Bollettino
There�s a story in today�s NYT about the trial that is replaying the Daimler Benz takeover of Chrysler . LI wrote a review of a book about that deal, so we take some interest and have some views. That the then CEO of Chrysler, a non-descript little egoist named Robert Eaton who basically resented the very smart crew of car designers and marketers that made Chrysler hot in the early nineties is going to have to testify about the inner workings of the thing will satisfy business watchers the way, say, forcing Iago to testify would have satisfied spectators in Venice. Kirk Kerkorian is the animating force behind the suit. Interestingly, Kerkorian wanted, in the early nineties, to take Chrysler private. He thought that the company had accumulated too much cash on hand � about eight billion dollars � and could pay out more to investors. Kerkorian is not our kind of guy � another sleazy billionaire buyout artist � but there was something to his offer. Unfortunately, he saddled the offer with the very unpopular notion that Chrysler should recall Lee Iacocca. Nobody thought Iacocca was a good idea � he was roundly disliked at Chrysler.
We were attracted by the end grafs, which compared the trial to a former trial.
�So who won one of the last times such titans met?
The Dodge brothers. They sued Henry Ford because he had cut Ford Motor's dividends and used the money to invest in new plants. The Dodges, who then owned about 10 percent of Ford, wanted to use the proceeds to finance an auto company bearing their name. Mr. Ford argued in court that business was about more than enriching shareholders, but about creating jobs and making products at a decent price.
"Ford lost," said Mr. Lewis, the historian. "On the other hand, he gained tremendously in public popularity."
The Dodge brothers built their own company, now a division of DaimlerChrysler.�
In the Automotive News this June, there was a little story about that trial which does a better job of talking about what the result of it was than to submerge it into the baby fat of celebrity culture (he gained tremendously in public popularity indeed). It is an interesting trial, because it exposed the historical dynamic that was operating to render the personally run corporation obsolete � the dynamic that led to what Veblen called absentee ownership.
The personal context of the trial was a Dreiser-like situation:
�The lawsuit represented bare-knuckle business brawling carried out with civilized tools. It was filed the day after Edsel Ford's wedding to Eleanor Clay; the Dodges had been guests at the reception. The lawsuit eventually put Henry Ford on the witness stand where canny lawyers made him look foolish. His beliefs in the way business was supposed to work were savaged and ridiculed.
Henry Ford was hurt by the accusations of cheating, but most of all, the Dodge lawsuit launched Ford's successful quest to bring ownership entirely within the family.�
Ford, losing the suit, responded with a two stage strategy. First, he resigned as President, leaving that office to Edsel Ford. Then he let it be known he was going to start a rival auto company. That fluttered all the hens in all the roosts of Detroit. The strategy abutted in a plan to buy out Dodge and other shareholders. Edsel�s independent board of directors was swept away. But this apparent victory over the trend towards the absentee run firm put Ford�s management in the hands of a man who could no longer manage the company: Henry Ford.
�On July 11, [1919] the Ford stock purchase deal was completed for a reported $106 million, $75 million of it borrowed from New York bankers. Henry, Edsel and Henry's wife, Clara, then held a total of 172,645 shares in a single, giant corporation.
Henry's moves had been successful, but his unchallenged dominance led to a strange and arbitrary management style rife with inefficiencies and damages that were not cleaned up until Henry Ford II and Ernest Breech took over.�
That we are re-playing these issues now will no doubt interest those who are wondering what direction the recent global corporate governance scandals are going to take the structure of the firm.
Friday, November 28, 2003
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Bollettino
Bush�s medicare victory, today, underscores the schizoid split in American conservative thinking. Conservatives have a way of thinkiong about the private sphere: they think of it as a place populated by agents who are rational maximizers of their self-advantage. To unduly limit this tendency, as in socialism, leads to inefficiency, bureaucracy, and eventually the horrors of totalitarianism. So, how do conservatives think about the public sphere? In the conservative utopia, these economic self-advancers are to be led by agents who pursue self-minimalization. That is, the public sphere is supposed to be full of politicians shrinking government, and, insofar as the scope of government is a measure of their own power, abdicating their own power.
Both images of action are severely distorted. The supposed atomism of agents in the economic sphere doesn�t exist, or exists only by abstracting members of collectives, like families and businesses. Furthermore, other interests � most notably, interests of identity � are as strong, in the economic sphere, as pure self-advantage. While the later can be quantified in terms of money, the former is about status, values, and feelings that give rise to various complexly qualified symbols.
Then there is the conservative incoherence about politicians. There is nothing more attacked, in the conservative discourse, than the politician � and yet, for conservatism to succeed in its ostensible goals, they need a combination politician/saint. Such creatures exist few times in a century � Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. Is it really coherent to believe that politican saints are going to govern, on a small government scale, the society in which the economic profit maximizers are rolling in opulence? The vestal virgins, we are to believe, will run the brothels, and the gates of paradise will open.
Well, there ain't any virgins on Capital Hill. The fact that government has mushroomed during the reign of Bush should come as no surprise. This time, we don�t hear any of the excuses we heard under Reagan�s terms � that is, that Congress just grew the budget, in spite of the Protestant ethic that Reagan was trying to enforce. That was a canard back then, and is now in the junkpile of forgotten excuses. The tendency of the state to grow should come as no surprise, given the intertwined interests of the Fortune 500 and the Bush campaign 500 � or the Tom Delay PAC 500. The Medicare bill is sloppy and dumb, but you know what? LI was affected by Clinton, after all. Dem senators should have voted for it. It is a platform. It can be used, in the same way that Nixon�s bureaucracies, like OSHA and the EPA, could be used.
However, that universal health care is and has been a liberal goal that this bill will, we think, bring closer doesn�t address the toxicity of the conservative incoherence in regard to spending and borrowing. The theory that Krugman has promoted, taking it from Nicolas Lehman, is that the Republicans intend to create a financial crisis that will result in a general abandonment of Government entitlement programs. I think Krugman is thinking, here, like an economist � that is, he is disregarding the difference between the conservative ideologues and the politicians. If we assume that the politicians are maximizers of their own self-advantage, we are not looking at a Master Plan � we are looking at a blind refusal to face up to the difference between rhetoric and reality. A better model for Republican politics than the Manchurian Candidate is the stock market boom of 2000. It is a politics of the Greater fool.
Bush�s medicare victory, today, underscores the schizoid split in American conservative thinking. Conservatives have a way of thinkiong about the private sphere: they think of it as a place populated by agents who are rational maximizers of their self-advantage. To unduly limit this tendency, as in socialism, leads to inefficiency, bureaucracy, and eventually the horrors of totalitarianism. So, how do conservatives think about the public sphere? In the conservative utopia, these economic self-advancers are to be led by agents who pursue self-minimalization. That is, the public sphere is supposed to be full of politicians shrinking government, and, insofar as the scope of government is a measure of their own power, abdicating their own power.
Both images of action are severely distorted. The supposed atomism of agents in the economic sphere doesn�t exist, or exists only by abstracting members of collectives, like families and businesses. Furthermore, other interests � most notably, interests of identity � are as strong, in the economic sphere, as pure self-advantage. While the later can be quantified in terms of money, the former is about status, values, and feelings that give rise to various complexly qualified symbols.
Then there is the conservative incoherence about politicians. There is nothing more attacked, in the conservative discourse, than the politician � and yet, for conservatism to succeed in its ostensible goals, they need a combination politician/saint. Such creatures exist few times in a century � Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. Is it really coherent to believe that politican saints are going to govern, on a small government scale, the society in which the economic profit maximizers are rolling in opulence? The vestal virgins, we are to believe, will run the brothels, and the gates of paradise will open.
Well, there ain't any virgins on Capital Hill. The fact that government has mushroomed during the reign of Bush should come as no surprise. This time, we don�t hear any of the excuses we heard under Reagan�s terms � that is, that Congress just grew the budget, in spite of the Protestant ethic that Reagan was trying to enforce. That was a canard back then, and is now in the junkpile of forgotten excuses. The tendency of the state to grow should come as no surprise, given the intertwined interests of the Fortune 500 and the Bush campaign 500 � or the Tom Delay PAC 500. The Medicare bill is sloppy and dumb, but you know what? LI was affected by Clinton, after all. Dem senators should have voted for it. It is a platform. It can be used, in the same way that Nixon�s bureaucracies, like OSHA and the EPA, could be used.
However, that universal health care is and has been a liberal goal that this bill will, we think, bring closer doesn�t address the toxicity of the conservative incoherence in regard to spending and borrowing. The theory that Krugman has promoted, taking it from Nicolas Lehman, is that the Republicans intend to create a financial crisis that will result in a general abandonment of Government entitlement programs. I think Krugman is thinking, here, like an economist � that is, he is disregarding the difference between the conservative ideologues and the politicians. If we assume that the politicians are maximizers of their own self-advantage, we are not looking at a Master Plan � we are looking at a blind refusal to face up to the difference between rhetoric and reality. A better model for Republican politics than the Manchurian Candidate is the stock market boom of 2000. It is a politics of the Greater fool.
Bollettino
On August 31, we wrote about the sleazy, backscratching connection between Boeing and the Defense Department, with Darleen Druyun, who eased from the Pentagon to Boeing, leaving a trail of slime behind her, being the center of a controversy about Boeing's greedy lease to buy scheme. Yesterday, she was fired. Here are two grafs from the NYT article:
"Ms. Druyun, who was vice president and deputy general manager of the company's missile-defense business, is also being investigated by the Defense Department's inspector general over accusations that she gave proprietary financial data to Boeing about a competing aerial tanker bid from Airbus while she was still an Air Force official. She joined Boeing last January after having resigned from the Pentagon as a deputy assistant secretary the previous November.
"Boeing's action can be seen as an indication that it wants to get ahead of any government investigation into its actions and polish an image that has already been tarnished. In July, the Air Force withheld $1 billion in rocket launching contracts from Boeing and barred it from that business for 60 to 90 days after determining that the company had illegally acquired thousands of pages of proprietary documents belonging to the rival Lockheed Martin Corporation. It was the stiffest punishment imposed on any major military contractor in decades."
On August 31, we wrote about the sleazy, backscratching connection between Boeing and the Defense Department, with Darleen Druyun, who eased from the Pentagon to Boeing, leaving a trail of slime behind her, being the center of a controversy about Boeing's greedy lease to buy scheme. Yesterday, she was fired. Here are two grafs from the NYT article:
"Ms. Druyun, who was vice president and deputy general manager of the company's missile-defense business, is also being investigated by the Defense Department's inspector general over accusations that she gave proprietary financial data to Boeing about a competing aerial tanker bid from Airbus while she was still an Air Force official. She joined Boeing last January after having resigned from the Pentagon as a deputy assistant secretary the previous November.
"Boeing's action can be seen as an indication that it wants to get ahead of any government investigation into its actions and polish an image that has already been tarnished. In July, the Air Force withheld $1 billion in rocket launching contracts from Boeing and barred it from that business for 60 to 90 days after determining that the company had illegally acquired thousands of pages of proprietary documents belonging to the rival Lockheed Martin Corporation. It was the stiffest punishment imposed on any major military contractor in decades."
Monday, November 24, 2003
Bollettino
Last week, LI suffered from a runny nose, sneezing, fever, and headache. The usual. LI is allergic to something in Austin, as are most people who live in Austin. It is a cyclical thing: for me, October and March are bad times. There�s mold, cedar pollen, ragweed. Supposedly, cedar trees shed pollen when the temperature suddenly changes. I have to navigate with a bloodstream full of whatever is released from the cheap antihistamines I buy into my bloodstream when the temperature suddenly changes. The bitch of this is, the core bitch of this is, that autumn is the prettiest time in Austin. The skies are big and blue, the temperature is mild, the wind picks up in the morning, there�s an ache outside the window that makes you want to not be inside � and then to be sneezing violently throughout this. It seems so grossly unfair.
The Bulletin of the History of Medicine, everybody�s favorite journal, has an article in the Summer issue by Gregg Mitman on how, in the late nineteenth century, allergy sufferers among the upper classes would vacation in allergy free zones, like mountains. Allergy, mountain resorts, and the money to stay in them forms the nexus he examines in Hay Fever Holiday, Health, Leisure and place in Gilded Age America.
We went from Milman�s article, which names John Bostock as the first person to identify hay fever, on a search for information about this Bostock. Bostock rang no bells. So we looked up a Lancet article from 1993, which had some very interesting information about Bostock. Apparently, the kind of catarrhal dysfunction suffered by Bostock was very rare in the early nineteenth century. Bostock came from North England � significantly, one of the early zones of industrialization. The Lancet author uses Bostock, who believed his �summer colds� were temperature related, and another Northern English doctor, Charles Blackley:
�Bostock did not relate his condition to pollen but believed that its seasonal incidence was due to physical factors, possibly temperature. Charles Blackley, a physician in Manchester who also suffered from hay fever, collected some grass pollen in the summer and stored it in a bottle until the middle of the winter. He then removed the top of the bottle and inhaled the pollen. This immediately caused an acute attack with streaming eyes, running nose, and sneezing. This simple and elegant exeriment proved that hay fever was a sensitivity to pollen.
"These historical facts raise the question as to why the first accounts of hay fever and its mechanism came from two physicians from the north-west of England--which was at that time very far removed from the centres of medical excellence and academia such as London, Edinburgh, Paris, and Berlin. To this may be added the question as to why hay fever first appeared at the beginning of the 19th century. The most likely answer to both these questions relates to a third question--was there anything special about the north of England at the beginning of the 19th century? The obvious answer is the Industrial Revolution which began in this area and led to massive chemical pollution for the first time in human history. Chronic chemical damage to the nasal mucosa would facilitate the entry of pollen antigens, leading to immunological sensitisation.
"According to our current understanding hay fever is due to an allergy to pollen in sensitive subjects. The allergic or sensitivity state is manifested by a high IgE which is probably inherited as an autosomal dominant on chromosome 11q.(n8) This explanation does not, however, explain the rarity of the condition before 1800 or its greatly increased prevalence since; grass has been a feature of the landscape for many thousands of years. A genetic mutation leading to a raised IgE could not be the explanation because a mutation in 1800 could not spread to 10% of the population in less than 200 years. This paradox only becomes explicable if chemical pollution is entered into the equation, coincident with the Industrial Revolution in about 1800.
"Work in laboratory animals points to an interaction between allergens and pollutants such as SO2, NO2, O3, and vehicle exhausts. Thus exposure of guineapigs to ozone at 5 parts per million increases the likelihood of sensitisation and anaphylaxis after inhalation of an albumen aerosol.(n10) Intraperitoneal sensitisation of mice to Japanese cedar pollen occurs with concurrent administration of diesel exhaust-particles but not without��
Another fine mess this industrial revolution has gotten us into! Odd, really, that we put up with so much unnecessary misery in this civilization, all for the sake of our petro fix. Sneezers of the world, unite! You have nothing to loose but your prescriptions for stronger anti-histamines! Ratify that Kyoto treaty!
Last week, LI suffered from a runny nose, sneezing, fever, and headache. The usual. LI is allergic to something in Austin, as are most people who live in Austin. It is a cyclical thing: for me, October and March are bad times. There�s mold, cedar pollen, ragweed. Supposedly, cedar trees shed pollen when the temperature suddenly changes. I have to navigate with a bloodstream full of whatever is released from the cheap antihistamines I buy into my bloodstream when the temperature suddenly changes. The bitch of this is, the core bitch of this is, that autumn is the prettiest time in Austin. The skies are big and blue, the temperature is mild, the wind picks up in the morning, there�s an ache outside the window that makes you want to not be inside � and then to be sneezing violently throughout this. It seems so grossly unfair.
The Bulletin of the History of Medicine, everybody�s favorite journal, has an article in the Summer issue by Gregg Mitman on how, in the late nineteenth century, allergy sufferers among the upper classes would vacation in allergy free zones, like mountains. Allergy, mountain resorts, and the money to stay in them forms the nexus he examines in Hay Fever Holiday, Health, Leisure and place in Gilded Age America.
We went from Milman�s article, which names John Bostock as the first person to identify hay fever, on a search for information about this Bostock. Bostock rang no bells. So we looked up a Lancet article from 1993, which had some very interesting information about Bostock. Apparently, the kind of catarrhal dysfunction suffered by Bostock was very rare in the early nineteenth century. Bostock came from North England � significantly, one of the early zones of industrialization. The Lancet author uses Bostock, who believed his �summer colds� were temperature related, and another Northern English doctor, Charles Blackley:
�Bostock did not relate his condition to pollen but believed that its seasonal incidence was due to physical factors, possibly temperature. Charles Blackley, a physician in Manchester who also suffered from hay fever, collected some grass pollen in the summer and stored it in a bottle until the middle of the winter. He then removed the top of the bottle and inhaled the pollen. This immediately caused an acute attack with streaming eyes, running nose, and sneezing. This simple and elegant exeriment proved that hay fever was a sensitivity to pollen.
"These historical facts raise the question as to why the first accounts of hay fever and its mechanism came from two physicians from the north-west of England--which was at that time very far removed from the centres of medical excellence and academia such as London, Edinburgh, Paris, and Berlin. To this may be added the question as to why hay fever first appeared at the beginning of the 19th century. The most likely answer to both these questions relates to a third question--was there anything special about the north of England at the beginning of the 19th century? The obvious answer is the Industrial Revolution which began in this area and led to massive chemical pollution for the first time in human history. Chronic chemical damage to the nasal mucosa would facilitate the entry of pollen antigens, leading to immunological sensitisation.
"According to our current understanding hay fever is due to an allergy to pollen in sensitive subjects. The allergic or sensitivity state is manifested by a high IgE which is probably inherited as an autosomal dominant on chromosome 11q.(n8) This explanation does not, however, explain the rarity of the condition before 1800 or its greatly increased prevalence since; grass has been a feature of the landscape for many thousands of years. A genetic mutation leading to a raised IgE could not be the explanation because a mutation in 1800 could not spread to 10% of the population in less than 200 years. This paradox only becomes explicable if chemical pollution is entered into the equation, coincident with the Industrial Revolution in about 1800.
"Work in laboratory animals points to an interaction between allergens and pollutants such as SO2, NO2, O3, and vehicle exhausts. Thus exposure of guineapigs to ozone at 5 parts per million increases the likelihood of sensitisation and anaphylaxis after inhalation of an albumen aerosol.(n10) Intraperitoneal sensitisation of mice to Japanese cedar pollen occurs with concurrent administration of diesel exhaust-particles but not without��
Another fine mess this industrial revolution has gotten us into! Odd, really, that we put up with so much unnecessary misery in this civilization, all for the sake of our petro fix. Sneezers of the world, unite! You have nothing to loose but your prescriptions for stronger anti-histamines! Ratify that Kyoto treaty!
