Dope
Words written in anger. LI finds this incredible: writers are treated so badly by the media that it either stupifies us, forces us to quit, or demoralizes us beyond repair. This is the second time in the last five days that LI has had to go without food for a day. The reason? No money in the bank. The reason: One company has deliberately floated me -- not paid me -- for work I turned in in June, and that was published in July. One company has "lost" my invoice -- this makes the second time in the last month. For that company, I have reviewed approximately ten to fifteen books in the last five weeks. Result: I am living by leeching on my friends. Leeching only goes so far, however. So, today, I didn't have the money to buy ten dollars worth of groceries from the clerk, who makes more than me, and who is paid biweekly. The time divide is the major divide in this country: a company can take its time about paying you, in spite of the contracts they have you sign in order to spin your work off without you gaining a penny by it, and they can do this repeatedly, and they can do this without penalty. This has happened with Lefty magazines; it has happened with national newspapers. You wouldn't think so, but this is true.The writer cannot make the same bargain with the grocer, the landlord, or the electric company. These are my expenses this week: 30.00 for groceries. 5.00 for a meal -- a big treat for me, going out and getting a sandwich! 4.00 for coffees. I would like to see anybody survive on what I am forced to, with chronic, unexplained shortfalls making me truly unable to say that I can eat tomorrow. In the literal sense, I can't. I will find some body, I hope, who can take me out. Hurray.
This is the life of a beast.
This is the system that makes life beastly. I am living in nineteenth century squalor. I am imprisoned in my conditions, and no amount of labor seems to help. I am being driven mad by this. Literally.
I can howl and scream, I can beat my skinny belly, but nothing, nothing changes.
What to do?
Thursday, September 12, 2002
Wednesday, September 11, 2002
Remora
September 11. LI was not going to post today. But then we thought, reading the NYT, and various media, that it might be a good idea to post today. After all, this is the week that Bush has chosen to press forward with his war against Iraq, with his address to the United Nations. And we were surprised to see Bush's comments on the NYT op-ed page -- surprised because we didn't expect to see a Washington Times guy like Bush appearing in same space used by Susan Sontag Monday.
So we decided, one year later, to take a look at Sontag's much condemned response to 9/11. It was easy to find on the web. A NYU finance professor has even taken the trouble to combine Sontag's 9/10 piece in the Times and the New Yorker piece. Here's the first paragraph, the one that drew down the wrath of the heavens last year:
"The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose
of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling & depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower; undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards. "
It was part of the disconnect from reality that much of the controversy about this graf had to do with whether or not the hijackers were or were not cowardly. The controversy seems, in retrospect, bizarre. On the one hand, to undertake to kill yourself in a cause can be construed as brave. On the other hand, to undertake to kill others without warning in a cause to which they are not clearly, if at all, connected can be construed as cowardly. It depends, obviously, on which end of the action you look at. In the end, I'd say that the story of war in this century is about the systematic displacement of all of the elements that were once engaged in the semantic field of "bravery." It is a field that fell to the technology of distance. Bombing Iraq is, indeed, another example in the endless story of 20th century fighting -- it is impervious to descriptions of cowardice and bravery. Once cowardice wins wars, and bravery loses them, the virtues begin to lose their luster.
That Bush would reach, instinctively, for the "coward" appelation had to do with forestalling criticism of his own regard for his skin, that day -- criticism that has been so reversed that we are now assured that the President nearly fought with his pilots to take Air Force one immediately to D.C., so brave a hero is he. This is blatantly untrue, and to the extent that Sontag takes on the press for "impression management," she is precisely right. That Sontag, a literary critic, fell for Bush's description of the act and the invitation to descriptions derived from an irrelevant system of virtues -- that in fact she doesn't make the elementary analysis of the coward trope that she, a good Barthesian, could easily have done -- gives us a measure of how confusing -- how stricken -- the period after 9/11 was. Criticism isn't simply opposition, and that, of course, was the whole problem with Sontag's piece.
The other thing to note, after a year, is that Sontag's numerous conservative critics -- who called her various names, like filthy, quisling, etc. -- now essentially agree with her that the whole thing was about Iraq. This would be funny, if it wasn't so not-funny. Of course, what we provisionally know, after a year of probing the Al Quaeda network, is that it wasn't at all about Iraq. It was about Saudi Arabia, first. It was about the perception that still lives, in the Arab world, among certain leaders, that the U.S. is a paper tiger -- a perception that arose from the bombing of the Marine Barracks in Lebanon in 83, and the subsequent American retreat from Lebanon. And if what has been reported about the preaching in the "radical" mosques in Hamburg is correct, it was about "Jewry" -- a soiled, disgusting theme that we are all too familiar with. The WP has an article, today, with the dime novel title, Hamburg's Cauldron of Terror, which quotes a typical sermon of the kind that, apparently, nourished Mohammed Atta's soul:
"The Al Quds mosque opened in 1993 and became a center for incendiary views. "The Jews and crusaders must have their throats slit," said Imam Mohammed bin Mohammed al Fizazi in a pre-Sept. 11 sermon, which was videotaped.
Such preaching has continued. The Post last month purchased a video at the Al Quds mosque in which an Islamic preacher, identified as Sheik Azid al Kirani, shouts out a call for mortal combat against "Jews, Israel and all unbelievers."
There is little common ground between the purveyors of this kind of Islamic ultramontanism and Iraq. There's good reason that none of the hijackers were Iraqi -- the issue between the U.S. and Iraq is definitely not at the center of the thinking of people like Atta, who detest the thought of secular Arabic power. "How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq?", Sontag justly asks. What she implies, however, is, distressingly, a view that has become very orthodox in right wing circles: the Middle East is one uniform mass, in which the differences between, say, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein melt down to a feeble few. This view is just plain wrong: its falsity can be spelled out in body counts.
September 11. LI was not going to post today. But then we thought, reading the NYT, and various media, that it might be a good idea to post today. After all, this is the week that Bush has chosen to press forward with his war against Iraq, with his address to the United Nations. And we were surprised to see Bush's comments on the NYT op-ed page -- surprised because we didn't expect to see a Washington Times guy like Bush appearing in same space used by Susan Sontag Monday.
So we decided, one year later, to take a look at Sontag's much condemned response to 9/11. It was easy to find on the web. A NYU finance professor has even taken the trouble to combine Sontag's 9/10 piece in the Times and the New Yorker piece. Here's the first paragraph, the one that drew down the wrath of the heavens last year:
"The disconnect between last Tuesday's monstrous dose
of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling & depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a "cowardly" attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world" but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower; undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards. "
It was part of the disconnect from reality that much of the controversy about this graf had to do with whether or not the hijackers were or were not cowardly. The controversy seems, in retrospect, bizarre. On the one hand, to undertake to kill yourself in a cause can be construed as brave. On the other hand, to undertake to kill others without warning in a cause to which they are not clearly, if at all, connected can be construed as cowardly. It depends, obviously, on which end of the action you look at. In the end, I'd say that the story of war in this century is about the systematic displacement of all of the elements that were once engaged in the semantic field of "bravery." It is a field that fell to the technology of distance. Bombing Iraq is, indeed, another example in the endless story of 20th century fighting -- it is impervious to descriptions of cowardice and bravery. Once cowardice wins wars, and bravery loses them, the virtues begin to lose their luster.
That Bush would reach, instinctively, for the "coward" appelation had to do with forestalling criticism of his own regard for his skin, that day -- criticism that has been so reversed that we are now assured that the President nearly fought with his pilots to take Air Force one immediately to D.C., so brave a hero is he. This is blatantly untrue, and to the extent that Sontag takes on the press for "impression management," she is precisely right. That Sontag, a literary critic, fell for Bush's description of the act and the invitation to descriptions derived from an irrelevant system of virtues -- that in fact she doesn't make the elementary analysis of the coward trope that she, a good Barthesian, could easily have done -- gives us a measure of how confusing -- how stricken -- the period after 9/11 was. Criticism isn't simply opposition, and that, of course, was the whole problem with Sontag's piece.
