Bollettino
The BBC news, doing its best to subvert the brightest and best that has been thought or spun -- at least if we confine this kind of thing, which can get out of hand, to the set of responsible Pentagon apparatchiks that operate in the circle around Wolfowitz -- featured a story on the Shi'ite protest of the Founding Convention at An Nasiriyah, under Smilin' Jay Garner, as always Iraq's number one choice for el jefe supremo. Jay, in an exclusive with the Scotsman, confided that he was reminded of the Philadelphia convention of 1787 himself:
"But General Jay Garner insisted that United States-style democracy could sprout on the shards of Saddam Hussein�s government.
"I don�t think they had a love-in when they had Philadelphia in 1787," he said before he left. "Anytime you start the process it�s fraught with dialogue, tensions, coercion, and should be."
Iraq, he suggested, could be the richest country in the Middle East within a few years."
That Jay, always with the history of Iraq at his fingertips -- and, of course, due to some thousands-weight of smart bombs and the cluster kind, Philadelphia in 1787 is, practically, Iraq's history now.
The Christian Science Monitor features this quote on the Philadelphia like meeting:
"Tuesday's meeting of Iraqis and Iraqi exiles in the shadow of the ancient ziggurat of Ur was simply the beginning of what is likely to be a lengthy process. Its ultimate aim, according to US officials: build a government in which all Iraqis, be they Sunni, Shiite, or Kurd, feel they have a representative voice."There are some very dangerous cleavages there," says Rashid Khalidi, a historian of the Middle East at the University of Chicago. "If exploited by outside forces they could cause problems."
Outside forces! Yikes! Like, say, a large superpower about 8,000 miles away, pulling all the strings?
Sorry about that. We've canned the pipsqueak that stole in and wrote that line. A cheap shot at our brave attempts to forge an Iraq fit for the vision of Iraq's corps of eager beaver proconsuls in D.C. An Iraq in which every corporation could participate in the sweet, sweet air of freedom sweeping that great Middle Eastern piece of real estate; in which, privatized, the natural resources of that great country can flow as the invisible hand intended them to; in which, angry at the wickedness of their neighbors, the government might even support staging surgical improvements, via the latest weaponry, in Damascus and Teheran, if this is so suggested by a close ally.
In other events celebrating the dawn of democracy, the NYT reported that "similar demonstrations [to those staged by the Shi'ites] were under way in Baghdad. In Mosul, an angry crowd stoned an Iraqi opposition leader praising the arrival of United States marines. A gun battle ensued in which 10 Iraqis were reported killed and 16 were wounded.
"The senior Shiite cleric in the holy city of Najaf, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sestani, sent a message through his son today saying he was in hiding until the religious strife that has included murders and demonstrations there subsided."
A gun battle? No doubt instigated by Rashid Kalidi's "outside forces." Although according to the WP, the NYT story reports that US Marines were the gunners. Here's another story, from Australia, about these confusing, although unimportant, events:
"US forces accused of shooting on an angry crowd in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul overnight said they had come under fire from at least two gunmen and fired back, but did not aim at the crowd.
The shots came as the newly-appointed governor of the city was making a speech from the building housing his offices which was deemed too pro-US by his listeners, witnesses said."There were protesters outside, 100 to 150, there was fire, we returned fire," a US military spokesman said."
Although the returned fire was trained on a roof, apparently ten to twelve people in the crowd died. But the reporting on this incident reminds us -- do we hear an echo here -- of the way Palestinian deaths somehow involve rockthrowing crowds, totally innocent gunplay by soldiers, and the miraculous, and unimportant, deaths of ten here, three there.
So it goes as Philadelphia like feelings permeate the junketeers of freedom over there, and all of us over here. God bless and good night.
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
Bollettino
Smilin' Jay
Smilin' Jay made his debut as the embodiment of the Iraqi Geist at a meeting of all allowable Iraqi political groups today. At this meeting he spoke for all of when he pledged, as head of the US led Iraqi government, never to install a US led government in Iraq. Lately, the Bush administration has been lessening the gap between the claim and its contradiction. It took three weeks between the time they pledged to use Iraqi oil revenues to pay for the invasion and the moment in which they disclaimed ever intending to use Iraqi oil revenues to pay for the invasion. Since the Bush administration is run by business types, they know that in today's competitive marketplace, it's an "I want it yesterday" kind of atmosphere. They are simply transferring those principles of free enterprise to their own dealing in mendacity. A credibility gap is only as big as the time it takes to contradict one falsehood with another.
