"How to Hide an Empire"

[fiefoe]

This book also should be tagged as "my-kid-should-read-this".
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• It did take a few useful goods from its tropical colonies, such as coconut oil from the Philippines and Guam and “Manila hemp” from the Philippines (used to make rope and sturdy paper, hence “manila envelopes” and “manila folders”).
• What the Depression drove home was that, three decades after the war with Spain, the United States still hadn’t done much with its empire... In fact, they were potentially a threat. Since colonial sugar competed with mainland cane and beet sugar, mainland farmers demanded protection from it.
• A fairer way to put it would be to say that Manuel Quezon embodied the contradictions of colonialism. The desire for the colonizer’s approval, the demand for autonomy, conciliation, violence—Quezon contained multitudes. One journalist compared talking with him to trying to pick up mercury with a fork.
• Douglas MacArthur is one of those blips in history, an idiosyncratic figure who, for reasons hard to satisfactorily explain, acquired far more power than he had any reason to. In the United States in the mid-twentieth century, there were three such men, each operating on a different scale. On the level of the city, there was Robert Moses, who somehow managed to trade up authority over New York’s parks—a position that traditionally entailed little more than serving the needs of the city’s bird-watchers—into a decades-long stranglehold over municipal politics. On the national level, there was J. Edgar Hoover, the spymaster who held presidents under his thumb. And in foreign relations, exercising more effective authority than perhaps anyone else in U.S. history, it was Douglas MacArthur. .. Though he was regarded by many as a military genius, his career was punctuated by eye-popping blunders. And he spoke about himself in the third person.
• “War,” the comedian Jon Stewart has observed, is “God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”
• (War economy:) Eight parlors supplied some four hundred to five hundred tattoos a day (“Remember Pearl Harbor” was a favorite). The overcrowded brothels, doling out services in three-minute increments, cleared $10 million a year—half the cost of the Alaska Highway, right there.
• Hawai‘i was “enemy country,” as the secretary of the navy saw it, with a suspect population, more than one-third of which was of Japanese ancestry. Thus were the territory’s residents registered, fingerprinted, and vaccinated—the first mass fingerprinting and the largest compulsory vaccination campaign the United States had ever undertaken.
• An incensed Ernest Gruening traveled to Washington to complain of the “introduction of Gestapo methods to the United States.” But he found, in a perfect catch-22, that the censorship was so complete that even congressmen didn’t know of it. <> Alaska was thus the “quietest war theater,” or the “hidden front,” as journalists called it. Today it is the forgotten war. Many people are surprised to learn that the Japanese even came near Alaska. <> They are also surprised to learn of the Aleut internment.
• But in Alaskan camps, by the war’s end, 10 percent had died.
• Hawai‘i’s war bond sales were the highest in the country, consistently between two and nearly four times the national average. Alaska’s, as of at least the middle of the war, ranked second. Even as they faced more extreme governmental intrusions than mainlanders, the people of the Pacific territories bankrolled the war.
• One soldier, Daniel Inouye, exhibited near-inconceivable levels of valor in Tuscany at the war’s end. When three German machine guns pinned his men down, he stood up to charge. He was immediately shot in the stomach, but he ran toward the first machine-gun nest and blew it up with a grenade.. . He pried the grenade free with his left hand and hurled it into the third machine-gun nest. As the few surviving Germans ran out, Inouye unslung his tommy gun and, left-handed, sprayed them with machine-gun fire.
• Pound for pound, the 100th/442nd (from Hawaii) was one of the most decorated units in U.S. history.
• Had MacArthur gone catatonic? Was he playing some devious (yet ineffectual) game? MacArthur’s biographer found his behavior “bewildering.” It’s a “riddle,” the biographer wrote, “and we shall never solve it.” <> Whatever the cause, the effect was catastrophe. The Japanese struck sometime after noon, nine hours after MacArthur’s phone had rung. “We could see our beautiful silver Flying Fortresses burning and exploding right before our eyes as we stood powerless to do anything about it,” one B-17 navigator wrote. In hours, MacArthur lost eighteen of his thirty-five B-17s and some ninety other aircraft.
• MacArthur abandoned the fight and concentrated on maneuvering his men on Luzon to the relative safety of the Bataan peninsula. It was a backpedaling waltz: engage, fall back, dynamite the bridge, repeat. The difficulty was that it was to be danced over long distances (184 bridges destroyed in all) by two of MacArthur’s deteriorating forces at once, and all to the accompaniment of enemy fire. Oddly, it was here, in retreat, that MacArthur proved his worth as a commander. The maneuver was by all accounts beautifully executed. General Pershing called it “a masterpiece, one of the greatest moves in all military history.”
