Remora
Wo Es war, soll Ich werden -- Freud,
Charles Krauthammer attends, so we are told, at all the high tables in D.C., and is one of the muskateers of The Project for the New American Century, which plays a role in today's politics similar to the role played by Committee on the Present Danger http://www.publiceye.org/research/Group_Watch/Entries-42.htm played in the good old days of Ronald Reagan.
Krauthammer presently plays the Id to the Bush court. While Paul Wolfowitz has been forced to straight-jacket his thoughts into the super-ego of officialdom, Krauthammer is free to express the desires that really roil the inner circle. This is important. Where the Id is, with the Bushes, the super-ego will surely follow, and trail in its wake the whole set of opinion makers, rationalizing madly. It's Freudian law applied to the Hof. Just look at tax policy. In 2000, only the wildest ideologues of plutocracy would have come out solidly against the Income Tax and in favor of sales taxes to finance the state. Slowly, though, it has dawned on even the NY Times business page that this is precisely Bush's strategy, as was remarked in this article on Bush's bizarre pension tax plan:
"Many analysts say the retirement proposals mesh with what appears to be Mr. Bush's long-term goal of removing most taxes on investment income and toward a system that essentially taxes only consumption."
So -- the rule should be, pay attention when the Id speaks. And thus spake Krauthammer in his latest. First, in typical Id style, he cannot believe -- he cannot believe at length, he cannot believe from his head to his boots -- that all of these, these obstacles have been thrown in the way of our desire. The pack desire. The desire that has sharpened his teeth. Well, it all has to come out somehow. And -- by the merest coincidence -- it comes out first in the form of rather mocking the fact that the U.S., at this crucial juncture, is being asked to take black nations seriously. The incredulity infects his writing. He trembles. Angola, Guinea, the Congo -- places that, eventually, we will have to recivilize with might and main, and here we are, bending over for them.
"The entire exercise is ridiculous, but for unfathomable reasons it matters to many, both at home and around the world, that the United States should have the permission of Guinea to risk the lives of American soldiers to rid the world -- and the long-suffering Iraqi people -- of a particularly vicious and dangerous tyrant."
To get permission of a black nation like Guinea -- does this upset the master-slave order of the world (the imperialist epoch now looked back upon so nostalgically) or what? And it can even become habit forming. We know how quickly the bully can deliquesce into the masochist. We know where that leads. It leads to perversity, and perversity leads to France. For who, really, is the problem here? Who stands between our virility and its consummation? A dozen times France. France, as Krauthammer says, which "pretends to great power status." A fake, then -- and, as all fakes to desire, a fetish, a deviation into sexual energies that we really don't want to go into in this post. Family reading, you know.
So, the Id, the loud mouth at the end of every canal and the beginning of every orifice, it wants to know -- how will we hurt this deviant? Krauthammer comes up with the appropriate answer:
"First, as soon as the dust settles in Iraq, we should push for an expansion of the Security Council -- with India and Japan as new permanent members -- to dilute France's disproportionate and anachronistic influence.
Second, there should be no role for France in Iraq, either during the war, should France change its mind, or after it. No peacekeeping. No oil contracts. And France should be last in line for loan repayment, after Russia. Russia, after all, simply has opposed our policy. It did not try to mobilize the world against us."
To exterminate them -- it is an old wet dream of the Ids. Bullied, he lies in bed, and dreams of torturing his enemies. Older, his aggressions somewhat under control, he merely verbalizes. Althought the thought of France "in line" -- LI believes that this is an image out of the Id's subconscious repertoire. You line up the prisoners to be executed. You line up the soldiers that you will order into battle. Lines are at once the preferred sexual position of power and the geometry of death in which power annihilates itself, and all within its graps. Scorched earth, death marches. That line, France at the end of it, humiliated as we were humiliated, bowing to Guinea.
Alas, meanwhile the super-ego is trying to tiptoe around those oil contracts. After all, the superego keeps telling everyone, this isn't a blood for oil transaction -- this is about democracy! Yet the question of the spoils rather begs the question of democracy. As in, isn't a force that dictates who the spoils belong to exercizing -- to put it at its most delicate, to put a Blair-ite fuzz on it -- a rather non-representative force? Because, of course, the great crusade for democracy -- a crusade in so many ways -- is confronted, at the outset, with the paradox that the people it democratizes might just operate in radically un-American ways. The people might not be sufficiently appreciative of the American libido, and we just don't like that. We cherish our Id.
Regrettably, this will require postponing democracy until political maturity can be expected among the Iraqi peoples such that they, too, can cherish the American Id. It sits on top of us all.
Friday, February 28, 2003
Remora
DEMS WAKE UP FROM YEARLONG SLEEP, ASK "WHA'S HAPPENING?"
Which should be the headline to the NYT piece on the hearing held to determine the 'price' of our beautiful occupation of Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz is the lead administration meretrician on the case (hey, shouldn't there be such a word? Meretrician -- it is an apt description for the present administration's way with figures). He comes a day after Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army let the cat out of the bag "that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq." Wolfowitz, a man who has made a vast study of war -- why, he's read several books on the subject by various Kagans -- is, of course, shocked that we would ever listen to some old no doubt senile duffer sitting on the Joint Chiefs of Staff who actually served in the military -- a service devoutly to be avoided by the key members of this administration when they were in their machine gun bearing primes. Here are a few grafs:
"Mr. Wolfowitz then dismissed articles in several newspapers this week asserting that Pentagon budget specialists put the cost of war and reconstruction at $60 billion to $95 billion in this fiscal year. He said it was impossible to predict accurately a war's duration, its destruction and the extent of rebuilding afterward.
"We have no idea what we will need until we get there on the ground," Mr. Wolfowitz said at a hearing of the House Budget Committee. "Every time we get a briefing on the war plan, it immediately goes down six different branches to see what the scenarios look like. If we costed each and every one, the costs would range from $10 billion to $100 billion ."
And, from the end of the article, the ever more Rumsfeldian Rumsfeld:
"Mr. Wolfowitz spent much of the hearing knocking down published estimates of the costs of war and rebuilding, saying the upper range of $95 billion was too high, and that the estimates were almost meaningless because of the variables.
Moreover, he said such estimates, and speculation that postwar reconstruction costs could climb even higher, ignored the fact that Iraq is a wealthy country, with annual oil exports worth $15 billion to $20 billion. "To assume we're going to pay for it all is just wrong," he said.
At the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld said the factors influencing cost estimates made even ranges imperfect. Asked whether he would release such ranges to permit a useful public debate on the subject, Mr. Rumsfeld said, "I've already decided that. It's not useful."
The word fascist is over-used, mainly to describe theocrats of Osama bin Laden's pursuasion -- but surely the blending of bullying and rhetoric, here, the overtness of the lie and the incorrigibility to shame when the lie is found out, carries delicious hints of Mussolini.
Now, to wake up the Dems about this kind of thing, you have to creep up behind them and say Boo. You have to do that for about three years. They are the party of Rip Van Winkle, Li'l Abner, and the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.
David Corn, doing the wrap up about the intellectual corruption rampant among the Dem establishment that lead up to the fatal vote last year allowing Bush to assume war powers as he will, drew up the painful chronicle of the business, killing the softly with their own quotes, these Dem senatorial types who voted Bush while claiming they were voting for, oh, the UN or something. And he put his finger on the reason the Dems failed in the midyear elections:
"My apologies. I should realize that war -- or pre-war -- does not always adhere to logic. But the meta-message of the Dems also is grounded in a fallacy. They argue Bush cannot be trusted to oversee the U.S. economy. Yet, at the same time, the Democrats -- meaning almost every national elected Democratic leader and 60 percent of the Democratic Senators and 40 percent of the House Democrats -- maintain Bush can indeed be trusted to precipitate and carry out a war. An insensitive, country-club-hanging corporate-lackey who will say anything and screw the middle-class to help out his rich pals, on one hand. But a wise and outstanding (moderate and deliberative, as Biden would say) defender of the nation who deserves loyalty and support, on the other. Can Democrats spell "disconnect"?"
....
We've been reading a book by the Washington Post correspondant, Nathan C. Randall, about the Kurds: After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? Randall writes about the refugee rush after the last war and reminds us that the end of the Kurd disaster came when the French -- the French -- came out and pressed upon the reluctant Bush administration the decision to push back Saddam H. from the three provinces of Northern Iraq. Kouchner,Mitterand's junior minister for humanitarian affairs, did the groundwork to prepare this with Ankara.
What strikes us about this is that if the Bush administration had really wanted international support for a war against Iraq, it would have been very easy to build on this history. France would have had a much more difficult time opposing an action that incorporated a strong French precedent. History is woven out of gaps: and we think this gap is significant. Since it has been universally un-recalled, we wonder if this isn't motivated -- a piece of the unconscious floating behind a piece of amnesia. One of the goals, it seems, of the Bush people is to wean the country from the naive trust in such organizations as the UN -- which has been the object of rightwing vituperation since its founding by Roosevelt and various covert communists in his administration oh so long ago. If the Bush's really wanted to build a case that would convince France, the obvious move would be to cite precedents to which the French were not only party, but prime mover. But the more general Bush objective has obviously been to squelch any precedent for buffering American hegemony. When Aznar, Spain's prime minister and Bush's only friend in Spain, asks that Donald Rumsfeld be stifled, he is obviously thinking that the rulebook says, hey, we listen to our allies because, uh, they are our allies.
That rulebook was written by Walter Lippman and Emily Post.
The Bush's rulebook was written by Mario Puzo.
DEMS WAKE UP FROM YEARLONG SLEEP, ASK "WHA'S HAPPENING?"
Which should be the headline to the NYT piece on the hearing held to determine the 'price' of our beautiful occupation of Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz is the lead administration meretrician on the case (hey, shouldn't there be such a word? Meretrician -- it is an apt description for the present administration's way with figures). He comes a day after Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army let the cat out of the bag "that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq." Wolfowitz, a man who has made a vast study of war -- why, he's read several books on the subject by various Kagans -- is, of course, shocked that we would ever listen to some old no doubt senile duffer sitting on the Joint Chiefs of Staff who actually served in the military -- a service devoutly to be avoided by the key members of this administration when they were in their machine gun bearing primes. Here are a few grafs:
"Mr. Wolfowitz then dismissed articles in several newspapers this week asserting that Pentagon budget specialists put the cost of war and reconstruction at $60 billion to $95 billion in this fiscal year. He said it was impossible to predict accurately a war's duration, its destruction and the extent of rebuilding afterward.
"We have no idea what we will need until we get there on the ground," Mr. Wolfowitz said at a hearing of the House Budget Committee. "Every time we get a briefing on the war plan, it immediately goes down six different branches to see what the scenarios look like. If we costed each and every one, the costs would range from $10 billion to $100 billion ."
And, from the end of the article, the ever more Rumsfeldian Rumsfeld:
"Mr. Wolfowitz spent much of the hearing knocking down published estimates of the costs of war and rebuilding, saying the upper range of $95 billion was too high, and that the estimates were almost meaningless because of the variables.
Moreover, he said such estimates, and speculation that postwar reconstruction costs could climb even higher, ignored the fact that Iraq is a wealthy country, with annual oil exports worth $15 billion to $20 billion. "To assume we're going to pay for it all is just wrong," he said.
At the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld said the factors influencing cost estimates made even ranges imperfect. Asked whether he would release such ranges to permit a useful public debate on the subject, Mr. Rumsfeld said, "I've already decided that. It's not useful."
The word fascist is over-used, mainly to describe theocrats of Osama bin Laden's pursuasion -- but surely the blending of bullying and rhetoric, here, the overtness of the lie and the incorrigibility to shame when the lie is found out, carries delicious hints of Mussolini.
Now, to wake up the Dems about this kind of thing, you have to creep up behind them and say Boo. You have to do that for about three years. They are the party of Rip Van Winkle, Li'l Abner, and the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.
David Corn, doing the wrap up about the intellectual corruption rampant among the Dem establishment that lead up to the fatal vote last year allowing Bush to assume war powers as he will, drew up the painful chronicle of the business, killing the softly with their own quotes, these Dem senatorial types who voted Bush while claiming they were voting for, oh, the UN or something. And he put his finger on the reason the Dems failed in the midyear elections:
"My apologies. I should realize that war -- or pre-war -- does not always adhere to logic. But the meta-message of the Dems also is grounded in a fallacy. They argue Bush cannot be trusted to oversee the U.S. economy. Yet, at the same time, the Democrats -- meaning almost every national elected Democratic leader and 60 percent of the Democratic Senators and 40 percent of the House Democrats -- maintain Bush can indeed be trusted to precipitate and carry out a war. An insensitive, country-club-hanging corporate-lackey who will say anything and screw the middle-class to help out his rich pals, on one hand. But a wise and outstanding (moderate and deliberative, as Biden would say) defender of the nation who deserves loyalty and support, on the other. Can Democrats spell "disconnect"?"
....
We've been reading a book by the Washington Post correspondant, Nathan C. Randall, about the Kurds: After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? Randall writes about the refugee rush after the last war and reminds us that the end of the Kurd disaster came when the French -- the French -- came out and pressed upon the reluctant Bush administration the decision to push back Saddam H. from the three provinces of Northern Iraq. Kouchner,Mitterand's junior minister for humanitarian affairs, did the groundwork to prepare this with Ankara.
What strikes us about this is that if the Bush administration had really wanted international support for a war against Iraq, it would have been very easy to build on this history. France would have had a much more difficult time opposing an action that incorporated a strong French precedent. History is woven out of gaps: and we think this gap is significant. Since it has been universally un-recalled, we wonder if this isn't motivated -- a piece of the unconscious floating behind a piece of amnesia. One of the goals, it seems, of the Bush people is to wean the country from the naive trust in such organizations as the UN -- which has been the object of rightwing vituperation since its founding by Roosevelt and various covert communists in his administration oh so long ago. If the Bush's really wanted to build a case that would convince France, the obvious move would be to cite precedents to which the French were not only party, but prime mover. But the more general Bush objective has obviously been to squelch any precedent for buffering American hegemony. When Aznar, Spain's prime minister and Bush's only friend in Spain, asks that Donald Rumsfeld be stifled, he is obviously thinking that the rulebook says, hey, we listen to our allies because, uh, they are our allies.
That rulebook was written by Walter Lippman and Emily Post.
The Bush's rulebook was written by Mario Puzo.
Thursday, February 27, 2003
Dope
"10 � Then Hanani'ah the prophet took the yoke from off the prophet Jeremiah's neck, and brake it.
11 And Hanani'ah spake in the presence of all the people, saying, Thus saith the LORD; Even so will I break the yoke of Nebuchadnez'zar king of Babylon from the neck of all nations within the space of two full years. And the prophet Jeremiah went his way.
12 � Then the word of the LORD came unto Jeremiah the prophet, after that Hanani'ah the prophet had broken the yoke from off the neck of the prophet Jeremiah, saying,
13 Go and tell Hanani'ah, saying, Thus saith the LORD; Thou hast broken the yokes of wood; but thou shalt make for them yokes of iron.
14 For thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; I have put a yoke of iron upon the neck of all these nations, that they may serve Nebuchadnez'zar king of Babylon; and they shall serve him: and I have given him the beasts of the field also.
15 Then said the prophet Jeremiah unto Hanani'ah the prophet, Hear now, Hanani'ah; The LORD hath not sent thee; but thou makest this people to trust in a lie."
Jeremiah, of course, lived in a primitive time, before mass produced protest signs. Limited Inc, however, enjoys all the fruits of modern technology, including the aforesaid mass produced protest signs, one of which we spotted yesterday, going into Book People. It said American for Peace, white caps on a red background. It was stapled to a stake, and intended for the good b�rger with the lawn and all the trimmings -- which we would be, Lord thou knowest, if only we had a weekly salary, a decent career, a future and a past, sex, kids, a car. Having none of those and two dollars on us, one buck in quarters, one buck in paper, we approached the Peace guy, who said the signs were three bucks. Dilemma! We wanted to spend our paper dollar, and one or two of our quarters, on getting a cup of java from the coffee shop inside Book People. So here it was, at last -- the social comforts or the stirn prompting of the moral law within us. The choice. And then, suddenly, the guy standing next to us bought us the sign, just dished out three bucks as pretty as you please.
Jeremiah's sign would no doubt have been a little more glorious -- something like "peace, peace, but there is no peace," written in letters of blood -- but ours looks pretty spiffy, wedged into our apartment window.
...
Prophecy is a dangerous business. You go around breaking yokes, thinking you are speaking God's own truth, and then God makes a yoke out of you. As per Hanani'ah, one of history's also runs. No book in the bible named for him. The visionary poets from Dante to Ginsburg, do they look back, do they instance Hanani'ah? Nope. Jeremiah even got to be a bullfrog in the days of my youth -- there he was, mentioned in a pop song. Hanani'ah however remains in the dustbin of history. And you'll notice why he is in the dustbin of history. He predicts an easy victory over Babylon. That just wasn't smart.
As we can see from this startling article in the City Journal by Stanley Kurtz, After the War. City Journal is put out by the Manhattan Institute, another rightwing think tank. We came upon it in a sour mood, after reading the extremely silly report on the protest in London by Julia Magnet (whose thesis, popular right now on the right, is that anti-semitism can be compressed into anti-Israel-ism, which can be further compressed into anti-Sharon-ism -- so that any objection to Israel's foreign policy is just a matter of Jew-hating). Magnet, while priding herself on being pro-Israel (and thus, by her convoluted logic, philo-semitic), makes no bones about having contempt for all Moslems. Through these blinders, the million people who turned out in London are transformed into some future brown-shirt army. This is a pandering hysteria that will, we prophesy (yoke on back) eventually haunt those who condone it.
