The argument I read is either that I haven't served (coward, leftist, not real American), or that even if I did wear the uniform (which I did), I had a comfortable and safe existence in Germany while my brethren were fighting and dying in Vietnam. Or, that I was not high-ranking enough to know anything. Or, that I was not low-ranking enough to really experience the truth. I can see, in the military blogs and in the comments of those who have written about my posts last week, that those who refer to themselves as Vietnam veterans still yearn for the recognition and thanks that they believe they haven't received. There is no question that Vietnam is still an open wound for them, and that they therefore only recognize the worth of fellow veterans, of those who have been through exactly the same experience.

He feels the sting, and he also feel the absurdity of being attacked that way. But so far he really has no answer to it, except an ad hominem on the veterans who abused him. Not very good. I could give him a primer on how to artfully get those chicken teeth out of his cheeks. He comes back to it again in the column:

As this line of argument goes, the soldiers themselves and those who have served in Iraq are the only ones who really know what it is like, what the war is about, and what should be done. The media in general and war opponents in particular intentionally and purposefully provide a negative and discouraging view that doesn't comport with what the soldiers see, so goes this argument. But the bigger point is that any dissenting voices are just those of whores, politicians, tin foil hat liberals, or worse, un-Americans. In this view, there are no actual experts in this world, no one who studies and measures public opinion, no one who studies war or the military, who do not wear the uniform.

Ah, well, I'm sure he was similarly denouncing this view when it was his friends and allies who spouted it. I'm sure.

I think the chickenhawk meme is a logical fallacy and a dangerous argument to make in a free nation. To accept it is to tacitly promote militarism and a marriage of martial and civilian authority. If only military men can make political decisions leading to war, all politicians ultimately will be military men. The alternative is an occasionally pacifist government that could not adequately defend itself in the modern world.

And if you think things in the U.S. military are bad now, imagine a nation where armed service was the doorway to political careers. Imagine every wanna-be legislator trying to get himself slathered in battlefield glory. No, you don't have to imagine it. The annals of 1861 and '62 still are damp with the gore of blood spilled by such politician-generals. Just Google "Ball's Bluff" if you don't believe me.

Back to Arkin. I think his original column was wrong-headed and foolish and insulting -- but not because of his military service or lack of it or the quality thereof.

He called the U.S. military a pack of "mercenaries," and he got an earful in response. He senses the chickenhawk meme is an error -- once it has attacked him -- but not for any of the right reason. No, but because it's "anti-elitist." Seriously:

This is not some post-modern relativism, it is pure anti-elitism. The elite think they know it all, while those who do all of the dirty work, who do all of the suffering, are methodically ignored and dominated.

And that's where he leaves it. Honest to Gods, with a whole toolbox of logical and political ripostes to the chickenhawk meme, the best he can do is say it's mean to the elites. Elites like William M. Arkin, who "strive to see an angle in an event that is different" and "try to be ahead of the curve, and not just reflect conventional wisdom ...." Yes, well, you can't very well be the new Will Rogers if you also want to carry on like Gore Vidal. You'll have to settle for being The Poor Man's Chomsky and take your appropriate lumps. It seems his editors are sitting on him:

Note: On the advice of my editors, this is the last column I will post for awhile on this subject. My impulse would be to continue to fight back and answer the critics, but I see the wisdom in their observation that nothing new is being said here and the Internet frenzy is adding nothing to the debate or our understanding of our world. I also see that I cannot continue to write about humanity and difficult questions if indeed what I wish is to vanquish those who attack me.

That's a shame. It would be interesting to see this continue, and to see whether he eventually gets it. Though I suspect Armed Liberal and I would bet the same way on that one.

« ok, I'm done now

Every 100 deaths in Iraq is a "grim milestone," by fiat of the media. It is the most overworked cliché of local journalism since, "Rain couldn't dampen the spirits/enthusiasm of _____ graduates of _____ high school during last night's commencement ceremony as they looked to the future and pondered the past."

It requires no thought or reflection. It treats round numbers as the definition of reality. This has been a media trope since the first shots were fired ("After days of intense searching by ground and air, U.S. forces on Saturday found the bodies of two soldiers missing north of Baghdad, as the toll of American dead since the start of war topped the grim milestone of 200 ..." -- Associated Press, June 29, 2003). I doubt anyone who wrote any of these headlines could explain to you why death number 3,000 was enormously more significant than death number 2,997. Certainly not to the parents of number 2,997.

