ON THE BOARDWALK IN ATLANTIC CITY, THE THOUGHTS AND EMOTIONS OF A FIFTIETH HIGH SCHOOL REUNION

I recently attended my fiftieth high school reunion in Atlantic City, the casino gambling center on the New Jersey coast. It was the first high school reunion that I attended, and what a mixture of emotions, thoughts and memories it awakened. I had had many reasons for not attending a high school reunion before, and one of them was that I saw myself as too busy earning a living to take the time to go. Another reason was that I had some less than happy memories of my time as a teenager in Atlantic City, many of which had nothing to do with high school per se.

By no means were all my thoughts negative, however. In fact wherever I lived in the ensuing years following graduation, I always felt some nostalgia for Atlantic City. As a lover of the sea and as a lover of performance and show business all my life, I was proud of my Atlantic City roots and was never hesitant to tell people about it.

Steel Pier, Quite a Phenomenon

One of the Atlantic City facts of my life that I have always been very quick to tell people about was my four summers working on Steel Pier in the food services department, known then as “the refreshment stands.” Back then, Steel Pier was quite a phenomenon—a huge entertainment complex that extended a half mile out to sea. It included three large theaters, one of them a vaudeville house presenting some of the best known performers of the day, the second a vaudeville-style venue for performing kids, and the third a first run movie theater.

Near the end of the pier was a huge dance hall where the best known big bands of the day could be heard and danced to. And at the very end was the water circus. Here divers demonstrated a bevy of Olympic style maneuvers as they plunged into the ocean, and here the famous diving horse made the audience gasp as it culminated every show with a jump into a large tank of water.

Business Reversal, A Wrenching Affair

My summers on Steel Pier then couldn’t help but form the basis of many of my happiest Atlantic City memories, but the circumstances of my family’s decision to relocate from Philadelphia just as I was about to start high school had a dark side. At the start of the 1950s, my father had suffered a business reversal, a wrenching affair that involved two other families—his in-laws, that is, my maternal grandparents, and the family of my mother’s sister, that is, my aunt.

As the major investors in the failed business, my grandparents took a severe beating. In their late fifties with their retirement savings severely depleted, they now needed some way to survive financially. They decided to take their remaining funds and to invest in a business they knew well from their earlier lives raising a family in a coal mining town in central Pennsylvania. They bought a small building in Ventnor, an Atlantic City suburb, took up residence in the apartment on the second floor, and opened a dress shop on the first.

In Poor Shape Financially

It was no accident that they had found their way to the Atlantic City area. One of my grandmother’s sisters, Rose Segal, had been a long time resident of Ventnor and had raised a family there.

My father, meanwhile, was having trouble getting a new career going in Philadelphia. Financially we were in poor shape. My mother saw my grandparents’ business as a possible salvation for our family. She would help her parents run the store in return for a small salary, and my father would start some kind of business of his own in Atlantic City. At the time, he told me that he was thinking of opening a hardware store. However, the reality was that he was not happy at all about leaving Philadelphia, and he would continue to complain about our having made the move for many years to come.

Best Job of a Lifetime

We found a house in Margate, another suburb, adjoining the marsh and the then undeveloped bayside, and as I have previously written, I quickly got swept up in the life of the bay including boat building with purloined house lumber. Meanwhile my father made no serious attempt to find work in Atlantic City, not that I could see anyway. Not too long after the move took place, as luck would have it, he would land the best job he would ever have in his life—as the Philadelphia-based East Coast manufacturer’s representative for a Minnesota manufacture of appliances, of which the home freezer was to be his hottest product.

Hence in 1954 I started the ninth grade at Atlantic City High School as an Atlantic City newcomer with a mother helping to run a dress shop in Ventnor and a father living five out of seven days a week in a combination office and apartment in Philadelphia. When my parents would get together in the house in Margate on weekends, the conversation would inevitably turn to the big issue in their lives. This was always the grist for my parents’ anger mill, especially my father’s, and he had a caldron of a temper.

Mother Holds Her Ground

My father would make clear how unhappy he was that we had made the move, and not backing down one iota my mother would make clear that she could not and would not abandon her parents and the dress shop in Ventnor.

By now, both of my grandparents were ailing, especially my grandfather who suffered from diabetes and a weak heart. And, it must be quickly added, that guilt over the business failure and the substantial financial loss incurred by my grandparents was still upper most in my mother’s mind.