Bollettino
The Washington Post�s Sally Quinn profiles Ahmed Chalabi with the affection of a true D.C. insider. It is a profile that is heavy on the names of other D.C. insiders. As for the Iraqis, who are presumably going to be gifted, in Quinn�s opinion, with this amusing dinner guest, they don�t receive much mention. Quinn, of course, has the racism and snobbery inherent to her fragile hold on a doyenne�s position in what is, after all, an outrageously provincial town. The Post�s Style section belies the fact that the town has none. Hence for Quinn, the crucial question is who has the table manners. Being a hostess has given her an eye for these things. The Chalabis know how to use the salad forks � and can be forgiven for pocketing a few, especially if their pocketing is mostly confined to odious foreign money, Jordanians and whatnot. But as for the Iraqis, why, they just can�t be allowed to rule themselves. I mean, it is a look what the dogs brought in situation, mon cher. Here, for instance, is Quinn�s tres amusante description of a Council Member, Zebari, who obviously lacks Chalabi�s training in American table manners. In fact, Zebari brings out in Quinn those oily metaphors from her childhood that have died, in other places in this country, fifty years ago. The greasy Mexican, the wog, the buck nigger enjoying his melon � these are the figures that populate Quinn�s cramped mental space:
�After the Biden visit there is no time for a long lunch that Chalabi had planned, so it is decided that the Senate dining room will have to do. Both Chalabi and Zebari tuck their napkins into their collars. Zebari is fat and nervous, with eyes that dart around as if he can't believe he's here meeting with all these important people. Pachachi, on the other hand is tall, white-haired and elegant, with Old World manners, well traveled and totally comfortable in the corridors of power. According to Sethna, they've been worried about whether Zebari will know how to handle himself. "We're keeping our fingers crossed," says Sethna. "The foreign minister is new to this. He's not good in meetings with the senators."
It is clear that Zebari is not ready for prime time. After devouring his lunch, he has so many grease spots on his suit that he looks like he's had a head-on collision with a jar of olive oil. And this is before the White House meeting with Rice.�
The article is peppered with the usual WP habit of covering Iraq with complete inaccuracy. Quinn, for instance, quotes some poll about Chalabi�s popularity among Iraqis without bothering to source it, or consider the, uh, shall we say problem with taking polls in a war zone. And the article ends with a phone interview with Chalabi that is quite funny. Quinn, throwing in a novelistic patch, has earlier remarked that Chalabi lowers his eyebrows when he makes a self-flattering remark. Forgetting that she has just introed her penultimate grafs with: At midnight on Wednesday, after the U.S. reversal on the timing of sovereignty, Ahmed Chalabi was a happy man. "We made a deal," he exulted in a phone call from Baghdad,� she happily throws in her little novelistic technique: �And Chalabi is definitely optimistic about the future of Iraq. "Where we were and where we have gotten now is 80 percent of the road. I've had some influence," he added, lowering his eyelids, "but it would be foolish for one person to take the credit."
One wonders: does Chalabi say the last bit with a Peter Lorre accent?
Do read the article � it is such an unerring and unconscious parody of D.C.�s current radical right chic.
The Washington Post�s Sally Quinn profiles Ahmed Chalabi with the affection of a true D.C. insider. It is a profile that is heavy on the names of other D.C. insiders. As for the Iraqis, who are presumably going to be gifted, in Quinn�s opinion, with this amusing dinner guest, they don�t receive much mention. Quinn, of course, has the racism and snobbery inherent to her fragile hold on a doyenne�s position in what is, after all, an outrageously provincial town. The Post�s Style section belies the fact that the town has none. Hence for Quinn, the crucial question is who has the table manners. Being a hostess has given her an eye for these things. The Chalabis know how to use the salad forks � and can be forgiven for pocketing a few, especially if their pocketing is mostly confined to odious foreign money, Jordanians and whatnot. But as for the Iraqis, why, they just can�t be allowed to rule themselves. I mean, it is a look what the dogs brought in situation, mon cher. Here, for instance, is Quinn�s tres amusante description of a Council Member, Zebari, who obviously lacks Chalabi�s training in American table manners. In fact, Zebari brings out in Quinn those oily metaphors from her childhood that have died, in other places in this country, fifty years ago. The greasy Mexican, the wog, the buck nigger enjoying his melon � these are the figures that populate Quinn�s cramped mental space:
�After the Biden visit there is no time for a long lunch that Chalabi had planned, so it is decided that the Senate dining room will have to do. Both Chalabi and Zebari tuck their napkins into their collars. Zebari is fat and nervous, with eyes that dart around as if he can't believe he's here meeting with all these important people. Pachachi, on the other hand is tall, white-haired and elegant, with Old World manners, well traveled and totally comfortable in the corridors of power. According to Sethna, they've been worried about whether Zebari will know how to handle himself. "We're keeping our fingers crossed," says Sethna. "The foreign minister is new to this. He's not good in meetings with the senators."
It is clear that Zebari is not ready for prime time. After devouring his lunch, he has so many grease spots on his suit that he looks like he's had a head-on collision with a jar of olive oil. And this is before the White House meeting with Rice.�
The article is peppered with the usual WP habit of covering Iraq with complete inaccuracy. Quinn, for instance, quotes some poll about Chalabi�s popularity among Iraqis without bothering to source it, or consider the, uh, shall we say problem with taking polls in a war zone. And the article ends with a phone interview with Chalabi that is quite funny. Quinn, throwing in a novelistic patch, has earlier remarked that Chalabi lowers his eyebrows when he makes a self-flattering remark. Forgetting that she has just introed her penultimate grafs with: At midnight on Wednesday, after the U.S. reversal on the timing of sovereignty, Ahmed Chalabi was a happy man. "We made a deal," he exulted in a phone call from Baghdad,� she happily throws in her little novelistic technique: �And Chalabi is definitely optimistic about the future of Iraq. "Where we were and where we have gotten now is 80 percent of the road. I've had some influence," he added, lowering his eyelids, "but it would be foolish for one person to take the credit."
One wonders: does Chalabi say the last bit with a Peter Lorre accent?
Do read the article � it is such an unerring and unconscious parody of D.C.�s current radical right chic.
Sunday, November 23, 2003
Bollettino
George Packer is following in the footsteps of Robert Shaplen at the New Yorker. Shaplen wrote long pieces about Vietnam that every journalist read. Packer�s piece on Iraq in this week�s New Yorker is the same big picture reporting. It�s good. It�s also a bit confusing. Internal textual clues indicate that much of it was written this Summer, when the Coalition authority was doing fairly well, and it was finished off this Autumn, when that wasn�t the case. Packer takes a much more benign attitude towards the Coalition program than LI. However, it was the last couple of grafs that pinpointed our Iraq problem. Packer meets a U.N. official who was an aid to the late Sergio Vieira de Mello, killed in an explosion in September. The official warns against holding elections too soon, before the moderates can be organized.
LI is for those moderates. We�d love us some moderates. But elections aren�t about electing who you want � they are about the risk of electing who you don�t want. To think that the first elections should be rigged is, well, typical bureaucratic thinking. And, we fear, the idea working like a deathwatch beetle behind the panel of U.S. policy. What impressed me most about Packer�s reporting was not anything that was said or described, but something that Packer ignores. With an occupation that, as Packer pictures it, is so often clueless and out of touch, it is amazing that it isn�t being resisted more vigorously. It is a measure of the bankruptcy of Saddam�s Iraq that his supporters, the Ba�athists, can�t seem to take advantage of the American ineptitude. Why? Because they represent zip. They represent the pure rapacity of zip. While the Sunnis have the traditional fear of elites in unstable times, even the Sunnis know that going back to a sanction period for the sake of Saddam is unacceptable.
Unfortunately, I still don�t think the effect of the sanctions has been understood among the Americans, who view the devastation as some kind of condemnation of state-ism. The Iraqis understand very well that state-ism worked just fine in the seventies and into the eighties. That was when it stopped working fine. State-ism became aggression, which became unsustainable borrowing, which became defeat, which became sanctions. Americans are proposing a cure for the wrong disease when they make their favorite profound economic changes in Iraq. One of the ironies, here, is that these changes are going to come about, in a more moderate form, anyway, since no economy in the global system can no operate without them. Look at Iran � the student protests, recently, weren�t set off by the violations of democracy, but by the attempt to privatize some Iranian higher education.
However, by putting their greasy fingerprints all over these laws, Americans have probably increased the chance that they will be resisted or overturned.
�
Enough. Packer discovered that the Coalition Authority people were all going around reading big history books this summer. Among others, he mentioned Horne�s history of the Algerian war, which we just read. In that vein � we�ve been reading a fascinating, thick history by Philip Mansel. We highly recommend Mansel�s history of Constantinople, 1435-1923. His latest on these shores, Paris between Empires, 1814-1852, is irresistible. And it throws some light on occupations � after all, 1814 was the year the Cossacks watered their horses at fountains in Paris. We are gonna write about this in another post, soon. In the meantime, here are two grafs from the review of the book in the Economist in July, 2001. That slight British disdain for the foreigner � how it oozes through!
�You might think that writing about Paris between empires-between the fall of Napoleon I and the rise of his nephew, Napoleon III-is a slightly odd enterprise. The former made Paris the centre of European power; the latter, by transforming the city into a showpiece of modernity, turned it in the eyes of many into "the capital of the 19th century". But Philip Mansel demonstrates that Paris in decline had its peculiar attractions. As in Weimar Berlin, or Moscow and St Petersburg in the 1990s, or indeed like Paris itself in the 1950s, the collapse of power drew a picturesque crowd seeking social, artistic and financial opportunities.
From the Duke of Wellington down, the victors and their hangers-on came to spend their money on high and low adventures. Paris was cheap, so people who did not greatly count in London could make a splash. Successive French kings were anglophiles-perhaps genuinely and certainly politically-so British tourists could be courtiers for a day. The richer and more ambitious could buy splendid mansions from Napoleon's impoverished marshals and have the Comtesse Juste de Noailles draw up the guest lists for their parties.�
George Packer is following in the footsteps of Robert Shaplen at the New Yorker. Shaplen wrote long pieces about Vietnam that every journalist read. Packer�s piece on Iraq in this week�s New Yorker is the same big picture reporting. It�s good. It�s also a bit confusing. Internal textual clues indicate that much of it was written this Summer, when the Coalition authority was doing fairly well, and it was finished off this Autumn, when that wasn�t the case. Packer takes a much more benign attitude towards the Coalition program than LI. However, it was the last couple of grafs that pinpointed our Iraq problem. Packer meets a U.N. official who was an aid to the late Sergio Vieira de Mello, killed in an explosion in September. The official warns against holding elections too soon, before the moderates can be organized.
LI is for those moderates. We�d love us some moderates. But elections aren�t about electing who you want � they are about the risk of electing who you don�t want. To think that the first elections should be rigged is, well, typical bureaucratic thinking. And, we fear, the idea working like a deathwatch beetle behind the panel of U.S. policy. What impressed me most about Packer�s reporting was not anything that was said or described, but something that Packer ignores. With an occupation that, as Packer pictures it, is so often clueless and out of touch, it is amazing that it isn�t being resisted more vigorously. It is a measure of the bankruptcy of Saddam�s Iraq that his supporters, the Ba�athists, can�t seem to take advantage of the American ineptitude. Why? Because they represent zip. They represent the pure rapacity of zip. While the Sunnis have the traditional fear of elites in unstable times, even the Sunnis know that going back to a sanction period for the sake of Saddam is unacceptable.
Unfortunately, I still don�t think the effect of the sanctions has been understood among the Americans, who view the devastation as some kind of condemnation of state-ism. The Iraqis understand very well that state-ism worked just fine in the seventies and into the eighties. That was when it stopped working fine. State-ism became aggression, which became unsustainable borrowing, which became defeat, which became sanctions. Americans are proposing a cure for the wrong disease when they make their favorite profound economic changes in Iraq. One of the ironies, here, is that these changes are going to come about, in a more moderate form, anyway, since no economy in the global system can no operate without them. Look at Iran � the student protests, recently, weren�t set off by the violations of democracy, but by the attempt to privatize some Iranian higher education.
However, by putting their greasy fingerprints all over these laws, Americans have probably increased the chance that they will be resisted or overturned.
�
Enough. Packer discovered that the Coalition Authority people were all going around reading big history books this summer. Among others, he mentioned Horne�s history of the Algerian war, which we just read. In that vein � we�ve been reading a fascinating, thick history by Philip Mansel. We highly recommend Mansel�s history of Constantinople, 1435-1923. His latest on these shores, Paris between Empires, 1814-1852, is irresistible. And it throws some light on occupations � after all, 1814 was the year the Cossacks watered their horses at fountains in Paris. We are gonna write about this in another post, soon. In the meantime, here are two grafs from the review of the book in the Economist in July, 2001. That slight British disdain for the foreigner � how it oozes through!
�You might think that writing about Paris between empires-between the fall of Napoleon I and the rise of his nephew, Napoleon III-is a slightly odd enterprise. The former made Paris the centre of European power; the latter, by transforming the city into a showpiece of modernity, turned it in the eyes of many into "the capital of the 19th century". But Philip Mansel demonstrates that Paris in decline had its peculiar attractions. As in Weimar Berlin, or Moscow and St Petersburg in the 1990s, or indeed like Paris itself in the 1950s, the collapse of power drew a picturesque crowd seeking social, artistic and financial opportunities.
From the Duke of Wellington down, the victors and their hangers-on came to spend their money on high and low adventures. Paris was cheap, so people who did not greatly count in London could make a splash. Successive French kings were anglophiles-perhaps genuinely and certainly politically-so British tourists could be courtiers for a day. The richer and more ambitious could buy splendid mansions from Napoleon's impoverished marshals and have the Comtesse Juste de Noailles draw up the guest lists for their parties.�
Friday, November 21, 2003
Bollettino
There�s a story in the WSJ on Kazakhstan. It provides an ironic commentary on the supposed Bush agenda of Democracy in the Middle East.
The WSJ is bullish on Kazakhstan. �For the U.S. -- and investors such as ChevronTexaco Corp., Exxon Mobil Corp. and AES Corp. -- Kazakhstan offers stability in a Central Asian region worried by the kind of Islamist fundamentalism that spawned Afghanistan's Taliban and local terrorist groups.� The figures look good:. �The economy has grown 10% a year since 2000, and a Norway-style national fund to save oil income has built up reserves of $3 billion, about 10% of GNP. A rickety banking sector has been tidied up into what the IMF calls "an independent and transparent financial system." Inflation is a steady 6%; reserves have grown to make Kazakhstan a net creditor to the world, with the highest per capita private bank deposits in the former Soviet Union.�
But there is the little problem of the man who runs Kazakhstan, President Nursultan Nazarbayev. As Hugh Pope, the writer of the article, notes further down from the optimistic grafs:
�Kazakhstan is still the kind of place where militiamen can force a planeload of passengers on a regular internal flight to stand outside for five hours in the snow with no explanation. A number of journalists who have stepped out of line with criticism of the regime have been beaten, jailed and, in one case, sent the headless body of a dog. Yet there are few problems with Islamist fundamentalists in Kazakhstan, which is half-Muslim and half-Christian. Mr. Nazarbayev attributes the lack of religious strife to the nomad Kazakhs' relatively late adoption of Islam.
Meanwhile, scandals have clouded the country's economic success. Mr. Nazarbayev said he "paid no attention" to a recent U.S. indictment of his former American adviser on oil deals, investment banker James H. Giffen, who allegedly directed a bribery scheme. U.S. prosecutors also are looking into $78 million paid by oil majors into Swiss bank accounts, including one in the president's name. "American companies should be grateful [to Giffen] because he brought them to Kazakhstan," Mr. Nazarbayev said.�
Dariga, Nazarbayev�s daughter, has founded a political party. Daddy has pledged to leave office in 2010, and Dariga looks set to take over. The usual thing. We loved Nazarbayev�s comment about the issue: �We prefer that [the succession] will happen as in the Bush family."
Funny � Wolfowitz doesn�t seem to be on the case, here. We expect any moment now he�s going to challenge the country to develop a robust civil society and kick the nepotists out.
EuroAsia net has an article about the latest doings of the Nazarbayevs by a journalist who, for some reason (probably having to do with an aversion to headless dogs) prefers to remain pseudonymous.
�
LI was pleased to hear from a man we quoted this week � Jay Bergman, over at Central Connecticut. We wrote about his article on how Trotsky was misled by his penchant for a particular historical analogy. Dr. Bergman wrote us to say that he was glad we liked it.
There�s a story in the WSJ on Kazakhstan. It provides an ironic commentary on the supposed Bush agenda of Democracy in the Middle East.
The WSJ is bullish on Kazakhstan. �For the U.S. -- and investors such as ChevronTexaco Corp., Exxon Mobil Corp. and AES Corp. -- Kazakhstan offers stability in a Central Asian region worried by the kind of Islamist fundamentalism that spawned Afghanistan's Taliban and local terrorist groups.� The figures look good:. �The economy has grown 10% a year since 2000, and a Norway-style national fund to save oil income has built up reserves of $3 billion, about 10% of GNP. A rickety banking sector has been tidied up into what the IMF calls "an independent and transparent financial system." Inflation is a steady 6%; reserves have grown to make Kazakhstan a net creditor to the world, with the highest per capita private bank deposits in the former Soviet Union.�
But there is the little problem of the man who runs Kazakhstan, President Nursultan Nazarbayev. As Hugh Pope, the writer of the article, notes further down from the optimistic grafs:
�Kazakhstan is still the kind of place where militiamen can force a planeload of passengers on a regular internal flight to stand outside for five hours in the snow with no explanation. A number of journalists who have stepped out of line with criticism of the regime have been beaten, jailed and, in one case, sent the headless body of a dog. Yet there are few problems with Islamist fundamentalists in Kazakhstan, which is half-Muslim and half-Christian. Mr. Nazarbayev attributes the lack of religious strife to the nomad Kazakhs' relatively late adoption of Islam.
Meanwhile, scandals have clouded the country's economic success. Mr. Nazarbayev said he "paid no attention" to a recent U.S. indictment of his former American adviser on oil deals, investment banker James H. Giffen, who allegedly directed a bribery scheme. U.S. prosecutors also are looking into $78 million paid by oil majors into Swiss bank accounts, including one in the president's name. "American companies should be grateful [to Giffen] because he brought them to Kazakhstan," Mr. Nazarbayev said.�
Dariga, Nazarbayev�s daughter, has founded a political party. Daddy has pledged to leave office in 2010, and Dariga looks set to take over. The usual thing. We loved Nazarbayev�s comment about the issue: �We prefer that [the succession] will happen as in the Bush family."
Funny � Wolfowitz doesn�t seem to be on the case, here. We expect any moment now he�s going to challenge the country to develop a robust civil society and kick the nepotists out.
EuroAsia net has an article about the latest doings of the Nazarbayevs by a journalist who, for some reason (probably having to do with an aversion to headless dogs) prefers to remain pseudonymous.
�
LI was pleased to hear from a man we quoted this week � Jay Bergman, over at Central Connecticut. We wrote about his article on how Trotsky was misled by his penchant for a particular historical analogy. Dr. Bergman wrote us to say that he was glad we liked it.
