Iraq war — Spain’s Jose Maria Aznar, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and Poland’s Leszek Miller — have paid the ultimate political price. [Link]
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p>This weekend the U.S. military’s chief logistics planner at the time of the attacks revealed that the decision to go to war in Iraq was made very shortly after the correct decision to topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. He also revealed that Rumsfeld and the administration refused to consider the possibility that we would have to stay in Iraq for any length of time.
In 2001, Scheid was a colonel with the Central Command, the unit that oversees U.S. military operations in the Mideast.
On Sept. 10, 2001, he was selected to be the chief of logistics war plans.
On Sept. 11, he said, “life just went to hell.”
That day, Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of Central Command, told his planners, including Scheid, to “get ready to go to war.”
A day or two later, Rumsfeld was “telling us we were going to war in Afghanistan and to start building the war plan. We were going to go fast.
“Then, just as we were barely into Afghanistan, Rumsfeld came and told us to get ready for Iraq…”“The secretary of defense continued to push on us that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we’re going to take out the regime, and then we’re going to leave,” Scheid said. “We won’t stay.”
Scheid said the planners continued to try “to write what was called Phase 4,” or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like security, stability and reconstruction.
Even if the troops didn’t stay, “at least we have to plan for it,” Scheid said.
“I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that,” Scheid said. “We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today. [Link]
On Friday the Republican-chaired Senate Intelligence Committee revealed as clearly as possible that not only did Saddam have no connection to Al-Qaida, he in fact wanted to hunt down al-Zarqawi himself:
The Senate intelligence committee [this past] Friday said it had found no evidence that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al-Qaida or provided safe harbor to one of its most notorious operatives, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — conclusions contradicting claims by the Bush administration before it invaded Iraq.
In a long-awaited report, the committee determined that the former Iraqi dictator was wary of Al-Qaida, repeatedly rebuffed requests from its leader, Osama bin Laden, for assistance and sought to capture Zarqawi when the deadly terrorist turned up in Baghdad. [Link]
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And still much of the public, which now more than ever needs to build a greater awareness of events beyond these shores, remains ignorant of basic facts:
Some adults in the United States remain convinced that the former Iraqi president played a role in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to three recent public opinion polls. In a survey by Zogby International, 46 per cent of respondents think there is a link between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda plot.
In studies by Opinion Research Corporation released by CNN and CBS News, 43 per cent and 31 per cent of respondents respectively believe Hussein was personally involved in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. [Link]
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Other Americans remain equally oblivious to reality, actually believing that our government was directly involved in the attacks on that day.
The 9/11 commission was tasked with figuring out what went wrong and how to prevent it from ever happening again. Here is their report card which shows how far we had come by 2005. It is only five pages long and every American should be familiar with what it says. Achieving grades of A’s and B’s on all these items would make me feel a lot safer than simply taking the fight to some amorphous enemy that seems to get larger with every bomb we drop on “him.” I have no doubt that it would cost far less as well. The foreign policy section of the report card, which I am sure will be of interest to many SM readers, is particularly insightful.
Five years later I am still waiting for our leaders to lead. I think many of us were up to the challenge of 9/11 but that our resolve has turned to cynicism and frustration. We have been misled and manipulated by the political party in power and uninspired by the other one. I think that musician Neil Young captures it best on his new album:
Lookin’ for a Leader
To bring our country home
Re-unite the red white and blue
Before it turns to stone
Lookin’ for somebody
Young enough to take it on
Clean up the corruption
And make the country strong… [Link]
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Noonan is right. Crisis is a great editor. With only seconds to think, the heroes of 9/11 made difficult decisions with admirable clarity. Since 9/11 we have let the thought of vengeance and the need to appear tough at all costs supercede the need for more patient and nuanced action. We have also lost the morality that they exemplified. Sending U.S. soldiers to die under the guise of “preserving freedom and our way of life” is easier than fighting for hearts and minds and maintaining the moral high ground. We have hurt ourselves more than we have hurt the terrorists that seek to do us harm. If we lose the “War on Terror” it certainly won’t be at the hands of any terrorists, but slowly by our own (in)actions. At home our civil liberties continue to be eroded. We can’t travel abroad without someone explaining to us how we Americans are ruining the world. Does anyone believe that the “War Against Terrorism” or “The War Against Islamo-Fascism” or whatever we are calling it today can be won by any means other than by winning the hearts and minds of the societies that harbor terrorists? If you consider 9/11 to be the date of the first battle of this war then the body count shows that our side lost ~3000 lives compared to 19. And yet…in almost every way that matters we won that first battle. We won the hearts and mind of the world on that day. They saw Americans die fighting against an amoral and cowardly enemy. They understood then that the idea of America was greater than the idealogy that sought to destroy it. They also believed that we would win. That is no longer true in the eyes of too many around the world.
