What Can Getting Out Of Vietnam Teach Us About Getting Our of Iraq?

When The Dubster goes to his final reward, he will find that The Trickster has reserved a space for him in one of the rings of Hades. The Trickster will congratulate The Dubster on passing the legacy of his war in Iraq to a successor. If this is (fair & balanced) eschatology, so be it.

[x HNS]
When Congress Failed to Stop the Vietnam War
By Joel K. Goldstein

Although polls show that two-thirds of the American public thinks that the war in Iraq is a mistake, Congress is having trouble stopping it. In fact, it continues to fund the war. The Congress recently voted to appropriate $162 billion more for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the bill, the Democrats included domestic benefits for veterans but yielded to the administration's opposition to any troop withdrawal. Thus, while Congress has power to declare war and controls the public purse, practical problems constrain its exercise of these constitutional powers. The chief problem is that the majority party lacks the two-thirds majority in either house to override a presidential veto. What's more, both houses are reluctant to cut off spending to support troops in the field.

But the problems run still deeper and make any Congress ill-equipped to stop even an unpopular war a president wishes to continue. This institutional limitation was demonstrated thirty-five years ago when Congress tried to stop President Nixon's bombing of Cambodia.

Large majorities in both houses opposed the bombing as illegal and ill-advised and Watergate had already undermined Nixon's popularity. Nonetheless, Congress, with the acquiescence of leading opponents of the Vietnam war, eventually allowed Nixon to continue. The episode reveals the enormous obstacles to Congress stopping even an unpopular war.

In the spring of 1973 Nixon directed American military forces to continue bombing Cambodia even after the United States and North Vietnam had signed an agreement to end the war. The administration had previously defended such bombing as protecting American troops but their return had eliminated that justification.

In an effort to stop Nixon, Congress approved an amendment to an appropriations bill by Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton to prevent federal funds from being used to bomb Cambodia. Nixon promptly vetoed the measure and the House failed to override the veto.

With the end of the government's fiscal year only a few days away, Congress was considering a continuing resolution to allow government to operate at prior spending levels and legislation to raise the debt ceiling. These routine but necessary measures became complicated when the Eagleton Amendment was added to them. Such legislation, if passed, would have allowed government programs to continue but would have precluded further bombing of Cambodia.

This legislative maneuver led to a bargain between Nixon and Congress. He agreed to sign legislation provided the bombing cutoff did not take effect until August 15. A historic Senate debate followed, splitting Democratic liberals between those, led by J. William Fulbright, who favored the compromise, and those, such as Eagleton, who opposed it.

Fulbright and his colleagues conceded that the compromise allowed Nixon to continue bombing for 45 days. They insisted that they opposed the bombing but were powerless to stop it since the House would not override Nixon's veto.

Eagleton and his allies saw it differently. Congress had never authorized the bombing of Cambodia. The August 15 compromise gave Nixon that permission. Congress should assert its prerogatives and stop the bombing, Eagleton argued, not acquiesce as Nixon trespassed on its constitutional role of deciding when the United States was to make war. Ultimately, Congress approved the compromise, the funding measures passed and Nixon signed them into law.

The episode presents a clear instance of Congress seeking to flex its spending power to stop an unpopular war. The Eagleton Amendment brought Nixon to the table and the August 15 compromise ended the assault after 45 more days.

Yet it also illustrates limitations on congressional power. The conditions for stopping the war were far stronger in 1973 than they are now regarding Iraq. The troops were home, the bombing lacked legal justification, huge congressional majorities opposed it, the bombing had little strategic value and Nixon's administration was falling apart barely six months into his second term. Even so, Congress allowed Nixon to bomb for 45 more days. If Congress could not blow the whistle under those circumstances, when could it ever do so?

In 1973, many members of Congress who denounced the bombing as illegal and immoral were unwilling to force a constitutional showdown. Some calculated they could blame Nixon for a bombing they allowed to continue; others were disposed to compromise on Congress' constitutional power as if it were an ordinary legislative tradeoff.

The battle over the Eagleton Amendment reminds us that then, and now, Congress is hard-pressed to stop even an unpopular war. That takes presidential action. That difficult job will fall to George Bush's successor.

[Joel K. Goldstein is Vincent C. Immel Professor of Law at the Saint Louis University School of Law and a writer for the History News Service. Goldstein attended Princeton University, A.B. (1975) summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, Chairman of The Daily Princetonian; Oxford University, Oxford, England, on Rhodes Scholarship, B.Phil. in Politics (1977) and D. Phil in Politics (1978); and Harvard Law School, J.D. (1981), Editor of the Harvard Law Review.]

