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.

A Brush with the Past

A few weeks ago I wrote about mysterious sights at sea. Here’s another one:

My grandfather, the painter Charles Hopkinson, had a lifelong love affair with the sea and ships of all sizes. In school and college he filled his books and papers (at times including examination papers, to the consternation of his teachers) with doodles and detailed sketches of skiffs, sloops, schooners, ketches, yawls, catboats, brigs, barques, and clipper ships. Long after school – indeed,  throughout his life – he would draw little sketches in the margins of books on ships and the sea to explain how a particular part of a ship's rigging worked, or to correct an error in the text or an illustration.

He sailed whenever he had a chance. As a boy summering in Maine he learned to handle small boats, and he was seldom without a sailboat of his own after he was married and settled down at the house in Manchester, Massachusetts, where he lived and painted for the rest of his life. Racing was not his thing, and he did not go in for long cruises either. Messing about in small boats was what he loved best, and he took great pleasure in passing along this joy to daughters and grandchildren alike.

Some of us took to it more than others, for this gentlest of men ashore was a stickler for perfection at sea: we soon learned that there was only one way to tie up a dinghy, fasten a halyard to a cleat, or to “shoot” a mooring (bring a boat up to the mooring buoy by turning into the wind and letting the sails luff at just the right point so that the vessel came to a complete halt just as its bow kissed against the buoy). If you didn't manage these and the myriad other skills a sailor must know just right, he'd have you do them again and again. To a small boy (and he started to teach me to sail when I was 8 or 9), he would seem a gruff taskmaster. But I remember that when I did master one of these skills at last, he was warm with his praise.

Charles Hopkinson in his (other) element

One July day in 1945, when I was eleven, he decided I was ready to handle his 17-foot centerboard sloop, the Armada, alone (almost alone; he'd be a passenger while I rowed us out in the dinghy, made sail, and handled tiller and sheets on a short sail around Egg Rock and back). The day was bright and clear, with a gentle breeze ruffling the water, and not a cloud in the sky.

He put a couple of sandwiches in a paper bag, squashed a weather-beaten hat on his head, and took

the oars out of the hall closet. The oarlocks clanged together, bringing John Joiner, his little Welsh terrier, bounding out of his wingback chair to join us. He was not about to miss a sail.

We walked together the half mile to the cove – through the woods, past the barn, through the orchard and along the lane to Kettle Cove, where the Armada was moored. I carried a bag with our lunch and our sweaters; my grandfather carried the oars across his shoulder; the oarlocks, dangling from their lanyards, chimed (e-flat) as they swung together with each step he took.

The tide in the cove was high. The venerable rowboat bobbed at the end of its running line fifty feet off the beach. I waded out a few feet to uncoil the line from its rock and pulled in the dinghy hand over hand, the water dripping off the line and soaking the front of my dungarees. The dinghy scraped on the gravel shore, the dog leapt aboard, I untied the boat, swung it around and we climbed aboard.

Under my grandfather’s watchful eye I rowed us out, carefully feathering the oars at every stroke. We were soon aboard the sloop. I tied the dinghy’s painter to the eye splice on the mooring pennant with a bowline, finished off with two half-hitches, unlaced the sail cover and stowed it away under the foredeck, hung the rudder on the transom, lowered the centerboard, hoisted the mainsail and jib, and cast off, leaving the dinghy rocking on the mooring.

We were soon out beyond Egg Rock. My grandfather hadn't said a word about my steering or sail handling. I was aglow with happiness. Then, almost without warning we were in thick fog.

The wind died away at the same moment, and we were left to rise and fall on the oily swell coming in from the east. The sea was gray satin, with only an occasional ripple to show there was still a ghost of a breeze.

We sat and waited. After a while he took a stub of a pencil out of his pocket and sharpened it with the jackknife he produced from another pocket. The shavings curled over the side. He produced an envelope from somewhere else, flattened it out, and began to sketch: a Gloucester fishing schooner heading home from the Banks with a trip o’ fish, thrashing along under shortened sail into a sou’wester. In a few strokes he had captured the driving wind, the long dark seas, the pounding of the hull into the waves, the decks awash with water pouring through the scuppers, the struggle of the helmsman to keep a sharp lookout and hold the vessel on course.

“Time for a bite to eat?” he asked me. I started to fish the sandwiches out of the bag, then stopped. I had heard a voice, off to port.

Then another, louder, more distinct; then a muffled laugh.

Then the creak of a block as a line worked back and forth over its sheave. The sound of heavy spars rubbing against one another. Something huge was out there in the fog, just beyond our narrow circle of vision.

Then the fog scaled up, and ... O, GLORY! A huge square-rigged ship loomed up above us, all sails set and drawing in the gentle breeze, easing along to the westward. We stared dumbfounded at the sight. Could it be real? Was it a mirage? A trick of the fog? A warp in time? What square-­rigger could be still be sailing in 1945? My grandfather would know, I was sure -- but a look at his face, as open-mouthed as mine, told me that he was as astonished as I, and not quite sure whether we were looking at reality or a ghostly apparition.

Three or four men stood along the vessel's starboard rail high above us; one, smoking a pipe, leaned over the side to wave, looking real enough. The water bubbled along the square-rigger's broad flanks and rippled outward to lap against our hull, rocking us back and forth; that too was real. John Joiner, loafing in the bilges, didn't seem overly impressed.