The other thing to note, after a year, is that Sontag's numerous conservative critics -- who called her various names, like filthy, quisling, etc. -- now essentially agree with her that the whole thing was about Iraq. This would be funny, if it wasn't so not-funny. Of course, what we provisionally know, after a year of probing the Al Quaeda network, is that it wasn't at all about Iraq. It was about Saudi Arabia, first. It was about the perception that still lives, in the Arab world, among certain leaders, that the U.S. is a paper tiger -- a perception that arose from the bombing of the Marine Barracks in Lebanon in 83, and the subsequent American retreat from Lebanon. And if what has been reported about the preaching in the "radical" mosques in Hamburg is correct, it was about "Jewry" -- a soiled, disgusting theme that we are all too familiar with. The WP has an article, today, with the dime novel title, Hamburg's Cauldron of Terror, which quotes a typical sermon of the kind that, apparently, nourished Mohammed Atta's soul:
"The Al Quds mosque opened in 1993 and became a center for incendiary views. "The Jews and crusaders must have their throats slit," said Imam Mohammed bin Mohammed al Fizazi in a pre-Sept. 11 sermon, which was videotaped.
Such preaching has continued. The Post last month purchased a video at the Al Quds mosque in which an Islamic preacher, identified as Sheik Azid al Kirani, shouts out a call for mortal combat against "Jews, Israel and all unbelievers."
There is little common ground between the purveyors of this kind of Islamic ultramontanism and Iraq. There's good reason that none of the hijackers were Iraqi -- the issue between the U.S. and Iraq is definitely not at the center of the thinking of people like Atta, who detest the thought of secular Arabic power. "How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq?", Sontag justly asks. What she implies, however, is, distressingly, a view that has become very orthodox in right wing circles: the Middle East is one uniform mass, in which the differences between, say, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein melt down to a feeble few. This view is just plain wrong: its falsity can be spelled out in body counts.
Tuesday, September 10, 2002
To continue from our last post� the Eyre affair. Governor James Eyre�s suppression of a �rebellion� in the Crown colony of Jamaica, and his subsequent trial by commission, is so much antiquarian dust today, but it shouldn't be. So we are grateful to two economists, David M. Levy and Sandra Peart, who have publicized this affair. In an interview with Reason magazine, these two sum up what they think they have discovered: the dark connection between opposition to laissez faire economics and racism. They are particularly focused on the chief disputants in England: Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill. These men, for Levy and Peart, stand not only for themselves, but also for two different ideologies: one statist, paternalistic, ultimately socialist, and one laissez faire, individualistic, and liberal � in the classical sense.
Q: What were the connections between the contempt for markets and defense of slavery?
A: Markets bust hierarchy. Carlyle also coined the term "consumer sovereignty" in 1833. It was a sneering reference to political economist Richard Whately�s exchange theory of government, in which policy is viewed as a trade between something like equals. Carlyle�s view of the world was that it should be ruled by hierarchy and the worship of heroes. Obedience to the demands of your superiors was everything. The exchange inherent in markets -- rather than the command of hierarchy -- was anarchy.
That markets don't bust hierarchy is a claim that, of course, the two don't consider -- even though it certainly animates a large tradition in the left, which goes from the French Revolution to Galbraith. However, the tie between hierarchy and racism is the one that concerns us here. The Eyre affair seems to seal their case. After showing that the motives behind the defense of Eyre were demonstrably racist -- that is, the supposition that blacks were inferior, and thus not subject to the judicial conventions protecting whites, animates the protection of Eyre from the consequences of having misused black subjects -- Levy and Peart make a few bold leaps. One of them we will get back to in a further post: the claim that the Reactionary clique gave rise to eugenics. This, it seems to us, is a serious distortion of the historical record.
First, let's get back to what happened in Jamaica, in October of 1865. To get a broader view of the facts in the affair, we turned to an article in the Winter, 2000 Clio by Howard Fulweiler, a literature professor at UNC: The Strange Case of Governor Eyre: Race and the "Victorian Frame of Mind". Fulweiler begins, as Levy and Peart do, by claiming that the Eyre affair did reflect distinct cultural differences about race. Astonishingly, in our view, there are academics who claim that the affair was "undetermined' by attitudes towards race. Levy and Peart, who have given a paper on this topic, have made a disheartening discovery about race and racism. The view, currently, is that the past was simply a monologue of racism, from which we fortunate few have somehow emerged. Thus, Mill and Carlyle are lumped together, an indistinguishable duo: Carlyle with his pathological fixation on black bodies, Mill with his defense of the authoritarian rule that the imperial powers could extend to �barbarians.�
"Four months ago when we presented some of our research on the Dismal Science, we heard two criticisms. Two months ago at a conference where we presented different but related papers, we heard similar comments. The first was a rather simple but damning consideration�'Everyone in Victorian England was a racist, so why be particularly annoyed with Carlyle, Ruskin or anyone else's attitudes?'
Clich� liquidates history in the name of stupidity. The dispute between Mill and Carlyle on race was not the nitpicking of two blind lacemakers over the pattern of the drapes. It was a fundamental, and stirring, conflict. Mill�s letter to Carlyle, when Carlyle wrote a piece in the Fraser magazine with the disgusting title, �The N- Question� (I bowdlerize because I don�t want hits to this site based on searches for the word. It is depressing enough to get hit on for �cocksucker� and the like), is an all too little known piece of liberatory lit. Here�s the beginning of it:
�SIR,� Your last month�s number contains a speech against the �rights of Negroes,� the doctrines and spirit of which ought not to pass without remonstrance. The author issues his opinions, or rather ordinances, under imposing auspices no less than those of the �immortal gods.� �The Powers,� �the Destinies,� announce, through him, not only what will be, but what shall be done; what they �have decided upon, passed their eternal act of parliament for.� This is speaking �as one having authority;� but authority from whom l If by the quality of the message we may judge of those who sent it, not from any powers to whom just or good men acknowledge allegiance. This so-called �eternal act of parliament� is no new law, but the old law of the strongest � a law against which the great teachers of mankind have in all ages protested � it is the law of force and cunning; the law that whoever is more powerful than an other, is �born lord� of that other, the other being born his �servant,� who must be �compelled to work� for him by �beneficent whip,� if �other methods avail not.� I see nothing divine in this injunction. If �the gods� will this, it is the first duty of human beings to resist such gods. Omnipotent these �gods� are not, for powers which demand human tyranny and injustice cannot accomplish their purpose unless human beings co�perate. The history of human improvement is the record of a struggle by which inch after inch of ground has been wrung from these maleficent powers, and more and more of human life rescued from the iniquitous dominion of the law of might. Much, very much of this work still remains to do; but the progress made in it is the best and greatest achievement yet performed by mankind, and it was hardly to be expected at this period of the world that we should be enjoined, by way of a great reform in human affair, to begin undoing it.�
This clear account of the case makes even passages in Ruskin, one of the great Victorian rhetoricians, look as shabby as peeling gilt. It is, by the way, interesting how pieces of prose on this side were regarded at the time. Bagehot, one of the many sympathizers of the Confederacy in the British press, found Lincoln�s speeches and writings grotesque and ungrammatical.
Fulweiler makes a move, in his article, that would have made Levy and Peart�s essay stronger: he provides some background for the revolt. This is crucial stuff, since it seems to contravene Levy and Peart's thesis, or at least gives them something to explain. The "rebellion" occurred in the context of unemployment and the disinclination of the colonial government to protect small freeholders against the plantation party. The period succeeding emancipation saw a great increase in unemployment in Jamaica. The slave-owners, who were plantation owners, responded to the liberation of the slaves in two ways: they held onto their position in the Island as the chief generators of wealth -- they did not break out of the sugar dominated system, in other words; and they refused outlay to create infrastructure for the ex-slaves. There was no schooling, none of the supports, even of legality, that would make it possible for the ex-slaves to establish autonomous economic structures. The black and mulatto population petitioned Queen Victoria for redress. In other words, they requested the state's intervention in their economic plight. This goes unmentioned in Levy and Peart's account, but it tells us something about the kind of intellectual history they are pursuing: they are careless of the constituencies of the ideas represented by their champions. In many ways, the rebel movement is consonant with the Chartists, and the nascent union movements in England, both of which were criticized by Carlyle. The intervention petitioned for was not �free trade,� but for some security net. Of course, Levy and Peart could argue that the only way to achieve economic viability would have been through free trade � trade, for instance, with countries outside the British domain � but it is hard to see how small freeholders in Jamaica would have benefited from this.
Governor Eyre's suppression of the rebellion, which amounted to a riot in which 25 people were killed, including some white plantation owners, was to declare martial law, march militia (interestingly, composed of white, mulatto and black Maroon soldiers) into St. Thomas Parish, where the revolt was centered, and kill and whip. But what truly stirred up the intellectuals in London was what happened next:
"At the center of the ensuing storm was George William Gordon, a mulatto landowner, magistrate, member of the Assembly, and Baptist minister, who had championed the cause of the black poor, and had been an implacable enemy of Governor Eyre. Gordon had spoken several times at Bogle's church [Bogle, you will remember from the last post, was the rebel leader- LI] and had ordained him as a Deacon. Governor Eyre believed, as did many others, that Gordon was the mastermind behind the rebellion. Since Gordon was in Kingston during the disturbance, where there was no martial law, the Governor had him arrested, transported on The Wolverine to Morant Bay where he was quickly courtmartialed by junior officers and hanged on October 23 with the express approval of Governor Eyre. Although many deplored the general brutality exercised by the troops, it was the execution of Gordon which later would offer an opportunity to charge Eyre with murder."