Does it help you to know these numbers divorced from context? Are there not many Americans who would consider, say, every 1,000 abortions nationwide a "grim milestone?" Even if you set 1,000 battle deaths (not the AP's preferred 200) as the benchmark for "grim milestones," you had a grim milestone every five days during America's involvement in World War II with nary a "grim milestone" headline to show for it.

The Associated Press coverage of Bush's recent speech on Iraq played up his admission of mistakes more than what he actually proposed:

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush acknowledged for the first time last night that he erred by not ordering a military buildup in Iraq last year and said he was increasing U.S. troops by 21,500 to quell the country's near-anarchy. "Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me," Bush said.

Because it's become a media/anti-war trope that "Bush never admits mistakes." But he sometimes does. Does he admit fewer than Roosevelt did in public? Than Reagan? Than Lincoln? Than John F. Kerry? How would you know that? Does the media even care? Now it's surge.

One thing is clear: Using the word "surge" to describe President Bush's forthcoming plan for reshaping U.S. efforts in Iraq has ignited a fiery political brouhaha.

Thus the LA Times. What's missing there? The sentence has no subject. "Who" is "[u]sing the word 'surge' to describe President Bush's forthcoming plan ..." The media, including the LA Times." In a laughable bit of journalistic commentary, the Times has a Roseanne Rosanadana moment and slips this into the article well down in the text:

The controversy has not been diminished by the fact that Bush and senior White House officials have steered clear of “surge” themselves.

And this well after the paper has allowed a Bush critic to blame it all on the president and his minions:

"I've noticed a complete acceptance on the part of most of the MSM [mainstream media] (and Congress) to accept the White House nomenclature," blogger Nicole Belle wrote in a complaint posted on crooksandliars.com.

Other anti-war pundits take umbrage at "surge" because their definition of "surge" is the real one and pouti that those evil neo-cons are stealing their language.

"This need not be complicated. A 'surge' suggests a brief increase in troops.
... "Well, enough of this. Liberals, journalists, I'm calling on you. We must never talk about a surge unless we're actually talking about a surge -- a temporary infusion of troops. We should resist that as well. But now, if the proponents of escalation have escalation on their agenda, we must bring this out in the open and defeat it. Deal?"

Let's look at that ol' dictionary, shall we?

1. to rise and fall actively : TOSS [a ship surging in heavy seas]
2 : to rise and move in waves or billows : SWELL [the sea was surging]
3 : to slip around a windlass, capstan, or bitts -- used especially of a rope
4 : to rise suddenly to an excessive or abnormal value [the stock market surgeed to a record high]
5 : to move with a surge or in surges [felt the blood surging into his face -- Harry Hervey] [she surged past the other runners]

Nothing in there about brief, small, or short. Nothing about "temporary." When "she surged past the other runners" there's no implication that they then all overtook her again.

These are not peripheral words in this national debate. They are its heart, and that heart is philological mud. Reactionary "progressives" and illiberal "liberals" rail at "conservatives" who couldn't find a single touchstone of philosophical conservatism with a Geiger counter.

« ok, I'm done now

Wilentz tells how the new republic quickly came to a crisis with Jefferson's election in 1800. Afterward Americans, including the political leaders, overcame the Founders' scruples and arrived at a general consensus that elections ought to be open to as many white males as possible.

Andrew Jackson's victory in 1828 was both a result of expanded suffrage and a rout of the last conservative defense against it. For the first time in America, popular causes begin to really drive national policy.

In the book's final third, the struggle over slavery distorts the march to democracy by forking it into two ideals: a Northern one and a largely anti-democratic Southern one.

But "The Rise of American Democracy" fails to rise above the mundane school of academic history-writing. It sees the past too much through the filter of current events. (Historians even have coined a word for this, "presentist.") Wilentz even lapses into modern catch phrases like "support the troops" that have dubious utility when applied to the War of 1812. Consequently, a great deal gets left out of his narrative.

Wilentz gets right to work in his introduction, asserting his right to define "democracy" in terms that would make it unrecognizable to the Founders, readers of ancient Greek, and many modern Americans.

Madison, for instance, might have defined "democracy" as a form of government vesting sovereignty in the majority, and in which the rulers serve the ruled.

Poppycock, Wilentz writes. "I think we go astray in discussing democracy simply as a form of government or society, or as a set of social norms ... a thing with particular structures that can be codified and measured." No? If democracy is not a form of government or society, what is it?

