Breugel Comes to Gloucester

I. MUSEUM HOURS

Pieter Breugel, Hunters in the Snow

A few days ago Joy and I went to see “Museum Hours,” a film presentation co-sponsored by the Cape Ann Museum and our wonderful, funky local movie theater, the Cape Ann Community Cinema. There you sit on a sofa with your feet up on a bench or a coffee table, drink a glass of wine if you want one, and soak in the ambience along with a good movie.

And “Museum Hours” is a fascinating film, if sometimes obscure. On film rating web sites, almost all the critics love it, while audience reactions range from ho-hum to “What was that all about?”

Johann, the museum guard

We, however, loved it. Set mostly in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum (the German translates as Art History Museum, but it’s referred to in the guide books as the Museum of Fine Arts), the film juxtaposes a chance encounter between Johann, a museum guard 

Anne

and Anne,  a visiting Canadian, in Vienna to tend to a dying relative, with a visual feast of glorious art, combined with strolls and subway rides through Vienna on a few bleak winter days. Anne speaks no German; Johann becomes her translator and guide (hers and ours) to the Museum and to Vienna. Theirs is not a romantic encounter; the romance lies in our immersion in the art.

The grand museum is one of two matching palatial structures facing each other across Vienna’s Ringstrasse (the other is the Natural History Museum), built in the late 19^th Century by Emperor Franz Josef of Austria to exhibit the House of Hapsburg’s enormous art collection. It displays a broad spectrum of art and artifacts, ranging from ancient Egyptian tomb paintings to contemporary artists (a visiting Lucien Freud show is currently on exhibit). 

There is a large collection of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance art, which includes 15 out of 45 known paintings by the Flemish painter Pieter Breugel the Elder (1525? – 1569), occupying a gallery of their own. (One of the compelling episodes in the movie is a guided tour of the Breugel room by a museum docent).

While his Renaissance contemporaries like Rembrandt and Vermeer were making elegant portraits of wealthy benefactors, Bruegel was showing us how the peasants – the 99 per centers of his day – spent their days. 

He painted during a harrowing period in Dutch and Flemish history, when the Netherlands were occupied by Spanish forces, carrying out the “Edict of Blood” prescribing death for Protestants defying the rule of the Catholic Church, issued in 1550 by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and viciously enforced by his son, Philip II.

The Tower of Babel

Breugel did not shy away from depicting this reign of terror, but most of his paintings, even the bloodier ones, also show his fellow men leading and enjoying their mundane lives. His busy canvases are populated by dozens – sometimes hundreds – of ordinary people engaged in work and play – eating, drinking, cooking, playing games, dancing, and making love. There’s even a tiny man (pointed out by the film’s docent) relieving himself on the hillside below the Tower of Babel in the painting by that name.

The Conversion of Paul

The nominal subjects of the paintings – Christ on his way to Calvary, St. Paul undergoing his conversion to Christianity, Saul falling on his sword after his defeat by the Philistines, the foolhardy Icarus splashing into the sea, and other notable figures from scripture and myth – are almost invisible, tiny afterthoughts on the margins of his busy tableaux.

Pieter Breugel is really the star of “Museum Hours.”  The camera dwells lovingly on the details of his paintings, and when Johann and Anne venture out in the evening (their daytime visits are to the hospital where Anne’s cousin is dying), it is to a favorite haunt of Johann's, a lively tavern filled with drinking, dancing and singing. The noisy room is filled with Breugel’s happy peasants.

The Peasant Wedding

The film ends with the camera following an old woman with a cane slowly making her way up a path and disappearing around a corner, while Johann’s voice-over narration sounds very like a museum docent’s description of a scene in the Old Master’s painting.

Opportunities to see “Museum Hours” are dwindling. Though it has won a series of international awards, it has been shown barely 100 times in this country, mostly in one-night stands at art houses and museums, since its release in June 2013. You can find the schedule, along with a film clip, stills, and contact information, at the website. And maybe some day it will be available online and on television. I hope enough people clamor for more so this mesmerizing film can get the audience it deserves.

II. ICARUS AT THE BEACH

The Procession to Calvary

“Museum Hours” is not the only instance where Breugel’s work has inspired later artists. Another recent film, “The Mill and the Cross,” was not only inspired by Breugel’s painting, “The Procession to Calvary”; the film’s grim opening scene is a carefully staged tableau with hundreds of actors posing in the same postures and positions as in the painting, before bloodthirsty Spanish soldiers gallop onto the scene to seize a peasant who gets in their way, lash him to a Catherine Wheel, and raise his dying body high above a hilltop. It’s grim but gripping. (And it was shown at the Cape Ann Community Cinema last year).