Gordon's murder was at the heart of Mill's indignation, Carlyle's defense of Eyre, and the alliance of the evangelicals with the evolutionists. We'll discuss this in another post. Probably not the next one - indignation calls, we have other issues and tasks -- but soon.
Sunday, September 8, 2002
Dope
LI was on the horn with our friend, MB. MB mentions an article she's writing for a book on Philosophy and Race, which gets us onto the topic of philosophy and race. So LI mentioned that if the editor expanded his mandate, he ought to include the Eyre Incident. MB hadn't heard of the Eyre incident, and --- putting our cards on the table -- LI has gone many moons in complete Eyre ignorance too. We came across a reference to it in a biography of Mary Kingsley. So we explained what we knew -- that Governor Eyre, in Jamaica, brutally put down a revolt of agricultural workers there, mostly black, in the 1860s. And that he was put on trial for murder. And that the case became a sensation in England, where two different committees were formed, one pro-Eyre, one anti. The pro-Eyre committee was openly contemptuous of the idea that a white man should be prosecuted for murdering black men. Alas, Charles Dickens was on the pro-Eyre committee, as well as the ever racist Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin. On the side of the angels, though, was James Stuart Mills. As well as Charles Darwin.
Well, after we got off the horn, we decided to look up Governor Eyre, in order to expand our knowledge from the rather potted account we'd given MB. We were in luck. Two free market economists, David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, have written a marvelous, long article that centers around the affair. For Levy and Peart, the themes are clear: critics of classical economics, the prototypical descendents of Adam Smith (who are, presumably, statists and other unspeakable things) are, from the beginning, advancing a racist agenda. Racist in the modern sense of refusing to grant, to blacks, or to disfavored ethnic groups (the Irish, mainly) a status of judicial equality, and backgrounding that refusal with a theory of racial or ethnic inferiority.
Now, LI doesn't buy Levy and Peart's entire argument. For one thing, the two make the mistake of taking ideological positions of circumstance to the be equivalent of ideological positions that unfold from logical necessity. Let me explain the difference with a more modern example. Religious conservatives in this country have been in the forefront of the attack on the whole language movement. The whole language movement seeks to teach reading by memorization, and using contextual clues -- whatever that means. Religious conservatives favor phonics.
Now, does is phonics somehow logically inferred from core conservative positions? I think not. LI thinks the whole language movement is, mostly, a crock, and that writing should be learned musically -- by way of phonics. We think this partly because it has been the more successful way to teach reading. We think it provides a more reliable interface between the text as a material object and the body. We think this for any number of reasons. But none of those reasons lead us to other conservative Christian positions. We think that, given other circumstances, the conservative position could as easily be whole language learning, and the liberal position phonics.
In the same way, we think that the racist positions taken by Ruskin and Dickens -- which, in spite of Levy and Peart's efforts, seem marginal to the work of both of those writers -- aren't to be deduced from their criticism of classical economics. With Carlyle, however, it is a wholly other matter.
We'll defend this thesis, and modify it, later on.
However, Levy and Peart are right to use the Eyre dispute as a sort of litmus test to tell us a lot about the intellectual playing field in Victorian England.
Here is the pair's simple, forceful abridgement of the affair:
The Eyre Controversy
"The controversy was triggered by a seemingly trivial event in the British colony of Jamaica. A contemporary witness wrote:
On Saturday the 7th October, 1865, a court of petty sessions was held at Morant Bay. A man made a noise in the court, and was ordered to be brought before justices. He was captured by the police outside, but immediately rescued by one Paul Bogle and several other persons, who had large bludgeons in their hands, and taken into the market-square, where some one hundred and fifty more persons joined them also with sticks: the police were severely beaten. ... On Monday, the 9th, warrants were issued against Paul Bogle and twenty seven others for riot and assault on the Saturday.1 Paul Bogle lives in the lyrics to Bob Marley's"So Much Things To Say."
On Wednesday the police came to enforce the warrants. Stones were thrown at the police. Then the shooting began. The island's Governor, Edward James Eyre, took command. Eyre imposed martial law and called in the army to restore order. By the time the army was done, over 400 Jamaicans were dead, and thousands homeless. Britons were horrified by the methods of state terror, including flogging with wire whips and the use of military courts to deny civilians their rights."
To understand how history, especially if it involves English or American injustice, can be covered up, compare this account to the account in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, in the entry under Eyre:
"1846 he was appointed lieutenant-governor of New Zealand, where he served under Sir George Grey. After successively governing St Vincent and Antigua, he was in 1862 appointed acting-governor of Jamaica and in 1864 governor. In Octobef~ ~865 a negro insurrection broke out and was repressed with laudable vigour, but the unquestionable severity and alleged illegality of Eyre�s subsequent proceedings raised a storm at home which induced the government to suspend him and to despatch a special commission of investigation, the effect of whose inquiries, declared by his successor, Sir John Peter Grant, to have been �admirably conducted,� was that he should not be reinstated in his office. The government, nevertheless, saw nothing in Eyre�s conduct to justify legal proceedings; indictments preferred by amateur prosecutors at home against him and military officers who had acted under his direction, resulted in failure, and he retired upon the pension of a colonial governor."
Laudable vigour -- unpack that phrase and what do you find? Flogging with wire whips and 400 deaths. Something to keep in mind as Bush uses America's "laudable vigour" as he sees fit.
The "amateur prosecutors" -- can't you hear the Tory sneer in that phrase? -- were stimulated by John Stuart Mill, in one of his greatest moments. To understand Levy and Peart's article, you have to understand the divide between Mill and Carlyle, and what it represented in England.
To be continued...
LI was on the horn with our friend, MB. MB mentions an article she's writing for a book on Philosophy and Race, which gets us onto the topic of philosophy and race. So LI mentioned that if the editor expanded his mandate, he ought to include the Eyre Incident. MB hadn't heard of the Eyre incident, and --- putting our cards on the table -- LI has gone many moons in complete Eyre ignorance too. We came across a reference to it in a biography of Mary Kingsley. So we explained what we knew -- that Governor Eyre, in Jamaica, brutally put down a revolt of agricultural workers there, mostly black, in the 1860s. And that he was put on trial for murder. And that the case became a sensation in England, where two different committees were formed, one pro-Eyre, one anti. The pro-Eyre committee was openly contemptuous of the idea that a white man should be prosecuted for murdering black men. Alas, Charles Dickens was on the pro-Eyre committee, as well as the ever racist Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin. On the side of the angels, though, was James Stuart Mills. As well as Charles Darwin.
Well, after we got off the horn, we decided to look up Governor Eyre, in order to expand our knowledge from the rather potted account we'd given MB. We were in luck. Two free market economists, David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, have written a marvelous, long article that centers around the affair. For Levy and Peart, the themes are clear: critics of classical economics, the prototypical descendents of Adam Smith (who are, presumably, statists and other unspeakable things) are, from the beginning, advancing a racist agenda. Racist in the modern sense of refusing to grant, to blacks, or to disfavored ethnic groups (the Irish, mainly) a status of judicial equality, and backgrounding that refusal with a theory of racial or ethnic inferiority.
Now, LI doesn't buy Levy and Peart's entire argument. For one thing, the two make the mistake of taking ideological positions of circumstance to the be equivalent of ideological positions that unfold from logical necessity. Let me explain the difference with a more modern example. Religious conservatives in this country have been in the forefront of the attack on the whole language movement. The whole language movement seeks to teach reading by memorization, and using contextual clues -- whatever that means. Religious conservatives favor phonics.
Now, does is phonics somehow logically inferred from core conservative positions? I think not. LI thinks the whole language movement is, mostly, a crock, and that writing should be learned musically -- by way of phonics. We think this partly because it has been the more successful way to teach reading. We think it provides a more reliable interface between the text as a material object and the body. We think this for any number of reasons. But none of those reasons lead us to other conservative Christian positions. We think that, given other circumstances, the conservative position could as easily be whole language learning, and the liberal position phonics.
In the same way, we think that the racist positions taken by Ruskin and Dickens -- which, in spite of Levy and Peart's efforts, seem marginal to the work of both of those writers -- aren't to be deduced from their criticism of classical economics. With Carlyle, however, it is a wholly other matter.