Democracy appears when some large number of previously excluded, ordinary persons -- what the eighteenth century called "the many" -- secure the power not simply to select their governors but to oversee the institutions of government, as officeholders and as citizens free to assemble and criticize those in office. [p.xix]

Ah, so. Democracy is a permanent state of "power to the people" revolution against the would-be ruling class gnawing at the roots of the tree of liberty. But instead of defining what democracy is, he's only described one way it happens.

I might call that a sometimes-feature of democracies, but to Wilentz it is the whole elephant. In so doing, Wilentz sweeps aside the notion that democracy ever can be a "gift bestowed by benevolent, farseeing rulers." Which puts the Founders in their place. Instead, "it must always be fought for."

And well you might assert that if you were publishing in 2006 and you had just announced your opinion that "George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace." In Wilentz's world, it seems the only assurance of a nation's freedom is a continuous state of anti-administration truculence by the working people, and carping at leaders is the highest form of patiotism.

Contra Wilentz, however, American democracy was more than just a tug-of-war between rich aristocrats and noble working people. New England had a "classical/puritan" model of republicanism, the South embraced a "modern/agrarian" model, and different strains of republicanism flourished in between -- in Dutch New York and Quaker Jersey and Pennsylvania. Democracy had roots in cultural and religious traditions Wilentz ignores.

You can find that in the works of historians like David Hackett Fischer, but none of this really gets any treatment in Wilentz's book, which presents America's political evolution as the work largely of organized lower-class outsiders and a few insider allies in Washington.

Wilentz, whose specialty is American working class leaders and movements (his c.v. is here) naturally wants to make radical labor leaders and anti-capitalist agitators the heroes of the story. Certainly they played a role in the evolution of the United States from the mixed-government republic of the Constitution toward the horizontal democracy it was becoming by the time Wilentz winds up his book circa 1861.

But his attempt to pump up the importance of the radicalized working class often oversells the product. The result can remind the reader how classless American politics, as opposed to European, tend to be. Marx's old perplexity remains, and that probably wasn't what Wilentz wanted you to notice.

For instance, in the chapter on the Van Buren administration he touts "polemics" by Fanny Wright and other radicals against paper money. As though Van Buren sat up at night in bed reading radical pamphleteers and shaping his policy accordingly.

The more likely results of the radical agitation turn up a few pages later when Wilentz mentions the administration's opponents made hay by tarring its fiscal policy as "the 'Fanny Wright' campaign to destroy all banks." Then as now, in America, shrill voices tend to taint the causes they preach, however valid those causes may be in the minds of most Americans. Only devotees of Ann Coulter and Cindy Sheehan need be surprised by that.

In chapter after chapter, Wilentz breathlessly builds up the momentum of a working-class or radical movement on some issue. Mass meetings gather and brave men make bold speeches. Then the elections come and the radical parties get a "respectable" 10 percent or so, and in a month it's all forgotten. But you can be sure Wilentz will remind you the winners were "forced to take notice" of the distant third-place finishers.

***

"The Rise of American Democracy" actually is a turn back to an older style of history writing, one focused on the leading men of the age. Wilentz seeks to merge this with the modern academic historian's fixation with race, class, and gender abstractions and economic explanations.

And though throughout Wilentz shows his propensity for retroactively empowering "ordinary Americans, including some beyond the outermost reaches of the country's formal political life," he also believes this progress toward democracy was accomplished by the combined efforts of the people and certain egalitarian political leaders.

As such, the book actually is a corrective to much of what has been written in the past 20 years or so. Those works can make it seem American history only ever happened from the bottom up.

Wilentz stays true to his purpose to write a history of the politics of the times. "The Rise of American Democracy" is blissfully free of statistics. Science and literature are invisible. "Moby Dick" appears only as an allegory of the national struggle over slavery; Walt Whitman strolls across the stage only as a political journalist.

Unfortunately, Wilentz seem to have fallen into his topic, like Alice through the looking glass, and has written a history book in political prose.

All historians do this to some extent, but the scent of it is particularly strong here. Wilentz uses campaign-trail rhetoric: good fanatics are "passionate" "reformers" who "rail against" their enemies; bad ones are "hot-headed" "extremists" who "sneer at" them. A writer he approves is an "author;" one he disapproves is a "scribbler."

