Last week there was this conference in Jerusalem that would allow me to scam the university for the cost of an airplane ticket (this was arranged just before the current crisis.)  I decided to make it interesting by including a visit to Jordan.  So I set out to explore with my trusty traveling companion, The Nerd of the Desert.  (I tried on "Irving of Arabia" for myself but it didn't stick - I guess I'm just not the type to carry a nickname.)  What follows is a description of a few of our many adventures, in no particular order.

Amman --  Back in Amman. Dinner with an unnamed figure in the American diplomatic corps.  I'll call him Bob.  One can easily see the effects of a lifetime in diplomatic service:  he knows a ton of rude jokes that Syrians tell about Egyptians and vice versa.  Learning that we planned to be in Jerusalem for Christmas Eve, one of the other dinner guests tried to persuade the Nerd that it would be amusing to start a fight in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre ("that guy over there says this belongs to his group"). 

As part of the trip I gave lectures at a couple of Jordanian universities.  First stop, Al Bayt.  Location:  the middle of nowhere.  40 kilometers North (I think) from Amman in the middle of the desert there is this compound of sand-colored concrete buildings.  We're driving in an embassy vehicle; I try to open a window and am informed that's impossible because the vehicle is armored.  The driver's jacket also does not fit terribly well -- a bit tight across the chest.  I will be spending the day in this vehicle with three women from the Embassy: a translator, an escort, and . . . I'm still not sure.  A keeper?  Someone trained to jump in at a moment's notice with "I'm sorry, the American guest is suffering from jet lag and sunstroke and appears to have temporarily lost control of his faculties"?  On the way I am informed that Al Bayt is a public university, that the student body is almost entirely Jordanian (as opposed to the private schools, which are full of Gulfies -- I did not make up that word), and -- oh, yes! -- religious and highly conservative.  None of the embassy types have ever been there, and they seem to feel that it is something like a visit to the moon.
No problem, it sounds like the perfect audience for my talk on "Religion and Law," an extended argument in favor of complete secularization of civil legal codes in a democratic state; sure to be a hit.  We arrive and are ushered into a meeting with the Dean of the Law School. . . who is also the Dean of Shari'a Studies.  That's my first warning.  He scowls a lot and is clearly suspicious.  I begin to think there might be a problem when he asks me whether I am aware of the theory that French law is inspired by the writings of the Imam Malik. 

Walking from the meeting to the lecture room I do some very fast improvised re-writing in my head; made sure to include the words "ijtahad," "hadith," and "Hanafi."  Favorite question:  "if there was Shari'a in the West, would the current crisis in the financial system have been avoided?"  (Answer:  "yes, because there would have been no financial system."  I have got to work on my diplomatic skills.)  The translator was brilliant, although we had to discuss the translation of terms like "precommitment."  For that matter, I have absolutely no actual proof that what she said in Arabic had any particular relation to what I was saying in English, but it all seemed to go fine.  Afterwards over juice and cookies the Dean is much nicer, although he asks me an odd question:  "in what ways are you authorized to cooperate with us?"  I suspect a translation issue.  As we are leaving we notice a huge brightly colored statue of a dinosaur in the courtyard.  No one can explain it.

Second lecture at Philadelphia University.  This one is private and expensive, meaning that the audience is mostly from the Gulf -- I am starting to be able to distinguish the styles of keffiyahs.  Much less interesting than Al-Bayt, but noteworthy for the expensive cars with Saudi plates in the parking lots. Also, the whole thing is vertical.  Amman is like that, too; the whole city is built on the sides of steep hills that must do a number of brakes and transmissions.  Nablus is the only city I have seen in Israel with the same kind of topography..

Wadi Rum. This is among the most magnificent place I have ever seen.  In the summer the heat is brutal, but in mid-winter there is a constant cold wind.  The sky is more shades of blue than I knew existed and the rock formations are breathtaking.  But the really cool part was that we experienced all this on camels.  A three-day camel trek with our Bedouin guide Saleh - a retired veteran of the Jordanian Desert Police Camel Corps who made his living chasing smugglers on the Saudi and Syrian borders.  A heck of a nice guy, but not given to excessive concern for comfort.  Sleeping at night in a tourist encampment maintained by local Bedouins; charred chicken, infinite supplies of sweet tea, oud music around the fire.  And wildly inadequate blankets - I have been colder, but not at altitudes below 6,000 feet.