And what about us in the South Asian American community? We are caught in the middle in many respects. We are as patriotic as any American and yet we are not always seen as such simply because of our appearance. Our thoughts about the conflict are often more nuanced because many of us have seen first hand the conditions which result in a fundamentalist idealogy. We know that weapons alone will do no good. We especially dread the next large attack. We know it will happen eventually. We are as worried about what will happen after the attack.
Five years later all this is going through my head. I am writing this post because I’d like to hear from some of you as well. I doubt that all of our thoughts can be condensed into a minute or two of radio time but perhaps a little group reflection would do us good. Beneath the pessimism I harbor some hope that there may still be some time to set our wrong course right. That won’t happen however, until we all become more engaged and demand more from our leaders. We owe this to everyone who died on that day.
Those Twin Towers were provocative man, the way they wiggled their hips at those Saudis was asking to be destroyed. And the way those people worked in their for the global capitalist system, we deserved it, so did all the people in there. Obviously, if anyone does anything that upsets Muhammad Atta, the best way is to expect to see 3000 liquidised people in an afternoon.
Obviously, I don’t agree with them or anything, but you know, this war has been going since, you know, they supported Israel, and all that, so, I’m just saying, you know. Be careful.
Hail
Muhammad AttaUnderstanding the mindset of Muhammad Atta!International Peace!Kody,
“I think it’s more like expecting individuals with backgrounds in Muslim nations not smashing planes into buildings that we expect.”
The common man may expect such safety, but anyone who has academically studied international affairs would see a steady escalation in temperature, from militant attacks on our colonial assets, to repeated attempts at targeting economic symbols like the WTC in 1980s. Any serious foreign policy analyst would have expected a response like 9/11, albeit without knowing exactly who, when, or how, but the “why” was very, very, clear, and to some extent, a vague answer of “who” was also evident — after all, we did train Bin Laden for a decade on psyops, recruitment tactics, unconventional warfare, munitions manufacturing, stealth networking, bombmaking, etc. We also didn’t particularly care when our jihadists (“our” when they were obeying us) killed tens of thousands of Russians, and let’s not forget the millions of jihadists who themselves died — however brainwashed, a life is still a life. Read any declassified 1950s paper on our interactions with the Mideast, and the analysis since. Plotting out the chain of events, 9/11 is hardly a shock, however gruesome and terrible it may be.
Yet, I agree, the common man should be able to expect safety, and our inability to expect it is in part due to turmoil emanating from Muslim nations, but we are deeply married to the problem, and the complexity of it cannot be reduced to finger-pointing. Many do bring up the important question, “why are all the terrorists Muslim?” The answer is that they are the best trained guerrillas, they have the best propaganda, and they can matriculate children into jihadis at frightening speeds. This powerful jihadi machine is, however, highly fragile. It requires a villain for them to fight against otherwise it devours itself in cannibalism (not unlike most Fascist movements). After evicting the Soviets, they turned to the next Imperial power most intrusive in their lives, American power. If we temporarily recluse ourselves from the Mideast, the jihadi machine would devour itself in a decade. For some reason, however, we seem to care too much about Iraqi oil and our increasing presence in the region is giving the jehadi machine greater fuel for growth at a time when we ought to be caring about the common man’s security and focusing energy on ending jehadi threat.
More likely scenario — more 9/11’s with a nuclear one right around the corner.