The Kurtz thing surprised us. Kurtz is a thinker at another rightwing think tank -- as Jeremiah said, in another context, according to the number of thy cities were they think tanks, oh America, and according to the number of the streets of D.C. have ye set up telegenic wonks to that shameful thing, tax free foundation money -- and so we would have written him off. At the moment, even though, in their heart of hearts, real conservatives know that there is something screwy in the Wilsonian enthusiasm they are all supposed to be experiencing at the thought of America's infinite involvement in imposing democracy around the world, real conservatives are not going to be expressing that thought and getting those looks from their comrades. This is a world of groupthink.
Well, Kurtz's essay treads on my territory -- he actually goes back to the analogy all the rightwingers love, the British empire, and asks Hobson's question: is it really the case that the British government, defying all the rules of governments ever known, extended itself with suffering and tax dollars in order to bring democracy to the heathen? The answer is no. Although we aren't absolutely happy with Kurtz's reasoning, we do think that this is a step in the right direction .... besides which, it is what we've been trying to write an essay about ourselves. Kurtz doesn't quite go all the way -- he doesn't mention the dreaded word, famine -- but he does hint that the golden picture of the British Raj painted by people like Robert Kagan has more to do with PBS costume dramas than reality.
Kurtz is, first, cautious about the idea that democracy can be imposed from above. Well he should be. If there is anything that binds together Anglo conservativism for the past two hundred twenty some years, it is that revolutions from the top impose an arbitrary order, the order of the abstract thinker, on the natural order of society. This is the lesson of Burke, who applied it not less to India than to France. Here's Kurtz's grafs on the subject:
"...If Iraq currently lacks a modernizing, democratizing class, like Japan�s samurai bureaucrats, might it not be possible to create a sector of Iraqi society that embraces liberal principles�a new, modern bureaucratic class that could then spark a liberalization of the larger society and the government, just as the samurai did in Japan?
In fact, there is a good historical precedent for just such a development: that is precisely what happened when the British ruled India. British rule in the subcontinent, let it be said at once, is a highly imperfect model of democratization. The Raj was often cruel and exploitative. And though a few British thinkers and bureaucrats may have understood the Raj�s 150-year imperium as the midwife of Indian self-rule, for the most part the British brought democracy to the Indians more or less by accident, in fits and starts. But by educating and training�and employing�English-speaking Indians to assist them in administering the empire, the British ended up forging a liberal-minded indigenous class that eventually could run a modern nation on its own.
A pivotal figure in this development is Ram Mohan Roy (1772�1833), the so-called father of modern India. Broadly educated in Indian languages, he went on to master English and work for the British East India Company, where he developed ideas that led to the first modernizing movement within Hinduism�a crucial stage on India�s path to modern democracy. Roy shows how it is possible to take an ancient, nonmodern tradition (like Islam, say) and�without seeming to violate it, and indeed while cherishing much that is valuable in it�to transform it substantially and adapt it to the modern condition. Roy used the philosophical ideas found in the earliest Hindu scriptures to criticize the polytheism and some of the practices of popular Hinduism, such as sati�widow burning. Yet he indignantly rejected the disdain for Hinduism that Christian missionaries and British liberals so casually showed. Immersed in Hinduism�s rich philosophical tradition, Roy defended Hindu pride against British prejudice and simultaneously argued for liberalizing change within the Hindu tradition. The surest route to modern life for Muslim societies may be just such an internal reformation of their Islamic tradition rather than a forcible extirpation of it. If democracy is to succeed in the Middle East, an Islamic Roy may have to arise."
Now that Kurtz has broached the subject, he boldly ventures out a little more.
"While Indian cultural values remain strong in India, Macaulay in a sense got his way, as well. Macaulay�s Minute began the process of relative Anglicization and accelerated the cultural transformation that Roy had begun, a transformation that pushed India into the modern world.
Before the new indigenous elite arose, however, at least one early-nineteenth-century British modernizing effort failed disastrously, proving that it is not enough to blow up existing social structures and assume that, when the dust settles, the fragments will re-form into something recognizably modern. Liberal British administrators wanted to shatter the power of traditional village landlord elites and give individual farmers control over their own land. Like famed Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto today, they believed that once the right property relations were in place, an explosion of free enterprise and productivity would follow. It didn�t happen. The British destroyed the traditional Indian system of village rule and created a market in land, but the Indians showed no signs of developing a liberal, capitalist ethos. Private ownership by itself was insufficient to bring deeper cultural change. So British administrators had to step in, at great and ultimately unsupportable expense to the British Treasury."
Of course, the last sentence is nonsense -- Indians paid for the administration of India, as Kurtz surely knows. He doesn't get into the details of exactly how the modernizing effort failed -- but it is the heart of our perhaps never to be completed essay on James Fitzjames Stephen that the 20th century conservative myth -- that central planning is confined to socialism -- ignores its roots, which are just here, in India. The Benthamite/Laissez faire idea was to "modernize" India along approved capitalist lines with centrally planned laws that would re-do the whole village economy, monetize the place, and bring about relationships of exchange among the happy farmers. Kurtz delicately skirts around the fact that this planning is directly implicated in the worst famines of the nineteenth century. But that he even ventures out far enough to cast doubt on the neo-colonialist projects a-bornin' in D.C. cocktail parties is pretty brave, as far as it goes.
So hallelujah, intelligent life on the right! But I'm not going to break my yoke quite yet.
"10 � Then Hanani'ah the prophet took the yoke from off the prophet Jeremiah's neck, and brake it.
11 And Hanani'ah spake in the presence of all the people, saying, Thus saith the LORD; Even so will I break the yoke of Nebuchadnez'zar king of Babylon from the neck of all nations within the space of two full years. And the prophet Jeremiah went his way.
12 � Then the word of the LORD came unto Jeremiah the prophet, after that Hanani'ah the prophet had broken the yoke from off the neck of the prophet Jeremiah, saying,
13 Go and tell Hanani'ah, saying, Thus saith the LORD; Thou hast broken the yokes of wood; but thou shalt make for them yokes of iron.
14 For thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; I have put a yoke of iron upon the neck of all these nations, that they may serve Nebuchadnez'zar king of Babylon; and they shall serve him: and I have given him the beasts of the field also.
15 Then said the prophet Jeremiah unto Hanani'ah the prophet, Hear now, Hanani'ah; The LORD hath not sent thee; but thou makest this people to trust in a lie."
Jeremiah, of course, lived in a primitive time, before mass produced protest signs. Limited Inc, however, enjoys all the fruits of modern technology, including the aforesaid mass produced protest signs, one of which we spotted yesterday, going into Book People. It said American for Peace, white caps on a red background. It was stapled to a stake, and intended for the good b�rger with the lawn and all the trimmings -- which we would be, Lord thou knowest, if only we had a weekly salary, a decent career, a future and a past, sex, kids, a car. Having none of those and two dollars on us, one buck in quarters, one buck in paper, we approached the Peace guy, who said the signs were three bucks. Dilemma! We wanted to spend our paper dollar, and one or two of our quarters, on getting a cup of java from the coffee shop inside Book People. So here it was, at last -- the social comforts or the stirn prompting of the moral law within us. The choice. And then, suddenly, the guy standing next to us bought us the sign, just dished out three bucks as pretty as you please.
Jeremiah's sign would no doubt have been a little more glorious -- something like "peace, peace, but there is no peace," written in letters of blood -- but ours looks pretty spiffy, wedged into our apartment window.
...
Prophecy is a dangerous business. You go around breaking yokes, thinking you are speaking God's own truth, and then God makes a yoke out of you. As per Hanani'ah, one of history's also runs. No book in the bible named for him. The visionary poets from Dante to Ginsburg, do they look back, do they instance Hanani'ah? Nope. Jeremiah even got to be a bullfrog in the days of my youth -- there he was, mentioned in a pop song. Hanani'ah however remains in the dustbin of history. And you'll notice why he is in the dustbin of history. He predicts an easy victory over Babylon. That just wasn't smart.
As we can see from this startling article in the City Journal by Stanley Kurtz, After the War. City Journal is put out by the Manhattan Institute, another rightwing think tank. We came upon it in a sour mood, after reading the extremely silly report on the protest in London by Julia Magnet (whose thesis, popular right now on the right, is that anti-semitism can be compressed into anti-Israel-ism, which can be further compressed into anti-Sharon-ism -- so that any objection to Israel's foreign policy is just a matter of Jew-hating). Magnet, while priding herself on being pro-Israel (and thus, by her convoluted logic, philo-semitic), makes no bones about having contempt for all Moslems. Through these blinders, the million people who turned out in London are transformed into some future brown-shirt army. This is a pandering hysteria that will, we prophesy (yoke on back) eventually haunt those who condone it.
The Kurtz thing surprised us. Kurtz is a thinker at another rightwing think tank -- as Jeremiah said, in another context, according to the number of thy cities were they think tanks, oh America, and according to the number of the streets of D.C. have ye set up telegenic wonks to that shameful thing, tax free foundation money -- and so we would have written him off. At the moment, even though, in their heart of hearts, real conservatives know that there is something screwy in the Wilsonian enthusiasm they are all supposed to be experiencing at the thought of America's infinite involvement in imposing democracy around the world, real conservatives are not going to be expressing that thought and getting those looks from their comrades. This is a world of groupthink.
Well, Kurtz's essay treads on my territory -- he actually goes back to the analogy all the rightwingers love, the British empire, and asks Hobson's question: is it really the case that the British government, defying all the rules of governments ever known, extended itself with suffering and tax dollars in order to bring democracy to the heathen? The answer is no. Although we aren't absolutely happy with Kurtz's reasoning, we do think that this is a step in the right direction .... besides which, it is what we've been trying to write an essay about ourselves. Kurtz doesn't quite go all the way -- he doesn't mention the dreaded word, famine -- but he does hint that the golden picture of the British Raj painted by people like Robert Kagan has more to do with PBS costume dramas than reality.
Kurtz is, first, cautious about the idea that democracy can be imposed from above. Well he should be. If there is anything that binds together Anglo conservativism for the past two hundred twenty some years, it is that revolutions from the top impose an arbitrary order, the order of the abstract thinker, on the natural order of society. This is the lesson of Burke, who applied it not less to India than to France. Here's Kurtz's grafs on the subject:
"...If Iraq currently lacks a modernizing, democratizing class, like Japan�s samurai bureaucrats, might it not be possible to create a sector of Iraqi society that embraces liberal principles�a new, modern bureaucratic class that could then spark a liberalization of the larger society and the government, just as the samurai did in Japan?
In fact, there is a good historical precedent for just such a development: that is precisely what happened when the British ruled India. British rule in the subcontinent, let it be said at once, is a highly imperfect model of democratization. The Raj was often cruel and exploitative. And though a few British thinkers and bureaucrats may have understood the Raj�s 150-year imperium as the midwife of Indian self-rule, for the most part the British brought democracy to the Indians more or less by accident, in fits and starts. But by educating and training�and employing�English-speaking Indians to assist them in administering the empire, the British ended up forging a liberal-minded indigenous class that eventually could run a modern nation on its own.
A pivotal figure in this development is Ram Mohan Roy (1772�1833), the so-called father of modern India. Broadly educated in Indian languages, he went on to master English and work for the British East India Company, where he developed ideas that led to the first modernizing movement within Hinduism�a crucial stage on India�s path to modern democracy. Roy shows how it is possible to take an ancient, nonmodern tradition (like Islam, say) and�without seeming to violate it, and indeed while cherishing much that is valuable in it�to transform it substantially and adapt it to the modern condition. Roy used the philosophical ideas found in the earliest Hindu scriptures to criticize the polytheism and some of the practices of popular Hinduism, such as sati�widow burning. Yet he indignantly rejected the disdain for Hinduism that Christian missionaries and British liberals so casually showed. Immersed in Hinduism�s rich philosophical tradition, Roy defended Hindu pride against British prejudice and simultaneously argued for liberalizing change within the Hindu tradition. The surest route to modern life for Muslim societies may be just such an internal reformation of their Islamic tradition rather than a forcible extirpation of it. If democracy is to succeed in the Middle East, an Islamic Roy may have to arise."
Now that Kurtz has broached the subject, he boldly ventures out a little more.
"While Indian cultural values remain strong in India, Macaulay in a sense got his way, as well. Macaulay�s Minute began the process of relative Anglicization and accelerated the cultural transformation that Roy had begun, a transformation that pushed India into the modern world.
Before the new indigenous elite arose, however, at least one early-nineteenth-century British modernizing effort failed disastrously, proving that it is not enough to blow up existing social structures and assume that, when the dust settles, the fragments will re-form into something recognizably modern. Liberal British administrators wanted to shatter the power of traditional village landlord elites and give individual farmers control over their own land. Like famed Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto today, they believed that once the right property relations were in place, an explosion of free enterprise and productivity would follow. It didn�t happen. The British destroyed the traditional Indian system of village rule and created a market in land, but the Indians showed no signs of developing a liberal, capitalist ethos. Private ownership by itself was insufficient to bring deeper cultural change. So British administrators had to step in, at great and ultimately unsupportable expense to the British Treasury."
Of course, the last sentence is nonsense -- Indians paid for the administration of India, as Kurtz surely knows. He doesn't get into the details of exactly how the modernizing effort failed -- but it is the heart of our perhaps never to be completed essay on James Fitzjames Stephen that the 20th century conservative myth -- that central planning is confined to socialism -- ignores its roots, which are just here, in India. The Benthamite/Laissez faire idea was to "modernize" India along approved capitalist lines with centrally planned laws that would re-do the whole village economy, monetize the place, and bring about relationships of exchange among the happy farmers. Kurtz delicately skirts around the fact that this planning is directly implicated in the worst famines of the nineteenth century. But that he even ventures out far enough to cast doubt on the neo-colonialist projects a-bornin' in D.C. cocktail parties is pretty brave, as far as it goes.
So hallelujah, intelligent life on the right! But I'm not going to break my yoke quite yet.
Wednesday, February 26, 2003
Remora
Notwithstanding the difference of their characters, the two emperors maintained, on the throne, that friendship which they had contracted in a private station. The haughty, turbulent spirit of Maximian, so fatal afterwards to himself and to the public peace, was accustomed to respect the genius of Diocletian, and confessed the ascendant of reason over brutal violence. From a motive either of pride or superstition, the two emperors assumed the titles, the one of Jovius, the other of Herculius. Whilst the motion of the world (such was the language of their venal orators) was maintained by the all-seeing wisdom of Jupiter, the invincible arm of Hercules purged the earth from monsters and tyrants. - Edward Gibbon,
LI imagines that the War has been a godsend for the British papers -- right now, you have to go to the Guardian, the Independent, even the Telegraph to find out what is going on. Except for the LA Times, American papers seem to have aligned themselves unilaterally with the unipolar power in a uni-fiesta.
This, we think, is not really due to media enthusiasm for the war -- that does exist, but outside of the WashPost it doesn't govern the way the papers are working on this issue. It is due to the vacuum which goes by the name of the Democratic Party. One of the oddities of the two party system is that the papers, and the news, can't comprehend the world beyond it. And if they can't comprehend it, they can't report on it, they can't analyze it, they can't spoon feed it to their readers -- they can't do anything the Press is supposed to do.
This mutually corrupting interdependence is naturally effected by the decline of one of those parties. And if ever there were a party in decline, it is the Democratic Party. Bested by Bush in a coup, bested again in the elections last year, bested as a money machine, bribed in the nineties by the corporate interests to taking positions directly contrary to their grass-roots base, unable to represent that base or replace it, led by non-entities who range from the truly unctuous (Joseph Lieberman) to the truly obnoxious (John Kerry), it is hard to see how this party is going to survive as an opposition, or as a real pole of power.
As a sign of this, consider that in D.C., attention is riveted as much on the Oxley grift as on Iraq.
Apparently, Democratic relics are being denied the milk and honey that flows to the defeated and to the suckers-up in the form of lobbyist sinecures. The Republicans are pursuing unilateral power on all fronts, apparently, and at warp speed. Is this going to be good for democracy or what? It upsets Dems politicos. The consolation prizes in politics are sweet. No matter how repulsive your personality, no matter how badly you've been battered by the folks back home, or how you've spent your career shitting on them, you and your little court of aides can still lick up the gravy in D.C. by using your contacts for private good. The P.R. firms, the pseudo think tanks, the boards of directors, the lobbying groups! It's Pinocchio at the fair. Well, big bad wolf Tom DeLay wants there to be only Republicans at the fair, and not utterly corrupt Democratic marrionettes and he's doing his best to Republicanize the place. Its rather like Richard Nixon's Vietnamization -- there are a few collateral casualties along the way.
The Dems, of course, are up in arms. Not to have their fair share of treats at the fair is intolerable! They might roll over about Iraq. They might roll over about the nutty tax cuts. They might allow Ashcroft to burn the Bill of Rights in his office fireplace. They might act in utterly dishonorable ways that are leading the country to disaster. But not to have a position with decent pay (say, +200,000) when you've ended your brilliant career voting for the wealthy and venal, or working for one of those geezers who did same -- why, that's cause for a revolt!
The WashPost (which has a relationship to the business of politics much like the Variety's relationship to the entertainment industry) has been featuring the machinations of Representative Oxley, who is the Representative from Anderson Accounting -- a man honorably engaged in making peculation safe for the stock option set.
Oxley, genius that he is, strongarmed the Mutual Funds lobbying group to fire the Democrat they hired. Here are the grafs on the grift:
"The K Street Project, which involves top Republican lawmakers and party officials, was designed to track the party affiliation and political contribution of hundreds of lobbyists in Washington. The data are made available to lawmakers -- so they can deny access to Democrats if they so choose -- and to top party officials so they can lobby companies and trade associations to hire Republicans for top-paying jobs. The ethics committee in 1998 admonished then-Majority Whip DeLay for pressuring the Electronic Industry Association not to hire former Rep. David McCurdy (D-Okla.) to run the group.