Thursday, November 20, 2003
Bollettino
In the NYT today, there is a story with the news that � gosh! � a democratic Iraq will probably reflect the fact that the Shi�ites hold a 60% majority in the country. I guess D.C.�s best and brightest got out the encyclopedia. While such coming to grips with reality, while belated, is welcome, the inevitable response of the ideologues in the Pentagon is to weave this into their favorite bed-time story: the one in which Chalabi, friend of Douglas Feith and staunch advocate of making Iraq into a little Chili, is elected, or somewhat elected, prime minister, or something like prime minister, in Iraq. The persistence of this fantasy is one of the wonders of the world, at the moment. In the Daily Telegraph, there is an article by David Frum, who is going to be covering Bush�s visit (one wonders why they didn�t just chose Laura Bush) who regales his readers with a comic litany about the influence of Blair on Bush. Frum has a double purpose: to claim that Blair is no poodle, and to exonerate Bush by blaming the Brits for every bit of the current bungle in Iraq. It is funny to see the two imperatives struggle with each other. But of course, Chalabi figures in this cartoon epic as, once again, Iraq�s Churchill (not DeGaulle � no French, please):
�The second reason for the misperception of Britain's place in the alliance is that the bad consequences of the policies advocated by the Blair Government have convinced many British leaders that the less said about them, the better. There was only ever one possible provisional government for Iraq: the Iraqi National Congress led by Ahmed Chalabi. Important sections of the US government - the State Department, the CIA - disliked Dr Chalabi for petty bureaucratic reasons of their own. The yearning of the British Government for an Iraqi Mubarak or Musharraf - a Western-oriented strongman backed by military power - lent extra force to the anti-INC faction. But because there was no plausible alternative to the INC, British advice helped bring the coalition to a point where six months after the fall of the dictator, Iraqis perceive themselves to be ruled without their consent by an English-speaking proconsul.�
There you go. Ahmed, with his black shirted militia, was about to be crowned by adoring Baghdadi crowds (who were all set to pull him, with maximum ardor and enthusiasm, out of Uday�s mansion, which he�d taken over in Baghdad), when the Brits, those wily anti-democratic foxes, persuaded Bush to avert this divinely appointed consummation.
This kind of fantasizing is what should be hit, and hit again, by the opposition. People on the right are always asking where the signs are condemning Saddam Hussein. Uh, well guys, if you want to make some signs and join the demonstrators, go right ahead. But LI wonders why the protestors aren�t taking up the occupation challenge � why they aren�t demonstrating for Democracy, now in Iraq. That means � don�t use this time as an excuse to impose insupportable economic policies on Iraq. Nor to impose exiles who, as we can pretty much guess by this time, have no constituencies in the country.
LI�s guess is that there must be a plan circulating around in the swamps of the Pentagon outlining how they could run Chalabi the way we ran the Christian Democrats in Italy in 49. To counter the threat of the Commies, secret money flowed into the campaign of 49, and a lot of deals were brokered, including, notoriously, deals with the mafia. Italy has suffered from that post-war effort ever since.
�
LI recommends the Sunday Times (London) article on Baghdad by Simon Jenkins. Jenkins makes the common sense point that opposing the war doesn�t mean supporting an immediate pull out of the troops. It does mean getting serious about monitoring the American occupation there. Here are a few grafs:
�Baghdad's greatest scenic asset must be Saddam's Republican Palace, now headquarters of the Coalition boss, Paul Bremer. Its sprawling site some three miles round lies in the heart of town, like Beijing's Forbidden City or the Bourbons' Louvre. Villas sit amid lawns, canals and eucalyptus groves. In the palace itself the great ballroom is now offices and the astonishing throne room with its "Scud murals" has become a chapel. The whole enclave should have been donated to the people of Baghdad when Saddam fell. Instead the Americans are laying down concrete car parks, chopping down trees and building a perimeter "Baghdad Wall". It is sad.�
And this is the end of his report, about the prisons in Iraq:
�Inside the prison is supposedly the son of a college lecturer, Omar Hamodi. He was last seen in June at a Baghdad wedding where guests fired into the air in traditional salute. A passing, jumpy American patrol seized the first three boys it could catch. One was Omar, despite another boy admitting to the soldiers that he alone had fired the shots.
Omar's parents later heard that he was in a prison far to the south in the port of Um Qasr. He was then transferred as prisoner No 116417 to Abu Ghraib, where he has been for three months.
� Omar's parents are educated Iraqis and no supporters of Saddam Hussein. They are simply appalled that an occupier proclaiming "freedom and democracy" should treat an innocent boy in this way. �
Abu Ghraib is becoming Iraq's Guantanamo Bay. I only hope that someone hunkered down in the Republican Palace might read this, and return prisoner No 116417 to his mother.�
In the NYT today, there is a story with the news that � gosh! � a democratic Iraq will probably reflect the fact that the Shi�ites hold a 60% majority in the country. I guess D.C.�s best and brightest got out the encyclopedia. While such coming to grips with reality, while belated, is welcome, the inevitable response of the ideologues in the Pentagon is to weave this into their favorite bed-time story: the one in which Chalabi, friend of Douglas Feith and staunch advocate of making Iraq into a little Chili, is elected, or somewhat elected, prime minister, or something like prime minister, in Iraq. The persistence of this fantasy is one of the wonders of the world, at the moment. In the Daily Telegraph, there is an article by David Frum, who is going to be covering Bush�s visit (one wonders why they didn�t just chose Laura Bush) who regales his readers with a comic litany about the influence of Blair on Bush. Frum has a double purpose: to claim that Blair is no poodle, and to exonerate Bush by blaming the Brits for every bit of the current bungle in Iraq. It is funny to see the two imperatives struggle with each other. But of course, Chalabi figures in this cartoon epic as, once again, Iraq�s Churchill (not DeGaulle � no French, please):
�The second reason for the misperception of Britain's place in the alliance is that the bad consequences of the policies advocated by the Blair Government have convinced many British leaders that the less said about them, the better. There was only ever one possible provisional government for Iraq: the Iraqi National Congress led by Ahmed Chalabi. Important sections of the US government - the State Department, the CIA - disliked Dr Chalabi for petty bureaucratic reasons of their own. The yearning of the British Government for an Iraqi Mubarak or Musharraf - a Western-oriented strongman backed by military power - lent extra force to the anti-INC faction. But because there was no plausible alternative to the INC, British advice helped bring the coalition to a point where six months after the fall of the dictator, Iraqis perceive themselves to be ruled without their consent by an English-speaking proconsul.�
There you go. Ahmed, with his black shirted militia, was about to be crowned by adoring Baghdadi crowds (who were all set to pull him, with maximum ardor and enthusiasm, out of Uday�s mansion, which he�d taken over in Baghdad), when the Brits, those wily anti-democratic foxes, persuaded Bush to avert this divinely appointed consummation.
This kind of fantasizing is what should be hit, and hit again, by the opposition. People on the right are always asking where the signs are condemning Saddam Hussein. Uh, well guys, if you want to make some signs and join the demonstrators, go right ahead. But LI wonders why the protestors aren�t taking up the occupation challenge � why they aren�t demonstrating for Democracy, now in Iraq. That means � don�t use this time as an excuse to impose insupportable economic policies on Iraq. Nor to impose exiles who, as we can pretty much guess by this time, have no constituencies in the country.
LI�s guess is that there must be a plan circulating around in the swamps of the Pentagon outlining how they could run Chalabi the way we ran the Christian Democrats in Italy in 49. To counter the threat of the Commies, secret money flowed into the campaign of 49, and a lot of deals were brokered, including, notoriously, deals with the mafia. Italy has suffered from that post-war effort ever since.
�
LI recommends the Sunday Times (London) article on Baghdad by Simon Jenkins. Jenkins makes the common sense point that opposing the war doesn�t mean supporting an immediate pull out of the troops. It does mean getting serious about monitoring the American occupation there. Here are a few grafs:
�Baghdad's greatest scenic asset must be Saddam's Republican Palace, now headquarters of the Coalition boss, Paul Bremer. Its sprawling site some three miles round lies in the heart of town, like Beijing's Forbidden City or the Bourbons' Louvre. Villas sit amid lawns, canals and eucalyptus groves. In the palace itself the great ballroom is now offices and the astonishing throne room with its "Scud murals" has become a chapel. The whole enclave should have been donated to the people of Baghdad when Saddam fell. Instead the Americans are laying down concrete car parks, chopping down trees and building a perimeter "Baghdad Wall". It is sad.�
And this is the end of his report, about the prisons in Iraq:
�Inside the prison is supposedly the son of a college lecturer, Omar Hamodi. He was last seen in June at a Baghdad wedding where guests fired into the air in traditional salute. A passing, jumpy American patrol seized the first three boys it could catch. One was Omar, despite another boy admitting to the soldiers that he alone had fired the shots.
Omar's parents later heard that he was in a prison far to the south in the port of Um Qasr. He was then transferred as prisoner No 116417 to Abu Ghraib, where he has been for three months.
� Omar's parents are educated Iraqis and no supporters of Saddam Hussein. They are simply appalled that an occupier proclaiming "freedom and democracy" should treat an innocent boy in this way. �
Abu Ghraib is becoming Iraq's Guantanamo Bay. I only hope that someone hunkered down in the Republican Palace might read this, and return prisoner No 116417 to his mother.�
Wednesday, November 19, 2003
Bollettino
I'm extremely dissatisfied, at the moment, with the anti-war movement. It seems as though the movement is frozen in time, and that, if they just protest loud enough, the troops won't go in...
This is, well, ignoble. There's real pressure that can be put on Bush at the moment. While the Bush administration says it is for democracy, it is for a democracy without elections. Very convenient. This is a simple point, that can be put on a placard. Iraq--Elections now. How simple is that? As for the troop pullout, that's a great idea, but nobody thinks it is a great idea to do it while the guerrillas present a threat -- not of terrorism, but a threat of retaking power on behalf of an evidently bankrupt system. The problem isn't, as the odious Hitchens insists, that the left is "for" the Ba'athists. The problem is that BushnBlair are clueless in the face of this threat. How clueless/ How about bombing cities you already occupy. I mean, if Saddam the H. is going to go to meet his maker, at least he is getting a good laugh beforehand. This is counter-insurgency as parody. Solution (I have to write this way because I'm going to mop a floor. Work, you know. So I'm telegraphing, rather than Henry Jamesing) the Iraqis who are not part of the resistance have to have something to fight for. How about: their own country? As in, let's not continue to pump the air out of Iraqi civil society in order to please the rightwing deologues in D.C., who mean, by free, free enterprise.
But are these the major features of the protests in London? No.
I get all red in the face thinking about this. In my life, I have seen nothing so worthy of being opposed as what Bush has done, is doing, and plans to do. From bad pre-conceptions to faulty follow through -- the guy's a mess. And I have seen nothing so depressing (okay, I have, but I wanted that sentential balance, you know) as the inability of the organised opposition to present reasonable and pursuasive reasons to oppose the bastards. Slogans should follow, not lead, policy.
Now that the U.S. has officially adopted reality -- that Iraqis have to defend Iraq -- the next step is to get them to adopt even more reality -- that Iraqis have to run the politics and the political economy of Iraq. Swallow it, guys. Swallow it without Chalabi, even. The narcissistic relief one gets from insulting Bush is what one of those commies called infantile leftism. Or is it left infantilism?
These people should really learn something from past mobilizations. The mobilization against the war was led by the dullest group of law student types imaginable. They did the organizing, and made it a success, while some Yippees freeloaded and made themselves celebrities. It is long past time for the dullards to come to the fore.
Talking about which -- I have been exchanging emails on the literary life with my friend T.S. in New York, and he just wrote me an email that discretion forbids me from pasting whole. However, here's the last couple of sentences, re the topic of Academic discombobulation in the face of Bush. Enjoy.
Academia! Fuck it! Of course it does criticism of Dauphin le Shrub so badly, because it doesn't do anything well but crunch numbers. Dissent and non-conformity (beginning at the absolute zero that is one's contempt) is simply not done; dissatisfaction is about all it can muster when its knickers really get twisted. As my old mentor Nelson Algren once wrote (I don't recall where, or even if he wrote it, once or multiple times, or at all) "a certain ruthlessness and alienation from society is as essential to writing as it is to armed robbery."
t
I'm extremely dissatisfied, at the moment, with the anti-war movement. It seems as though the movement is frozen in time, and that, if they just protest loud enough, the troops won't go in...
This is, well, ignoble. There's real pressure that can be put on Bush at the moment. While the Bush administration says it is for democracy, it is for a democracy without elections. Very convenient. This is a simple point, that can be put on a placard. Iraq--Elections now. How simple is that? As for the troop pullout, that's a great idea, but nobody thinks it is a great idea to do it while the guerrillas present a threat -- not of terrorism, but a threat of retaking power on behalf of an evidently bankrupt system. The problem isn't, as the odious Hitchens insists, that the left is "for" the Ba'athists. The problem is that BushnBlair are clueless in the face of this threat. How clueless/ How about bombing cities you already occupy. I mean, if Saddam the H. is going to go to meet his maker, at least he is getting a good laugh beforehand. This is counter-insurgency as parody. Solution (I have to write this way because I'm going to mop a floor. Work, you know. So I'm telegraphing, rather than Henry Jamesing) the Iraqis who are not part of the resistance have to have something to fight for. How about: their own country? As in, let's not continue to pump the air out of Iraqi civil society in order to please the rightwing deologues in D.C., who mean, by free, free enterprise.
But are these the major features of the protests in London? No.
I get all red in the face thinking about this. In my life, I have seen nothing so worthy of being opposed as what Bush has done, is doing, and plans to do. From bad pre-conceptions to faulty follow through -- the guy's a mess. And I have seen nothing so depressing (okay, I have, but I wanted that sentential balance, you know) as the inability of the organised opposition to present reasonable and pursuasive reasons to oppose the bastards. Slogans should follow, not lead, policy.
Now that the U.S. has officially adopted reality -- that Iraqis have to defend Iraq -- the next step is to get them to adopt even more reality -- that Iraqis have to run the politics and the political economy of Iraq. Swallow it, guys. Swallow it without Chalabi, even. The narcissistic relief one gets from insulting Bush is what one of those commies called infantile leftism. Or is it left infantilism?
These people should really learn something from past mobilizations. The mobilization against the war was led by the dullest group of law student types imaginable. They did the organizing, and made it a success, while some Yippees freeloaded and made themselves celebrities. It is long past time for the dullards to come to the fore.
Talking about which -- I have been exchanging emails on the literary life with my friend T.S. in New York, and he just wrote me an email that discretion forbids me from pasting whole. However, here's the last couple of sentences, re the topic of Academic discombobulation in the face of Bush. Enjoy.
Academia! Fuck it! Of course it does criticism of Dauphin le Shrub so badly, because it doesn't do anything well but crunch numbers. Dissent and non-conformity (beginning at the absolute zero that is one's contempt) is simply not done; dissatisfaction is about all it can muster when its knickers really get twisted. As my old mentor Nelson Algren once wrote (I don't recall where, or even if he wrote it, once or multiple times, or at all) "a certain ruthlessness and alienation from society is as essential to writing as it is to armed robbery."
t
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
Bollettino
Historical analogies cannot take the place of historical analysis � Leon Trotsky
Jay Bergman, in an fascinating article on Trotsky published two decades ago in the Journal of the History of Ideas, noted Trotsky�s borrowing of terms and phrases from the French revolution, and the way the neurotic recapitulation of this reference misshaped and ultimately falsified his analysis of Stalin. It is Bergman�s thesis that one of the intellectual causes of Trotsky�s failure on the level of practical politics was his habit of casting the contemporary history in terms of the French Revolution. Marx had already mocked the French revolutionists habit of clothing their every act in the language of Republican Rome, as if they could exchange their button up trousers for togas. Bergman has some fun in showing how the scare-word �Thermidor� was thrown around in the early years of the Russian Revolution. The Mensheviks, in exile, poked at Lenin�s NEP as a pernicious backsliding to capitalist norms. For them, here�s the proof that Bolshevism was descending into its Thermidor. When Trotsky was still close to the center of power, he dismissed the analogy out of hand. However, once he was clawed out of the center of power, the old black magic of analogy appealed to his mind like that last pipeful to a pothead. Suddenly, the the Thermidor analogy seemed golden. This was a product of the fateful historical experience of the counter-revolution, i.e. Trotsky's being kicked out on his can, in the Soviet Union. One should always ask, when an historical analogy is offered, who benefits -- for usually it aggrandizes the image of its maker in some way. In any case, as out of Thermidor grew the context in which Napoleon emerged, so too, in Russia, out of the counter-revolutionary bureaucratic forces within the Bolshevik party grew the context in which the Soviet Bonaparte, Stalin, emerged.
There are serious problems with treating Stalin as a species of Bonaparte. Stalin himself thought he was a species of Ivan the Terrible. What is most interesting about the analogy, perhaps, is that both Bonaparte and Stalin came from peripheral cultural zones � Corsica and Georgia � to dominate the hegemonic center. So did Hitler, for that matter. But such insights into historical states of affairs afforded by analogies have to shuck off the analogic form in order to become serious. In other words, suggestion has to cede to hypothesis, and hypotheses are brutal.
Bergman is damningly succinct about Trotsky�s problem.
�� Trotsky, desperately seeking for something from the past that would make sense of the present and promise vindication in the future, failed to recognize (except on rare occasions) that historical analogies, especially inappropriate ones, can often obscure more than they clarify, particularly when the object of one�s analysis � in Trotsky�s case, Stalinism � proves to be far more rooted in a nation�s history and culture than any transnational comparison or analogy might suggest. Indeed, the categories Trotsky borrowed from the French Revolution � Jacobinism, Thermidor and Bonapartism � were too much the product of one historical epoch and national history to be useful in explaining, or even in helping to explain, the evolution of another. �
LI has been irritated, and often expressed our irritation, by the use of analogy by the defenders of our irrational policy in Iraq. There is another analogy that is floating around that also irritates us � Dean to McGovern. In both cases, analogy doesn�t really operate to illuminate, but to disguise � and to disguise for unavowed purposes. In the case of Iraq, the struggle that the Bush administration has publicly set itself is to create a free Iraq, but the struggle it is really engaged in is to create a free enterprise Iraq. In the case of Dean, the analogy to McGovern has operated as a codeword, among D.C. establishment Dems who fear the party edging out from under their control. These are the consultants, commentators, and networked political operatives whose collective record has been one of almost unalloyed failure since 2000. These are liberals who are quite comfortable giving with giving up the principles of liberalism � in fact, they feel quite daring and contemporary as they do so.
That said, there is a place for analogy in understanding and proceeding with any social action. What that place is is a topic for a future LI.
Historical analogies cannot take the place of historical analysis � Leon Trotsky
Jay Bergman, in an fascinating article on Trotsky published two decades ago in the Journal of the History of Ideas, noted Trotsky�s borrowing of terms and phrases from the French revolution, and the way the neurotic recapitulation of this reference misshaped and ultimately falsified his analysis of Stalin. It is Bergman�s thesis that one of the intellectual causes of Trotsky�s failure on the level of practical politics was his habit of casting the contemporary history in terms of the French Revolution. Marx had already mocked the French revolutionists habit of clothing their every act in the language of Republican Rome, as if they could exchange their button up trousers for togas. Bergman has some fun in showing how the scare-word �Thermidor� was thrown around in the early years of the Russian Revolution. The Mensheviks, in exile, poked at Lenin�s NEP as a pernicious backsliding to capitalist norms. For them, here�s the proof that Bolshevism was descending into its Thermidor. When Trotsky was still close to the center of power, he dismissed the analogy out of hand. However, once he was clawed out of the center of power, the old black magic of analogy appealed to his mind like that last pipeful to a pothead. Suddenly, the the Thermidor analogy seemed golden. This was a product of the fateful historical experience of the counter-revolution, i.e. Trotsky's being kicked out on his can, in the Soviet Union. One should always ask, when an historical analogy is offered, who benefits -- for usually it aggrandizes the image of its maker in some way. In any case, as out of Thermidor grew the context in which Napoleon emerged, so too, in Russia, out of the counter-revolutionary bureaucratic forces within the Bolshevik party grew the context in which the Soviet Bonaparte, Stalin, emerged.