• First, though, the Corregidor headquarters would have to be scuttled. The gold was sneaked out, at night, to a waiting submarine, which took it to San Francisco. The paper currency was incinerated to keep it out of Japanese hands. (“Guess what I learned after burning ten million dollars?” one officer said. “That Jackson twenties burn faster than Lincoln fives.”) The 150 tons of silver pesos, too bulky to move, were dumped into a secret spot in Manila Bay—a tantalizing challenge for future treasure hunters.
• The films were incorrigible on this score. The stars were white, the writers were white, and the tragedies they acted out befell white people: soldiers, sailors, doctors, and nurses. Even the stereotype-shattering Bataan, a heroic tale of a racially mixed patrol (a young Desi Arnaz played a Mexican American), had only one speaking Filipino character, a Moro who used broken English and walked around shirtless.
• MacArthur lacked the resources to roll back the Japanese and retake all the territory the Allies had lost. <> Instead, he became a genius of economy. He stopped playing Risk and started playing Go, leaping his units over Japanese positions. What MacArthur (along with Admiral Chester Nimitz in the Central Pacific) had grasped was that, in an age of aviation and on a battlefield of islands, you didn’t have to maintain a continuous, football-scrimmage front.
• The twin Pacific campaigns were long and brutal, and it’s telling that many veterans of the war who went on to political greatness earned their spurs in them. John F. Kennedy got shipwrecked in the Solomons (an island there is named after him). Lyndon Baines Johnson won a Silver Star, personally given by MacArthur, for “gallantry” as an observer in New Guinea. Richard Nixon served in air logistics in MacArthur’s theater. Gerald Ford gamely puttered around nearly every island group in the ocean on a light aircraft carrier. The twenty-year-old Lieutenant George H. W. Bush was shot down over Chichi Jima in the Bonins. Bush—the plane’s sole survivor—got rescued by a submarine. He was extremely lucky. Four other airmen shot down later in the same area were captured and became the unfortunate victims in the highest-profile documented instance of Japanese wartime cannibalism.
• We slammed the back door shut before we began to fight” is how the official history of MacArthur’s leading division put it. A group of military historians judged this enclosure of the city to be “the strategic blunder of the Philippine campaign.” Having cut off Iwabuchi’s escape route, MacArthur practically guaranteed that the admiral would make his final stand in a densely populated city. <> The battle for Manila would be a fight to the death.
• Within a week of fighting, U.S. shelling of the whole area in front of advancing troops became, as one report put it, “the rule rather than the exception.” Any structure suspected of containing Japanese troops was a target. “Block after bloody block was slowly mashed into an unrecognizable pulp,”
• In four days, Elpidio Quirino had lost eight members of his family, including his wife, his mother-in-law, and three of his five children. A woman who saw him at the end of this remembered Quirino staggering around Manila in his undershirt, smeared with mud, a vacant stare in his eyes—a latter-day Lear.
• The pride of the colonial state, built by a Filipino to a mainlander’s plan, lay in ruins. The symbolism was hard to miss. <> Manila wasn’t short on symbols. The sixth-largest city in the United States—substantially larger than Boston or Washington, D.C.—had for a month of fighting been converted into an abattoir.
• Demonic, maybe, but not indiscriminate. The “better to lose a building than an American life” logic succeeded in protecting mainland soldiers. In the month of fighting, 1,010 of them died. Compare that with the 16,665 Japanese troops who perished. And compare that with the 100,000 Manilans killed.
• The counter-entropic side of the war was the less glamorous side. Think of a GI, and you’re more likely to imagine a soldier on the front lines than a construction worker. But in the case of the United States, the construction worker is the better mental image. During the war, fewer than one in ten U.S. service members ever saw a shot fired in anger. For most who served, the war wasn’t about combat. It was about logistics. <>  The novelist Neal Stephenson got it right when he described the U.S. military in World War II as “first and foremost an unfathomable network of typists and file clerks, secondarily a stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another, and last and least a fighting organization.”