Democrats said they would base their call for an investigation of Oxley on a Feb. 15 report in The Washington Post that detailed how Oxley and his staff have leaned on the Investment Company Institute -- the mutual fund industry's main lobbying arm -- to oust Democratic lobbyist Julie Domenick. Six sources, Republicans among them, told The Post that two of Oxley's top aides told industry officials that a House investigation of the industry was linked to ICI's strong ties to Democrats. Oxley spokeswoman Peggy Peterson said, "Rumors of some quid pro quo are exactly that: rumors."
We urge our readers to email their congressmen in support of Project K street. It is probably the best chance we have for reforming politics as it now stands.
Notwithstanding the difference of their characters, the two emperors maintained, on the throne, that friendship which they had contracted in a private station. The haughty, turbulent spirit of Maximian, so fatal afterwards to himself and to the public peace, was accustomed to respect the genius of Diocletian, and confessed the ascendant of reason over brutal violence. From a motive either of pride or superstition, the two emperors assumed the titles, the one of Jovius, the other of Herculius. Whilst the motion of the world (such was the language of their venal orators) was maintained by the all-seeing wisdom of Jupiter, the invincible arm of Hercules purged the earth from monsters and tyrants. - Edward Gibbon,
LI imagines that the War has been a godsend for the British papers -- right now, you have to go to the Guardian, the Independent, even the Telegraph to find out what is going on. Except for the LA Times, American papers seem to have aligned themselves unilaterally with the unipolar power in a uni-fiesta.
This, we think, is not really due to media enthusiasm for the war -- that does exist, but outside of the WashPost it doesn't govern the way the papers are working on this issue. It is due to the vacuum which goes by the name of the Democratic Party. One of the oddities of the two party system is that the papers, and the news, can't comprehend the world beyond it. And if they can't comprehend it, they can't report on it, they can't analyze it, they can't spoon feed it to their readers -- they can't do anything the Press is supposed to do.
This mutually corrupting interdependence is naturally effected by the decline of one of those parties. And if ever there were a party in decline, it is the Democratic Party. Bested by Bush in a coup, bested again in the elections last year, bested as a money machine, bribed in the nineties by the corporate interests to taking positions directly contrary to their grass-roots base, unable to represent that base or replace it, led by non-entities who range from the truly unctuous (Joseph Lieberman) to the truly obnoxious (John Kerry), it is hard to see how this party is going to survive as an opposition, or as a real pole of power.
As a sign of this, consider that in D.C., attention is riveted as much on the Oxley grift as on Iraq.
Apparently, Democratic relics are being denied the milk and honey that flows to the defeated and to the suckers-up in the form of lobbyist sinecures. The Republicans are pursuing unilateral power on all fronts, apparently, and at warp speed. Is this going to be good for democracy or what? It upsets Dems politicos. The consolation prizes in politics are sweet. No matter how repulsive your personality, no matter how badly you've been battered by the folks back home, or how you've spent your career shitting on them, you and your little court of aides can still lick up the gravy in D.C. by using your contacts for private good. The P.R. firms, the pseudo think tanks, the boards of directors, the lobbying groups! It's Pinocchio at the fair. Well, big bad wolf Tom DeLay wants there to be only Republicans at the fair, and not utterly corrupt Democratic marrionettes and he's doing his best to Republicanize the place. Its rather like Richard Nixon's Vietnamization -- there are a few collateral casualties along the way.
The Dems, of course, are up in arms. Not to have their fair share of treats at the fair is intolerable! They might roll over about Iraq. They might roll over about the nutty tax cuts. They might allow Ashcroft to burn the Bill of Rights in his office fireplace. They might act in utterly dishonorable ways that are leading the country to disaster. But not to have a position with decent pay (say, +200,000) when you've ended your brilliant career voting for the wealthy and venal, or working for one of those geezers who did same -- why, that's cause for a revolt!
The WashPost (which has a relationship to the business of politics much like the Variety's relationship to the entertainment industry) has been featuring the machinations of Representative Oxley, who is the Representative from Anderson Accounting -- a man honorably engaged in making peculation safe for the stock option set.
Oxley, genius that he is, strongarmed the Mutual Funds lobbying group to fire the Democrat they hired. Here are the grafs on the grift:
"The K Street Project, which involves top Republican lawmakers and party officials, was designed to track the party affiliation and political contribution of hundreds of lobbyists in Washington. The data are made available to lawmakers -- so they can deny access to Democrats if they so choose -- and to top party officials so they can lobby companies and trade associations to hire Republicans for top-paying jobs. The ethics committee in 1998 admonished then-Majority Whip DeLay for pressuring the Electronic Industry Association not to hire former Rep. David McCurdy (D-Okla.) to run the group.
Democrats said they would base their call for an investigation of Oxley on a Feb. 15 report in The Washington Post that detailed how Oxley and his staff have leaned on the Investment Company Institute -- the mutual fund industry's main lobbying arm -- to oust Democratic lobbyist Julie Domenick. Six sources, Republicans among them, told The Post that two of Oxley's top aides told industry officials that a House investigation of the industry was linked to ICI's strong ties to Democrats. Oxley spokeswoman Peggy Peterson said, "Rumors of some quid pro quo are exactly that: rumors."
We urge our readers to email their congressmen in support of Project K street. It is probably the best chance we have for reforming politics as it now stands.
Tuesday, February 25, 2003
Remora
One of the oddities of the upcoming war (may Popeye avert it!) is that those opposing it are accused of having no "solution" to the situation in Iraq. Usually this accusation is made by supporters of the war, like Salman Rushdie , who support an entirely different war than the one justified by Bush and Blair. LI thinks it is fair to assume that Bush and Blair will not invite Rushdie, or Hitchens, or any of the rest of them, into their counsels of war when the invasion begins. So arguing about the Rushdie/Hitchens war is a pointless exercise: that war is neither contemplated nor likely to be fought.
However, the idea that we, who speak no Arabic, or Kurnamji, who have no stake in Iraq, and who have no sense of the fabric of the culture, come up with "solutions" to how Iraq should be governed is... curious. It is one of those problems that remind me of why, in spite of my overall disagreement with Hayek, I am sympathetic to some of his grander themes. Hayek's objection to centrally planned economies was that planning diverges from reality at just that key point where reality is lived -- because that is the point of accident, of emergence, of unexpected outcomes, of intangible knowledge, of everything that falls in the domain of acquaintance, as William James puts it, rather than propositional knowledge. The history of the No Fly Zone in Northern Iraq is a case in point. It is also a case that should receive more attention. If we want a picture of the forces with which the American occupiers of Iraq would be contending, it is a good idea to look at a genuine slice of the post-Saddam countryside.
Susan Graham-Brown gives us a nice potted history of the decisions that led to the No Fly Zone on the globalpolicy site There was no consideration of the the need for democracy in Bush the first's order that American aircraft purge Northern Iraq of Saddam Hussein's military. It was, rather, a response to the refugee problem:
"
The original northern no-fly zone was first declared by President George Bush in early April 1991 to protect coalition aircraft during the airdrops of aid to Kurdish refugees on the Turkish border and then to protect coalition ground troops advancing into northern Iraq as part of Operation Provide Comfort. This action, Britain, France and the US asserted, was taken under the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 688, which called on Iraq to cease repression of its civilian population. However no explicit endorsement in the form of a Security Council resolution was obtained for either Operation Provide Comfort, or the no-fly zone.
"When coalition ground troops were withdrawn, the no-fly zone was left in place, ostensibly to "protect"
the Kurds and the international humanitarian workers based in the north. After the Iraqi government decided, in October 1991, to withdraw its ground troops -- and all funding -- from the three northern governorates, the region came under Kurdish control but had no formalized status. It was part of Iraq but not under government control. The no-fly zone and the presence of international humanitarian staff may have deterred the Iraqi regime from trying to retake the northern region, but as a protection mechanism it has had considerable limitations."
So, a decision in one context, of military and political action, leads to a situation that was not planned -- the withdrawal of Saddam Hussein's power from the three northern governorates. For the first time since the end of World War I, the inhabitants of Northern Iraq are liberated from the governance of the Arabic south. What happened?
There's a nice story of democracy, free markets, and prosperity that is commonly retailed in the media. However, the real story is more complicated, and involves armed factions, smuggling, and unsavory alliances. In 1996, when the Free Fly Zone suddenly hit the news again, this is how David Plotz summarized the recent history of Northern Iraq:
"The United States, France, Britain, and Turkey delivered humanitarian aid, established a no-fly zone, and pressured Hussein to withdraw from Kurdish territory. With Western help, the Kurds elected a Parliament in 1992. Based in Irbil, the Parliament split evenly between the KDP and the PUK.
Democracy didn't last. With no Iraqis to fight, the Kurds turned on each other. Civil war broke out in 1994, and more than 2,000 Kurds were killed before the United States brokered a peace in 1995. That peace collapsed this summer. The PUK helped Iran conduct an incursion into northern Iraq. Barzani's KDP, in turn, asked for Hussein's help (even though Hussein had slaughtered thousands of Barzani's supporters during the 1980s). Hussein accepted the invitation. On Aug. 31, 30,000 Iraqi troops and thousands of KDP fighters drove the PUK from Irbil. This raid inspired United States cruise-missile strikes on southern Iraq. After securing Irbil, Barzani's men quickly routed the PUK from its other strongholds. Talabani fled to the Iran border, and the PUK is all but defunct. Barzani insists that he's not Hussein's puppet, and that Iraqi troops have withdrawn to the south. But Hussein's secret police have settled in; the Kurdish Parliament has collapsed; and experts doubt that the KDP can resist Iraqi bullying."
Well, experts were wrong. Not only did the KDP and the PUK resist Hussein's bullying -- with a little help from their friends in the sky, raining down bombs -- but the fighting between them trickled off. Which isn't to say that there isn't still a great deal of factional struggle. For the latest news on Kurdistan, in fact, there's no better place to go than to Kurdistan Observer, and even a glance at its contents tells you that fraternity has made considerable inroads on hostility since 1996. But our point is that the supposed moral front, which is aglow with the idea of a democratic Iraq growing under the benign eye of an American governor, is fantastically different from the patchwork of conflict and compromise that appears in the only post-Saddam Iraq we know. And that is going to only increase when the Ba'athist structure collapses. The best "solution" is for the Iraqi peoples to have control over that collapse, rather than have it micro or macromanaged by Americans. This will turn out not to be a solution at all -- it is LI's idea that all solutions are Final Solutions. Solutions are about death -- in living societies, they just don't happen.
One of the oddities of the upcoming war (may Popeye avert it!) is that those opposing it are accused of having no "solution" to the situation in Iraq. Usually this accusation is made by supporters of the war, like Salman Rushdie , who support an entirely different war than the one justified by Bush and Blair. LI thinks it is fair to assume that Bush and Blair will not invite Rushdie, or Hitchens, or any of the rest of them, into their counsels of war when the invasion begins. So arguing about the Rushdie/Hitchens war is a pointless exercise: that war is neither contemplated nor likely to be fought.
However, the idea that we, who speak no Arabic, or Kurnamji, who have no stake in Iraq, and who have no sense of the fabric of the culture, come up with "solutions" to how Iraq should be governed is... curious. It is one of those problems that remind me of why, in spite of my overall disagreement with Hayek, I am sympathetic to some of his grander themes. Hayek's objection to centrally planned economies was that planning diverges from reality at just that key point where reality is lived -- because that is the point of accident, of emergence, of unexpected outcomes, of intangible knowledge, of everything that falls in the domain of acquaintance, as William James puts it, rather than propositional knowledge. The history of the No Fly Zone in Northern Iraq is a case in point. It is also a case that should receive more attention. If we want a picture of the forces with which the American occupiers of Iraq would be contending, it is a good idea to look at a genuine slice of the post-Saddam countryside.
Susan Graham-Brown gives us a nice potted history of the decisions that led to the No Fly Zone on the globalpolicy site There was no consideration of the the need for democracy in Bush the first's order that American aircraft purge Northern Iraq of Saddam Hussein's military. It was, rather, a response to the refugee problem:
"
The original northern no-fly zone was first declared by President George Bush in early April 1991 to protect coalition aircraft during the airdrops of aid to Kurdish refugees on the Turkish border and then to protect coalition ground troops advancing into northern Iraq as part of Operation Provide Comfort. This action, Britain, France and the US asserted, was taken under the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 688, which called on Iraq to cease repression of its civilian population. However no explicit endorsement in the form of a Security Council resolution was obtained for either Operation Provide Comfort, or the no-fly zone.
"When coalition ground troops were withdrawn, the no-fly zone was left in place, ostensibly to "protect"
the Kurds and the international humanitarian workers based in the north. After the Iraqi government decided, in October 1991, to withdraw its ground troops -- and all funding -- from the three northern governorates, the region came under Kurdish control but had no formalized status. It was part of Iraq but not under government control. The no-fly zone and the presence of international humanitarian staff may have deterred the Iraqi regime from trying to retake the northern region, but as a protection mechanism it has had considerable limitations."
So, a decision in one context, of military and political action, leads to a situation that was not planned -- the withdrawal of Saddam Hussein's power from the three northern governorates. For the first time since the end of World War I, the inhabitants of Northern Iraq are liberated from the governance of the Arabic south. What happened?
There's a nice story of democracy, free markets, and prosperity that is commonly retailed in the media. However, the real story is more complicated, and involves armed factions, smuggling, and unsavory alliances. In 1996, when the Free Fly Zone suddenly hit the news again, this is how David Plotz summarized the recent history of Northern Iraq:
"The United States, France, Britain, and Turkey delivered humanitarian aid, established a no-fly zone, and pressured Hussein to withdraw from Kurdish territory. With Western help, the Kurds elected a Parliament in 1992. Based in Irbil, the Parliament split evenly between the KDP and the PUK.
Democracy didn't last. With no Iraqis to fight, the Kurds turned on each other. Civil war broke out in 1994, and more than 2,000 Kurds were killed before the United States brokered a peace in 1995. That peace collapsed this summer. The PUK helped Iran conduct an incursion into northern Iraq. Barzani's KDP, in turn, asked for Hussein's help (even though Hussein had slaughtered thousands of Barzani's supporters during the 1980s). Hussein accepted the invitation. On Aug. 31, 30,000 Iraqi troops and thousands of KDP fighters drove the PUK from Irbil. This raid inspired United States cruise-missile strikes on southern Iraq. After securing Irbil, Barzani's men quickly routed the PUK from its other strongholds. Talabani fled to the Iran border, and the PUK is all but defunct. Barzani insists that he's not Hussein's puppet, and that Iraqi troops have withdrawn to the south. But Hussein's secret police have settled in; the Kurdish Parliament has collapsed; and experts doubt that the KDP can resist Iraqi bullying."
Well, experts were wrong. Not only did the KDP and the PUK resist Hussein's bullying -- with a little help from their friends in the sky, raining down bombs -- but the fighting between them trickled off. Which isn't to say that there isn't still a great deal of factional struggle. For the latest news on Kurdistan, in fact, there's no better place to go than to Kurdistan Observer, and even a glance at its contents tells you that fraternity has made considerable inroads on hostility since 1996. But our point is that the supposed moral front, which is aglow with the idea of a democratic Iraq growing under the benign eye of an American governor, is fantastically different from the patchwork of conflict and compromise that appears in the only post-Saddam Iraq we know. And that is going to only increase when the Ba'athist structure collapses. The best "solution" is for the Iraqi peoples to have control over that collapse, rather than have it micro or macromanaged by Americans. This will turn out not to be a solution at all -- it is LI's idea that all solutions are Final Solutions. Solutions are about death -- in living societies, they just don't happen.
Monday, February 24, 2003
Dope
An assembly, an association, a crowd or a sect has no idea other than that which is whispered to it by someone; and that idea, that indication more or less intelligent of a purpose to pursue, or a means to employ, however much it propagates itself in the brain of an individual or the brains of a group, it remains the same. The whisperer is thus responsible for its direct effects. But the emotion joined to that idea which propagates with it does not remain the same in growing, it intensifies by a sort of mathematical progression... The heads of a gang or of a riot can reasonably be called to account for the shrewdness and the craft by which they have executed massacres, pillages, arsons, etc., but not always for the violence and extensiveness of injuries caused by criminal contagions. � Gabriel Tarde, L�opinion et la foule
In our last post, we made reference to reputation � a seemingly forgotten element in the cool analysis of social action. The defenders of the Iraq war, having failed to find any reason for the war in matters of state, or any reason that would convince civilized people, have recently fallen back on moral reasons for the war. Indeed, who could argue that Saddam Hussein is a moral ruler? He�s a tyrant who employs torture and imposes mortal hardships on his people while wasting their wealth on himself, his army, and his family.
But what of his accusers? What of the cabal of the eager, the Rumsfelds, Wolfowitzes and Bushes? And what of the Blairs?
Before we accept what they whisper to us like their syncophants and servants � like, that is, America�s corporate media � we might want to inquire into whether, in the very country, Iraq, which has provoked such moral dudgeon, the United States and Britain haven�t encouraged tyranny � haven�t, in fact, aided in the mass murder of dissidents and the setting up of the structure that Saddam Hussein has utilized to his own purpose.
Today�s sermon, kids, will come from Said Aburish, the journalist I mentioned yesterday. It concerns a very convoluted coup. The coup occurred in February, 1963. Its object was an Iraqi strongman, General Abdel Karim Kassem, or Qasim. Kassem had staged a coup himself, overthrowing Iraq�s king. Kassem proved to be that Western nightmare, a populist with a leaning to communism. Or at least so he was interpreted both by the CIA and by Nasser. Nasser was anti-Western, in his way, too, but he was definitely hostile to Communism. So as Kassem started redistributing land, got the British controlled Iraqi Petroleum Company to hand over a bigger share of the wealth to the state, and he stood, for a while, in the way of Arab nationalism. For the latter virtue, he was initially supported by the Brits. But by 1963, he had made it clear that he was getting cozier with Iraqi commies, and he was also not so necessary to stopping Nasser.
