#Michael HIrsh

[tvbrittanyf]

Michael Hirsh reflects on an animated life in book Animation Nation

Most of Michael Hirsh’s life is wrapped up in children’s animation, and now the co-founder of legendary studio Nelvana is opening up about his love for the medium in Animation Nation: How We Built a Cartoon Empire. The book not only discusses how Michael and his colleagues worked with iconic properties such as Babar and The Magic School Bus, but goes into his own “transformative” experiences with…

[newstfionline]

Sunday, October 13, 2024

The Age of Depopulation? (Foreign Affairs) Although few yet see it coming, humans are about to enter a new era of history. Call it “the age of depopulation.” For the first time since the Black Death in the 1300s, the planetary population will decline. But whereas the last implosion was caused by a deadly disease borne by fleas, the coming one will be entirely due to choices made by people. With birthrates plummeting, more and more societies are heading into an era of pervasive and indefinite depopulation, one that will eventually encompass the whole planet. What lies ahead is a world made up of shrinking and aging societies. A revolutionary force drives the impending depopulation: a worldwide reduction in the desire for children.

Far from where Hurricane Milton hit, tornadoes wrought unexpected damage (AP) Tony Brazzale, a diving boat captain who has lived for 10 years in his Wellington home in southeastern Florida, wasn’t worried about Hurricane Milton. The storm’s center was forecast to make landfall on the opposite side of the peninsula and then cross the state well to the north of his family. But on Wednesday afternoon as the hurricane began to pummel the state, he stood outside his house and watched as a tornado loomed in the sky. The twister shattered windows in the home, tore off roof shingles, ripped a tree from the ground and left branches and other debris scattered in the yard. “The hurricane was a nonevent for us,” he said. “Had it not been for an F-3 tornado, the entire thing would have been a nonevent for us.” It was one of dozens of tornadoes spawned by Milton that hit South Florida far from where the storm made landfall near Sarasota. Meteorologists believe there may have been at least 38 tornadoes associated with Milton.

UK leader Keir Starmer is marking 100 days in office. It has been a rocky ride (AP) British Prime Minister Keir Starmer marks 100 days in office Saturday with little cause for celebration. Starmer’s center-left Labour Party was elected by a landslide on July 4, sweeping back to power after 14 years. But after weeks of stories about feuding, freebies and fiscal gloom, polls suggest Starmer’s personal approval rating has plummeted, and Labour is only slightly more popular than a Conservative Party that was rejected by voters after years of infighting and scandal. “You couldn’t really have imagined a worse start,” said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. “First impressions count, and it’s going to be difficult to turn those around.”

Why NATO, Ukraine are nervous about a second Trump presidency (The Week) Europe is watching the 2024 presidential election closely, wondering how Donald Trump would handle the Ukraine War and the future of NATO in a second term. Trump has promised he would “stop the war 24 hours after being elected,” though he has not shared any details about how to stop the war or how to get Russia and Ukraine to negotiate. Trump has held an “escalating political grudge” against Ukraine since early in his first presidency, believing that the country’s leaders favored Democrats. Overall, he has pushed the GOP toward a “vision of a less interventionist” foreign policy, said The New York Times. It’s a vision that is more reluctant to come to the aid of countries like Ukraine. Many observers believe it’s a “question of when, not whether” Trump would lead the United States out of NATO, Michael Hirsh said at Politico. But Trump is “unlikely to quit NATO outright.” Instead, he would probably work for what one observer called a “radical reorientation” of NATO—continuing to keep the American nuclear umbrella over Europe but handing responsibility for the “bulk of infantry, armor, logistics and artillery” to the European allies, Hirsh said. Instead of being the “primary provider of combat power in Europe,” said defense expert Dan Caldwell, who is linked to Trump’s circle, the United States would be “somebody who provides support only in times of crisis.”

Why Politicians Ignore Abuses in India’s Sugar Industry: They Run It (NYT) In the sweltering sugar fields of the western Indian state of Maharashtra, abusive practices such as debt bondage and child labor have long been an open secret. But in 2019, a state lawmaker named Neelam Gorhe documented a new level of brutality: Female workers were getting unnecessary hysterectomies at alarmingly high rates. She presented her findings to the state’s health minister and alerted the region’s sugar regulator. She called on her government colleagues to ensure that workers received basic services including toilets, running water and a minimum wage—all in accordance with Indian law. Yet most lawmakers apparently ignored the report, or read it and moved on. They launched no further investigation and passed no laws. The reason, to many in Maharashtra, is obvious. Sugar is among the state’s most important industries, one that sells to big brand buyers such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi, and is heavily controlled by the political elite. Most of the state’s sugar mills are led by sitting lawmakers or political figures, a new investigation by The New York Times and The Fuller Project found. That includes at least 21 state lawmakers, four members of the national Parliament, five government ministers and nearly 50 former officials. That means, in many cases, that the very people who could protect workers are also profiting from their exploitation.

Myanmar military unleashes drones to counter rebel advances (Washington Post) Myanmar’s military has been ramping up its use of drones, deploying a combination of retrofitted commercial drones and customized military munitions to carry out a torrent of deadly strikes against rebel forces and civilians, according to visual evidence of recent attacks and interviews with people inside the country. After being hammered by a major rebel offensive, the military has clawed back some territory in the south but lost more ground in the northwest and east of Myanmar. As rebels capture towns closer to the capital Naypyidaw, surveillance and attack drones have filled critical gaps in the military’s defense, including providing support for its overstretched air force and helping to compensate for a lack of manpower, said Morgan Michaels, a Singapore-based security analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

For Atomic Bomb Survivors, a Nobel Prize 80 Years Later (NYT) Cities blasted to rubble. Burned bodies and flayed flesh. Invisible waves of radiation coursing through the air. And the indelible image of a mushroom cloud. The atomic bombs dropped by the United States on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed the world what an apocalypse looks like. Tens of thousands of people died in the immediate aftermath. But some emerged from the devastation. Struggling with survivors’ guilt and sick with illnesses caused by the radiation, they were shunned for years as living reminders of the human capacity to engineer horror. On Friday, Nihon Hidankyo, a collective of Japanese atomic bomb survivors, was awarded the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize for its decades-long campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons. The survivors of the bombings—more than 100,000 are still living—“help us to describe the indescribable, to think the unthinkable, and to somehow grasp the incomprehensible pain and suffering caused by nuclear weapons,” Jorgen Watne Frydnes, the committee chairman, said.

Global Trade Grows but Remains Vulnerable to War and Geopolitics (NYT) The global system of container ships and tankers that move tens of billions of dollars of products around the world each day mostly functions fluidly and without notice. But in a few parts of the world, shipping lanes shrink to narrow straits or canals, geographical choke points where an isolated disruption can threaten to throw much of international trade out of whack. One of those is the Taiwan Strait, a 100-mile-wide strip of water between Taiwan and mainland China, which has become a critical shipping lane for countries across the globe. New research from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, has found that the strait is a conduit for more than a fifth of the world’s seaborne trade, with $2.45 trillion worth of energy, electronics, minerals and other goods transiting the channel in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available. The findings are significant given that the strait is at the center of a geopolitical dispute between Taiwan and China, which views the island as part of its territory. A blockade or military action from China that halted traffic in the strait could have dramatic implications for the global flow of goods, and the Chinese economy in particular, the researchers say.