There are serious problems with treating Stalin as a species of Bonaparte. Stalin himself thought he was a species of Ivan the Terrible. What is most interesting about the analogy, perhaps, is that both Bonaparte and Stalin came from peripheral cultural zones � Corsica and Georgia � to dominate the hegemonic center. So did Hitler, for that matter. But such insights into historical states of affairs afforded by analogies have to shuck off the analogic form in order to become serious. In other words, suggestion has to cede to hypothesis, and hypotheses are brutal.
Bergman is damningly succinct about Trotsky�s problem.
�� Trotsky, desperately seeking for something from the past that would make sense of the present and promise vindication in the future, failed to recognize (except on rare occasions) that historical analogies, especially inappropriate ones, can often obscure more than they clarify, particularly when the object of one�s analysis � in Trotsky�s case, Stalinism � proves to be far more rooted in a nation�s history and culture than any transnational comparison or analogy might suggest. Indeed, the categories Trotsky borrowed from the French Revolution � Jacobinism, Thermidor and Bonapartism � were too much the product of one historical epoch and national history to be useful in explaining, or even in helping to explain, the evolution of another. �
LI has been irritated, and often expressed our irritation, by the use of analogy by the defenders of our irrational policy in Iraq. There is another analogy that is floating around that also irritates us � Dean to McGovern. In both cases, analogy doesn�t really operate to illuminate, but to disguise � and to disguise for unavowed purposes. In the case of Iraq, the struggle that the Bush administration has publicly set itself is to create a free Iraq, but the struggle it is really engaged in is to create a free enterprise Iraq. In the case of Dean, the analogy to McGovern has operated as a codeword, among D.C. establishment Dems who fear the party edging out from under their control. These are the consultants, commentators, and networked political operatives whose collective record has been one of almost unalloyed failure since 2000. These are liberals who are quite comfortable giving with giving up the principles of liberalism � in fact, they feel quite daring and contemporary as they do so.
That said, there is a place for analogy in understanding and proceeding with any social action. What that place is is a topic for a future LI.
Sunday, November 16, 2003
Bollettino
LI has often enough expressed contempt for the most prominent of the press�s hawks, C. Hitchens. But for another hawk, Nik Cohen, who was, if anything, more vituperative than Hitchens, we have a certain undiminished admiration. Cohen�s fierce hatred of Saddam Hussein was not corrupted by any cozying up to the rightwing powers that be, whether operating under Blair or Bush,
Cohen has penned an astonishingly good article in today�s Guardian about a man we have mentioned before: Nadhmi Auchi. Cohen takes a hard look at the sleeze magnetism of the man � both Tory and Labor went out of their way to protect the guy. He bought a lot of politicians, a lot of ex politicians, and established himself like a tick under the skin of the body politic:
Perhaps you would, but I forgot to add a final fact about Mr Auchi: he is the thirteenth-richest man in Britain, and he has been able to collect British politicians the way other people collect stamps. After wrecking the economy, Norman Lamont retired from government to a seat on the board of the financial arm of General Mediterranean Holding, which runs Auchi's many businesses. Lord Steel, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats and the current presiding officer of the Scottish Parliament, is also on the board. Lady Falkender, Harold Wilson's former secretary, has worked for Auchi, as has Gerald Malone, a former Tory Minister you've probably forgotten about. Keith Vaz, the former New Labour Foreign Office Minister once accepted a directorship from Auchi.
Auchi's political friendships extended far beyond the boardroom. There were indirect links to MI6, and he made a donation to a political party. (We don't know which one.) Many of the threads in his web of influence were on show when a touching scene was enacted on the evening of 23 April 1999. Lord Sainsbury joined 600 guests in the Grand Ballroom of the Park Lane Hotel. The Science Minister announced that he was deputising for the Prime Minister. To show the goodwill that politicians from all parties felt towards Auchi, he presented him with a print of the Houses of Parliament signed by Tony Blair, William Hague, Charles Kennedy and 132 other Ministers and backbenchers. "
Ah, sweet.
Here�s what we�ve been saying about the guy:
Apr 21, 09:04:48 AM | roger gathman | edit ]
Bollettino
Bagmen
Coups are expensive. As Jonathan Kwitney pointed out years ago, private enterprise and public governments often find pleasing compromises that allow them to go dutch on overturning third world governments and installing those pleasing puppets that age so badly in their baroque, disco palaces. It is a win win proposition - in the old days, you got staunch anti-communists, elected again and again by a wonderfully cooperative electorate, and you got sweet deals being cut that divvied up, in the most rational way, the natural resources to which the third world country was, by some mistake of providence, heir to.
One wonders how the INC in Iraq is being financed. We are suspicious that an exile Iraqi billionaire currently being held in an extradition trial in London, Nadhmi Auchi, might have some answers. The Observer has a wrap around bio of Auchi that reveals some interesting things. The man's main company is hq-ed in Luxemburg, natch: GenMed. We are being killed, in this century, by bland corporate acronyms. Auchi was connected, in some mysterious way, with the former meat machine tyrant of a Middle Eastern country -- guess which one. But Auchi claims, of course, that said Meat Machine turned against him and killed his brothers. However, Auchi, who turned up in Britain in the eighties, did not let family tragedy get in the way of peculative interests. He cut deals for Elf, and for other Euro petro companies, to get oil from Iraq -- and for himself he collected your average multi million dollar kickback. GenMed's main business, supposedly, is hospitality. In fact, Auchi's company just opened a swinging hot spot in Amman, Jordan. Auchi himself keeps to London. In his office hangs a painting of the House of Commons signed by such well wishers as Tony Blair. Blair's cabinet has a soft spot for the exiled Iraqi -- in fact, one sub minister was caught advising him on extradition matters vis a vis the French charge against him still on the docket there.
The Observer article doesn't touch on his connections with one Henry J. Leir. If you touch on that connection, you can get sued for libel, as Le Soir in Belgium found out. There is an article of mysterious provenance floating on the web none the less, in which it is claimed that Auchi was connected as an arms dealer with Leir. Leir, apparently, is golden: a major player in channeling enriched uranium to Israel -- again, for you libel lawyers out there, this is all wink wink. Leir endowed a chair at Tufts university in -- oh, spirit of the age -- peace, and seems to be an establishment figure in America -- but in Europe he has a different reputation. Denis Robert und Ernest Backes, two journalists, have written a book, Revelations, about the Leir/Auchi connection.�
We were interested in Cohen�s last graf:
�There is a rumour that MI6 liked to have him around because he understood the Iraqi regime. I can't substantiate it, and it may be nonsense. All I can do is point to a strange coincidence. Britain handed Auchi to France in the spring when the overthrow of Saddam's regime became inevitable and knowledge of that regime was no longer a unique selling point. The flight of Saddam should provide a happy ending of sorts, were it not for a small problem. When the Coalition handed out contracts to set-up mobile phone networks in liberated Iraq, one went to a firm called Orascom. And who's backing Orascom?�
So, we went looking for info about Orascom. Here�s a graf from a Time Magazine article, of Nov. 9:
�Now another deal is coming under scrutiny. A senior Pentagon official told Time that the U.S. is reviewing its decision to grant the mobile license for Baghdad and central Iraq to a consortium led by Egyptian telecom giant Orascom because of its ties to Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi-born billionaire who built his fortune partly through arms deals with the Iraqi regime in the 1980s. Industry sources say Auchi provided Orascom with a $20 million loan to help pay down its $500 million debt. The sources say the loan gave Auchi, who faced French prosecutors earlier this year for his role in a corruption and embezzlement scandal, a controlling stake in Orascom. A senior U.S. official says Orascom's ties to Auchi are being investigated. As a result, no mobile licenses have yet been issued. �
For more on Auchi, go to a French site �l�investigateur. It is an incomparable source for scuttlebutt.
LI has often enough expressed contempt for the most prominent of the press�s hawks, C. Hitchens. But for another hawk, Nik Cohen, who was, if anything, more vituperative than Hitchens, we have a certain undiminished admiration. Cohen�s fierce hatred of Saddam Hussein was not corrupted by any cozying up to the rightwing powers that be, whether operating under Blair or Bush,
Cohen has penned an astonishingly good article in today�s Guardian about a man we have mentioned before: Nadhmi Auchi. Cohen takes a hard look at the sleeze magnetism of the man � both Tory and Labor went out of their way to protect the guy. He bought a lot of politicians, a lot of ex politicians, and established himself like a tick under the skin of the body politic:
Perhaps you would, but I forgot to add a final fact about Mr Auchi: he is the thirteenth-richest man in Britain, and he has been able to collect British politicians the way other people collect stamps. After wrecking the economy, Norman Lamont retired from government to a seat on the board of the financial arm of General Mediterranean Holding, which runs Auchi's many businesses. Lord Steel, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats and the current presiding officer of the Scottish Parliament, is also on the board. Lady Falkender, Harold Wilson's former secretary, has worked for Auchi, as has Gerald Malone, a former Tory Minister you've probably forgotten about. Keith Vaz, the former New Labour Foreign Office Minister once accepted a directorship from Auchi.
Auchi's political friendships extended far beyond the boardroom. There were indirect links to MI6, and he made a donation to a political party. (We don't know which one.) Many of the threads in his web of influence were on show when a touching scene was enacted on the evening of 23 April 1999. Lord Sainsbury joined 600 guests in the Grand Ballroom of the Park Lane Hotel. The Science Minister announced that he was deputising for the Prime Minister. To show the goodwill that politicians from all parties felt towards Auchi, he presented him with a print of the Houses of Parliament signed by Tony Blair, William Hague, Charles Kennedy and 132 other Ministers and backbenchers. "
Ah, sweet.
Here�s what we�ve been saying about the guy:
Apr 21, 09:04:48 AM | roger gathman | edit ]
Bollettino
Bagmen
Coups are expensive. As Jonathan Kwitney pointed out years ago, private enterprise and public governments often find pleasing compromises that allow them to go dutch on overturning third world governments and installing those pleasing puppets that age so badly in their baroque, disco palaces. It is a win win proposition - in the old days, you got staunch anti-communists, elected again and again by a wonderfully cooperative electorate, and you got sweet deals being cut that divvied up, in the most rational way, the natural resources to which the third world country was, by some mistake of providence, heir to.
One wonders how the INC in Iraq is being financed. We are suspicious that an exile Iraqi billionaire currently being held in an extradition trial in London, Nadhmi Auchi, might have some answers. The Observer has a wrap around bio of Auchi that reveals some interesting things. The man's main company is hq-ed in Luxemburg, natch: GenMed. We are being killed, in this century, by bland corporate acronyms. Auchi was connected, in some mysterious way, with the former meat machine tyrant of a Middle Eastern country -- guess which one. But Auchi claims, of course, that said Meat Machine turned against him and killed his brothers. However, Auchi, who turned up in Britain in the eighties, did not let family tragedy get in the way of peculative interests. He cut deals for Elf, and for other Euro petro companies, to get oil from Iraq -- and for himself he collected your average multi million dollar kickback. GenMed's main business, supposedly, is hospitality. In fact, Auchi's company just opened a swinging hot spot in Amman, Jordan. Auchi himself keeps to London. In his office hangs a painting of the House of Commons signed by such well wishers as Tony Blair. Blair's cabinet has a soft spot for the exiled Iraqi -- in fact, one sub minister was caught advising him on extradition matters vis a vis the French charge against him still on the docket there.
The Observer article doesn't touch on his connections with one Henry J. Leir. If you touch on that connection, you can get sued for libel, as Le Soir in Belgium found out. There is an article of mysterious provenance floating on the web none the less, in which it is claimed that Auchi was connected as an arms dealer with Leir. Leir, apparently, is golden: a major player in channeling enriched uranium to Israel -- again, for you libel lawyers out there, this is all wink wink. Leir endowed a chair at Tufts university in -- oh, spirit of the age -- peace, and seems to be an establishment figure in America -- but in Europe he has a different reputation. Denis Robert und Ernest Backes, two journalists, have written a book, Revelations, about the Leir/Auchi connection.�
We were interested in Cohen�s last graf:
�There is a rumour that MI6 liked to have him around because he understood the Iraqi regime. I can't substantiate it, and it may be nonsense. All I can do is point to a strange coincidence. Britain handed Auchi to France in the spring when the overthrow of Saddam's regime became inevitable and knowledge of that regime was no longer a unique selling point. The flight of Saddam should provide a happy ending of sorts, were it not for a small problem. When the Coalition handed out contracts to set-up mobile phone networks in liberated Iraq, one went to a firm called Orascom. And who's backing Orascom?�
So, we went looking for info about Orascom. Here�s a graf from a Time Magazine article, of Nov. 9:
�Now another deal is coming under scrutiny. A senior Pentagon official told Time that the U.S. is reviewing its decision to grant the mobile license for Baghdad and central Iraq to a consortium led by Egyptian telecom giant Orascom because of its ties to Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi-born billionaire who built his fortune partly through arms deals with the Iraqi regime in the 1980s. Industry sources say Auchi provided Orascom with a $20 million loan to help pay down its $500 million debt. The sources say the loan gave Auchi, who faced French prosecutors earlier this year for his role in a corruption and embezzlement scandal, a controlling stake in Orascom. A senior U.S. official says Orascom's ties to Auchi are being investigated. As a result, no mobile licenses have yet been issued. �
For more on Auchi, go to a French site �l�investigateur. It is an incomparable source for scuttlebutt.
Saturday, November 15, 2003
Bollettino
Back on September 8, LI took stock of Iraq and came up with five combinations, given the forces in play at the moment, which might come true. Here are the combinations and our analysis.
�1. American troops withdraw. We leave behind a stable, American friendly democracy, that pays America back its 200 billion dollars, with interest, in a timely matter.
2. American troops withdraw. The government that is left behind is less friendly to America than Kuwait, but more friendly than Iran. It is, however, stable, and has certain democratic aspects. The 200 billion dollars is not paid back.
3. American troops leave. The American friendly democracy that is left behind tries to repay the American debt, causing a nation wide rebellion. It is overthrown by a government that is hostile to America.
4. American troops leave. Iraq is riven with conflict. The 200 billion dollars is gone. The conflict lasts for a long time, is destabilizing, and no side in it is openly pro-American.
5. American troops don't leave, but have to stay indefinitely, due to conflict. Another 100 billion dollars is spent on Iraq, but the nation is riven with conflict. Casualties mount. No stability, no democracy, and increasing harm to American forces.
One can argue that there are innumerable subsets. There are. But I imagine each one simply enriches the detail of one or another item on this list.
The problem with the Bush solution is simple. It bets everything on 1. Myself, I think one has about the same chance as Dennis Kucinich has of being the next US president.
The second option is much more possible. But humans drive their own history -- it will definitely be made impossible the more Bush bets on 1. The other three options are progressively worse for American interests. And for Iraq.
So, rationally, for our 150-200 billion dollars -- money we are not going to see again -- I'd say the reasonable thing to do is to take 2 as a scenario and try to improve it. That means ... well, it means handing power over to the Iraqi cabinet, and letting Bremer tell rotary clubs in Indiana all about his splendid plan for an Iraqi constitution. It means getting real about the money -- this money isn't coming back. It means letting the Iraqis decide what kind of economy they want -- from the contractors they hire to repair oil wells to the market system they are comfortable with. Of course, the "Iraqis" don't operate in isolation. But we should certainly not get into a situation in which there is a puppet Iraqi elite that simply obeys Americans, and thus abruptly abridges its shelf life. The commentary I've read about Iraq is truly odd -- it is as if nobody even thinks about what happens when the Americans withdraw. The Americans are not going to enforce a permanent solution to the Iraq problem -- period. The arguments are all about the chaos that will ensue if we withdraw right now, and how we have to do this, and how we have to do that... But by the force of things (ah, Lucretian phrase!) the Iraqis are the ones who will be there when the Americans are long gone. The american exit strategy better be shaped with that reality in mind.�
Since then, we are happy to say that the Bush administration, with all the finesse of a gnat shooting an elephant gun, has actually committed itself to certain of the changes we recommended in our last graf. Congratulations, Bush-ites. Alas, for changes in a plan to be successful, they have to be timely, correspond with the changed circumstances (of which they are part � feedback, my dear Watson, is an inherent factor in any extended action), and have to project some kind of goal. By September 8, it was obvious that Bush�s people had lied about the cost of the war and who was going to pay for it. Bush�s 87 billion dollar speech was much like the patient finally admitting to the shrink that those dreams did signify something a little funny about his relationship to his parents. Actually, Bush looked much like a patient as he droned the speech out. Now, another bullet point of the plan � the incredibly silly search for a constitution that would guarantee a democracy in Iraq, as long as it didn�t give the majority in the country (the Shi�ites) the majority, is starting to crumble. But accepting reality in Iraq (which extends to such things as calling the war in Iraq a war, and not a war on terrorists or terrorism, which it isn�t) is not a hallmark of the dimwit D.C. occupiers. The goal from the beginning of the occupation has been to make Iraq free for free enterprise. Whether that idea is good or bad for Iraq is irrelevant � the question is, is it implement-able? The answer is no. The one thing the Americans can�t leave behind, with any confidence, is a set of laws that radically change the economic nature of the country.
Ah, but the reader exclaims, Mr. LI, incredibly prescient as you have been so far, sir, aren�t you committing an act of probabilistic hubris here?
Well� okay, we are. No is too big, perhaps. But it is colorful, and it does bear the weight of history. It is a much better bet than the Bush bet.
For confirmation, one has only to go to Bush�s favorite occupation stories, the case of Germany and the case of Japan. Germany is more interesting. There were essentially two occupations of Germany, the American and the Soviet. The Americans never even broke up the criminal corporations that did the dirty work for the Nazis, and profited by it. Essentially, the Americans left the economic structure of Germany to be worked out by the Germans. The Soviets, on the other hand, re-did the whole system. They implemented Communism with a Non-Human face � Frankenstalin Communism � from the top. Result: East Germany became an economic basket case by the eighties, and was absorbed by West Germany � an act that showed the incredible opulence of West Germany, by the way � when the Wall fell.
So what are the combinations now?
Point for our side: we can now subtract the 200 billion the Iraqis are going to pay us. This should make combination 2, above, a better bet. So far, the resistance in Iraq has not produced a program, or a leadership. We are told repeatedly that polls show how much the resistance is disliked. We don�t quite believe that so much military activity could be carried out by so wholly an unpopular network. We think that even those people who tell American pollsters that they dislike the guerrillas might be thinking that the guerrillas are supplying messy but needed pressure on the Americans to get going. Otherwise, the impunity of guerrilla actions is pretty hard to fathom. On the other hand, since guerrilla activity seems to correspond pretty strongly to the map of Sunni Iraq, it is possible that he Shi'ite population doesn't even toy with this Machiavellian afterthought.
Alas, while the resistance hasn�t produced a program or a leadership, neither have the American sponsored Iraqi leaders. This is a leadership that longs for democracy without elections. Being perpetually appointed by democratic powers seems to suit them just fine. That is because they, too, stand for nothing. Chalabi has turned into a symbol of this hollow leadership. We once thought of Chalabi as a sort of Iraqi Mussolini. No longer. We think of him now as an Iraqi D�Annunzio. You�ll recall that the poet, D�Annunzio, seeing himself as the natural duce of Italy, organized a paramilitary force at the end of WWI and tried to take Trieste. D�Annunzio was much better at designing operatic costumes than coups. His was a fiasco, and his natural duce-ship of Italy soon went up in smoke.
