Edward Luce in The FT
“Nothing is fun until you are good at it,” said Amy Chua in her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Eight years later the Yale professor continues to display her prowess.
This week Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, Ms Chua’s daughter, was hired as a Supreme Court clerk by Brett Kavanaugh — the judge for whom her mother vouched during his stormy Senate hearings last autumn.
Ms Chua is a shrewd string-puller. A Supreme Court clerkship sets up a young lawyer for life. Whether she is enjoying the publicity is another matter. Overnight the Chuas have turned into emblems of what Americans distrust about their meritocracy.
There is much more where that came from. What Ms Chua did was brazen. The liberal academic offered a very public endorsement of the conservative Mr Kavanaugh. As the head of the Yale committee that steers graduates into highly-coveted clerkships, Ms Chua boosted his credibility with her endorsement.
But the apparent quid pro quo was legal. Actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, on the other hand, are accused of having broken the law.
The first is alleged to have paid $500,000 to fake athletics records that would help her two daughters enter the University of Southern California. The second has pleaded guilty to paying $15,000 to cheat on her daughter’s standardised admission test. Both Hollywood actresses, and one of their husbands, face likely jail in the “Operation Varsity Blues” scandal.
Americans would be forgiven for blurring the moral of these tales.
On pure arithmetic, the average American’s chances of entering a top university are tiny if they are born into the wrong home. Studies show that an eighth grade (14-year-old) child from a lower income bracket who achieves maths results in the top quarter is less likely to graduate than a kid in the upper income bracket scored in the bottom quarter. This is the reverse of how meritocracy should work. Children from the wealthiest 1 per cent take more Ivy League places than the bottom 60 per cent combined. Being born under a roof like Ms Chua’s — with two high-achieving parents obsessed with your success — is almost impossible to match.
That is how most of the world works. The US has erected three additional barriers. The first is legacy places. In contrast to most other democracies, America’s top universities credit an applicant if a parent, or grandparent, went to the school. A better name for this would be “hereditary preference”, which is antithetical to America’s creed. Roughly one in six Ivy League places are taken by children of alumni. This sharply reduces the places available to children of talent from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The second is affirmative action. The courts will soon rule on an Asian-American class action suit alleging that Harvard University discriminated against them. A significant — though artfully selected — share of places are reserved for children of Hispanic and African-American backgrounds. The fact that some of those are also legacy applicants adds a layer of irony. Whichever way it goes, the case is likely to end up in the Supreme Court. Mr Kavanaugh, who is a legacy graduate of Yale, could prove the decisive vote on whether affirmative action will survive. That prospect, too, is rich in irony.
The third barrier is brute wealth. If you endow a library, or a medical lab, the university will bend over backwards to admit your child. A prime example is Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, whose poor SAT scores critics perceive may have been outweighed by his father’s $2.5m donation to Harvard. The US tax system even rewards such palm-greasing by making it tax-deductible. The fact that the best universities are richer than some countries (Harvard’s $38bn endowment is larger than the GDPs of El Salvador and Nicaragua combined) is no check on their ambitions. They always want more.
The most egregious figure in the college admissions scandal is William McGlashan, a former partner at TPG, the private equity firm. He allegedly offered a bribe of $250,000 to get his son into a top university. His job was to head TPG’s social impact unit — capitalism’s virtue signalling arm.
You do well by doing good, goes the saying. Which brings us back to Ms Chua. The best restraint on any elite is its sense of shame. Without that code, anything is possible. Everyone in America seems to know the system is rigged. The real distinction is whether you rig things from inside the law or outside.
Showing posts with label legacy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label legacy. Show all posts
Thursday, 13 June 2019
Thursday, 14 March 2019
It's not just corruption. Entrance into elite US colleges is rigged in every way
An FBI sting revealed that wealthy parents are buying their children a place in top universities. But they’re not the only problem: the whole system is rigged writes Richard V Reeves in The Guardian
How elite US schools give preference to wealthy and white 'legacy' applicants
Or how about Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law? Kushner was accepted into Harvard shortly after his father donated $2.5m. An official at Kushner’s high school said there was “no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would, on the merits, get into Harvard. His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it.”