As Hezbollah and Israel battle on the border, Lebanon’s army watches from the sidelines (AP) Since Israel launched its ground invasion of Lebanon, Israeli forces and Hezbollah militants have clashed along the border while the Lebanese army has largely stood on the sidelines. It’s not the first time the national army has found itself watching war at home from the discomfiting position of bystander. Lebanon’s widely beloved army is one of the few institutions that bridge the country’s sectarian and political divides. Several army commanders have become president, and the current commander, Gen. Joseph Aoun, is widely regarded as one of the front-runners to step in when the deadlocked parliament fills a two-year vacuum and names a president. But with an aging arsenal and no air defenses, and battered by five years of economic crisis, the national army is ill-prepared to defend Lebanon against either aerial bombardment or a ground offensive by a well-equipped modern army like Israel’s. The army is militarily overshadowed by Hezbollah. The Lebanese army has about 80,000 troops, with around 5,000 of them deployed in the south. Hezbollah has more than 100,000 fighters, according to the militant group’s late leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

U.N. convoy to evacuate patients fails to reach besieged northern Gaza (Washington Post) A U.N.-led convoy trying to evacuate patients from northern Gaza was forced to delay its mission for a third day Friday amid heavy fighting, the United Nations said, as Israeli forces once again battled Hamas militants in the area, leaving neighborhoods under siege. Israel launched its latest operation in northern Gaza on Saturday night, ordering swaths of the region to evacuate, including several hospitals where staff said they lacked basic supplies and were struggling to treat victims. Residents and first responders said the bombing has been relentless, especially in and around the Jabalya refugee camp, a longtime Hamas stronghold, and that there were dead and wounded lying in the streets. The U.N.-led convoy, which left southern Gaza for the north on Wednesday, hoped to retrieve critically ill and injured patients from the Kamal Adwan Hospital and bring them south to Gaza City, officials said. But for days, despite prior coordination with the Israeli military, the vehicles were held up at checkpoints by forces on the ground or prevented from moving because of the strikes, according to Georgios Petropoulos, head of the Gaza office at the U.N. agency for humanitarian affairs. In Jabalya on Friday, rescue workers said Israeli troops had laid siege to the camp, which the United Nations says still has about 40,000 residents, and were firing at those who tried to leave. “There are tens of people killed and injured lying on the ground who we cannot reach,” said Fares Afana, head of the ambulance services in northern Gaza.

[gwydionmisha]

Now might be a really good time to let the White House and congress Critters know you still support Ukraine.

[philgbtqochs]

i was listening to this week's m*a*s*h matters episode and in it they broadcast an interview McLean Stevenson did a few decades ago in which he talks more about his experience on the show and why he left and it's kind of heartbreaking anyway i love you McLean Stevenson

[ridenwithbiden]

Worth reading.

"No American diplomat is more familiar with the long history of enmity between Israelis and Palestinians than Dennis Ross, who played a leading role in shaping U.S. involvement in the Middle East peace process in both the George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations. As special envoy, Ross was one of Washington’s key Middle East negotiators in the Oslo peace process, beginning with the historic agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1993 and 1995. Ross also served as director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff in the first Bush administration, and later as special assistant to President Barack Obama and special advisor on Iran to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

On Saturday, just hours after the Islamist militant group Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel unprecedented in its scope, POLITICO Magazine reached out to Ross to help explain how and why the conflict began — and how it might ultimately be resolved."

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Michael Hirsh: Hamas’ military leader was quoted as saying that it launched this new war because “enough is enough.” Why is this happening now and why are they doing it?

Dennis Ross: I think the main reason this is happening now is because of the prospect of the U.S.-Saudi-Israeli deal. Hamas understands this is a huge transformative event, and they are trying to create a circumstance where it will be difficult for Saudi Arabia to do it right. This is not spur of the moment. What’s interesting is you had the Iranian supreme leader giving a speech this past week where he attacks the idea of normalization with the Zionist entity. This attack was clearly something planned over a long period of time: the fact that they had hang gliders, they had prepared to breach the fence, they did a barrage of rockets as a way of overwhelming Israel’s air defense system, Iron Dome.

There are reports I have seen that yesterday, Hezbollah [a Lebanese militant group backed by Iran that has links to Hamas] was telling UNIFIL [United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon] to stay on their bases. Meaning, they knew this was coming. The scope of the intelligence failure in Israel is almost equivalent to literally 50 years ago [when a coalition of Arab states attacked Israel on Yom Kippur, starting the Yom Kippur War]. This surprise is equivalent, although in 1973 we’re talking about Arab conventional armies. Now we’re talking about non-state actors, although backed by a state, Iran. [Tehran, Israel’s avowed enemy, has long supported proxy groups opposed to Israel].

Hirsh: In 1973, you also had much more of an equivalence of forces to the point where Israel almost lost. I mean, now you have a modern military and air force going against Hamas as a non-state actor, as you say. It seems almost like an act of communal suicide by Hamas to do this.

Ross: It is, but think about what they’ve done. They have grabbed hostages. And they’re hoping the hostages will be a deterrent against Israel coming in on the ground. To show you the stakes, they were prepared to do this knowing what the likely Israeli response is going to be. And in a sense, Hezbollah is sort of being held at this point as kind of a possible hammer that if you [the Israelis] come in, then we’ll come in from the north. They have the ability to do something similar, at least in terms of grabbing and holding for a few days, or taking hostages back to Lebanon. There are Israeli villages that are close to the border in the north so that’s a very real option. And no doubt right now it’s affecting the Israeli choice on how and what they’re going to do in response.

Hirsh: To what extent do you think the government of Iran and Hezbollah were actively involved in planning this, if they were?

Ross: I believe they were. There clearly is very close to coordination between Hezbollah and Hamas. As I said, if it’s true that Hezbollah was telling UNIFIL to stay in their bases yesterday, they for sure had advance warning.

When you look at the character of Israeli intelligence to be surprised in this fashion, it’s like any strategic surprise: In retrospect, you may find you had all the information that you needed to have, but you had made a series of [wrong] assumptions about how the other side is operating. Also, in the last couple of weeks, you had Hamas going back to sending protesters to the border in Gaza, creating turmoil. Then there were negotiations [indicating] that Hamas just wanted to get the Israelis to increase the number of workers in Israel and Gaza. And to me, it now looks like this was all part of a feint.

Hirsh: In some respects, the most astonishing thing about this is the intelligence failure. Is it fair to ask to what extent do you think the Biden administration might be responsible? They were caught by surprise as much as the Israelis were.

Ross: There’s no particular reason why the U.S. would be training enormous intelligence assets on Hamas, which has never been a threat to us. So it’s pretty hard to say this was a failure on our part. But I think it's unmistakable that it's an Israeli intelligence failure.