Okay, here's the thing about camel trekking; for those unaccustomed to the practice it can be hard on the, um, "lower back" (This was more a problem for me than the Nerd, who took to it right away.)  Lawrence's famous feat of crossing 120 kilometers in three days is even more impressive to me now. But once you get the hang of it, there is no substitute - the alternative was being driven around in SUV's, which misses the whole point.  First lesson:  the desert has to be experience up close (this was not my first desert trip by any means, but it was all new to the NotD.  Many other valuable lessons, as well.  For example, sometimes the fact that you can climb up something does not guarantee your ability to get back down.

Petra. We were set up with a female Bedouin guide named Chanan. As she proudly explained, she is the only woman in the business in Petra.  I don't know about the other guides, but this one was the real thing; she showed us the village where her family lived, but said she preferred to live outside.  Except when it gets cold in the winter; then she moves into a cave. 

Never mind walking through the siq for the famous view of the Treasury; we did that the first day, but for the second day, Chanan's idea of a good time was to take us up the old Nabotean road over the mountains.  I think she was trying to prove something, actually, but we sure showed her!  Tough Americans that we are, by the end of the day we had pushed her so hard that at one point she actually removed the heavy wool coat she was wearing over her oversized sweatshirt along with her headdress.  I should probably mention that by that point we were panting and sweating like sea lions.  I should probably also mention that Chanan is about 4 feet tall and did the whole day's hike wearing pink plastic bedroom slippers.   But still, I think we made some kind of a statement here.  The place was crawling with Israeli tourists.

Crossing to Israel. The famous Allenby Bridge.  Not like it used to be; the trucks still have to pass through the part with the Russian teenagers manning machine guns and the surly reservists ("the worst reserve duty in the world" as a friend of mine describes it), but the tourists and other foot traffic are diverted to a separate building that looks like  a small airport terminal.  All very unthreatening and clean.  The desks are manned - er, personned - by young women, presumably to increase the unthreatening quality of the experience, but there are plenty of young men with rifles hanging around.  Sailed right through on the strength of my Hebrew.  Well, we sailed through at first, anyway.  We reached the very last step and they decided to send us back.  Then they told us to sit on a bench.  It all felt very Alice's Restaurant, there was me, the NotD, and a couple of very agitated looking Israeli Arabs.  After a while they sent us back to go through the security lines again.  We ended up spending more than three hours in that station.  The reasons are not entirely clear, but reconstructing events later with Israeli friends in Jerusalem gave us some hints: 

Let's see.  After we got sent back into line the first time, I decided to help out the nice Tunisian family ahead of us by translating from French to Hebrew.  Israelis' reaction:  "You spoke French??  Are you insane?"  It didn't help when I mentioned that I also had used the occasion to try out my minimal Arabic.  Then there was the fact that we were visiting for only two days.  I actually had a good reason for that one -- the aforementioned conference -- but I had misplaced the conference brochure.  And the fact that the conference was scheduled for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day (so much for cultural sensitivity and inclusiveness in the Israeli academy) seemed to make the whole story less rather than more persuasive. 

Anyway, somewhere at this point we got transferred to the "V.I.P. line" -- which doesn't mean what it sounds like.  It's the line for Israeli Arabs seeking to confirm their citizenship papers.  Also, it turns out that I have a bad attitude -- at one point I got an entire desk of three IDF soldier girls to break into a chorus of "Heveinu  Shalom Aleichem" in a truly inspired moment of sarcasm, followed immediately by "why are you so nervous?" (mitazbein -- doesn't translate quite right, more like "why are you irritated?")  I think that was the point at which the Nerd started looking around with a "who is this guy?  I've never seen him before" expression, but he was trapped. 

Eventually they let us go, I think on the theory that no one that stupid could actually be a terrorist or "innocent" (what they call people who helpfully carry packages to someone's aged grandmother who lives in the basement of the Knesset building).  Crossing the othe way was painless, but the Israelis charged us $50 each to get out of the country.  Worth it.