No Unqualified Welcome

This then was the baggage I brought with me when I started Atlantic City High School. The social situation I found there is what I have come to believe was fairly typical. No, I was not given an unqualified welcome, but if I had expected that I would have been very naïve. I hadn’t gone to junior high or elementary school with any of these kids. I was an unknown. Given that fact, it is amazing that I did as well as I did socially.

First of all I was fortunate to have been accepted as a pledge by one of the two Jewish high school fraternities. Exactly how this came about is a mystery to me now. I did know, but I’ve long since forgotten the exact circumstances. However, it must have had something to do with family connections through my Great Aunt Rose, who was always “Aunt Rosie” to me.

Rough Pledge Experience

Through the fraternity, I had access to friendships and a social life, but first I had to get through my pledge year, which proved a rough time, particularly one less than wonderful hazing experience. This hazing experience left its scars, the worst of which were the emotional ones. These scars had everything to do with my decision not to join a fraternity when I went on to college.

I am speculating, but I now think that my less than happy experience as a pledge had to do not just with my newcomer status, but with the fact that I did not live up to expectation among certain segments of the fraternity. As a very tall person, I was expected to be an accomplished athlete, and in this regard I was a disappointment. I have always loved athletics as a participant as well as a spectator, but especially with regard to the ball sports where hand-eye coordination is important I just never measured up to my own or many others’ expectations.

Reality of Cliques and In-Groups

That said, I have to quickly point out that there is probably no secondary level school in the country and probably the world that does not have its cliques and in-groups. Atlantic City High School was no worse than any other secondary school in this respect and probably not as bad as many. Also I have to say that as a shy person I did not do myself any good. A more socially aggressive person might have been able to break through more barriers more quickly than I did.

Though barriers existed, by no means did I feel overly circumscribed. I remember many happy Friday and Saturday evenings, that is, once we got our licenses, driving through town with my high school friends and singing the latest hit songs at the top of our lungs. Singing was something I always enjoyed doing and continue to enjoy to this day. These drives would often include stops at a great pizza joint in the inlet called Maria’s and later stops at a Chinese restaurant in the center of the city where we would finish out the night with a succulent appetizer like roasted, bright red Sha-shu.

Great Swimming Adventure

During summer nights, one of my friends and I found a way to work off the excess energy in our teenage bodies, energy that remained despite our seven-day-per-week day jobs. We’d go swimming from his house on a lagoon in Margate. Our most ambitious feat involved swimming to the Ocean City bridge, a distance of over a mile in each direction. Swimming remains to this day my favorite form of physical exercise--swimming and ballroom dancing, that is.

And so these are the memories that I brought with me to my fiftieth reunion, held at the huge casino resort Trump Taj Mahal, a complex right across the Boardwalk from what remains of the Steel Pier, now strictly an amusement pier and maybe a third of the size of the original. As I rubbed shoulders with my classmates over a period of two days—about half of the original class appeared to have made it, half of a class that was not small by any measure--I was at first struck with feelings of self doubt. It’s a complex of feelings that I’m sure is not unique to me, a feeling that is bound to be awakened by something as momentous as a fiftieth reunion in almost everyone.

The Awful Reunion Comparisons

How did my life compare with that of my classmates? Had I come anywhere close in 50 years to accomplishing what some of them had accomplished? Toughest thought of all, had I come anywhere close to measuring up to my own expectations for myself? Also there were the memories of the classmates who hadn’t survived, who were taken from us much too early.

Soon, thank goodness, a more positive emotion took over. That thought went something like this: “Damn it, you enjoy this thing called a reunion. Fifty years---it is an amazing milestone.” That was followed by still more good feelings: “What a great group of people. I’m only sorry now that I didn’t make more of an effort to get to know more of them back then and then to stay in touch, but at least I’m starting to make up for it now.” Let us hope all of us have many more good years ahead and many more happy reunions.

As I say, one of life’s amazing milestones—a fiftieth high school reunion.

To communicate with the author, write to Stephen.saft@gmail.com.

Copyright © 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft

SEEKING JUSTICE? THEN TRY TO SEE THE BIG PICTURE AND RISE ABOVE ANGER AND HATRED

Once again Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has proven himself extremely adept at making people’s blood boil. His recent visit to New York with its speaking engagements at the United Nations and at Columbia University is the latest example. The overt purpose of this exercise in political theatrics was to gain sympathy for Iran’s insistence on an unrestrictive nuclear program, including the development of nuclear weapons, an idea that is an anathema in the U.S., Israel and in many other parts of the world.