• “The condition of Egyptian ports” isn’t a subject that would have interested many in Washington in 1935. But now it did. The United States launched a massive Middle Eastern infrastructure campaign. Up went new piers with cranes to unload tanks, assembly plants to put them together, railways and hard roads to carry them to the front, and repair shops to keep them running. By June 1942, the depot near Cairo had a large airport, housing for nearly ten thousand men, a thousand-bed hospital, warehouses, and enough spare parts, tools, and skilled mechanics to keep the whole operation functioning.
• The campaign also transformed the Middle East, converting it into what the secretary of state called a “tremendous supply base” for the Allies. Factories in Palestine made batteries, those in Iran made antifreeze, and canning plants in Egypt produced rations for the troops. The northern half of Africa, which had been a virtual terra incognita for the United States, hummed with U.S. bases, ports, assembly plants, barracks, and warehouses.
• Somehow, in the anything-goes atmosphere of the occupation, a twenty-two-year-old Jewish woman named Beate Sirota had made it onto the constitutional drafting committee (she had spent part of her childhood in Tokyo and was one of the few whites who spoke Japanese fluently). It was largely owing to her influence that the constitution mandated equal rights within marriage and prohibited sex discrimination—things that the U.S. constitution conspicuously does not do.

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• This was what the Second World War had done. Colonized peoples had seen their white overlords defeated by an Asian power—it was the sort of sight that was hard to unsee. They’d heard Japan’s message of “Asia for the Asiatics” blaring from radio speakers for years. In Burma and the Philippines, they’d tasted liberty itself when Japan granted those colonies nominal independence in 1943... It wasn’t just what Asians thought, it was what they could do. The tight arms controls that had been a persistent feature of colonial life broke down entirely as the war spread weapons all around Asia.
• The Manila protest set off a string of others. Twenty thousand soldiers protested in Honolulu, three thousand in Korea, five thousand in Calcutta. On Guam, the men burned the secretary of war in effigy, and more than three thousand sailors staged a hunger strike. Protests erupted in China, Burma, Japan, France, Germany, Britain, and Austria, too, with supporting demonstrations in Washington, Chicago, and New York.
• It is perhaps not a surprise, then, that Puerto Rico became the proving ground for one of the twentieth century’s most transformative inventions: the birth control pill.


• Why did contraceptives fare so poorly in Puerto Rico despite the boundless zeal of birth control advocates? Surely, social stigma was part of the story. But another part was the aggressive promotion of a different form of birth control: female sterilization.
• Yet again, the mainland press treated the political violence as a freak event. Nationalism in Puerto Rico was “about as lunatic a movement as could exist in the world,” wrote The New York Times. Albizu and his followers were “fanatics” or “terrorists” in the press’s telling—kooks, easily dismissed and quickly forgotten. <> They have largely stayed forgotten. Despite his extraordinary career, Pedro Albizu Campos is hard to find in surveys of U.S. history.
• And so Sondheim ended up writing one Broadway musical about New York Puerto Ricans in the fifties and another about presidential assassins—without ever mentioning the New York Puerto Ricans in the fifties who tried to assassinate the president.
• The government scrambled to plug the gap. FDR begged citizens to turn over to the government “every bit of rubber you can possibly spare”: old tires, raincoats, garden hoses, shoes, bathing caps, gloves. The president’s Scottish Terrier, Fala, donated his rubber bones. Eventually nearly seven pounds of scrap rubber were collected for every man, woman, and child in the country.
• Difference two: the U.S. program worked. There was no “eureka” moment when the secret to rubber synthesis was revealed. It was the result of a thousand little discoveries made by a small army of well-funded industrial chemists. Those scientists remembered it as a golden age, when men who had formerly labored as rivals in different companies could collaborate with a shared sense of purpose.
• By the end of the war, the government had built fifty-one synthetic rubber plants (compared with Germany’s three), operating at the collective cost of $2 million a day. Just one such plant, which might employ 1,250 workers, made enough rubber to replace a rubber plantation that had twenty-four million trees and a workforce of at least 90,000.
• One such factory is the one outside Auschwitz, which survived the war and is today the third-largest European source of synthetic rubber. That single plant in Poland has the capacity to satisfy 5 percent of the world demand for rubber.
• The replacement of colonial rubber with synthetic rubber was a sort of magic. Yet it wasn’t the only rabbit that chemists yanked from their hats. What’s extraordinary is how many raw materials the United States weaned itself off during the war. Silk, hemp, jute, camphor, cotton, wool, pyrethrum, gutta-percha, tin, copper, tung oil—for one after another, the United States found synthetic substitutes. Throughout its economy, it replaced colonies with chemistry.