David E and Stacey Goel just gave $100m to Harvard. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that their children probably have an excellent chance of Harvard admission.
Even those parents who are not in the wealthiest brackets, but are squarely in the upper middle class, can use their money to boost their kids’ chances, through tutors, SAT prep classes, athletic coaches. Students who apply early have better chances of admission, which favors more affluent families since early admission precedes financial aid decisions. Many colleges prefer students who have “shown an interest” in their college. How to show an interest? By visiting the campus – easy for those with money for flights and hotels, less so for those on modest or low incomes.
Small wonder that at elite colleges, including most of those targeted in the corruption scheme such as Yale, Duke, Stanford and Wake Forest, take more students from families in the top 1% of the income distribution than from those in the bottom 60% combined.
So hats off to FBI special agent Bonavolonta and his team for exposing the corruption admissions. But it is in fact simply the most visible sign of a much deeper problem with college admissions. Elite colleges are serving to reinforce class inequality, rather than reduce it. The opaque, complex, unfair admissions process is a big part of the problem. From an equality perspective, it is not just Singer and his clients who are at fault: it’s the system as a whole.
‘Elite colleges are serving to reinforce class inequality, rather than reduce it.’ Photograph: Boston Globe/Boston Globe via Getty Images
Shock horror! Wealthy Americans are using their money to buy their children places at elite colleges. An FBI investigation, appropriately named Operation Varsity Blues, has exposed a $25m cash-for-admissions scandal. Coaches were allegedly bribed to declare candidates as athletic recruits; test administrators to change their scores, or allow someone else to take the test for them.
At the center of the cheating scheme was William “Rick” Singer, the founder of a for-profit college preparation business based in Newport Beach, California. Among the 33 parents caught in the FBI sting were Hollywood stars Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman. Loughlin starred in the series Full House. Huffman is famous for her role in Desperate Housewives; now she will be more famous as a desperate mom. And she’s not alone. The breathless anxiety among many affluent parents to get their kids into the very best colleges is a striking feature of upper-class American life.
Singer’s bribery scheme allegedly allowed parents to buy entrance for their offspring at some of the nation’s most prestigious colleges, including Yale, Georgetown University, Stanford University, UCLA, the University of San Diego, USC, University of Texas and Wake Forest.
FBI officers were at pains to point out that the colleges themselves are not being found liable; though nine athletic coaches were caught in the net.
“Following 10 months of investigation using sophisticated techniques, the FBI uncovered what we believe to be a rigged system,” John Bonavolonta, the FBI special agent in charge said, “robbing students all over the country of their right to a fair shot of getting into some of the most elite universities in this country”.
But here’s the thing: the whole system is “rigged” in favor of more affluent parents. It is true that the conversion of wealth into a desirable college seat was especially egregious in this case – to the extent that it was actually illegal. But there are countless ways that students are robbed of a “fair shot” if they are not lucky enough to be born to well-resourced, well-connected parents.
The difference between this illegal scheme and the legal ways in which money buys access is one of degree, not of kind. The mistake here was to do something illegal. Meanwhile, much of what goes on in college admissions many not be illegal, but it is immoral.
Take legacy preferences, for example. This boosts the admissions chances of the children of alumni; and for obvious reasons the alumni of elite colleges tend to be pretty affluent, especially if they marry each other. (They are also disproportionately white.) The acceptance rate for legacy applicants at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Georgetown and Stanford is between two and three times higher than the general admission rate. If they don’t get in first time round, they might be asked to take a “gap year” and enter a year later instead, a loophole known as “Z-listing”. A Princeton study found that being a legacy applicant had the same effect as adding 160 SAT points – on the old scale up to 1600 – to a student’s application. Imagine if colleges gave that kind of admissions boost to lower-income kids?