Jerusalem. Driving up to the Hebrew U. campus for the first time in several years was a little startling.  The Nerd took one look and proclaimed it the greatest example of Brutalist Architecture he had ever seen.  The campus is a giant underground compound covering the entire hilltop from which buildings stick up like chimneys. (An Israeli from Tel Aviv insisted that the design showed the bunker mentality of Jerusalemites.)  The whole thing looks exactly like a giant version of an Israeli air raid shelter with air vents.  The inside is almost as charming as the exterior. 

Met Natan Sharansky, whom I think of as a walking argument for the proposition that Something Went Wrong.  At the end of the panel I raised a question about the rule of law in response to which he dismissed me as "just a lawyer."  I insisted that was not true -- "I also play the piano."  (I was tired -- this was the evening of the day we crossed the bridge.)  On the way out he stopped to shake my hand and tell me that he approves of my playing the piano.  Once again I am confirmed in my belief that in Jerusalem surrealism is the norm.  Wanna drive a Dadaist crasy?  Stick him in Jerusalem and tell him to do something absurd.  It would be like watching a panicked turkey looking for a corner to hide in. 

Also on the panel was Nazmi Al-Jubeh from Bir Zeit.  He makes an interesting point.  Israel has never defined its national borders (the claim has been that Arab states must recognize Israel's right to exist, but Israel does not have to define the boundaries of its existence).  Al-Jubeh makes the point that the same is true of "Jerusalem"; when the Israeli representatives at Annapolis said that "Jerusalem is non-negotiable" they never defined the boundaries of the city.  It's not a trivial question:  at this point my impression is that the Israeli definition of the city includes the string of settlements stretching most of the way across the Jordan River Valley.  Al-Jubeh also points out that after 40 years, the Israelis governments of Jerusalem have never gotten around to zoning the Arab parts of the city.

Visited the Old City and East Jerusalem.  The Israelis have constructed enormous 4- and 6-lane roads -- with huge pedestrian sidewalks and terraces and10-foot high retaining walls cut into the hillsides -- that are squeezing East Jerusalem out of existence where they haven't involved the outright destruction of blocks of houses and shops and the outdoor market by the Jaffa Gate.  Getting from anywhere to anywhere on foot is nearly impossible, and as for the herds of goats that used to traverse the olive groves on the side of Mt. Scopus, forget about it.  Meanwhile main streets are torn up for a new light rail project.  Hummus at Lina's - is it better than Abu Shukri's?  I reluctantly concede the possibility, but it appears that Abu's has gone downhill.  By this point the Nerd is mumbling things like "where the hell am I going to find this olive oil in  Chicago?"  Dinner provided by the university is kosher and halavi, and hence inedible.

Our last night in Amman is New Year's Eve.  Let me tell you something about secular Jordanians:  they know how to party.  The celebration in the hotel restaurant went until 5:00 a.m.

Home again.  I miss my camel.

The first thing to understand about what is going on in Gaza is that it is not the result of a sudden decision or an immediate provocation by one side or the other; this thing has been in the planning by both sides for months. It was only a question of when to trigger events.  Since both Israel and Hamas can always be relied upon to overreact to a provocation, thus each side has the ability to effectively schedule the others' overreactions (hence the metaphor of the tango, a form of dance consisting entirely of a series of carefully scheduled overreactions.)

At the beginning of last week, it seemed clear that this was a conflict by something like mutual agreement.  Both sides wanted to improve the terms of the existing truce, and both saw military conflict as a way to get there.  Israel had never been satisfied with the conduct of that truce:  no suicide bombings was a relief, but continuing (albeit much fewer and ineffectual) rocket attacks and above all continued weapons smuggling were intolerable.  Hamas, in turn, was infuriated by Israel's refusal to relax its siege of the territory -- imposed in retaliation for the election of a Hamas government -- despite the truce and despite Hamas' statements that came within a hair of formally recognizing Israel.  Despite these concessions to Israel's demands Hamas found itself governing a besieged and slowly starving population that was rapidly heading from crisis into something close to famine.  (The cynicism of Tzipi Livni's assertion in Paris that "there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza" was simply breathtaking, as is the hypocricy of the constant description of conditions in Southern Israel as "intolerable" while residents of Gaza are reduced to eating pet food.)  To make the case explicit, in December Hamas offered to extend the truce in return for opening border crossings, despite having allowed sporadic rocket and mortar fire into Southern Israel throughout the length of the truce. Israel responded by a raid to destroy a tunnel that they said was going to be used to attack Israelis. Hamas responded with a barrage of rockets. Israel initiated Operation Cast Lead.