But the Breugel work that has surely inspired more derivative art than any other is his “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.”  (believed to be a copy of the original work, now lost). In the foreground is a busy farmer and his horse, plowing a field, high above an arm of the sea.  Part way down the hill below them a shepherd tends a flock of sheep. On the bay below, a stately warship puts out to sea, and several other ships dot the water. A seaport city sparkles in the distance, and jagged mountain peaks line the distant shore. And, oh yes – there is a tiny splash in the lower right hand corner, where two thrashing legs can be seen still breaking the water. A few feathers flutter in the air above them, but nobody notices.

The Fall of Icarus

In the ancient Greek myth Icarus, you’ll remember, was the son of Daedalus, the gifted craftsman who designed the Labyrinth where King Minos of Crete imprisoned the Minotaur, a savage half-man, half bull. The Minotaur was Minos’ son born of his wife and the “Cretan Bull.”  (What was she thinking)?

Minos kept Daedalus a prisoner on the island because Daedalus had helped Minos’ enemy Theseus kill the Minotaur and escape from the Labyrinth. Minos’ daughter Ariadne helped too.

The inventive Daedalus had an idea: he would build a set of wings, fasten them to his shoulders with beeswax, and escape by flying off the island. He made a set of wings for his son Icarus as well. “Don’t fly too close to the sun,” he warned his headstrong son, or the wax will melt and you’ll fall into the sea.” Well, we all know how that came out. Poor Icarus.

Breugel was far from the only artist inspired by the myth. It appears in  the ceiling of the Rotunda of Apollo at the Louvre, in paintings, etchings and sculpted bas-relief, in poems by W. H. Auden, William Carlos Williams, and Anne Sexton, and  in psychology and psychiatry.

Here’s Auden’s poem, “Musée des Beaux-Arts:”

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breugel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

A couple of weekends ago, Joy and I were walking on Gloucester’s Good Harbor Beach, a half-mile strand facing  the open Atlantic. We heard a buzzing sound, looked up and saw a red and white parachute floating overhead, with a pilot dangling below it, with a small motor and propeller blade strapped to his back: a “paramotor.” 

Nearby, another “paranaut” spread out his bright yellow parachute on the sand, ran a few steps into the wind, pulled on a starter cord, and took off into the bright blue sky. He circled to the north, and as I attempted to film him with my iPhone video camera, disappeared into the sun.  The red and white parachute flew into view just as my camera’s battery ran out.

It’s “Icarus at the Beach!” exclaimed Joy.

She too wrote a poem about Icarus:

Icarus at the Beach

By Joy Halsted

He stands

poised to rise,

clutching the reins

of the parasail.

Strapped to his back

the propeller whirls and rasps

but the red and yellow sail

refuses to blossom,

lies listless on the sand,

a reluctant dragon.

Wait -

the wind grows stronger,

the indolent creature fills and lifts,

bringing the rider’s leaping form to ride

its  billowing body aloft

to float towards the sun

while below,

the sea is waiting.

©2013 Tom Halsted

Poem “Icarus at the Beach, ©2013, Joy Halsted

Water, Water, Everywhere (Everywhere You Can Make a Buck from It)

I went for  swim at the Y a few days ago. When I plunked down my stainless steel water bottle by the poolside, my friend Carol asked, “What’s in that, coffee or water?”

“Good old Glosta tap water, of course,” I replied.

She blanched.

“I never drink tap water,” she said, “I only drink Poland Spring.”

“Oh,” said I. “Don’t you know that bottled water is a scam, and that it’s nearly all tap water anyway?”

She bristled, and was understandably defensive.

Not sure I hadn’t overstated my case, I nevertheless said, “You can look it up online.”

Of course I did too, as soon as I got home. 

For the most part, I had not overstated my case. In fact, it’s worse. The bottled water industry has succeeded in bamboozling much of the nation (heck, much of the world) into thinking municipal water supplies are dangerous and only bottled water is safe. They make pots of money out of this outrageous canard, and few if any public figures  speak out against it. Just look at television coverage or newspaper photos of almost any Congressional hearing, international conference, or public meeting and see the ubiquitous plastic bottles at each attendee’s place.

At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearing

At a UN Conference

 (A Google search of photos of presidential cabinet meetings as far back as Reagan’s, however, showed that the White House always served water – presumably from the tap -- in glasses, with not a bottle in sight). 