As John W Anderson, the former co-director of college counseling at the Phillips Academy, an elite boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts, once admitted, of the students from his school who are Z-listed for Harvard, “a very, very, very high percent” are legacies. The Harvard Crimson estimates the proportion at around one in two.
Or how about donor preferences? Rather than bribing coaches, the wealthiest parents can just bribe – sorry, donate to – the college directly. In 2017, the Washington Post reported on the special treatment given to “VIP applicants” via an annual “watch list”. Applicants whose parents were big donors would have notes on their files reading “$500k. Must be on WL” (wait list). Even better, these donations are tax free!
As a general rule, the bigger the money the bigger the effect on admissions chances. Among elite aspirational alums, the question asked is “what’s the price?”. In other words, how much do you have to donate to get your child in?
Whatever the price is, those with the fattest wallets can obviously pay it. Peter Malkin graduated from Harvard Law School in 1958. He became a very wealthy real estate businessman, and huge donor. In 1985, the university’s indoor athletic facility was renamed the Malkin Athletic Center in his honor. All three of Malkin’s children went to Harvard. By 2009, five of his six college-age grandchildren had followed suit. (One brave boy dared to go to Stanford instead.)
Shock horror! Wealthy Americans are using their money to buy their children places at elite colleges. An FBI investigation, appropriately named Operation Varsity Blues, has exposed a $25m cash-for-admissions scandal. Coaches were allegedly bribed to declare candidates as athletic recruits; test administrators to change their scores, or allow someone else to take the test for them.
At the center of the cheating scheme was William “Rick” Singer, the founder of a for-profit college preparation business based in Newport Beach, California. Among the 33 parents caught in the FBI sting were Hollywood stars Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman. Loughlin starred in the series Full House. Huffman is famous for her role in Desperate Housewives; now she will be more famous as a desperate mom. And she’s not alone. The breathless anxiety among many affluent parents to get their kids into the very best colleges is a striking feature of upper-class American life.
Singer’s bribery scheme allegedly allowed parents to buy entrance for their offspring at some of the nation’s most prestigious colleges, including Yale, Georgetown University, Stanford University, UCLA, the University of San Diego, USC, University of Texas and Wake Forest.
FBI officers were at pains to point out that the colleges themselves are not being found liable; though nine athletic coaches were caught in the net.
“Following 10 months of investigation using sophisticated techniques, the FBI uncovered what we believe to be a rigged system,” John Bonavolonta, the FBI special agent in charge said, “robbing students all over the country of their right to a fair shot of getting into some of the most elite universities in this country”.
But here’s the thing: the whole system is “rigged” in favor of more affluent parents. It is true that the conversion of wealth into a desirable college seat was especially egregious in this case – to the extent that it was actually illegal. But there are countless ways that students are robbed of a “fair shot” if they are not lucky enough to be born to well-resourced, well-connected parents.
The difference between this illegal scheme and the legal ways in which money buys access is one of degree, not of kind. The mistake here was to do something illegal. Meanwhile, much of what goes on in college admissions many not be illegal, but it is immoral.
Take legacy preferences, for example. This boosts the admissions chances of the children of alumni; and for obvious reasons the alumni of elite colleges tend to be pretty affluent, especially if they marry each other. (They are also disproportionately white.) The acceptance rate for legacy applicants at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Georgetown and Stanford is between two and three times higher than the general admission rate. If they don’t get in first time round, they might be asked to take a “gap year” and enter a year later instead, a loophole known as “Z-listing”. A Princeton study found that being a legacy applicant had the same effect as adding 160 SAT points – on the old scale up to 1600 – to a student’s application. Imagine if colleges gave that kind of admissions boost to lower-income kids?
As John W Anderson, the former co-director of college counseling at the Phillips Academy, an elite boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts, once admitted, of the students from his school who are Z-listed for Harvard, “a very, very, very high percent” are legacies. The Harvard Crimson estimates the proportion at around one in two.
Or how about donor preferences? Rather than bribing coaches, the wealthiest parents can just bribe – sorry, donate to – the college directly. In 2017, the Washington Post reported on the special treatment given to “VIP applicants” via an annual “watch list”. Applicants whose parents were big donors would have notes on their files reading “$500k. Must be on WL” (wait list). Even better, these donations are tax free!