Ha'Aretz investigations have shown the operation was in the planning stages for six months.  Israelis on the Right criticized the government for its inaction in this period, but the IDF was spending the time poring over photographic data from drones and satellites, pinpointing bases, weapons silos, camps, and the homes of officials; Hamas used that same period to make its own preparations including booby traps and IEDs (many of which appear to have been destroyed by Israel's air and artillery bombardments).  The final plan was presented to Barak on November 19, and approved by the Cabinet on December 19th, following which Livni flew to Cairo to brief the Egyptian government.  The timing on the Israeli side obviously involves considerations of upcoming Israeli elections -- both Livni and Barak have shot up in the polls over the past week -- and the last chance to act with the anything-goes free pass of the Bush administration.  The timing considerations on the Hamas side are less clear, but may well include a desire to create a certain set of facts on the ground for the new American President and Secretary of State.

Israel's preparations appeared to pay off handsomely during the air phase of the operation.  IDF data on Gaza are so complete that the IAF frequently calls houses up by cell phone and delivers ten minutes' warning, a maneuver called "roof knocking."  Targeted assassinations from the air, in addition, fuel suspicions of informers on the ground, but it is possible that they are simply the result of drone surveillance technology.  In the past, sometimes residents of targeted houses would take to the roof of the targeted house in defiance; sometimes the IAF pilots would not fire.  Such a warning appears to have been given in the case of Nizar Ghayan, who was killed along with his four wives and eleven children.  (Why did Ghayan not leave his house?  Maybe he wanted martyrdom -- he had previously sent his son on a suicide bombing mission that killed two Israelis -- or maybe it is just not possible to get 16 people out of a house in ten minutes and he did not want to choose.)

As a result of Israel's careful preparations and relatively discriminate air attacks, the operation seemed to be working out to Israel's advantage to an almost startling degree.  Most importantly, an emergency meeting of Arab League foreign ministers in Cairo produced statements by Arab governments that essentially blamed Hamas. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal told the session "this terrible massacre would not have happened if the Palestinian people was standing united behind one leadership," and Arab League Secretary General Amr Musa focused on the "unacceptable" disputes within Palestinian ranks and the Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul  Gheit declared that Hamas had "given Israel an excuse" and declared that rocket fire into Israel must stop as a condition of any truce deal as Mubarak steadfastly ruled out opening the Rafah crossing until it is in the control of the Palestinian Authority and international monitors, Cairo police clashed with demonstrators, and 40 Muslim Brotherhood leaders were arrested.  

Meanwhile, while Syria and Iran issues the expected denunciations, Hezbollah has thus far shown no interest in launching attacks from the North.  In Jordan -- with its 3 million Palestinians still in giant refugee camps --  King Abdullah stated that "nothing justifies the world's failure to hold Israel back" and Queen Raina spoke of a "crime against human dignity,"  But Jordanian responses, both government and private, have been focused on providing humanitarian relief, not on threatening to cut off ties with Israel.  Through the weekend protests in Amman were peaceful and relatively small (the biggest saw 24,000 people in the streets near the foreign embassies and was entirely law-abiding). 

Even Hamas' leadership seemed to be of two minds.  On January 1, on the same day that Ismail Haniyeh said there could be no truce until the siege of Gaza was lifted, senior Hamas official Ayman Taha told reporters that "as soon as we receive a proposal, we will study it.  We support any initiative that would end the aggression and lift the siege."  On Dec. 31st exiled Hamas leader Khaled Mishaal spoke to Russia's foreign minister of "readiness to cease armed confrontation but on condition of the lifting of the blockade of Gaza," according to a statement by the Russian Foreign Ministry. On Sunday, Jan. 4th he went even further, telling the Iz al-Din al-Qassam Web site that he was prepared not only for a "cessation of aggression" -- he proposed going back to the arrangement at the Rafah crrossing as of 2005 prior to Hamas' electoral victory, in which the crossing would be managed jointly by Egypt, the European Union, the Palestinian Authority presidency and Hamas.