An Obama Cabinet Meeting

You can also Google “poison in tap water” and find dozens of lurid You Tube videos and web sites claiming that municipal water supplies are full of poison,  starting with that old villain fluoridation (once viewed as a communist plot), and including rivers of vaccines, discarded pharmaceuticals, and other assorted menaces, none of them, of course, detected or neutralized by standard water treatment procedures.

Bottled water is a huge global business, with or without the help of such scare stories. According to the New York Times (October 25), “Coke sold 5.8 billion liters of waters abroad and 253 million liters in the United States and Canada from 2007 to 2012. Pepsi’s water sales in North America actually declined by 636 million liters over that period, but it still sold 4.7 billion liters overseas.”

At the same time that the bottled water industry is expanding its global reach, public water supplies in most industrialized nations couldn’t be safer. Health and safety laws and regulations insure that filtration and treatment are conducted to the highest standards; and now tertiary sewage treatment plants are even producing an end-product -- water -- that is totally safe for public consumption (though there’s a an understandable public reluctance to try it out).

Speaking specifically to the question, "Does Poland Spring water actually come from underground springs?" the answer appears to be yes; though the original spring in Poland, Maine was pumped dry nearly 50 years ago, the parent company (Nestlé) does put spring water from Maine and elsewhere in its Poland Spring bottles. But more than half the water sold by others as "natural" or "spring" water comes right out of the tap, particularly that sold by the big two bottlers, Coca Cola (Dasani) and Pepsi-Cola (Aquafina).  Look at the label; if it says “purified water” or “municipal water supply” it’s tap water.

And, irony of ironies, Poland Spring is selling its bottled spring water to buyers in Maine communities that are already getting the same water from the same springs out of their own wells. Talk about selling iceboxes to Eskimos!

But that's beside the point. Study after study has shown that municipal tap water is as healthy or healthier than bottled water, and infinitely cheaper.  Of course it's treated, and we should all be glad of it. Sometimes it tastes funny, as it has here in Gloucester the past few days when they had to switch to chlorine instead of the less noticeable chloramine while refurbishing and refilling two big storage tanks at Plum Cove and Blackburn Park. But it’s safe to drink. And bottled water has additives too.

The bottled water industry is carrying out a world wide scam job. Somehow they have persuaded millions of people worldwide -- not just in America -- that municipal tap water is dangerous. In some parts of the world where there is no publicly treated water they may be right, though portable water purifiers are extremely simple and cheap and readily available.

But in the industrialized world there's no excuse, and many reasons not to turn to bottled water. Not only are treated water supplies safe; tap water is far cheaper, tastes good, and is readily available. Bottled water comes in non-biodegradable containers made from petroleum-based products, uses still more petroleum to transport it, and while some of the used bottles are recycled into items like road surfacing materials and synthetic lumber, more often they are thrown away. Empty water bottles constitute a huge proportion of America's trash problem. They are not biodegradable, and not redeemable for a deposit in most states. Consequently millions of tons of them wind up in landfills or are thrown away by the roadside or into rivers, streams, and oceans, where they add to Texas-sized “gyres” of  plastic refuse, circling endlessly in mid-ocean.

Trying to Paddle in the Pacific Gyre

But the industry has put on heavy advertising campaigns to persuade people that their products will make people healthier, stronger, sexier, and that therefore we should all shell out many times what we pay for tap water. Bottled water prices keep dropping, but even at today’s prices that are sometimes as low as 16¢ per liter for bottled water, treated tap water costs less than 1¢ a gallon. So people who buy bottled water are still paying more than 600 times what they would pay for tap water…and unless you’re the homeowner who pays the water bills, you’re paying nothing! 

Furthermore, bottled water is not healthier and may be less so. There's no added fluoride in it, for example, which is essential for healthy teeth. The American Dental Association has estimated that there has been a 20-40% reduction in incidences of tooth decay since additional fluoride has been introduced into most municipal water supplies (some fluoride already occurs naturally in water -- including bottled water).

There's not a whole lot to be said in favor of bottled water. 

Even if it does make you feel kind of sexy.

A Boyhood Memory -- The Good Old Kanahoya

(Updated October 29, 2013)

Gampy in 1935

My father’s father, my grandfather and namesake Dr. Thomas Henry Halsted, was born in Listowel, Ontario in 1865 and moved to Syracuse, NY around 1890. Widowed twice, from his three marriages he eventually had six children, most of whom married in turn and provided many grandchildren. We Halsted grandchildren called him “Gampy,” which he never liked. I remembered him as a gruff, unsmiling 19th century man, with a Victorian sense of decorum and a conviction that the proper place for children was out of sight.

