by | 26 February 2007 · 6:10 pm

Rats, Cats, and Mongooses

The January 2007 issue of Pacific Science (subscription required to either Project Muse or BioOne.2) inaugurates a new series of articles on the Biology and Impacts of Pacific Island Invasive Species with A Worldwide Review of Effects of the Small Indian Mongoose, Herpestes javanicus (Carnivora: Herpestidae) by Warren S. T. Hays and Sheila Conant, who explode a few bits of conventional wisdom.

Abstract: The small Indian mongoose, Herpestes javanicus (E. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 1818), was intentionally introduced to at least 45 islands (including 8 in the Pacific) and one continental mainland between 1872 and 1979. This small carnivore is now found on the mainland or islands of Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, South America, and Oceania. In this review we document the impact of this species on native birds, mammals, and herpetofauna in these areas of introduction.

There is a common story in Hawai‘i that small Indian mongooses failed to control rats in areas of introduction because the mongoose is diurnal and rats are primarily nocturnal (Stone et al. 1994). Most published accounts dispute this story, asserting that the small Indian mongoose served as an excellent cane-field ratter (Pemberton 1925, Barnum 1930, Doty 1945), though it was eventually made obsolete by the development of improved techniques of rat poisoning (Doty 1945).

On Trinidad, Urich (1931) found that rats were rare in cane fields, though they had been a major pest before the introduction of the mongoose in the 1870s. By 1882, a government botanist estimated that the mongoose in Jamaica was saving the colony 100,000 pounds sterling (current value: $8.3 million) per year (Espeut 1882). Spencer (1950, cited by Seaman [1952]), however, found that roof rat populations were as high as 50 per hectare in some parts of St. Croix, despite the presence of mongooses. Seaman (1952) wrote that some cane fields on St. Croix still suffered 25% crop loss due to rats and believed that rats were as much a problem as before the introduction of the mongoose.

Another common story is that mongooses drove rats to become arboreal nesters in areas of introduction (Nellis and Everard 1983). On Hawaiian islands with mongooses, Polynesian rats (Rattus exulans) and Norway rats are terrestrial nesters, whereas roof rats are arboreal nesters. This appears to be true on islands with and without mongooses in Hawai‘i and throughout the world (Baldwin et al. 1952). There is, however, evidence that mongooses alter the relative abundance of rats in favor of arboreal roof rats (Walker 1945). In Puerto Rico, Norway rats are common only in mongoose-free urban areas, whereas roof rats are found in mongoose habitat (Pimentel 1955). Hoagland et al. (1989) made a census of populations of mongooses and rats on St. Croix and Jamaica, and found more roof rats and fewer Norway rats in mongoose habitat.

Nellis (1989) stated that mongooses ‘‘often dominate over’’ cats (Felis catus [domesticus]), though the degree to which they limit the abundance of feral cats in areas of sympatry has not been studied. Feral cats and wild mongooses peacefully share food at artificial feeding sites on O‘ahu, feeding within centimeters of each other (W.S.T.H., pers. obs.). More pertinently, on 3 June 1999, while doing a radio-tracking study, one of us (W.S.T.H.) observed two large male mongooses pass together within 3 m of an adult feral cat, in a relatively undisturbed woodlot and apparently by coincidence, without any of the animals involved showing any sign of excitement or stress even while making eye contact. This anecdotal observation suggests that adults of these species can coexist in peaceful sympatry, at least under some conditions, though it is also possible that they may harry or prey upon each other’s young….

In 1883, sugar planters imported the small Indian mongoose from Jamaica to four Hawaiian islands (Hawai‘i, O‘ahu, Maui, and Kaua‘i) and to the Fijian island of Viti Levu (Gorman 1975, Nellis and Everard 1983). For unknown reasons, the crate of mongooses was kicked off the dock at Kaua‘i, and to date the mongoose has apparently not established there, although a dead mongoose was found in Kaua‘i in 1976 (Tomich 1986). Mongooses were later introduced to the Hawaiian island of Moloka‘i and to the Fijian island of Vanua Levu.

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by | 22 February 2007 · 5:44 pm

What Distinguishes Coastal Peoples?

The December 2006 issue of the Journal of World History (Project Muse subscription required) starts off with an interesting article by Michael N. Pearson on littoral society.