I’d love to “recluse ourselves from the Mideast” but whether we like it or not, the tentacles of globalization & capitalism make it pretty darn impossible. The same mechanisms that put an unholy, heathen britney spears in Osama’s face allow them to put a suicide terrorist in our midst. Only next time around, the toys will be bigger. Both Britney’s & the Islamo-fascists.
At the end of the day, this isn’t about stuff we’ve done to them (although there’s no shortage of stuff you can put on such a list) but rather, 2 fundamentally incompatible world views that the dynamics of the modern world bring into constant contact….
Everyone knows the approximate area where Bin Laden is hiding. Whats truly bizarre is the reason given by the Bush administration for not going after him: the pakistani govt wont let them!!!!
Its just mind boggling that no one calls Bush on this.
While Iraq has replaced one man responsible for the murder of thousands for thousands of murderes, and Afghanistan is, well, still Afghanistan – it is important to keep in mind how much has not changed. William Dobson of the Rand Corporation wrote in the current issue of Foreign Affairs that many of the problem we face in 2006 are somewhat the same as in 2001 – debates about stem cells, what to do about Iran, American hegemony. For those who believe that anti-Americanism has taken on a particularly harsher tone since Bush took office, keep in mind:
“Sensibly, those fears grew with the end of the superpower contest. In 1995, in a survey conducted by the United States Information Agency, majorities around the world said that the United States was intent on dominating them. Even with a president as beloved abroad as Bill Clinton, America was considered a bully by 83 percent of people polled in Israel, 77 percent in Morocco, 71 percent in Colombia, and 61 percent in Britain.”
Bush has squandered many opportunities. But that hardly lets the rest of the world off the hook. Russia and China are hardly models of global citizenship, the UK and France enjoy their status as a result of a legal fiction called the UN Security Council – while Germany and Japan remain stuck in some nether region. What the critics of American hegemony leave out is – what would be in its place, and would it be more or less likely to consider the opinions of other nations? Keep in mind it was American influence was partly responsible for holding India back from invading Pakistan in 2002, it is the U.S. that focused the world’s attention on Darfur, and it was the U.S. that pressured debt forgiveness for the world’s poorest nations.
If we temporarily recluse ourselves from the Mideast, the jihadi machine would devour itself in a decade.
Can anyone, be it USA, France, China recluse themselves with so much oil and natural gas there, and that too cheap ($5/ barrel lifting cost) and sweet (low sulphur content). Come on. If US is not there directly, France and China will be (example Iran).
Even Jack 2 is only worth 1-2 years of hunger for oil amongst uppity SUV driving uncle and aunties. Start cycling and turn off your laptop.
Saying “9/11, instead, is a reaction to US foreign policy actions that include military and economic support for Israel and US sanctions against Iraq” is a far cry from saying “we deserved it”. If you think differently, please clarify.
9.11 + 5 …and you need more than 60 secs to do the math? 🙂
13.11, There, I told you now.
Even Jack 2 is only worth 1-2 years of hunger for oil amongst uppity SUV driving uncle and aunties. Start cycling and turn off your laptop.
Yeah. As far as I’m concerned global warming is an immensely bigger issue than this fixation on terrorism. I just read Lovelock’s The Revenge of Gaia, which predicts a permanent uptick in global heating within half a century. That is one depressing book.
macacaroach:
Are you serious here? The illiterate in India never had a choice. I think a little better can be expected of citizens of the most privileged country on earth.
BrooklynBrown,
“9/11, instead, is a reaction to US foreign policy actions that include military and economic support for Israel and US sanctions against Iraq”
Let’s not conflate Iraq with 9/11. Sanctions against Iraq were not of any concern to 9/11 hijackers, none of whom hailed from Iraq. The hijackers were predominately comprised of Saudi citizens who, although it is not certain, were likely recruited to oppose the House of Saud and the staunch support America supplies them. I doubt Israel was a concern to the 9/11 hijackers either. Based on intelligence we have about Al Qaeda, their recruiting policies are identical to those employed by Ayatollah Khomeini to raise a jihadi army against Hussein’s advances following the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. These tactics center around claiming that westernized Arabs, like the Shah of Iran, are more susceptible to bribery and control by Washington than their fundamentalist counterparts. The Shah of Iran, Hussein, and the House of Saud, are locally considered “bad” Muslims by the religious extreme. In fact, since sanctions were placed on Iraq, Hussein’s image greatly improved in the region because he was no longer seen as being a puppet of Washington. So, to reiterate, Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, and it’s unlikely that Israel did either.