For a few years in the early 20^th century he owned a “camp” on Honnedaga Lake, in the large private preserve managed by the Adirondack League Club, an organization dedicated to hunting, fishing, hiking and recreation on 55,000 forested acres in upstate New York. The camp was named "Kanahoya," an Iroqouis name for the mountain ash, a red-berried shrub growing by the water. There he and his family spent their summers swimming, boating, hiking and trout fishing, for lake trout in the deep Honnedaga Lake itself and in a chain of outlying smaller lakes and streams, stocked with brook, brown and rainbow trout. Each outlying camp was provided with flat-bottomed skiffs for fishing. Rustic lodges and open lean-tos, all connected by miles of trails, provided shelter and a comforting destination after a long day’s hike. Tame deer wandered the paths and begged for handouts.

The air was crystal clear and the water in Honnedaga Lake itself was so transparent you could see objects on the bottom as much as 40 feet deep through the cobalt-blue water (and it really was blue, not just a reflection of the sky)  It was a  paradise, all built and maintained by the Adirondack League Club. 

"But it's my turn in the Packbasket!"
At Honnedaga, 1938:
The Author (4), Pa (Dr. Jim Halsted, 33), Nell (6)

Enjoying these amenities was never cheap, and even with a successful medical practice (he was a well-known ear specialist whose patients included Bernard Baruch and Eleanor Roosevelt), Gampy wisely decided to sell his camp in 1920, though he retained his membership in the club so that he and his children and their families could continue to enjoy it. My parents stayed there soon after their marriage in 1930, and until World War II came in 1941 were spending the month of August there in rented camps -- including the old Kanahoya camp -- each year with their four children. We made several short visits there after the war, and I returned once with Joy and our then-infant son in 1957.

In those pre-Interstate days it was a challenge to get to Honnedaga from almost anywhere, which made the place all the more magical. From Dedham, MA, where we lived from 1933 to 1950, it was a 300 mile drive, and took two days. Our family of six would take two cars, crossing Massachusetts on Route 20, spending the night in “cabins” – clusters of one-room shacks that predated motels, and continuing on across New York State, through Albany, Schenectady, bypassing Utica, then on to Forestport, where the pavement ended. From there it was 20 miles of dirt and potholes. We called it “the bumpy road,” for good reason. 

The road ended at the “head of the lake,” as everyone called the terminus of the bumpy road at the western end of Honnedaga Lake, which was shaped like a dipper, with a long narrow handle, stretching east for four miles before widening into a broader bowl, a mile square. We would leave our car at the head of the lake and board a launch that would take us to our camp’s dock.  The launch was named the "Honnedaga," but my younger brother called it the “Dagy-Boat,” as did we all.

In 1911 Gampy bought a used 25-foot Fay and Bowen launch, powered by a single-cylinder engine.  Like the camp, she was named “Kanahoya.”  She had a huge cockpit, and could easily carry a dozen passengers or more.  He and his family used her on picnic excursions and to travel to Forest Lodge, the “clubhouse,” a mile away, where there were a boat house filled with canoes and graceful Adirondack guide-boats, tennis courts, a grocery store, an ice house, and a restaurant.

I loved the Kanahoya. She could and did hold Gampy and at least two of his offspring’s families.

The Kanahoya, August 1946
Gampy, surrounded by the families of his son Jim (4th from left) and daughter Frances (6th from left). That's me between the two siblings.
The old boat could use a fresh coat of paint

At the bow flew a burgee with the ALC emblem, an eight-point buck; an American flag was at the stern. There was a small foredeck, then a huge open cockpit, and a smaller afterdeck. There was a small steering wheel at the bow, but she could also be steered with a wheel on the portside coaming. Some sister ships had a striped awning, though the Kanahoya’s cockpit was open to the sky.

Another F&B launch,  with all the trimmings

But the Kanahoya's crowning glory was her one-cylinder engine, which sported a large iron flywheel with a shiny nickel-plated rim, just ahead of a tall black single cylinder with a gleaming brass cap on top, containing the magneto and a governor, whose little balls on the end of scissor-like arms spun around to control the speed of the engine. There were important looking throttle and spark levers , a glass bowl through which you could see the gasoline flowing, another for oil, and a bronze priming cup. There were grease cups at strategic points to keep the shaft lubricated. A six-volt “hot-shot” dry-cell battery was stowed in a locker on one side, its wires threaded under the floorboards.  A tall shift lever with a spring-loaded grip straddled a toothed metal quadrant. You squeezed the handle to disengage the tooth from the arc and shoved the lever forward to go forward, aft to go in reverse, because under the transom at the end of the shaft was a shiny bronze propeller with reversing blades.