Who are the people who live on or near the beach, those who inhabit the coastal zone, not just the beach? They have been called the shore folk, or sea nomads, or members of a littoral society. The place of port cities in littoral society is a matter of dispute. In terms of location they may qualify, though Ashin Das Gupta in his classic book on Surat made an important distinction. “To begin with there was coastal Gujarat, marshy, irregular, often broken by estuaries of the rivers and dotted with tidal flats which were submerged at high tide…. It was peopled by the truly maritime men who fished and who sailed the vessels on which trade depended. The coastal cities usually stood back a little.” On our other two criteria, occupation and culture, definition is more difficult, and things change over time. In premodern times port cities had more of a whiff of ozone about them than is the case today. The occupations of many of the inhabitants were intricately connected to the foreland and hinterland, thus making these people truly littoral. However, their economic functions and influences extended much further than their fellows on the coast, with much more extended forelands and hinterlands. Culturally, the port cities, where populations are more concentrated, are more exposed to external influences, such as élite norms from the inland, or the attentions of seafaring scholars and religious folk. Ibn Battuta traveled around the Indian Ocean, calling at port cities and being recognized for his scholarship. In return he tried to improve the quality of Islam in these places.

One way to separate out littoral from port city is to insist that littoral people live on the coast and seldom travel. Some people in the port cities—sailors, merchants—indeed go to sea and have important maritime experiences, but my concern is with fisherfolk, or people who tend the lighters that go out to meet the big ships. These folk live on shore, but work on the sea: they are very precisely littoral.

Greg Dening wrote, “Beaches are beginnings and endings. They are frontiers and boundaries of islands. For some life forms the division between land and sea is not abrupt but for human beings beaches divide the world between here and there, us and them, good and bad, familiar and strange”—an extravagant claim indeed, even if meant metaphorically. I would argue exactly the opposite, as does Jan Heesterman. He stressed that “The littoral forms a frontier zone that is not there to separate or enclose, but which rather finds its meaning in its permeability.” Braudel wrote evocatively about coastal society, stressing that it was as much land oriented as sea oriented. The life of the coast of the Mediterranean “is linked to the land, its poetry more than half-rural, its sailors may turn peasant with the seasons; it is the sea of vineyards and olive trees just as much as the sea of the long-oared galleys and the round-ships of merchants, and its history can no more be separated from that of the lands surrounding it than the clay can be separated from the hands of the potter who shapes it.”

Several modern scholars have described the shore folk of the Indian Ocean. John Middleton focused on the east African coast. “Part of the coast is the sea: the two cannot be separated. The Swahili are a maritime people and the stretches of lagoon, creek, and open sea beyond the reefs are as much part of their environment as are the coastlands. The sea, rivers, and lagoons are not merely stretches of water but highly productive food resources, divided into territories that are owned by families and protected by spirits just as are stretches of land. The Swahili use the sea as though it were a network of roads.” The very term “Swahili” means “shore folk,” those who live on the edge of the ocean. As Randall L. Pouwels has it, Swahili culture was “a child of its human and physical environment, being neither wholly ‘African’ nor ‘Arab,’ but distinctly ‘coastal,’ the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.”…

Certain languages achieved wide currency, this providing commonality around the shores of the Indian Ocean. In the earlier centuries it was Arabic. There are some five thousand words of Arabic influence in Malay, and more than that in Swahili, and about 80 percent of these are the same in Malay and Swahili, so that we have a “corpus of travelling Arabic words.” Later, a sort of nautical Portuguese and, today, some variant of English, have achieved a quasi-universal status.

Languages know no boundaries, and this also applies to coastal people. For most of history they knew little of political borders. Smuggling was an occupation, not a crime, as was the plunder of ships driven ashore. Dian Murray, an expert on piracy, wrote of a “water world,” where boundaries were indistinct, just like Villiers’s delta region. Robert Antony recently modified Murray slightly, writing of a water world of “shared social, economic, and cultural activities, and patterns that are not easily defined and delimited by ethnic and linguistic differences or by national boundaries.” He and Murray are concerned with the southern China coast, but their findings apply precisely to other coasts.