As several commentators have stated, the visit was a flamboyantly graceless effort to lay claim for Iran and by extension for Ahmadinejad himself to a role of importance on the world stage. It’s also no big stretch to see it as Iran’s attempt to convince world opinion that its nuclear program could not possible have any hostile intent and to appeal for sympathy against would-be attackers of that program. How could anyone attack such a principled nation, Ahmadinejad seems to be saying by his presence, whether Iran is developing hydrogen bombs or sending arms to Iraq to be used against the U.S. military or to Hizballah in Lebanon?

Inflammatory Position on Israel

The main reason that Ahmadinejad is such a disturber of the peace, of course, has to do with his position on Israel. In fact, his pronouncement on Israel has frequently been translated into the assertion that Israel “should be wiped off the map.” As an anti-Israel extremist, Ahmadinejad has further stirred up emotion by aligning himself with those who deny that the holocaust ever took place, calling it “a fabricated legend” in a December 2005 telecast, and then a year later hosting a two-day conference of holocaust deniers.

Questioned in New York about his stands on both Israel and its right to exist and the holocaust, Ahmadinejad responded with a rhetorical question. “Why is it that the Palestinian people are paying the price for an event that they had nothing to do with?” he asked. His past denial of the holocaust notwithstanding, he is telling us that his problem with it now is that, in his opinion, it has been used as a justification for, first of all, the establishment of the state of Israel and, second, as justification for the alleged mistreatment of the Palestinians.

Maddening, Short-Circuited Logic

This linkage of these different assertions makes for a maddening, short-circuited exercise in logic and is not all that dissimilar to the line I have heard from others, particularly from some of those on the left of the Israel-Palestinian issue. Those who see the establishment of Israel, whether with approval or disapproval, only as pay back for the holocaust are drastically undervaluing the reason the nation of Israel came into being, and they play into the hands of the Ahmadinejads of the world and their sinister intent.

As I have previously said in this forum, establishment of the state of Israel was the right thing to do in 1948 for many reasons, of which making a homeland for abused and dispossessed people was only one. However, seeing the establishment of Israel as the be-all and the end-all of a comprehensive verdict in the name of justice for the lost Jews of Europe is entirely unsatisfying. Israel as a nation came into being for a whole slew of reasons--religious, historic, political, economic, social—that is, for reasons as broad and diverse as the founding of the United States of America itself.

Separate Nation in Europe

Had an attempt to mete out justice for the atrocities of World War II been truly made in the years immediately following the war, then what we might have seen would have involved creation for the survivors of a protected area, that is, an independent country, within the area in proximity to their home and the home of generation after generation of their ancestors. I speak of creation of a separate nation in Europe as well as Israel.

Such a protected area in Europe should have been taken from the country whose government, military establishment and people were the perpetrators of the atrocities called the holocaust, that is, from Germany.

That said, it must be acknowledged that the concept of justice when applied in a historic and political context is never clear cut and free of Byzantine complexities. What we have to hope for is that people of good will and compassion on all sides of the issue—people who have risen above anger and hatred, however understandable—will prevail.

To communicate with the author, write Stephen.saft@gmail.com.

Copyright (c ) 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft

TO BE ALIVE IS TO KNOW DISAPPOINTMENT

Periodically I think about people who have disappointed me, and people that I have disappointed. I wish disappointment were not so common an occurrence in life, but the fact is it is. The older we get, the more disappointments we accumulate. We are always disappointing each other, and in turn we are always being disappointed by others. In some cases, the disappointment we feel is unreasonable. In other cases it is eminently warranted from whatever the perspective.

To understand disappointment, we have to understand another important emotion—expectation. We come into most of our relationships with high expectation, and sometimes our expectations exceed good sense. We are expecting more than the other can possibly deliver.

Often our attitudes toward our parents include such unrealistic expectations. We expect our parents to be perfect. Because they are human beings, perfect is something they cannot be. Even their deaths are sometimes experienced as a disappointment. We find it hard to get over what we see as their abandonment of us.