What ensued was a plot with multiple aspects. Nasser agreed to let the CIA train some military men in Cairo for the eventual overthrow of Kassem. Bagman for the CIA was none other than a young officer, Saddam Hussein. A CIA man named Critchfield oversaw the operation, supported by a military attach� in Baghdad, William Lakeland. The coup successfully implemented Ba�athist military power in the state. After it was over, it was purge time. A mini Phoenix program ensued, avant la lettre. Lists of leftist were compiled, with the CIA�s help, and maybe five thousand people were variously tortured and murdered. Among the makers of the lists, Aburish claims, was the friendly Time Magazine reporter on the spot, William McHale. Not himself a CIA officer, he did have friends in the agency, including his brother, Donald. Now, we have some doubts about this point, since according to the NewsMuseum, William McHale died in a plane wreck in 1962. In fact, due to the wondrous internet, we even have an account of how McHale died. The plane was sabotaged. The sabateur's name was Laurent, the target was an Italian petro-official named Mattei, and McHale was definitely not around to compile lists. That account is here, in French. Given this discrepancy of fact, I am a little wary of Aburish's account. Other accounts have been collected on the Center for Research on Globalization site. Whether Aburish is over-reaching with his McHale story or not, the upshot is, Americans contrived the very structure of tyranny they now seek, with freshfaced virtue, to overthrow.
The idea of an American occupation of Iraq has to evoke some horror in those who are familiar with this history. There�s a wonderful phrase of Rebecca West�s. She is reading the papers in the hospital, and she reads that the King of Yugoslavia has been assassinated, and she thinks of the assassination that started World War I, and other assassinations. And she writes: �I was really frightened, for all these earlier killings had either hastened doom towards me or prefigured it.�
Speaking of hastening doom, here's a story from the Guardian:
�In a meeting with American congressmen last week, the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, nominated three countries to be tackled after Iraq: Iran, Libya and Syria.
Mr Sharon also met John Bolton, the US under secretary of state, who reportedly told him that it will be "necessary" to deal with Syria, Iran and North Korea after an attack on Iraq. That puts Syria and Iran into the lead with two votes each, followed by Libya and North Korea, with only one.
The attraction of this approach is easy to see. After Afghanistan and Iraq, conquering Syria and Iran would create an unbroken chain of puppet regimes stretching from the Mediterranean to China.�
An assembly, an association, a crowd or a sect has no idea other than that which is whispered to it by someone; and that idea, that indication more or less intelligent of a purpose to pursue, or a means to employ, however much it propagates itself in the brain of an individual or the brains of a group, it remains the same. The whisperer is thus responsible for its direct effects. But the emotion joined to that idea which propagates with it does not remain the same in growing, it intensifies by a sort of mathematical progression... The heads of a gang or of a riot can reasonably be called to account for the shrewdness and the craft by which they have executed massacres, pillages, arsons, etc., but not always for the violence and extensiveness of injuries caused by criminal contagions. � Gabriel Tarde, L�opinion et la foule
In our last post, we made reference to reputation � a seemingly forgotten element in the cool analysis of social action. The defenders of the Iraq war, having failed to find any reason for the war in matters of state, or any reason that would convince civilized people, have recently fallen back on moral reasons for the war. Indeed, who could argue that Saddam Hussein is a moral ruler? He�s a tyrant who employs torture and imposes mortal hardships on his people while wasting their wealth on himself, his army, and his family.
But what of his accusers? What of the cabal of the eager, the Rumsfelds, Wolfowitzes and Bushes? And what of the Blairs?
Before we accept what they whisper to us like their syncophants and servants � like, that is, America�s corporate media � we might want to inquire into whether, in the very country, Iraq, which has provoked such moral dudgeon, the United States and Britain haven�t encouraged tyranny � haven�t, in fact, aided in the mass murder of dissidents and the setting up of the structure that Saddam Hussein has utilized to his own purpose.
Today�s sermon, kids, will come from Said Aburish, the journalist I mentioned yesterday. It concerns a very convoluted coup. The coup occurred in February, 1963. Its object was an Iraqi strongman, General Abdel Karim Kassem, or Qasim. Kassem had staged a coup himself, overthrowing Iraq�s king. Kassem proved to be that Western nightmare, a populist with a leaning to communism. Or at least so he was interpreted both by the CIA and by Nasser. Nasser was anti-Western, in his way, too, but he was definitely hostile to Communism. So as Kassem started redistributing land, got the British controlled Iraqi Petroleum Company to hand over a bigger share of the wealth to the state, and he stood, for a while, in the way of Arab nationalism. For the latter virtue, he was initially supported by the Brits. But by 1963, he had made it clear that he was getting cozier with Iraqi commies, and he was also not so necessary to stopping Nasser.
What ensued was a plot with multiple aspects. Nasser agreed to let the CIA train some military men in Cairo for the eventual overthrow of Kassem. Bagman for the CIA was none other than a young officer, Saddam Hussein. A CIA man named Critchfield oversaw the operation, supported by a military attach� in Baghdad, William Lakeland. The coup successfully implemented Ba�athist military power in the state. After it was over, it was purge time. A mini Phoenix program ensued, avant la lettre. Lists of leftist were compiled, with the CIA�s help, and maybe five thousand people were variously tortured and murdered. Among the makers of the lists, Aburish claims, was the friendly Time Magazine reporter on the spot, William McHale. Not himself a CIA officer, he did have friends in the agency, including his brother, Donald. Now, we have some doubts about this point, since according to the NewsMuseum, William McHale died in a plane wreck in 1962. In fact, due to the wondrous internet, we even have an account of how McHale died. The plane was sabotaged. The sabateur's name was Laurent, the target was an Italian petro-official named Mattei, and McHale was definitely not around to compile lists. That account is here, in French. Given this discrepancy of fact, I am a little wary of Aburish's account. Other accounts have been collected on the Center for Research on Globalization site. Whether Aburish is over-reaching with his McHale story or not, the upshot is, Americans contrived the very structure of tyranny they now seek, with freshfaced virtue, to overthrow.
The idea of an American occupation of Iraq has to evoke some horror in those who are familiar with this history. There�s a wonderful phrase of Rebecca West�s. She is reading the papers in the hospital, and she reads that the King of Yugoslavia has been assassinated, and she thinks of the assassination that started World War I, and other assassinations. And she writes: �I was really frightened, for all these earlier killings had either hastened doom towards me or prefigured it.�
Speaking of hastening doom, here's a story from the Guardian:
�In a meeting with American congressmen last week, the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, nominated three countries to be tackled after Iraq: Iran, Libya and Syria.
Mr Sharon also met John Bolton, the US under secretary of state, who reportedly told him that it will be "necessary" to deal with Syria, Iran and North Korea after an attack on Iraq. That puts Syria and Iran into the lead with two votes each, followed by Libya and North Korea, with only one.
The attraction of this approach is easy to see. After Afghanistan and Iraq, conquering Syria and Iran would create an unbroken chain of puppet regimes stretching from the Mediterranean to China.�
Sunday, February 23, 2003
Remora
Hawks have my head, Doves have my heart, reads the headline of Ian McEwan's essay about the Iraq war. On the evidence of the article, the hawks are getting screwed.
Of course, McEwan's heart seems to be standard issue fare. While his Id no doubt bubbles away, consciously he does not want men, women and children to be eviscerated by bombs, or perforated by bullets, or just plain fragmented by the soldiery's everyday explosives, or so he presents himself. Isn't that nice?
But his head makes your standard belligerent knock down arguments - which are more knock em down than reason. He tells us that Saddam Hussein is evil. Thus, eliminating that evil is good. Q.E.D., here's your red hot reason for a war.
McEwan, like so many belligerents, suffers from the delusion that he gets to make up the reasons for fighting the war. This is very convenient: it allows him never to confront the official reasons for fighting the war. That's because the official reasons are so weak that they wouldn't convince a child. Although McEwan writes that Hussein "has obsessively produced chemical and biological weapons on an industrial scale, and has a history of bloody territorial ambition," this is a partial truth at best. Hussein's history of chemical and biological weapons is not one of him "producing them" by himself - no, he was given vast and crucial help by Western governments, corporations, and scientists. Since the end of the Gulf War, in fact, the threat from Hussein, which we are supposed to think reaches to London and New York City, hasn't even reached to Erbil, the headquarters of the Kurdish government that, in effect, runs most of Northern Iraq. Bloody territorial ambition has been, effectively, crushed for ten years. In the last war, the American military faked reports of a vast assembling of Iraqi troops on the border between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia; in this one, they don't even bother with evidence that Saddam Hussein is planning an incursion, well, anywhere.
However, it is part of the fraudulent logic of bellicosity to evoke principles in order to attack Saddam Hussein and then, quietly, dismiss those same principles when it comes to judging the U.S. and Britain. McEwan is quick to dismiss the idea that the Anglo allies previous history in the area has anything to do with what is happening now:
"To the waverer, some of the reasoning from the doves seems to emerge from a warm fug of illogic. That the U.S. has been friendly to dictators before, that it cynically supported Saddam in his war against Iran, that there are vast oil reserves in the region-none of this helps us decide what specifically we are to do about Saddam now.'
Really? The only past that counts, apparently, is Hussein's past. The warm fug of illogic is the manufacture of McEwan's self-vaunted brain. If McEwan hired a lawyer who defrauded him, or a plumber who flooded his house, would he go to that same lawyer when he needed to defend himself in court, or that same plumber when his drains clogged? Of course not. Reputation isn't a phantom. One of the oddest aspects of the colonial mentality is the expectation that sub-altern people have no memory. They can't remember that the CIA sold them out to be slaughtered. They can't remember that the Western oil companies did their best to monopolize the one natural resource they possess that is of value. They blink, and they forget. So when the master comes around again and finds, among his native bearers, a certain resistance �. It must be on account of some immoral passage in the Koran, or in Lenin. Or something.
LI's been reading two books this week: Jonathan Kwitny's Endless Enemies, a page turner when it came out in 84, and A Brutal Friendship by Said Aburish , a Palestinian journalist. Both have their problems. Aburish is anti-Israeli in that way that makes me a little suspicious. Kwitny is vain, and, as fits a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, a little too confident of the absolute rightness of capitalism. However, they make very seasonable reading.
Kwitny devotes a nice chapter or two to the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. This is an often told story. Kermit Roosevelt, a CIA man, and various military and political advisors (among whom there was one H. Norman Schwarzkopf, military advisor at that time to the Iranian gendarmerie) managed the overthrow of Mossadegh, an Iranian nationalist who inconvenienced the West by being the Shah's prime minister. Mossadegh was determined to make the monarchy constitutional, and had wrested executive power from the Shah. The CIA paid for thugs to riot in Teheran for the Royalist side, and resurrected one Fazlollah Zahedi to be the new prime minister. The recent talk about how the left is allying itself with Islamofascists, popular with the Hitchens set, is rather inflected here, since Zahedi, who was imprisoned for pro-Nazi activities in the war, was propped up by Americans who were quite forgiving - being masters of dispersing mental fugs, apparently - of that faux pas.
As Kwitny writes, this story has been told before, notably by Barry Rubin's Paved with Good Intentions. However, as Kwitny is quick to point out, Rubin's book didn't even have an index entry for Standard Oil. The oil companies were completely left out of a story that begins when a nationalist nationalizes oil fields claimed by the Anglo-Iran Oil Company (aka B.P.) As Kwitny says, Rubin, like most foreign policy analysts, shows a world in which ideology, embodied by diplomats, military men, spies, and politicians is the sole motivation for political action. No lucre here. But in fact the men who overthrew Mossadegh benefited enormously, starting with Kermit Roosevelt himself, who went on to sell the Shah arms on behalf of Northrup, a weapons manufacturer, and who claimed, in the first version of his autobiography, that the coup was suggested by B.P. Kwitny also got hold of a report written by the New York Times reporter on the scene, Kennet Love. The report didn't go into the paper, though - it went to Alan Dulles, head of the CIA. It recounted Love's patriotic cooperation with the CIA operatives, including his humorous recount of how Love "accidentally" precipitated the final assault on Mossadegh's compound. For the McEwan's of the world, this is so much old, old news. However, for those of us whose heads aren't stuck up some hawk's unmentionable orifice, this bears a deadly relevance to the machinations of the belligerent cabal. We want to talk about the CIA's role in a lesser known coup, staged in Iraq, that is detailed by Aburish - we will get to this in the next post. However, given the background of the Iran coup story, one can't read the Washington Post's report of the Bush "plan" for a post Saddam Hussein Iraq without dread. Here's a few grafs:
"Officials said other governments are being recruited to participate in relief and reconstruction tasks under U.S. supervision at a time to be decided by Franks and officials in Washington. Although initial food supplies are to be provided by the United States, negotiations are underway with the U.N. World Food Program to administer a nationwide distribution network Opposition leaders were informed this week that the United States will not recognize an Iraqi provisional government being discussed by some expatriate groups. Some 20 to 25 Iraqis would assist U.S. authorities in a U.S.-appointed "consultative council," with no governing responsibility. Under a decision finalized last week, Iraqi government officials would be subjected to "de-Baathification," a reference to Hussein's ruling Baath Party, under a program that borrows from the "de-Nazification" program established in Germany after World War II.
Criteria by which officials would be designated as too tainted to keep their jobs are still being worked on, although they would likely be based more on complicity with the human rights and weapons abuses of the Hussein government than corruption, officials said. A large number of current officials would be retained."
And this, we are told, is the way Bush people think Iraq is going to be ruled for an indefinite period. Vietnam be damned; this is imperialism raw. The no blood for oil slogan, we are told repeatedly told, makes no sense - because American taxpayers will be forking over hundreds of billions of dollars for oil that will bring in maybe half that amount. That's an argument for those who are either terminally na�ve or have the brains of McEwan. The coincidence of interest between the taxpayer and the D.C. poobahs is limited to what the poobahs can abstract from the taxpayers pocket - but the friends of those poobahs have every interest in the fifty billion or so bucks, diverted, no doubt in the interest of democracy, towards their own patriotic bank accounts.
Hawks have my head, Doves have my heart, reads the headline of Ian McEwan's essay about the Iraq war. On the evidence of the article, the hawks are getting screwed.
Of course, McEwan's heart seems to be standard issue fare. While his Id no doubt bubbles away, consciously he does not want men, women and children to be eviscerated by bombs, or perforated by bullets, or just plain fragmented by the soldiery's everyday explosives, or so he presents himself. Isn't that nice?
But his head makes your standard belligerent knock down arguments - which are more knock em down than reason. He tells us that Saddam Hussein is evil. Thus, eliminating that evil is good. Q.E.D., here's your red hot reason for a war.
McEwan, like so many belligerents, suffers from the delusion that he gets to make up the reasons for fighting the war. This is very convenient: it allows him never to confront the official reasons for fighting the war. That's because the official reasons are so weak that they wouldn't convince a child. Although McEwan writes that Hussein "has obsessively produced chemical and biological weapons on an industrial scale, and has a history of bloody territorial ambition," this is a partial truth at best. Hussein's history of chemical and biological weapons is not one of him "producing them" by himself - no, he was given vast and crucial help by Western governments, corporations, and scientists. Since the end of the Gulf War, in fact, the threat from Hussein, which we are supposed to think reaches to London and New York City, hasn't even reached to Erbil, the headquarters of the Kurdish government that, in effect, runs most of Northern Iraq. Bloody territorial ambition has been, effectively, crushed for ten years. In the last war, the American military faked reports of a vast assembling of Iraqi troops on the border between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia; in this one, they don't even bother with evidence that Saddam Hussein is planning an incursion, well, anywhere.
However, it is part of the fraudulent logic of bellicosity to evoke principles in order to attack Saddam Hussein and then, quietly, dismiss those same principles when it comes to judging the U.S. and Britain. McEwan is quick to dismiss the idea that the Anglo allies previous history in the area has anything to do with what is happening now:
"To the waverer, some of the reasoning from the doves seems to emerge from a warm fug of illogic. That the U.S. has been friendly to dictators before, that it cynically supported Saddam in his war against Iran, that there are vast oil reserves in the region-none of this helps us decide what specifically we are to do about Saddam now.'
Really? The only past that counts, apparently, is Hussein's past. The warm fug of illogic is the manufacture of McEwan's self-vaunted brain. If McEwan hired a lawyer who defrauded him, or a plumber who flooded his house, would he go to that same lawyer when he needed to defend himself in court, or that same plumber when his drains clogged? Of course not. Reputation isn't a phantom. One of the oddest aspects of the colonial mentality is the expectation that sub-altern people have no memory. They can't remember that the CIA sold them out to be slaughtered. They can't remember that the Western oil companies did their best to monopolize the one natural resource they possess that is of value. They blink, and they forget. So when the master comes around again and finds, among his native bearers, a certain resistance �. It must be on account of some immoral passage in the Koran, or in Lenin. Or something.
LI's been reading two books this week: Jonathan Kwitny's Endless Enemies, a page turner when it came out in 84, and A Brutal Friendship by Said Aburish , a Palestinian journalist. Both have their problems. Aburish is anti-Israeli in that way that makes me a little suspicious. Kwitny is vain, and, as fits a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, a little too confident of the absolute rightness of capitalism. However, they make very seasonable reading.
Kwitny devotes a nice chapter or two to the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. This is an often told story. Kermit Roosevelt, a CIA man, and various military and political advisors (among whom there was one H. Norman Schwarzkopf, military advisor at that time to the Iranian gendarmerie) managed the overthrow of Mossadegh, an Iranian nationalist who inconvenienced the West by being the Shah's prime minister. Mossadegh was determined to make the monarchy constitutional, and had wrested executive power from the Shah. The CIA paid for thugs to riot in Teheran for the Royalist side, and resurrected one Fazlollah Zahedi to be the new prime minister. The recent talk about how the left is allying itself with Islamofascists, popular with the Hitchens set, is rather inflected here, since Zahedi, who was imprisoned for pro-Nazi activities in the war, was propped up by Americans who were quite forgiving - being masters of dispersing mental fugs, apparently - of that faux pas.