• In a vividly metaphorical development, toy soldiers, formerly made of lead or tin, started selling after the war as “little green men” made entirely of molded plastic. <> Those little green men were just the start—shock troops in a full-scale economic invasion. At the war’s end, one plastics executive remarked, “virtually nothing” in the civilian economy was made of plastic, yet it was clear that “anything could be.” And so the military technologies flooded into society at large. Swords were beaten into plowshares but, as an ad in Modern Plastics noted, the new plows had plastic handles.
• But that vision was never realized. The United States neither claimed new colonies nor organized the joint colonization of the tropics. Instead, synthetics dulled its hunger pangs.

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• After Dewey’s victory, Teddy Roosevelt eagerly assembled the Rough Riders to storm Cuba. But they got stuck in Tampa, a port clogged with what Roosevelt called a “swarming ant-heap of humanity,” as they waited for transport. The logjam was so great that the enlisted men had to leave their horses behind and take Cuba on foot. <> The USS Oregon could have helped, and indeed it was dispatched from Seattle. But Seattle to Florida was a two-month journey, requiring the ship to go down the Pacific coast of South America, around Tierra del Fuego, and back up through the Gulf of Mexico.
• Captain Mahan had suggested opening a canal through the Central American isthmus, which divided the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and Roosevelt agreed. He tried to buy territory from Colombia, without luck. He tried threatening and got no further. Finally, concluding that bargaining with Colombia’s leaders was liking trying to “nail currant jelly to a wall,” Roosevelt threw his support behind rebels, who declared Panama’s independence from Colombia. The newly established republic then leased to the United States a ten-mile-wide strip of land slicing through the middle of the country: the Panama Canal Zone.
• The Panama Canal was a significant achievement. But next to the challenges posed by the Second World War, digging it was a gentle warm-up exercise. War planners faced what one dazed general called “ordnance requirements of a size beyond the bounds of imagination.” For every soldier overseas, the United States would ship sixty-seven pounds of matériel abroad per day.
• During the war, the military devised a suite of logistical innovations, all designed to move people, things, and information cleanly and quickly around the planet. Planes were the most obvious—the United States came to dominate aviation—but others were no less important. Radio, cryptography, dehydrated food, penicillin, and DDT: these technologies laid the foundations of today’s globalization. <> The logistical innovations did more than speed everything up. They also enabled the United States to move through places without carefully preparing the ground first, as it had in Panama.
• The United States, in response, began to build its own air fleet, putting its full industrial muscle behind the effort. At peak, U.S. plants churned out more than one plane every four minutes—a Luftwaffe every eleven days. <> Abundance in aircraft meant that the Allies could use them for more than combat. They could use them for nearly everything. Even long-distance supply lines, they realized, could be maintained by air.
• It also allowed the Allies to do something extraordinary: defeat Japan without setting foot on its main islands. Instead, using bases at Guam, Tinian, Saipan, Okinawa, and Iwo Jima, they laid waste to nearly seventy Japanese cities by air.
• In the opening days of the First World War, Britain cut Germany’s transatlantic cables—something it could easily do, as Germany did not control the territory around them. The Germans were then forced to use unreliable intermediaries to carry their messages, which opened them up to espionage. In 1917 the German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann sent a proposal to Mexico promising to help Mexico “reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona” in exchange for an alliance. But the British intercepted the message and shared it with Washington. The “Zimmermann Telegram,” as it is now known, was crucial in drawing the United States into the war.
• Such a feeble, incomplete network wouldn’t suffice in World War II, which was, among other things, an information war. Billions of words would eventually flow overseas from the U.S. mainland—somewhere on the order of eight words transmitted for every Allied bullet fired. By D-Day, U.S. teleprinter traffic would reach eight million words a week...  Instead, the United States came to rely on another technology: radio.
• Half a year into the war, the United States figured out how to fax images wirelessly, a technology it used for maps, weather charts, and news photos. The famous Iwo Jima flag-raising photograph traveled by fax. Soon enough, the military was faxing images in color.
• Penicillin, the most powerful bacteria killer, was honed during the war, too, turning battlefield injuries from likely killers to recoverable setbacks. The death rate for all disease in the army in World War II was just 4 percent of what it had been in the First World War.