I don’t think american football is going to have a world championship anytime soon. I think people don’t like soccer here because its the rest of the world’s game. All the shots against soccer aside, I fail to see how the rest of the world, give or take, can appreciate soccer but we can’t. Do we know something everyone else doesn’t? I think our inability to get into the World Cup is, frankly, borne more of stubborness than anything else.
On national newspapers, many indian newspapers are written in English, and I think it would be much harder to access a Chinese language paper for example. I don’t know your experience, but I think the level of interest in Indian affairs is much lower in the US than the interest in US affairs in India. Not that I really care about India, versus Sudan. I’d like if we knew more about a lot of different nations
Yes, the masses of indians never had a choice. They are condemned to live in hunger, illiteracy, human degradation of the worst kind.
Which means that India is a miserably failed state. Isn’t it obscenely presumptuous of someone from such a failed society to be pointing fingers at one that has done far, far better?
Not if the polcies of the society that has done far far better impact those of the failed state.
that was policies not polcies. 🙂
sakshi,
“Which means that India is a miserably failed state. Isn’t it obscenely presumptuous of someone from such a failed society to be pointing fingers at one that has done far, far better?”
For those of us born in the US, I don’t see why we have to care one iota what happens in India. It would be nice to care a little about foreign countries, and especially a country our forefathers came from, but to assume that people born in the US must think about India is presumptuous on your part. Moreover, would you oppose Gandhi and tell him “India can achieve independence only after Dalits are treated better than the British treat Brahmins” ? Would you oppose George Washington and tell him “America can achieve independence only after slaves and women are treated better than the British treat Yanks” ? Yes, we all know, India in aggregate is an incredibly pathetic, poor, 3rd world, shitty, crappy, sorry excuse for a nation, and that means, I suppose, that we should all cower in shame and never express an opinion in our lives? No one lives in “India in aggregate”. There are specific areas of India each with their own level of income, level of social progress, etc. There are parts of India that are 1st world, and parts of it that are 4th world, parts of it where a gay-dalit-woman can teach a PhD course, parts of it where there are tribal killings and sati. There are countless millions of India who live in India already championing for social progress, better equality, and there are industrious Indians in India setting up corporations and creating jobs for locals. Why should Indian-Americans suddenly have to become pundits-in-exile of India’s natural progress and destiny? I care more about Connecticut’s progress and destiny, and care very little about Indiana leave alone India.
Now that we’ve figued out why Islamists target Americans for violence, if we can only figure out why they target Israelis, British, Spanish, Indians, Jews, Lebanese, Indonesians, Iraqis, Chechens, Jordanians, Egyptians, Christian Nigerians, Buddhists, beauty contestants, cartoonists, Algerians, Saudi Arabians, and not to mention women and homosexuals.
sic semper tyrannis:
“Which means that India is a miserably failed state. Isn’t it obscenely presumptuous of someone from such a failed society to be pointing fingers at one that has done far, far better?”
That was macaroach’s comment (# 63 ), not mine. I was trying to reply to his/her remark in #64. Unfortunately, I screwed up the tags in #64. Mea culpa.
Sheer hypocrisy, selfishness…….and obviously a lie. You have shown much concern for what happens in Europe, Turkey and the Middle-East.
Why should Americans embrace another sport when we already view another one as being infinitely better? Why try to like soccer, when we can just as easily turn on a football/basketball/baseball game? Why should I continue eating cherry ice cream when I already know pistachio is where its at? People need to be willing to try new things, but if they have and they didn’t like it, then they shouldnt (necessarily) be pushed to try them again.
I don’t understand what people don’t get about this though… its EASY for every other nation in the world to sit back and look at america and what americans are doing wrong, because america is in the spotlight. Other nations aren’t expected to know endless details about countries that don’t currently have influence over them, but america is. Americans, unlike any other group of people, are expected to know the details of what is going on in EVERY other nation. We have to read every paper, watch every newscast, and care about every cause. Why is this?