The town meeting idea � that town meetings, rather than elections, are going to find the representatives to assemble the congress that assembles the constitution that lives in the house that Jack Bremer built � represents an unworkable compromise with democracy. Sorry, no dice, Jack. While it is natural that Bush should have a liking for the electoral college, and a dislike for popular elections, he shouldn�t assume that it makes a great foreign policy idea.
Back on September 8, LI took stock of Iraq and came up with five combinations, given the forces in play at the moment, which might come true. Here are the combinations and our analysis.
�1. American troops withdraw. We leave behind a stable, American friendly democracy, that pays America back its 200 billion dollars, with interest, in a timely matter.
2. American troops withdraw. The government that is left behind is less friendly to America than Kuwait, but more friendly than Iran. It is, however, stable, and has certain democratic aspects. The 200 billion dollars is not paid back.
3. American troops leave. The American friendly democracy that is left behind tries to repay the American debt, causing a nation wide rebellion. It is overthrown by a government that is hostile to America.
4. American troops leave. Iraq is riven with conflict. The 200 billion dollars is gone. The conflict lasts for a long time, is destabilizing, and no side in it is openly pro-American.
5. American troops don't leave, but have to stay indefinitely, due to conflict. Another 100 billion dollars is spent on Iraq, but the nation is riven with conflict. Casualties mount. No stability, no democracy, and increasing harm to American forces.
One can argue that there are innumerable subsets. There are. But I imagine each one simply enriches the detail of one or another item on this list.
The problem with the Bush solution is simple. It bets everything on 1. Myself, I think one has about the same chance as Dennis Kucinich has of being the next US president.
The second option is much more possible. But humans drive their own history -- it will definitely be made impossible the more Bush bets on 1. The other three options are progressively worse for American interests. And for Iraq.
So, rationally, for our 150-200 billion dollars -- money we are not going to see again -- I'd say the reasonable thing to do is to take 2 as a scenario and try to improve it. That means ... well, it means handing power over to the Iraqi cabinet, and letting Bremer tell rotary clubs in Indiana all about his splendid plan for an Iraqi constitution. It means getting real about the money -- this money isn't coming back. It means letting the Iraqis decide what kind of economy they want -- from the contractors they hire to repair oil wells to the market system they are comfortable with. Of course, the "Iraqis" don't operate in isolation. But we should certainly not get into a situation in which there is a puppet Iraqi elite that simply obeys Americans, and thus abruptly abridges its shelf life. The commentary I've read about Iraq is truly odd -- it is as if nobody even thinks about what happens when the Americans withdraw. The Americans are not going to enforce a permanent solution to the Iraq problem -- period. The arguments are all about the chaos that will ensue if we withdraw right now, and how we have to do this, and how we have to do that... But by the force of things (ah, Lucretian phrase!) the Iraqis are the ones who will be there when the Americans are long gone. The american exit strategy better be shaped with that reality in mind.�
Since then, we are happy to say that the Bush administration, with all the finesse of a gnat shooting an elephant gun, has actually committed itself to certain of the changes we recommended in our last graf. Congratulations, Bush-ites. Alas, for changes in a plan to be successful, they have to be timely, correspond with the changed circumstances (of which they are part � feedback, my dear Watson, is an inherent factor in any extended action), and have to project some kind of goal. By September 8, it was obvious that Bush�s people had lied about the cost of the war and who was going to pay for it. Bush�s 87 billion dollar speech was much like the patient finally admitting to the shrink that those dreams did signify something a little funny about his relationship to his parents. Actually, Bush looked much like a patient as he droned the speech out. Now, another bullet point of the plan � the incredibly silly search for a constitution that would guarantee a democracy in Iraq, as long as it didn�t give the majority in the country (the Shi�ites) the majority, is starting to crumble. But accepting reality in Iraq (which extends to such things as calling the war in Iraq a war, and not a war on terrorists or terrorism, which it isn�t) is not a hallmark of the dimwit D.C. occupiers. The goal from the beginning of the occupation has been to make Iraq free for free enterprise. Whether that idea is good or bad for Iraq is irrelevant � the question is, is it implement-able? The answer is no. The one thing the Americans can�t leave behind, with any confidence, is a set of laws that radically change the economic nature of the country.
Ah, but the reader exclaims, Mr. LI, incredibly prescient as you have been so far, sir, aren�t you committing an act of probabilistic hubris here?
Well� okay, we are. No is too big, perhaps. But it is colorful, and it does bear the weight of history. It is a much better bet than the Bush bet.
For confirmation, one has only to go to Bush�s favorite occupation stories, the case of Germany and the case of Japan. Germany is more interesting. There were essentially two occupations of Germany, the American and the Soviet. The Americans never even broke up the criminal corporations that did the dirty work for the Nazis, and profited by it. Essentially, the Americans left the economic structure of Germany to be worked out by the Germans. The Soviets, on the other hand, re-did the whole system. They implemented Communism with a Non-Human face � Frankenstalin Communism � from the top. Result: East Germany became an economic basket case by the eighties, and was absorbed by West Germany � an act that showed the incredible opulence of West Germany, by the way � when the Wall fell.
So what are the combinations now?
Point for our side: we can now subtract the 200 billion the Iraqis are going to pay us. This should make combination 2, above, a better bet. So far, the resistance in Iraq has not produced a program, or a leadership. We are told repeatedly that polls show how much the resistance is disliked. We don�t quite believe that so much military activity could be carried out by so wholly an unpopular network. We think that even those people who tell American pollsters that they dislike the guerrillas might be thinking that the guerrillas are supplying messy but needed pressure on the Americans to get going. Otherwise, the impunity of guerrilla actions is pretty hard to fathom. On the other hand, since guerrilla activity seems to correspond pretty strongly to the map of Sunni Iraq, it is possible that he Shi'ite population doesn't even toy with this Machiavellian afterthought.
Alas, while the resistance hasn�t produced a program or a leadership, neither have the American sponsored Iraqi leaders. This is a leadership that longs for democracy without elections. Being perpetually appointed by democratic powers seems to suit them just fine. That is because they, too, stand for nothing. Chalabi has turned into a symbol of this hollow leadership. We once thought of Chalabi as a sort of Iraqi Mussolini. No longer. We think of him now as an Iraqi D�Annunzio. You�ll recall that the poet, D�Annunzio, seeing himself as the natural duce of Italy, organized a paramilitary force at the end of WWI and tried to take Trieste. D�Annunzio was much better at designing operatic costumes than coups. His was a fiasco, and his natural duce-ship of Italy soon went up in smoke.
The town meeting idea � that town meetings, rather than elections, are going to find the representatives to assemble the congress that assembles the constitution that lives in the house that Jack Bremer built � represents an unworkable compromise with democracy. Sorry, no dice, Jack. While it is natural that Bush should have a liking for the electoral college, and a dislike for popular elections, he shouldn�t assume that it makes a great foreign policy idea.
Thursday, November 13, 2003
Bollettino
A country, X, is run by a corrupt family. The prime minister is notoriously greedy. There is a religious secret police. Another country invades this X, captuiring the family, and rooting out the old government. It proposes a constitution that abolishes the old secret police, creates modern property rights, and asserts the rights of men. The constitution is taken up by a convention composed of some of the leading businessmen in the country. In the meantime, the occupier�s army is met with resistance. The resistance is low level and unorganized at first. The occupier responds with force. The resistance grows. The occupier blames foreigners for the increase in resistance�
Sound familiar? This is pretty much the story of Napoleon�s invasion of Spain.
There�s a pernicious meme that emerged at the end of the �hostilities� in Iraq. The meme was that occupying Iraq would be much like occupying Germany or Japan at the end of World War II. Now, the elements of the likeness, here, were broadly two: The U.S. invaded another country. The U.S. occupied that country. This is about as far as we could go with that analogy. Not only is this a different country, with a very different history. Not only did the occupation of Germany and Japan take place in the face of the Soviet Union�s own occupation of what became East Germany, and of Eastern Europe. But the U.S. of that time was a much different place, too. It was coming out of a Great Depression and the incredible mounting of a war effort that overshadowed anything the U.S. government had ever done before. Etc.
This is not even to get into the finer grained differences of the Iraqi situation, in which the occupying reference would be to the British in 1920-25.
The post-WWII analogy, however, was right to give us a sense that the U.S. has done this before. Hell, we could have produced tons of analogies, from Haiti to Panama, for that matter. Alas, for the general chickenhawk right, the analogy operated as a sort of holy writ. This is where it became pernicious. With all those batty references to Churchill and MacArthur in his mind, Bremer made the cardinal error of the occupation so far, disbanding the Iraqi army. And the idea of a supreme council of exiles attracting the support of the natives � the Adenauer solution, diffused, this time, among Chalabi-bots � is still buzzing like a bee in the bonnets of the D.C. Napoleons around Rumsfeld and Cheney.
A bad analogy generates bad arguments. The current mania on the right is to dig up obscure newspaper articles about the occupation of Germany that criticized the pace, structure or doing of it. Well, the occupation of Germany did have its problems. As Hannah Arendt pointed out in Eichmann in Jerusalem, in 1962, well after Adenauer was established as a reliable U.S. ally, five thousand of West Germany�s eleven thousand judges had been active in the courts under Hitler. The German war crimes investigation unit was only founded in 1958. Even very prominent war criminals had little trouble �hiding� in West Germany through the sixties. Etc. But the main lesson, here, is that there isn�t a lesson. We don�t need an analogy to tell us about Iraq. We have � Iraq.
There was a recent debate at Oxford over the proposition: we are losing the peace in Iraq. Now, the proposition itself was ridiculous. There is no peace in Iraq, so how can we be losing it? The general sense, however, was that the occupation is going badly. The pro-war side won. The speech by Josh Chavetz starts out with the non-sequitor that because the German occupation was a success (or partially � wonder what the East Germans make of that success?), and because the initial American policy was criticized by the press at the time, by a law of historical commutation, the Iraqi policy will be a success. This is, I guess, how they teach political science at Oxford. It is definitely the reason political science is considered a joke science by natural scientists. Here�s how Chavetz�s speech makes its case:
I must begin with a word of apology for my lack of preparation. Not only was I just asked yesterday to speak, but I was also laboring under the apparent misapprehension that we would be addressing the resolution that "This House believes that we are losing the Peace." Yet I find that the honorable gentleman who has just spoken in the affirmative [Jeremy Corbyn, MP] has talked about the war - about Vietnam, oil, Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair, international law, weapons of mass destruction, sanctions, and so on. While these are all issues worthy of serious discussion, I must confess to being somewhat baffled at how these normative questions bear on the empirical resolution that I was told we were to debate.
And an important empirical question it is. Three of the most widely read American magazines have recently run stories on how the occupation is going, and the verdict is unanimous. "Americans are Losing the Victory" screams one. "How We Botched the Occupation" is on the cover of another. "Blueprint for a Mess" is the verdict of the third.
Actually, I've taken some liberties with two of those headlines, so let me start over. "Blueprint for a Mess" is indeed the cover article in this week's New York Times Magazine. But "Americans Are Losing the Victory" is from the January 7, 1945 issue of Life magazine, and the full headline is "Americans are Losing the Victory in Europe." The Saturday Evening Post on January 26, 1946 ran "How We Botched the German Occupation."
Here�s an idea: maybe what�s botched, here, is the analogy. Especially considering that on January 7, 1945, we were advancing with troops into Germany, still � not occupying the damn place. And considering that, in 1946, botching the occupation probably referred to the threat of the Soviets, rather than a renewal of Naziism. Although maybe we should pursue the analogy further and ask what the effect of FDR donning a combat uniform and proclaiming mission accomplished � oops, or proclaiming, under a banner of mysterious origin that read, mission accomplished, that the hostilities were over � maybe we should wonder what effect that would have had on the war.
Incidentally, some say you can date the downfall of Napoleon to the committment of troops to Spain.
A country, X, is run by a corrupt family. The prime minister is notoriously greedy. There is a religious secret police. Another country invades this X, captuiring the family, and rooting out the old government. It proposes a constitution that abolishes the old secret police, creates modern property rights, and asserts the rights of men. The constitution is taken up by a convention composed of some of the leading businessmen in the country. In the meantime, the occupier�s army is met with resistance. The resistance is low level and unorganized at first. The occupier responds with force. The resistance grows. The occupier blames foreigners for the increase in resistance�
Sound familiar? This is pretty much the story of Napoleon�s invasion of Spain.
There�s a pernicious meme that emerged at the end of the �hostilities� in Iraq. The meme was that occupying Iraq would be much like occupying Germany or Japan at the end of World War II. Now, the elements of the likeness, here, were broadly two: The U.S. invaded another country. The U.S. occupied that country. This is about as far as we could go with that analogy. Not only is this a different country, with a very different history. Not only did the occupation of Germany and Japan take place in the face of the Soviet Union�s own occupation of what became East Germany, and of Eastern Europe. But the U.S. of that time was a much different place, too. It was coming out of a Great Depression and the incredible mounting of a war effort that overshadowed anything the U.S. government had ever done before. Etc.
This is not even to get into the finer grained differences of the Iraqi situation, in which the occupying reference would be to the British in 1920-25.
The post-WWII analogy, however, was right to give us a sense that the U.S. has done this before. Hell, we could have produced tons of analogies, from Haiti to Panama, for that matter. Alas, for the general chickenhawk right, the analogy operated as a sort of holy writ. This is where it became pernicious. With all those batty references to Churchill and MacArthur in his mind, Bremer made the cardinal error of the occupation so far, disbanding the Iraqi army. And the idea of a supreme council of exiles attracting the support of the natives � the Adenauer solution, diffused, this time, among Chalabi-bots � is still buzzing like a bee in the bonnets of the D.C. Napoleons around Rumsfeld and Cheney.
A bad analogy generates bad arguments. The current mania on the right is to dig up obscure newspaper articles about the occupation of Germany that criticized the pace, structure or doing of it. Well, the occupation of Germany did have its problems. As Hannah Arendt pointed out in Eichmann in Jerusalem, in 1962, well after Adenauer was established as a reliable U.S. ally, five thousand of West Germany�s eleven thousand judges had been active in the courts under Hitler. The German war crimes investigation unit was only founded in 1958. Even very prominent war criminals had little trouble �hiding� in West Germany through the sixties. Etc. But the main lesson, here, is that there isn�t a lesson. We don�t need an analogy to tell us about Iraq. We have � Iraq.
There was a recent debate at Oxford over the proposition: we are losing the peace in Iraq. Now, the proposition itself was ridiculous. There is no peace in Iraq, so how can we be losing it? The general sense, however, was that the occupation is going badly. The pro-war side won. The speech by Josh Chavetz starts out with the non-sequitor that because the German occupation was a success (or partially � wonder what the East Germans make of that success?), and because the initial American policy was criticized by the press at the time, by a law of historical commutation, the Iraqi policy will be a success. This is, I guess, how they teach political science at Oxford. It is definitely the reason political science is considered a joke science by natural scientists. Here�s how Chavetz�s speech makes its case:
I must begin with a word of apology for my lack of preparation. Not only was I just asked yesterday to speak, but I was also laboring under the apparent misapprehension that we would be addressing the resolution that "This House believes that we are losing the Peace." Yet I find that the honorable gentleman who has just spoken in the affirmative [Jeremy Corbyn, MP] has talked about the war - about Vietnam, oil, Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair, international law, weapons of mass destruction, sanctions, and so on. While these are all issues worthy of serious discussion, I must confess to being somewhat baffled at how these normative questions bear on the empirical resolution that I was told we were to debate.
And an important empirical question it is. Three of the most widely read American magazines have recently run stories on how the occupation is going, and the verdict is unanimous. "Americans are Losing the Victory" screams one. "How We Botched the Occupation" is on the cover of another. "Blueprint for a Mess" is the verdict of the third.
Actually, I've taken some liberties with two of those headlines, so let me start over. "Blueprint for a Mess" is indeed the cover article in this week's New York Times Magazine. But "Americans Are Losing the Victory" is from the January 7, 1945 issue of Life magazine, and the full headline is "Americans are Losing the Victory in Europe." The Saturday Evening Post on January 26, 1946 ran "How We Botched the German Occupation."
Here�s an idea: maybe what�s botched, here, is the analogy. Especially considering that on January 7, 1945, we were advancing with troops into Germany, still � not occupying the damn place. And considering that, in 1946, botching the occupation probably referred to the threat of the Soviets, rather than a renewal of Naziism. Although maybe we should pursue the analogy further and ask what the effect of FDR donning a combat uniform and proclaiming mission accomplished � oops, or proclaiming, under a banner of mysterious origin that read, mission accomplished, that the hostilities were over � maybe we should wonder what effect that would have had on the war.
Incidentally, some say you can date the downfall of Napoleon to the committment of troops to Spain.
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
Bollettino
LI�s prize for the best essay in an academic journal goes, in a unanimous decision, to the Lawrence Lipking�s Chess Minds and Critical Moves in the Winter 2003 New Literary History.
Seriously, go to a library, LI reader, and check out this essay. It is astonishing. Lipking, a professor at Northwestern, is a chess master. He�s also a member of the upper echelon of the lit crit establishment. These are two exclusive circles � and usually mutually exclusive ones, too. By way of an extended comparison between chess and literary criticism, Lipking does a lot in the essay: he sets up a memorial to(and carps a bit at) William Wimsatt, who was also a chess fanatic; he makes a distinction between problem setter and player that I have been waiting for all my life; he riffs on an extremely funny chess passage in Beckett�s Murphy; he considers what criticism does, and why it does it the way it does it now, and why it did it the way it did it when he became part of the �game;� he makes a tentative foray into the touchy question of genius, re the genius of certain chess players; and he asks, where have all the poet/critics gone?
Here�s the passage on problem creators vs. players:
�Nevertheless, a great gulf separated the two of us [Wimsatt and Lipking]: he was a problemist, I was a player. The distinction between these habits of mind is so fundamental that, like yin and yang, it can be used to divide the whole intellectual world into contrary pairs�for example, Plato the problemist and Aristotle the player, or Being and Becoming. The problemist seeks perfection of form and idea (or "theme"), and arranges the pieces artistically to realize that theme in the purest and most elegant way. The player seeks the excitement of a constantly shifting struggle against a recalcitrant foe, and subordinates considerations of beauty and style to the most efficient method of winning. A move is best, for the problemist, when most ingenious; for the player, when most advantageous. A problemist needs to be original; a player needs to be tough. 2 In practice, to be sure, the two habits of mind often mingle. Most problemists also play games, and most players sometimes solve problems. Yet Wimsatt was not at all a strong player, and difficult problems usually baffle me.
On one occasion he showed me a "slender Indian" he had composed, which "has cropped up again and again in my conversations with new chess friends and has worked as a kind of touchstone. No chess player who had an acquaintance with problems has ever failed to solve it almost upon inspection. No player who was largely uninitiated in problems has ever been able to solve it at all" (HC 15). [End Page 156]
By chance, since I recognized the signs of an "Indian," the solution leapt to my mind, and its clever logic was pleasing. 3 Yet the artificial world of the problem also annoyed me. In a game Black would have resigned long since, nor would anyone care if the mate took five moves rather than four. Players are prejudiced against such devices.�
For myself, this passage put a silver ball in motion. Bing bing bing, it touched all the lights. My early intellectual life, really up until around 35, was spent under the problemist spell. I actually considered myself a maker of formal structures, of interesting problems with multiple solutions. I loved that sentence of Novalis�s: God is a problem whose solution is another problem.