• It was a bold move. Berlin was importing fifteen thousand tons of goods per day. Stalin apparently hoped that by sealing it off, he could force the West to abandon it and perhaps retreat from Germany altogether... “I may be the craziest man in the world,” said the U.S. military governor of occupied Germany, Lucius Clay, to the mayor-elect of Berlin, “but I am going to try the experiment of feeding this city by air.”

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• A sample of headlines from the journal Industrial Standardization gives a sense of the exquisite heights to which boredom can be taken:.. And I’ll confess a special fondness for this one:    ASA Approval of Pipe Standards Important Event in Pipe History
• It helped that the bureau had, in the 1920s, one of the most trusted public officials at its helm: Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. Today Hoover is remembered as the president unfortunate enough to have been in office during the 1929 stock market crash. Yet the popular image of him as a bumbler misses a lot. He may have been a maladroit politician and a poor steward of the economy, but Hoover was an astonishingly capable bureaucrat. And there was little he cared about as much as standardization. <> Herbert Hoover, as a man, can best be understood as the opposite of Teddy Roosevelt. Whereas Roosevelt lusted for combat and styled himself as a cowboy, Hoover was a Quaker who had lived for a year among Osages in Indian Country (he later had Charles Curtis, a Native American with Osage heritage, as his vice president).
• As he saw it, the true problem with the economy was neither the injustice of capitalists nor the impatience of workers, but the inefficiency of objects. So much time and money were wasted on things that just didn’t work. Solve that problem, Hoover thought, and there’d be more than enough to go around. Standardizing and simplifying were, in his mind, the keys to prosperity.
• Hoover’s greatest challenge was one of the least visible: the humble screw thread. Screws, nuts, and bolts are universal fasteners.
• (Australian agriculture:) All that would have to change. The United States sent over experts, agricultural missionaries bearing machines, herbicides, and fungicides. Their charge? Transform a continent. <> They bombarded farmers with lectures, radio broadcasts, educational films, leaflets, and field demonstrations, all to teach the U.S. way of farming.
• “Without any inhibitions of any kind,” announced Australia’s prime minister early in the war, “I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.” In the realm of standards, that was an unavoidable truth.
• In industry after industry, the world tuned itself to the United States. This happened literally in music, where countries bickered over the pitch of a concert A. The United States had been tuning its instruments to an A of 440 hertz since 1917. But continental Europe was officially tuned to the “French pitch,” a slightly flatter A of 435 hertz, closer to the classical pitches of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Austrian delegates pushed for A435 at the United Nations. Yet with U.S. recordings flooding the market and the U.S. government broadcasting a pure A440 tone around the world from powerful radio stations in Maryland and Hawai‘i as a “service” to musicians, the Austrians stood little chance.
• Yet just a year later, in 1954, the United States changed its mind about the yellow. Experts thought that red better signified danger, and new developments in industrial chemistry allowed for durable, reflective red finishes. So, to what I can only imagine was the apoplectic fury of traffic engineers worldwide, the United States abandoned the global standard—its own standard, designed in Michigan and foisted on the world—and began to replace its yellow signs with red ones. <> This, more than anything, showed the stupefying privilege the United States enjoyed in the realm of standards. It could force other countries to adopt its screw thread angle in the name of international cooperation. But it was never bound by those imperatives itself.
• Outside of the settler population, though, enforcing English as a national language proved to be a more violent undertaking. Slave owners made a point of separating African slaves who spoke the same language. Those caught speaking their home languages could face serious punishment; there are reports of some having their tongues cut out. The result was total linguistic annihilation.
• Herbert Hoover ranged even further. He had tried to learn Osage as a boy, his first publication was a translation of a sixteenth-century Latin treatise on mining, and he and his wife, Lou, used Mandarin (learned while living in China) when they wished to speak privately.
• Air traffic controllers, then scientists, then internet users. As each increasingly large technical community adopted English, the momentum grew. Whole countries—some containing hundreds of millions of people who have never attended a scientific conference and may not even use the internet often—were dragged into the vortex.
• Axel Wenner-Gren, a Swedish multimillionaire who had established himself on an island in the Bahamas... He also pursued peace by serving as a back-channel emissary between British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and Hermann Göring, the second-in-command in the Nazi leadership.
• The main revelation from the FBI’s round-the-clock surveillance was not that Arvad was consorting with Nazis, but that she was conducting a torrid, involved affair—one the FBI recorded on tape—with a young naval ensign named John F. Kennedy. (..Hoover used the FBI’s dossier on Arvad as blackmail to ensure his reappointment as FBI director.)