High Expectations in Romantic Involvements

High expectation and even unrealistic expectations are also true in our love relations, that is, in our romantic involvements. We do not pursue a romantic relationship with the assumption that we will be mistreated or hurt in the process, nor do we pursue such a relationship with the intention of hurting the other. We enter into such relationships full of optimism. Sometimes, however, mistreatment is exactly the result, and the cause may be an obsession we dwell on for the rest of our lives.

Workplace: Source of Much Disappointment

In the last 30 to 40 years the workplace has become a source of many of the disappointments in most of our lives. This is partly the result of the fact that the workplace is not an isolated entity, but part of a dynamic known as the economy. As the economy has become more and more global in nature, we may experience in our individual workplaces the results of events that originated on the other side of the world.

Layoffs or reductions in force, also known as RIFs, are the painful economic phenomena that come readily to mind. These workplace disappointments always have a personal side to them. When we are laid off, we feel considerable anger towards other members of the rejecting organization, the survivors of the massacre and especially the boss, that is, if he is one of the survivors.

Trust, A Feeling Related to Expectation

Like the parent child relationship we knew growing up, the workplace presents us with a relationship hierarchy where trust, a feeling related to expectation, is assumed. Our assumption is that the boss, the parent substitute in the workplace, will treat us well. For example, we take for granted that promises made to us at the time of hiring will be kept.

We take for granted that the boss will make wise decisions with respect to the hiring of others with whom we have to work and with respect to the expenditure and allocation of limited resources. We do not assume that the volatility of the greater economy will be adverse to our own situation, and we do not assume that we will be victimized by leadership or management problems within the organization itself, such as one misguided decision after the other driving the entire organization into ruin.

Expectations of Those We Hire

In turn if we are the one doing the hiring, we have a feeling of trust in the people we bring on board. Something impressed us in their resume and the interview when we were considering them, and we have high expectation for their performance with us. We assume that they will give us their best effort. We do not deliberately choose people who have a drug or alcohol habit and thus, it may be assumed, will exhibit a high rate of absence or, worse, will steal from the organization to support that habit.

During the last years of a long career as an employee, I experienced both satisfaction and disappointment in abundance. I was working for a branch of a university that specialized in career education. Given our mission we were expected to be more entrepreneurial or business-oriented than is normally the case with universities.

Start Media-Rich Educational Program

I had the satisfaction of starting my own program involving the creation of computer-delivered media-rich applications and guiding it through to financial stability, but then I had the pain of seeing my good works squandered in an ill-conceived reorganization and a series of very poor hiring decisions and other poor management choices, all engineered by someone whose glibness I had previously admired and long mistook as a sign of intelligence and good judgment.

To teach in the program, I had hired several very capable instructors. I also taught in the program. With the loss of the program, these jobs were no longer tenable. Some of those I hired were resentful toward me, but there was nothing that I could do to intercede in their behalf. Thus what had been a very good relationship turned more than a little ugly. I, the founder of the program, had disappointed them.

How do we cope with disappointment? First we must accept that to disappoint and to be disappointed are part of the normal process of living. As long as what we did or what was done to us was not the result of intention or malice, we need to make ourselves get over it. Even if intention or malice was a factor, we need to practice acceptance. If we are the victim, we need to remember the importance of forgiveness. If we are the perpetrator, we may need to forgive ourselves.

Embrace the richness of possibility that is life at its fullest and move on. Yes, we must forgive.

You can reach the writer at this address: Stephen.saft@gmail.com.

Copyright © 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft

THE BENEFITS OF BEING UNKNOWN, An Obscure Writer's Confession

For many decades, I have put considerable effort into finding an audience for my creative work, an effort that got started in the late 1960s when I began writing the first novel that I subsequently was to complete. By putting “considerable effort into finding an audience,” I mean that over the years I have sent the things I have written to many people and organizations in the business of helping writers reach wider audiences, such as publishers and producers as well as literary agents. This effort has earned me many rejections.

During the period, I have experienced many fallow or inactive periods as a marketer of my own works. Sometimes this inaction has been the result of carefully considered priorities. As a creative person, I want to give the lion share of my time to creating, not to self marketing. Self marketing takes a lot of time. It is the creating that I love and feel compelled to do. I don’t love marketing. At any rate, I don’t love marketing my own work.