This isn’t fair. America hasn’t been an “oppressed” country for hundreds of years.
HOw much safer would the world be today, if Saddam were still in power and the Taliban were still in power? If the course has been messy, it is because the choices were messy and there was a mess to begin with. The right thought it would be easier, and they were wrong. They got that wrong. But I fail to see the moral victory in allowing the Taliban and Saddam to continue. Perhaps it would have deflected fury (although there was enough fury before to fly planes into buildings full of innocents) to stay out. It, of course, would be easier for the West to have continued the sanctions regime, or continued to loosen it in reality (this is the containment that people speak of, kickbacks through Kofi and the UN), because our troops wouldn’t be there and we could go back to ignoring it all…….someone mentioned that if we left the mideast to itself it would implode in ten years time. The problem is, how much shrapnel would hit outside the mideast? A lot of technology can be transferred in ten years. I just don’t understand how a world with Saddam, Iran, Pakistan and North Korea is better than a world without Saddam, but with Iran and North Korea and Pakistan? And, would someone please answer Manju’s question?
And abhi, the Kurds are thankful. The Kurds are doing well. If Iraq is a failure, it hardly lies entirely with the Coalition. There is little violence in the Kurdish regions and it is relatively stable, if not as liberal as we might like, but Rome was hardly build in a day. Even the enlightened European continent was home to a man and movement that murdered six million Jews only 50 odd years ago. Look as the Sudan, abhi, and tell me what your vision of self-restraint and solidarity and genteel UN pronouncements has wrought?
Since the second world war, out of 72 American Nobel winners in Physics, 60 are born in America. Out of 12 who were born outside, Tsui moved from Hong Kong to USA when he was 18 and Steinberger was 13 when he came to US. I am not sure what you mean by basic education, but to me it’s the undergrad degree. So I will not count them. 62 out of 72 (86%) <> not many.
cite
Similar exercise in other Nobel categories, Fields medal and patents would be interesting.
The Nobel Prize is a very subjective prize and not a good way to measure the intellectual prowess in a given country.
I am not expressing any opinion on the relevance of Nobel, just refuting a very specific point with some numbers.
More importantly than subjectivity, the Nobel Prize reflects a very narrow tail end of the ‘intellect distribution'(ya, its a stupid phrase-better ones welcome). I’d wager the distribution for America has a very long tail…at both ends 🙂 .
Abhi – good luck brotha! 60 seconds – no pressure, eh? 😉 We know that you’ll do a great job!
Well I must say that it’s nice to see that we’ve all matured beyond the false dilemmas of five years ago. “Would we prefer a world with Saddam?” “Why do the ‘Islamistcs’ kill?” Heck – sheep have never bleated this pliantly.
With some of us asking these kinds of deep searching questions, I think we can expect peace and progress in the world any day now!
(sorry, it needs to be said)
Soccer is a great sport though, and people like it all over the world; regardless of what people may say, I don’t think its inherently boring. People are exposed to basketball and baseball as well in other countries, and many people like those sports too. Some people like cricket, others don’t. But the World Cup is a gathering of all the countries in the world every 4 years. Its like the Olympics, but in some ways even more looked-forward to. Its a different thing to not enjoy soccer versus american football on the whole. But not being willing to participate in the festivities of the World Cup is different. Its every four years, soccer isn’t a horrible game, at the very least every four years why not check it out and follow the games?
I think this is over-stating the case. I might have over-stated the case regarding the New York Times. I think given the US’s position, its not realistic to think someone would follow the NY Times with the same interest as The Hindu, or whatever other paper in India. That was over-stating things. However, I think, from my experience, having a slight grasp of the situation in other countries is something that is more prevelent in other nations. I could give ancedotal evidence, but that would be it.
On another subject that has nothing to do with our convo above, regarding the other thought-thread in this conversation, that India is a degraded nation – thats blatant racism.
I like your optimism, Oneup09. Over there, the party is just getting started 🙂 .
Since the second world war, out of 72 American Nobel winners in Physics, 60 are born in America.