But I have been slowly realizing that I am not a great maker of problems. Usually we divide our lives between the head and the heart � but in my case, the division was between my head and my character. My character is a player. I find my current novel much more interesting than my previous novels because I am writing it to win. Not just to win money, although that is a major point, but to win in terms of a certain kind of novel. One that is exterior, and oriented towards what language indicates � character and action � rather than interior, and oriented towards what language is � the density of it, the matter of it. I used to be obsessed with the idea that the way a person spoke materially embodied a certain history � by accent, by phrases, by hesitations, one could tease out the whole layered geneology. The voice was literally, in this reading, the conscience. Whether that is true or not, however, I am much less concerned with that resonant realism in what I am writing right now.
If I still haven�t convinced you to read the Lipking, I�ll paste two more grafs here on the subject of winning, playing, art and criticism. Where Lipking uses criticism, I substitute the phrase, novel writing �
�To speak for myself, the deep pleasure of chess can rival the spell of great music. In the best games there comes a moment�the one that Satan and his Watch Fiends cannot find 11 �when the balance of tensions in a position reaches its climax and the mind is challenged to see through all the ramifications. This is a dangerous moment for a player like me, because time seems suspended while the analysis lasts, and the clock keeps ticking away. When I indulge this luxury too much, time pressure will finally ruin me. But the pleasure is usually worth it. Just as some critics gradually go to the heart of a poem, surrendering to the process for its own sake rather than any rewards that may follow, a chessplayer can savor a game whether winning or losing. Both as a player and critic, I prize these moments of incredibly focused attention. They do not last long in chess, unfortunately. Once the game is over, its aftereffects do not linger and spread as they sometimes do with poems and music. Chess draws on cognitive powers like those of the critic, but not on the other capacities that a critic requires, where all the senses and feelings come into play. Even a very good game does not tell us, like Rilke's Apollo, to change our lives. But subject to that limitation, the pleasure of chess is intense. Unlike Rilke's Apollo, it affirms unashamedly that the head is important.
"Yet chess and criticism are not always a pleasure. Professionals regard them as hard work, and amateurs tremble at the constant prospect of humiliation. An emphasis on the euphoria of playing the game, as if competitors were connoisseurs, neglects the harsh demands of practical play, when artistry often bows to sheer will power. Successful players cannot afford to aestheticize chess. The best move, like the best critical interpretation, often involves resisting a tempting, ingenious, or pretty idea and choosing a line that is ugly, brutal, and sound. Self-command scores over self-admiration. From this point of view my surrender to pleasure might be considered not only a weakness�a covert problemist undermining a player�but also a fundamental denial of the nature of chess, and perhaps of criticism as well. Chess, a skeptic might say, is by no means an art. It is a game, a contest between opposing sides; and someone who forgets about winning and losing might as well play with himself. And another skeptic might add that chess is also a science, a systematic pursuit of objectively optimal moves, while art consists of subjective illusions that veil or manipulate data. A similar point could be raised about the task of the critic. Despite Oscar Wilde's embrace of the critic as artist, in practice most critics seem more like policemen, or at least like debaters and judges�devoted to games and systems rather than art. The art of a critic arouses mistrust, as Wilde understood quite [End Page 165] well, because it represents a confusion of realms, as when a flashy referee gets tangled together with wrestlers. The pretensions of chess to be more than a game provoke the same misgivings. Such activities cross the line between work and play; apparently no one knows how to define them.�
LI�s prize for the best essay in an academic journal goes, in a unanimous decision, to the Lawrence Lipking�s Chess Minds and Critical Moves in the Winter 2003 New Literary History.
Seriously, go to a library, LI reader, and check out this essay. It is astonishing. Lipking, a professor at Northwestern, is a chess master. He�s also a member of the upper echelon of the lit crit establishment. These are two exclusive circles � and usually mutually exclusive ones, too. By way of an extended comparison between chess and literary criticism, Lipking does a lot in the essay: he sets up a memorial to(and carps a bit at) William Wimsatt, who was also a chess fanatic; he makes a distinction between problem setter and player that I have been waiting for all my life; he riffs on an extremely funny chess passage in Beckett�s Murphy; he considers what criticism does, and why it does it the way it does it now, and why it did it the way it did it when he became part of the �game;� he makes a tentative foray into the touchy question of genius, re the genius of certain chess players; and he asks, where have all the poet/critics gone?
Here�s the passage on problem creators vs. players:
�Nevertheless, a great gulf separated the two of us [Wimsatt and Lipking]: he was a problemist, I was a player. The distinction between these habits of mind is so fundamental that, like yin and yang, it can be used to divide the whole intellectual world into contrary pairs�for example, Plato the problemist and Aristotle the player, or Being and Becoming. The problemist seeks perfection of form and idea (or "theme"), and arranges the pieces artistically to realize that theme in the purest and most elegant way. The player seeks the excitement of a constantly shifting struggle against a recalcitrant foe, and subordinates considerations of beauty and style to the most efficient method of winning. A move is best, for the problemist, when most ingenious; for the player, when most advantageous. A problemist needs to be original; a player needs to be tough. 2 In practice, to be sure, the two habits of mind often mingle. Most problemists also play games, and most players sometimes solve problems. Yet Wimsatt was not at all a strong player, and difficult problems usually baffle me.
On one occasion he showed me a "slender Indian" he had composed, which "has cropped up again and again in my conversations with new chess friends and has worked as a kind of touchstone. No chess player who had an acquaintance with problems has ever failed to solve it almost upon inspection. No player who was largely uninitiated in problems has ever been able to solve it at all" (HC 15). [End Page 156]
By chance, since I recognized the signs of an "Indian," the solution leapt to my mind, and its clever logic was pleasing. 3 Yet the artificial world of the problem also annoyed me. In a game Black would have resigned long since, nor would anyone care if the mate took five moves rather than four. Players are prejudiced against such devices.�
For myself, this passage put a silver ball in motion. Bing bing bing, it touched all the lights. My early intellectual life, really up until around 35, was spent under the problemist spell. I actually considered myself a maker of formal structures, of interesting problems with multiple solutions. I loved that sentence of Novalis�s: God is a problem whose solution is another problem.
But I have been slowly realizing that I am not a great maker of problems. Usually we divide our lives between the head and the heart � but in my case, the division was between my head and my character. My character is a player. I find my current novel much more interesting than my previous novels because I am writing it to win. Not just to win money, although that is a major point, but to win in terms of a certain kind of novel. One that is exterior, and oriented towards what language indicates � character and action � rather than interior, and oriented towards what language is � the density of it, the matter of it. I used to be obsessed with the idea that the way a person spoke materially embodied a certain history � by accent, by phrases, by hesitations, one could tease out the whole layered geneology. The voice was literally, in this reading, the conscience. Whether that is true or not, however, I am much less concerned with that resonant realism in what I am writing right now.
If I still haven�t convinced you to read the Lipking, I�ll paste two more grafs here on the subject of winning, playing, art and criticism. Where Lipking uses criticism, I substitute the phrase, novel writing �
�To speak for myself, the deep pleasure of chess can rival the spell of great music. In the best games there comes a moment�the one that Satan and his Watch Fiends cannot find 11 �when the balance of tensions in a position reaches its climax and the mind is challenged to see through all the ramifications. This is a dangerous moment for a player like me, because time seems suspended while the analysis lasts, and the clock keeps ticking away. When I indulge this luxury too much, time pressure will finally ruin me. But the pleasure is usually worth it. Just as some critics gradually go to the heart of a poem, surrendering to the process for its own sake rather than any rewards that may follow, a chessplayer can savor a game whether winning or losing. Both as a player and critic, I prize these moments of incredibly focused attention. They do not last long in chess, unfortunately. Once the game is over, its aftereffects do not linger and spread as they sometimes do with poems and music. Chess draws on cognitive powers like those of the critic, but not on the other capacities that a critic requires, where all the senses and feelings come into play. Even a very good game does not tell us, like Rilke's Apollo, to change our lives. But subject to that limitation, the pleasure of chess is intense. Unlike Rilke's Apollo, it affirms unashamedly that the head is important.
"Yet chess and criticism are not always a pleasure. Professionals regard them as hard work, and amateurs tremble at the constant prospect of humiliation. An emphasis on the euphoria of playing the game, as if competitors were connoisseurs, neglects the harsh demands of practical play, when artistry often bows to sheer will power. Successful players cannot afford to aestheticize chess. The best move, like the best critical interpretation, often involves resisting a tempting, ingenious, or pretty idea and choosing a line that is ugly, brutal, and sound. Self-command scores over self-admiration. From this point of view my surrender to pleasure might be considered not only a weakness�a covert problemist undermining a player�but also a fundamental denial of the nature of chess, and perhaps of criticism as well. Chess, a skeptic might say, is by no means an art. It is a game, a contest between opposing sides; and someone who forgets about winning and losing might as well play with himself. And another skeptic might add that chess is also a science, a systematic pursuit of objectively optimal moves, while art consists of subjective illusions that veil or manipulate data. A similar point could be raised about the task of the critic. Despite Oscar Wilde's embrace of the critic as artist, in practice most critics seem more like policemen, or at least like debaters and judges�devoted to games and systems rather than art. The art of a critic arouses mistrust, as Wilde understood quite [End Page 165] well, because it represents a confusion of realms, as when a flashy referee gets tangled together with wrestlers. The pretensions of chess to be more than a game provoke the same misgivings. Such activities cross the line between work and play; apparently no one knows how to define them.�
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
Bollettino
The bankruptcy of the establishment Dems
There�s an exchange on Talking Points Memo between Josh Marshall, who runs it, and a buddy, John Judis, one of those ubiquitous liberal honchos who is regularly trotted out to make lame arguments on major league op ed pages, and within his stomping ground, The New Republic. The New Republic has been campaigning against Howard Dean, with comic ineffectuality, since last January (comic, since they keep running that blurb from Howard Kurz, about how the Democratic candidate has to �win the TNR primary.� Right. Judis�s letter is couched in that higher form of brainlessness that passes for political wisdom in the salons of establishment Dems. It lost them one presidential election and the Senate --- but of course, such losses pale, in the minds of such as Judis, with what happened thirty two years ago in 1972. Those who remember parts of their history too well, to paraphrase Santayana, by way of Freud, are doomed to repeat it.
Here�s most of the letter:
�I share your sentiments completely. The only thing I'm semi-certain about is Dean's lack of electability in November. I think it is because I lived through the McGovern campaign, as did some of those ex-Clinton people who have tried to pump up Clark. The similarities grow with every day. Not just the insurgent voter enthusiasm, the new ways of fundraising, and the bevy of flummoxed opponents, but also the economy (artificially stimulated by Nixon through the Fed and by Bush through the dollar just in time for election year) and the war (raging, but bound to quiet some by election time, and to raise prospects of peace). The economy deprives the Democrat of the issue that would allow him to attract working class votes; the war splits the Democrats, but not the Republicans. True, there are more "Starbucks" voters now than in 1972, but on the other side Bush is far more popular than Nixon was. Nixon was actually trailing Muskie in polls, which is why he thought he needed all the dirty tricks. I fear a cataclysm in the fall if the Democrats nominate Dean.�
This could have come from Tom Daschle�s super-ego � the same Daschle who said, about the compliant senate voting a blank check to Bush to make war in the Middle East, �now that�s over, we can get back to the economy.� These people truly don�t see what is right in front of their noses. The similarities with McGovern are trite. The idea that the war is just gonna simmer down, with the resistance melting away, is from Donald Rumsfeld�s May playbook � it looks silly now, and it will look even sillier as Bush bungles from one homemade solution to another. The truth is, the administration doesn�t just want to defeat the guerrillas in Iraq � they want a conservative showpiece in Iraq, something like Chili on the Euphrates. This is the dream they have clung consistently to, and there is no indication whatsoever that they have been swayed by the Reality principle. This is the true comparison with Vietnam. It isn't military, but attitudinal. Johnson saw Southeast Asia as another version of Delta Mississippi, with himself and the Pentagon supplying the necessary Great Society programs. Bush sees Iraq as a sort of Texas, where privatization and the right kind of can do businessmen will get the whole thing on-line and up to speed. That's a permanent illusion, we think. If there are any analogies to past elections, it should be more like Nixon vs. Humphrey.
As for the economic pickup � to be spooked because of a good quarter, and an uptick in employment that is, incidentally, one hundred thousand short of the standard Bush projection, is either na�ve or blind. Of course the economy is going to grow, but I wouldn�t bet on the deficit shrinking. I also wouldn�t bet on unemployment going down far enough that it recedes as an issue. So the Dem candidate ought to be able to talk about both of those things � and the only one I see crafting a realistic message is Dean. Dean is also the only candidate who knows that the electorate doesn�t punish an adaptive candidate � all the fingerpointing about previous positions just looks silly. Who cares what Dean said about Medicare in 94? It is an unlikely issue for the Republicans, anyway � what are they going to do, accuse Dean of secretly wanting to bring down the cost of Medicare?
There are, of course, a number of wildcards, but they are mostly not in Bush's favor. There is the possibility of another terrorist attack on this country -- and there is the growing possibility that terrorists might interrupt the oil economy of the Saudis. If that happened, the spike in oil prices would unwind this leveraged economy like nobody's business.
What Judis hates is the prospect of a Democratic president who does not particularly care for his kind � that niche of D.C. liberals who are always finding liberal reasons to support conservative policy. Those people have created a silly putty party, that presses out pale imitations of Republican programs. That�s a deeply dumb thing to keep on doing. Judis should look not to 72, but to 2002.
The bankruptcy of the establishment Dems
There�s an exchange on Talking Points Memo between Josh Marshall, who runs it, and a buddy, John Judis, one of those ubiquitous liberal honchos who is regularly trotted out to make lame arguments on major league op ed pages, and within his stomping ground, The New Republic. The New Republic has been campaigning against Howard Dean, with comic ineffectuality, since last January (comic, since they keep running that blurb from Howard Kurz, about how the Democratic candidate has to �win the TNR primary.� Right. Judis�s letter is couched in that higher form of brainlessness that passes for political wisdom in the salons of establishment Dems. It lost them one presidential election and the Senate --- but of course, such losses pale, in the minds of such as Judis, with what happened thirty two years ago in 1972. Those who remember parts of their history too well, to paraphrase Santayana, by way of Freud, are doomed to repeat it.
Here�s most of the letter:
�I share your sentiments completely. The only thing I'm semi-certain about is Dean's lack of electability in November. I think it is because I lived through the McGovern campaign, as did some of those ex-Clinton people who have tried to pump up Clark. The similarities grow with every day. Not just the insurgent voter enthusiasm, the new ways of fundraising, and the bevy of flummoxed opponents, but also the economy (artificially stimulated by Nixon through the Fed and by Bush through the dollar just in time for election year) and the war (raging, but bound to quiet some by election time, and to raise prospects of peace). The economy deprives the Democrat of the issue that would allow him to attract working class votes; the war splits the Democrats, but not the Republicans. True, there are more "Starbucks" voters now than in 1972, but on the other side Bush is far more popular than Nixon was. Nixon was actually trailing Muskie in polls, which is why he thought he needed all the dirty tricks. I fear a cataclysm in the fall if the Democrats nominate Dean.�
This could have come from Tom Daschle�s super-ego � the same Daschle who said, about the compliant senate voting a blank check to Bush to make war in the Middle East, �now that�s over, we can get back to the economy.� These people truly don�t see what is right in front of their noses. The similarities with McGovern are trite. The idea that the war is just gonna simmer down, with the resistance melting away, is from Donald Rumsfeld�s May playbook � it looks silly now, and it will look even sillier as Bush bungles from one homemade solution to another. The truth is, the administration doesn�t just want to defeat the guerrillas in Iraq � they want a conservative showpiece in Iraq, something like Chili on the Euphrates. This is the dream they have clung consistently to, and there is no indication whatsoever that they have been swayed by the Reality principle. This is the true comparison with Vietnam. It isn't military, but attitudinal. Johnson saw Southeast Asia as another version of Delta Mississippi, with himself and the Pentagon supplying the necessary Great Society programs. Bush sees Iraq as a sort of Texas, where privatization and the right kind of can do businessmen will get the whole thing on-line and up to speed. That's a permanent illusion, we think. If there are any analogies to past elections, it should be more like Nixon vs. Humphrey.
As for the economic pickup � to be spooked because of a good quarter, and an uptick in employment that is, incidentally, one hundred thousand short of the standard Bush projection, is either na�ve or blind. Of course the economy is going to grow, but I wouldn�t bet on the deficit shrinking. I also wouldn�t bet on unemployment going down far enough that it recedes as an issue. So the Dem candidate ought to be able to talk about both of those things � and the only one I see crafting a realistic message is Dean. Dean is also the only candidate who knows that the electorate doesn�t punish an adaptive candidate � all the fingerpointing about previous positions just looks silly. Who cares what Dean said about Medicare in 94? It is an unlikely issue for the Republicans, anyway � what are they going to do, accuse Dean of secretly wanting to bring down the cost of Medicare?
There are, of course, a number of wildcards, but they are mostly not in Bush's favor. There is the possibility of another terrorist attack on this country -- and there is the growing possibility that terrorists might interrupt the oil economy of the Saudis. If that happened, the spike in oil prices would unwind this leveraged economy like nobody's business.
What Judis hates is the prospect of a Democratic president who does not particularly care for his kind � that niche of D.C. liberals who are always finding liberal reasons to support conservative policy. Those people have created a silly putty party, that presses out pale imitations of Republican programs. That�s a deeply dumb thing to keep on doing. Judis should look not to 72, but to 2002.
Sunday, November 9, 2003
As much as LI finds it rather laughable to advertise on this site, which at most gets sixty hits in a day, and usually hums along at thirty, we are going to put up our email address for our writing and editing service in this blog.
The service, RWGCommunications, copyedits, proofreads, and ghostwrites scholastic and technical papers, newsletters, news releases, speeches, and any and all written communications in English. We just copyedited some articles in a volume on process ontology that is coming out next year.
Here's the full advertisement:
I am a freelance writer and copyeditor. I have a B.A. in French, with a minor in German. I have extensive experience in two domains: editing and writing. I have proofread a number of e-books for Farrar Straus Giroux, one of the major American publishers. I have also done a number of more sophisticated copy-editing jobs, all as a freelancer, on academic topics ranging from Colonial Mexican literature to Jane Austin to Artificial Intelligence.
My experience as a writer is more varied. The list of my publications includes local, national, and Canadian magazines and newspapers. The brief list includes: the Austin Chronicle, the Austin American Statesman, San Antonio Express News, Wall Street Journal,Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, the Economist, Newsday, New York Observer, New York Press, Boston Herald, Boston Review, Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, Metro, Chicago Sun-Times, In These Times, National Post (of Canada), Salon, Feed, Intellectual Capital,Poets and Writers, Kamera (British), and Greenmagazine.
For the last named, Green, an investment magazine for 20 to 30 year olds started by Ken Kurson of Esquire magazine, I served as the chief business book reviewer. The magazine folded in 2001, but not before I had done more than 12 business book reviews. I mention this experience in particular because it gave me a large sense of the genre of business writing.
I currently run a weblog, and I have edited my own webzine, using FrontPage and copyediting the HTML myself.
Call me for prices (I'm very reasonable!) at (512) 478-3699, or write: Roger Gathman at rogerwgathman@yahoo.com.
Thanks.