Confession: I Was A Marketer

Since I am indulging in self confession, I had better quickly own up to the fact that working as a marketer is one of the ways I earned a living during a long career, recently ended. And so it may sound a little strange when I as this one-time marketer confess that I’ve never enjoyed being a marketer of my own work, and, of course, the record shows that it is an activity in which I have been a particularly poor performer.

Interestingly, during the early part of my career the job was called not “marketing” but “promotion.” Hence my very first full-time job in New York City in 1963 was as a “book promotion copywriter” for the book publisher Holt, Rinehart and Winston on Madison Avenue, the heart of the advertising business. The term “marketing” came into fashion only later.

Father’s Field: Promotional Sales

My father during a lifetime in sales including many jobs in which he originated many sales strategies —some might call them “sales gimmicks”--frequently referred to what he did as “promotional sales.” Today how Louis Saft earned a living would probably be called “sales marketing.”

On the other hand, I recognize that as a creative person I am not just creating for myself. No writer writes just for himself. I write to reach people. I write because I think I have something to say to my contemporaries and those who will come after. Hence as much as I don’t like self promotion or self marketing I have to do it. I recognize that fact. Otherwise there will be no chance that my work will ever get out into the world.

Despondency Over Past Rejections

My not sending out my work has been the result of carefully considered priorities, as I indicated, but it also has been the result of despondency over past rejection and fear of future rejection. I get no pleasure from having my work rejected. Having my work returned with a rejection note has often made me sad and feeling sorry for myself.

On rare occasion this sense of despair has led me to consider giving up writing, but then the fact that I would be walking away from something that I love, namely writing, has hit me square in the face. No, I can’t do that. That’s an unacceptable proposition. Tired of self pity, I have aroused myself with self-generated exhortations, exhortations that I will not quit, that I will keep on trying, that I will keep on writing as long as my brain still works and I have the energy to keep coming up with cogent ideas and startling images and the arsenal of sizzling words to express them.

Unencumbered by Expectations

Of late, I have even started seeing my situation as an unknown or obscure writer—to use a painful expression common in literary circles—as an advantage. As a writer without reputation, my audience comes to me with a clean slate, without preconceived ideas of who I am and what I stand for. If I have an axe to grind, they don’t know it. I am unencumbered by expectations—other than the assumed expectation that what I have to say will be presented clearly, with conviction and with a concern for the fact that many other subjects cry out for all of our attentions and that I as the writer, the creator, need to put some effort in keeping you, the reader, interested in what I have to say.

Because I am a blank slate to much of my intended audience, I don’t have to allow myself to succumb to an attack of nerves over whether I will live up to expectation or not. Will my intended audience find my latest work on a par with everything else of mine they have pored over with relish and in such huge numbers in times past? Having experienced my first rate murder mysteries, my wonderful fantasy thrillers, my engrossing memoirs, my Tony award winning plays, my Oscar winning film scripts, and my poet laureate quality poetry, will they come to my latest work with overblown assumptions?

Perhaps my past works have deserved such recognition, but the fact is I don’t have the credits to prove it. The vast majority of my intended audience come to my work with no such knowledge of who I am and all that I have previously written. I am fresh. I am new to them.

There is a freedom and correspondingly a sense of empowerment that can come from such a realization, and I need to try to keep that fact forever in my mind. I am free. I am stuck in no rut. I can say what I believe.

You can reach the writer at stephen.saft@gmail.com.

Copyright (c) 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft

ACQUISITIVENESS, THE CONSUMING OBSESSION

Wanting something can be a very powerful preoccupation that interferes with a steadiness of mind and a balanced perspective, two states of mind that I have come to value greatly. My latest obsession is land, acquiring land, and sometimes I am aware that thinking about the subject is keeping me from thinking about subjects that I normally want to occupy my thoughts like my creative work.

An obsession with land acquisition is an easy fixation to catch when you live in an area filled with beautiful vistas such as the southwestern mountains of Virginia. I forget that the enjoyment of what I am seeing is what is important, and I start imagining myself owning what I am seeing. I convince myself that I have to own the land in order to enjoy the land.

Before Land Came Boats

Before the beautiful scenery of southwestern Virginia there were boats—large live-aboard pleasure boats. Over many years I became fixated on many large boats, most of which I could not afford, but that didn’t matter. I spent a lot of time thinking about them anyway. These were boats that caught my eye along the coast of New Jersey, along the mid coast of Maine, and in Maryland and Virginia on Chesapeake Bay. Sometimes they were pure products of my imagination, that is, they were boats I conceived of, designed and even drew on paper. I saw myself living on these real and imagined boats, doing maintenance on them, and driving them on calm and challenging seas.