In a water world, coastal religion is also distinctive. Littoral people, living in a more cosmopolitan environment than those inland, are more likely to convert. In the case of the Indian Ocean, the cosmopolitan, international aspect of Islam has often been cited as a prime motivation for conversion, and while this applied most strongly in the port cities, it also was evident on the coasts between them. Coastal people especially found their indigenous beliefs, localized and very specific, to be inadequate as their world expanded. When they were exposed to a universal faith—Islam as exemplified by visitors from the north—the attraction was obvious, and the results can be seen all over the Indian Ocean world from the early modern period onward. There were and are widespread Islamic religious connections around the coasts. In Zanzibar one group uses a certificate of authenticity and authority issued in Indonesia. In Mayotte, off Madagascar, South Asian Islamic reformers are active. A devotional text in Indonesia was probably originally written in Arabic, either in the Middle East or in Indonesia itself, and is now available in Javanese and Acehinese. In Zanzibar Islamic books, including Qur’ans, come from Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India, and Pakistan.

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by | 21 February 2007 · 9:13 pm

Gaddis on the Able Archer Missile Crisis, 1980s

Reagan was deeply committed to SDI [Strategic Defense Initiative]: it was not a bargaining chip to give up in future negotiations. That did not preclude, though, using it as a bluff: the United States was years, even decades, away from developing a missile defense capability, but Reagan’s speech persuaded the increasingly frightened Soviet leaders that this was about to happen. They were convinced, Dobrynin recalled, “that the great technological potential of the United States had scored again and treated Reagan’s statement as a real threat.” Having exhausted their country by catching up in offensive missiles, they suddenly faced a new round of competition demanding skills they had no hope of mastering. And the Americans seemed not even to have broken into a sweat.

The reaction, in the Kremlin, approached panic. Andropov had concluded, while still head of the K.G.B., that the new administration in Washington might be planning a surprise attack on the Soviet Union. “Reagan is unpredictable,” he warned. “You should expect anything from him.” There followed a two-year intelligence alert, with agents throughout the world ordered to look for evidence that such preparations were under way. The tension became so great that when a South Korean airliner accidentally strayed into Soviet airspace over Sakhalin on September 1, 1983, the military authorities in Moscow assumed the worst and ordered it shot down, killing 269 civilians, 63 of them Americans. Unwilling to admit the mistake, Andropov maintained that the incident had been a “sophisticated provocation organized by the U.S. special services.”

Then something even scarier happened that attracted no public notice. The United States and its NATO allies had for years carried out fall military exercises, but the ones that took place in November—designated “Able Archer 83″—involved a higher level of leadership participation than was usual. The Soviet intelligence agencies kept a close watch on these maneuvers, and their reports caused Andropov and his top aides to conclude—briefly—that a nuclear attack was imminent. It was probably the most dangerous moment since the Cuban missile crisis, and yet no one in Washington knew of it until a well-placed spy in the K.G.B.’s London headquarters alerted British intelligence, which passed the information along to the Americans.

That definitely got Reagan’s attention. Long worried about the danger of a nuclear war, the president had already initiated a series of quiet contacts with Soviet officials—mostly unreciprocated—aimed at defusing tensions. The Able Archer crisis convinced him that he had pushed the Russians far enough, that it was time for another speech. It came at the beginning of Orwell’s fateful year, on January 16, 1984, but Big Brother was nowhere to be seen. Instead, in lines only he could have composed, Reagan suggested placing the Soviet-American relationship in the capably reassuring hands of Jim and Sally and Ivan and Anya. One White House staffer, puzzled by the hand-written addendum to the prepared text, exclaimed a bit too loudly: “Who wrote this shit?”

Once again, the old actor’s timing was excellent. Andropov died the following month, to be succeeded by Konstantin Chernenko, an enfeebled geriatric so zombie-like as to be beyond assessing intelligence reports, alarming or not. Having failed to prevent the NATO missile deployments, Foreign Minister Gromyko soon grudgingly agreed to resume arms control negotiations. Meanwhile Reagan was running for re-election as both a hawk and a dove: in November he trounced his Democratic opponent, Walter Mondale. And when Chernenko died in March, 1985, at the age of seventy-four, it seemed an all-too-literal validation of Reagan’s predictions about “last pages” and historical “ash-heaps.” Seventy-four himself at the time, the president had another line ready: “How am I supposed to get anyplace with the Russians, if they keep dying on me?”