We'll defend this thesis, and modify it, later on.
However, Levy and Peart are right to use the Eyre dispute as a sort of litmus test to tell us a lot about the intellectual playing field in Victorian England.
Here is the pair's simple, forceful abridgement of the affair:
The Eyre Controversy
"The controversy was triggered by a seemingly trivial event in the British colony of Jamaica. A contemporary witness wrote:
On Saturday the 7th October, 1865, a court of petty sessions was held at Morant Bay. A man made a noise in the court, and was ordered to be brought before justices. He was captured by the police outside, but immediately rescued by one Paul Bogle and several other persons, who had large bludgeons in their hands, and taken into the market-square, where some one hundred and fifty more persons joined them also with sticks: the police were severely beaten. ... On Monday, the 9th, warrants were issued against Paul Bogle and twenty seven others for riot and assault on the Saturday.1 Paul Bogle lives in the lyrics to Bob Marley's"So Much Things To Say."
On Wednesday the police came to enforce the warrants. Stones were thrown at the police. Then the shooting began. The island's Governor, Edward James Eyre, took command. Eyre imposed martial law and called in the army to restore order. By the time the army was done, over 400 Jamaicans were dead, and thousands homeless. Britons were horrified by the methods of state terror, including flogging with wire whips and the use of military courts to deny civilians their rights."
To understand how history, especially if it involves English or American injustice, can be covered up, compare this account to the account in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, in the entry under Eyre:
"1846 he was appointed lieutenant-governor of New Zealand, where he served under Sir George Grey. After successively governing St Vincent and Antigua, he was in 1862 appointed acting-governor of Jamaica and in 1864 governor. In Octobef~ ~865 a negro insurrection broke out and was repressed with laudable vigour, but the unquestionable severity and alleged illegality of Eyre�s subsequent proceedings raised a storm at home which induced the government to suspend him and to despatch a special commission of investigation, the effect of whose inquiries, declared by his successor, Sir John Peter Grant, to have been �admirably conducted,� was that he should not be reinstated in his office. The government, nevertheless, saw nothing in Eyre�s conduct to justify legal proceedings; indictments preferred by amateur prosecutors at home against him and military officers who had acted under his direction, resulted in failure, and he retired upon the pension of a colonial governor."
Laudable vigour -- unpack that phrase and what do you find? Flogging with wire whips and 400 deaths. Something to keep in mind as Bush uses America's "laudable vigour" as he sees fit.
The "amateur prosecutors" -- can't you hear the Tory sneer in that phrase? -- were stimulated by John Stuart Mill, in one of his greatest moments. To understand Levy and Peart's article, you have to understand the divide between Mill and Carlyle, and what it represented in England.
To be continued...
Thursday, September 5, 2002
Remora
The Times' David Sanger's article about Bush's first strike doctrine quotes the man on the reasons for changing, fundamentally, the principles of American foreign policy :
"Implicitly, Mr. Bush has agreed to engage the country in a discussion over a fundamental change in America's national security strategy: his doctrine that perilous times have forced the United States to assert a right to launch pre-emptive strikes against any state that could put weapons of mass destruction into the hands of terrorists.
"After Pearl Harbor and the invasion of Kuwait, presidents sought Congressional approval to strike back. Mr. Bush seeks approval to strike first, because Sept. 11 taught him that any other strategy may be too costly. "We're in a new era," he said, adding: "We spend a lot of time thinking about how best to secure our homeland even further. And this is the debate the American people must hear, must understand. And the world must understand as well that its credibility is at stake."
Ah, the credibility of the world is at stake, here. As opposed, one wonders, to the other planets? Perhaps Bush is hinting that, if he doesn't get his war, like that guy from N'Sync, he's going to apply to be a cosmonaut, and leave this world in a huff. Let Dick Cheney get it back in order. Let Laura deal with the reporters.
Well, of course, Bush's nonsense will be made into solemn sense by the commentariat, which exists to preform the invaluable service of making this brain-dead lightweight seem something more than the cartoon figure he, in actuality, is.
Meanwhile, let's talk about the suddenly grave problem of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, LI has already posted a long, meandering account of Iraqi-US relations. While researching that post, we came across a reference to Bruce Jentleson's book, With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush and Saddam, 1982-1990. The book is about an earlier phase of American Foreign Policy. In this phase, we definitely liked the idea of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. We ought to have: we sold him the parts.
Jentleson provides two lists of "dual-use" items that Iraq (using credit supplied by the ever willing Export Import bank) purchased in the Reagan years, and in the Bush years -- before Saddam became the next Hitler. Here is the list from the Reagan years:
- Precision machine tools for 'general military use"
-a hybrid digital analog computer for 'materials research,' comparable to the one then in use at White Sands missile test range
-computers and other equipment for the 'Arab Company for Detergent Chemicals', a front for the production of chemical weapons
-numerous items for the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission
-bacterial and fungus cultures for 'research purposes'
- quartz crystals and frequency synthesizers
-high speed oscilloscopes, used for missile guidance
-fuel air explosive technology.
Hmm, does this sound like the shopping list of a harmless old lady? Actually, it sounds like fattening up a man who is engaged in a war with the means of mass destruction -- which, in fact, it was.
The years roll by. Pastoral scenes, etc. The glorious Reagan years, remember how we all made money, broke the wicked unions, and defeated the Soviets? And those chemicals, which came not just from the U.S. but from all over the helpful West, and those bacterial cultures -- well, they got put to various brilliant uses. In 1988, the Kurds got a sound whacking with chemical weapons, as well as simple mass deportation and massacre. The U.S. senate voted, unanimously, to put sanctions on Iraq. An idea that was vetoed by our man Reagan, who was definitely seconded in this by his V.P., who saw economic opportunity on the horizon with Iraq.
(As in all things Cold War, there's an odd Alice in Wonderland aspect that keeps intruding into history: where once it was Reaganites who opposed sanctions, it is now Leftists who oppose them. It sometimes seems like a game of musical chairs).
Well, the Iraq-Iran war ground, like a meatgrinder all too full of flesh, to a halt.
One would think that now there's less toss the rabid dog meat chunks. But no! Remember, under Bush I the mission was originally to talk nice and make friends. So in the pre-Gulf War period, the White House was more than willing to see goods and services transferred to Iraq and, even, to the Sa'ad 16 weapons research complex. Here's the list from those years:
-- equipment for the inevitable Arab Company for Detergent Chemicals (it cleans! it makes whiter and brighter! it kills Kurds!)
-bacteria samples to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission and University of Baghdad
-nine high powered supply units for the steel industry that were diverted to the making of weapons grade uranium
-vacuum pump oil, later found by weapons inspectors to have been used to facilitate the corrosion preventing pumps used to keep uranium moving in the enrichment process
-communications and tracking equipment
-compasses, gyroscopes and accelerometers for the Iraqi air force
-helicopter guidance and fight equipment
-computers for the Iraqi navy
-command and control equipment for the Iraqi ministry of defense
Etc.
Now, there are readers who will say, what does this past history have to do with the current situation?
There are two answers to that.
One is, what is the moral background of the current US claim against Iraq? In other words, how has the US acted in that area before? If there is a pattern of promises and betrayals, if there is collaboration with military dictators followed by hostility to these same dictators followed by collaboration with succeeding dictators --well, that is a suspicious pattern. Patterns in the past are not to be discounted as predictors for patterns in the future. If an alcoholic swears off drinking on Monday, there's every reason to suspect you will find him drunk on Friday. If the U.S. has supported arming a nation that was visibly ruled by a military tyrant with regional ambitions on Monday, there's reason to suspect that it will be doing the same thing on Friday. Saddam Hussein or our current buddy, General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan, are the same story. In Hussein's case, during the Reagan years the FPE (foreign policy establishment) was wont to produce canards like this one, one of Jentleson's more delicious quotes: "it is probably not just idle chatter when Iraqi officials express a hope that the end of the war [between Iraq and Iran] will bring more democracy affirming that Saddam Hussein is 'much concerned about democracy.'" As indeed he was -- he was concerned to torture to death anyone who suggested it. However, you have merely to transpose the word Iraq for Pakistan, or Afghanistan, to get similar stuff which floats around in the newspapers today. When the reality principle kicks in -- say, that Pervez' recent usurpation of power for the foreseeable future in Pakistan, regardless of elections -- and it becomes all too obvious what is happening, there is a switch in the American mind that simply turns to off. We forget what the struggle was all about. That switch, for instance, that makes Americans extremely incurious about the government of Kuwait, on whose rescue we expended 70 billion dollars a decade ago.