Hirsh: Can you talk more about why Hamas felt this was necessary to do now, and how this is related to the Israeli deal with Saudi Arabia?

Ross: I think this is where the hand of Iran is also a very prominent one — that Iran clearly began to think that if there is this kind of a normalization deal, it’s a transformative event in the region. And not because suddenly it’s this coalition arrayed against them. It’s that you’re taking the religious content of the Arab-Israeli conflict out by having the custodian of the two holy mosques be in accord with the nation state of the Jewish people. In addition, there is just the prospect that you’re going to see these countries that are successful economically joining together and becoming more successful at a time when Iran economically is continuing to fail. They call themselves the resistance coalition but in truth, they’re the coalition of the failed and the failing states. So [Iran and Hamas] are being confronted by what could make them lag even farther behind.

Hirsh: You co-wrote a Washington Post op-ed piece a few weeks ago with David Makovsky about how Oslo could still be revived because there’s still no alternative. How do you see that prospect now in the face of what’s going on today?

Ross: During the heat of what is now a war and what looks to be a terrible one, I think no one is going to be thinking about the future. When this is over there is going to be this reality that’s going to cut in two different ways. There are going to be those who will say something has to be done with the Palestinians or we’re going to continue to face things of this sort. And others will say, look, we have no margin for error. You saw what the threat is and so forth. So you’ll have that debate. There’s going to be a lot of soul-searching in Israel when this is over. We cannot ignore the Palestinians as an issue — this will be part of the discussion after this war is over.

Hirsh: Let’s talk a little bit about the history of this, because Benjamin Netanyahu has been very, very involved going back to the late nineties, his first stint as prime minister. And there was a sense that Netanyahu’s goal even then was to destroy the Oslo peace process. And it seemed as if he succeeded, but without putting up any kind of alternative other than the Iron Dome and pretending that what effectively became a giant concentration camp, which is Gaza, wasn’t there. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Ross: Look, one of the most interesting things is he was obviously a major critic of Oslo, but when he first became prime minister, he said, “We’ll respect it.” And the truth is he did the Wye River and Hebron accords, [two agreements that furthered implementation of the Oslo process in the late 1990s]. And even now he has said, you know, they've said we don’t want the Palestinian Authority to collapse. So in a sense, he has certainly acted in a way that weakened the P.A. over time, even as he understands there isn’t a real alternative to it. I always felt historically that in the end, he understood you have to reach some kind of deal with the Palestinians because they’re not going to go away, but he always wanted to build Israel’s leverage. Look at how he talks about the breakthrough with Saudi Arabia. He said once this happens, this will help with the Palestinians, too, because they’ll have to become more realistic in terms of what’s possible.

Hirsh: But “realistic” is a loaded term, one that came up after Jared Kushner’s effort to resolve the conflict, because what it meant was essentially that the Palestinians were going to simply going to have to accept Israeli diktat, which meant no state and no military, and no one expected that that would ever happen. So is Netanyahu’s approach a realistic one or was it always sort of blowing smoke?

Ross: I don’t know that it was always blowing smoke, but I think you have two poles of opinion. You recall [then-Secretary of State] John Kerry saying that nothing would be possible with any Arab states until you solve the Palestinian issue. And then you have the Abraham Accords where Arab states were saying, look, we’re not going to deny ourselves what’s in our interest because we have to wait for the Palestinians who we think have a leadership that will never allow them to do anything. And you see what’s been going on with the Saudis, once again reflecting that, “Yeah, we need to do something for the Palestinians, but we’re not going to wait until the end of the occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state with borders and a capital.” So the Abraham Accords was, “Let’s do something that materially improves life for Palestinians and allows you to ensure that two states remains as an option.” So it’s a far cry from where things used to be.

The irony for me is how far Hamas is going, given what the potential for destruction in Gaza is going to be.

Hirsh: What do you expect the Israelis to do now, looking ahead?

Ross: They will hit hard from the air. They will try to carry out some operations that will be just as surprising to Hamas as what Hamas has done to them. You can bet that all of Hamas’ leaders went deep underground. There’s just the general reality we’ve seen over time, that every time there’s a war of this sort there’s a lot of sympathy to begin with for Israel, but the longer it goes on and the more they inflict on the Palestinians, especially in Gaza, the more there’ll be pressure to try to bring this to an end.

Israel also faces the prospect of a multi-front war with some extreme Israeli Arabs trying to disrupt movement within Israel itself. So they have to think about that. Hamas has hostages in Gaza, and the Israelis are not going to simply turn a blind eye to that. They will try to find out where they are. They’re going to try to rescue them. But Hamas won’t keep them in one place, they will disperse them. They’ll also have them deep underground. Hamas has literally tens of miles of tunnels. And all the tunnels are booby-trapped where the entrances are. So Israel’s options are very difficult.

But Israel, in the end, will also want to inflict an unmistakable defeat. Israel will want to destroy as much of Hamas’s military as possible. With Gaza being a dense population, it means there’s going to be a lot of Gazans who get killed in the process as well. And Hamas did this knowing full well what the likely consequences would be.

Hirsh: Do you think that this is as consequential as, say, the 1973 war?

Ross: I don’t see it that way for the reasons that you said at the outset, that there are no Arab states involved. Then you had over 2,800 Israelis dead; now you have probably hundreds dead. But I think it’s still a kind of earthquake within Israel. Israel’s sense of security will have been fundamentally altered. There’s certain to be a kind of state commission after this to investigate how this kind of a surprise could have happened. In 1973, the recommendation was just for the head of military and intelligence to be the ones to pay the price. The reservists came out in the streets and forced [Prime Minister] Golda Meir and [Defense Minister] Moshe Dayan to resign. I don’t see anything like that now, but we’re going to see a very thorough soul-searching in the aftermath of this in Israel as well.

Hirsh: Is there any possibility at all, do you think, this becomes a wider war, given Iran’s alleged involvement already, and the other Arab states?

Ross: I don’t know whether Arab states will become involved. Israel will not attack Iran right now because it will have enough that it’s doing with Gaza potentially as well. You’re going to see them bolster the northern border. To try to anticipate that Hezbollah might try to do exactly what Hamas has done. It is inconceivable that Israel won’t go in on the ground in Gaza at this point, but they don’t want to go into Gaza in a way that plays into what and where Hamas is kind of positioning itself to deal with this.

Hirsh: What, if anything, can the Biden administration do right now to help Israel?

Ross: There is a high probability of exhausting Iron Dome missiles, so the Americans should be prepared to provide that help, though Israel isn’t going to need a lot. Also additional money for supply lines and the like and publicly not just standing by Israel, but saying Israel has the right of self-defense and then resisting calls for an early cease-fire. An early cease-fire means that Hamas has a big victory. The worst thing in the world for the Middle East is for Hamas to look successful and say this is the answer for dealing with Israel. You don’t want Hamas to determine Saudi Arabia’s future.