The service, RWGCommunications, copyedits, proofreads, and ghostwrites scholastic and technical papers, newsletters, news releases, speeches, and any and all written communications in English. We just copyedited some articles in a volume on process ontology that is coming out next year.
Here's the full advertisement:
I am a freelance writer and copyeditor. I have a B.A. in French, with a minor in German. I have extensive experience in two domains: editing and writing. I have proofread a number of e-books for Farrar Straus Giroux, one of the major American publishers. I have also done a number of more sophisticated copy-editing jobs, all as a freelancer, on academic topics ranging from Colonial Mexican literature to Jane Austin to Artificial Intelligence.
My experience as a writer is more varied. The list of my publications includes local, national, and Canadian magazines and newspapers. The brief list includes: the Austin Chronicle, the Austin American Statesman, San Antonio Express News, Wall Street Journal,Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, the Economist, Newsday, New York Observer, New York Press, Boston Herald, Boston Review, Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, Metro, Chicago Sun-Times, In These Times, National Post (of Canada), Salon, Feed, Intellectual Capital,Poets and Writers, Kamera (British), and Greenmagazine.
For the last named, Green, an investment magazine for 20 to 30 year olds started by Ken Kurson of Esquire magazine, I served as the chief business book reviewer. The magazine folded in 2001, but not before I had done more than 12 business book reviews. I mention this experience in particular because it gave me a large sense of the genre of business writing.
I currently run a weblog, and I have edited my own webzine, using FrontPage and copyediting the HTML myself.
Call me for prices (I'm very reasonable!) at (512) 478-3699, or write: Roger Gathman at rogerwgathman@yahoo.com.
Thanks.
Bollettino
The rightwing media is so focused on the building of schools in Iraq that they have neglected a triumph of free enterprise: the building of concrete barriers. The NYT story, today, is enough to warm the cockles of Christopher Hitchens� heart. His buds among the occupiers � oops, liberators � are, of course, in intimate touch with the silent majority of Iraqis. But intimate touch doesn�t mean having the nasty things around you all the time, does it? Far better to seal yourself in with, say, a 9,000 pound concrete structure, �12 feet tall, is 9 feet wide, 4 feet thick at the base and 8 inches thick at the top.� Good fences make good neighbors, Frost wrote. In that spirit, the Occupation authority has been following the motto: �good concrete walls make good conquerors.� As things get better and better in Iraq, as we are making good progress, as many a hawk has to pinch himself not to move there, lock stock and barrel, so good are the circs (the affection of the people, the joy of being in the company of giants like Chalabi � it amazes me that Brit expats like Sullivan and Hitchens are still living in D.C. when they could be where the action is), the barrier has become a kind of status symbol.
�Miles of the barriers circle Baghdad's "green zone," the quiet, tree-lined neighborhoods were American occupation authorities live. But in recent weeks, as bombers have broadened their target list, the hulking walls have been installed around hotels, police stations, government ministries and private organizations. Every day, it seems, another facility is hidden behind a towering concrete wall.�
This is an entirely new take on the old Vietnam era idea of declaring victory and going home. We are going to create an enclave in Iraq that is so entirely bombproof and impenetrable by Iraqis that it will be a new, triumphant Iraq within Iraq. An Iraq we can rule. An Iraq that we have reformed. An Iraq that is entirely English speaking, and composed of men and women who are wholly on the Defense department contractor dole. Is this a great country, or what? No wonder Bush is practicing saying, �it�s morning in America.�
The rightwing media is so focused on the building of schools in Iraq that they have neglected a triumph of free enterprise: the building of concrete barriers. The NYT story, today, is enough to warm the cockles of Christopher Hitchens� heart. His buds among the occupiers � oops, liberators � are, of course, in intimate touch with the silent majority of Iraqis. But intimate touch doesn�t mean having the nasty things around you all the time, does it? Far better to seal yourself in with, say, a 9,000 pound concrete structure, �12 feet tall, is 9 feet wide, 4 feet thick at the base and 8 inches thick at the top.� Good fences make good neighbors, Frost wrote. In that spirit, the Occupation authority has been following the motto: �good concrete walls make good conquerors.� As things get better and better in Iraq, as we are making good progress, as many a hawk has to pinch himself not to move there, lock stock and barrel, so good are the circs (the affection of the people, the joy of being in the company of giants like Chalabi � it amazes me that Brit expats like Sullivan and Hitchens are still living in D.C. when they could be where the action is), the barrier has become a kind of status symbol.
�Miles of the barriers circle Baghdad's "green zone," the quiet, tree-lined neighborhoods were American occupation authorities live. But in recent weeks, as bombers have broadened their target list, the hulking walls have been installed around hotels, police stations, government ministries and private organizations. Every day, it seems, another facility is hidden behind a towering concrete wall.�
This is an entirely new take on the old Vietnam era idea of declaring victory and going home. We are going to create an enclave in Iraq that is so entirely bombproof and impenetrable by Iraqis that it will be a new, triumphant Iraq within Iraq. An Iraq we can rule. An Iraq that we have reformed. An Iraq that is entirely English speaking, and composed of men and women who are wholly on the Defense department contractor dole. Is this a great country, or what? No wonder Bush is practicing saying, �it�s morning in America.�
Saturday, November 8, 2003
Bollettino
Wow. An answering spirit. A man who gets it. LI is frankly amazed.
In Slate, there�s an article by one Daniel Benjamin. Benjamin analyzes a fact that we have referred to obsessively: the unsecured military dumps around Iraq. In particular, the transfer of anti-aircraft weaponry to unknown, and probably unfriendly, hands. This, we believe, might be the worst thing the Bush administration, in its unblemished record of calamitous and stupid acts, has done so far. A sin of omission indicating the omission is between the ears of the President:
�Given the growing intensity of the combat in Iraq, the downing of two helicopters and the resulting deaths of 22 soldiers in the last week comes as little surprise. The destruction of a Black Hawk today, reportedly by a rocket-propelled grenade, and a Chinook on Sunday by a shoulder-fired missile were all but statistical inevitabilities in a country with a deepening insurgence and 600,000 or more tons of largely unsecured armaments.
But the attacks should also send a shudder through anyone who flies, even if they never board anything but commercial wide-body airliners and never venture within 5,000 miles of Iraq. By removing the locks from Iraq's enormous stores of armaments, including "vast, unknown" quantities of anti-aircraft weapons, as Air Force Gen. John Handy, commander of U.S. Transportation Command, put it several months ago, the fighting in Iraq has virtually ensured that some of these arms will wind up in the hands of terrorists who will want to use them outside the current war zone.�
/
There�s an absolutely hilarious defense of Bush�s record on terrorism going the rounds � that the lack of an attack in the U.S. is evidence of success. The same conservatives who spout this nonsense segue, without hesitation, into denunciations of Clinton�s slackness � a segue that calmly bypasses the almost nine year interval between the first and the second attempts on the WTC. The Bushies don�t even have that inactivity to excuse their comedy cop routine, since earlier this year, in a band reaching from Morocco to Java, the network � that loosely connected, intrastate and informal structure that supports Al Qaeda influenced operatives � was able to hit a number of targets. Discussions about the deployment of more U.S. troops or less miss, largely, the point: what are the troops supposed to be doing in Iraq? One major objective should certainly be to destroy the weaponry that Saddam�s and the previous guvs were able to lavish on the country in extended shopping expeditions that surely benefited the good workers of Lille, Nashville, Tennessee, and Kiev for a good twenty years before 1991.
Here�s what we have said in various recent posts about this. Notice, this was written by a poor man in Austin, Texas, a good 7,000 miles from the conflict, with only newspapers to supply him with information, and that information, too, in English. In other words, this isn�t rocket science. It was easy to foresee, before November 2, that a helicopter was going to go down. What was not easy to foresee would be three hits in one and a half weeks.
September 21:
Here we have a presidency that has utterly failed. One that has amassed a five hundred billion dollar deficit on� nothing. One that has gotten us enmeshed in one war, in Iraq, that not only has nothing to do with our interests, but is actually harmful to them. Meanwhile, we have incompletely dealt with a group that really has physically attacked us � al Qaeda. By cautiously never pronouncing the name, Osama bin Laden, Bush attempts to exorcize the man. What is the result? In Morocco, Bali, Jakarta and Saudi Arabia the organization, or its allies, have attacked. The pretence that they are crippled makes sense only to people who cannot see what is in front of their nose. Here�s something in front of our noses: the people who hijacked the four planes three years ago did not have chemical weapons. They didn�t have Uzis. They used credit cards, airplane tickets, and hobby shop paraphernalia to wipe out three thousand lives. And so far, nothing that has happened tells us that this can�t happen again. Meanwhile, the Democrats act as if calling the President a �miserable failure� is some kind of logomachical triumph.
October 30:
1. End the p.r. aspect of the war. In Vietnam, the army would take a hill simply to have it reported on the news that they took a hill. That soon demoralized troops, and eventually corrupted the whole military effort in that war. In this war, we are hearing all about troops building schools. Meanwhile, on the side, we are also hearing that the guerillas are supplying themselves from huge dumps of conventional weapons, including surface to air missiles, because we don�t have enough military personnel on the ground to destroy these things. This is, to put it bluntly, lunatic. If you don�t prioritize military missions for the army in a hostile situation, you shouldn�t have any responsibility for the army. Be a man, pull the school builders, cut off the enemy�s ability to acquire weapons. Period.
Wow. An answering spirit. A man who gets it. LI is frankly amazed.
In Slate, there�s an article by one Daniel Benjamin. Benjamin analyzes a fact that we have referred to obsessively: the unsecured military dumps around Iraq. In particular, the transfer of anti-aircraft weaponry to unknown, and probably unfriendly, hands. This, we believe, might be the worst thing the Bush administration, in its unblemished record of calamitous and stupid acts, has done so far. A sin of omission indicating the omission is between the ears of the President:
�Given the growing intensity of the combat in Iraq, the downing of two helicopters and the resulting deaths of 22 soldiers in the last week comes as little surprise. The destruction of a Black Hawk today, reportedly by a rocket-propelled grenade, and a Chinook on Sunday by a shoulder-fired missile were all but statistical inevitabilities in a country with a deepening insurgence and 600,000 or more tons of largely unsecured armaments.
But the attacks should also send a shudder through anyone who flies, even if they never board anything but commercial wide-body airliners and never venture within 5,000 miles of Iraq. By removing the locks from Iraq's enormous stores of armaments, including "vast, unknown" quantities of anti-aircraft weapons, as Air Force Gen. John Handy, commander of U.S. Transportation Command, put it several months ago, the fighting in Iraq has virtually ensured that some of these arms will wind up in the hands of terrorists who will want to use them outside the current war zone.�
/
There�s an absolutely hilarious defense of Bush�s record on terrorism going the rounds � that the lack of an attack in the U.S. is evidence of success. The same conservatives who spout this nonsense segue, without hesitation, into denunciations of Clinton�s slackness � a segue that calmly bypasses the almost nine year interval between the first and the second attempts on the WTC. The Bushies don�t even have that inactivity to excuse their comedy cop routine, since earlier this year, in a band reaching from Morocco to Java, the network � that loosely connected, intrastate and informal structure that supports Al Qaeda influenced operatives � was able to hit a number of targets. Discussions about the deployment of more U.S. troops or less miss, largely, the point: what are the troops supposed to be doing in Iraq? One major objective should certainly be to destroy the weaponry that Saddam�s and the previous guvs were able to lavish on the country in extended shopping expeditions that surely benefited the good workers of Lille, Nashville, Tennessee, and Kiev for a good twenty years before 1991.
Here�s what we have said in various recent posts about this. Notice, this was written by a poor man in Austin, Texas, a good 7,000 miles from the conflict, with only newspapers to supply him with information, and that information, too, in English. In other words, this isn�t rocket science. It was easy to foresee, before November 2, that a helicopter was going to go down. What was not easy to foresee would be three hits in one and a half weeks.
September 21:
Here we have a presidency that has utterly failed. One that has amassed a five hundred billion dollar deficit on� nothing. One that has gotten us enmeshed in one war, in Iraq, that not only has nothing to do with our interests, but is actually harmful to them. Meanwhile, we have incompletely dealt with a group that really has physically attacked us � al Qaeda. By cautiously never pronouncing the name, Osama bin Laden, Bush attempts to exorcize the man. What is the result? In Morocco, Bali, Jakarta and Saudi Arabia the organization, or its allies, have attacked. The pretence that they are crippled makes sense only to people who cannot see what is in front of their nose. Here�s something in front of our noses: the people who hijacked the four planes three years ago did not have chemical weapons. They didn�t have Uzis. They used credit cards, airplane tickets, and hobby shop paraphernalia to wipe out three thousand lives. And so far, nothing that has happened tells us that this can�t happen again. Meanwhile, the Democrats act as if calling the President a �miserable failure� is some kind of logomachical triumph.
October 30:
1. End the p.r. aspect of the war. In Vietnam, the army would take a hill simply to have it reported on the news that they took a hill. That soon demoralized troops, and eventually corrupted the whole military effort in that war. In this war, we are hearing all about troops building schools. Meanwhile, on the side, we are also hearing that the guerillas are supplying themselves from huge dumps of conventional weapons, including surface to air missiles, because we don�t have enough military personnel on the ground to destroy these things. This is, to put it bluntly, lunatic. If you don�t prioritize military missions for the army in a hostile situation, you shouldn�t have any responsibility for the army. Be a man, pull the school builders, cut off the enemy�s ability to acquire weapons. Period.
Friday, November 7, 2003
Bollettino
Notes on unemployment. LI's was not one of the figures that got slotted into the employment column this month. We are happy to see that one hundred thousand more people did get jobs. Ourselves, it will now be six months, and, we estimate, seventy some applications, resumes, and cover letters since we started our quest. In September, we even went to some employment agencies. Kelly's, and one that specialized in secretarial work. Employment agencies used to be bread and butter. In New Haven, LI really did work for a year for a temp agency. Around that experience, in retrospect, we have woven a rosy glow. Back in those days, we could manfully go out on a Friday and pay for our drinks and eats. Something we haven't been able to do, now, for a year.
Today the job we had scared up lately -- painting -- was cancelled. Bad news, as we haven't paid a bill this month, and they are all hanging over our head. There is this much to be said for poverty -- it makes you very, very aware. For instance, I am very aware of opening the front door. I take a deep breath when I do it. I expect something to be hanging there -- a notice from the landlady or the power company. The telephone company isn't as client friendly -- they just cut you off.
So, rather glumly, we decided to take advantage of our "free day" to apply for something. Surely the employment numbers ought to nudge retail stores in Austin gearing up for holiday sales. Happy, newly employed people will want to buy gifts for all the people who floated them when they were down, n'est-ce pas? We went to our two most visited sites -- Monster and Statesman jobs. Ah, Statesman jobs had a nice one -- the liquor store we pass almost every day wants help! Well, from consumer to advisor -- trust me for the higher zones of drunkenness. I put on a nice shirt and my nice black shoes, the blunt nosed one, and ventured out. The woman behind the counter didn't exactly seem overjoyed to see me -- although surely she's rung up my 1.39 Buds before? No matter. I went to the Lotto machine, which had a surface on which I could write, and scribbled down my history, at least as the makers of job applications view the salient points of it. In the meantime, two customers came in, both of whom seemed to be living on the street. The had the street aura attachng to their gimme caps and jeans and backpacks. That sense that the long, strange trip has been way too long -- in fact, it looks like it is going to go on until you die. The one with the big curly beard was determined to cash a check, while the younger one, blonde, a little abashed, hung back. The woman at the counter couldn't cash the check because there wasn't enough money in the cash register. The big curly beard just wanted, though, to cash a check. And so, for about six times, the woman at the counter re-iterated the fund deficit problem, and the man in the beard re-iterated his check situation. The beard was already a little wasted, but it was a friendly, morning glow. His buddy caught on the first time, and when the woman explained the fund deficiency problem, the blonde would also explain the problem, until the beard finally achieved a puddled satori and said, hey, why am I in here so early?
I think my future is with the beard.
Notes on unemployment. LI's was not one of the figures that got slotted into the employment column this month. We are happy to see that one hundred thousand more people did get jobs. Ourselves, it will now be six months, and, we estimate, seventy some applications, resumes, and cover letters since we started our quest. In September, we even went to some employment agencies. Kelly's, and one that specialized in secretarial work. Employment agencies used to be bread and butter. In New Haven, LI really did work for a year for a temp agency. Around that experience, in retrospect, we have woven a rosy glow. Back in those days, we could manfully go out on a Friday and pay for our drinks and eats. Something we haven't been able to do, now, for a year.
Today the job we had scared up lately -- painting -- was cancelled. Bad news, as we haven't paid a bill this month, and they are all hanging over our head. There is this much to be said for poverty -- it makes you very, very aware. For instance, I am very aware of opening the front door. I take a deep breath when I do it. I expect something to be hanging there -- a notice from the landlady or the power company. The telephone company isn't as client friendly -- they just cut you off.
So, rather glumly, we decided to take advantage of our "free day" to apply for something. Surely the employment numbers ought to nudge retail stores in Austin gearing up for holiday sales. Happy, newly employed people will want to buy gifts for all the people who floated them when they were down, n'est-ce pas? We went to our two most visited sites -- Monster and Statesman jobs. Ah, Statesman jobs had a nice one -- the liquor store we pass almost every day wants help! Well, from consumer to advisor -- trust me for the higher zones of drunkenness. I put on a nice shirt and my nice black shoes, the blunt nosed one, and ventured out. The woman behind the counter didn't exactly seem overjoyed to see me -- although surely she's rung up my 1.39 Buds before? No matter. I went to the Lotto machine, which had a surface on which I could write, and scribbled down my history, at least as the makers of job applications view the salient points of it. In the meantime, two customers came in, both of whom seemed to be living on the street. The had the street aura attachng to their gimme caps and jeans and backpacks. That sense that the long, strange trip has been way too long -- in fact, it looks like it is going to go on until you die. The one with the big curly beard was determined to cash a check, while the younger one, blonde, a little abashed, hung back. The woman at the counter couldn't cash the check because there wasn't enough money in the cash register. The big curly beard just wanted, though, to cash a check. And so, for about six times, the woman at the counter re-iterated the fund deficit problem, and the man in the beard re-iterated his check situation. The beard was already a little wasted, but it was a friendly, morning glow. His buddy caught on the first time, and when the woman explained the fund deficiency problem, the blonde would also explain the problem, until the beard finally achieved a puddled satori and said, hey, why am I in here so early?
I think my future is with the beard.
Wednesday, November 5, 2003
Bollettino
As we numerously, and numbingly pointed out in the pre-war buildup, Christopher Hitchens, one of the most showcased of the Bush apologists in the media, argued for a war that diverged significantly from the one the Bush administration said it wanted to fight. Hitchens�s war was never fought. Bush�s was. We have been wondering what effect this might have had on Hitchens. Does his heart still belong to Daddy? Or has he crawled off Paul Wolfowitz�s knee and become a finger-pointer?