It is essentially the tabloid mindset. Does anyone remember Burt Reynolds divorce troubles? Does anyone remember Paula Jones? We pick up the dolls, we toss aside the dolls.
There is another reason, however, to look at the past. Bush's policy makers were intimately involved in crafting previous policy about Iraq, and the Middle East in general.
To be fair, this is also true of his Republican critics. But we should ask about the track records of people who are suddenly sensitive like the most liberal guys about the aches and pains of the oppressed Iraqi people. Why this sudden sensitivity?
Well, even if we grant LI's case weighing the moral reasons for a 'regime change' in Iraq against the suspicion that the structure of governance will not change by way of American intervention, if we maintain that we have every reason to believe that a post-Saddam Iraq will be ruled, with American connivance, by another bloody dictator -- even if we grant this, there still might be an American interest in going to war with Iraq. American interests aren't necessarily moral. Every war is not a crusade or a jihad, although of course, in talking up war, the powers that be have to make it seem like a crusade or a jihad. We'll discuss this at another time.
The Times' David Sanger's article about Bush's first strike doctrine quotes the man on the reasons for changing, fundamentally, the principles of American foreign policy :
"Implicitly, Mr. Bush has agreed to engage the country in a discussion over a fundamental change in America's national security strategy: his doctrine that perilous times have forced the United States to assert a right to launch pre-emptive strikes against any state that could put weapons of mass destruction into the hands of terrorists.
"After Pearl Harbor and the invasion of Kuwait, presidents sought Congressional approval to strike back. Mr. Bush seeks approval to strike first, because Sept. 11 taught him that any other strategy may be too costly. "We're in a new era," he said, adding: "We spend a lot of time thinking about how best to secure our homeland even further. And this is the debate the American people must hear, must understand. And the world must understand as well that its credibility is at stake."
Ah, the credibility of the world is at stake, here. As opposed, one wonders, to the other planets? Perhaps Bush is hinting that, if he doesn't get his war, like that guy from N'Sync, he's going to apply to be a cosmonaut, and leave this world in a huff. Let Dick Cheney get it back in order. Let Laura deal with the reporters.
Well, of course, Bush's nonsense will be made into solemn sense by the commentariat, which exists to preform the invaluable service of making this brain-dead lightweight seem something more than the cartoon figure he, in actuality, is.
Meanwhile, let's talk about the suddenly grave problem of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, LI has already posted a long, meandering account of Iraqi-US relations. While researching that post, we came across a reference to Bruce Jentleson's book, With Friends Like These: Reagan, Bush and Saddam, 1982-1990. The book is about an earlier phase of American Foreign Policy. In this phase, we definitely liked the idea of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. We ought to have: we sold him the parts.
Jentleson provides two lists of "dual-use" items that Iraq (using credit supplied by the ever willing Export Import bank) purchased in the Reagan years, and in the Bush years -- before Saddam became the next Hitler. Here is the list from the Reagan years:
- Precision machine tools for 'general military use"
-a hybrid digital analog computer for 'materials research,' comparable to the one then in use at White Sands missile test range
-computers and other equipment for the 'Arab Company for Detergent Chemicals', a front for the production of chemical weapons
-numerous items for the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission
-bacterial and fungus cultures for 'research purposes'
- quartz crystals and frequency synthesizers
-high speed oscilloscopes, used for missile guidance
-fuel air explosive technology.
Hmm, does this sound like the shopping list of a harmless old lady? Actually, it sounds like fattening up a man who is engaged in a war with the means of mass destruction -- which, in fact, it was.
The years roll by. Pastoral scenes, etc. The glorious Reagan years, remember how we all made money, broke the wicked unions, and defeated the Soviets? And those chemicals, which came not just from the U.S. but from all over the helpful West, and those bacterial cultures -- well, they got put to various brilliant uses. In 1988, the Kurds got a sound whacking with chemical weapons, as well as simple mass deportation and massacre. The U.S. senate voted, unanimously, to put sanctions on Iraq. An idea that was vetoed by our man Reagan, who was definitely seconded in this by his V.P., who saw economic opportunity on the horizon with Iraq.
(As in all things Cold War, there's an odd Alice in Wonderland aspect that keeps intruding into history: where once it was Reaganites who opposed sanctions, it is now Leftists who oppose them. It sometimes seems like a game of musical chairs).
Well, the Iraq-Iran war ground, like a meatgrinder all too full of flesh, to a halt.
One would think that now there's less toss the rabid dog meat chunks. But no! Remember, under Bush I the mission was originally to talk nice and make friends. So in the pre-Gulf War period, the White House was more than willing to see goods and services transferred to Iraq and, even, to the Sa'ad 16 weapons research complex. Here's the list from those years:
-- equipment for the inevitable Arab Company for Detergent Chemicals (it cleans! it makes whiter and brighter! it kills Kurds!)
-bacteria samples to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission and University of Baghdad
-nine high powered supply units for the steel industry that were diverted to the making of weapons grade uranium
-vacuum pump oil, later found by weapons inspectors to have been used to facilitate the corrosion preventing pumps used to keep uranium moving in the enrichment process
-communications and tracking equipment
-compasses, gyroscopes and accelerometers for the Iraqi air force
-helicopter guidance and fight equipment
-computers for the Iraqi navy
-command and control equipment for the Iraqi ministry of defense
Etc.
Now, there are readers who will say, what does this past history have to do with the current situation?
There are two answers to that.
One is, what is the moral background of the current US claim against Iraq? In other words, how has the US acted in that area before? If there is a pattern of promises and betrayals, if there is collaboration with military dictators followed by hostility to these same dictators followed by collaboration with succeeding dictators --well, that is a suspicious pattern. Patterns in the past are not to be discounted as predictors for patterns in the future. If an alcoholic swears off drinking on Monday, there's every reason to suspect you will find him drunk on Friday. If the U.S. has supported arming a nation that was visibly ruled by a military tyrant with regional ambitions on Monday, there's reason to suspect that it will be doing the same thing on Friday. Saddam Hussein or our current buddy, General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan, are the same story. In Hussein's case, during the Reagan years the FPE (foreign policy establishment) was wont to produce canards like this one, one of Jentleson's more delicious quotes: "it is probably not just idle chatter when Iraqi officials express a hope that the end of the war [between Iraq and Iran] will bring more democracy affirming that Saddam Hussein is 'much concerned about democracy.'" As indeed he was -- he was concerned to torture to death anyone who suggested it. However, you have merely to transpose the word Iraq for Pakistan, or Afghanistan, to get similar stuff which floats around in the newspapers today. When the reality principle kicks in -- say, that Pervez' recent usurpation of power for the foreseeable future in Pakistan, regardless of elections -- and it becomes all too obvious what is happening, there is a switch in the American mind that simply turns to off. We forget what the struggle was all about. That switch, for instance, that makes Americans extremely incurious about the government of Kuwait, on whose rescue we expended 70 billion dollars a decade ago.
It is essentially the tabloid mindset. Does anyone remember Burt Reynolds divorce troubles? Does anyone remember Paula Jones? We pick up the dolls, we toss aside the dolls.
There is another reason, however, to look at the past. Bush's policy makers were intimately involved in crafting previous policy about Iraq, and the Middle East in general.
To be fair, this is also true of his Republican critics. But we should ask about the track records of people who are suddenly sensitive like the most liberal guys about the aches and pains of the oppressed Iraqi people. Why this sudden sensitivity?
Well, even if we grant LI's case weighing the moral reasons for a 'regime change' in Iraq against the suspicion that the structure of governance will not change by way of American intervention, if we maintain that we have every reason to believe that a post-Saddam Iraq will be ruled, with American connivance, by another bloody dictator -- even if we grant this, there still might be an American interest in going to war with Iraq. American interests aren't necessarily moral. Every war is not a crusade or a jihad, although of course, in talking up war, the powers that be have to make it seem like a crusade or a jihad. We'll discuss this at another time.
Monday, September 2, 2002
Dope
LI was in a restaurant last night with two friends. Over the fajitas, we started talking about Iraq, and the coming war to ensure infinite freedom and Bush's re-election -- or should we say first election? Since the thing that got him into office was definitely something between an election and a judicial coup. In any case, this is not a good subject to spring on LI spontaneously, because we get all red in the face, and start splashing the margaritas and gesticulating wildly.
What got us red in the face this time, though, was that one of these friends said that she'd been told that Iraq was armed by the Soviets. This version of Hussein's armory would make invading Iraq a sort of delayed clean-up operation of one of the peripheral bits of the Evil Empire.