As a general rule, the bigger the money the bigger the effect on admissions chances. Among elite aspirational alums, the question asked is “what’s the price?”. In other words, how much do you have to donate to get your child in?
Whatever the price is, those with the fattest wallets can obviously pay it. Peter Malkin graduated from Harvard Law School in 1958. He became a very wealthy real estate businessman, and huge donor. In 1985, the university’s indoor athletic facility was renamed the Malkin Athletic Center in his honor. All three of Malkin’s children went to Harvard. By 2009, five of his six college-age grandchildren had followed suit. (One brave boy dared to go to Stanford instead.)
How elite US schools give preference to wealthy and white 'legacy' applicants
Or how about Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law? Kushner was accepted into Harvard shortly after his father donated $2.5m. An official at Kushner’s high school said there was “no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would, on the merits, get into Harvard. His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it.”
David E and Stacey Goel just gave $100m to Harvard. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that their children probably have an excellent chance of Harvard admission.
Even those parents who are not in the wealthiest brackets, but are squarely in the upper middle class, can use their money to boost their kids’ chances, through tutors, SAT prep classes, athletic coaches. Students who apply early have better chances of admission, which favors more affluent families since early admission precedes financial aid decisions. Many colleges prefer students who have “shown an interest” in their college. How to show an interest? By visiting the campus – easy for those with money for flights and hotels, less so for those on modest or low incomes.
Small wonder that at elite colleges, including most of those targeted in the corruption scheme such as Yale, Duke, Stanford and Wake Forest, take more students from families in the top 1% of the income distribution than from those in the bottom 60% combined.
So hats off to FBI special agent Bonavolonta and his team for exposing the corruption admissions. But it is in fact simply the most visible sign of a much deeper problem with college admissions. Elite colleges are serving to reinforce class inequality, rather than reduce it. The opaque, complex, unfair admissions process is a big part of the problem. From an equality perspective, it is not just Singer and his clients who are at fault: it’s the system as a whole.
Tuesday, 27 December 2016
Obama’s passing shot at Netanyahu is a futile gesture
Simon Tisdall in The Guardian
In a way, Binyamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama deserve each other. Both promised great things. Both proved themselves masters of their respective political spheres. And yet both have contributed, since 2009, to a chronic deterioration in US-Israel relations and the wider Middle East meltdown. This process of polarisation and mutual alienation culminated last Friday with Obama’s active connivance in the passing of a landmark UN security council resolution. The resolution condemned all Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory as a “flagrant violation” of international law that imperilled a future two-state peace.
Amid talk of betrayal, the Israeli response, personally orchestrated by Prime Minister Netanyahu, has been swift and furious. Ambassadors from the 14 countries that backed resolution 2334 were carpeted at the foreign ministry on Christmas Day. Israel has withdrawn its ambassadors from two of the countries concerned, New Zealand and Senegal, and cut aid assistance to the latter. Planned diplomatic exchanges have been cancelled, future Israeli cooperation with UN agencies placed under urgent review, and civilian coordination with the Palestinian Authority suspended. “We will do all it takes so Israel emerges unscathed from this shameful decision,” Netanyahu said.
If he really believes settlements undermine peace, why abstain? Why not go the whole hog and condemn them?
In a sense, these are symbolic actions in response to a symbolic vote. Resolution 2334 is unenforceable. Nobody, least of all the Americans, will attempt to evict the 430,000 Jewish settlers currently living in the West Bank or the 200,000 in east Jerusalem. Nobody can force Israel to embrace John Kerry’s recycled ideas about a two-state solution, although the US secretary of state is expected to spell them out one more time before he leaves office next month. Resolution 2334 joins UN resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973) in the theoretical, consistently bypassed legal canon of the Israel-Palestine issue. It says what should happen. It does not say how.
