Bobby Fisher Question

[cynatnite]

Is it so horrible that Bobby Fisher played a chess game in Yugoslavia?


http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050324/ap_on_re_eu/bobby_fischer_11

[solinvictus]

1. No...

it's a bullshit political charge against him.

[smiley]

2. not in my opinion...

He was also very outspoken against US policies, and specifically George Bush. Probably why they are pushing this so much IMO.

[RaleighNCDUer]

3. Oh My God! Yes!!

If we allow chess in Yugoslavia, today, it will be Parchisi in Cuba tomorrow!

Strip him of his citizenship. Force him to spent the rest of his life sailing around the world on US warships like that guy in "Man Without a Country"!

That'll teach that, that, CHESSPLAYER!!!

[cynatnite]

4. Glad to know I'm not crazy

ROFL. I'm dying here. It just seemed so lame to prosecute this guy for playing chess in Yugoslavia.

[Wonk]

6. He's a poster child for the fine line between genius and insanity

[lenidog]

8. You have got that straight

Its not really Bush that he is pissed at but the Jewish Cabal that pulls his strings.

[UdoKier]

15. What he believes to be the Jewish Cabal pullinf Bush's strings.

His theories are ludicrous. Not that the US isn't as bad as he says - it's just not run by evil Jews.

[lenidog]

5. No it isn't

But it pissed off a lot of people because he went to what was left of Yugoslavia at the time which mean't Serbia and while he is playing chess the Serbs are having fun with their ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. That is what their was a ban on travel.

[solinvictus]

11. Myth...

Check disinfo.com on Yugoslavia. It was found that the casualties and numbers on all sides were consistent with numbers and casualties produced by a low-intensity conflict. The mass graves and such were NATO hype to rile up the public to bomb Serbia.

[punpirate]

7. Well, considering that a fair amount of...

... the turmoil in Yugoslavia came about by the actions of the CIA, I would guess the charges against Fischer are an attempt to make an example of him. Chess is not exactly running guns or subverting governments, much of which went on around him while he was staring at a chess board.

He's a bit of a harmless wacko, but, last time I looked, that wasn't in the criminal code.

So, yeah, this is probably blown out of proportion.

[lenidog]

9. I agree with you

It was in poor taste at the very worst not a jail offense.

[Jim Lane]

10. I disagree, the U.S. acted responsibly (for once)

The United Nations imposed economic sanctions on the former Yugoslavia (essentially, Serbia) for its actions in Bosnia. Accordingly, President Bush issued an executive order prohibiting U.S. citizens from engaging in economic activities there. That was the other President Bush, the one who didn't invade Iraq and who occasionally recognized that there was such a thing as an international community, although of course he can be faulted for apparently not having told his son that we were part of it.

Fischer wasn't caught up in some technicality. He made a very public show of defying U.S. law. (I forget all the details. I think he held a news conference at which he spat on a letter he'd received from the State Department telling him not to go through with the match.)

Have any of you seen Hotel Rwanda? The slaughter in Bosnia wasn't on the same horrific scale, but Serbian troops launched an aggressive war and killed thousands of civilians.

If you believe that the world community should stand up against aggression (some would say genocide) of the kind initiated against Bosnia, then the U.N. sanctions were correct. If you believe that the U.S. should respect the U.N. rather than demeaning it, then Bush's executive order of 1992 was correct. Given that, what was the U.S. supposed to do? A failure to respond to Fischer's provocation would have meant that our participation in the U.N. sanctions was just so much hot air. I'm sure that, as with other laws, plenty of Americans quietly violated the sanctions and got away with it, but the sanctions would lose even their moral force if we didn't act against such public defiance of them.

I'm not vindictive toward Fischer -- far from it. The whole episode breaks my heart. In the 1960s I was an active tournament chess player. In the frequent arguments we had about Fischer and his future, I was always taking his side, and was one of those who insisted (to much derision) that he would someday be World Champion.