Of course, LI launched into a long monologue that hastily reviewed the history of Iraq, going back to the Iraqi launch of an offense against Iran, in 1980. Long monologues, by the way, are not rhetorically effective. By the listener, these are often called harangues, shooting off at the mouth, hogging the spotlight, or yak yak yak. Hitler, by all accounts, was a very boring dinner companion precisely because he would launch a long monologue, aka yak yak yak, at the drop of a hat. His dinner companions, however, never complained, on the principle that criticizing a murderous dictator is even worse for your health than smoking a pack of cigarrettes a day. LI hopes that, in almost all ways, we are a better person than Hitler; but we do concede, when pressed, a somehwat lesser world historical importance... Maybe this is why our friends, at this dinner table, made fun of us, called us gabby, used the zip phrase from Austin Powers, and in other ways signified a desire to change the subject. Another problem is our grasp of fact is, as is often the case in these kind of conversations, subject to our indignation -- which entails a fatal habit of fillng in, with our own imagination, those inconvenient facts and themes that aren't quite at our fingertips. It is the intellectual equivalent of an asthma attack -- we know we are right, but in the heat of the moment we gasp for the air of memory, searching for info in our brain that has been disconnected or is no longer in service.
So, as is the case with all good keepers of weblogs, we went home and looked things up manically on the web. Here, as a public service, is a cooler outline of the Iraqi arming. The BBC outline goes back to the twenties, and on this topic goes something like this:
1980 1 April - The pro-Iranian Da'wah Party claims responsibility for an attack on Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, at Mustansiriyah University, Baghdad.
1980 4 September - Iran shells Iraqi border towns (Iraq considers this as the start of the Iran/Iraq war).
1980 17 September - Iraq abrogates the 1975 treaty with Iran.
1980 22 September - Iraq attacks Iranian air bases.
1980 23 September - Iran bombs Iraqi military and economic targets.
1981 7 June - Israel attacks an Iraqi nuclear research centre at Tuwaythah near Baghdad
While LI is not going to go too far back, we should mention one of those nagging problems that seem to crop up when the American and British press report on Iraq. There seems to be the damndest problem with completeness. Omissions seem to flower of themselves. For instance, the BBC outline completely skips the first "successful" bombing campaign in world history, surely one of the high water points of civilization. It was mounted by the British against rebellious Arab groups in Iraq in the twenties. Here's a quote from the Financial TImes review of Patrick and Andrew Cockburn's excellent book, Out of the Ashes:
"The Cockburns' sketch of the past finds eerie echoes in the present. The colonial power withdrew its ground troops and tried to bomb Iraqis into submission. The British used poison gas on the fractious Kurds and then unleashed Arthur "Bomber" Harris, the architect of the air offensiveagainst Germany two decades later. The Arabs and the Kurds, Harris averred in 1924, "now know what real bombing means . . . they know that within 45 min-utes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out anda third of its inhabitants killed or injured."
Recently, however, this kind of history has been verboten. Since 9/11, it is generally accepted that the West has done only good things in the world. We are the Welcome Wagon Lady of History. If the West has made a mistake, a little thing, you know -- starving a native people, bombing third world wogs, or the like -- well, there's no use DWELLING on it. As we know, the official line now is: the only crimes committed by the West in the past 100 years were committed by the demented Nazis.
Well, that's a diversion from the main topic, right? So, let's get into it.
1. In 1980, Iraq, led by the Soviet backed Ba'athist regime, under Saddam Hussein, invades Iran. Good time to stage that particular act of aggression, given that Iran is pretty isolated. Outside of Iraq, the question of who initiated the war is, by the way, beyond dispute. What was the international community's response to this war? It was a dance that extended over several years, and did not exactly fall into place the way Cold War dualism would seemingly dictate.
First, the Soviet Union stopped arms shipments to Iraq, according to Stephen Shalom. Shalom, who is writing for the lefty mag, Z, might be a suspect source, except that he is quoting from a Hoover Institute analyst -- and let's just say the Hoover Institute has Coulterish views about the left:
"When the war first broke out, the Soviet Union turned back its arms ships en route to Iraq, and for the next year and a half, while Iraq was on the offensive, Moscow did not provide weapons to Baghdad.<30> In March 1981, the Iraqi Communist Party, repressed by Saddam Hussein, beamed broadcasts from the Soviet Union calling for an end to the war and the withdrawal of Iraqi troops."
In the first step of the dance, Iraq mis-stepped, basically.
2. However, the Soviets soon grew disenchanted, for obvious reasons, with Iran -- which was rapidly proving, body by body, televised confession by televised confession, not to be a soviet friendly country. Khomeini hadn't heard of liberation theology, and wasn't about to let some khafir goody goody doctrine about crossing Marx and Jesus be some stupid model for liberation Islam. So the Soviets, beginning in 1981, did supply Saddam Hussein with a great deal of weaponry, including scud missiles.
3. But who knew that detente would grow in such far flung niches? When those scud missiles started raining down on Teheran in 1988, it was due to the synergy of German tech and old fashioned Soviet rocketry. Yes, a weapons system from one Bloc got hotwired by technicians and equipment from another Bloc. Who said we couldn't all just get along?
On the principle that the enemy of my enemy is, etc., the Reagan administration tried to covertly woo the Iranians -- as we all know, or at least those of us who were intellectually alert in the eighties. Iran-Contra, remember? The cake, the bible, the package brought by eager beaver Reagan-ite Bud McFarland to the Teheran airport. The carrot, in other words. But since carrots are best tasted when some whacking big stick is poised to hit you on the crown if you don't make like Bugs Bunny, the Reaganites decided, in 1982, to play the Iraq card. This was simple: it was a matter of removing Iraq from the list of Terrorist Nations. That greased the wheels for what became a huge arming effort, propping up a regime that was seen, at least by our Middle Eastern allies (Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, to name the usual suspects) as an essential bulwark against chaos.
4. This is where the year by year breaks down. What do we know? Well, we still don't know the exact figures, who sold what to who, and who leveraged the deals. 43 billion dollars were fed into the arms network worldwide by S. Hussein, as crazy as a a gold-digger with her deathbed sugar daddy's credit card. This included chemicals for "fertilizer" from the U.S. Ah, ironically, the chemicals were used to make fertilizer, insofar as the corpse, in form of dead Kurds and Iranians fertilized the streets of Birjinni and the battle fields of Halapja. This was old time religion, here. The same principle that applied to Injuns in the ha ha Wild West days (as in the only good one is a dead one) applied at that time to Iranians. That's what they get for being axis of Evil. For a little article about the consequences of the Iraq's systematic use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, click here. Or check out this recent Guardian piece by Dilip Hiro. Hiro is a Middle East veteran, and writes not only for the lefty Guardian, but for the right-wing Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs too.
"As Iraq's use of poison gases in war and in peace was public knowledge, the question arises: what did the United States administration do about it then [in 1988]? Absolutely nothing. Indeed, so powerful was the grip of the pro-Baghdad lobby on the administration of Republican President Ronald Reagan that it got the White House to foil the Senate's attempt to penalise Iraq for its violation of the Geneva Protocol on Chemical Weapons to which it was a signatory. This made Saddam believe that the US was his firm ally - a deduction that paved the way for his brutal invasion and occupation of Kuwait and the 1991 Gulf war, the outcomes of which have not yet fully played themselves out."
Two further grafs in the story definitely take us back to the bad old days of the eighties.
"Between October 1983 and the autumn of 1988, Baghdad deployed 100,000 munitions, containing mainly mustard gas, which produces blisters on the skin and inside the lungs, and nerve gas, which damages the nervous system, but also cyanide gas, which kills instantly. From initially using these lethal agents in extremis to repulse Iran's offensives, the Iraqis proceeded to use them as a key factor in their assaults in the spring and summer of 1988 to regain their lost territories, including the strategic Fao peninsula. That the Pentagon had first-hand knowledge of Iraq's use of chemical agents during these offensives was confirmed by the New York Times two weeks ago.
'After the Iraqi army, with American planning assistance, retook the Fao peninsula, a Defense Intelligence Agency officer, Lt Col Rick Francona, now retired, was sent to tour the battlefield with Iraqi officers,' wrote Patrick Tyler of the Times. 'Francona saw zones marked off for chemical contamination, and containers for the drug atropine scattered around, indicating that Iraqi soldiers had taken injections to protect themselves from the effects of gas that might blow back over their positions.'