Starting the engine was a suspenseful project, requiring coordination, patience, and luck. First you’d switch on the current to the magneto, then set the throttle up a notch, open the lever on the side of the priming cup, and while one person slowly turned the flywheel (sitting on the starboard side and pulling it counterclockwise), another person would dribble gasoline into the cup, hopefully not spilling too much into the bilges. It made a whistling, sucking sound (the shift lever would be in neutral, of course).

Then you’d close the priming cup, reach across the flywheel to grasp it with both hands, and heave it toward you in the hope that the engine would catch. It never would on the first pull, but by pulling it two or three more times, if spark and throttle were set right, it would suddenly let loose a satisfying whump! sound. Pull it again, and the engine would catch in earnest. Whump, whump, whump would turn to putt, putt, putt, as you adjusted the throttle. You’d cast off from the dock, put the gear lever in reverse, pull away from the shore, shove the gear lever forward, advance the throttle and away you’d go, at a stately four or five knots.

Here's a video of an identical engine in operation at an antique engine show in Mystic, CT in 2012 (click on the link).

Digging recently through a packet of old V-mails my father had saved throughout his service in North Africa and Italy in World War II, I came upon one I had written to him in 1943, which said in part: “You remember you said when I was ten, I could have the Kanahoya? Well, I’m ten now.” Wisely, he never replied.

The last we heard of the dear old Kanahoya, she was hauled out of the water in 1948 and never launched again. I have searched in vain for any evidence of her eventual fate, but with no luck. Perhaps her old cedar and oak bones are resting somewhere in the Adirondack forest, slowly returning to the soil. And that grand old engine is putt-putting away somewhere in one-lunger heaven, or wherever old one-lungers go to die.

-- Updated October 29, 2013, after conversations with Alexander Millard, the present owner of the Kanahoya Camp and with Keith Billet, the restorer of the Fay & Bowen engine shown here, who kindly sent me a copy of a 1902 engine user's manual ("Rules and Suggestions: Fay and Bowen Gasoline Vapor Motors").

Defusing the Syrian Chemical Warfare Crisis -- Part II: "American Exceptionalism" Redux

If there was a jarring note to the week’s dramatic diplomatic developments, it lay in the exchanges between Presidents Obama and Putin over an assertion in Obama’s Tuesday speech that acting against Syria reflected America’s sense of exceptionalism:  “America,” President Obama said, “is not the world’s policeman. Terrible things happen across the globe, and it is beyond our means to right every wrong. But when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death, and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act. That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional.” [Italics mine].

Putin jumped on the use of the term “exceptional,”  concluding his op-ed remarks with the statement: “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”

Interestingly, Secretary of State Kerry’s father Richard, who died in 2000, was deeply concerned about the temptation of American politicians to wrap themselves and their actions in a mantle of American exceptionalism, and wrote a thoughtful book about it.

Dick Kerry was a neighbor and friend. We would meet weekly over fish chowder to discuss politics from the local level to the global.

He had served in the Army Air Corps in World War II, and became a lawyer and Foreign Service officer after the war, serving in Washington, Berlin, and Oslo during the early days of the Cold War. My Washington service as a Congressional aide and in the State Department and Arms Control Agency overlapped his for a few years.  

We had many friends in common, and shared many ideas, including the notion that the United States was treading a dangerous path in foreign affairs, particularly after the fall of Communism.

As the Cold War ended, Kerry worried that a longstanding American tendency to judge global problems through American eyes alone would be hard to resist in an era when we had no natural enemies and a near monopoly on military outreach and striking power. We were no longer just one of the big boys on the block; we were the only one. Kerry saw great dangers in this new American monopoly of power, and worried about the day that such power might not be matched with the wisdom to recognize the concerns and priorities of allies and other governments.

In 1990 he put these ideas together in a book he entitled The Star Spangled Mirror. Its title captures the essence of its message.

The idea that America has a mission to straighten out the world is not new. Almost since the nation was founded, America’s leaders have toyed with the view that the rest of the world ought to be like us.   If other nations failed to share our goals, support our initiatives, or join in our prejudices, they were on the wrong track, and needed correcting.  We tended to look for our mirror image in others’ actions and policies; where we failed to see our star-spangled reflection, the image was flawed.