Copyright © 2008 History News Service

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OK, I Admit It. I'm An Infovore!

I was threatened with the loss of this computer for 5 days yesterday. I've got a minor glitch somewhere with a corrupted file or files and I cannot seem to get rid of the error messages. So, I took the laptop to the geek hospital and the tech told me that I would have to leave the laptop with them for 5 days. Instant withdrawal took control. Instead, I opted for a geek house call and so, tomorrow, a roaming tech will arrive sometime between Gary Cooper time and 4:00 PM and restore my laptop to health (I hope). Now, thanks to Professor Irving Biederman, I know why I went into withdrawal at the geek hospital: I am an infovore. If this is (fair & balanced) brain science (quackery?), so be it.

[x LA Fishwrap]
The 411 To Avoid Boredom
By Irving Biederman

(Summary: As "infovores," information is the fuel that keeps our brains all fired up.)

Crackberry. Only a metaphor for our addiction-like urge to check e-mail? Or does the term shed light on a deep biological truth about our hunger for information?

Human-motivation studies traditionally stress well-established needs: food, water, sex, avoidance of pain. In a culture like ours, most of these needs can be satisfied easily. Just open the refrigerator door, or blow on that spoonful of hot soup. (Satisfying the need for sex may require a bit more doing.)

What's been missing from this scientific research is humans' nonstop need for more information.

We are "infovores." The human eye makes three fixations a second on the world around it, and not at random. Our gaze is drawn to items we suspect have something new to tell us -- posters, signs, windows, vistas, busy streets. Confined to a featureless physician's examination room, we desperately seek a magazine, lest we be reduced to counting the holes in the ceiling tiles. Cornered at a party in a banal conversation, we seek to freshen our drink.

Without new information to assimilate, we experience a highly unpleasant state. Boredom. Conversely, at one time or another, each of us has felt the joy of information-absorption -- the conversation that lasts late into the night, the awe at a magnificent vista.

Cognitive neuroscience -- the science that seeks to explain how mind emerges from brain -- is beginning to unravel how this all works. At USC, my students and I use brain scanning to specifically investigate the neuroscience behind the infovore phenomenon.

The explanation involves opioids, one of many neurotransmitters -- which are molecules that the neurons in our brain release to activate or inhibit other neighboring neurons. The effect of opioids is pleasurable. In fact, the same neural receptors are involved in the high we get from opiate drugs, such as heroin or morphine.

In the past, these opioids were believed to exist primarily in the spinal cord and lower brain centers, where they reduced the sensation of pain. But more recently, a gradient of opioid receptors was discovered in a region of the cerebral cortex, humans' enormous outer brain layer that is largely responsible for perception and cognition.

In the areas of the cortex that initially receive visual or auditory information, opioids are sparse. But in "association areas," where the sensory information triggers memory and taps into previous knowledge, there is a high density of opioid receptors. So the more a new piece of information tickles that part of your brain where you interpret the scene or conversation, the bigger the opioid hit.

Staring at a blank wall will produce few, if any, mental associations, and thus standing in a corner is punishment. Looking at a random mass of objects will produce strong activation only in the initial stages, where there is little opioid activity to be had.

Gaze at something that leads to a novel interpretation, however, and that will spur higher levels of associative activity in opioid-dense areas. We are thus thrilled when new insights tap into what we have previously learned. We seek ways to feed our opioid desires; we are willing to endure the line at the movie theater in anticipation of the pleasure within. We pay more for a room with a view or a cup of coffee at a Parisian sidewalk cafe.

But if we get more opioids from making connections to our memories and knowledge, why do we then prefer the new? The first time our brains take in a new perception -- a scene, a movie, a literary passage -- there's a high level of activity in which a few neurons are strongly activated but the vast majority are only moderately or weakly activated. The strongly activated neurons inhibit the weak -- so there's a net reduction of activity and less opioid pleasure when our brain is exposed to the same information again. (Don't feel sorry for the inhibited neurons, the losers in this instance of neural Darwinism. They are now freed up to code other experiences.)

No wonder we can't resist carrying a BlackBerry 24/7. Who knows what goodies it will deliver? A breaking news item. A piece of gossip. An e-mail from a long-ago girlfriend. Another wirelessly and instantaneously delivered opioid hit.

I hope you got a few opioid hits, too, in learning about your inner infovore.

As for me, I'm starting to feel separation anxiety. Where's my BlackBerry?

[Irving Biederman is the Harold W. Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Southern California. Biederman received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor in 1966. Biederman directs the Image Understanding Laboratory at USC as a professor in the departments of psychology and computer science and the neuroscience program.]

Copyright © 2008 Los Angeles Times

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