Well, between knowledge of its use and collaboration in its use, there seems to be a gap. There really isn't. The arms bazaar is a nexus of state and private interests, and the interlock is pretty tight. When the US wants a country armed, you don't always have to go through Congress to get authorization -- especially if the country in question has beaucoup oil wealth, as Iraq did. So you lift restrictions on the transfer of certain chemicals. And the private sector obliges.
Ah, dinner table conversation -- it is the mother of posts! I could have gone on (and on...), but the main points we should take away from this history lesson are:
1. American interest in the Middle East has not been about good and evil -- it has been about American interest.
2. That interest is defined partly by the changing perspectives and constituencies in the Foreign Policy elite. That elite isn't monolithic, but it is not motivated, ultimately, by Wilsonian ideals of a democratic New World Order. Nor is it repulsed by the most barbaric slaughters, or uses of the 'weapons of mass destruction," as long as the body counts consist of the right people.
3. There's no evidence this has changed. If the US gets its war on Iraq, one good thing -- from the standpoint of the aforesaid Wilsonian ideals of democracy -- will result -- the downfall of Saddam Hussein. But one bad thing will almost inevitably happen too -- the collapse of the Kurdish semi-states in Northern Iraq. Furthermore, the U.S has depended on military strongmen to maintain states in the Middle East, except for Israel (and Sharon looks more and more like an Assad figure than a Jeffersonian democrat). Do they have any incentive not to do that in the future? No. For evidence, one merely has to cast a glance at Pakistan to see how the Bush doctrine works. It works by shutting its eyes quite firmly to coup d'etats mounted by our guys.
4. Iraq looks like it is at an end, as a state. Totalitarian methods will provoke state split ups -- see the former U.S.S.R. To prevent this, expect the US to promote, actively, a military regime that engages in low grade repression (nothing so messy as gassing Kurds). But look for that strategy to fail. At least, LI is optimistic that it will. And look for panic to ensue among the Arab states that are our allies.
LI was in a restaurant last night with two friends. Over the fajitas, we started talking about Iraq, and the coming war to ensure infinite freedom and Bush's re-election -- or should we say first election? Since the thing that got him into office was definitely something between an election and a judicial coup. In any case, this is not a good subject to spring on LI spontaneously, because we get all red in the face, and start splashing the margaritas and gesticulating wildly.
What got us red in the face this time, though, was that one of these friends said that she'd been told that Iraq was armed by the Soviets. This version of Hussein's armory would make invading Iraq a sort of delayed clean-up operation of one of the peripheral bits of the Evil Empire.
Of course, LI launched into a long monologue that hastily reviewed the history of Iraq, going back to the Iraqi launch of an offense against Iran, in 1980. Long monologues, by the way, are not rhetorically effective. By the listener, these are often called harangues, shooting off at the mouth, hogging the spotlight, or yak yak yak. Hitler, by all accounts, was a very boring dinner companion precisely because he would launch a long monologue, aka yak yak yak, at the drop of a hat. His dinner companions, however, never complained, on the principle that criticizing a murderous dictator is even worse for your health than smoking a pack of cigarrettes a day. LI hopes that, in almost all ways, we are a better person than Hitler; but we do concede, when pressed, a somehwat lesser world historical importance... Maybe this is why our friends, at this dinner table, made fun of us, called us gabby, used the zip phrase from Austin Powers, and in other ways signified a desire to change the subject. Another problem is our grasp of fact is, as is often the case in these kind of conversations, subject to our indignation -- which entails a fatal habit of fillng in, with our own imagination, those inconvenient facts and themes that aren't quite at our fingertips. It is the intellectual equivalent of an asthma attack -- we know we are right, but in the heat of the moment we gasp for the air of memory, searching for info in our brain that has been disconnected or is no longer in service.
So, as is the case with all good keepers of weblogs, we went home and looked things up manically on the web. Here, as a public service, is a cooler outline of the Iraqi arming. The BBC outline goes back to the twenties, and on this topic goes something like this:
1980 1 April - The pro-Iranian Da'wah Party claims responsibility for an attack on Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, at Mustansiriyah University, Baghdad.
1980 4 September - Iran shells Iraqi border towns (Iraq considers this as the start of the Iran/Iraq war).
1980 17 September - Iraq abrogates the 1975 treaty with Iran.
1980 22 September - Iraq attacks Iranian air bases.
1980 23 September - Iran bombs Iraqi military and economic targets.
1981 7 June - Israel attacks an Iraqi nuclear research centre at Tuwaythah near Baghdad
While LI is not going to go too far back, we should mention one of those nagging problems that seem to crop up when the American and British press report on Iraq. There seems to be the damndest problem with completeness. Omissions seem to flower of themselves. For instance, the BBC outline completely skips the first "successful" bombing campaign in world history, surely one of the high water points of civilization. It was mounted by the British against rebellious Arab groups in Iraq in the twenties. Here's a quote from the Financial TImes review of Patrick and Andrew Cockburn's excellent book, Out of the Ashes:
"The Cockburns' sketch of the past finds eerie echoes in the present. The colonial power withdrew its ground troops and tried to bomb Iraqis into submission. The British used poison gas on the fractious Kurds and then unleashed Arthur "Bomber" Harris, the architect of the air offensiveagainst Germany two decades later. The Arabs and the Kurds, Harris averred in 1924, "now know what real bombing means . . . they know that within 45 min-utes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out anda third of its inhabitants killed or injured."
Recently, however, this kind of history has been verboten. Since 9/11, it is generally accepted that the West has done only good things in the world. We are the Welcome Wagon Lady of History. If the West has made a mistake, a little thing, you know -- starving a native people, bombing third world wogs, or the like -- well, there's no use DWELLING on it. As we know, the official line now is: the only crimes committed by the West in the past 100 years were committed by the demented Nazis.
Well, that's a diversion from the main topic, right? So, let's get into it.
1. In 1980, Iraq, led by the Soviet backed Ba'athist regime, under Saddam Hussein, invades Iran. Good time to stage that particular act of aggression, given that Iran is pretty isolated. Outside of Iraq, the question of who initiated the war is, by the way, beyond dispute. What was the international community's response to this war? It was a dance that extended over several years, and did not exactly fall into place the way Cold War dualism would seemingly dictate.
First, the Soviet Union stopped arms shipments to Iraq, according to Stephen Shalom. Shalom, who is writing for the lefty mag, Z, might be a suspect source, except that he is quoting from a Hoover Institute analyst -- and let's just say the Hoover Institute has Coulterish views about the left:
"When the war first broke out, the Soviet Union turned back its arms ships en route to Iraq, and for the next year and a half, while Iraq was on the offensive, Moscow did not provide weapons to Baghdad.<30> In March 1981, the Iraqi Communist Party, repressed by Saddam Hussein, beamed broadcasts from the Soviet Union calling for an end to the war and the withdrawal of Iraqi troops."
In the first step of the dance, Iraq mis-stepped, basically.
2. However, the Soviets soon grew disenchanted, for obvious reasons, with Iran -- which was rapidly proving, body by body, televised confession by televised confession, not to be a soviet friendly country. Khomeini hadn't heard of liberation theology, and wasn't about to let some khafir goody goody doctrine about crossing Marx and Jesus be some stupid model for liberation Islam. So the Soviets, beginning in 1981, did supply Saddam Hussein with a great deal of weaponry, including scud missiles.
3. But who knew that detente would grow in such far flung niches? When those scud missiles started raining down on Teheran in 1988, it was due to the synergy of German tech and old fashioned Soviet rocketry. Yes, a weapons system from one Bloc got hotwired by technicians and equipment from another Bloc. Who said we couldn't all just get along?
On the principle that the enemy of my enemy is, etc., the Reagan administration tried to covertly woo the Iranians -- as we all know, or at least those of us who were intellectually alert in the eighties. Iran-Contra, remember? The cake, the bible, the package brought by eager beaver Reagan-ite Bud McFarland to the Teheran airport. The carrot, in other words. But since carrots are best tasted when some whacking big stick is poised to hit you on the crown if you don't make like Bugs Bunny, the Reaganites decided, in 1982, to play the Iraq card. This was simple: it was a matter of removing Iraq from the list of Terrorist Nations. That greased the wheels for what became a huge arming effort, propping up a regime that was seen, at least by our Middle Eastern allies (Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, to name the usual suspects) as an essential bulwark against chaos.