Look at the list you put carefully – how many of them are Europeans and/ or sons of European immigrants (specifically European Jews) in that. If you know your science history, a lot of them eventually settled in US. You have to be very careful also about nationality. A lot of Nobel Laureates, they might win while they are US but might have retained their country’s nationality. Or later settle in US.
How did you come with 12 number? Maybe, you are counting whether it cites outside country of birth and USA citizenship on the Sweedish Academy. Fair, but simplistic.
I can count much more than 12 who immigrated to US or spent fair amount of time in US but were not born? Which category do you put Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe in? Or Rudolf Mossbaeur?
I guess people like Subramanyan Chandrashekar are easy to count.
But then you miss two Chandrashekar student’s (Yang and Lee) at Chicago who were Chinese that immigrated to US, went to win NP. Or Isador Rabbi?
You go through the list and see the ones who are US citizens at the time they won the prize and shows a different nation as a place of birth. However such an exercise misses (fails to catch) the majority of them.
But how about Abdus Salam who spent time at Princeton. How about Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe who spent most of their life in US.
I am very curious about your methodology.
Amartya Sen maintains Indian possport and has spent most of his time in USA and in Europe (especially UK where he got educated and holds a faculty position).
For those of us born in the US, I don’t see why we have to care one iota what happens in India.
Speak for yourself, bro.
if Saddam were still in power and the Taliban were still in power?
MD, i think coupling the two is problematic. only a few people disagreed with invading afghanistan, many disagreed within invading iraq. i for one think that we’re not as safe because saddam isn’t in power.
i don’t agree with the generalizations many people are making here, but that doesn’t mean i agree with the general thrust of our foreign policy.
p.s. yes, americans are an unread people, that’s not the point of the original post which held that they were less informed. i’d like to see statistics for how many books canadians or mexicans read per year
Why should Americans embrace another sport when we already view another one as being infinitely better? Why try to like soccer, when we can just as easily turn on a football/basketball/baseball game? Why should I continue eating cherry ice cream when I already know pistachio is where its at? People need to be willing to try new things, but if they have and they didn’t like it, then they shouldnt (necessarily) be pushed to try them again.
Soccer, I believe, is the most played youth sport in the country. American women are world class. American men, not so much. There is also a professional soccer league in the United States, and most franchises are building stadiums. Unfortunately, they cannot hold a candle to any European league. Will soccer ever be popular here in the way, say, the NHL is popular? I went to a Giants Stadium (NJ) FC Barcelona exhibition recently, and it was packed with 80,000 people, 90% of them Latin American, so the demographic shift may change things.
Also metric is right. Many people have noticed how America-centric news reports are here. Kishore Mabhubhani, who is an American booster if there ever was one (he is a former Singapore diplomat and intellectual), noted how much easier it was to get international news in a hotel room in Africa than in a comparable one in America. Of course the internet changes the options.
I separated the two in that sentence for a reason, razib, and here I simply disagree with you. We were not any safer with Saddam in power, it was an illusion and if we are unsafe now, we were unsafe then. I’m sorry, I just disagree with you on that one. And, you will notice, that a great deal of the argument in the comments section is not simply based on the safety issue, but on the morality of removing a dictator and the resulting chaos and destruction. So, to that argument, I say, there was a lot of destruction and killing before. You can’t ignore it. How many terrorists were the sanctions regime creating?
Kush, Your original comment was that not many of the American Nobel Prize winners were born in USA and had their basic education here. I was trying to prove/disprove that comment with Physics starting from WW2. So as you correctly surmised, I counted the number of winners who had American citizenship (two of them had dual citizenships and I counted both) at the time of the award and were born outside USA (place of birth cross-checked with wikipedia) and came up with 86%.
If you propose a different methodology for determining American-ness and validating not many, I can run the numbers again. If you disregard second-generation Americans who were born here as Americans, then I guess it becomes trickier as determining whether the parents of NP winners migrated or not is harder. Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing at stake here. What kind of numbers you had in mind when said “not many” ?