Hirsh: Is there any reason to think that Russia is involved, given the closer relations it has with Iran, including weapons sent to aid Russia in its conflict in Ukraine?

Ross: I don’t know that they’re involved, but they’re not unhappy. They’d like everyone’s attention to be diverted. So the idea that there can be turmoil elsewhere, from their standpoint, that’s a positive.

Hirsh: Going back a few decades, do you think anything could have been done differently? I’m thinking in particular of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s decision to withdraw from Gaza and then the 2006 elections that brought Hamas to power. And then, of course, they seized power undemocratically. Those elections were pushed by the George W. Bush administration at the time.

Ross: At the time I said to Sharon, “Your declaration of withdrawal is perfect, but it should be tied to some behaviors by the Palestinians assuming responsibility.” One of my arguments was that you don’t want to put Hamas into a position where they can claim credit. Their violence drove you out. The Bush administration should have brokered a set of understandings about how to do some test cases to show that the P.A. was in control so that the withdrawal was the victory of [President of the Palestinian Authority] Abu Mazen and the Palestinian Authority, not a victory for Hamas.

What Sharon said to me is, “I can’t let their irresponsibility define our future.” Meaning, if they don’t do what they’re supposed to do, then I’m stuck there forever. It was a powerful argument, but it overlooked that at least this should have been tested. I was not in favor of the elections when they were held by Sharon at the time. People forget that Hamas boycotted the original election in 1996 because we had criteria in there that you were supposed to be against violence and supposed to be signing agreements and so forth. And I was saying to the Bush administration in 1996: “Apply the same standard.”

Hirsh: And what did they say?

Ross: Well, they didn’t do it because they said Abu Mazen doesn’t want to look like he's preventing Hamas from voting. Yeah. Except that Hamas doesn’t want to vote to begin with! I think the withdrawal from Gaza was not exploited the way it could have been. This was a big move, but it needed to be able to be part of a strategy. So in a sense, it was a kind of missed opportunity.

Hirsh: Do you think that had there been a different Israeli leadership over the past 10, 15 years or so that it could have gone differently?

Ross: Six months before the assassination of [former Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak] Rabin, I was sitting with him on a Shabbat afternoon and he said to me, “What do you think’s going to determine the next Israeli election?” I was trying to prove to him how maybe I really knew the inner workings of Israeli politics, so I said, “Shas [the religious party].” And he says, “No, guess again.” And I said, “No, no, I'm not going to play the game. You tell me.” He said, “Hamas will determine the next Israeli election through two suicide bombs.” What killed the peace camp in Israel was the second intifada, so I don’t think you can put it just on who would’ve been the Israeli leader.

[fanthatracks]

For Star Wars fans from the class of '77, our first bit of the larger Star Wars galaxy would be the Star Wars Holiday Special. This two-hour special event contained nine animated minutes that introduced a fan favorite character - Boba Fett. It also set the foundations for the successful partnership between Star Wars and animation that perseveres to this day. The short-titled The Story of the Faithful Wookiee also introduced many viewers to the independent animation company Nelvana Studios and the co-founder/CEO of the company Michael Hirsh. Michael will be at San Diego Comic Con this year with a spotlight panel and book signing celebrating his novel Animation Nation. Here is the press information about his panel: [gallery link="file" columns="2" size="large" td_select_gallery_slide="slide" ids="165394,165391"] In a rare one-on-one discussion with Mark Evanier, Michael Hirsh, the Award-winning visionary and creator of some of the most popular animated TV series of our time, including A Cosmic Christmas, Star Wars: Droids, Star Wars: Ewoks, The Story of the Faithful Wookiee, Babar, Little Bear, The Adventures of Tintin, Berenstain Bears, Franklin, The Magic School Bus, Beetlejuice, Rolie Polie Olie, Inspector Gadget, Johnny Test, Caillou, Arthur, Max & Ruby, Cyberchase and beyond, will recount his long and illustrious career, share stories about noted personalities he’s worked with, discuss his debut memoir, his vision for the future of children’s animation and reveal how he accomplished “world domination through animation.” Throughout his prestigious career, Michael co-founded leading animation companies including Nelvana, Cookie Jar and Wow Unlimited. Michael will also have a book signing on the opening day of the convention hosted by Stuart Ng Books: THURSDAY, JULY 25 BOOK SIGNING TO FOLLOW Discussion at 10:00 AM Pacific in Room 9 Book Signing at 12:00 PM Noon Pacific at Stuart Ng Books Booth 501 My review of the book will land on Fantha Tracks soon, and hopefully I'll be able to catch a few minutes with Michael at the convention. This appearance at SDCC is a wonderful opportunity to connection with a creator of so many beloved characters and animated shows. [amazon box="130295492X"]

[dalt20]

Tooning in 18 Greg Bailey part 6 of 10

DL:So, on Arthur did AKOM do anything off model? Because the studio had a reputation for being off model or lacking in their animation.

GB:I can't remember any series where someone wasn't complaining about a character being off-model from time to time to time. I'm not even sure what that means anymore. In the end, I preferred that something might be off-model a little instead of looking like a cutout of the same model sheet in every frame. At least that gives some character and exaggeration. Generally, I felt Akom was fairly on model though. Though in the 15 years they did the show I'm sure there are lots of off-model freeze frames out on the web. Mostly Akom was great because they moved the character and it wasn't all traceback stuff all the time. When things switched to digital 2D like Flash or Toon Boom it became on model but it looks really dead compared to hand-drawn animation. You are literally looking at the same model sheet position on every frame so it definitely creates significant deadness in the animation compared to hand-drawn where the character seems to almost breathe in comparison.

DL:Ah, ok. So AKOM brung their A game I guess.

GB:I really appreciated the work we got in those early seasons from Akom. Nelson had some respect for the show and he made sure the studio did a good job on the show. We weren't exactly the highest-paying studio that was sending work there but Nelson and also Frank Shinn would put more into the shows that had some integrity to them. If the series was just some generic series they might not have been so attentive. We did a really complete and tight pre production work to send over to Korea so I think they saw that and realized we meant to do a better show than the rest of stuff out there.

DL:So, About the CiNAR scandal, did the feds storm in like The Wolf of Wall Street? With everyone destroying documents and everyone being rounded up?

GB:It's more slo-mo than that, but I guess it wouldn't have made a very exciting movie for things to unravel as slowly as it did. It was so slow that basically, the media was doing all the prosecuting faster than the police. It was more of a legal assault like from the different agencies like Telefilm that were looking to get their funding money back or the archives getting a refund for one reason or another. But yes the RCMP did interview people like writers and regular staff to see if the names matched the documents they had about who did what. I don't remember a lot of destroying documents but I was on the wrong floor to see that, and there wasn't a round-up of the usual suspects where they marched a bunch of people out to a paddy wagon. I don't think anyone got taken out in handcuffs because I would have heard the rumours of that. It was strange to see the media assault and what the public was accusing them of because it wasn't what was happening or what the issue was. There was a very strange perception of it in the public. Even now everyone just says the Cinar scandal but they don't know what it was all about.