SOURCE: The Cold War: A New History, by John Lewis Gaddis (Penguin, 2005), pp. 227-228

That was the (American) academic year I spent in Ceauşescu’s Romania, 1983–84.

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by | 20 February 2007 · 8:54 pm

Debunking the Self-Esteem Industry

The latest issue of New York Magazine reports on new research that not only debunks the self-esteem mania that prevails in Western educational theory, but suggests why the constant criticism that prevails in much Asian teaching and learning seems to get better results.

Since the 1969 publication of The Psychology of Self-Esteem, in which Nathaniel Branden opined that self-esteem was the single most important facet of a person, the belief that one must do whatever he can to achieve positive self-esteem has become a movement with broad societal effects. Anything potentially damaging to kids’ self-esteem was axed. Competitions were frowned upon. Soccer coaches stopped counting goals and handed out trophies to everyone. Teachers threw out their red pencils. Criticism was replaced with ubiquitous, even undeserved, praise.

[Carol] Dweck and [Lisa] Blackwell’s work is part of a larger academic challenge to one of the self-esteem movement’s key tenets: that praise, self-esteem, and performance rise and fall together. From 1970 to 2000, there were over 15,000 scholarly articles written on self-esteem and its relationship to everything—from sex to career advancement. But results were often contradictory or inconclusive. So in 2003 the Association for Psychological Science asked Dr. Roy Baumeister, then a leading proponent of self-esteem, to review this literature. His team concluded that self-esteem was polluted with flawed science. Only 200 of those 15,000 studies met their rigorous standards.

After reviewing those 200 studies, Baumeister concluded that having high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career achievement. It didn’t even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive, violent people happen to think very highly of themselves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to make up for low self-esteem.) At the time, Baumeister was quoted as saying that his findings were “the biggest disappointment of my career.”

Now he’s on Dweck’s side of the argument, and his work is going in a similar direction: He will soon publish an article showing that for college students on the verge of failing in class, esteem-building praise causes their grades to sink further. Baumeister has come to believe the continued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents’ pride in their children’s achievements: It’s so strong that “when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves.”…

Psychologist Wulf-Uwe Meyer, a pioneer in the field, conducted a series of studies where children watched other students receive praise. According to Meyer’s findings, by the age of 12, children believe that earning praise from a teacher is not a sign you did well—it’s actually a sign you lack ability and the teacher thinks you need extra encouragement. And teens, Meyer found, discounted praise to such an extent that they believed it’s a teacher’s criticism—not praise at all—that really conveys a positive belief in a student’s aptitude.

In the opinion of cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham, a teacher who praises a child may be unwittingly sending the message that the student reached the limit of his innate ability, while a teacher who criticizes a pupil conveys the message that he can improve his performance even further.

via Arts & Letters Daily

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by | 20 February 2007 · 6:20 pm

Two Hawaiian Canoes Reach Micronesia

Today’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin reports that two Polynesian voyaging canoes have made landfall in Micronesia.

MAJURO, Marshall Islands » To the sounds of ukuleles and a conch shell, the Hawaiian double-hulled canoes Hokule’a and Alingano Maisu arrived at a dock here today, completing their 2,200-mile journey from Hawaii to Micronesia.

The vessels are on a pilgrimage to Satawal atoll to deliver the Alingano Maisu to renowned navigator Mau Piailug, who taught Pacific way-finding to native Hawaiians and sparked a renaissance in the building of voyaging canoes in the Pacific….

The welcome in Majuro was a celebration of two Pacific cultures that have kept sailing traditions alive, and of their ancient mariners who developed ocean-voyaging methods centuries before Westerners had nautical navigation equipment to cross vast oceans.

Majuro islander Alson Kelon, who escorted the vessels into port, said he felt proud to be a Micronesian and honored to support the voyaging tradition of his ancestors.

Kelon said he helped to found a canoe sailing group in Majuro after witnessing the Hokule’a make its first voyage from Hawaii to Tahiti in 1976.