Yet for all that, the US abstention and UN vote are not lacking in significance. Netanyahu’s smug suggestion that he need only wait for the advent of a Donald Trump presidency is misleading. It is likely Trump will give him a more sympathetic hearing. He may well move the US embassy to Jerusalem – a gratuitously inflammatory gesture.
The personal chemistry between Trump and Netanyahu will be vastly different; insecurity, aggression and paranoia are their shared characteristics. But Trump’s vain, vague boast that he could be the one to “solve” the Israel-Palestine conflict is as insubstantial as his many other foreign policy pledges. And a Trump administration cannot simply reverse the stated will of the UN security council – backed in this case by permanent members China, Russia, France and Britain – any more than it can unilaterally scrap last year’s multinational nuclear deal with Iran.
It is likely the resolution will accelerate existing moves to prosecute Israel at the international criminal court. By specifically instructing UN members to “distinguish between the territory of the state of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967”, it may also encourage new boycotts and sanctions. But more than that, the UN vote has highlighted the extraordinary extent of Israel’s international isolation under Netanyahu. Even he cannot persuasively dismiss the unanimous opinion of countries as diverse as Japan, Ukraine, Malaysia, Venezuela, Angola and Spain. It takes a lot to make an enemy of New Zealand, but Netanyahu has managed it.
This was the world telling Netanyahu, with one voice, that the expanded settlement policy he has encouraged and justified is wrong – wrong legally, wrong morally, wrong politically, and wrong in terms of Israel’s future peace and security. The odd thing is, he knows this. In 2009, Netanyahu, newly re-elected, described his “vision” of a historic peace, “of two free peoples living side by side in this small land, with good neighbourly relations and mutual respect, each with its flag, anthem and government, with neither one threatening its neighbour’s security and existence”. Although he appeared to renege during last year’s election campaign, Netanyahu still claims to support a two-state solution. Now the international community’s message is unequivocal: you were right in 2009. So stop undermining the prospect of peace. Honour your promise.
US abstention allows UN to demand end to Israeli settlements
Obama has not been much help. He, too, made a big speech in 2009, shortly after taking office, pledging a “new beginning” for the Middle East. But Obama’s so-say inspirational Cairo performance turned out to be the prelude not to transformational progress, but to regional disintegration and growing American detachment. The US withdrawal from Iraq left a political vacuum in Baghdad that Iran and its Shia allies filled. Then, in partial reaction, came the Sunni jihadists of Islamic State. The Arab spring revolts of 2011 left Washington nonplussed. In Egypt it fretted over the toppling of Hosni Mubarak and welcomed his eventual replacement by another pro-American military dictator. In Syria, Obama prematurely anticipated the demise of Bashar al-Assad, only to back away when the going got tough, letting in the Russians and the Iranians (again) and squandering US leverage.
Obama never seemed to grasp the implausibility of publicly pressurising the risk-averse Netanyahu into peace talks with the Palestinians, even as Israel’s immediate neighbours fell prey to civil disorder and Islamist insurrection. As the US retreated, physically and diplomatically, Hezbollah (Iran’s and Hamas’s Lebanese ally), advanced. Little wonder, in this chaotic context, that the Obama-Kerry “comprehensive plan” for peace ran into the sand in 2014. Little wonder, perhaps, that Israelis now eye the Golan Heights, their disputed land border with Syria, with growing apprehension as Assad’s forces are advancing.
Add in Libya and Yemen, for example, and Obama’s Middle East legacy is not one to be proud of. Like Netanyahu, 2009 promise went unfulfilled. And it is fitting that his final days in office should be marked by petulance and impotence. Obama did not push nearly hard enough for peace when the regional climate might have allowed it. In 2011, he vetoed a similar UN resolution, arguing US-brokered talks would find a way forward. Obama, senior partner in a dysfunctional relationship, allowed Netanyahu to beard him repeatedly, not least in the latter’s self-justificatory 2015 address to Congress. Cautious to the end, even Obama’s UN demarche on Friday was half-hearted. If he really believes settlements are undermining peace, why abstain? Why not go the whole hog and vote to condemn them? And why wait seven years?