DL:So, Did you work on any other projects other than Arthur in the early 2000s post scandal, like Creepschool, Potatoes and Dragons, Treasure, The Baskervilles? Before Michael Hirsh came to CiNAR?

GB:did because I was the supervising director. I supervised the other directors. I didn't have much to do on Creepschool, or Baskervilles. Potatoes and Dragons was all done in France before it came in and it was more of an acquisition for us. I had a great model sheet with like 100 cute characters on it. I did at one point try to re-edit all those shows into a different show so they made more sense and weren't so slow. It looked very cute but it wasn't easy to sell the show. Even on Treasure, I was only brought in occasionally to look at how the show was going or meet with the terrific clients from the UK who created the series. Francois Perrault directed the show. I did start up Postcards From Buster at that time before handing off the series to Nick Vallinakis after a few episodes. During that time I was working on the development of all new series and so I designed the style or look of the show and animation style. We developed a lot of shows. The one that stands out the most was developing Mona the Vampire which Graham Fault did the initial design work on while we were in development. I think Graham did that just before creating the Untalkative Bunny in Ottawa. That was the period of Animal Crackers development and probably even Caillou. A lot of shows that I worked on in development actually made it into a series during that period. A lot of others were involved in it but hopefully, I made some meaningful contribution to it. I am probably mixing up my years there but usually, I was developing a show a few years before it hit the small screen and it was also a really insane time in the studio. After the scandal hit in fact there was not really any more development. We were still finishing off the shows that were developed earlier. Postcards from Buster was

the only series that got developed and greenlit after the scandal and before Michael Hirsch. Postcards was the one series that began under Stuart Snyder (or any of the other interim CEO's) thus fulfilling one of the major terms of Stuart's contract that allowed him to receive his bonus of tens of millions of dollars before he stepped aside.

DL:So, What's your thoughts on the studio who co-produced Animal Crackers, Alphaim? They replaced France Animation as the main co-producers in 1998.

GB:I didn't have much interaction with them. I was founded Christian Davin. I met Christian a few times and he seemed like a nice guy. Gaumont bought them out after that time. The thing that makes it hard for me to answer is that in these co-productions with France there were 2 types of shows. One that the majority partner was in Canada and the other series that the majority partner was in France. So Animal Crackers was a show that we had the lead and we did most of the work. And something like Potatoes and Dragons had the majority in France. So on the ones with majority in France we often only did the post production or maybe some of the production-like layouts. If it was our majority we did most of the work in Canada. It seemed to get more and more like that over time. So I think it is really more of a financing issue or question that you would ask to an executive producer rather than looking for a creative perspective. It wasn't on my radar very much once I knew what the work split was.

PS. Christian Davin was involved with the Robinson Sucro copyright infringement.

DL:Ah, so Thoughts on Wang Film Productions, They animated on season one on the Little Lulu Show.

GB:You mean Cuckoos Nest owned by James Wang. They did a nice job on the animation on season one. We started putting a lot of work into Cuckoo's nest at one point. Like City Mouse Country Mouse was also there. That was the really crazy period at Cinar when we just had so many series going through that studio and the place was growing like crazy. Lulu was a hard show for animation because of that super thick line was all done in traditional animation. But the look of the show was great, especially the first few shows. One thing that is not well known is that initially that show was going to be 5 specials on HBO. Tracy Ullman was doing the voice of Lulu. It was the only time I went to the pitch session that we did in NY at HBO. I only directed those first 5 episodes then supervised the director Louis Piche when the show went into a full series. To be more on topic, I had visited Cuckoo's Nest back in 1986 or so when I was at DIC Tokyo. The Japanese studio was going to visit the studio in Taiwan and they very nicely brought along the foreign staff as well.When they did City Mouse Country Mouse it wasn't so beautiful but I remember they were contracted by Cinar to churn out one episode per week through the animation department. It was usually one episode every 2 weeks at that time. But I don't think the show was well funded and we just needed to make a lot of shows quickly probably to impress the shareholders. So it was an ugly show but I can't blame Cuckoos Nest for that.Wang Productions also did the Richard Scarry series after episode 26. It was far less good than what we had been getting from Hanho on the first 26 shows.

DL:So, The Arthur episode, The Contest. How did you animated the episode in the Three styles of the segments parodying South Park, Beavis and Butthead, Dexter's Laboratory and Hulk Hogan?

GB:And Little Lulu and Richard Scarry but that was more of an in-joke. It's interesting how that episode came together. I think it was one of the best shows overall. The weirdest one at least.The South Park section was actually done under an old Oxberry film camera and shot on film. Peter Huggan who was the layout supervisor at the time made all the models out of felt. He was kind of doing the felt characters in his spare time while checking layouts. Then we rented the one last Oxberry in Montreal and we shot the sequence under the camera. It was just the way we made the films when I was a student at Sheridan College.Beavis and Butthead was just a different drawing style so it took a lot of new design . I really liked how the AC /DC logo on Beavis' shirt made a good change into AB/CD on the Arthurized version. Dexter’s lab again was just a lot of new design. We could not reuse anything from the regular series and that one had a thick line. Also the color design was new and we had lots of references from the real show.The Hulk Hogan was just styled on the many 1980's series I worked on at DIC. In fact I worked a few shows of Hulk Hogan when I first went to Tokyo for DIC.We also did a spoof of Richard Scarry and we had Lowly Huckle were bats hanging upside down. I even got Sonia Ball to do the voice of the bat in the voice she used to do Huckle. There was a Lulu parody there as well using that thick line. I used to worry about getting fired at Cinar for using R. Scarry and Lulu styles in that Arthur show. But I was just banking on that the producers never really watch the shows they are producing. I lost a lot of sleep over that idea but never heard anything from the producers at Cinar. But in general, when we would parody a different style, like we did on that Ulysses episode, it took a lot of new design and being extra careful with the storyboard, and most of all, it was traditional animation so there was no problem with changing style because we didn't have to do rigging in order to animate. The ideas for what to parody just came from suggestions I could make to Joe Fallon and Ken Scarborough about which styles we could do to give us a different look for each sequence. I loved doing all those special style things in various Arthur shows. It was something really nice about the series that we could do parodies. Usually Canadian animation companies do not do parodies in their shows. But because the scripts were produced by WGBH we would do it once their lawyers would sign off. We also based one segment on Dr Katz Psychiatrist but I don't think our squiggle vision animation was very recognizable. That was a cool episode. When Peter was making all the South Park figures no one knew what he was doing and his crew thought he was making dolls on company time like he was losing his marbles.

DL:That's so Funny! 😄

GB:yeah.

DL:So, at Cookie Jar did you work on Gerald McBoingBoing, Johnny Test, Kung Fu Dino Posse, Busytown Mysteries, World of Quest, Will and Dewitt, etc?

GB:No I didn't. Actually I helped out for a very short time on Busytown Mysteries but the other shows I had nothing to do with. That was after they closed down the Montreal studio and opened up in Toronto. I didn't move.