Thus at the end of the second or even the third day of air strikes, had Israel pulled back it would have seemed to be in an excellent position to seek truce terms more to its liking, with Arab support for international monitors and an end to weapons smuggling and an increased role for the PA at the crossings.  In return, perhaps, Israel would have considered lifting the siege of Ghetto Gaza.  As odd as it may sound, the result of the air attacks might have been something like a win-win on the ground, a boost for the PA, and a step toward new levels of cooperation with moderate  Arab governments.

Instead Israel launched a ground offensive that Defense Minister Barak promises will be "neither short nor easy."  The question now is, what is Israel after, and what is its exit strategy?  At the outset of the air campaign, government representatives were eager to assure the world that the only goal was a cessation of rocket attacks.  IDF Brig. Gen. Mike Herzog told reporters that Israel had no intent to topple Hamas, and the IDF's recommendation (again, as reported in Ha'Aretz) was that "more pressure . . . be put on Hamas to make it agree to a long-term cease-fire under conditions more favorable to Israel" by an intensive but brief incursion.  But even before Saturday the tone from the civilian leadership was different. It is clear that the Israeli leadership has no intention of ordering a cessation of operations until its goals are met, and that its goals go far beyond a cessation of rocket attacks and weapons smuggling.  Comments by Olmert, Barak, and Livni all support this conclusion. 

Livni's comments to journalists on December 28th in Sderot were particularly interesting.  For one thing, she declared that "this is a zero sum game . . . not between Israel and Hamas, this is a zero sum game between the extremists and the moderates, between Hamas and Fatah, between Abu Mazen and Haniyeh."  In other words, there is no such thing as a win-win outcome by definition.  In addition, she declared that "Hamas is not legitimate and Hamas control of the Gaza Strip is not legitimate" and called on the international community to avoid "legitimating" Hamas. The key, Livni insisted, is that the Annapolis approach represents an attempt to reach out to "pragmatists."  "We decided to initiate the Annapolis process according to a strategy that was agreed with the international community and with the pragmatic part of the Palestinian Authority. The idea was to work with the moderates, to work with the pragmatic leadership of the Palestinian Authority in order to reach a peace treaty."  Friday evening Vice Premier Haim Ramon told Israeli TV that "we need . . . to reach a situation in which we do not allow Hamas to govern."

So there seem to be two distinct sets of goals at work, here:  1) to end the rocket attacks and weapons smuggling and bring international monitors and the PA into the process of monitoring truce terms; and 2) to bring down Hamas and strengthen the PA and "pragmatic" elements in Arab states everywhere.  The problem is that these goals are incommensurate, and the strategies for pursuing one contradict the strategies for pursuing the other.  The first set of goals are pragmatic, concrete, immediate, and promise to lessen tensions and improve security.  The second set of goals are ideological, global, and promise endless war until final and complete victory.  Which is Israel pursuing?  With the commencement of the ground operation, there is very grave reason to fear that the "pragmatism" that Livni praises on the part of Abbas is not part of her own strategic vocabulary.

What exactly would this mean for military operations over the next week?  Think about those six months of careful preparations.  When an IDF spokesperson says "we have a long list of targets," one has to wonder what these "targets" comprise; names of individuals?  is the whole ground offensive an enormous murder raid to take out the Hamas leadership?  Put it this way:  supposing it wanted to (it doesn't), how could Hamas "surrender" at this point?  By offering up the dead bodies of every elected official?  That's how sieges used to end.  The siege had already produced a situation in which electricity, heat, water, food, electricity and medicine were only intermittently available; does Israel contemplate a complete and final destruction of Gaza's infrastructure?  The creation of its own little African-style famine right here on the shores of the Mediterranean, Somalia-style, complete with Al Qaeda infiltration and new homegrown groups?  American diplomatic personnel with whom I spoke expressed concern about "PIJ" -- that's "Palestinian Islamic Jihad" -- as the new wild card, joining the Al Qassam Brigades who were previously responsible for the bulk of the most devastating suicide bombing attacks against Israel.  There are more dangerous creatures than Hamas out there.

Weakening Hamas makes sense if it means strengthening the PA --  the Annapolis model -- and bringing Arab states into the process in a postive way.  But "weakening Hamas" by producing mass civilian casualties and an overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe, that is something else. The attacks from the air, although savage, were relatively contained and focused.  By contrast, the use of artillery and ground forces is not.  The goal of truce terms that would put an end to weapons smuggling and involve international monitors, accompanied by the promise of a lifting of the siege of Ghetto Gaza, was one that aroused considerable support within the Arab world.  A campaign to exterminate Hamas at the cost of thousands of civilian deaths is not.  There is a real and immediate danger that Israel will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, by radicalizing the population of Gaza even further, depriving pragmatic Arab government of maneuvering room, making it impossible for Abbas and the PA to resume control in Gaza, and finally turning even American public opinion against the program of endless war.