If a class of men you approve engages in politics you don't, blame it on exploitation by party bosses and propaganda. If a class of men you despise engages in politics you approve, dismiss it as the cold calculation of self-interest and temporary expedience.

Men of Party-I-Like have "moral seriousness" and take care to be "estranged" from the extremists on their side. Men of Party-I-Don't-Like, on the other hand, believe in their hearts the most extreme versions of their dogmas; it's only the "more candid" ones who say "frankly what others try to cloak."

The most complex situations resolve into simple good guy-bad guy plotlines more worthy of a professional wrestling show. Working-class Irish-American racism against blacks, deftly analyzed in Noel Ignatiev's "How the Irish Became White," tends to crop up in Wilentz's book as a case of innocent immigrants exploited by political schemers. The Irish immigrants, you see, are "offended by the Republicans' nativist tinge and empathy for black slaves" (never mind that the racism was in place a generation before the birth of either Know-Nothing nativism or Republicans).

Wherever Wilentz mentions Irish antipathy to blacks, he couples it with the political press and Democratic candidates who benefited from Irish votes. It all begins to read like an apology, as though the press was the source of the racism, not the fan to the flames. As though the basic arithmetic of wages and available labor were something only a politician, not an Irish workman, could calculate. It is odd that Wilentz's class-consciousness would overlook this, but he has bigger fish to fry. If working people are heroes and working people are racists, it must be someone else's fault.

It's only in a footnote on Irish-black relations that Wilentz admits his version is outside "The conventional and by no means wholly discredited view on Irish-black relations ...."

In such a milieu, it's no surprise political men, who ought to burst to life on these pages, simply fall out of them like cardboard bookmarks.

The great chamaeleon Van Buren goes from a cynical but brilliant coalition-builder for Jackson, playing footsie with the slave-masters for the sake of a majority, to the "courageous" and principled candidate of the Free-Soilers in their anti-slavery crusade. He then reverts to party hack when he refuses to join a later abolitionist movement.

John C. Calhoun is the great cartoon villain of the work, of course. And of course every breath Calhoun takes is explained as being grounded either in his pathological desire to make himself president or his twisted racist defense of slavery. Which would be absurd to anyone who could step outside Wilentz's world long enough to glance at Calhoun's career of deliberate steps that sabotaged his hope to lead the nation, or the future of slavery, for the sake of being consistent to his principles.

Wilentz is content to mouth the old Van Burenite slanders against Calhoun, because doing so suits his ideological need for a slaveocrat arch-satan. The caricature is downright scurilous, as when cartoon Calhoun's opposition to the huge annexations that followed the Mexican War, on anti-imperialist grounds, is dismissed as merely a racist desire to keep swarthy Mexicans out of the union.

Calhoun's constitutional position, the key to everything he did, finally gets a word in edgewise on page 729 of Wilentz's book, more than 600 pages after Calhoun first pops up in the text. He's already a decade dead and buried by that time, and Wilentz only deigns to give his doctrine a reasonably fair one-sentence summation for the sake of then pointing out how extreme, by contrast, were some of the Southern leaders who followed him.

(Along the way he also manages to misidentify Calhoun's "Disquisition on Government" as "unpublished" -- probably to diminish its importance. It was the summation of thought that Calhoun worked on until his death, and it was published three years later in a treatise of 107 pages.)

Nothing shows how completely Wilentz fails to consider Calhoun more than his description of Calhoun's "attacks on democracy -- or what ... he carefully called 'absolute democracy' ..." blithely eliding over the chasm of distinction at the core of Calhoun's entire career as though it was a rhetorical trick any clever modern-day Princeton historian can see through.

Even Lincoln, who in this book can do no wrong, is a cypher as he rides the political rapids from one political alignment to another. Other men seem to be simply inexplicable in Wilentz's world, such as Mayor Fernando Wood: champion of New York City's working-class poor AND pro-Southern conservative.

As a result, some of the juiciest perplexities of the times go unexplored in "The Rise of American Democracy." The evolution of radical anti-constitutional and disunionist sentiments by the Northern abolitionists happened at the same time there was, for the first time, a mainstream abolitionist political party. Why is that?

Wilentz rightly notes something historians often overlook: It wouldn't have mattered if the Democratic Party had maintained unity in 1860; Lincoln would have won anyhow. But this comes after a lurid account of how the evil Southern fire-eaters gleefully split the Democratic Party in hopes it would spur secession.