Thomas Jefferson declared that America should be “a standing monument and example” which would “ameliorate the condition of man over a great portion of the globe,” a virtuous notion that helped rationalize America’s westward expansion and interventionist policies for the next century.  President Monroe declared that the Western Hemisphere was ours to control; William McKinley, encouraged by Mark Hanna, the Karl Rove of his day, launched an imperial war against Spain and managed to get us bogged down in the Philippines for decades. Woodrow Wilson, hoping to sell the League of Nations to a wary American public, elevated America’s global perspective from manifest destiny to a harmonious world based on democratic universalism: the more the world was patterned on American ideals, the better the chances for lasting peace would be. 

Thus while most American presidents have too often subscribed to the view that our way to run the world is the only right way, only a few have recognized --  infrequently at that -- that we are part of a larger global system, where we must take the concerns and interests of other nations into account and moderate our policies accordingly.

The urge to cry “We’re Number One” is hard to suppress, but we should. Not only is it unfortunately true that the United States is not, in fact, number one in many important ways (e.g., affordable health care or universal public education) it is number one in, among other measurements, military spending, income disparity, obesity, prison incarceration, divorce rate, drug use, gun ownership and homicide and suicide by firearms.

We have much to be proud of as Americans; and we are indeed exceptional in that we have managed to survive as a nation for more than 230 years, and have been able to function as a heterogeneous society made up of many cultures -- albeit wracked by the consequences of the inclusion of slavery in the Constitution that led to a Civil War every bit as bloody as Syria's; we are still struggling more than 150 years later to create equal opportunity for all Americans.  

We also live in an exceptionally beautiful land, as anyone who has driven across it can attest.

But that's not the point. We cannot afford to alienate the rest of the world by claiming some sort of moral superiority over all others, as President Obama appeared to assert in his speech, sounding hardly different from President George W. Bush, who told author Bob Woodward that it was his “duty to free the Iraqi people.”

Putin's pious observations about the civil war in Syria are hypocritical to say the least, given the years of military assistance Russia has given the Assad regime. His assertion that the rebels, not Assad, had been responsible for the gas attacks in August is ludicrous in the face of persuasive evidence from Human Rights Watch observers and apparently from considerable US intelligence sources. It is expected that the UN teams that have been investigating the attacks will reach the same conclusion. But Putin was right about the need to view other countries as no less entitled to respect than one's own, and right too, if less than diplomatic, about the impropriety of Obama's assertions of exceptionalism and the implication that we occupy morally higher ground because if it.  
President Obama would have been wiser to drop the last two sentences in his speech last Tuesday. And I hope that Secretary Kerry has the chance to remind the President of his own father’s warning from time to time.

Defusing the Syrian Chemical Weapons Crisis - Part I: Diplomacy Trumps Warfare

            A dramatic week that began last Monday with the widespread expectation that a punishing United States missile and bomber attack on Syrian military and command targets was imminent had turned by Friday into a US-Russian joint plan to disarm Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal under United Nations auspices. Furthermore, Syria has agreed to ratify and comply with the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, which requires all parties to declare the size and location of their chemical arsenals, and to destroy them under United Nations supervision.

On Monday morning, September 9, at a press conference in London, Secretary of State John Kerry, in a seemingly offhand remark, asserted that the only way the United States would  consider abandoning its plans to attack would be if Syria immediately agreed to dismantle its chemical arsenal.  Asked if Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad could avoid an attack, Kerry replied, “Sure. He could turn over every bit of his weapons to the international community within the next week, without delay.”

Then, while Kerry’s flight home to Washington was still in midair, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov issued a statement that

 “We are calling on the Syrian authorities to not only agree on putting chemical weapons storages under international control but also for its further destruction and then joining the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.”

Then the Syrian Foreign Minister, Walid al-Moualem, who just happened to be in Moscow to meet with his counterpart Lavrov, immediately announced that his government “welcomes Russia’s initiative, based on the Syrian government’s care about the lives of our people and security of our country.”

On Tuesday, September 10, President Obama addressed the American people in a speech that ended by welcoming the potential diplomatic resolution of the crisis but emphasized American readiness to attack if diplomacy failed.

On Thursday, September 12, Russian President Putin, in an op-ed column in the New York Times, welcomed the potential diplomatic solution as well.