Israel seems to believe that it can calculate these things to a nicety; this much horror will be tolerated, this much we can get away with and still have someone to negotiate with afterwards.  But that is a dangerous calculation.  Already Mubarak has joined Abdullah and Abbas in condemning the ground assault, and Abbas has released hundreds of Hamas prisoners from PA jails.  Does Livni really believe that there are no limits to what Mubarak can tolerate?  (Were those limits, perhaps, spelled out in their meeting in Cairo just before operations began?  Mubarrak, too, is playing a dangerous game.)  Hamas is not beloved among Arab governments or among Palestinians; but how long can any of leader in the Arab world hang on to a moderate position in the face of endlessly broadcast video clips of dead children?

Israel's leaders have apparently decided that stopping the rocket attacks and the weapons smuggling is not so important after all; what is much more important is inflicting misery on Gaza and showing the world that Hamas must never have a place in the discussion.  Actually securing truce terms favorable to Israel's security would have required talking with Hamas and international cooperation, which would have bestowed that dreaded legitimacy.  Much better to keep shooting and count on Israel being the last one standing at the end.  As for pragmatism?  Apparently it's overrated.

Among early Zionist writers, Ze'ev Jabotinsky stood out for the cruelty and compete amorality of his arguments.  His position was simple:  we want territory in Palestine, there is an indigenous Palestinian people living in that territory, we must crush them by violence until they surrender to our will. "As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups."  Jabotinsky was forthright about the nature of Zionism:  it was "colonialism," a program to be carried out behind "a wall of bayonets."  

There was almost something bracing about his brutal honesty:  that Zionism was an essentially imperialist enterprise, that Jews simply should not care about non-Jews, that "right" is determined by reasoning backwards from what we want to what is required to achieve it.  "We hold that Zionism is moral and just," he wrote.  "And since it is moral and just, justice must be done . . . There is no other morality."  Jews should make no other kinds of claims (Jabotinsky was particularly contemptuous of the Jewish religion, which he described as "a preserved corpse" in the Diaspora:  it is interesting that today it is in Israel that Judaism most obviously fits his description.)  Israel was not to be a center of Jewish culture or learning or the inculcation of virtue, it needed no justification beyond "we want it and we have bayonets."

To bolster his arguments later, however, Jabotinsky also made an argument based on "justice":  "The soil does not belong to those who possess land in excess but to those who do not possess any.  It is an act of simple justice to alienate part of their land from those nations who are numbered among the great landowners of the world, in order to provide a place of refuge for a homeless, wandering people."  The weird perversity of this notion of justice becomes apparent (if it isn't already) as soon as one tries to apply it in any other context.  Catholics have a country in Southern Ireland - therefore Northern Irish Protestants should be entitled to drive out all Catholics from the area?  There is no Romany state, nor a Breton state nor a Druze state nor a Kurdish nor a Basque state; therefore it would be justifiable to drive Americans, Frenchmen, or Spaniards, Turks, Lebanese or Israelis out of their homes in order to create a new state for each of these peoples?  There is no Bahai state nore a Wiccan state nor a Sufi state.  Therefore it would be justifiable to drive Christians, Muslims and Jews out of their homes to create space for these new states?  Jabotinsky's answer was, effectively, a shrug.

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There are two reasons we need to bail out the auto industry.  The first, quite simply, is to buy time. Let's say we agree that the American auto industry is doomed, and that a $25 billion bailout does nothing more than delay the inevitable by three years.  That is a perfect and entirely persuasive argument in favor of a bailout.  Right now, the ripple effects of the loss of a million or two million or three million jobs  (no one is quite sure of the number) would be a nuclear bomb detonated in the middle of a national recovery plan.  It's not just the consequences for unemployment and health care and pension guarantees and consumer credit, it's the complete devastation of the landscape in which the efforts of the new Obama administration will have to take place.  If $25 billion buys us three years for a recovery plan to take effect, that's a bargain.  And there are other reasons to buy time.  It is almost impossible to overstate the short-sightedness and pigheadedness of the management teams at the Big Three automakers.  In the past few years GM executives have repeatedly derided the idea of a business model based on building fuel efficient cars and have pinned much of their hopes on selling luxury vehicles in China.  But there are, finally, signs of improvement, including the development of the Chevy Volt.  And there are a whole series of changes in the terms of employment under UAW contracts that are described below.  But these things will take time to have their positive effects.  