As Kwitny writes, this story has been told before, notably by Barry Rubin's Paved with Good Intentions. However, as Kwitny is quick to point out, Rubin's book didn't even have an index entry for Standard Oil. The oil companies were completely left out of a story that begins when a nationalist nationalizes oil fields claimed by the Anglo-Iran Oil Company (aka B.P.) As Kwitny says, Rubin, like most foreign policy analysts, shows a world in which ideology, embodied by diplomats, military men, spies, and politicians is the sole motivation for political action. No lucre here. But in fact the men who overthrew Mossadegh benefited enormously, starting with Kermit Roosevelt himself, who went on to sell the Shah arms on behalf of Northrup, a weapons manufacturer, and who claimed, in the first version of his autobiography, that the coup was suggested by B.P. Kwitny also got hold of a report written by the New York Times reporter on the scene, Kennet Love. The report didn't go into the paper, though - it went to Alan Dulles, head of the CIA. It recounted Love's patriotic cooperation with the CIA operatives, including his humorous recount of how Love "accidentally" precipitated the final assault on Mossadegh's compound. For the McEwan's of the world, this is so much old, old news. However, for those of us whose heads aren't stuck up some hawk's unmentionable orifice, this bears a deadly relevance to the machinations of the belligerent cabal. We want to talk about the CIA's role in a lesser known coup, staged in Iraq, that is detailed by Aburish - we will get to this in the next post. However, given the background of the Iran coup story, one can't read the Washington Post's report of the Bush "plan" for a post Saddam Hussein Iraq without dread. Here's a few grafs:
"Officials said other governments are being recruited to participate in relief and reconstruction tasks under U.S. supervision at a time to be decided by Franks and officials in Washington. Although initial food supplies are to be provided by the United States, negotiations are underway with the U.N. World Food Program to administer a nationwide distribution network Opposition leaders were informed this week that the United States will not recognize an Iraqi provisional government being discussed by some expatriate groups. Some 20 to 25 Iraqis would assist U.S. authorities in a U.S.-appointed "consultative council," with no governing responsibility. Under a decision finalized last week, Iraqi government officials would be subjected to "de-Baathification," a reference to Hussein's ruling Baath Party, under a program that borrows from the "de-Nazification" program established in Germany after World War II.
Criteria by which officials would be designated as too tainted to keep their jobs are still being worked on, although they would likely be based more on complicity with the human rights and weapons abuses of the Hussein government than corruption, officials said. A large number of current officials would be retained."
And this, we are told, is the way Bush people think Iraq is going to be ruled for an indefinite period. Vietnam be damned; this is imperialism raw. The no blood for oil slogan, we are told repeatedly told, makes no sense - because American taxpayers will be forking over hundreds of billions of dollars for oil that will bring in maybe half that amount. That's an argument for those who are either terminally na�ve or have the brains of McEwan. The coincidence of interest between the taxpayer and the D.C. poobahs is limited to what the poobahs can abstract from the taxpayers pocket - but the friends of those poobahs have every interest in the fifty billion or so bucks, diverted, no doubt in the interest of democracy, towards their own patriotic bank accounts.
Thursday, February 20, 2003
Dope
I had a large post today. Alas, the system froze for some reason, the blogger didn't post, and it is gone. Hmm, I don't feel like reconstructing it at the moment. Here, at least, is how it started out.
Remora
The crocodile tears of Rambo
Years and years ago, LI was a graduate student. I lived in a house with a flying circus of roommates, one of whom was a Mexican Marxist on a downer. The low was due to a deadly combo of misplaced affection, excess alcohol and Ronald Reagan. To cheer himself up, H. would rent films and watch them while drinking Papst Blue ribbon and eating little pieces of cheese and sausages. To liven the meal up, sometimes he would stick little toothpicks in the sausages. His favorite film, the one that he considered one of the great comedy classics of all time, was Rambo. Sometimes I would join him. I didn't find Rambo as worthy of repeated viewing as he did, but it was funny.Our favorite part was the final scene. After Rambo had personally kicked North Vietnam into the sea and freed a whole campful of MIA/POWs that were getting the guinea pig treatment from the sadistic Orientals, Rambo confronts some conventional military type who asks the sweat drenched superhero (the sweat oozed out of him by the bucketloads in the film, as I remember) what he wanted. In a strangled voice that was apparently some hommage to Clint Eastwood's on screen laconicism, Rambo said:
"I just want... my country... to love me... as much as I love it!"
At least, that is how I remembered it. At this point both H. and I would completely crack up. This had to be one of the funniest things ever said on film. I've since looked it up on the Internet, and it turns out I'm misremembering the line --- it is "We just want ...etc."
I'm not much of a prognosticator, or I would have understood that a whole new political sensibility was going to spring from Rambo's crocodile tears. A weak-kneed jingoism, a lachrymose nativism. This first became evident under the first Bush's term. The weirdly resentful revolt led by Buchanon in 1992, which dominated the Republican convention even as its candidate was visibly a minority phenomenon, arguably cost Bush I the election.
Well, we wonder whether the same thing isn't happening again. Since 9/11, the Bush administration has been shamelessly playing to the tearful jingoists. It's a constituency that is captured, heart and soul, by the senile barking of Donald Rumsfeld, and whipped into a frenzy by every newspaper headline that hints at skepticism about its general bellicosity. So far, so good. However, it is easy to imagine that this kind of constituency might hold its panderers captive in the end. A replay of 1992 is a distinct possibility, with Bush having to mouth a position that is much more reactionary, much more nativist, than one he really holds. We think that if Bush can't navigate between this vocal group and the rest of the country, which may find extreme and expensive foreign policy adventurism mildly repulsive, he might do himself in. ...
Well, this is as much of the post as I've reconstructed so far. We'll publish the rest of it in the next entry.
I had a large post today. Alas, the system froze for some reason, the blogger didn't post, and it is gone. Hmm, I don't feel like reconstructing it at the moment. Here, at least, is how it started out.
Remora
The crocodile tears of Rambo
Years and years ago, LI was a graduate student. I lived in a house with a flying circus of roommates, one of whom was a Mexican Marxist on a downer. The low was due to a deadly combo of misplaced affection, excess alcohol and Ronald Reagan. To cheer himself up, H. would rent films and watch them while drinking Papst Blue ribbon and eating little pieces of cheese and sausages. To liven the meal up, sometimes he would stick little toothpicks in the sausages. His favorite film, the one that he considered one of the great comedy classics of all time, was Rambo. Sometimes I would join him. I didn't find Rambo as worthy of repeated viewing as he did, but it was funny.Our favorite part was the final scene. After Rambo had personally kicked North Vietnam into the sea and freed a whole campful of MIA/POWs that were getting the guinea pig treatment from the sadistic Orientals, Rambo confronts some conventional military type who asks the sweat drenched superhero (the sweat oozed out of him by the bucketloads in the film, as I remember) what he wanted. In a strangled voice that was apparently some hommage to Clint Eastwood's on screen laconicism, Rambo said:
"I just want... my country... to love me... as much as I love it!"
At least, that is how I remembered it. At this point both H. and I would completely crack up. This had to be one of the funniest things ever said on film. I've since looked it up on the Internet, and it turns out I'm misremembering the line --- it is "We just want ...etc."
I'm not much of a prognosticator, or I would have understood that a whole new political sensibility was going to spring from Rambo's crocodile tears. A weak-kneed jingoism, a lachrymose nativism. This first became evident under the first Bush's term. The weirdly resentful revolt led by Buchanon in 1992, which dominated the Republican convention even as its candidate was visibly a minority phenomenon, arguably cost Bush I the election.
Well, we wonder whether the same thing isn't happening again. Since 9/11, the Bush administration has been shamelessly playing to the tearful jingoists. It's a constituency that is captured, heart and soul, by the senile barking of Donald Rumsfeld, and whipped into a frenzy by every newspaper headline that hints at skepticism about its general bellicosity. So far, so good. However, it is easy to imagine that this kind of constituency might hold its panderers captive in the end. A replay of 1992 is a distinct possibility, with Bush having to mouth a position that is much more reactionary, much more nativist, than one he really holds. We think that if Bush can't navigate between this vocal group and the rest of the country, which may find extreme and expensive foreign policy adventurism mildly repulsive, he might do himself in. ...
Well, this is as much of the post as I've reconstructed so far. We'll publish the rest of it in the next entry.
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
Notes
For some reason, although we read blogs, we don't often refer to them. This is sheer irresponsibility. But we want to point our readers to one blog today -- Junius -- written by Chris Bertram, a philosophy guy in Bristol, England. Bertram is a dithering dove and frankly, LI does not share his dithers. But we like Bertram's mixture of Burke-ishnesss (the very name, Junius, refers to Burke's ally in the war against Warren Hastings, Phillip Francis) and socialism.
For us, the problem with philosophy guys and war is that they immediately plunge into talk about whether a war is just or not. Now, it is interesting whether a war is just or not. But that is obviously only one consideration in deciding that one supports a war. The mix of motives that eventuate in any social act should include justice, and should also include interest, costs and benefits, honor, pertinency, past actions, context, etc. The moral issues at stake in the invasion of Iraq often smell of ether -- odorless, tasteless, and absolutely unrooted in the history and culture of Iraq or the culture and history of Britain and the U.S. -- who have left a long, dark trail in the area. For those who believe justice should override all other considerations, we urge a reading of that great tale by Heinrich Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas.
Anyway, in the spirit of Burke, we wrote Bertram a little letter (yes, the war fever is driving us crazy. We know this. We know we've gone insane) to shore up the case against the War. Here it is.
Dear Chris Bertram
I read your post on human rights and the just war approach to war in Iraq.
Surely the antiwar argument stands on strong Burkean grounds, making something like the following two points:
One, replacing an unjust order with a just order is best done by the people themselves. Why? Because replacing an unjust order with a "revolution from above" presumes a mechanical, non-representative politics alien to the organic structure of society. In Hayek's terms, it is the ultimate in central planning -- planners with no knowledge (not even tacit knowledge) of Iraqi society usurp for themselves the right to change it radically. If Burke supported war against the directorate in France, it was because the directorate had recently overthrown what he viewed as the legitimate governors of France. His model, however, seems to have been the Glorious Revolution. Although King William enjoyed the support of some foreign powers, his right to the throne was founded not only in the spirit of the English order, but in the acceptance, by the British, of his rule -- an acceptance that expressed itself in supporting and supplying King William's forces.
The second point would be: are there indications of Iraqi self-organisation on Burkean lines? I'd say yes -- in the case of Iraq, we already have a "liberated zone" that is making fractious efforts to organize itself in terms of representative government.
Given these two points, the question is: what would both instill a legitmate representative govenment in Iraq and preserve it from the kind of military dictatorship to which American allies in the Middle East (vide Pakistan) are heir? It would seem here that invasion is actually injurious to that objective. The argument against war -- at least, invasion by foreign powers -- should then countenance the preservation of the current zone in Northern Iraq, in order for the people to work out for themselves the proper structures of their order. As it becomes stronger, it will act as an attractor for the legitimate interests of the Iraqi people, which will ultimately be crowned by the internal overthrow of the Ba'athist structure. In fact, it has taken a long time for that to happen in the North -- the endemic warlordism of the middle nineties has only recently lost its grip on the countryside.
The only objection to this is that Saddam Hussein is strong enough to suppress such internal change, and that his strength hasn't changed over time. But I don't think that is a strong enough argument for invasion -- although it might be a strong argument for supporting the liberated zone in more concrete ways.
Burke was very conscious of the continuity of character, and he would certainly have found suspicious that the cabal of D.C. officials who now advocate war were once so favorable to Saddam Hussein's government that they covertly supplied it with military aid while it was gassing Kurds and Iranians. In fact, it is easy to imagine what he would have said about this. Just read the speeches in the impeachment of Warren Hastings.
Yours,
Etc.
....
We received an email from our friend T. in New York re the birthday of Kazantzakis. We liked it. Here it is, in all its crabby splendor.
"Salon was decent enough to acknowledge the anniversary of NK's birth today, and showed further decency with the selected passage from Zorba. Although NK should not be considered "minor" and I have tried and failed to make him "nomadic", to my mind, he is just not spoken of often enough when discussions move to the subject of "the novel"; hell, he wrote at least three wonderful ones - The Greek Passion, The Last Temptation of Christ and Zorba. Something like twenty years ago, those, Dead Souls, Quixote, Anna Karenina and The Bros. K brought me to a sense of what a novel is and why it is important to have such things around and why one should go to the trouble of keeping them close at all times. Perhaps he is "too ethnic" to be included in matters of the novel (?) More than Greek, he was Cretan.
Maybe its that the image of Anthony Quinn is too strong for me, but Zorba never was The One for me. No, The One has always been The Greek Passion. My esteem altogether reinforced with those extraordinarily intimate books The Saviors of God and Report to Greco. Is it twenty years ago that I first read the later? Mere sentimentality: Shortly after I had finished cluelessly turning the pages of Zarathustra, I read the Report for the first time. NK still strikes me (and herein is the sentimentality) as amongst the most passionate (exuberance, merciful sympathy) readers of FWN (heres there with Batille, Blanchot, Deleuze and Klossowski).
Unlike the others, however, his introduction to Fritz was as personal as imaginable: he was told that he looked like Nietzsche!
Also, I never fail to recall that he was excommunicated (not even Friedrich the Antichristian could pull that off).
Anyway, I'm in no position to tell his tale (I include a link to a detailed chronology of his life below), but I can at least spit out a blurb on this anniversary.
I hate the snow, and I hope that you are well and good.
For some reason, although we read blogs, we don't often refer to them. This is sheer irresponsibility. But we want to point our readers to one blog today -- Junius -- written by Chris Bertram, a philosophy guy in Bristol, England. Bertram is a dithering dove and frankly, LI does not share his dithers. But we like Bertram's mixture of Burke-ishnesss (the very name, Junius, refers to Burke's ally in the war against Warren Hastings, Phillip Francis) and socialism.
For us, the problem with philosophy guys and war is that they immediately plunge into talk about whether a war is just or not. Now, it is interesting whether a war is just or not. But that is obviously only one consideration in deciding that one supports a war. The mix of motives that eventuate in any social act should include justice, and should also include interest, costs and benefits, honor, pertinency, past actions, context, etc. The moral issues at stake in the invasion of Iraq often smell of ether -- odorless, tasteless, and absolutely unrooted in the history and culture of Iraq or the culture and history of Britain and the U.S. -- who have left a long, dark trail in the area. For those who believe justice should override all other considerations, we urge a reading of that great tale by Heinrich Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas.
Anyway, in the spirit of Burke, we wrote Bertram a little letter (yes, the war fever is driving us crazy. We know this. We know we've gone insane) to shore up the case against the War. Here it is.
Dear Chris Bertram
I read your post on human rights and the just war approach to war in Iraq.
Surely the antiwar argument stands on strong Burkean grounds, making something like the following two points:
One, replacing an unjust order with a just order is best done by the people themselves. Why? Because replacing an unjust order with a "revolution from above" presumes a mechanical, non-representative politics alien to the organic structure of society. In Hayek's terms, it is the ultimate in central planning -- planners with no knowledge (not even tacit knowledge) of Iraqi society usurp for themselves the right to change it radically. If Burke supported war against the directorate in France, it was because the directorate had recently overthrown what he viewed as the legitimate governors of France. His model, however, seems to have been the Glorious Revolution. Although King William enjoyed the support of some foreign powers, his right to the throne was founded not only in the spirit of the English order, but in the acceptance, by the British, of his rule -- an acceptance that expressed itself in supporting and supplying King William's forces.
The second point would be: are there indications of Iraqi self-organisation on Burkean lines? I'd say yes -- in the case of Iraq, we already have a "liberated zone" that is making fractious efforts to organize itself in terms of representative government.
Given these two points, the question is: what would both instill a legitmate representative govenment in Iraq and preserve it from the kind of military dictatorship to which American allies in the Middle East (vide Pakistan) are heir? It would seem here that invasion is actually injurious to that objective. The argument against war -- at least, invasion by foreign powers -- should then countenance the preservation of the current zone in Northern Iraq, in order for the people to work out for themselves the proper structures of their order. As it becomes stronger, it will act as an attractor for the legitimate interests of the Iraqi people, which will ultimately be crowned by the internal overthrow of the Ba'athist structure. In fact, it has taken a long time for that to happen in the North -- the endemic warlordism of the middle nineties has only recently lost its grip on the countryside.
The only objection to this is that Saddam Hussein is strong enough to suppress such internal change, and that his strength hasn't changed over time. But I don't think that is a strong enough argument for invasion -- although it might be a strong argument for supporting the liberated zone in more concrete ways.
Burke was very conscious of the continuity of character, and he would certainly have found suspicious that the cabal of D.C. officials who now advocate war were once so favorable to Saddam Hussein's government that they covertly supplied it with military aid while it was gassing Kurds and Iranians. In fact, it is easy to imagine what he would have said about this. Just read the speeches in the impeachment of Warren Hastings.
Yours,
Etc.
....
We received an email from our friend T. in New York re the birthday of Kazantzakis. We liked it. Here it is, in all its crabby splendor.
"Salon was decent enough to acknowledge the anniversary of NK's birth today, and showed further decency with the selected passage from Zorba. Although NK should not be considered "minor" and I have tried and failed to make him "nomadic", to my mind, he is just not spoken of often enough when discussions move to the subject of "the novel"; hell, he wrote at least three wonderful ones - The Greek Passion, The Last Temptation of Christ and Zorba. Something like twenty years ago, those, Dead Souls, Quixote, Anna Karenina and The Bros. K brought me to a sense of what a novel is and why it is important to have such things around and why one should go to the trouble of keeping them close at all times. Perhaps he is "too ethnic" to be included in matters of the novel (?) More than Greek, he was Cretan.