The fact is that over many years, I did own a very small number of relatively large pleasure boats, and I now have scores of memories to show for it—many of them happy, but a few of them the raw material for nightmares. For example, in the summer of 1991, I once took our 43-foot live-aboard trawler with a round, roll-prone hull past the Cape Charles Lighthouse out in the ocean into 10-foot waves knowing that small boat advisories had been issued by the U.S. Coast Guard.

Out into the Ocean

On a planned circuit of the Delmarva (Delaware-Maryland-Virginia) Peninsula, we had gotten tired of being tied up day after day in a marina in the town of Cape Charles while waiting for the weather to clear. Fortunately, after about a half hour of crashing through the waves in the vicinity of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel complex we reached much calmer seas further off shore, and we were able to reach our next port of call by ocean of Wachapreague, Virginia, without incident.

My new preoccupation with land ownership has a practical side, and it also comes with a further complication. In January my wife and I traveled to Evansville in southern Indiana to get an unusual breed of dog, a girl puppy just 11 weeks old at the time, whom we named Cassie Rose. Cassie Rose is a Portuguese Water Dog or PWD, and true to her breed, she loves water. She loves to swim. Hence my obsession with land has not just been with land per se but with land with water on it such as a creek or stream.

No Personal Watering Hole

I should point out that we already live on a piece of land that is not exactly tiny, not anyway in comparison with what is common in metropolitan areas. And we have beautiful mountain views in two directions. What we don’t have is unlimited land for Cassie Rose to work off her youthful energy, and we don’t have water. We don’t have anything that we can consider Cassie Rose’s very own swimming hole.

What are we going to do about this deficit in our lives? With great difficulty we’ve decided to do absolutely nothing about it. We’ve decided that now is not the time to be adding to our indebtedness or to be sacrificing our limited liquid assets. Cassie Rose is just going to have to make due with running around on other people’s land and jumping into other people’s streams, creeks or ponds.

Hence we’ll be walking away from the creek-front property less than 10 miles from our home that became our obsession for awhile. Creek-front property, I should add, that we also started to worry might be in a flood hazard zone.

Meanwhile I’ll be working at the restoration of the steadiness of mind and better balance of mental faculties that was mine before this latest land obsession took hold of me. Good luck to me.

Write to the author at stephen. saft@gmail.com.

Copyright (c) 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft

WAR IN IRAQ, NOW WHAT?

What about the war in Iraq, this most divisive of issues facing this nation? I am not going to say much about whether we should have gotten into conflict or not other than to admit that like a lot of Americans I was fooled by the Bush Administration into thinking that Iraq under Saddam Hussein posed more of a threat to us in the West than he actually did. Like most of our congressmen, I initially supported our getting into the war.

I now see Hussein as a maverick with only minimal connection to his Moslem neighbors, a maverick whose single greatest inspiration for governance was Josef Stalin. Hussein used political terror to cobble together a nation and to keep himself in power just as Josef Stalin, his role model, used political terror to keep his hold on the Russian people and then to extend his empire to the countries of Eastern Europe.

Blunder: Misunderstanding Iraq Ethnic Structure

By failing to recognize how the separate elements of Iraqi society were being held together and through blunders such as disbanding the defeated Iraqi army, the Bush Administration set us up for and put us in the middle of the disastrous civil war that ensued. There was, for example, no functional Al Qaida in Iraq until after the defeat of the forces of Saddam Hussein and disbanding of the Iraqi army.

So that’s my take on how we got where we are today. It’s a position that a lot of commentators on the war have staked out including a lot of people running for president in the 2008 election campaign. However, what these commentators aren’t presenting us with is a clear picture of what a so-called victory in Iraq would look like and, secondly, a strategy for withdrawing our forces that makes sense.

Is the Surge Working?

Is the surge in U.S. troops, currently going on, working or is it not? General David Petraeus, our new top general in Iraq, has asked for more time before he gives his own answer to that question. Meanwhile, we’re getting a lot of assessments from the media including from frequently quoted observers. These sources are all over the lot with their evaluations.