The same day, Syria submitted to the United Nations a letter announcing its intention to comply with the Chemical Weapons Convention,

On Saturday, September 14, the United States and Russia announced a deal to eliminate Syria's chemical weapons by mid-2014.

On Sunday, September 15, Syria deposited its formal instrument of accession to the CWC.

And while the US Defense Department declared that it was still ready to strike at any time, by the weekend it was clear that the fix was in and there would be no attack.

The rapid sequence of events was so seamless that it is hard to believe that it had not been carefully orchestrated in such a way that all parties could claim that they had played an important and productive role in averting a wider war and in finding a diplomatic solution: the United States showing resolve to attack if necessary but able to claim that the credibility of its resolve to attack had led to a welcome diplomatic solution; Russia emphasizing that the benefits of its close relationship with Syria had made the breakthrough possible; Syria asserting its willingness to adhere to international norms.

Orchestrated or not, the week’s events did produce a significant result beyond the diplomatic window-dressing: not only was Syria compelled to acknowledge for the first time that it did possess a chemical arsenal but it agreed to dismantle it and join the OPCW; it is highly unlikely to ever again launch a chemical weapons attack on its own people without risking a global response, no longer simply an American reaction.

Lest we congratulate the parties on averting a potentially horrifying disaster, let us remember that the devastating Syrian civil war goes on unabated, with thousands killed, nearly a third of the country's population jammed in refugee camps in Turkey, Jordan and Iraq, severely taxing the resources of the host countries and the United Nations to feed and house them -- and no end to the fighting is in sight.  

It would be a triumph if the momentum of the resolution of the chemical weapons issue can now result in serious efforts, under United Nations auspices, to end the fighting, return the displaced population to what is left of its homes, and find a viable resolution to the sectarian divisions that have caused so much bloodshed. Then the rebuilding of a ruined country can begin. 

Stay Out of the Syrian Quagmire

President Obama’s decision to press for a “limited” military attack on Syria because President Assad’s forces apparently used chemical weapons  against Syrian civilians on August 21 (and earlier) is a terrible idea.

Some opponents of military action question the alleged extent of the chemical attack, and some even question whether it took place at all. I am persuaded that a chemical attack did take place, and that the Assad government launched it, but whether the facts of the attack are still in dispute is irrelevant. Even if all the gruesome details presented by President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry are true, the use or possession of chemical weapons by Syria do not for a minute constitute a threat to the security of the United States or its allies -- the only justification for the United States to make war on another nation, no matter how thuggish its leader may be. 

Supposedly the “limited” US response to Assad’s provocation will be to attack key installations and command structures with Tomahawk cruise missiles. Firing a barrage of Tomahawk missiles at Assad’s military forces is an act of war, not the minor gesture, “sending a message,” that its proponents try to portray.

A Tomahawk cruise missile is a large and lethal weapon, a 20-foot long unmanned bomber, launched from a surface ship or a submarine, weighing nearly 3,000 pounds and capable of delivering a half-ton high explosive warhead or a package of cluster bombs with pinpoint accuracy over a range as great as 1,500 miles. (An earlier version, now withdrawn, carried a 200 kiloton nuclear warhead). It’s reasonable to suppose that Defense Department planners have been able to come up with dozens of potential targets for even a “limited” strike by Tomahawk missiles, and that these would be supplemented by aircraft attacks as well. 

Tomahawks are not a new weapon; they have been in service since the 1970s, have been used in both Gulf Wars, in Bosnia, and Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen and the Sudan. More than 6,000 of them have been manufactured, and about 2,000 used in combat.  There are still 4,000 left for use against Syria and other targets needing to be “sent a message.”

An attack on Syria would have profoundly negative consequences for critical American objectives in the region and around the world, among them:

Defusing Iranian nuclear concerns: Seeing to it that Iran does not develop nuclear weapons is one of the United States’ paramount concerns. The non-proliferation regime is already weakened by the actions of North Korea. If Iran would turn from its present nuclear power development to bomb-making it would greatly increase tensions in the Middle East, and encourage others to follow suit.

Israel, which asserts that Iran is well on the way to developing nuclear weapons, claims an Iranian bomb would upset the balance of power in the Middle East. (It certainly would; Israel, which secretly developed an arsenal of hundreds of nuclear weapons more than 50 years ago, would no longer have a monopoly in the region, and has persistently pressed the US to go to war with Iran if necessary, to prevent it from developing a bomb).

Despite pressures from the hawkish government of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu,  President Obama has consistently declared that the way to prevent an Iranian bomb is through diplomacy, not military action.  Iran’s new President Hassan Rouhani his made it clear he is ready for improved relations with the West and a resolution to the nuclear impasse. 