As quickly as the ship had appeared, she passed us by to disappear into the mist once more. But we both saw her name as she ghosted by: Joseph Conrad was picked out on her broad black transom in bright white letters.

The Joseph Conrad now lies at Mystic Seaport, where's she's been moored to a dock for most of the sixty-four years since her ghostly appearance off Cape Ann.

The Joseph Conrad

The Author, 1945
Portrait by Charles Hopkinson

A version of this story appeared in the Gloucester Daily Times in 2009

Our Top Secret World

The ongoing sagas of whistle blowers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden have brought to the public eye the astonishing extent of secret programs run by branches of the United States government. Just the number of people cleared for Top Secret information and its more specialized, still more secret sub-compartments is mind-boggling:  since 2010, government agencies have  been required to report the number of persons holding security clearances. By 2012 the number had risen to over 4 million, nearly 1.5 million of whom were cleared for Top Secret.

But that’s only part of the story. Top Secret clearance alone will allow authorized personnel access to a large body of classified information, but there are clearances beyond Top Secret provided only to people involved with specific intelligence and other national security programs. The number of people with such special clearances has not  been made public, but it too may number in the tens – maybe even hundreds --  of thousands. And people cleared for some of these programs might not be cleared for others, thereby adding yet another element of confusion to an intelligence system already bogged down with more secret information than humans are able to handle.

I lived in this bizarre world for a  few years. In the mid-1950s I was an infantry officer stationed in the Panama Canal Zone. When my tour there was up, I was sent, to my surprise, to the Army Intelligence School at Fort Holabird, MD, to learn to be a photo interpreter. After six months of training, I reported with a few other graduates to the Pentagon, where we were informed that we had been selected to study aerial photos taken by the then-secret U-2 high altitude spy plane. We were all cleared for Top Secret, but also for a special subcategory of Top Secret reserved for people working with the U-2 photos. A special codeword was assigned to the program, and another codeword to the photographs and the reports we wrote about the installations we analyzed. But even we were not supposed to know how the pictures were taken or what aircraft was involved. For that you needed another special clearance and codeword.

When satellite photography came into service in 1961, there was yet another new family of  special clearances and code names for the various kinds of satellites and the film and digital imagery they produced.

And another to work with so-called “Special intelligence (“SI”) gleaned from communications intelligence (COMINT), and still another (“Q” clearance) if you were working on issues related to nuclear weapons design and performance. And there was yet another for intelligence derived by secret submarine missions inside Soviet or Communist Chinese waters. And those were only the ones my job required me to know about in the 1950s and early 1960s. Today there are reportedly hundreds of special access intelligence programs, each with its own code name.

An inevitable result of all this complex compartmentalization, codeword clearances, need-to-know requirements and other restrictions was to reinforce an already entrenched cult of security surrounding the users of classified intelligence: the more information to which the system granted you access, the more important you were seen to be, and therefore the more important you came to feel.

The person who had more little letters surrounding the photo on his or her CIA badge, denoting access to more categories of information, the smarter, and more powerful he or she obviously was. It was demeaning for me, first as an Army officer and then as a State Department employee, to have to be escorted around the CIA buildings—even to the bathroom—wearing a visitor’s badge on a chain around the neck.

When the CIA finally issued me a photo badge of my own in the mid-1960s (I was then working for the State Department, in a job that regularly sent me to the CIA to consult with various officials there) I finally had the freedom to roam the halls. At once I found myself looking down with condescending pity on escorted visitors with their shameful scarlet letter of a visitor’s badge hanging round their necks, slightly inadequate, not quite to be trusted.

One Sunday morning in 1964 the New York Times Magazine carried on its cover the picture of an earnest National Security Advisor, McGeorge Bundy, standing in the White House Rose Garden explaining something to an attentive President Lyndon  Johnson. Clearly visible under Bundy’s arm was an open copy of that morning’s Current Intelligence Bulletin, a document prepared each night by the CIA and containing the latest current intelligence and brief analyses of critical issues of interest to top decision makers. On top of the visible page of the document, in bright red letters, were the sacred words “TOP SECRET DINAR,”—“Dinar” being the then current codeword used with documents containing information derived from SI (COMINT) material.

The security people must have gone wild. Here was one of their cherished secrets, flaunted around the world. The code word was changed immediately. To do so meant sending rush messages to every security agency, military unit and diplomatic post that might have access to COMINT material, reclassifying every new Top Secret SI document not yet in final form.

And the worst of it was that there was no one to punish. You couldn’t jail the President’s National Security Advisor or the New York Times photographer. Presumably some hapless NSC staffer was given a tongue-lashing. The world may never know. In due course a new codeword began to appear on the pages of the Current Intelligence Bulletin and all other COMINT documents.[1]

The uproar over the Manning and Snowden revelations may result in some much-needed controls over NSA access to telephone and internet records of American citizens and to the content of their phone calls and email messages, but it will likely do little or nothing to end the bureaucratic fascination with the cult of secrecy. 

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[1] Ironically, the printed information visible under the TOP SECRET DINAR classification line happened to be a summary of newspaper commentary on the August 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident— not classified at all. But the bulletin's pages were preprinted with the highest classification of any article that might be carried in a particular edition. I happened to have been the State Department representative on the interagency team that had prepared that particular day's “CIB” and remember observing the flap with wry delight. More security-conscious intelligence types were less amused.