And, you will notice, that a great deal of the argument in the comments section is not simply based on the safety issue, but on the morality of removing a dictator and the resulting chaos and destruction. So, to that argument, I say, there was a lot of destruction and killing before. You can’t ignore it. How many terrorists were the sanctions regime creating?
1) i think it can be argued that iraqis are safer and more well off now, and will be for a long time. i don’t care about iraqis. there are many genocides in the world, i am not the sort who believes we should usually get involved (at least alone).
2) i don’t think the sanctions were creating any terrorists.
3) there is no perfect bullet. i think that quantitatively one must weigh cost vs. benefits. the iraqi regime was no threat to the united states, that seems pretty clear now. the iraqi sunnis are mostly a threat to their fellow iraqis. i’m mostly concerned with the $$$ we have to spend.
4) my point is that some conservatives on this thread (not you) who seem to be taking the bait and turning this into a foreign policy debate. as a matter of facts my own position on foreign policy in iraq is close to that of abhi’s from what i can tell. over the years i have lost my fear of the islamists as an existential threat to the united states for a variety of reasons. but that doesn’t mean that i don’t think 9/11 was a matter of grave concern and that it deserves some respect in this particular moment, as opposed to using it as an opening toward criticizing the policies of the american gov. and hammering home the point how stupid the american people are. this isn’t a republican-democrat or pro-war/anti-war thing, it’s a human thing.
railing about how stupid americans are is unseemly and childish and selfish at this particular moment.
razib: that seems pretty clear now…..
madhu: ahem. Why does that seem pretty clear now?
I really think it depends whom you ask. I know a few Iraqis here who were refugees from the first war. They all say that their families in Iraq have never felt more unsafe (except during an actual war) in the last 15 years as they do now.
md,
clear to me. i did have friends who worked in the defense industry tell me that iraq wasn’t capable of doing much, so some peopel did know (they didn’t have the number of good physicists, etc. etc.)…but i assumed that the american gov. knew better and i do recall repeating verbatim judith miller’s articles verbatim. but anyway, my hands aren’t totally dirty, you can look back on my blog posts and see that i was always uncertain about the whole iraq rationale. you work with the data you have on hand, fair enough, and i think we have enough data for me to personally conclude that the bush foreign policy is not the correct one, and that the current conflict is not world war iii and that iran is not bent on gotterdammerung.
dipanjan, i was crunching the numbers when i saw your post 😎 good show.
I really think it depends whom you ask. I know a few Iraqis here who were refugees from the first war.
shrug sure, perhaps you’re right. as i said, i sidestep this whole issue by not giving a damn about the iraqis in the humanitarian sense.
As for cost benefit analysis – when one is trying to make a decision in real time, you only have the information at hand.
In appendectomies, there is an accepted error rate because if every appendix is abnormal, you are missing too many cases of appendicitis and someone may die because of this. And the only way to get to this accepted error rate, is to pull the trigger a little earlier than later. Okay, I did my surgery rotation years ago, so this may be dated info. some things we only know because of information we have now, because of certain actions we have taken. Like performing an ‘unnecessary’ surgery because we think the risk of not acting is too great.
The situation with Iraqis is likely heterogeneous depending on region, tribe, relations to the previous Baathists in power, etc.
In appendectomies, there is an accepted error rate because if every appendix is abnormal, you are missing too many cases of appendicitis and someone may die because of this.
yes. i don’t think the USA can die because of any islamic power.
fair enough – there was conflicting information beforehand, I agree, and some of it suspect. It also important to remember that intelligence estimates underestimaed what Saddam had after Gulf War I, I believe. So they were wrong the other way that time. It is not world war III, but there are ominous trends, I think. Iran, I have no idea what to think of because I don’t know the culture and I don’t know if the crazy things said by the regime are, well, would the do what they said they’d do? Scary to think about.
The ominous thing is still this: weapons of mass destruction in the wrong hands. Do I think it’s a high possibility? Not as much as I used to, but it’s still irresponsible not to act to stop that possible aquisition. It’s not the Cold War, when the whole world could have gone kaput. But it’s not a happy state, either.
No, the US can’t but US citizens can. Cost benefit is hard, huh?
What kind of numbers you had in mind when said “not many” ?