One commentator, Ken Pollock of the Brookings Institute, who says he previously was a critic of how the administration has managed the war, recently spent a week in Baghdad. He argues that the surge appears to be working and that he’s seen a substantial improvement in U.S. troop morale as a result, his first pro administration assessment, he tells us.

Inept Regime

If Pollock’s observations bear out as accurate, that’s all to the good, but what about the regime of Iraqis now governing the country? No reliable source that I have come across is telling us that this feeble organization is anywhere close to being able to effectively govern the country. Bringing democracy to Iraq was a stated goal of the Bush Administration in initiating the war in the first place. Remember the administration’s insistence on using the words “the war for Iraqi freedom” in describing the action? As of this writing, one would have to say that that policy is a sad failure.

Given the level of hostility, in fact, the extreme ruthlessness with which the two major ethnic groups, Shiite and Sunni, have exhibited toward each other, finding an accommodation that would make possible an effective governing body including representatives of the two groups strains credulity. It’s even harder to imagine democracy ever working in such a caldron of hatreds.

Democrats Call for Quick Withdrawal

Some presidential candidates on the Democratic Party side, despairing of ever resolving these issues, are saying that the solution is simply to withdraw our troops and quickly. In that case, what about Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia? The fear is that the more radical and aggressive Moslem states, namely Iran and Syria, would jump into the breach, and that that would force action by the Saudis. Some observers see the whole Middle East erupting into war as a result. What then would become of the world’s oil supply, most of which comes from the Middle East?

Then there is the issue of the Kurds in northern Iraq. The Kurds are the only people to have benefited from the U.S. invasion. Oppressed and the victims of poison gas attacks under Saddam Hussein, the Kurds in northern Iraq are free for the first time, and many of them are prospering. With a wider scale war erupting in the region, the area known as Kurdistan would inevitably be sucked into the conflict.

Turkey Won’t Stand By

Further complicating the issue is Turkey on the northern border of Iraq. The Turks are currently engaged in a battle with elements of their own native Kurdish population over the issue of political autonomy. These elements say they want to be free of Turkish control to establish their own government or to merge with their brothers and sisters to the south. In fact, they have taken up arms in support of their cause, and fighting has occurred.

The Turks are opposed to independence for their native Kurdish population and have accused the Kurds in Kurdistan of providing safe haven, money and arms to the dissident Kurdish population in Turkey. Were the U.S. to withdraw from the region, what would Turkey do? Would it invade Kurdistan in an effort to pacify its own Kurdish population and to prevent Iran, for example, from becoming the power broker in the world of the Kurds?

Politicians Responding to Polls

A quick withdrawal from Iraq sounds good and seems to be in keeping with what the current polls of the American public are telling us. Many of our politicians appear to be responding to those polls and frame their answers during questions in public debates accordingly. The trouble is a quick withdrawal is not in the interest of this country and not in the interest of the world at large.

Yes, we need an exit strategy from Iraq. No doubt about that, but that exit strategy is going to have to be phased in gradually. We have no other choice.

Copyright (c) 2007 by Stephen Alan Saft

A POLITICAL AND PUBLIC POLICY INVENTORY, WHAT DO I BELIEVE?

It’s time I took a look at the major issues of a political and public policy nature that are currently having a profound effect on the peoples of the world and on my outlook. I can’t possible cover all the issues nor can I possibly cover any one of them in any depth in one posting, and so this will be just a start.

The first item is the State of Israel, which recently engaged in a war with Hezbollah that did not have to take place—unless, that is, the conflict was the only way for the nation’s military analysts to gage the current military strength of Hezbollah—for example, its arsenal of mobile rockets—a proposition that I doubt. Many people died in the conflict and much property was destroyed. Was all this bloodshed and all this destruction necessary? No, not in the least. The current leadership of Israel did not act with good sense and needs to be replaced.

Israel Needs to Survive

Having said that, I want to quickly add that I strongly support the State of Israel, and I strongly support its need to survive. The State of Israel needs to survive, but it needs to survive as a place where commitment to the highest ideals of humankind are exemplified and practiced. For one thing, its leaders must be vigilant about finding the moral high ground with respect to treatment of the Palestinians. In saying this, I realize that finding that high ground has never been more difficult given the current conflict between Fatah and Hamas with Fatah controlling the West Bank and Hamas controlling Gaza.