Maybe its that the image of Anthony Quinn is too strong for me, but Zorba never was The One for me. No, The One has always been The Greek Passion. My esteem altogether reinforced with those extraordinarily intimate books The Saviors of God and Report to Greco. Is it twenty years ago that I first read the later? Mere sentimentality: Shortly after I had finished cluelessly turning the pages of Zarathustra, I read the Report for the first time. NK still strikes me (and herein is the sentimentality) as amongst the most passionate (exuberance, merciful sympathy) readers of FWN (heres there with Batille, Blanchot, Deleuze and Klossowski).
Unlike the others, however, his introduction to Fritz was as personal as imaginable: he was told that he looked like Nietzsche!
Also, I never fail to recall that he was excommunicated (not even Friedrich the Antichristian could pull that off).
Anyway, I'm in no position to tell his tale (I include a link to a detailed chronology of his life below), but I can at least spit out a blurb on this anniversary.
I hate the snow, and I hope that you are well and good.
Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Remora
The focus groups in the street
"Size of protest, it's like deciding, 'Well I'm going to decide policy based up on a focus group.' The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security - in this case - security of the people." - Bush, Washington Post
"I understand the concerns of the thousands who marched on Saturday. -- Tony Blair, Guardian
Millions of Soviet people are profoundly sympathetic with the Hungarian workers' struggle to successfully transform their homeland into a free, sovereign socialist state. We understand the desire of the Hungarian workers, peasants and intelligentsia to raise the standard of living of the population, utilizing the great advantages of the people's democratic system to do so. -- Pravda, November 1956, commenting on the Hungarian Revolution
The reaction to the protests is very -- as Donald Rumsfeld might say (vide our last post on him) --- interesting. We have been especially amused by NPR. They excerpted Bush's speech, and followed it with the explanation that "thousands" demonstrated over the world. Expect that same innumeracy when it comes to Iraqi casualties in the war (Some tens were killed in Baghdad's bombing today...). But there is a more profound issue here than that of war or peace in Iraq. The question is: who runs things. The dismissal of the Protesters has been breathtaking in its reach, and revealing in its vocabulary. In the Figaro, there was an interview with Laurent Murawiec which, we think, is representative. Murawiec was the man who caused a bit of a stir last summer when he instructed Richard Perle's White House sponsored Defense council on the advisability of overthrowing the Saudi government. Here he is breathing the very air of the Bellicose cabal:
"What do you think of the anti-war protests last Saturday?
The "pacifists" believe they are giving peace a chance, but in fact, the only thing they are giving a chance to is their blindness. The protests last Saturday were the marriage of John Lennon and Neville Chamberlain. A naivete pushed to the point where there is an absolute unconsciousness of the issues of the conflict, a complete contempt for reality. There's nothing to be expected from such an alliance."
This is the tone of Pravda on the Potomac. What is more disturbing, however, is that the assumptions underlying this tone are shared, to a large extent, by the opposition in this country. I talked on the phone to my best friend yesterday, and he was rather mocking about the demonstrations making any difference. It is that frozen response to the mechanism of oppression that shows just how much oppression has become the default, in this country. It is a conviction that false consciousness is all there is to consciousness. Flattering both to elitist policy makers in right wing think tanks and academic leftists, who have provided themselves with a wonderfully narrowed field of action, it seems to me so clearly false, so clearly not the story of the last couple hundred of years, that I am surprised how prevalent, how almost universal it is. "Resistance" in academia is almost invariably trivialized: it is a matter of choosing to watch Buffy the Vampire Killer, or dressing Barbie in a strange way. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the Enlightenment project of adults governing themselves. In this way, the "union sacre" to use Murawiec's words has been consumated between the world view of Madison Avenue and the world view of Cultural Studies. It is coupled with another idea, also immensely flattering to those educated in expensive Universities: that the popular mood is infinitely malleable. This has animated both the makers of Wag the Dog and the busy staffers working for Karl Rove. But why would anybody, in the long run, believe it? Two hundred years of history, from the American and French Revolutions to de-colonization to the end of the Soviet empire, show how badly Revolutions from above fare.
But we don't have to look at the Grand Pattern - all we have to do is look at the spectacular failure of media and policy elites to impeach President Clinton. That is a history replete with the comedy of secret makers and shakers betting on the magic of the coup. Well, it didn't work. Once again, those makers and shakers are betting on the magic of a coup - running roughshod over the popular mood to create a war. Well, they might just create a war, but the damage is becoming clear. Those who have attached themselves to the Cabal of belligerents (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld) are going to have severe trouble retaining their 'leadership" roles - starting with Aznar in Spain and going through Tony Blair in the U.K. Let's take Aznar first. Here's a report from the Voice of America, not a leftist bastion:
"Anti-war demonstrations took place in 57 cities throughout Spain, including all the provincial capitals. The two biggest were held in Madrid and Barcelona with a total of about two million people. Spain's Prime Minister Jos� Mar�a Aznar has been a staunch supporter of U-S policy toward Iraq despite the fact that polls show that the vast majority of Spaniards are against the use of force to make Iraq disarm. The result has been that his ruling Popular Party has stood alone in parliament in defending the U-S policy on Iraq.
The peace demonstrations were organized or supported by the major opposition Socialist party, the United Left Coalition, the major labor unions, and various non-government organizations like Green Peace. Following Pope John Paul II's opposition to the war option against Iraq, Catholics led by priests and nuns turned out in large numbers and church bells chimed in some cities during the demonstrations.Both the Madrid and Barcelona demonstrations were headed not only by opposition politicians and union leaders but by Spanish actors and artists as well. Film Director Pedro Almodovar, nominated for Oscars as best script writer and director, read the closing manifesto in Madrid."
And this, from today's Guardian:
More significantly for Mr Aznar, opinion polls have shown that, for the first time since securing a clear victory in elections three years ago, the Socialists have overtaken the People's party in voting intentions.
Mr Aznar also faced embarrassment yesterday when it was revealed that in 1997 he had offered to pay Baghdad in "aid" if it gave oil contracts to the Spanish-owned Repsol company. The government was ready to make a "donation" if Repsol was given a concession in the Nasiriya field, despite the fact that the UN had just issued a series of resolutions condemning Iraq's continued blocking of inspections, according to El Mundo newspaper, which quoted official documents."
As to Tony Blair, I don't need to quote polls.
Now, the point here isn't just that the war is unpopular, but that the very ability of the American media to analyze the factors which would be set in motion by Bush's foreign policy have been almost universally pathetic. That because the media has bought into the common 'educated' perception that elites run things while the common man drools over brainless celebrities. This is comically illustrated in the analyses, leading up to the U.S. foreign policy debacles of the last couple of weeks, that France wasn't "serious" about opposing the U.S. policy. No, they'd get out of the way at the last moment. That was the almost universal opinion, in spite of the fact that there are plenty of reasons to think France's interest, especially as interpreted by Chirac, would be precisely the opposite of that. This isn't a matter of opposing the war: it is a matter of understanding, outside the filter of one's personal opinions, the interest of the other. The expectation that the popular mood just doesn't count has so seized the educated that it has become inscribed in the very way that even those who oppose the war here think about politics. The war is inevitable refrain is partly about the fact that the clever top class always gets what it wants.
Well, the quietism of the left in America is a scandal which we aren't going to embark on analyzing at the moment. But we do think that somebody ought to ask: if the planners are so smart, why is the plan so dumb?
Instead of believing that democracy is a mere sham concealing the puppetmasters pulling strings and getting their way, LI subscribes to the belief of the Psalmist: "Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength."
And of Blake: "How do you know but every bird that cuts the
airy way, is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?"
These are the pillars of our politics, mes amies.
The focus groups in the street
"Size of protest, it's like deciding, 'Well I'm going to decide policy based up on a focus group.' The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security - in this case - security of the people." - Bush, Washington Post
"I understand the concerns of the thousands who marched on Saturday. -- Tony Blair, Guardian
Millions of Soviet people are profoundly sympathetic with the Hungarian workers' struggle to successfully transform their homeland into a free, sovereign socialist state. We understand the desire of the Hungarian workers, peasants and intelligentsia to raise the standard of living of the population, utilizing the great advantages of the people's democratic system to do so. -- Pravda, November 1956, commenting on the Hungarian Revolution
The reaction to the protests is very -- as Donald Rumsfeld might say (vide our last post on him) --- interesting. We have been especially amused by NPR. They excerpted Bush's speech, and followed it with the explanation that "thousands" demonstrated over the world. Expect that same innumeracy when it comes to Iraqi casualties in the war (Some tens were killed in Baghdad's bombing today...). But there is a more profound issue here than that of war or peace in Iraq. The question is: who runs things. The dismissal of the Protesters has been breathtaking in its reach, and revealing in its vocabulary. In the Figaro, there was an interview with Laurent Murawiec which, we think, is representative. Murawiec was the man who caused a bit of a stir last summer when he instructed Richard Perle's White House sponsored Defense council on the advisability of overthrowing the Saudi government. Here he is breathing the very air of the Bellicose cabal:
"What do you think of the anti-war protests last Saturday?
The "pacifists" believe they are giving peace a chance, but in fact, the only thing they are giving a chance to is their blindness. The protests last Saturday were the marriage of John Lennon and Neville Chamberlain. A naivete pushed to the point where there is an absolute unconsciousness of the issues of the conflict, a complete contempt for reality. There's nothing to be expected from such an alliance."
This is the tone of Pravda on the Potomac. What is more disturbing, however, is that the assumptions underlying this tone are shared, to a large extent, by the opposition in this country. I talked on the phone to my best friend yesterday, and he was rather mocking about the demonstrations making any difference. It is that frozen response to the mechanism of oppression that shows just how much oppression has become the default, in this country. It is a conviction that false consciousness is all there is to consciousness. Flattering both to elitist policy makers in right wing think tanks and academic leftists, who have provided themselves with a wonderfully narrowed field of action, it seems to me so clearly false, so clearly not the story of the last couple hundred of years, that I am surprised how prevalent, how almost universal it is. "Resistance" in academia is almost invariably trivialized: it is a matter of choosing to watch Buffy the Vampire Killer, or dressing Barbie in a strange way. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the Enlightenment project of adults governing themselves. In this way, the "union sacre" to use Murawiec's words has been consumated between the world view of Madison Avenue and the world view of Cultural Studies. It is coupled with another idea, also immensely flattering to those educated in expensive Universities: that the popular mood is infinitely malleable. This has animated both the makers of Wag the Dog and the busy staffers working for Karl Rove. But why would anybody, in the long run, believe it? Two hundred years of history, from the American and French Revolutions to de-colonization to the end of the Soviet empire, show how badly Revolutions from above fare.
But we don't have to look at the Grand Pattern - all we have to do is look at the spectacular failure of media and policy elites to impeach President Clinton. That is a history replete with the comedy of secret makers and shakers betting on the magic of the coup. Well, it didn't work. Once again, those makers and shakers are betting on the magic of a coup - running roughshod over the popular mood to create a war. Well, they might just create a war, but the damage is becoming clear. Those who have attached themselves to the Cabal of belligerents (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld) are going to have severe trouble retaining their 'leadership" roles - starting with Aznar in Spain and going through Tony Blair in the U.K. Let's take Aznar first. Here's a report from the Voice of America, not a leftist bastion:
"Anti-war demonstrations took place in 57 cities throughout Spain, including all the provincial capitals. The two biggest were held in Madrid and Barcelona with a total of about two million people. Spain's Prime Minister Jos� Mar�a Aznar has been a staunch supporter of U-S policy toward Iraq despite the fact that polls show that the vast majority of Spaniards are against the use of force to make Iraq disarm. The result has been that his ruling Popular Party has stood alone in parliament in defending the U-S policy on Iraq.
The peace demonstrations were organized or supported by the major opposition Socialist party, the United Left Coalition, the major labor unions, and various non-government organizations like Green Peace. Following Pope John Paul II's opposition to the war option against Iraq, Catholics led by priests and nuns turned out in large numbers and church bells chimed in some cities during the demonstrations.Both the Madrid and Barcelona demonstrations were headed not only by opposition politicians and union leaders but by Spanish actors and artists as well. Film Director Pedro Almodovar, nominated for Oscars as best script writer and director, read the closing manifesto in Madrid."
And this, from today's Guardian:
More significantly for Mr Aznar, opinion polls have shown that, for the first time since securing a clear victory in elections three years ago, the Socialists have overtaken the People's party in voting intentions.
Mr Aznar also faced embarrassment yesterday when it was revealed that in 1997 he had offered to pay Baghdad in "aid" if it gave oil contracts to the Spanish-owned Repsol company. The government was ready to make a "donation" if Repsol was given a concession in the Nasiriya field, despite the fact that the UN had just issued a series of resolutions condemning Iraq's continued blocking of inspections, according to El Mundo newspaper, which quoted official documents."
As to Tony Blair, I don't need to quote polls.
Now, the point here isn't just that the war is unpopular, but that the very ability of the American media to analyze the factors which would be set in motion by Bush's foreign policy have been almost universally pathetic. That because the media has bought into the common 'educated' perception that elites run things while the common man drools over brainless celebrities. This is comically illustrated in the analyses, leading up to the U.S. foreign policy debacles of the last couple of weeks, that France wasn't "serious" about opposing the U.S. policy. No, they'd get out of the way at the last moment. That was the almost universal opinion, in spite of the fact that there are plenty of reasons to think France's interest, especially as interpreted by Chirac, would be precisely the opposite of that. This isn't a matter of opposing the war: it is a matter of understanding, outside the filter of one's personal opinions, the interest of the other. The expectation that the popular mood just doesn't count has so seized the educated that it has become inscribed in the very way that even those who oppose the war here think about politics. The war is inevitable refrain is partly about the fact that the clever top class always gets what it wants.
Well, the quietism of the left in America is a scandal which we aren't going to embark on analyzing at the moment. But we do think that somebody ought to ask: if the planners are so smart, why is the plan so dumb?
Instead of believing that democracy is a mere sham concealing the puppetmasters pulling strings and getting their way, LI subscribes to the belief of the Psalmist: "Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength."
And of Blake: "How do you know but every bird that cuts the
airy way, is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?"
These are the pillars of our politics, mes amies.
Monday, February 17, 2003
Remora
Powers of Thought
The best American coverage of the protests world wide was carried by the Los Angeles Times. LI would bet that if ten million people around the world had protested in favor of Bush's position in Iraq, the Washington Post and the New York Times would have been alight with celebratory headlines. But no, we will give no headlines for peace marchers. Heavens.
The LA Times went with an honest report. It didn't mix protest against Tony Blair's policy in London with machine gun toting thugs marching in Baghdad as a species of the same thing. We liked these grafs in Sebastian Rotella's story:
"Leslie Druce, 70, marched in London carrying a placard that proclaimed "Bush and Blair ... Liars and Bullies."
"They treat us like we have no power of thought," Druce said. "Who are they kidding? Do they really feel threatened by the Iraqis? The U.S. could be such a power for good in the world, but Bush has chosen to be the bully boy instead. It really bothers me that Bush has used Blair as a veil of decency through all of this."
Many protesters were members of Blair's Labor Party who have broken with their leader over the war.
"We voted for Blair, but on this he's totally wrong. It's immoral," said Peter Burton, who made the 237-mile trip to London from his Exeter home along with his wife, Rita. "He has totally misjudged how dangerous this is to the Middle East and how destabilizing this has been to the United Nations. And we believe in the United Nations."
There is, in politics, one rule of success that seems pretty constant. You have to help your friends. Eventually, the consistent, serial betrayal of allies will undermine even the most secure of empires. The D.C. cenacle of belligerents has concluded that their only friends are to the right: the frothing academics in various conservative think tanks or the Likudniks at the Weekly Standard. Hence the unceasing flow of vituperation directed, for instance, at France. This has taken on a logic of its own that is undermining its objective. The creation of an atmosphere in which all impediments to war with Iraq are treated as the hostile and nasty acts of terrorists is going to make it impossible to justify retaining that closeness to Bush's administration that Rumsfeld's 'New Europe' has been trying to impress upon the world. You know that when even Chili goes against you at the U.N., something is seriously wrong.
Speaking of France...
A wonderful example of how polemical talent cannot survive its own debauch is Christopher Hitchens recent screed about Chirac, which was published, appropriately enough, on the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Hitchens used to know something about the deadly insult: the polemicists great truth is that truth itself must, given the moral occassion, exaggerate. But insult without the backing of truth, insult in the service of a blind and conniving power, destroys even the truths it embraces. As Mary McCarthy once said about Lilian Hellman, every word she says is a lie, including "the" and "a," So, too, in this incredibly silly piece about the ever corrupt Chirac, entitled Saddam's pal, Chirac the Rat. Among the carious verbiage we loved this passage:
"However, the conduct of Jacques Chirac can hardly be analysed in these terms. Here is a man who had to run for re-election last year in order to preserve his immunity from prosecution, on charges of corruption that were grave. Here is a man who helped Saddam Hussein build a nuclear reactor and who knew very well what he wanted it for. Here is a man at the head of France who is, in effect, openly for sale. He puts me in mind of the banker in Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale: a man so habituated to corruption that he would happily pay for the pleasure of selling himself.
Here, also, is a positive monster of conceit. He has unctuously said that "force is always the last resort". Vraiment? This was not the view of the French establishment when troops were sent to Rwanda to try to rescue the client regime that had just unleashed ethnocide against the Tutsi. It is not, one presumes, the view of the French generals who are treating the people and nation of Cote d'Ivoire as their fief. It was not the view of those who ordered the destruction of an unarmed ship, the Rainbow Warrior, as it lay at anchor in a New Zealand harbour after protesting against the French official practice of conducting atmospheric nuclear tests in the Pacific. (I am aware that some of these outrages were conducted when the French Socialist Party was in power, but in no case did Chirac express anything other than patriotic enthusiasm. If there is a truly "unilateralist" government on the UN Security Council, it is France.)"