That's the first reason we need a bailout:  it might turn out to be enough to save the industry, and even if it doesn't it buys us desparately needed time.  But there is a second reason for a bailout that has to do with nothing less than the question of the current economic age: was Marx right?

Was Marx right?  The usual answer is "no" with respect to his predictions in the Communist Manifesto. In some ways, to be sure, his arguments seem quite prescient, as in his warnings that capitalism's ever-expanding desire for markets that would lead to the creation of a globalized economy, his predictions that sovereign political systems would come to serve primarily as managing entities for multinational wealth, and his emphasis on the equation of market liberalism with free trade.  On the other hand, the standard wisdom is that he was wrong about the consequences of these developments.  In particular, it simply was not true that industrial capitalism resulted in ever-downward pressure on the living standards of workers, that the cycle of crises of capitalism continued to get worse and worse (after the global depression of the early 1930s), and above all that the middle economic classes disappeared as industrialization and corporate capitalism expanded.  In the U.S. as in all western democracies, some combination of government intervention in the market and/or organization of labor produced counter-pressures that ensured that the immense wealth being created was shared.  As a result, contrary to Marx's prediction of society devolving into two opposing classes, these western nations' economies were marked by the appearance of strong and stable working middle classes, a category Marx did not envision at all.  

But was Marx wrong, or was the creation of a working middle class merely a temporary exception?  It is not news that the American working middle class, especially in the manufacturing sector, has taken a beating over the past two decades, nor that the increase in the gap between rich and poor has been accompanied by a progressive weakening of organized labor.  The Europeans and Asians proved Marx wrong by using political authority to reshape capitalist markets.  In the U.S. we have tried to do the same thing by turning labor into a market participant.  Then we started busting the unions.  Which brings us to current discussions about the auto industry.

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The financial firms were first, now it's the automakers. We hear estimates of anywhere from 1 million to 3 million jobs at stake, and other industries are lined up to make their own claims about their importance to the long-term health of the economy. President-elect Obama has responded forcefully, unveiling a plan to put up to 2.5 million workers on the federal payroll by January of 2011, putting them to work on infrastructure and energy-related projects. These are terrific steps – the appointment of Timothy Weithner as Treasury Secretary is another – but in the course of these discussions it's time we focused on yet a different danger that is involved in this general economic crisis. I am referring to the danger to America's system and tradition of higher education.

Let's start with some background. There are three historical trends that combined to create a situation that on the verge of instability even before the current crisis began. First, the ever-expanding (yet still inadequate) access to higher education; second, an almost 30-year pattern of rising expenses and costs being shifted from public funding to students and their families; and third, a rapidly approaching point at which rising costs outstrip families' ability to pay, threatens the continued viability of the system. At stake is one of the miracles of post-World War II America, the expanding access to higher education for middle and low-income families. Don't worry; the families that could really afford to choose a college based on the quality of the omelet chef in the dorm are not likely to find themselves suddenly resorting to fish sticks. But the truth is that those families are not, ultimately, the ones on whom we should be focusing our attentions.

The historical trend of expanding participation in higher education is longstanding. Consider the following percentages of Americans over the age of 25 who had at least a bachelor's degree in different decades. 1940: 4.6%; 1950: 6.2%; 1960: 7.7%; 1970:10.7%; 1980: 16.2%; 1990: 20.3%; 2000: 24.4%;. In 2007, the number was 27.5% (another 7.4% held associate degrees, and 19.5% more had some college education.) The 27.5% figure breaks down into 28.2% of males and 26.8% of females, as compared with 26.1% of men and 22.9% of women in 2000. The 2000 figure of 24.4% is further broken down by race : among Americans over the age of 25 27.0% of Whites, 14.3% of African-Americans and 10.4% of non-white Hispanics had college degrees.

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