Nevertheless, if I had been President in 1992, I would have approved the issuance of the arrest warrant.

[allemand]

12. What does a chess match have to do with economic sanctions?

How many Bosnians were killed by those evil chess games? If the Serbs decided to spend all that money on chess, why stop them? Would it have been better if they had used the money to buy weapons?

And why did France and all the other EU governments never prosecute Boris Spassky? Perhaps because they realized how ridiculous it would be...

[Jim Lane]

13. Yes, it was connected

Did the chess games directly kill any Bosnians? Of course not. That's not the issue.

The government of Serbia wanted to say to the rest of the world, "Nothing to see here. Move along. Everything is just business as usual."

The U.N. wouldn't go along with it. The U.N. said, "No, this is not business as usual. Your conduct in Bosnia is totally unacceptable, and you will not be able to engage in economic activity with anyone else as long as you continue that way." Bush (41) gave the U.N. sanctions the force of law as to American citizens.

So, what were the alternatives?

1. Don't issue the executive order based on the U.N. sanctions. Instead, publish an official State Department communique, deploring genocide in the strongest possible terms, and expressing the profound hope that all the parties will reach a peaceful resolution of their differences. Then, having churned out that communique (which some State Department flack could probably knock out in twenty minutes), go back to business as usual while the Serbs perpetrate their ethnic cleansing.

2. Issue the executive order but don't enforce it. When Fischer very publicly spits on the letter and breaks the law, look the other way. Hypocritically claim to be doing all you can. Take the opportunity to reiterate your condemnation of genocide.

3. Do as Bush did -- issue the executive order and do what you can to enforce it, including, bizarrely enough, issuing an arrest warrant for a whacked-out chess genius. I grant you he's not exactly Public Enemy Number 1 but he put himself in the position where we have to go after him to maintain the credibility of the sanctions. Enforcing the sanctions will have some adverse economic impact on Serbia. Perhaps more important is to delegitimize the Milosevic government. We send the message that the U.S. won't take a position of business-as-usual when such outrages are being committed. If sanctions fail to solve the problem, follow up as Clinton did, with a multilateral military intervention.

I don't know what France did about Spassky. I know that, in general, the leaders of Western Europe didn't distinguish themselves in dealing with the Yugoslavian crisis. They were largely inert except when they were following Clinton's lead. Clinton saved lives there. As a chessplayer, I still marvel at 17. ...Be6 (one of Fischer's most brilliant moves, played when he was 13 years old!!) -- but as an American, and as a citizen of the world, I say lock him up.

[Devlzown]

14. Didn't invade Iraq?

What about Desert Storm?

[Jim Lane]

16. True, let me be more precise

Bush 41 sent troops into Iraq; however, he did not commit the crime of "waging aggressive war", to use the wording applied in the Nuremberg trials to the actions of the national leaders who sent their armed forces across established international boundaries without provocation. In the first Gulf War, it was Saddam Hussein who violated that standard. U.S. troops entered Iraq only as part of the military operations taken in response to Saddam's aggression.

Yes, I know, the first President Bush wasn't perfect, and if he'd managed things better, Saddam might never have invaded Kuwait in the first place. That's a different order of magnitude of criticism, though. Under the Nuremberg standards, George H. W. Bush would be acquitted of the charge of waging aggressive war. His son would be convicted.

Beyond that, consider that in 1991 there was a deliberate decision not to stage a full-fledged invasion of Iraq. Here's how Bush the elder later detailed his reasoning:

Trying to eliminate Saddam ... would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. ... We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.

According to The Memory Hole, this material is from the 1998 book A World Transformed, by George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft. This particular passage appeared in an excerpt, "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam", in Time magazine, March 2, 1998. Read the excerpt at http://www.thememoryhole.org/mil/bushsr-iraq.htm and try to imagine this kind of thoughtful consideration coming from the current denizen of the White House.