Of course, as faithful readers of LI know, the corruptions of Chirac are entangled with the corruptions of Hitchen's great "pal," George Bush. Chirac was the first European politician to congratulate Bush after the coup in Florida -- a result that Hitchens, proceeding through his accustomed tergiversation, is surely happy with. After all, democracy has a limit. And among those corrupt supporters of Chirac, we have previously mentioned an arms dealer, Pierre Falcone. Pierre Falcone runs with a highly smelly contingent of criminals including the well known Russian-Israeli Mafioso, Arcadi Gaydamak. Gaydamak can come to the U.S. to parties honoring the likes of his friend, Ariel Sharon, and remain unmolested by the FBI, which is so vigilant, otherwise, in incarcerating brown skinned working class men who happen to speak Arabic. Falcone is in jail in France, but his wife, beauty queen, Sonia, lives in Arizona and is highly active in Republican circles.
Here's a corpwatch article that fills in the details:
"According to Global Witness, the links between Angola's corrupt government and the Bush administration are just as odorous as those linking Luanda's leadership to past and current members of the French government, both Socialist and Gaullist. In addition to the French oil giant Total-Fina-Elf, oil companies like Chevron, Texaco, Philipps Petroleum, Exxon Mobil, and BP-Amoco -- all with close links to Bush and his White House oil team -- were heavily involved in propping up dos Santos in return for profitable off-shore oil concessions.After transferring some $770 million in oil revenues to their own private bank accounts, dos Santos and his cronies became convinced that pluralism in their country would be a very dangerous thing for their future business deals. They also quickly abandoned their former Marxist beliefs in favor of the type of capitalist principles embraced by George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac.
Paris, Texas
There are similarities between dos Santos' new relationship with George W. Bush and the Bush family's historical ties to the House of Saud. Both represent the murky nature of oil politics that places US economic, national security, and human rights interests far behind the priority assigned to ensuring maximum corporate profits for a tight-knit and secretive international oil fraternity.Just as Bush's past financial links to the Bin Laden family have been exposed by the media, so too have his links to Angolagate and Falcone. Falcone's wife, Sonia, a former Miss Bolivia and a friend of First Lady Laura Bush, became a big-ticket contributor to Bush's 2000 election campaign. Contributions were made to the campaign through Sonia's Essant� Corporation, a distributor of health, beauty, and sexual pleasure products (such as a cream called Entisse that Essant�'s web site says is guaranteed to duplicate the effects of Viagra). http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=2576 We recommend the whole Corporate Watch article as a nice introduction to the chamber of horrors which financed the Bush campaign."
Thieves can fall out, but it takes the blind vanity of a Hitchens to take the side of one of those thieves as a moral imperative. For those who want to know more about the Chirac-Bush arms connection, read our post of 6/19 last year.
Powers of Thought
The best American coverage of the protests world wide was carried by the Los Angeles Times. LI would bet that if ten million people around the world had protested in favor of Bush's position in Iraq, the Washington Post and the New York Times would have been alight with celebratory headlines. But no, we will give no headlines for peace marchers. Heavens.
The LA Times went with an honest report. It didn't mix protest against Tony Blair's policy in London with machine gun toting thugs marching in Baghdad as a species of the same thing. We liked these grafs in Sebastian Rotella's story:
"Leslie Druce, 70, marched in London carrying a placard that proclaimed "Bush and Blair ... Liars and Bullies."
"They treat us like we have no power of thought," Druce said. "Who are they kidding? Do they really feel threatened by the Iraqis? The U.S. could be such a power for good in the world, but Bush has chosen to be the bully boy instead. It really bothers me that Bush has used Blair as a veil of decency through all of this."
Many protesters were members of Blair's Labor Party who have broken with their leader over the war.
"We voted for Blair, but on this he's totally wrong. It's immoral," said Peter Burton, who made the 237-mile trip to London from his Exeter home along with his wife, Rita. "He has totally misjudged how dangerous this is to the Middle East and how destabilizing this has been to the United Nations. And we believe in the United Nations."
There is, in politics, one rule of success that seems pretty constant. You have to help your friends. Eventually, the consistent, serial betrayal of allies will undermine even the most secure of empires. The D.C. cenacle of belligerents has concluded that their only friends are to the right: the frothing academics in various conservative think tanks or the Likudniks at the Weekly Standard. Hence the unceasing flow of vituperation directed, for instance, at France. This has taken on a logic of its own that is undermining its objective. The creation of an atmosphere in which all impediments to war with Iraq are treated as the hostile and nasty acts of terrorists is going to make it impossible to justify retaining that closeness to Bush's administration that Rumsfeld's 'New Europe' has been trying to impress upon the world. You know that when even Chili goes against you at the U.N., something is seriously wrong.
Speaking of France...
A wonderful example of how polemical talent cannot survive its own debauch is Christopher Hitchens recent screed about Chirac, which was published, appropriately enough, on the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Hitchens used to know something about the deadly insult: the polemicists great truth is that truth itself must, given the moral occassion, exaggerate. But insult without the backing of truth, insult in the service of a blind and conniving power, destroys even the truths it embraces. As Mary McCarthy once said about Lilian Hellman, every word she says is a lie, including "the" and "a," So, too, in this incredibly silly piece about the ever corrupt Chirac, entitled Saddam's pal, Chirac the Rat. Among the carious verbiage we loved this passage:
"However, the conduct of Jacques Chirac can hardly be analysed in these terms. Here is a man who had to run for re-election last year in order to preserve his immunity from prosecution, on charges of corruption that were grave. Here is a man who helped Saddam Hussein build a nuclear reactor and who knew very well what he wanted it for. Here is a man at the head of France who is, in effect, openly for sale. He puts me in mind of the banker in Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale: a man so habituated to corruption that he would happily pay for the pleasure of selling himself.
Here, also, is a positive monster of conceit. He has unctuously said that "force is always the last resort". Vraiment? This was not the view of the French establishment when troops were sent to Rwanda to try to rescue the client regime that had just unleashed ethnocide against the Tutsi. It is not, one presumes, the view of the French generals who are treating the people and nation of Cote d'Ivoire as their fief. It was not the view of those who ordered the destruction of an unarmed ship, the Rainbow Warrior, as it lay at anchor in a New Zealand harbour after protesting against the French official practice of conducting atmospheric nuclear tests in the Pacific. (I am aware that some of these outrages were conducted when the French Socialist Party was in power, but in no case did Chirac express anything other than patriotic enthusiasm. If there is a truly "unilateralist" government on the UN Security Council, it is France.)"
Of course, as faithful readers of LI know, the corruptions of Chirac are entangled with the corruptions of Hitchen's great "pal," George Bush. Chirac was the first European politician to congratulate Bush after the coup in Florida -- a result that Hitchens, proceeding through his accustomed tergiversation, is surely happy with. After all, democracy has a limit. And among those corrupt supporters of Chirac, we have previously mentioned an arms dealer, Pierre Falcone. Pierre Falcone runs with a highly smelly contingent of criminals including the well known Russian-Israeli Mafioso, Arcadi Gaydamak. Gaydamak can come to the U.S. to parties honoring the likes of his friend, Ariel Sharon, and remain unmolested by the FBI, which is so vigilant, otherwise, in incarcerating brown skinned working class men who happen to speak Arabic. Falcone is in jail in France, but his wife, beauty queen, Sonia, lives in Arizona and is highly active in Republican circles.
Here's a corpwatch article that fills in the details:
"According to Global Witness, the links between Angola's corrupt government and the Bush administration are just as odorous as those linking Luanda's leadership to past and current members of the French government, both Socialist and Gaullist. In addition to the French oil giant Total-Fina-Elf, oil companies like Chevron, Texaco, Philipps Petroleum, Exxon Mobil, and BP-Amoco -- all with close links to Bush and his White House oil team -- were heavily involved in propping up dos Santos in return for profitable off-shore oil concessions.After transferring some $770 million in oil revenues to their own private bank accounts, dos Santos and his cronies became convinced that pluralism in their country would be a very dangerous thing for their future business deals. They also quickly abandoned their former Marxist beliefs in favor of the type of capitalist principles embraced by George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac.
Paris, Texas
There are similarities between dos Santos' new relationship with George W. Bush and the Bush family's historical ties to the House of Saud. Both represent the murky nature of oil politics that places US economic, national security, and human rights interests far behind the priority assigned to ensuring maximum corporate profits for a tight-knit and secretive international oil fraternity.Just as Bush's past financial links to the Bin Laden family have been exposed by the media, so too have his links to Angolagate and Falcone. Falcone's wife, Sonia, a former Miss Bolivia and a friend of First Lady Laura Bush, became a big-ticket contributor to Bush's 2000 election campaign. Contributions were made to the campaign through Sonia's Essant� Corporation, a distributor of health, beauty, and sexual pleasure products (such as a cream called Entisse that Essant�'s web site says is guaranteed to duplicate the effects of Viagra). http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=2576 We recommend the whole Corporate Watch article as a nice introduction to the chamber of horrors which financed the Bush campaign."
Thieves can fall out, but it takes the blind vanity of a Hitchens to take the side of one of those thieves as a moral imperative. For those who want to know more about the Chirac-Bush arms connection, read our post of 6/19 last year.
Saturday, February 15, 2003
Remora
Michael Kelly's column on Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister, profiles his new left career, from street protests against Vietnam to street protests against the supposed suicide of Ulrike Meinhof. The tone is set by the use of Stern magazine via an article by Paul Berman for the accusation that Fischer beat a policeman -- because, of course, there is no judicial accusation of this act. The tirade was unleashed by Joschka Fischer's reply to Donald Rumsfeld. Here's the beginning graf:
"Excuse me. I am not convinced."
-- German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, lecturing to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in Munich last week, after Rumsfeld's argument for war against Iraq.
Mr. Rumsfeld may have convinced the leaders of 18 European nations, but not you, Mr. Fischer. It's personal. This seems to me the right way to look at it. The question of failing to convince must be seen in the context of whom we have failed to convince."
We, in turn, have a question: who is the "we" to whom Kelly is referring? To determine this, let's ask, on a personal level, about Mr. Rumsfeld, who may have convinced the prime minister of Spain, but not 70% of the population; who may have convinced the prime minister of the Netherlands, but not 72% of the population; who may have convinced Tony Blair, but not the 52% that see him as George Bush's poodle ; who may have convinced Berlusconi, but not 72.7% of Italians.
Mr. Kelly's column then references pictures published by Stern that purportedly show Mr. Fischer in various criminal acts:
Sometimes "who" explains "why."Mr. Fischer, who are you?
You are the foreign minister of Germany. You have been that since 1998, when Germany's left-wing Greens party, of which you are a leader, won enough in the polls to force the Social Democratic Party into the so-called Red-Greens coalition government.
But for the formative years of your political life, you were no man in a blue government suit. You were a man in a black motorcycle helmet. That is what you were wearing on that day in April 1973 when you were photographed, to quote the New Left historian Paul Berman, "as a young bully in a street battle in Frankfurt."In 2001, Stern magazine published five photographs of you in action that day. What these pictures depicted was described by Berman in a deeply informed 25,000-word article, "The Passion of Joschka Fischer" (The New Republic, Sept. 3, 2001). The photos showed you, Mr. Fischer, inflicting a "gruesome beating" on a young policeman named Rainer Marx: "Fischer and other people on the attack, the white-helmeted cop going into a crouch; Fischer's black-gloved fist raised as if to punch the crouching cop on the back; Fischer's comrades crowding around; the cop huddled on the ground, Fischer and his comrades appearing to kick him . . ."
Thus, according to Kelly, Mr. Fischer. Well, on the principle that who's lead to why's, perhaps we should find out who Mr. Rumsfeld is, the man who was appointed to be Secretary of Defense after the Supreme Court forced the nation to ignore the popular vote totals in favor of the dubious balloting practices of Florida and elevated George Bush to the Presidency. Let's start with a picture, too. How about this one, of Mr. Rumsfeld as Reagan's "personal envoy" shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in 1983? No black gloved fists are involved. Rather, we see only the oiliest cordiality all the way around. The pic was published by CNN, who interviewed Rumsfeld. 1 Here's how that went:
McIntyre [CNN reporter]: Well, let me take you back to about 20 years ago. The date, I believe, was December 20, 1983. You were meeting with Saddam Hussein, I think we have some video of that meeting. Tell me what was going on during this meeting?
Rumsfeld: Where did you get this video, from the Iraqi television?
McIntyre: This is from the Iraqi television.
Rumsfeld: When did they give it to you, recently or back then?
McIntyre: We dug this out of the CNN library.
Rumsfeld: I see. Isn't that interesting. There I am.
McIntyre: So what was going on here, what were you thinking at the time?
Rumsfeld: Well, Iraq was in a battle, a war, with Iran."
To explain about the who, the Rumsfeld who was being browbeaten, Mr. Kelly has it, by the bullying Mr. Fischer, scum that arose from the very streets, here's a little background from the Washington Post:
"Among the people instrumental in tilting U.S. policy toward Baghdad during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war was Donald H. Rumsfeld, now defense secretary, whose December 1983 meeting with Hussein as a special presidential envoy paved the way for normalization of U.S.-Iraqi relations. Declassified documents show that Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad at a time when Iraq was using chemical weapons on an "almost daily" basis in defiance of international conventions."
Interesting, as Rummy might say. So, shall we add up atrocities so far? On the one hand, we have Mr. Fischer supposedly beating up a policeman and attending a rally in which someone was killed. On the other hand, we have our Defense secretary being wined and dined by Saddam Hussein, whose case he later represented to his boss, President Reagan, while, what was it? 300, 000? 500,000 Iraqi and Iranian casualties were, even at that time, piling up. Interesting.
Ah, and it gets more interesting, doesn't it? Return with us to March 24, 1984. On that day the UN released a report on the Iraqi use of chemical weapons. Does Mr. Kelly find those kind of weapons shocking? Does he find them cause, now, to invade Iraq? Well, on March 24, 1984, Mr. Rumsfeld didn't. No, Mr. Rumsfeld was returning ot Baghdad on that day to resume meetings with Iraqi ministers.
Interesting. And did that meeting have consequences? Oh, yes it did. Here is the chronology from the cooperative research site:
November 26, 1984. The United States Government re-established full diplomatic ties with Baghdad [Gwertzman 11-27-1984] even though it was fully aware that Iraq was using chemical weapons in its war against Iran.
1985. U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz successfully convinced Rep. Howard Berman to drop a House bill that put Iraq back on the State Department's list of states that sponsor terrorism. Shultz argued that the United States was actively engaged in "diplomatic dialogue on this and other sensitive issues," and asserted that "Iraq has effectively distanced itself from international terrorism." The Secretary of State further claimed that if the U.S. discovered any evidence implicating Iraq in the support of terrorist groups, the U.S. Government "would promptly return Iraq to the list." [Jentleson 1994 p. 54]
Here's how Kelly's column ends:
"So, that's who you are, Mr. Fischer, the man we haven't convinced. You are the man for whom Munich wasn't enough, the man who needed Entebbe to convince him that murdering Jews was wrong. You ask to be excused. You have been excused."
And here's how we will end this post: "So that's who you are, Mr. Rumsfeld, the man who wants to convince us now to go to war, but who once found nothing inexcusable in a relationship with a country who was daily using chemical weapons to fight an aggressive war in 1983; the man who, in 1984, acting as a go-between, was instrumental in sealing a "special relationship" between Iraq and the United States which, by happy coincidence, preceded the use of scud missiles against Iran to the extent that perhaps 300 rained down upon Teheran in 1988; the man whose boss, President Bush, was clearly using the jingoistic side of the potential war to defeat the wan opposition in November, 2002; the man who now tells us that war is so urgent that it should be fought in a matter of days, but who once was so careless of the Iraqi use of the weapons of mass destruction that he made it an opportunity for profit on the part of American military contractos. You tell us that the European opposition isn't inexcusable. Well, no, Mr. Rumsfeld, it isn't inexcusable. Your hypocrisy, though, is."
Michael Kelly's column on Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister, profiles his new left career, from street protests against Vietnam to street protests against the supposed suicide of Ulrike Meinhof. The tone is set by the use of Stern magazine via an article by Paul Berman for the accusation that Fischer beat a policeman -- because, of course, there is no judicial accusation of this act. The tirade was unleashed by Joschka Fischer's reply to Donald Rumsfeld. Here's the beginning graf:
"Excuse me. I am not convinced."
-- German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, lecturing to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in Munich last week, after Rumsfeld's argument for war against Iraq.
Mr. Rumsfeld may have convinced the leaders of 18 European nations, but not you, Mr. Fischer. It's personal. This seems to me the right way to look at it. The question of failing to convince must be seen in the context of whom we have failed to convince."
We, in turn, have a question: who is the "we" to whom Kelly is referring? To determine this, let's ask, on a personal level, about Mr. Rumsfeld, who may have convinced the prime minister of Spain, but not 70% of the population; who may have convinced the prime minister of the Netherlands, but not 72% of the population; who may have convinced Tony Blair, but not the 52% that see him as George Bush's poodle ; who may have convinced Berlusconi, but not 72.7% of Italians.
Mr. Kelly's column then references pictures published by Stern that purportedly show Mr. Fischer in various criminal acts:
Sometimes "who" explains "why."Mr. Fischer, who are you?
You are the foreign minister of Germany. You have been that since 1998, when Germany's left-wing Greens party, of which you are a leader, won enough in the polls to force the Social Democratic Party into the so-called Red-Greens coalition government.
But for the formative years of your political life, you were no man in a blue government suit. You were a man in a black motorcycle helmet. That is what you were wearing on that day in April 1973 when you were photographed, to quote the New Left historian Paul Berman, "as a young bully in a street battle in Frankfurt."In 2001, Stern magazine published five photographs of you in action that day. What these pictures depicted was described by Berman in a deeply informed 25,000-word article, "The Passion of Joschka Fischer" (The New Republic, Sept. 3, 2001). The photos showed you, Mr. Fischer, inflicting a "gruesome beating" on a young policeman named Rainer Marx: "Fischer and other people on the attack, the white-helmeted cop going into a crouch; Fischer's black-gloved fist raised as if to punch the crouching cop on the back; Fischer's comrades crowding around; the cop huddled on the ground, Fischer and his comrades appearing to kick him . . ."