That, he sees, is a threat to democracy. The fact that a regional candidate like Lincoln could win the national election with only 39 percent of the popular vote doesn't seem to cross his transom for trouble. Eighteen-sixty was the most anti-democratic election (defining "democracy" in the usual way) in American history, yet because it brought to power an outsider minority that ultimately set another outsider minority free, it was for Wilentz the supreme democratic event. You'd think he'd at least acknowledge the contradiction in that.

The modern Middle East is sobering some Americans to the ugliness that can rise up to power in a popular election. A look at our past might teach the same lesson.

In the 1850s, the extreme men of the South made slow inroads among the leadership class in Dixie -- the aristocrats of slavery that Wilentz scorns. Instead, the underminers of the union had much more rapid success among the enfranchised masses in popular elections. Wilentz even notes this paradox -- "The upholders of Southern aristocracy were gaining power through the Southern democratic ballot box" [p.755] -- and there it starts and ends, as far as this book is concerned.

The Southern Confederacy and its rhetoric offer a broad-side barn target for a modern enlightened American. Wilentz's abhorrence of racism and African slavery make him the kind of fellow you'd invite to a dinner party. But they alone hardly qualify him to write this sort of drive-by history book.

The national deterioration in the 1850s was a radical table tennis match played across the Mason Dixon Line: Christiana riots, Nebraska, Dred Scott, John Brown. But in Wilentz's chicken-or-egg story of the conflict between North and South, the Southern fried chicken always comes first. To see the thing in purely political terms requires the historian to put aside his revulsion at slavery, his utter sympathy for the abolitionists, and consider the process.

Wilentz simply drags out the dusty old dossier of quotes mined from Southern political speeches and declarations of 1860 to prove defense of slavery as the central motive for secession. Then he angrily dismisses the reflective views of the chief men of both sides, years after the bid for Southern independence had failed, as a pack of lies. Because the later writings put the slavery debate in the context of the spark that lit the fire, the perceived proof of the need to separate, not the purpose of the new nation.

And so we have here the spectacle of the historian of politics dismissing the calmer reflections of historical writing as wicked lies and insisting the political boilerplate speeches and heat-of-the-moment rallying cries are the only true statements. Oh, he's not alone. It's prevailing wisdom these days, however absurd it will look to a future generation.

Still, Wilentz passes up a chance to explore the really interesting political mentality of men like Alexander Stephens, a Henry Clay-style Southern Whig by nature who felt the need to reconcile his later embrace of slavery with his essential Whig ideology based on order and philanthropy.

The slavery passage in the speech Stephens made in Savannah in 1861, which Wilentz cherry-picks to prove that the Southern rebellion had no purpose but to protect slavery, is a reflection of Stephens' internal struggle to maintain consistency of thought.

Here was a man who had publicly reversed most of his earlier political positions. As late as the 1860 election, Stephens had backed the moderate Douglas, not the South's hard-line choice, Breckenridge. He considered secessionists "demagogues," and he defended Lincoln, with whom he had served in the House. Lincoln, he wrote, "is not a bad man. He will make as good a president as Fillmore did and better too in my opinion." Lincoln, for his part, actually considered inviting Stephens to join his cabinet.

But Stephens cast his loyalty with his section, not his principles. If he could not correct the South, he would try to guide it and, by compromising some, attempt to save the rest. He failed, and the South failed.

The Savannah speech is a sad affair, not just because of the blunt racism of that one passage -- the racism itself, it ought to be noted, would hardly have offended any white audience in 1861 America, North, South, or West, outside a few abolitionist circles. But sad because it shows a politician who has so twisted himself to try to hold the reins of a revolution that he has got tangled in them and they now rule him. He embraces what he once scorned, and he mocks positions he once held. He has thrown away his ideals, and the "cornerstone" passage, to me, reads so much more accurately as an odd eruption of a warped and very personal ideological struggle.

***

It's not surprising that a Princeton historian would tack well to the left of the typical American (in his article on Bush, Wilentz writes, "Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole"). But Wilentz actually has to shield himself from the extreme left side of his profession when it comes to his hero Andrew Jackson. Which may be why I found the Jackson section of the book the most appealing.