What happens next, in the dawning Trump era, is deeply worrying. A continuing, polarising stalemate over Palestinian statehood looks probable. So, too, do expanding settlements on occupied land and possibly annexations, as mooted by Netanyahu’s rightwing allies. How long before the Palestinian response grows violent once again? And how long before Netanyahu induces an impulsive, know-nothing Trump to take joint action against the bigger target, Iran?
In a way, Binyamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama deserve each other. Both promised great things. Both proved themselves masters of their respective political spheres. And yet both have contributed, since 2009, to a chronic deterioration in US-Israel relations and the wider Middle East meltdown. This process of polarisation and mutual alienation culminated last Friday with Obama’s active connivance in the passing of a landmark UN security council resolution. The resolution condemned all Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory as a “flagrant violation” of international law that imperilled a future two-state peace.
Amid talk of betrayal, the Israeli response, personally orchestrated by Prime Minister Netanyahu, has been swift and furious. Ambassadors from the 14 countries that backed resolution 2334 were carpeted at the foreign ministry on Christmas Day. Israel has withdrawn its ambassadors from two of the countries concerned, New Zealand and Senegal, and cut aid assistance to the latter. Planned diplomatic exchanges have been cancelled, future Israeli cooperation with UN agencies placed under urgent review, and civilian coordination with the Palestinian Authority suspended. “We will do all it takes so Israel emerges unscathed from this shameful decision,” Netanyahu said.
If he really believes settlements undermine peace, why abstain? Why not go the whole hog and condemn them?
In a sense, these are symbolic actions in response to a symbolic vote. Resolution 2334 is unenforceable. Nobody, least of all the Americans, will attempt to evict the 430,000 Jewish settlers currently living in the West Bank or the 200,000 in east Jerusalem. Nobody can force Israel to embrace John Kerry’s recycled ideas about a two-state solution, although the US secretary of state is expected to spell them out one more time before he leaves office next month. Resolution 2334 joins UN resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973) in the theoretical, consistently bypassed legal canon of the Israel-Palestine issue. It says what should happen. It does not say how.
Yet for all that, the US abstention and UN vote are not lacking in significance. Netanyahu’s smug suggestion that he need only wait for the advent of a Donald Trump presidency is misleading. It is likely Trump will give him a more sympathetic hearing. He may well move the US embassy to Jerusalem – a gratuitously inflammatory gesture.
The personal chemistry between Trump and Netanyahu will be vastly different; insecurity, aggression and paranoia are their shared characteristics. But Trump’s vain, vague boast that he could be the one to “solve” the Israel-Palestine conflict is as insubstantial as his many other foreign policy pledges. And a Trump administration cannot simply reverse the stated will of the UN security council – backed in this case by permanent members China, Russia, France and Britain – any more than it can unilaterally scrap last year’s multinational nuclear deal with Iran.
It is likely the resolution will accelerate existing moves to prosecute Israel at the international criminal court. By specifically instructing UN members to “distinguish between the territory of the state of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967”, it may also encourage new boycotts and sanctions. But more than that, the UN vote has highlighted the extraordinary extent of Israel’s international isolation under Netanyahu. Even he cannot persuasively dismiss the unanimous opinion of countries as diverse as Japan, Ukraine, Malaysia, Venezuela, Angola and Spain. It takes a lot to make an enemy of New Zealand, but Netanyahu has managed it.
This was the world telling Netanyahu, with one voice, that the expanded settlement policy he has encouraged and justified is wrong – wrong legally, wrong morally, wrong politically, and wrong in terms of Israel’s future peace and security. The odd thing is, he knows this. In 2009, Netanyahu, newly re-elected, described his “vision” of a historic peace, “of two free peoples living side by side in this small land, with good neighbourly relations and mutual respect, each with its flag, anthem and government, with neither one threatening its neighbour’s security and existence”. Although he appeared to renege during last year’s election campaign, Netanyahu still claims to support a two-state solution. Now the international community’s message is unequivocal: you were right in 2009. So stop undermining the prospect of peace. Honour your promise.