As for the meeting, like unto the sacred Philadelphia convention that whelped our own republic -- if, that is, that convention had been led by a French marquis, and backed up with two hundred thousand french troops -- the NYT has the grafs:
"Many of those who did not attend said they opposed United States plans to install the retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner to run an interim administration in Iraq.
General Garner, wearing an Iraqi flag pin on his blue shirt, opened the conference by saying, ``A free and democratic Iraq will begin today.''
He added, ``What better place than the birthplace of civilization could you have for the beginning of a free Iraq?''
This is particularly rich considering the US decision to stand by while the Baghdad museum was looted. This Chicago Sun-Times article details the damage. The last three grafs are a fair indication of the Bush-ite attitude towards the birthplace of civilization:
"U.S. forces are making a belated attempt to protect the National Museum, calling on Iraqi policemen to turn up for duty. There is no pay, but 80 have volunteered.
"The Americans were supposed to protect the museum," Amin said. "If they had just one tank and two soldiers, nothing like this would have happened. I hold the American troops responsible.
"The Americans knew that the museum was at risk and could have protected it, said Patty Gerstenblith, a professor at DePaul School of Law in Chicago who helped circulate a petition before the war, urging that care be taken to protect Iraqi antiquities. ''It was completely inexcusable and avoidable,'' she said."
Well, you just can't pay police to hang around a palace of dusty junk. You get Dyncorps to do it! and pay them out of future oil revenues. An especially brilliant plan, this one, of guarding a looted museum. Those future retarded looters are gonna get it.
Smilin' Jay
Smilin' Jay made his debut as the embodiment of the Iraqi Geist at a meeting of all allowable Iraqi political groups today. At this meeting he spoke for all of when he pledged, as head of the US led Iraqi government, never to install a US led government in Iraq. Lately, the Bush administration has been lessening the gap between the claim and its contradiction. It took three weeks between the time they pledged to use Iraqi oil revenues to pay for the invasion and the moment in which they disclaimed ever intending to use Iraqi oil revenues to pay for the invasion. Since the Bush administration is run by business types, they know that in today's competitive marketplace, it's an "I want it yesterday" kind of atmosphere. They are simply transferring those principles of free enterprise to their own dealing in mendacity. A credibility gap is only as big as the time it takes to contradict one falsehood with another.
As for the meeting, like unto the sacred Philadelphia convention that whelped our own republic -- if, that is, that convention had been led by a French marquis, and backed up with two hundred thousand french troops -- the NYT has the grafs:
"Many of those who did not attend said they opposed United States plans to install the retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner to run an interim administration in Iraq.
General Garner, wearing an Iraqi flag pin on his blue shirt, opened the conference by saying, ``A free and democratic Iraq will begin today.''
He added, ``What better place than the birthplace of civilization could you have for the beginning of a free Iraq?''
This is particularly rich considering the US decision to stand by while the Baghdad museum was looted. This Chicago Sun-Times article details the damage. The last three grafs are a fair indication of the Bush-ite attitude towards the birthplace of civilization:
"U.S. forces are making a belated attempt to protect the National Museum, calling on Iraqi policemen to turn up for duty. There is no pay, but 80 have volunteered.
"The Americans were supposed to protect the museum," Amin said. "If they had just one tank and two soldiers, nothing like this would have happened. I hold the American troops responsible.
"The Americans knew that the museum was at risk and could have protected it, said Patty Gerstenblith, a professor at DePaul School of Law in Chicago who helped circulate a petition before the war, urging that care be taken to protect Iraqi antiquities. ''It was completely inexcusable and avoidable,'' she said."
Well, you just can't pay police to hang around a palace of dusty junk. You get Dyncorps to do it! and pay them out of future oil revenues. An especially brilliant plan, this one, of guarding a looted museum. Those future retarded looters are gonna get it.
Monday, April 14, 2003
Bollettino
Let�s overturn some silver plated pieties, shall we?
David Remnick�s review of Annie Applebaum�s history of the Gulag is so riddled with disingenuous passages and distortions that it could have been written for a particularly dim Tory publication in 1930.
If there is one atrocity against the human race that we ought to know more about, it is the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn�s history weighs on that history like a nightmare �and it should. It is a great work of art. I am almost tempted to say, alas. The standard histories of the holocaust, like Raul Hilberg, are not works of art. So that any account of the Gulag, in the west, has to wrest it from Solzhenitsyn. There are, of course, histories about aspects of the Stalinist terror, from Robert Conquest to Zhores Medvedev; however, I believe Annie Applebaum has written the first popular history of it.