DL:So, I couldn't find anything on the move to Toronto when Michael bought CiNAR can you tell me what time period that was?

GB:It went in stages. In 2005 Michael and Toper and the bank bought Cinar. Renamed it Cookie Jar of all things after Huck Scarry suggested the name. They started closing up the Montreal studio that year by consolidating the 3 floors of office space onto one floor. I developed a few shows then like Bronco Teddy and that Santa Clause special. Then just a small animation crew and 2 producers moved to a new but small building in downtown Montreal . I think it was an old Canada Cement company building from the sign embossed over the front door. It had a lot of marble and brass on the main floor and an ancient elevator. Anyway we were there for a year before they shut down entirely in Montreal, and they opened up a Toronto office in that time. We did Arthur out of that new office in downtown Montreal. So by 2006 or early 2007 they were set up in Toronto on King Street. I remained on the Cookie payroll but no one else from Cinar remained after 2007. In fact I worked at Cinar/Cookie Jar full time from 1991 to 2011. I was the longest running employee of that company.

DL:Wow! So, you were demoted to the Arthur guy at that point?

GB:Yeah pretty much. They would try to keep me busy with stuff during the off-season. I developed a few shows but nothing really stuck and I would get busy again with Arthur so they would take it away from me and give it to another director. Like I was starting on a remake of Caillou and then that happened. Someone else took over the series. Or I helped out a director on Busytown for a few months. I even tried getting the director position on a series with Disney near the end of my time there but I purposely blew my application so I could go elsewhere to do Arthur. The Disney show was very preschool and the producers at Disney were in disarray. It looked like it would be really unpleasant. But yeah I guess all I really did of any significance was Arthur. We did Arthur out of Oasis Animation company in Montreal. They hired some of my old crew from Cinar while I remained on the Cookie Jar payroll. So at one point, I did some work setting up the studio to do the Arthur series.

DL:So, how was the downfall of Cookie Jar/ the DHX media purchase went for you in 2012?

GB:I was there for the downfall like when they laid off all the animation staff and pretty much everyone else. I wasn't there when DHX actually bought them. I was there when CJ bought DIC and that terrible purchase of Strawberry Shortcake. It seemed ironic to me when they bought DIC because I was there when they fell apart 20+ years earlier.The big layoff was very sudden and shocking for the people in Toronto. I don't know why they seemed so surprised. The shows were terrible. They blew a ton of money buying DIC which was even more in debt than after DIC broke up with Charlopin. They said they bought DIC to get the Saturday morning hours that DIC owned. But Saturday morning doesn't mean anything like it did when I was a kid or when I worked at Hanna Barbera. No one gets up to watch animation on Saturday morning anymore. The Strawberry Shortcake scandal was going on at that time but I wasn't paying attention to it. You probably know more than I do. But my view was - who would want to watch anything to do with Strawberry Shortcake. It was the most ugly and trite property when it came out in the 80's and it was even more horrible in the 2000's. But that was CJ's corporate culture. From the top down the company management spewed marketing jargon when they spoke about anything including creative things like animation. They would never make a great new show because they were not trying to make a show that people would want to watch. They were basing decisions on values like branding and marketing. They never spoke of things that drive other producers that try to make something kids enjoy or benefit from in some meaningful way. I understand the sense of trying to capitalize as much as possible on everything in the world, but in a creative field like animation, it's disappointing to see people only equate a good show with good merchandising. They could be happily selling stickers or really tacky toys like Strawberry Shortcake or Elf on the Shelf. They are not patient enough to make a good show first and then sell stuff because the show is popular like SpongeBob. They only want the show made in order to sell the toy.

DL:Well Michael tried to create that workspace mentality from Nelvana. Remember when we talked about the program slate from Nelvana from 1995-1996?

GB:Yes! Nelvana was also a 3 way partnership. Clive Smith was coming from animation production in the UK before they started Nelvana. So there was more push in the direction of the art at one time at Nelvana. This time his partner Toper Taylor was a marketing person. When he speaks it's a lot of marketing jargon.I shouldn't really say that Clive did this or that at Nelvana. I was never working at that studio and I've only met him briefly. Michael has been a great businessman there is no doubt about that.

DL:Yeah, I saw that the only thing that was making money at the studio was Arthur, the Doodlebops and Johnny Test. Everything else was a co-production at the company.At Cookie Jar , that is.

GB:They made a horrible mess out of Richard Scarry and the Caillou properties that had generated a lot of money at Cinar. But the versions they made at CJ were terrible. They were so commercially exploitative looking. It's true that you don't make money just selling the show to broadcasters. At least it's not a big part of the income in TV animation. I'm not sure Arthur was making much money for them either. Eventually, they quit doing it because they either had to make a totally horrible different-looking show or lose money making it. Like there was no toy licensing or books or anything to make money on with Arthur. The Arthur series never had a really high budget compared to other big animated series like WB or Disney or Nickelodeon shows and the amount coming in for production kept getting smaller year by year.

[dzismis]

Państwa arabskie nie chcą przyjąć Palestyńczyków ze Strefy Gazy. Oto dlaczego

Michael Hirsh Ryan Crocker, były ambasador USA w wielu krajach Bliskiego Wschodu, opowiada o tym, dlaczego państwa arabskie nie przyjmują Palestyńczyków uciekających przed wojną. Palestyńczycy modlą się w zniszczonym meczecie w Rafah w Strefie Gazy. 23 lutego 2024 r. Izrael jest gotowy do rozpoczęcia operacji w mieście Rafah na granicy Strefy Gazy z Egiptem, dokąd setki tysięcy palestyńskich…

[cyclone-rachel]

books read in October and November 2023:

October:

Crudo by Olivia Liang

The Bookshop Book by Jen Campbell

And What Can We Offer You Tonight by Premee Mohamed

Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval

Dogs of Summer by Andrea Abreu Lopez

Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower by Tamsyn Muir

The Last Fallen Moon by Graci Kim

Superman: The Harvests of Youth by Sina Grace

FantasticLand by Mike Bockoven

Invincible Compendium vol. 1 by Robert Kirkman

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Hey, Hun by Emily Lynn Paulson

Weasels in the Attic by Hiroko Oyamada

Lucky Penny by Ananth Hirsh

November:

Victor and Nora by Lauren Myracle

All Rights Reserved by Gregory Scott Katsoulis

Invincible Compendium vol. 2 by Robert Kirkman

Love Theoretically by Ali Hazelwood

Loathe to Love You by Ali Hazelwood

Mem by Bethany C. Morrow

Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker

Lightlark by Alex Aster

Check and Mate by Ali Hazelwood

The House of Kent by Brian Michael Bendis

White Holes by Carlo Rovelli

Parasocial by Alex de Campi

Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld

[christinamac1]

The Biden Administration Is Quietly Shifting Its Strategy in Ukraine

For two years, Biden and Zelenskyy have been focused on driving Russia from Ukraine. Now Washington is discussing a move to a more defensive posture. Politico, By MICHAEL HIRSH, 12/27/2023 With U.S. and European aid to Ukraine now in serious jeopardy, the Biden administration and European officials are quietly shifting their focus from supporting Ukraine’s goal of total victory over Russia to…

[grunkletony]

Cable Channel Cartoon I would like to see.