Thus, according to Kelly, Mr. Fischer. Well, on the principle that who's lead to why's, perhaps we should find out who Mr. Rumsfeld is, the man who was appointed to be Secretary of Defense after the Supreme Court forced the nation to ignore the popular vote totals in favor of the dubious balloting practices of Florida and elevated George Bush to the Presidency. Let's start with a picture, too. How about this one, of Mr. Rumsfeld as Reagan's "personal envoy" shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in 1983? No black gloved fists are involved. Rather, we see only the oiliest cordiality all the way around. The pic was published by CNN, who interviewed Rumsfeld. 1 Here's how that went:
McIntyre [CNN reporter]: Well, let me take you back to about 20 years ago. The date, I believe, was December 20, 1983. You were meeting with Saddam Hussein, I think we have some video of that meeting. Tell me what was going on during this meeting?
Rumsfeld: Where did you get this video, from the Iraqi television?
McIntyre: This is from the Iraqi television.
Rumsfeld: When did they give it to you, recently or back then?
McIntyre: We dug this out of the CNN library.
Rumsfeld: I see. Isn't that interesting. There I am.
McIntyre: So what was going on here, what were you thinking at the time?
Rumsfeld: Well, Iraq was in a battle, a war, with Iran."
To explain about the who, the Rumsfeld who was being browbeaten, Mr. Kelly has it, by the bullying Mr. Fischer, scum that arose from the very streets, here's a little background from the Washington Post:
"Among the people instrumental in tilting U.S. policy toward Baghdad during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war was Donald H. Rumsfeld, now defense secretary, whose December 1983 meeting with Hussein as a special presidential envoy paved the way for normalization of U.S.-Iraqi relations. Declassified documents show that Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad at a time when Iraq was using chemical weapons on an "almost daily" basis in defiance of international conventions."
Interesting, as Rummy might say. So, shall we add up atrocities so far? On the one hand, we have Mr. Fischer supposedly beating up a policeman and attending a rally in which someone was killed. On the other hand, we have our Defense secretary being wined and dined by Saddam Hussein, whose case he later represented to his boss, President Reagan, while, what was it? 300, 000? 500,000 Iraqi and Iranian casualties were, even at that time, piling up. Interesting.
Ah, and it gets more interesting, doesn't it? Return with us to March 24, 1984. On that day the UN released a report on the Iraqi use of chemical weapons. Does Mr. Kelly find those kind of weapons shocking? Does he find them cause, now, to invade Iraq? Well, on March 24, 1984, Mr. Rumsfeld didn't. No, Mr. Rumsfeld was returning ot Baghdad on that day to resume meetings with Iraqi ministers.
Interesting. And did that meeting have consequences? Oh, yes it did. Here is the chronology from the cooperative research site:
November 26, 1984. The United States Government re-established full diplomatic ties with Baghdad [Gwertzman 11-27-1984] even though it was fully aware that Iraq was using chemical weapons in its war against Iran.
1985. U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz successfully convinced Rep. Howard Berman to drop a House bill that put Iraq back on the State Department's list of states that sponsor terrorism. Shultz argued that the United States was actively engaged in "diplomatic dialogue on this and other sensitive issues," and asserted that "Iraq has effectively distanced itself from international terrorism." The Secretary of State further claimed that if the U.S. discovered any evidence implicating Iraq in the support of terrorist groups, the U.S. Government "would promptly return Iraq to the list." [Jentleson 1994 p. 54]
Here's how Kelly's column ends:
"So, that's who you are, Mr. Fischer, the man we haven't convinced. You are the man for whom Munich wasn't enough, the man who needed Entebbe to convince him that murdering Jews was wrong. You ask to be excused. You have been excused."
And here's how we will end this post: "So that's who you are, Mr. Rumsfeld, the man who wants to convince us now to go to war, but who once found nothing inexcusable in a relationship with a country who was daily using chemical weapons to fight an aggressive war in 1983; the man who, in 1984, acting as a go-between, was instrumental in sealing a "special relationship" between Iraq and the United States which, by happy coincidence, preceded the use of scud missiles against Iran to the extent that perhaps 300 rained down upon Teheran in 1988; the man whose boss, President Bush, was clearly using the jingoistic side of the potential war to defeat the wan opposition in November, 2002; the man who now tells us that war is so urgent that it should be fought in a matter of days, but who once was so careless of the Iraqi use of the weapons of mass destruction that he made it an opportunity for profit on the part of American military contractos. You tell us that the European opposition isn't inexcusable. Well, no, Mr. Rumsfeld, it isn't inexcusable. Your hypocrisy, though, is."
Thursday, February 13, 2003
Dope
A few days ago we mentioned McClellan and Grant as the two poles of the American attitude towards war. The more we've mulled over this point, the more we think there is a tasty essay here. The point is simple. Empires persist because of a willingness of the citizens of the empire to endure a certain constant level of casualties in the course of maintening the empire. If we take the British empire, for instance, its expansion through numerous small wars in the nineteenth century was made possible, at home, because of a willingness to sanction an annual tribute of British lives to the ideal of maintaining and expanding the empire in India, Central Asia, and Africa. From the Sepoy Mutiny to the Boer War, this willingness was often tested, and rarely provoked the kind of backlash that would rein in the imperial ambitions of the British Government.
In contrast, the United States did not seek that kind of empire. Briefly, the U.S. embarked on an expansion at the turn of the century, but in comparison to the French, the British, and even the Germans, the American effort was relatively minor. A recent book by a Wall Street Journal writer, Max Boot, documents the many small wars that America has engaged in to shore up the idea that Empire is, indeed, in the American grain. However, more significant is the rarity of any long-term occupation resulting from those wars. Occupation means more than soldiers being stationed in a place -- it means the gradual transfer of a whole administrative apparatus. This was the backbone of the British empire, but only the Phillipines, and, briefly, Cuba, tempted the Americans to do likewise. There's a reason for that: while Americans have traditionally shyed away from situations that involve attrition over the long term. It is that reflex which dooms the imperial project.
It is not that Americans are averse to bloodshed. While the British were constructing their empire out of multitudinous border wars, Americans did endure, in the Civil War, violence of a much more concentrated and horrific kind. And in the twentieth century, the U.S. engagement in World War I and II also saw committment to wars which were comparable, in terms of casualties, to any of the participants. However, I think the pattern of American behavior is more normally represented by the Korean and Vietnam war. In both wars, the reality of high casualties and the expectation that optimal victory would exact more of the same had a determining effect on the American conduct of the war. General Westmoreland once said, famously, that more American lives were lost on the highways during the sixties than were lost in the Vietnam war. This was taken, and should be taken, to be a callous statement. Nevertheless, the callousness it reflects is necessary for any sustained imperial effort. There are no painless empires.
This American pattern is often ignored by American policy makers. The latest example is the kind of ambitious policy in the Middle East being promoted by the circle around Paul Wolfiwitz. According to this circle, America is, in reality, an empire. So using that imperial power, we can remake social and political situations that we don't like in our image. The language of empire now fills our foreign policy journals, as well as conservative weeklies. The opposition to the Bush administration's aggressive plans in the Middle East has concentrated mainly on the cost of war in the narrow sense -- the cost, that is, of invading and defeating Iraq. However, the real question is about the cost of the war in the larger sense -- the cost of exposing an occupying force to the constant attrition of a guerilla war, and to the unexpected violence of factional conflict. This is where the imperial model has failed in the recent past, from Saigon to Somalia. Empires require some legitimation that goes beyond the mere aggrandizement of power. Americans have never accepted any legitimation, over the long run, except national defense. Neither glory nor ideology have garnered American support for a war.
To explain the paradox of American power -- that combination of a high level of military spending with a low level of acceptable risk -- I believe this, it is useful to use McClellan and Grant to represent the two poles of the American dialectic. Both McClellan and Grant started from the same premise: the prerequisite to fighting a war was amassing a force disproportionately greater than the enemy's. However, while the strategic premise was the same, the tactics were much different. McClellan Civil War career has become infamous for the chances he refused to take. He was tender for the lives of his men. It was a this caution that doomed his Virginia campaign of 1862. As one private wrote, "We are at a loss to imagine whether this is strategy or defeat." (Gallagher)
Grant's tactics were very different. He used the advantage of a more numerous army to raise the level of casualties he would accept. This made it possible to continue inflicting casualties on the enemy in a more prolonged way than was ever seen before, in the campaign. The general stress broke the army of Northern Virginia. It is easy to forget that Grant's ultimate success was preceded by general shock at the the bloodletting he was prepared to countenance -- a shock that so shook the Union side that Lincoln, in the middle of the election campaign of 1864, thought he was going to lose. Grant's position was made plain in a telegram Sherman, with whom he was in perfect agreement, sent to Halleck, one of the incompetent Union commanders, after Vicksburg:
``War is upon us, none can deny it. It is not the choice of the Government of the United States, but of a faction; the Government was forced to accept the issue, or to submit to a degradation fatal and disgraceful to all the inhabitants. In accepting war, it should be `pure and simple' as applied to the belligerents. I would keep it so, till all traces of the war are effaced; till those who appealed to it are sick and tired of it, and come to the emblem of our nation, and sue for peace. I would not coax them, or even meet them half-way, but make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it....
This is the kind of language spoken by legendary American commanders, like Sherman, Grant, Patton and Macarthur. The words are stirring. We shouldn't be deluded, however, into thinking that the feelings are typical. McClellan's caution has never been submerged by Grant's boldness in the mix of American foreign policy and military strategy. In fact, it is the McClellan pole that drives the fundamental US military strategy of the moment: replacing the manpower of battle with military technology. The goal is to achieve Grant's objective with McClellan's tenderness for American life. This works in the case of those military engagements that can be decided solely by weaponry. However, occupation is, by definition, not one of those strategies. In fact, by raising the optimistic vision of a bloodless (at least for our side) war, it prepares the guerillas advantage -- blows struck against the occupying forces will be illogically magnified because they are judged against the background of a military technical utopia.
The best argument against the imperial design of the Wolfiwitzes is to appeal to the reality of this American pattern, in which the cost of an enterprise is judged rigidly against the benefit it brings. The benefit brought by regime change in Iraq is obvious -- but the benefit wrought by invading and occupying Iraq is not. The landscape, as it appears to D.C. foreign policy honchos, is one of overwhelming American power. But the landscape since 9/11 has changed. Guerillas may not possess nuclear missiles, but they can forge the weapons of mass destruction out of boxcutters and American airliners. in treating Iraq as though it were merely a problem amenable to a Grant-like solution, we are putting ourselves into a situation in which all alternatives are impalatable. Assuming that 9/11, and the suicide bombers in Israel, are omens of things to come, the occupying U.S. forces in Iraq will be subject to the constant low attrition of guerilla warfare, with its morale breaking concomitants: a desire to strike blows against a dispersed enemy driving general dispersed acts of mayhem against the native population, which in turn creates mutual distrust between American forces and the native population, which in turn creates a gap between the ostensible reasons for the American presence (that they somehow 'represent' the aspirations of the native people) and the reality of it. Bush is edging into a situation in which the choices will be an unacceptable withdrawal from Iraq, and an unacceptable occupation of Iraq.
This situation should look familiar. It is Vietnam.
A few days ago we mentioned McClellan and Grant as the two poles of the American attitude towards war. The more we've mulled over this point, the more we think there is a tasty essay here. The point is simple. Empires persist because of a willingness of the citizens of the empire to endure a certain constant level of casualties in the course of maintening the empire. If we take the British empire, for instance, its expansion through numerous small wars in the nineteenth century was made possible, at home, because of a willingness to sanction an annual tribute of British lives to the ideal of maintaining and expanding the empire in India, Central Asia, and Africa. From the Sepoy Mutiny to the Boer War, this willingness was often tested, and rarely provoked the kind of backlash that would rein in the imperial ambitions of the British Government.
In contrast, the United States did not seek that kind of empire. Briefly, the U.S. embarked on an expansion at the turn of the century, but in comparison to the French, the British, and even the Germans, the American effort was relatively minor. A recent book by a Wall Street Journal writer, Max Boot, documents the many small wars that America has engaged in to shore up the idea that Empire is, indeed, in the American grain. However, more significant is the rarity of any long-term occupation resulting from those wars. Occupation means more than soldiers being stationed in a place -- it means the gradual transfer of a whole administrative apparatus. This was the backbone of the British empire, but only the Phillipines, and, briefly, Cuba, tempted the Americans to do likewise. There's a reason for that: while Americans have traditionally shyed away from situations that involve attrition over the long term. It is that reflex which dooms the imperial project.
It is not that Americans are averse to bloodshed. While the British were constructing their empire out of multitudinous border wars, Americans did endure, in the Civil War, violence of a much more concentrated and horrific kind. And in the twentieth century, the U.S. engagement in World War I and II also saw committment to wars which were comparable, in terms of casualties, to any of the participants. However, I think the pattern of American behavior is more normally represented by the Korean and Vietnam war. In both wars, the reality of high casualties and the expectation that optimal victory would exact more of the same had a determining effect on the American conduct of the war. General Westmoreland once said, famously, that more American lives were lost on the highways during the sixties than were lost in the Vietnam war. This was taken, and should be taken, to be a callous statement. Nevertheless, the callousness it reflects is necessary for any sustained imperial effort. There are no painless empires.
This American pattern is often ignored by American policy makers. The latest example is the kind of ambitious policy in the Middle East being promoted by the circle around Paul Wolfiwitz. According to this circle, America is, in reality, an empire. So using that imperial power, we can remake social and political situations that we don't like in our image. The language of empire now fills our foreign policy journals, as well as conservative weeklies. The opposition to the Bush administration's aggressive plans in the Middle East has concentrated mainly on the cost of war in the narrow sense -- the cost, that is, of invading and defeating Iraq. However, the real question is about the cost of the war in the larger sense -- the cost of exposing an occupying force to the constant attrition of a guerilla war, and to the unexpected violence of factional conflict. This is where the imperial model has failed in the recent past, from Saigon to Somalia. Empires require some legitimation that goes beyond the mere aggrandizement of power. Americans have never accepted any legitimation, over the long run, except national defense. Neither glory nor ideology have garnered American support for a war.
To explain the paradox of American power -- that combination of a high level of military spending with a low level of acceptable risk -- I believe this, it is useful to use McClellan and Grant to represent the two poles of the American dialectic. Both McClellan and Grant started from the same premise: the prerequisite to fighting a war was amassing a force disproportionately greater than the enemy's. However, while the strategic premise was the same, the tactics were much different. McClellan Civil War career has become infamous for the chances he refused to take. He was tender for the lives of his men. It was a this caution that doomed his Virginia campaign of 1862. As one private wrote, "We are at a loss to imagine whether this is strategy or defeat." (Gallagher)
Grant's tactics were very different. He used the advantage of a more numerous army to raise the level of casualties he would accept. This made it possible to continue inflicting casualties on the enemy in a more prolonged way than was ever seen before, in the campaign. The general stress broke the army of Northern Virginia. It is easy to forget that Grant's ultimate success was preceded by general shock at the the bloodletting he was prepared to countenance -- a shock that so shook the Union side that Lincoln, in the middle of the election campaign of 1864, thought he was going to lose. Grant's position was made plain in a telegram Sherman, with whom he was in perfect agreement, sent to Halleck, one of the incompetent Union commanders, after Vicksburg:
``War is upon us, none can deny it. It is not the choice of the Government of the United States, but of a faction; the Government was forced to accept the issue, or to submit to a degradation fatal and disgraceful to all the inhabitants. In accepting war, it should be `pure and simple' as applied to the belligerents. I would keep it so, till all traces of the war are effaced; till those who appealed to it are sick and tired of it, and come to the emblem of our nation, and sue for peace. I would not coax them, or even meet them half-way, but make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it....
This is the kind of language spoken by legendary American commanders, like Sherman, Grant, Patton and Macarthur. The words are stirring. We shouldn't be deluded, however, into thinking that the feelings are typical. McClellan's caution has never been submerged by Grant's boldness in the mix of American foreign policy and military strategy. In fact, it is the McClellan pole that drives the fundamental US military strategy of the moment: replacing the manpower of battle with military technology. The goal is to achieve Grant's objective with McClellan's tenderness for American life. This works in the case of those military engagements that can be decided solely by weaponry. However, occupation is, by definition, not one of those strategies. In fact, by raising the optimistic vision of a bloodless (at least for our side) war, it prepares the guerillas advantage -- blows struck against the occupying forces will be illogically magnified because they are judged against the background of a military technical utopia.
The best argument against the imperial design of the Wolfiwitzes is to appeal to the reality of this American pattern, in which the cost of an enterprise is judged rigidly against the benefit it brings. The benefit brought by regime change in Iraq is obvious -- but the benefit wrought by invading and occupying Iraq is not. The landscape, as it appears to D.C. foreign policy honchos, is one of overwhelming American power. But the landscape since 9/11 has changed. Guerillas may not possess nuclear missiles, but they can forge the weapons of mass destruction out of boxcutters and American airliners. in treating Iraq as though it were merely a problem amenable to a Grant-like solution, we are putting ourselves into a situation in which all alternatives are impalatable. Assuming that 9/11, and the suicide bombers in Israel, are omens of things to come, the occupying U.S. forces in Iraq will be subject to the constant low attrition of guerilla warfare, with its morale breaking concomitants: a desire to strike blows against a dispersed enemy driving general dispersed acts of mayhem against the native population, which in turn creates mutual distrust between American forces and the native population, which in turn creates a gap between the ostensible reasons for the American presence (that they somehow 'represent' the aspirations of the native people) and the reality of it. Bush is edging into a situation in which the choices will be an unacceptable withdrawal from Iraq, and an unacceptable occupation of Iraq.
This situation should look familiar. It is Vietnam.
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