He said the teaching traditional voyaging integrates all kinds of learning, including mathematics, science, oceanography, astronomy, English and leadership….

The late Big Island canoe builder Clay Bertelmann promised to deliver a double-hulled canoe to Mau about five years ago, and his family has continued to fulfill the promise….

Mau’s son Sesario said his father’s health is waning.

“The main thing is to get it there while he’s still around,” he said.

Sesario said his family has to discuss what to do with the Alingano Maisu, but he hopes that it will be used to carry on his father’s work teaching way-finding navigation.

Sesario, a police officer in Yap, said he would like to use the canoe as a way to reach youths at risk of becoming criminals.

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by | 19 February 2007 · 7:57 pm

Origins of the South Pacific Coastwatching Network

The idea for a coast watching network originated in the year 1919, beginning as a defensive measure to protect the long, and virtually unprotected, coastline of Australia. At that time, the country’s population was concentrated primarily in the southeast section of the continent; in the event of war, an enemy could launch a surprise air attack on this area by crossing a wide expanse of desolate territory. To counter this threat, a plan was developed to use civilian spotters as coast watchers. They were equipped with telegraph and radio sets and were expected to act as an early warning system to report unidentified aircraft.

In September 1939, Lieutenant Commander Eric Feldt, Royal Australian Navy, was stationed at Port Moresby, New Guinea, and placed in charge of intelligence gathering operations. The coast watching organization comprised about 800 people—the majority positioned along the Australian shore. A Solomon Islands screen, to the north, consisted of a few hundred plantation owners and managers. This group of spotters was spread very thin along the coasts of Buka, Bougainville, New Georgia, and other islands of the Solomons chain.

Lieutenant Commander Feldt gave his Solomon Islands watchers the code name FERDINAND, after the storybook character Ferdinand the bull, who preferred to sit under a tree and smell the flowers rather than fight. Although FERDINAND comprised a small group of spotters, its intelligence-gathering network covered more than a half million square miles of islands and ocean. The nickname not only suited this band of observers but also reminded them of their assignment as lookouts, not fighters. During World War II, however, there were many times when the Solomon Islands coast watchers, with their backs to the wall, were forced to battle the Japanese.

SOURCE: Coast Watching in WWII: Operations against the Japanese in the Solomon Islands, 1941–43, by A. B. Feuer (Stackpole, 2006), pp. xvii–xviii

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by | 19 February 2007 · 6:16 pm

Malabari’s Impressions of Englishwomen, 1893

What strikes you most about Englishwomen is their look of health, strength, elasticity, all proclaiming a freedom of mind, to begin with. How they walk, and talk, and carry themselves generally! How they rush in and out, saying good-bye with the right hand turned towards themselves, meaning what our women in India always say, “vehela aujo,” come back soon! How they kiss one another, and offer their children, even their cats and dogs to be kissed by the friends departing! Does this last ceremony show heart-hunger, or is it affectation? Here they are, half a dozen of them rushing into my omnibus (the Lord have mercy on an unprotected orphan!) squeezing themselves into their seats. I am between two of the prettiest and quietest, feeling a strange discomfort. As the bus hobbles along, I feel my fair neighbours knocking against me every moment. They do not seem to mind it at all; it is a matter of course. Why, then, should I cry out against the inevitable? Evil to him who evil thinks. We are all too busy here, reading the paper, chatting about the weather, minding our packages and our toes. Further, I find both my neighbours resting their parasols between them and me on either side. A straw shows how the breeze blows. The breeze that I have just discovered is very refreshing to my soul. I have also noted that respectable Englishwomen rather avoid entering a carriage occupied by men. It is mainly through such experience that I am learning to take a charitable view of ladies sitting on the knees of gentlemen, or gentlemen on the knees of ladies, when three of a family happen to be in one hansom, or more than ten in a railway carriage. These sights, queer as they are, do not offend me now. They would be an eyesore amongst our own people. I myself could hardly bear them at first; but that is no reason why I should judge others in such a matter, before I am well equipped to form a judgment.