But an American attack on Iran’s ally Syria would almost certainly put an end to any efforts in this direction, and would be likely to reinvigorate Israeli pressure on the US to attack Iran’s nuclear installations as well. Even those skeptical of Israeli assertions that Iran is already developing a bomb believe that Iran is approaching the point where it could do so if such a decision were made. A US attack on Syria might push Iran past that tipping point.

Arab-Israeli talks: the latest round of discussions between Israel and the Palestinian authority has not gotten off to a promising beginning in the presence of new Israeli settlement-building activities, but at least the discussions are nominally going on, even though presently in recess.  It’s hard to see how peace talks could continue if an attack on Syria results in Syrian retaliation against Israel, as Assad has threatened in response.

US-Russian relations, testy for a variety of reasons, can only worsen in the wake of an attack; a wiser course would be to enlist Russia, as its president Vladimir Putin has already suggested, into finding a diplomatic approach to the issue of Syrian use of chemical warfare through a diplomatic exploration of ways to expand the effectiveness of the 1925 Geneva Protocol and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention against the possession and use of chemical weapons. An obvious objective would be to persuade Syria -- and Israel, which has not joined the 1993 convention either -- to complete process of ratification.

Afghanistan:  President Obama has committed the US to withdraw all combat forces from Afghanistan next year.  He will need the cooperation of  Russia and Afghanistan's neighbors Iran and Pakistan to accomplish this. Will he get it?

The Rest of the World: A US attack on Syria would reinforce the now decades-old image of a trigger-happy America that sees war as a first, not a last resort. It would weaken still further America’s image as a beacon of hope and exemplar of democracy that increasingly is seen more as slogan than reality.  Already fading hopes that President Obama would somehow be different from his predecessors would be further eroded.

Obama’s Domestic Agenda:  Just as Lyndon Johnson sacrificed his Great Society dreams to continue the war in Vietnam, Obama risks losing what momentum he had gained on finally passing an immigration bill and perhaps even on fully implementing the Affordable Care Act, along with a long list of other unfinished business. His political opponents will take comfort in the widespread loss of support from his base that he will suffer if he presses ahead on this foolhardy plan, far more than if he recognizes it’s a totally unnecessary distraction and refocuses on what matters to him.

The Democratic Party:  Democrats seeking re-election to the House and Senate in 2014 already know their constituents overwhelmingly oppose going to war over Syria. If the President perseveres in his plans, he will further fragment the party, possibly leading to the loss of control of the Senate and making impossible an already uphill fight to regain control of the House.  And whichever Democrat is the Presidential nominee in 2016 will face a difficult time consolidating support from a disillusioned party – especially if the Republicans finally stop shooting themselves in the foot and actually nominate an electable candidate.

Finally, what would be the benefits of a US attack on Syria?  Allegedly it would deter Assad from subsequent use of chemical weapons, but exactly how or why has not been explained. Nor is anyone claiming it would stop him from continuing to fight his domestic opponents, including the civilians he is slaughtering daily by other means.

Perhaps the only party that would benefit unambiguously from the use of Tomahawks on Syrian forces would be the Raytheon corporation that manufactures the missiles. That’s not sufficient reason to unleash them.

If the United States has any legitimate objective to pursue in Syria, it is a humanitarian one, and that can best be advanced through a concerted diplomatic effort, through the United Nations, necessarily including all interested parties, including Russia and Iran.

Obama was right to go to Congress for approval of any military action, and if Congress, as I fervently hope, does not support his proposed attack, he will be wise to heed its advice and, like Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, embrace the wiser choice of a diplomatic solution.

But then, say his supporters, he would lose credibility!  Can’t a stronger case be made that he is already fast losing his credibility – with America’s allies, with the once-hopeful Prize Committee who awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, and with the many Americans who voted for him in 2008 and 2012 because they believed he would somehow be a different – and better – president than George W. Bush?  That he would turn America away from its instinctive resort to war whenever a potential international disagreement arose, and restore a national focus on bettering the lives of all Americans?

----------------------

Barack Obama was to be the president of hope and change. We are still hoping, but the change we all were hoping for appears more elusive by the day. The dwindling number of Americans who thought his presidency would be different, better, and more visionary than those of his predecessors need him to reconsider and to reverse this wrong-headed, impulsive lunge toward war. 

Surely he wants to leave behind a better legacy when he completes his term of office.