• Jamaica was also where Fleming conducted an affair with a rich widow named Blanche Blackwell, who was in turn having an affair with Fleming’s neighbor, Errol Flynn. Scampering underfoot at Goldeneye was Blackwell’s young son, Chris, who would later grow up to found Island Records and launch the reggae musicians Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, Toots and the Maytals, and Peter Tosh onto the world scene.
• Howland Island was of special interest, as it was to be a stop in the aviator Amelia Earhart’s round-the-world journey (she died en route to it). But to tame it, the Hawaiians would have to deal with an out-of-control rat population... The resulting scenario was surreal, half Heart of Darkness, half Salvador Dalí. At the very least, it would make a striking diorama: four Hawaiians eating out of crates, waiting for a famous aviator who would never arrive on a tiny, poisoned island that was littered with guano, crab vomit, and dead rats.
• This was Barber’s “strategic island concept,” and it gave a name to what the United States was already doing. It underscored the point that in this new pointillist empire, colonialism was a liability, not an asset. The best bases were those that didn’t enmesh large populations. They were places where, in the words of Doctor No, the United States would have to “account to no one.”
• The CIA island was in fact a central node in the vast and distinctly not-legal plot to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. That plot in its fullness incorporated arms dealers, drug traffickers, Middle Eastern governments, religious organizations, Cuban exiles, retired generals, and Rambo-style soldiers of fortune. Had such a multifarious scheme appeared in one of Fleming’s novels, it might have strained his readers’ patience. It is a victory for the forces of concision that today we know it simply by two words, albeit incongruous ones: the Iran-Contra affair.
• Such opinions may sound strange coming from a band that owed its very existence to the U.S. military, but that’s often how it went. Those who lived in the shadow of the bases both resented them and built their lives around them, vacillating between protest and participation.
• Ultimately, Schwarzkopf marched across Iraq’s border. Yet the promised mother of all battles proved to be anything but. Schwarzkopf led his troops in a GPS-guided charge across the desert and caught the remnants of Iraq’s battered army by surprise (the Iraqis, assuming no army could navigate the trackless expanse, had expected the invasion to come via the roads). The ground war lasted one hundred hours, cost the coalition forces 366 lives, and consisted mainly of accepting Iraqi surrenders.
• The Russian military theorist Vladimir Slipchenko noted that the very spatial categories of war were changing. In the future, he suggested, area-based military concepts such as front, rear, and flank would be irrelevant. There would be only “targets and non-targets.” Further, Slipchenko predicted, “there will be no need to occupy enemy territory.” Controlling territory wouldn’t matter, because war was no longer about area. It was about points.
• If there is one episode that perfectly captures the dual nature of the U.S. basing empire, it’s this one. Participation and protest—the Beatles and the peace sign, Sony and the Okinawa riots—braided within a single family. The Bin Ladens built the bases. A Bin Laden would seek to destroy them.
• Bin Laden used his phone to coordinate the first attacks that we are certain were his doing: bombings, five minutes apart, of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. More than two hundred people died, and several thousand were wounded. It was as if the first day of the Gulf War had been reflected in a mirror: satellite technology used to coordinate synchronized strikes on key targets, all ordered from another continent.
• Drones carried pointillist warfare to its logical endpoint. Unlike manned planes, they could hover for hours, gathering information with high-resolution cameras.
• Expecting a seamless transition, the Pentagon’s planning for the postwar occupation was last-minute, haphazard, and badly underfunded. The occupation leadership didn’t even arrive in Iraq until weeks after Baghdad’s fall, by which point the city had no electricity, was running low on water, and was seeing its ministries and museums stripped of records and valuables.
• So, for the purposes of labor law, the Northern Marianas wasn’t part of the United States. For the purposes of trade, it was. And for the purposes of lobbying regulations, it was a foreign government. <> Nearly half the Republican members of the House Committee on Resources went to Saipan or sent staffers there... It was the first in a string of legally creative maneuvers that would turn him into Washington’s highest-paid lobbyist—“The Man Who Bought Washington,” Time called him—and a household name. <> That name? Jack Abramoff.
• Had this been litigated, it would have made for fascinating case law. McCain was, per the 1937 statute, a citizen by virtue of his birth. But he wasn’t born a citizen, as no law made him a citizen at the time of his birth. Arguably, then, he was not a “natural born citizen” and thus not eligible for the presidency.
• Despite its origin among Clinton-supporting Democrats, the birther conspiracy theory hopped party lines in the general election.