I have said above that the average Englishwoman strikes me most by her healthy looks and active habits. But, as usual, there is another side to this picture. One often meets with the anaemic and the consumptive, victims of overwork, starvation, or dissipation, in themselves or their parents. How pathetic is the sight of one of these girls, moving softly like a ghost, with a frame so fragile as to be driven by the wind behind, with a transparent skin and glassy eyes, exhausted by the effort to creep on to the platform, and going directly to sleep in the carriage, with the delicate little mouth half open, as if to allow the breath of life to ebb out without a struggle! It fills me with grief to watch this fair slight being as if in the process of dissolution. And yet I sit there, fascinated by her presence, unmindful of time or distance.

SOURCE: “Malabari: A Love-Hate Affair with the British,” in Other Routes: 1500 Years of African and Asian Travel Writing, edited by Tabish Khair, Martin Leer, Justin D. Edwards, and Hanna Ziadesh (Indiana U. Press, 2005), pp. 374-375

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by | 18 February 2007 · 5:42 pm

Hidden Turning Points in the Cold War, 1970s

Most experts would probably have agreed that [the global balance of power] had been tilting in Moscow’s favor through most of the 1970s. The United States had acknowledged strategic parity with the Soviet Union in SALT I, while that country had claimed the right, through the Brezhnev Doctrine, to resist all challenges to Marxism-Leninism wherever they might occur. Despite Kissinger’s success in excluding the Russians from the Egyptian-Israeli peace negotiations, the 1973 war had triggered an Arab oil embargo, followed by price increases that would stagger western economies for the rest of the decade. Meanwhile the U.S.S.R., a major oil exporter, was raking in huge profits. That made it possible to hold military spending steady as a percentage of gross national product during the 1970s, perhaps even to increase it—at a time when the equivalent United States budget, for reasons relating to both economics and politics, was being cut in half.

Americans seemed mired in endless arguments with themselves, first over the Vietnam War, then Watergate, then, during Carter’s presidency, over charges that he had failed to protect important allies like the Shah of Iran or Anastasio Somoza, the Nicaraguan dictator whose government fell to the Marxist Sandinistas in the summer of 1979. The low point came in November of that year when Iranians invaded the United States embassy in Teheran, taking several dozen diplomats and military guards hostage. This humiliation, closely followed by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan a few weeks later, made it seem as though Washington was on the defensive everywhere, and Moscow was on a roll. Kissinger captured the prevailing pessimism when he acknowledged in the first volume of his memoirs, published that year, that “our relative position was bound to decline as the USSR recovered from World War II. Our military and diplomatic position was never more favorable than at the very beginning of the containment policy in the late 1940s.”

In this instance, though, Kissinger’s shrewdness as a historian deserted him. For it has long since been clear—and should have been clearer at the time—that the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies were on the path to decline, and that detente was concealing their difficulties. One hint of this came as early as March, 1970, when in the spirit of Ostpolitik the East German authorities invited West German Chancellor Brandt to visit Erfurt, unwisely giving him a hotel room with a window overlooking a public square. To their intense embarrassment, hundreds of East Germans gathered under it to cheer their visitor: “[T]he preparation for the Erfurt meeting,” party officials admitted, “was not fully recognized as a key component in the class conflict between socialism and imperialism.”

More serious signs of discontent arose in Poland the following December, when protests over food prices led the army to fire on and kill dozens of striking workers in Gdansk and Gdynia. Significantly, this crisis did not lead Moscow to invoke the Brezhnev Doctrine: instead Soviet leaders ordered an increase in the production of consumer goods—and they approved imports of food and technology from Western Europe and the United States. This made stability in the region contingent not on the use of military force, but rather on the willingness of capitalists to extend credit, a striking vulnerability for Marxist-Leninist regimes.

Nor was the oil windfall without its downside. The Soviet Union chose to pass along price increases to the Eastern Europeans: this led to a doubling of their oil costs within a year. While not as dramatic as the increases the West faced, the unanticipated expenses undercut the improvements in living standards Moscow had hoped to achieve. Meanwhile, swelling oil revenues were diminishing incentives for Soviet planners to make their own economy more productive. It was no source of strength for the U.S.S.R. to be sustaining a defense burden that may well have been three times that of the United States by the end of the 1970s, when its gross domestic product was only about one-sixth the size of its American counterpart. “[W]e were arming ourselves like addicts,” Arbatov recalled, “without any apparent political need.” And oil fueled the addiction.