I�m not going to comb through this review. That seems pointless. When Remnick gets to the meat of the Gulag � the meat of the meatgrinder � you don�t have to put a bodyguard on him. It is only when he is revving up, getting into his anti-Bolshie mode, that he starts throwing spitballs.
The intro serves up a familiar Remnick motif: the anxiety to blame Lenin. Lenin, in Remnick�s view, is the father of the Gulag. To do this, however, he has to deal with the fact that, under Lenin, atrocities were mainly embedded in the Civil War. If one compares the number of prisoners in camps under Lenin to, say, the number in France�s penal colonies, there isn�t much of a difference. Lenin, of course, died in 1924. Remnick starts out with Dmitri Likhachev, a man who was imprisoned at the Solovki Islands in 1928. Here�s how Remnick puts it:
�He was living proof that the Gulag had been the invention not of Stalin but, rather, of Lenin, the Bolshevik founder, because, he said wearily, �I was a prisoner at Lenin�s first concentration camp.�
As almost always, when Remnick gets on this topic, you can bet that the omission of the fact that Lenin died four years before Likhachev was sent to Solovki is malignant. But if the confusion of dates is leading the witness, Remnick�s riff on the origin of the term concentration camp is leading the witness to drink, and heavily, and all from the waters of oblivion.
�The concentration camp, as both a term and a concept, has complicated beginnings. It was first used to refer to a form of incarceration, when the Spanish military during the Cuban insurrection, Americans in the Philippines, and the British during the Boer War established what were called �concentration camps.� These camps were harsh places, where many prisoners died, but they did not begin to suggest the horror that �concentration camp� would soon convey.�
As a moral tergiversator, Remnick is operating on a grand scale. The reason that so many became communists in the 1930s was exactly this kind of distortion of the evidence made one believe that anticommunists were inherently incapable of telling the truth. Concentration camps in British and American hands, we are given to believe by the bland Remnick, were mild things. �Many prisoners died there�� Hmm. According to Niall Ferguson�s handy Empire, 27,927 Boers died in the camps, or 14 percent of the entire Boer population. Since this happened in 1900, and Lenin was alive, perhaps he was, in some mysterious way, responsible. 14,000 of the black prisoners died, too, by the way, 81 percent children. These deaths were not the fault of commisars, but of good old British upper class politicians. The imprisoned, by the way, consisted mostly of women and children. Why? Because the Boers were, by this time, fighting a guerilla war against the British army. So the British took their families prisoner in order to subdue them. Like the empire itself, the concentration camp system happened in a fit of absent mindedness � for instance, the absence of mind that would provide little provision, and no medical care, for those prisoners.
Now, let�s see how that compares to Lenin�s real concentration camp totals. Solovki was started a year before Lenin�s death. There were, according to Annie Applebaum�s introduction, eighty one camps started under Lenin, after 1921. However, even she doesn�t claim these camps were killing on the Boer camp level. They weren�t even, by her account, on the Czarist level:
�Still, in the nineteenth century, katorga [political exile] remained a relatively rare form of punishment. In 1906, only about 6,000 katorga convicts were serving sentences; in 1916, on the eve of the Revolution, there were only 28,600. Of far greater economic importance was another category of prisoner: the forced settlers, who were sentenced to live in exile, but not in prison, in underpopulated regions of the country, chosen for their economic potential. Between 1824 and 1889 alone, some 720,000 forced settlers were sent to Siberia. Many were accompanied by their families. They, not the convicts laboring in chains, gradually populated Russia's empty, mineral-rich wastelands.�
To really talk about the Gulag is to talk about Prison. Since America is the world incarceration leader, it is difficult to do in the American context. The americans contend that putting a man in prison because he is a Trotskyist is the height of unreason, while putting him in prison because he injects opiates in his veins is common sense. Americans conted that leaving a man to almost freeze to death in the snow on a work detail is torture, while immersing him in 23 hours of solitary darkness per diem, as is the fate of many of NY's worst criminals, is a refreshing response to liberal leniety. We consider that there is no topic like prison to bring out all the disgusting sophistries in a society. But certain things are clear:
- Lenin early on adapted all the techniques that were employed by the �bourgeois� powers, including executing deserters, terrorizing prisoners, and throwing into prison dissenters.
- Stalin�s name is connected by an indissoluble link to the Gulag because he took the prison camp and made it the central characteristic of his rule. That simply isn�t true of Lenin.