I would really like to see Dana Terrace and Alex Hirsh take on this project but really any alumni of Gravity Falls and The Owl House would be great.

Set in Emerald, Wisconsin: “Teenage Warlocks and the Magic Pony Apocalypse”.  Both the writers and the characters use “Way of the Horned God” by Dancing Rabbit; “The Ozark Mountain Spellbook” by Brandon Weston; and “Spirit Walking” by Evelyn Rysdyk.  Writers and artists will take turns reading to each other from “The Oz Books” by L. Frank Baum; “The New English Bible with Apocrypha” by Oxford and “Wisconsin Folklore” by James P. Leary, once per week while the other writers listen with their eyes closed imagining themselves as the protagonists in the story.  Cast and crew may join in later as the series progresses.  It’s okay to spend most or all of the first season foreshadowing the magic pony invasion.  Each season of the show is to be 26 episodes long.  The series is portable and can be moved from one cable channel to another.  The magic pony invasion lasts for 13 years from 2025 to 2038.  Don’t rush the conclusion.  It’s okay for the boys to grow up and mentor younger teenagers.  I’m thinking a group of five boys.  It’s okay to start with just three and add more as the story progresses.

Options: 1. One of the boys asks why Michelangelo’s Moses has horns.  An older relative blames St. Jerome’s translation of the bible and points out that if he had been consistent Jesus would have had horns after meeting with Moses and Elijah on the mountain in Michael 17.  The boys start praying to Jesus of the two horns.

2. One of the boys overhears an older relative talking about the book “When God had a Wife” by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince.  The boys start praying to Mary Magdalene Avatar of Wisdom.

3. As a homage to “Stranger Things” have the boys play “Ponyfinder” by Silver Games LLC.

4. Make one of the boys Trans.  Transitioning from girl to boy.  Hire a writer who has undergone the process themselves.

5. Make one of the boys Muslim.  Hire a Muslim writer.  If you go for the Muslim option include Surat’s from the Koran in with chapters from the Bible, etc.  For example: Wisconsin Folklore; Genesis Chapter one; “the Wizard of OZ” Chapter one; 1Esdras chapter one; 1st Surat.

Options can be added in or dropped as the story progresses.

[fata-cu-palarie-neagra]

Michael Hirsh to Receive Animaze’s Lifetime Achievement Award

The Nelvana co-founder and Canadian animation industry leader will also deliver the event’s Keynote; the Montreal International Animation Festival takes place September 17 – 19. from AWN Headline News https://ift.tt/VzbgH2o

[uykulupsikolog]

Michael Hirsh to Receive Animaze’s Lifetime Achievement Award

The Nelvana co-founder and Canadian animation industry leader will also deliver the event’s Keynote; the Montreal International Animation Festival takes place September 17 – 19. from AWN Headline News https://ift.tt/Vp6TkHf

[xtruss]

Analysis: Twenty Years On, The War Still Shapes Policy—Mostly For The Worse. The Lessons Not Learned From Iraq

“Considering its long-term effects, the Iraq invasion amounted to one the most consequential strategic misdirections in U.S. history,” FP’s Michael Hirsh writes in a new essay. He states that there has been very little discussion about why that is—and why what happened two decades ago is not a history lesson at all but rather part of an ongoing class in current events.

Hirsh argues that the Iraq invasion set the stage for many other geopolitical conflicts, such as “dramatically [reducing] the position of the United States in the Middle East, most recently opening the way to China’s brokering of Iran-Saudi Arabia rapprochement” and also draining “U.S. resources and attention that resulted from it—[setting] the stage for Washington’s 20-year failure in Afghanistan.”

He writes: “The self-created disaster of Iraq exposed U.S. military weakness, teaching the rest of the world how to outmaneuver and fight what was once considered an unassailable superpower.”

— March 17, 2023 | Foreign Policy | By Michael Hirsh

U.S. Marines walk past a toppled statue of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in Baghdad on April 10, 2003. Patrick Baz/AFP Via Getty Images

“War is a Stern Teacher,” Thucydides wrote nearly 2,500 years ago. Since then, great nations have often sought to learn lessons from the wars they waged, especially bad or stupid wars. But the same can’t really be said of the United States, which invaded Iraq 20 years ago as of Sunday. (March 19, 2003, marked the start of the “shock and awe” air war.)

Considering its long-term effects, the Iraq invasion amounted to one the most consequential strategic misdirections in U.S. history. Yet there has been very little discussion about why that is—and why what happened two decades ago is not a history lesson at all but rather part of an ongoing class in current events.

The hubris and excess of the Iraq invasion—a later iteration of the “reckless audacity” that Thucydides, the Greek historian, ascribed to the warmongering Greeks in the Peloponnesian War—are still with us today, shaping our times. The aftereffects of Iraq dramatically reduced the position of the United States in the Middle East, most recently opening the way to China’s brokering of Iran-Saudi Arabia rapprochement. The unnecessary diversion into Iraq—and the drain on U.S. resources and attention that resulted from it—set the stage for Washington’s 20-year failure in Afghanistan, which left U.S. President Joe Biden humiliated when he precipitously withdrew all U.S. troops, declaring in August 2021 that he was putting an end to U.S. efforts “to remake other countries.”

The Afghanistan catastrophe in turn projected an image of panicky weakness from which Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to have drawn false encouragement by invading Ukraine. (In speeches, Putin has also invoked the Iraq invasion to justify his own.) The self-created disaster of Iraq exposed U.S. military weakness, teaching the rest of the world how to outmaneuver and fight what was once considered an unassailable superpower. It arguably transformed American politics by helping to discredit the political establishment in Washington and open the way for former U.S. President Donald Trump and his “America First” neo-isolationism. Another little-noted domestic effect of the twin wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was that they dramatically worsened America’s opioid crisis, as a poorly prepared Department of Veteran Affairs chronically overprescribed fentanyl and other drugs to wounded and traumatized service members.

Smoke covers the presidential palace compound in Baghdad on March 21, 2003, during a massive U.S.-led air raid on the Iraqi capital. Patrick Baz/AFP VIA Getty Images

So, did any good come out of the Iraq War—a worthwhile lesson or two? Yes, but they’re not terribly encouraging. Indeed, a U.S. Army study found that “an emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor” in the war.

Certainly, at least, Iraq is no longer ruled by anti-American tyrant Saddam Hussein. Instead, it is loosely governed by a squabbling collection of corrupt politicians who would likely be anti-American except that if they were, they’d be overthrown (either by Iran or the Islamic State) were it not for the roughly 2,500 U.S. troops who remain there.