From this perspective, then, the Soviet Union’s support for Marxist revolutionaries in Africa, its SS-20 deployment, and its invasion of Afghanistan look less like a coordinated strategy to shift the global balance of power and more like the absence of any strategy at all. For what kind of logic assumes the permanence of unexpected windfalls? What kind of regime provokes those upon whom it has become economically dependent? What kind of leadership, for that matter, commits itself to the defense of human rights—as at Helsinki in 1975—but then is surprised when its own citizens claim such rights? The U.S.S.R. under Brezhnev’s faltering rule had become incapable of performing the most fundamental task of any effective strategy: the efficient use of available means to accomplish chosen ends. That left the field open for leaders elsewhere who were capable of such things.

SOURCE: The Cold War: A New History, by John Lewis Gaddis (Penguin, 2005), pp. 212-214

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by | 17 February 2007 · 1:32 pm

Pamuk on the Conquest of Istanbul

You can often tell whether you’re standing in the East or in the West, just by the way people refer to certain historical events. For Westerners, May 29, 1453, is the Fall of Constantinople, while for Easterners it’s the Conquest of Istanbul. Years later, when my wife was studying at Columbia University, she used the word conquest in an exam and her American professor accused her of nationalism. In fact, she’d used the word only because she was taught to use it as a Turkish lycée student; because her mother was of Russian extraction, it could be said that her sympathies were more with the orthodox Christians. Or perhaps she saw it neither as a fall nor a conquest and felt more like an unlucky hostage caught between two worlds that offered no choice but to be Muslim or Christian.

It was westernization and Turkish nationalism that prompted Istanbul to begin celebrating the conquest. At the beginning of the twentieth century, only half the city’s population was Muslim, and most of the non-Muslim inhabitants were descendents of Byzantine Greeks. When I was a child, the view among the city’s more vocal nationalists was that anyone who so much as used the name Constantinople was an undesirable alien with irredentist dreams of the day when the Greeks, who had been the city’s first masters would return to chase away the Turks, who had occupied it for five hundred years—or, at the very least, turn us into second-class citizens. It was the nationalists, then, who insisted on the word conquest. By contrast, many Ottomans were content to call their city Constantinople.

Even in my own time, Turks committed to the idea of a westernized republic were wary of making too much of the conquest. Neither President Celal Bayar nor Prime Minister Adnan Menderes attended the 500th anniversary ceremony in 1953; although it had been many years in the planning, it was decided at the last moment that to do so might offend the Greeks and Turkey’s western allies. The Cold War had just begun, and Turkey, a member of NATO, did not wish to remind the world about the conquest. It was, however, three years later that the Turkish state deliberately provoked what you might call “conquest fever” by allowing mobs to rampage through the city, plundering the property of Greeks and other minorities. A number of churches were destroyed during the riots and a number of priests were murdered, so there are many echoes of the cruelties western historians describe in accounts of the “fall” of Constantinople. In fact, both the Turkish and the Greek states have been guilty of treating their respective minorities as hostages to geopolitics, and that is why more Greeks have left Istanbul over the past fifty years than in the fifty years following 1453.

In 1955 the British left Cyprus, and as Greece was preparing to take over the entire island, an agent of the Turkish secret service threw a bomb into the house where Atatürk was born in the Greek city of Salonika. After Istanbul’s newspapers had spread the news in a special edition exaggerating the incident, mobs hostile to the city’s non-Muslim inhabitants gathered in Taksim Square, and after they had burned, destroyed, and plundered all those shops my mother and I had visited in Beyoğlu, they spent the rest of the night doing the same in other parts of the city.

The bands of rioters were most violent and caused greatest terror in neighborhoods like Ortaköy, Balıklı, Samatya, and Fener, where the concentration of Greeks was greatest; not only did they sack and burn little Greek groceries and dairy shops, they broke into houses to rape Greek and Armenian women. So it is not unreasonable to say that the rioters were as merciless as the soldiers who sacked the city after it fell to Mehmet the Conqueror. It later emerged that the organizers of this riot—whose terror raged for two days and made the city more hellish than the worst orientalist nightmares—had the state’s support and had pillaged the city with its blessing.