Jackson's Indian removal policy, he writes, has become "the great moral stain on the Jacksonian legacy." Wilentz bristles that "Jackson's democracy, for these historians -- indeed, liberal society -- was founded on degradation, dishonor, and death." Jackson, Wilentz insists, "truly believed" his policy was relatively just and humane. He was "a benevolent, if realistic paternalist." Why, he went so far as to adopt an orphaned Indian boy. What's more, his policy was constrained by his commitment to follow the Constitution.

Thing is, I agree with Wilentz about all that. And that the Indian removal, however well intentioned, was the least-terrible from a short list of terrible options, a tragedy, and a misguided benevolence whose good intentions were undercut by the administration itself.

But still it's amusing to watch Wilentz completely flip-flop on a paternalistic master-race leader and rally to his defense because, after all, the man advanced democracy, the one value that matters. He scolds the version of the story given by Jackson's detractors in the history-writing profession:

Like all historical caricatures, this one turns tragedy into melodrama, exaggerates parts at the expense of the whole, and sacrifices nuance for sharpness.

Which is a better summation than I could write of my opinion about "The Rise of American Democracy."

There are better studies than this one available for every issue and administration covered here, and they make the same points with more vigor and evidence. I suppose it's some use to have all this between two covers. But so much ground gets covered that, even for a book this size, and even if you agree with Wilentz about everything, the treatment is superficial.

The Jackson section is best, but we already have Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s "Age of Jackson" for that. Wilentz adds only a few dabs of color to that masterpiece. Compare any passage of Wilentz and Schlesinger on the same topic: Calhoun in the Senate grimly casting the tie-breaking vote that he thinks will end Van Buren's career; Van Buren remaining in "careful ignorance" of the unfolding scandal as the rest of Jackson's cabinet self-destructs in the Peggy Eaton affair.

Feel the vitality of the writing, the subtlety of the political comprehension. Nuance can share a page with sharpness.

« ok, I'm done now

Thaksin was a very promising figure to Thais. He was a native son who had completed his education in the USA, had returned to Thailand, and had created a telecom company that led the nation and had expanded regionally. He was, to most Thais, a thoughtful and promising personality who appeared to be trustworthy.

But to most Thais today, that appearance was just a front. Shortly after taking office, Thaksin pressed to pass laws that limited competition to his own company. This allowed him to expand his business with little opposition, thought many people and members of Thailand's legislature complained. As a result, he transferred his personal holdings to his family, to present the appearance he had nothing to gain by the laws he pressed forward. After his (family's) company became powerful on a regional basis, he entered into a sales agreement, but performed his sale through Singapore, allowing him to collect billions in profits outside of Thai taxation laws. When this information became available to the Thai people, a growing number of Thais began to call for Thaksin to step down.

Thaksin responded as if he had done nothing wrong. As if he was being informed of some outside breach or faith and law, he instead passed laws to ban other businesses doing exactly what he had done himself. It was as if he had no belief or understanding that he had done those things he was then denouncing, and in fact publicly declared those angry with him to be wrong and himself to be completely innocent of any wrongdoing.

That didn't sit very well with Thais, who value honesty, character and face above everything. Thailand is a Buddhist society, believing in a sort of yin-yang form of good and bad, or basically "what goes around, comes around." Therefore a leader who is a cheat, or worse, a liar, is only going to bring bad luck on the rest of the country.

Elected officials in the legislature began to complain, and complain loudly. Others outside of the government began to write and complain as well.

This started coming to a sort of crest late last year. By January, Thaksin had taken advantage of a loophole in the Thai constitution and abolished the elected legislature that had begun to call for investigations. In effect, in response to protests against his own actions and those of members of his party, he completely removed the elected government of Thailand.

In abolishing of the legislature, Thaksin took advantage of his position and weaknesses in the Thai constitution yet again. According to the constitution, it became the prime minister's job to create an interim or "caretaker" government. This allowed him to legally step into the position of head of the "caretaker" government, which essentially preserved his leadership. In this position he was required to appoint a committee for elections, and then set dates for elections. His solution was to appoint TRT cronies and call for snap elections, to be held in March.

By February, the first major protests were being held in Bangkok by outspoken critics of Thaksin and the money-oriented government he led. These protests in BKK were week-long events, with thousands showing up. The main complaint of these protests was alleged actions by Thaksin or the TRT, and the snap elections that most members of the opposition claimed were to be held too early, leaving opposition parties without candidates to put on the ballots. Thaksin ignored the protests.