4. This is where the year by year breaks down. What do we know? Well, we still don't know the exact figures, who sold what to who, and who leveraged the deals. 43 billion dollars were fed into the arms network worldwide by S. Hussein, as crazy as a a gold-digger with her deathbed sugar daddy's credit card. This included chemicals for "fertilizer" from the U.S. Ah, ironically, the chemicals were used to make fertilizer, insofar as the corpse, in form of dead Kurds and Iranians fertilized the streets of Birjinni and the battle fields of Halapja. This was old time religion, here. The same principle that applied to Injuns in the ha ha Wild West days (as in the only good one is a dead one) applied at that time to Iranians. That's what they get for being axis of Evil. For a little article about the consequences of the Iraq's systematic use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, click here. Or check out this recent Guardian piece by Dilip Hiro. Hiro is a Middle East veteran, and writes not only for the lefty Guardian, but for the right-wing Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs too.
"As Iraq's use of poison gases in war and in peace was public knowledge, the question arises: what did the United States administration do about it then [in 1988]? Absolutely nothing. Indeed, so powerful was the grip of the pro-Baghdad lobby on the administration of Republican President Ronald Reagan that it got the White House to foil the Senate's attempt to penalise Iraq for its violation of the Geneva Protocol on Chemical Weapons to which it was a signatory. This made Saddam believe that the US was his firm ally - a deduction that paved the way for his brutal invasion and occupation of Kuwait and the 1991 Gulf war, the outcomes of which have not yet fully played themselves out."
Two further grafs in the story definitely take us back to the bad old days of the eighties.
"Between October 1983 and the autumn of 1988, Baghdad deployed 100,000 munitions, containing mainly mustard gas, which produces blisters on the skin and inside the lungs, and nerve gas, which damages the nervous system, but also cyanide gas, which kills instantly. From initially using these lethal agents in extremis to repulse Iran's offensives, the Iraqis proceeded to use them as a key factor in their assaults in the spring and summer of 1988 to regain their lost territories, including the strategic Fao peninsula. That the Pentagon had first-hand knowledge of Iraq's use of chemical agents during these offensives was confirmed by the New York Times two weeks ago.
'After the Iraqi army, with American planning assistance, retook the Fao peninsula, a Defense Intelligence Agency officer, Lt Col Rick Francona, now retired, was sent to tour the battlefield with Iraqi officers,' wrote Patrick Tyler of the Times. 'Francona saw zones marked off for chemical contamination, and containers for the drug atropine scattered around, indicating that Iraqi soldiers had taken injections to protect themselves from the effects of gas that might blow back over their positions.'
Well, between knowledge of its use and collaboration in its use, there seems to be a gap. There really isn't. The arms bazaar is a nexus of state and private interests, and the interlock is pretty tight. When the US wants a country armed, you don't always have to go through Congress to get authorization -- especially if the country in question has beaucoup oil wealth, as Iraq did. So you lift restrictions on the transfer of certain chemicals. And the private sector obliges.
Ah, dinner table conversation -- it is the mother of posts! I could have gone on (and on...), but the main points we should take away from this history lesson are:
1. American interest in the Middle East has not been about good and evil -- it has been about American interest.
2. That interest is defined partly by the changing perspectives and constituencies in the Foreign Policy elite. That elite isn't monolithic, but it is not motivated, ultimately, by Wilsonian ideals of a democratic New World Order. Nor is it repulsed by the most barbaric slaughters, or uses of the 'weapons of mass destruction," as long as the body counts consist of the right people.
3. There's no evidence this has changed. If the US gets its war on Iraq, one good thing -- from the standpoint of the aforesaid Wilsonian ideals of democracy -- will result -- the downfall of Saddam Hussein. But one bad thing will almost inevitably happen too -- the collapse of the Kurdish semi-states in Northern Iraq. Furthermore, the U.S has depended on military strongmen to maintain states in the Middle East, except for Israel (and Sharon looks more and more like an Assad figure than a Jeffersonian democrat). Do they have any incentive not to do that in the future? No. For evidence, one merely has to cast a glance at Pakistan to see how the Bush doctrine works. It works by shutting its eyes quite firmly to coup d'etats mounted by our guys.
4. Iraq looks like it is at an end, as a state. Totalitarian methods will provoke state split ups -- see the former U.S.S.R. To prevent this, expect the US to promote, actively, a military regime that engages in low grade repression (nothing so messy as gassing Kurds). But look for that strategy to fail. At least, LI is optimistic that it will. And look for panic to ensue among the Arab states that are our allies.
Sunday, September 1, 2002
Remora
LI recommends this article in the Sunday Times:
A Guardian of Jobs or a "Reverse Robin Hood"? by Leslie Wayne
Since the question of bias in the press has been a hot button issue (which is one of those pundit phrases that make less and less sense as they are repeated more and more -- what, exactly, is a hot button? Rather, the issue has become a diacritical button issue -- like the period key, or the comma key, it has become a sustaining, semantic blank, functioning to convey an ideological payload hither and yon, to much yapping from the examiners of yap, aka media critics), it should be pointed out that bias, without which that title would make no sense, given its tilt towards the irresistable phrase, reverse Robin Hood, is inseparable from analysis, here.
Anyway, the analysis is on point. While much fuss and tossing of teathers went into forcing CEOs to sign off on their balance sheets, the Export-Import bank was quietly expanded. The article focuses on just what the Ex-Imlax Bank does. In the past, we dilated about another ridiculous tool of government finance: OPIC. The Ex-Lax is bigger, and more pernicious. Here's a graf:
"More fundamentally, there are questions about why the bank exists at all. Less than 1 percent of all American exports receive Export-Import financing, which comes in the form of direct loans, loan guarantees or export credit insurance. The bulk of Export-Import's benefits go to a small number of large companies that are sophisticated enough to get financing on their own: Boeing, Halliburton, General Electric, Northrop Grumman, Lucent Technologies, ChevronTexaco, Caterpillar and Dell Computer, among others."
More sickening stuff:
"Commercial banks, meanwhile, love Export-Import loan guarantees because they turn corporate loans for business in risky places into risk-free loans. If a corporate borrower halts payments on an Export-Import backed loan, the federal government must step in and pay it off. The bank claims a default rate of less than 2 percent.American exporters love it even more. With an Export-Import loan guarantee, they can borrow money from banks at lower rates and more favorable terms than usual. And if they get into a jam overseas, the Export-Import bank can be a powerful ally. "You've got the full weight of our U.S. embassy, our ambassador, the Treasury Department here and overseas, the State Department, all coming in," said Mr. Rice at the export coalition.
On the other hand, small businesses, which often need the help more than large companies, get short shrift from the bank, despite Congressional pressure to change that practice. Only 18 percent of the bank's financing last year went to small business, down from 21 percent in 1998."
LI recommends this article in the Sunday Times:
A Guardian of Jobs or a "Reverse Robin Hood"? by Leslie Wayne
Since the question of bias in the press has been a hot button issue (which is one of those pundit phrases that make less and less sense as they are repeated more and more -- what, exactly, is a hot button? Rather, the issue has become a diacritical button issue -- like the period key, or the comma key, it has become a sustaining, semantic blank, functioning to convey an ideological payload hither and yon, to much yapping from the examiners of yap, aka media critics), it should be pointed out that bias, without which that title would make no sense, given its tilt towards the irresistable phrase, reverse Robin Hood, is inseparable from analysis, here.
Anyway, the analysis is on point. While much fuss and tossing of teathers went into forcing CEOs to sign off on their balance sheets, the Export-Import bank was quietly expanded. The article focuses on just what the Ex-Imlax Bank does. In the past, we dilated about another ridiculous tool of government finance: OPIC. The Ex-Lax is bigger, and more pernicious. Here's a graf:
"More fundamentally, there are questions about why the bank exists at all. Less than 1 percent of all American exports receive Export-Import financing, which comes in the form of direct loans, loan guarantees or export credit insurance. The bulk of Export-Import's benefits go to a small number of large companies that are sophisticated enough to get financing on their own: Boeing, Halliburton, General Electric, Northrop Grumman, Lucent Technologies, ChevronTexaco, Caterpillar and Dell Computer, among others."
More sickening stuff:
"Commercial banks, meanwhile, love Export-Import loan guarantees because they turn corporate loans for business in risky places into risk-free loans. If a corporate borrower halts payments on an Export-Import backed loan, the federal government must step in and pay it off. The bank claims a default rate of less than 2 percent.American exporters love it even more. With an Export-Import loan guarantee, they can borrow money from banks at lower rates and more favorable terms than usual. And if they get into a jam overseas, the Export-Import bank can be a powerful ally. "You've got the full weight of our U.S. embassy, our ambassador, the Treasury Department here and overseas, the State Department, all coming in," said Mr. Rice at the export coalition.
On the other hand, small businesses, which often need the help more than large companies, get short shrift from the bank, despite Congressional pressure to change that practice. Only 18 percent of the bank's financing last year went to small business, down from 21 percent in 1998."
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