The Jews have a right to be in the Middle East, the birth place of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the founders of the religion of one God and its Patriarchs, and they need to have their own country with their own elected government. One important lesson for Jews from past history is that a minority without political status, that is, without the status that comes from having a piece of geography associated with its ethnicity is even more vulnerable than it would be otherwise. One would like to believe that the vast majority of those in the majority in any nation will always be tolerant of their minorities, but history provides many terrible lessons that contradict such a hope.

Are You Being Fair Minded?

Some of the policies of Israel with respect to the territories it annexed in the 1967 war are certainly not beyond reproach. Many instances of injustice can be found, and these injustices need to be addressed and rectified. But I ask those who have taken stands against Israel including the use of boycotts of Israeli products and services and Israeli intellectuals whether they have scrutinized their own actions to determine if they are being fair or not?

First of all, have they taken stands against all examples of what they perceive as injustices sanctioned by governments in our current world, or have they chosen to single out Israel? Do they genuinely want peace in the Middle East and in the world, or do they want peace in a world without Jews, in a world in which all the Jews have converted to Christianity or Islam or some other majority faith?

Long History of Persecutions by Moslems

At the same time, have they stopped to consider that the persecution of Jews by Moslems predates the founding of the state of Israel by many centuries? The founding of Israel gave the Jew haters in the Moslem world a new script, but that is all. The hatred was pre-existent and often virulent. Many Jews--and Christians as well--died at the hands of Moslem fanatics long before the founding of Israel or even Theodor Herzl and the birth of the Zionist movement in the 19^th century.

Hitler, Haj of Jerusalem Sign Pact

In reading a recent issue of Newsweek magazine (June 18, 2007 issue), I made this startling and chilling discovery in an article by Robert M. Morgenthau and Frank M. Tuerkheimer. “In November 1941, Adolf Hitler and the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, met in Berlin and reached an agreement that a German occupation of Palestine and other mandated territories would result in the annihilation of the Jewish population, adding well over half a million Jews to the 6 million European Jews to be murdered by the Nazis.”

So much for any notion that the turmoil of hatreds coming out of the Middle East originated with the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. Had the State of Israel not been founded, one shudders to think what would have happened to the half a million Jews of Palestine. These Jews needed the protection of their own country with its own army and security apparatus to keep them safe.

The Problem of Germany

Finally for this posting the problem of Germany or more specifically the problem of the annihilation of the Jews of Europe by the Germans before and during World War II. Though now 62 years behind us, is this matter now closed? It may be in the minds of many people, but not mine. Was justice done with the Nuremberg Trials, the executions of some Nazis of rank and the payment of reparation to some Jewish heirs of holocaust victims? Not for me it wasn’t.

The Germans murdered not just millions of Jews, but the whole Jewish culture of Europe of which just a remnant remains today. What can be done about the loss of that culture—a culture based on the language of Yiddish and including a treasure trove of literature, theatre and other performing arts, painting and other visual arts, music and a thousand years of history?

Proposed: Jewish State of Europe

The people and all their heirs who should have existed but can’t because of mind numbing German atrocities and the lost Yiddish culture cannot be resurrected, but there should have been and there can now be a better settlement than that which was initiated with the ending of hostilities in 1945. The Germans should have been forced to relinquish land toward the founding of an independent Jewish State of Europe back then, but the political realities of the time made such a solution impossible.

The Soviet Union was intent on having its piece of Germany, and the U.S. and its Allies wanted to make sure that what was left was protected from the Russian lust for a socialist empire. Hence the East and West Germany solution, a division that ceased to exist with the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

German or Nazi, Which?

In a future posting I will treat this concept with greater detail. However, let me call attention before closing to the fact that I am deliberately using the word “German” in this posting instead of the term most often used in describing the perpetrators of the atrocities in Europe just before and during World War II, namely the term “Nazi.”

Here is the fiction underlying what many commentators on what took place have adopted as their reality and the fantasy they want others to believe: Once upon a time a group of monsters masquerading as people appeared in the country known as Germany. These monsters were known as “the Nazis.” Lead by the arch villain called Adolf Hitler, these monsters forced the German people into waging a devastating war and to commit countless atrocities that they would not ordinarily have committed.

This piece of fiction is a rationalization that lets a criminal nation off the hook and prevents us from facing what really did take place in the period 1932 to 1945 and from looking at the numerous other atrocities in human history and, ultimately, at looking at ourselves—at our many insufficiencies and failings.