Some military experts also believe that the U.S. military learned valuable lessons about the serious limitations of counterinsurgency operations. Even if the original invasion was a mistake, the United States managed to defeat both the Iraqi insurgency and the Islamic State occupation that followed. Still, those were hardly models of success or future strategy, notes C. Anthony Pfaff, a retired Army colonel who teaches at the Army War College. “What I don’t see is turning those operational successes into strategic ones,” he said.

Ironically, the most important lesson to be learned from the initial success of both the Iraqi insurgency and the triumph of the Taliban is how effective insurgencies can be against invading powers, like the French and Norwegians during World War II. “But we don’t like to talk about that too much because then we would be the Nazis,” said David Kilcullen, author of the 2020 book The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West.

War Criminals Still At Large: Then-U.S. President George W. Bush meets with then-U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and then-U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld outside the Oval Office shortly after authorizing Operation Iraqi Freedom in Washington on March 19, 2003. Eric Draper/White House/Getty Images

The experience of Iraq and Afghanistan proved beyond any remaining doubt that no amount of money and strength by a superpower will change the outcome on the ground without a legitimate government in place.

Above all, combined with the United States’ earlier experience of losing in Vietnam, the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan proved beyond any remaining doubt that no amount of money and strength by a superpower will change the outcome on the ground without a legitimate government in place. And Washington has found itself unable to implement that in Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq.

Even that lesson took a long time to learn, said Andrew Wiest, co-director of the Center for the Study of War and Society at the University of Southern Mississippi. Wiest argues that for too long, the United States repeated the same mistakes in Afghanistan—open-ended support to an unsustainable government—that it did in Vietnam. Moreover, “the diversion to Iraq greatly impacted and perhaps even doomed the war in Afghanistan,” he told me in an email. This, Wiest wrote, “has not been debated enough.”

The question is whether any of these lessons will stick since the war is rarely discussed. Even now, there is no serious public debate about what went wrong. This is hardly surprising considering that, starting with Biden, many of the same officials and pundits who supported the invasion are still running things in government and the media. (This includes not only leading Republicans and conservatives but also leading Democrats, such as John Kerry, who is now Biden’s climate envoy.)

Amazingly, even the administration of George W. Bush, which launched the Iraq War, never gave “systemic thought to the fundamental challenge” of terrorism after 9/11, University of Virginia historian Melvyn Leffler writes in a new history, Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W. Bush and the Invasion of Iraq. As then-U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote in a memo that was leaked in October 2003, “we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror.”

‘Countries outside the west have an interest in defending the principle that sovereignty should be respected.’ Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

No reliable “metrics” were ever found in the subsequent two decades. “We had all sorts of metrics and were constantly looking for more,” said Pfaff, who served in Army intelligence during the war, but “we could never figure out how to connect those metrics to strategic results.” Neither was any reason ever given for the Iraq invasion other than the administration felt an urgent need to reassert American power after the trauma of 9/11. After it turned out that fears of Saddam’s links to al Qaeda and his supposed cache of weapons of mass destruction were unfounded, the Bush administration pursued a vague, ill-thought-out plan of asserting American power and values in the region. That backfired too; by becoming an occupying power in the heart of the Arab world—often a brutal one, as the torture at Abu Ghraib and other prisons showed—Washington only touched off new waves of terrorism.

“Bush and his advisers never quite grasped that the anti-Americanism coursing through the Islamic world was not a result of Arabs hating American values but a consequence of their resentment of American deeds.”

“Bush and his advisers never quite grasped that the anti-Americanism coursing through the Islamic world was not a result of Arabs hating American values but a consequence of their resentment of American deeds—Washington’s support of repressive regimes, its embrace of Israel, its sanctions policy in Iraq, its military presences in Muslims’ Holy Land (Saudi Arabia), its quest for oil, and its hegemonic role in their neighborhood,” Leffler writes.

The Iraq invasion “certainly takes the prize for lack of preparation. Yet what preparation there was sucked the air out of the Afghan mission from its beginning,” said James Dobbins, Bush’s former Afghanistan envoy. Harold Koh, a former senior official in the Obama administration, calls this the “original sin” of the war on terrorism after 9/11. “If we hadn’t invaded Iraq—and had we used the resources elsewhere and correctly assessed the situation initially—a lot of this would not have happened,” he told me on the 15th anniversary of 9/11.

Kilcullen said another problem is that because so many senior government and military officials signed onto the invasion, there was very little or no accountability afterward. He contrasts this with how other great powers, going back to ancient Rome and the Battle of Cannae, learned from their mistakes. “But that only works if you recognize you’ve been defeated,” Kilcullen said. “One thing we don’t do is punish generals for losing wars.”

— By Michael Hirsh, A Columnist For Foreign Policy.

[noloveforned]

no love for ned -will- be on wlur tonight from 8pm until midnight! tune in via the station website or the tune-in app on your phone. as always, last week's show is below (and will re-air at 10pm tonight)!

no love for ned on wlur – november 18th, 2022 from 8-10pm

artist // track // album // label richard and linda thompson // a man in need // shoot out the lights // hannibal full power happy hour // bit of brightness // bit of brightness // coolin' by sound eggs // certain smile // a glitter year // howlin' banana the cool greenhouse // get unjaded // sod's toastie // melodic the impossible shapes // we are here to watch the light // hemlock cassette // (self-released) diode // eye pop // diode // refry martha // beat, perpetual // please don't take me back // dirtnap exwhite // conspiracy theory // estray // turbo discos smooch // feminine touch // a force to be rockin' with // legless jaded lady // rock 'n' roll ain't pretty // bound for hell- on the sunset strip compilation // numero group marvin tate's d-settlement // all pro // partly cloudy // american dreams alex macfarlane // the thousand note chord // the thousand note chord cassette // hobbies galore bettie serveert // for all we know (acoustic demo) // for all we know digital single // palomine fern knight // pentacles // castings // vhf yonatan gat featuring greg saunier, michael coltun and curt sydnor // slow american movement - ii. lento // american quartet // joyful noise denis fournier featuring pascale labbé and renata roagna // ywy mara ey // paysage de fantaisie // vent du sud ben lamar gay // drunkard's path // certain reveries cassette // international anthem nok cultural ensemble featuring angel bat dawid // enlightenment // njhyi // sa chad fowler, ivo perelman, zoh amba, matthew shipp, william parker and steve hirsh // alien skin // alien skin // mahakala johnny hammond // shifting gears // gears // craft morris day featuring snoop dogg // use to be the playa // last call // bungalo nxworries featuring h.e.r. // where i go // where i go digital single // stones throw smino // defibrillator // luv 4 rent // zero fatigue akai solo // heart wary! // spirit roaming // backwoodz studioz okay kaya // jazzercise // sap // jagjaguwar the randy paserntes trio featuring sam gendel, gabe noel and topanga paserntes // waterfalls // now at last // colorfield dear nora // scrolls of doom // human futures // orindal lewsberg // sweets // in your hands // 12xu blue roof // marios // (bandcamp mp3) // (self-released) the laughing chimes // guess you'll never be the same // in this town // pretty olivia jetenderpaul // an old pamphlet quote // presents the modal lines // burnt toast vinyl