US abstention allows UN to demand end to Israeli settlements
Obama has not been much help. He, too, made a big speech in 2009, shortly after taking office, pledging a “new beginning” for the Middle East. But Obama’s so-say inspirational Cairo performance turned out to be the prelude not to transformational progress, but to regional disintegration and growing American detachment. The US withdrawal from Iraq left a political vacuum in Baghdad that Iran and its Shia allies filled. Then, in partial reaction, came the Sunni jihadists of Islamic State. The Arab spring revolts of 2011 left Washington nonplussed. In Egypt it fretted over the toppling of Hosni Mubarak and welcomed his eventual replacement by another pro-American military dictator. In Syria, Obama prematurely anticipated the demise of Bashar al-Assad, only to back away when the going got tough, letting in the Russians and the Iranians (again) and squandering US leverage.
Obama never seemed to grasp the implausibility of publicly pressurising the risk-averse Netanyahu into peace talks with the Palestinians, even as Israel’s immediate neighbours fell prey to civil disorder and Islamist insurrection. As the US retreated, physically and diplomatically, Hezbollah (Iran’s and Hamas’s Lebanese ally), advanced. Little wonder, in this chaotic context, that the Obama-Kerry “comprehensive plan” for peace ran into the sand in 2014. Little wonder, perhaps, that Israelis now eye the Golan Heights, their disputed land border with Syria, with growing apprehension as Assad’s forces are advancing.
Add in Libya and Yemen, for example, and Obama’s Middle East legacy is not one to be proud of. Like Netanyahu, 2009 promise went unfulfilled. And it is fitting that his final days in office should be marked by petulance and impotence. Obama did not push nearly hard enough for peace when the regional climate might have allowed it. In 2011, he vetoed a similar UN resolution, arguing US-brokered talks would find a way forward. Obama, senior partner in a dysfunctional relationship, allowed Netanyahu to beard him repeatedly, not least in the latter’s self-justificatory 2015 address to Congress. Cautious to the end, even Obama’s UN demarche on Friday was half-hearted. If he really believes settlements are undermining peace, why abstain? Why not go the whole hog and vote to condemn them? And why wait seven years?
What happens next, in the dawning Trump era, is deeply worrying. A continuing, polarising stalemate over Palestinian statehood looks probable. So, too, do expanding settlements on occupied land and possibly annexations, as mooted by Netanyahu’s rightwing allies. How long before the Palestinian response grows violent once again? And how long before Netanyahu induces an impulsive, know-nothing Trump to take joint action against the bigger target, Iran?
Thursday, 13 November 2014
How a decade of misguided war has corroded the idea of Britain
Persistent unease about the legitimacy of military action in Iraq and Afghanistan has left a toxic political legacy
Few would deny that for all the wanton slaughter of the first world war, the conflict acted as a catalyst for profound change. The experience of war on such a scale had an immense and lasting impact on social relations and political ideas. Britain was shielded from the worst of the consequences that affected the continent, not least because victory provided a justification in itself for war, and because British values appeared to have been vindicated.
For over a decade now, Britain has been apparently engaged in another “war for civilisation”. Though different in character and intensity, this engagement is at the same time more protracted, less tangible in its aims, and perhaps more important in its consequences. While the British withdrawal from Afghanistan last month closed a chapter, it did not provide a conclusion. If the British like their wars short and sharp, with a clear cause and a victory they can celebrate, then Iraq, Afghanistan, and its associated interventions, along with the seemingly open-ended commitments they represent, have been a major source of disaffection.
As the interminable course of the Chilcott inquiry suggests, there are a great many outstanding questions on the motivations, means and methods that launched Britain on this most dangerous of political trajectories.
Some years ago, at a meeting in the House of Commons, I suggested that the war in Iraq, and particularly its opaque causes, was leading to a dangerous loss of moral authority abroad that could rebound on domestic politics. A senior Labour MP responded with a confidence that surprised me: Britons don’t vote on issues of foreign policy,she said, and the war in Iraq would have no significant effect. The return of a Labour majority in 2005 no doubt bolstered that view.
