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What happened next illustrated how much American society and values had changed. Seven months after 2,800 Americans were killed at Pearl Harbor in 1941, Adm. Chester Nimitz sailed west to Midway Island, where his carrier destroyed the Japanese fleet and changed the course of the war. Now imagine if Nimitz, when he reached the International Dateline, had decided to turn back, thereby granting the Japanese a sanctuary in the Western Pacific. Such a decision would have been preposterous. Sixty years later, nearly three thousand Americans were murdered in New York City. A few months later, the American military was poised to destroy Osama bin Laden’s force. The al Qaeda Arabs were running for their lives in sneakers, unprepared for the harsh winter, while the local Pashtun tribes were in deathly fear of the enraged juggernaut in pursuit. Fearful of America’s wrath, the Pakistani army was scrambling to distance itself from the Islamist fighters. But when al Qaeda crossed the Durand Line—a scratch on a map ignored by all the local tribes—into Pakistan, the U.S. military, the U.S. Congress, the U.S. president, and the U.S. press stopped as if shocked by an electric current. There was never a serious policy discussion about pursuing and destroying the enemy. By halting on a ridge in the middle of nowhere, we legitimized Pakistan as a sanctuary. Encouraged by our fastidiousness, the Pakistani army regained its confidence and issued dire warnings that the border was inviolate to American ground attack. At the same time, the Pashtun border tribes, due to intimidation, Islamic solidarity, and blood ties, acceded to Taliban rule. Since 2001, Pakistan has played both sides, sheltering Taliban and terrorists while permitting American strikes by unmanned aircraft and accepting American aid. Obsessed with India, the Pakistani army deployed most of its forces along its eastern border and supported terrorist groups in Kashmir. A popular saying was “Every country has an army; in Pakistan, the army has a country.” Inside the army, though, officers were wary of each other’s loyalties. Having encouraged Islamism in the 1980s to divide civilian political parties, the generals weren’t certain which fellow officers rendered loyalty to Islamic parties above loyalty to the army. U.S. aid subsidized the ruling elite in Islamabad. Since 2001, the United States has given Pakistan over $15 billion.2 With only 2 percent of the 170 million people paying income tax, the national budget is sustained by sales taxes that levy the same burden on street sweepers as on members of Parliament whose incomes reportedly average $900,000 a year.3 The goal of U.S. aid was to persuade Pakistan to take seriously the threat from the Islamists it protected, including al Qaeda. But the Pakistani army had proved both unable and unwilling to control the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, along the Afghan border. It remained a sanctuary, sheltering over 150 insurgent camps.
Most revealingly, many of the people on the list contributed to both parties. Indeed, real estate developers are infamous as political contributors. Many of them strike it big by getting a zoning change from the local commission or obtaining a license to develop a facility from a state agency. Real estate developers commonly donate to both parties. In early 1987, Texas S&L insiders held a Republican fund-raiser at which Treasury Secretary Baker was the featured speaker. Baker sat next to Don Dixon of Vernon Savings. Dixon had also contributed to the DCCC. In 1987 he was the worst known control fraud in the nation; he was on the prosecutors’ list of 400 names. When Wright saw his name on that list he thought “Democratic contributor.” Similarly, Craig Hall contributed to the Republicans and the DCCC (O’Shea 1991, 227). Wright never considered that control frauds have compelling incentives to make contributions to powerful politicians of either party who might intervene on their behalf.
The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One
William K. Black
Although everyone calls it the Big Bang, many books caution us not to think of it as an explosion in the conventional sense. It was, rather, a vast, sudden expansion on a whopping scale. So what caused it? One notion is that perhaps the singularity was the relic of an earlier, collapsed universe—that we're just one of an eternal cycle of expanding and collapsing universes, like the bladder on an oxygen machine. Others attribute the Big Bang to what they call “a false vacuum” or “a scalar field” or “vacuum energy”—some quality or thing, at any rate, that introduced a measure of instability into the nothingness that was. It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can. It may be that our universe is merely part of many larger universes, some in different dimensions, and that Big Bangs are going on all the time all over the place. Or it may be that space and time had some other forms altogether before the Big Bang—forms too alien for us to imagine—and that the Big Bang represents some sort of transition phase, where the universe went from a form we can't understand to one we almost can. “These are very close to religious questions,” Dr. Andrei Linde, a cosmologist at Stanford, told the New York Times in 2001. The Big
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
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