So for that entire night, every non-Muslim who dared walk the streets of the city risked being lynched; the next morning the shops of Beyoğlu stood in ruins, their windows smashed, their doors kicked in, their wares either plundered or gleefully destroyed.

SOURCE: Istanbul: Memories and the City, by Orhan Pamuk (Vintage, 2006), pp. 172-173

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by | 17 February 2007 · 11:46 am

Gaddis on Mao vs. Khrushchev

The Americans’ difficulties in dealing with de Gaulle … paled in comparison to those Khrushchev encountered in trying to manage Mao Zedong. The sources of Sino-Soviet tension lay, first, in the long history of hostility between Russia and China, which commitment to a common ideology had only partially overcome: Khrushchev and Mao had all the instincts and prejudices of nationalists, however much they might be communists. Stalin’s legacy also posed problems. Mao had defended the dead dictator when Khrushchev attacked him in 1956, but the Chinese leader also cultivated—and frequently displayed—his memory of each of Stalin’s slights, affronts, or insults. It was as if Stalin had become a tool for Mao, to be used when necessary to bolster his own authority, but also to be rejected when required to invoke the dangers of Soviet hegemony. At the same time, Mao treated Khrushchev as a superficial upstart, neglecting no opportunity to confound him with petty humiliations, cryptic pronouncements, and veiled provocations. Khrushchev could “never be sure what Mao meant…. I believed in him and he was playing with me.”

Mao did so, at least in part, because picking fights abroad—whether with adversaries or allies—was a way to maintain unity at home, a major priority as he launched the Great Leap Forward. That had been one of the reasons for the second offshore island crisis, which had brought China to the brink of war with the United States during the summer of 1958. But Mao had already by then picked a separate fight with the Soviet Union. The Russians had made the mistake of proposing the construction of a long-wave radio station on the China coast, together with the establishment of a joint Sino-Soviet submarine flotilla. Mao responded furiously. “You never trust the Chinese!” he complained to the Soviet ambassador. Moscow might as well be demanding joint ownership of “our army, navy, air force, industry, agriculture, culture, education…. With a few atomic bombs, you think you are in a position to control us.”

When Khrushchev hastened to Beijing to try to smooth things over, Mao accused him of having lost his revolutionary edge. “[W]e obviously have the advantage over our enemies,” Mao told him, having already put the imperfectly aquatic Khrushchev at a disadvantage by receiving him in a swimming pool. “All you have to do is provoke the Americans into military action, and I’ll give you as many divisions as you need to crush them.” Struggling to remain afloat, Khrushchev tried to explain “that one or two missiles could turn all the divisions in China to dust.” But Mao “wouldn’t even listen to my arguments and obviously regarded me as a coward.”

Defying the logic of balancing power within the international system, Mao sought a different kind of equilibrium: a world filled with danger, whether from the United States or the Soviet Union or both, could minimize the risk that rivals within China might challenge his rule. The strategy succeeded brilliantly. Despite a degree of mismanagement unparalleled in modern history—if such a euphemism can characterize policies that caused so many of his countrymen to starve to death during the Great Leap Forward—Mao survived as China’s “great helmsman.” What did not survive was the Sino-Soviet alliance, which had, as far as Mao was concerned, outlived its usefulness. Khrushchev, fearing the implications, tried desperately to reconstitute it right up to the moment he was deposed in 1964, despite repeated insults, rebuffs, and even instances of deliberate sabotage from Mao. But in the end even he had to admit—revealingly—that “it was getting harder and harder to view China through the eager and innocent eyes of a child.”

How was it, then, that de Gaulle and Mao, the leaders of medium powers, were able to treat the superpowers in this way? Why were the traditional forms of power itself—military strength, economic capacity, geographical reach—so useless in this situation? Part of the answer has to do with the new kind of power balancing that was taking place here: de Gaulle’s strategy of “defense in all directions” was not that different from Mao’s of giving offense in all directions. Both saw in the defiance of external authority a way to enhance their own internal legitimacy. Both sought to rebuild national self-esteem: that required, they believed, the thumbing of noses, even the biting of hands that had previously provided food and other forms of sustenance.

SOURCE: The Cold War: A New History, by John Lewis Gaddis (Penguin, 2005), pp. 140-142

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