Yet the remark also seemed profoundly out of touch with the undercurrent of unease that was building most clearly among the professionals who provide the intellectual and administrative backbone of the British state and wider society. What was most striking about this malaise was that it was affecting people who had hitherto enjoyed a positive relationship with the idea of Britain. This was not some containable peripheral group susceptible to radicalisation; it was something more fundamental to the body politic, something more subtle. Many had put their faith in New Labour and everything Tony Blair’s “cool Britannia” represented. Iraq, emblematic of the broader global war on terror, tested that faith to breaking point. Many have come, slowly but surely, to feel a sense of betrayal.
I invite anyone who finds it difficult to believe that this tear in the moral fabric of the British state has had no repercussions on domestic politics to take a look at developments in Scotland. Far from being marginal to the political process, as some in Westminster like to believe, it might be better to see events in Scotland as a harbinger of things to come should complacency persist and political stupidity take hold.
Among the politicians to seize on the sense of unease was Alex Salmond. While some cautioned against the folly of the war, Salmond – then an MP at Westminster – went for the jugular and attacked Blair directly in a manner calculated to draw the attention of those veering towards disaffection. As the war dragged on and victory seemed ever more remote, Salmond’s attempt to impeach Blair seemed increasingly to strike a chord with the public. Indeed his criticisms have felt only more appropriate with the passage of time as the perception grows that a war intended to make us safe from terrorism has encouraged homegrown radicalisation while the man seen as culpable spends more time making money than making peace.
Salmond’s attacks were matched by an incompetence on the part of New Labour that was breathtaking in its short-sightedness. The Scots are rightly proud of their contributions to the British army, and the army has traditionally recruited well in Scotland, which boasts some of the most famous regiments, including the Black Watch. But they expect some respect in return.
To paraphrase Barack Obama, people aren’t necessarily against wars – just dumb wars; they don’t expect their sons to be sent to fight on a false prospectus. The decision of the then defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, to announce the effective abolition of the Black Watch while the unit on active combat in Iraq went down like a lead balloon. The “military covenant”, now enshrined in law, was found to be sadly wanting. The mood in Scotland was in some ways mirrored by scenes in Wooton Bassett. As affection for the soldiers served and respect for the armed forces have risen, so has contempt for the political leadership behind Britain’s continuing wars. By 2007 the SNP had made big gains, not least in areas traditionally associated with key regiments, allowing the party for the first time to replace Labour as the governing party in Scotland. Salmond was returned as first minister, and relentlessly condemned “illegal wars” in which, he assured his public, an independent Scotland would not have become embroiled. It became a central tenet of the independence campaign that was to follow the SNP landslide at the expense of Labour in 2011.
It was not so much that Britain was broken; it was that its embrace of ill-defined military interventions showed it was morally bankrupt and beyond repair. This view was surprisingly common among professionals, and the SNP courted them with a discipline, some might argue, cynicism that would have made New Labour proud. There is irony in the fact that the SNP is on the brink of disestablishing Labour from its Scottish power base by applying methods, tactics and slogans learned from a Labour electoral machine at its strategic best.
Yet appreciation of the strategic lie of the land is woefully missing from the current political class in Westminster. If the SNP’s rise is anything to go by, then foreign policy and war have consequences that, while not immediate, are all the more profound for it. Among the many inventions credited to the Scots, perhaps the greatest was the idea of Great Britain as a political construct. The September 2014 referendum has shown that among its progenitors there is life yet in the idea.
But the result should never have been as close as it was, and there is no doubt that the idea of Britain was under serious attack – not from without but from within: not only from critics but from pro-union politicians unable effectively to articulate a sense of what Britain means. Britain’s modern wars are by no means the only cause of our difficulties, but their mishandling has arguably tipped the balance from self-criticism to self-loathing. This country still lacks closure. We need to talk about the war.
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