- The rhetoric of atrocity is diseased from the very beginning if the standards by which one condemns it are jiggered in favor of societies one favors. One of the many admirable things about Ferguson�s book is that, though he is a Conservative, he doesn�t do a lot of jiggering. One of the awful things about all of Remnick�s Russian writings is he does nothing but.
Let�s overturn some silver plated pieties, shall we?
David Remnick�s review of Annie Applebaum�s history of the Gulag is so riddled with disingenuous passages and distortions that it could have been written for a particularly dim Tory publication in 1930.
If there is one atrocity against the human race that we ought to know more about, it is the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn�s history weighs on that history like a nightmare �and it should. It is a great work of art. I am almost tempted to say, alas. The standard histories of the holocaust, like Raul Hilberg, are not works of art. So that any account of the Gulag, in the west, has to wrest it from Solzhenitsyn. There are, of course, histories about aspects of the Stalinist terror, from Robert Conquest to Zhores Medvedev; however, I believe Annie Applebaum has written the first popular history of it.
I�m not going to comb through this review. That seems pointless. When Remnick gets to the meat of the Gulag � the meat of the meatgrinder � you don�t have to put a bodyguard on him. It is only when he is revving up, getting into his anti-Bolshie mode, that he starts throwing spitballs.
The intro serves up a familiar Remnick motif: the anxiety to blame Lenin. Lenin, in Remnick�s view, is the father of the Gulag. To do this, however, he has to deal with the fact that, under Lenin, atrocities were mainly embedded in the Civil War. If one compares the number of prisoners in camps under Lenin to, say, the number in France�s penal colonies, there isn�t much of a difference. Lenin, of course, died in 1924. Remnick starts out with Dmitri Likhachev, a man who was imprisoned at the Solovki Islands in 1928. Here�s how Remnick puts it:
�He was living proof that the Gulag had been the invention not of Stalin but, rather, of Lenin, the Bolshevik founder, because, he said wearily, �I was a prisoner at Lenin�s first concentration camp.�
As almost always, when Remnick gets on this topic, you can bet that the omission of the fact that Lenin died four years before Likhachev was sent to Solovki is malignant. But if the confusion of dates is leading the witness, Remnick�s riff on the origin of the term concentration camp is leading the witness to drink, and heavily, and all from the waters of oblivion.
�The concentration camp, as both a term and a concept, has complicated beginnings. It was first used to refer to a form of incarceration, when the Spanish military during the Cuban insurrection, Americans in the Philippines, and the British during the Boer War established what were called �concentration camps.� These camps were harsh places, where many prisoners died, but they did not begin to suggest the horror that �concentration camp� would soon convey.�
As a moral tergiversator, Remnick is operating on a grand scale. The reason that so many became communists in the 1930s was exactly this kind of distortion of the evidence made one believe that anticommunists were inherently incapable of telling the truth. Concentration camps in British and American hands, we are given to believe by the bland Remnick, were mild things. �Many prisoners died there�� Hmm. According to Niall Ferguson�s handy Empire, 27,927 Boers died in the camps, or 14 percent of the entire Boer population. Since this happened in 1900, and Lenin was alive, perhaps he was, in some mysterious way, responsible. 14,000 of the black prisoners died, too, by the way, 81 percent children. These deaths were not the fault of commisars, but of good old British upper class politicians. The imprisoned, by the way, consisted mostly of women and children. Why? Because the Boers were, by this time, fighting a guerilla war against the British army. So the British took their families prisoner in order to subdue them. Like the empire itself, the concentration camp system happened in a fit of absent mindedness � for instance, the absence of mind that would provide little provision, and no medical care, for those prisoners.
Now, let�s see how that compares to Lenin�s real concentration camp totals. Solovki was started a year before Lenin�s death. There were, according to Annie Applebaum�s introduction, eighty one camps started under Lenin, after 1921. However, even she doesn�t claim these camps were killing on the Boer camp level. They weren�t even, by her account, on the Czarist level:
�Still, in the nineteenth century, katorga [political exile] remained a relatively rare form of punishment. In 1906, only about 6,000 katorga convicts were serving sentences; in 1916, on the eve of the Revolution, there were only 28,600. Of far greater economic importance was another category of prisoner: the forced settlers, who were sentenced to live in exile, but not in prison, in underpopulated regions of the country, chosen for their economic potential. Between 1824 and 1889 alone, some 720,000 forced settlers were sent to Siberia. Many were accompanied by their families. They, not the convicts laboring in chains, gradually populated Russia's empty, mineral-rich wastelands.�
To really talk about the Gulag is to talk about Prison. Since America is the world incarceration leader, it is difficult to do in the American context. The americans contend that putting a man in prison because he is a Trotskyist is the height of unreason, while putting him in prison because he injects opiates in his veins is common sense. Americans conted that leaving a man to almost freeze to death in the snow on a work detail is torture, while immersing him in 23 hours of solitary darkness per diem, as is the fate of many of NY's worst criminals, is a refreshing response to liberal leniety. We consider that there is no topic like prison to bring out all the disgusting sophistries in a society. But certain things are clear:
- Lenin early on adapted all the techniques that were employed by the �bourgeois� powers, including executing deserters, terrorizing prisoners, and throwing into prison dissenters.