The good news is, Hitchens is a loyal soldier. In his latest column for Slate, he shows that he, and Tony Blair, are perhaps the only Brits left who believe the Saddam and the WMD fairytale. But Hitchens was never along on the weapons case. He was, emotionally, tugged by the idea that Saddam was a terrorist, and he still clings to that. Here�s an all too typical passage:
�And it [the peace of 91] left Saddam free to continue to threaten his neighbors and to give support and encouragement to jihad forces around the world. (The man most wanted in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Abdul Rahman Yasin, fled straight from New Jersey to Baghdad, though there are still those in our "intelligence" services who prefer to grant Saddam the presumption of innocence in this and many other matters.).�
Perhaps the intelligence services remembered that they helped Klaus Barbie escape Europe in the late 1940s � and they perhaps remembered that that did not imply that the U.S. was pro-Hitler. States make all kind of alliances, for all kinds of reasons. As for the threats to his neighbors, Hitchens truly must be joking. This is a man who didn�t even effectually threaten Northern Iraq, split off by the Coalition No-Fly zone. Since Hitchens loves to put in unsupported French bashing statesments (�Not only was he able to defy the United Nations, but with French and Russian collusion, he was also increasingly able to circumvent sanctions�), perhaps we should add that the No Fly zone was initiated by the French, who moved a reluctant Bush I to implement it.
Hitchens loves to battle straw men; but as the Iraq situation worsens, he doesn�t have that luxury as much as he used to. So as he moves to shape his argument for the war in his customary, and purely meretricious, terms (�The continuation of this regime was indeed an imminent threat, at least in the sense that it was a permanent threat. The question then, becomes this: Should the date or timing of this unpostponable confrontation have been left to Saddam Hussein to pick? The two chief justifications offered by the Bush administration (which did mention human rights and genocide at its first presentation to the United Nations, an appeal that fell on cold as well as deaf ears) were WMDs and terrorism. Here, it is simply astonishing how many people remain willing to give Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt.�), you can feel him starting to come to grips with the argument that the planning up to the war was flawed, even if one bought the case for belligerence � that instead of having the obnoxious Rumsfeld shooting off his mouth, it would have been far better to have the oily Baker jetting around, holding the hands of the allies. Hitchens, as an ideologue, hates the idea that sometimes, extremism isn�t necessary in the defense of liberty. It is interesting that Lefty types, when they migrate right, don�t stop until they are as far over as possible. Hitchens pairing with Newt Gingrich is much like Horowitz�s pairing with a varied and unsavory crew of racists. Hitchens, however, is a brighter man than the never too 100 watt-ish Horowitz. That said, he is still inclined to that laughable gesture of the self-important insider, the personal assurance from a Very Important Person:
�More to the point, one has to be prepared to support a campaign�or a cause�that is going badly. The president has been widely lampooned by many a glib columnist for saying that increased violence is not necessarily a cause for despair and may even be evidence of traction. He is, in fact, quite right to take this view, which was first expressed, to my knowledge, by Gen. John Abizaid. Those who murder the officials of the United Nations and the Red Cross, set fire to oil pipelines and blow up water mains, and shoot down respected clerics outside places of worship are indeed making our point for us. There is no justifiable way that a country as populous and important as Iraq can be left at the mercy of such people.�
With the last, of course, we can agree. Iraq was never going to have avoid the historic pattern that usually precedes liberation � that is, internal strife. The idea that the U.S. was, or is, going to impose its own form of liberation on the country was the whole reason to oppose the war, from a Burkean standpoint. Hitchens� war was one fought against an absolute evil by an entity without its own interests. A fairy tale war. Luckily, in the real war, the Coalition is reluctantly starting to rethink its screw-ups � for instance, trusting Chalabi as the voice of the Iraqi people; or disbanding the Iraqi army. No thanks, one must add, to Hitchens, whose miserable invectives before the war have not been enriched by any particular ingenuity since Daddy declared the major hostilities over. If Hitchens really wanted to justify this war, perhaps he would have chose this week to write about something a little more timely � for instance, the bonehead gesture of imposing a Grover Norquist approved flat tax on the country. Since nobody in Iraq is much used to paying taxes, this is a non-issue for the nonce � but in combination with selling off Iraq�s private industry, it could soon become a very hot, and very fraught one. We leave Iraqis to the �mercy of such people� as the guerillas when we give them such rally-able objects to resist.
As we numerously, and numbingly pointed out in the pre-war buildup, Christopher Hitchens, one of the most showcased of the Bush apologists in the media, argued for a war that diverged significantly from the one the Bush administration said it wanted to fight. Hitchens�s war was never fought. Bush�s was. We have been wondering what effect this might have had on Hitchens. Does his heart still belong to Daddy? Or has he crawled off Paul Wolfowitz�s knee and become a finger-pointer?
The good news is, Hitchens is a loyal soldier. In his latest column for Slate, he shows that he, and Tony Blair, are perhaps the only Brits left who believe the Saddam and the WMD fairytale. But Hitchens was never along on the weapons case. He was, emotionally, tugged by the idea that Saddam was a terrorist, and he still clings to that. Here�s an all too typical passage:
�And it [the peace of 91] left Saddam free to continue to threaten his neighbors and to give support and encouragement to jihad forces around the world. (The man most wanted in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Abdul Rahman Yasin, fled straight from New Jersey to Baghdad, though there are still those in our "intelligence" services who prefer to grant Saddam the presumption of innocence in this and many other matters.).�
Perhaps the intelligence services remembered that they helped Klaus Barbie escape Europe in the late 1940s � and they perhaps remembered that that did not imply that the U.S. was pro-Hitler. States make all kind of alliances, for all kinds of reasons. As for the threats to his neighbors, Hitchens truly must be joking. This is a man who didn�t even effectually threaten Northern Iraq, split off by the Coalition No-Fly zone. Since Hitchens loves to put in unsupported French bashing statesments (�Not only was he able to defy the United Nations, but with French and Russian collusion, he was also increasingly able to circumvent sanctions�), perhaps we should add that the No Fly zone was initiated by the French, who moved a reluctant Bush I to implement it.
Hitchens loves to battle straw men; but as the Iraq situation worsens, he doesn�t have that luxury as much as he used to. So as he moves to shape his argument for the war in his customary, and purely meretricious, terms (�The continuation of this regime was indeed an imminent threat, at least in the sense that it was a permanent threat. The question then, becomes this: Should the date or timing of this unpostponable confrontation have been left to Saddam Hussein to pick? The two chief justifications offered by the Bush administration (which did mention human rights and genocide at its first presentation to the United Nations, an appeal that fell on cold as well as deaf ears) were WMDs and terrorism. Here, it is simply astonishing how many people remain willing to give Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt.�), you can feel him starting to come to grips with the argument that the planning up to the war was flawed, even if one bought the case for belligerence � that instead of having the obnoxious Rumsfeld shooting off his mouth, it would have been far better to have the oily Baker jetting around, holding the hands of the allies. Hitchens, as an ideologue, hates the idea that sometimes, extremism isn�t necessary in the defense of liberty. It is interesting that Lefty types, when they migrate right, don�t stop until they are as far over as possible. Hitchens pairing with Newt Gingrich is much like Horowitz�s pairing with a varied and unsavory crew of racists. Hitchens, however, is a brighter man than the never too 100 watt-ish Horowitz. That said, he is still inclined to that laughable gesture of the self-important insider, the personal assurance from a Very Important Person:
�More to the point, one has to be prepared to support a campaign�or a cause�that is going badly. The president has been widely lampooned by many a glib columnist for saying that increased violence is not necessarily a cause for despair and may even be evidence of traction. He is, in fact, quite right to take this view, which was first expressed, to my knowledge, by Gen. John Abizaid. Those who murder the officials of the United Nations and the Red Cross, set fire to oil pipelines and blow up water mains, and shoot down respected clerics outside places of worship are indeed making our point for us. There is no justifiable way that a country as populous and important as Iraq can be left at the mercy of such people.�
With the last, of course, we can agree. Iraq was never going to have avoid the historic pattern that usually precedes liberation � that is, internal strife. The idea that the U.S. was, or is, going to impose its own form of liberation on the country was the whole reason to oppose the war, from a Burkean standpoint. Hitchens� war was one fought against an absolute evil by an entity without its own interests. A fairy tale war. Luckily, in the real war, the Coalition is reluctantly starting to rethink its screw-ups � for instance, trusting Chalabi as the voice of the Iraqi people; or disbanding the Iraqi army. No thanks, one must add, to Hitchens, whose miserable invectives before the war have not been enriched by any particular ingenuity since Daddy declared the major hostilities over. If Hitchens really wanted to justify this war, perhaps he would have chose this week to write about something a little more timely � for instance, the bonehead gesture of imposing a Grover Norquist approved flat tax on the country. Since nobody in Iraq is much used to paying taxes, this is a non-issue for the nonce � but in combination with selling off Iraq�s private industry, it could soon become a very hot, and very fraught one. We leave Iraqis to the �mercy of such people� as the guerillas when we give them such rally-able objects to resist.
Tuesday, November 4, 2003
Bollettino
"We mourn every loss, we honour every name, we grieve with every family, and we will always be grateful that liberty has found such brave defenders� � George Bush, November 3
�Bring em on� � George Bush, July 3
Ten names of the 16 that were killed Sunday in Fallujah.
Joe Wilson, Crystal Springs, Mississippi
Sgt. Ernest Bucklew, Enon Valley, Pennsylvania
Sgt. Keelan L. Moss, Houston, Texas
Pfc. Anthony Domenic D'Agostino, Waterbury, Connecticut
Spc Brian Penniston, Fort Wayne, Indiana
Staff Sgt. Daniel Bader, York, Nebraska
Private Karina Lau, Livingstone, California
Spc. Frances M. Vega, San Francisco, California
Darius T. Jennings, Cordova, South Carolina
1st Lt. Brian Slavenas, Genoa, Illinois
Sgt. Steven D. Conover, Wilmington, Ohio
Let these names lie heavy on D.C.
"We mourn every loss, we honour every name, we grieve with every family, and we will always be grateful that liberty has found such brave defenders� � George Bush, November 3
�Bring em on� � George Bush, July 3
Ten names of the 16 that were killed Sunday in Fallujah.
Joe Wilson, Crystal Springs, Mississippi
Sgt. Ernest Bucklew, Enon Valley, Pennsylvania
Sgt. Keelan L. Moss, Houston, Texas
Pfc. Anthony Domenic D'Agostino, Waterbury, Connecticut
Spc Brian Penniston, Fort Wayne, Indiana
Staff Sgt. Daniel Bader, York, Nebraska
Private Karina Lau, Livingstone, California
Spc. Frances M. Vega, San Francisco, California
Darius T. Jennings, Cordova, South Carolina
1st Lt. Brian Slavenas, Genoa, Illinois
Sgt. Steven D. Conover, Wilmington, Ohio
Let these names lie heavy on D.C.
Monday, November 3, 2003
Bollettino
Who are these people? That�s a good question to pose when newspapers quote out of the blue experts, often described with stunning vagueness. This morning, the Washington Post, in a typical D.C. analysis of the helicopter downing � an analysis that sees the deaths of these guys as having no meaning in itself, empty burned ciphers hardly worth a human interest story, but very exciting in terms of polls � maundered on in its brainless way for a while about what the Bushies would do. It wrung its little article hands like this:
�Indeed, the helicopter downing came as two worrisome trends face the Bush administration. In Iraq, there are signs that the anti-U.S. opposition is escalating its attacks both in numbers and sophistication. Even while the U.S. intelligence haul in Iraq is improving, commanders there said, the fighters attacking them also are becoming more effective.
Meanwhile, the American public's support for President Bush's handling of the war is declining, which makes the situation even more volatile.�
The link between being anti-Bush and anti-U.S. isn�t even subtle there, is it? But that is D.C., where the Republican establishment line has long become the default for Post-speak. That the American people would become anti-U.S. has, after all, happened before, when they refused to impeach Clinton. The Post scourged those slackers then, and intends to scourge them now, if they lack resolve. So the article bleets, and slowly loses its air. But not before it rallies around a quote from �retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, a consultant to the Pentagon on Iraqi security issues.� Now if you guess that Anderson said this will test American resolve, but that we are winning, you win a penny. Although since it is boring simply to repeat the same robot line, he was quoted to the more specific effect of opining �it is clear that the only "exit strategy" available is to develop Iraqi security forces to fight the remnants of Saddam Hussein's government. And he predicted that that approach will succeed.�
The deal is � who the hell is retired Col. Gary Anderson? It turns out that Anderson � as one discovers from Google � was not just walking in a military way down the street, when the Pentagon decided to consult with him. No, Anderson is working for Science Applications International, one of the largest privately held defense contracting firms in the country, with huge stakes in Iraq � for instance, they �hired� the Iraqi exiles that have since been appointed to the Council. Now, would the Post quote an Enron executive about power with the description that he �consulted� for the Energy department? We doubt it. But when it comes to foreign policy � especially a war that the Post editorial board pumped and plumped for � any retired colonel with hawkish views is worth quoting. It�s a wonderful life, in D.C.
In another piece of news � we were alerted to the International Studies in Higher Education Act (H.R. 3077) by the National Review, which is solidly in favor of the little monster. Ping, went the radar. Ping ping. We went to the website of another supporter, Martin Kramer, for details. Kramer, defines the bill in terms of the opposition it has engendered: �The higher education lobby, led by the American Council on Education (ACE), remains determined to gut the bill. Never mind that the board will be advisory, not supervisory. Never mind that the bill doesn't allow the board "to mandate, direct, or control an institution of higher education's specific instructional content, curriculum, or program of instruction.� Why, if it doesn�t do those things, have a monitoring body at all? Cutting to the chase, Kramer quotes with approval one of the bill�s supporters, Howard Berman:
�I am encouraged that the creation of this Advisory Board will help redress a problem which is a great concern of mine, namely, the lack of balance, and indeed the anti-American bias that pervades Title VI-funded Middle East studies programs in particular. To the extent that it advances the national interest to commit taxpayer funds to institutions of higher education for the purpose of fostering expertise with regard to key regions of the world�and I would emphatically affirm that it does�then surely it is troubling when evidence suggests that many of the Middle East regional studies grantees are committed to a narrow point of view at odds with our national interest, a point of view that questions the validity of advancing American ideals of democracy and the rule of law around the world, and in the Middle East in particular.�
The contradiction between descriptions of the bill smells like Ashcroft. How will the Advisory Board �redress� the �problem� here if it is prevented absolutely from impinging on a specific content, curriculum or program of instruction? If it quacks like a cop and wears a uniform like a cop and takes you down to the police station and gives you the fifth degree � it is a cop. I especially like the idea that a professor that questions the validity of advancing American ideals of democracy in the Middle East would run into trouble from the Advisory committee � who are no doubt simply making observations, instead of impinging on content. It is of course an objective fact that all American involvement in the Middle East is nothing more than democracy in action. As for the other side of the coin -- say, the Advisory committee discovering that students at some shoddy rightwing junior college in Marietta, Georgia, are only getting old film clips of Newt Gingrich lectures in their middle eastern studies course � do you think this is something the Advisory committee is going to stamp its foot at? I don't think so. The law simply and purely mandates rightwing activism as an official policy of the U.S. government. No wonder the Kramers of the world love it. This is a laughable extension of the de-fund the left � and fund the right with government money � type of stuff that goes on in D.C. when the Repubs are in power.
Who are these people? That�s a good question to pose when newspapers quote out of the blue experts, often described with stunning vagueness. This morning, the Washington Post, in a typical D.C. analysis of the helicopter downing � an analysis that sees the deaths of these guys as having no meaning in itself, empty burned ciphers hardly worth a human interest story, but very exciting in terms of polls � maundered on in its brainless way for a while about what the Bushies would do. It wrung its little article hands like this:
�Indeed, the helicopter downing came as two worrisome trends face the Bush administration. In Iraq, there are signs that the anti-U.S. opposition is escalating its attacks both in numbers and sophistication. Even while the U.S. intelligence haul in Iraq is improving, commanders there said, the fighters attacking them also are becoming more effective.
Meanwhile, the American public's support for President Bush's handling of the war is declining, which makes the situation even more volatile.�
The link between being anti-Bush and anti-U.S. isn�t even subtle there, is it? But that is D.C., where the Republican establishment line has long become the default for Post-speak. That the American people would become anti-U.S. has, after all, happened before, when they refused to impeach Clinton. The Post scourged those slackers then, and intends to scourge them now, if they lack resolve. So the article bleets, and slowly loses its air. But not before it rallies around a quote from �retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, a consultant to the Pentagon on Iraqi security issues.� Now if you guess that Anderson said this will test American resolve, but that we are winning, you win a penny. Although since it is boring simply to repeat the same robot line, he was quoted to the more specific effect of opining �it is clear that the only "exit strategy" available is to develop Iraqi security forces to fight the remnants of Saddam Hussein's government. And he predicted that that approach will succeed.�
The deal is � who the hell is retired Col. Gary Anderson? It turns out that Anderson � as one discovers from Google � was not just walking in a military way down the street, when the Pentagon decided to consult with him. No, Anderson is working for Science Applications International, one of the largest privately held defense contracting firms in the country, with huge stakes in Iraq � for instance, they �hired� the Iraqi exiles that have since been appointed to the Council. Now, would the Post quote an Enron executive about power with the description that he �consulted� for the Energy department? We doubt it. But when it comes to foreign policy � especially a war that the Post editorial board pumped and plumped for � any retired colonel with hawkish views is worth quoting. It�s a wonderful life, in D.C.
In another piece of news � we were alerted to the International Studies in Higher Education Act (H.R. 3077) by the National Review, which is solidly in favor of the little monster. Ping, went the radar. Ping ping. We went to the website of another supporter, Martin Kramer, for details. Kramer, defines the bill in terms of the opposition it has engendered: �The higher education lobby, led by the American Council on Education (ACE), remains determined to gut the bill. Never mind that the board will be advisory, not supervisory. Never mind that the bill doesn't allow the board "to mandate, direct, or control an institution of higher education's specific instructional content, curriculum, or program of instruction.� Why, if it doesn�t do those things, have a monitoring body at all? Cutting to the chase, Kramer quotes with approval one of the bill�s supporters, Howard Berman:
�I am encouraged that the creation of this Advisory Board will help redress a problem which is a great concern of mine, namely, the lack of balance, and indeed the anti-American bias that pervades Title VI-funded Middle East studies programs in particular. To the extent that it advances the national interest to commit taxpayer funds to institutions of higher education for the purpose of fostering expertise with regard to key regions of the world�and I would emphatically affirm that it does�then surely it is troubling when evidence suggests that many of the Middle East regional studies grantees are committed to a narrow point of view at odds with our national interest, a point of view that questions the validity of advancing American ideals of democracy and the rule of law around the world, and in the Middle East in particular.�
The contradiction between descriptions of the bill smells like Ashcroft. How will the Advisory Board �redress� the �problem� here if it is prevented absolutely from impinging on a specific content, curriculum or program of instruction? If it quacks like a cop and wears a uniform like a cop and takes you down to the police station and gives you the fifth degree � it is a cop. I especially like the idea that a professor that questions the validity of advancing American ideals of democracy in the Middle East would run into trouble from the Advisory committee � who are no doubt simply making observations, instead of impinging on content. It is of course an objective fact that all American involvement in the Middle East is nothing more than democracy in action. As for the other side of the coin -- say, the Advisory committee discovering that students at some shoddy rightwing junior college in Marietta, Georgia, are only getting old film clips of Newt Gingrich lectures in their middle eastern studies course � do you think this is something the Advisory committee is going to stamp its foot at? I don't think so. The law simply and purely mandates rightwing activism as an official policy of the U.S. government. No wonder the Kramers of the world love it. This is a laughable extension of the de-fund the left � and fund the right with government money � type of stuff that goes on in D.C. when the Repubs are in power.
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