So when the elections came around, the people responded in the only way they really could, that is, by essentially boycotting them. Another feature of Thai constitutional law holds that candidates without 30% of the registered vote cannot be certified for office. At the end of the elections, TRT candidates who ran unopposed collected less than 15% of the available vote, so some 23 positions within the legislature were left unfilled. Legal challenges were immediately filed, and eventually Thai courts ruled the election to be invalid. On top of that, accusations about the conduct of the elections had been filed against Thaksin's election committee for election fraud.

In the meantime, the King of Thailand, the most revered man in the nation, had celebrated his 60th coronation jubilee in June, with world dignitaries and every Thai who could possibly come attending. During a rare speech to the nation, he urged both the Thai people and the government to look inwards for what was right, and to strive to do those things that were necessary to keep the strength and quality of the Thai people. At about the same time, he also urged Thaksin to make right on elections. Subsequently, Thaksin bowed to the wishes of his more respected leader, and called for new elections to be held in October, even while claiming those preceding them were valid.

Vast quantities of political BS have passed between then and now. But one prevailing feature has been Thaksin's attempt to proclaim innocence, and to legitimize himself and his government. This has gone as far as to point an accusing finger, lightly veiled, at the King himself, as the cause for his and his party's problems. This hasn't sat well with Thais, who do not tolerate insults to their king well, especially from other Thais. Meanwhile, in August, all three members of Thaksin's self-appointed election committee were found guilty of election fraud and sentenced to some 15 years or so in jail.

My understandings from my boss and friends in Thailand has been this. While Thaksin has been in NYC for U.N. meetings, members of the military and police loyal to him have moved to arrest and push aside opposition members prior to the coming elections in a sort of coup. This has been expected by other members of the military and police loyal to the King and the Thai people. In response, they have moved in, sealed off the government house of the interim government, have sealed off the home of Thaksin, and have placed guards around the palace of the King, presumably for his protection.

The soldiers doing this are wearing or showing yellow flags or ribbons from uniforms and equipment, which is a sign of devotion to the King. This suggests that they will hold themselves loyal to the King, who has opposition to Thaksin and a well known loyalty and affection towards his people and fully supports their efforts towards a workable democracy.

I suspect that Thaksin made his move while he was out of the country because there was a good chance he might not be successful. For whatever reason, he does not share the humility towards his fellow Thais that most have. In a country where shame is incredibly horrible, he feels none, though he is literally buried in it.

I also believe the army has stepped in to stop what has been impossible to stop otherwise. If the Thaksin of the past can be compared to that of the future, the October election will be no more fair or valid than that which proceeded it. And the Constitution provides for nothing beyond more of the same. Thaksin has made the faults of the present constitution abundantly clear to most Thais, and I believe this is why the military has, for the moment, abolished it.

At present, the majority of the army and police appear to be in charge of the government, and they in turn are apparently sworn in loyalty to the King. The King in turn is dedicated to a democratic Thailand, so unless fighting occurs between the army and other armed portions of the government, most things should be calm. Fighting cannot be ruled out, however, because Thaksin gave substantial amounts of money to police forces and other armed security forces within the Thai government, apparently to preserve their support.

The news will tell you that many Thais support Thaksin. This is true. He is supported in certain parts of the business world, but more importantly, within the more poor and rural portions of Thailand. The business support is to be expected, as he threw open doors for certain supporters. But in the farm portions of Thailand where people are the most poor, he is appreciated because he stepped into the place vacated by the King as the ruler has grown older and less able to travel.

The King and royal family have a long tradition of working alongside farmers and laborers to improve their production techniques and provided additional help when necessary. These projects still hold the attention of the royal family, but Thaksin stepped in to present himself as a representative of the King. Traditions die hard, and Thaksin wisely took advantage of that. In these areas, education levels are typically primary grades and below, so political sophistication is out of the question. If a representative of the King can come to the village and show a new way to help reduce water loss in ponds during the hot season, then he's beloved, no matter how many baht he cheated the people out of in a telecom deal.

Hopefully this helps. It's hard to know that much right now, even for me. TV coverage is under strict control at the moment, but Thais aren't stupid. They find ways to learn about what's going on, including by talking to friends in the U.S. So if anything of great interest comes up that you don't see in the news, I'll pass it on.

Also, let me say, I'm not worried. In my opinion this has been coming for months. Thaksin has made it almost impossible for the Thai people to get him out of office. I consider that the army is doing nothing more than carrying out by arms what the people have been unable to do by themselves.

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« ok, I'm done now