Dipajan,
What I said was very simple, I do not how could be misconstrued. Most of the top tier scientists (NP or no) (whatever passport they hold at that time, or at a later date), a lot of them spent quality time in US. Around WW2, America has been a magnet for those people, and has the financial might to get them hired or lure them away. If you carefully, looked at their bios, they spent a lot of time in US, sometimes prize winning work is done in US. Harvard rehired Amartya Sen. Sooner or later, America brings them over. It does not matter what passport they hold.
A person like Fermi who is an Italian moves to US till his death, and makes one of the most significant contributions (controlled chain reaction and many, many more) with great ramifications while in US. When I said not getting basic educated in USA – I had Chandrashekar (US Citizen), Yang and Lee (Chinese educated and then US, Chinese citizens but later moved to US) in mind. If you go into detailed bios of them (Physics, Chemistry, Math NP) – they will emerge very strongly.
I want to know where do you put people like Hans Bethe.
It becomes complicated making Wikipedia like analysis moot. How do you count those kind of people. In your analysis, your denominator is grossly wrong. People like Hans Bethe moved to US in 1935 and died in 2005 in US. 70 years in US, and in your number crunching he will be a German NP winner. However, person like Hans Bethe was a father-like figure to American Science, Physics, and Cornell U.
A few years ago, they were 3 NP (it was US-European mix) who were at that time working in IBM Labs in Zurich. However, the work which led to the prize was done at Los Alamos National Labs. Who takes the credit?
Please do not get me wrong, if all your number crunching floats your boat, be happy and cool and be all pumped to prove me wrong. Go ahead, and this is my last post on this subject. But all this simplistic numbers are very misleading sans knowledge of history of science of modern era.
Sons of Jewish immigrants in US winining NPs – you can write a book on it.
Atleast some of the Iraqis think the Americans are preferable…
<
blockquote> Tortured screams ring out as Iraqis take over Abu Ghraib
The notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad is at the centre of fresh abuse allegations just a week after it was handed over to Iraqi authorities, with claims that inmates are being tortured by their new captors.
“The Americans were better than the Iraqis. They treated us better,” said Khalid Alaani, who was held on suspicion of involvement in Sunni terrorism.
Do I think it’s a high possibility? Not as much as I used to, but it’s still irresponsible not to act to stop that possible aquisition.
but this loads the die in favor of action, as it is almost mathematically impossible to exclude every possible instance where WMDs could get into the wrong hands. so the real issue is that what the threshold and intuition of the probability of the possibility is. i will offer a number to reflect the level of my sanguinity about the issues of WMDs:
1) i think the chances of terrorist of any stripe using WMDs on a massive scale (fatalities greater than 1,000) in an american city is 0.001% within the next 10 years. we could reduce the magnitude to 0.00001% or 0.00000001% of that specific threat targeted through aggressive foreign policy, but i don’t think that the costs are worth it, and the chances of hostility being elicited that compenstates for the initial threat is very high so that the WMD risk might be greater than 0.001% at the end of 10 years. that’s my estimation.
2) now, a less popular position here on SM is that i think that the chances, though low, of mass immigration destroying the nations of the west is far higher than 0.001% in the next generation.* i think that the best guarantee for the perpetuation of liberal democracy is that western nations reassert their values within, make no cultural accommodation to the medievalism which is normative within islam, and reduce immigration rates so that culturally hostile minorities can be assimilated (or at least the fist steps taken).
those are my cards….
No, the US can’t but US citizens can. Cost benefit is hard, huh?
a certain number of deaths is inevitable and unavoidable. we don’t live in finland.
freudian slip? 😉
my gf is 1/4 norwegian. so that want is somewhat sated 🙂
the problem, razib, is that we live in a culture where no death is acceptable and the decision makers are always suspect. If one person dies, it’s due to the incompetence of the decision maker. That also loads the die. It’s easy to write up statistical scenarios – it’s much harder to make the decisions when you are the one accountable for them.
As for #2, I’m not holding my breath. And, here I’ll be cheeky. Imagine, my dear internet friend, a democratic house versus a republican house. What would the differing immigration bills look like 🙂