- Stalin�s name is connected by an indissoluble link to the Gulag because he took the prison camp and made it the central characteristic of his rule. That simply isn�t true of Lenin.
- The rhetoric of atrocity is diseased from the very beginning if the standards by which one condemns it are jiggered in favor of societies one favors. One of the many admirable things about Ferguson�s book is that, though he is a Conservative, he doesn�t do a lot of jiggering. One of the awful things about all of Remnick�s Russian writings is he does nothing but.
Bollettino
Dyncorps to the rescue!
Corp watch continues its excellent coverage of the looting in Iraq -- that is, the looting by major corporations in cahoots with the Bush-ites. Apparently Dyncorps, a corporation that is one of the growing number of private military organizations that have taken the paramilitary out of the primitive era of random torture and put it on a paying basis is heading for Iraq, to guard the streets and prisons of Smilin' Jay Garner's fair democracy.
Dyncorps has established a solid record in Columbia (where they spray herbicide for the US Gov, and have had a suit, brought against them by Ecuadorian peasants for the collateral damage to livestock, crops, and human babies (not important ones -- just Ecuadorians), blocked by the US Gov; and in Bosnia, where Corp Watch culled these interesting tidbits:
"...Kathryn Bolkovac, a U.N. International Police Force monitor filed a lawsuit in Britain in 2001 against DynCorp for firing her after she reported that Dyncorp police trainers in Bosnia were paying for prostitutes and participating in sex trafficking. Many of the Dyncorp employees were forced to resign under suspicion of illegal activity. But none were prosecuted, since they enjoy immunity from prosecution in Bosnia.
Earlier that year Ben Johnston, a DynCorp aircraft mechanic for Apache and Blackhawk helicopters in Kosovo, filed a lawsuit against his employer. The suit alleged that that in the latter part of 1999 Johnson "learned that employees and supervisors from DynCorp were engaging in perverse, illegal and inhumane behavior [and] were purchasing illegal weapons, women, forged passports and [participating in] other immoral acts."
Shucks, if this isn't just the kind of company in whose company Dick Cheney has always shown himself to be a grateful guest! Dick's company, after all, has had a bit of a tohu-bohu about its own private army's doin's in Angola.
Insight also features a story about the Dyncorps contract. It is very interesting:
Insight has learned that the U.S. State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs has issued a $22 million contract to DynCorp Aerospace Operations (UK) Ltd., a subsidiary of Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), to "re-establish police, justice and prison functions in postconflict Iraq." "The contract," according to one congressional aide who asked not to be identified, "was sole-sourced for one year. But this contract could come to $500 million before it's through."
"There are some strange things about how this contract was issued," the aide continues, "because why would CSC use an offshore subsidiary. Is it so they won't have to pay taxes on this money? Also, why wasn't this contract put up for bid? Why was DynCorp the chosen recipient?"
Indeed, DynCorp has many federal contracts. But sole-sourcing of this contract has raised eyebrows for some at the State Department and in Congress where aides want answers about this deal and others coming down the pike."
On to the eternal battle: winning hearts and minds for at least the two more weeks that the US press will pay attention to the effort! Although one does wonder if any noise will be made at all about the US doing business with an obvious tax shelter. Last year, there were even some virtuous noises made about such things. But that was soooooooo l'an dernier!
Dyncorps to the rescue!
Corp watch continues its excellent coverage of the looting in Iraq -- that is, the looting by major corporations in cahoots with the Bush-ites. Apparently Dyncorps, a corporation that is one of the growing number of private military organizations that have taken the paramilitary out of the primitive era of random torture and put it on a paying basis is heading for Iraq, to guard the streets and prisons of Smilin' Jay Garner's fair democracy.
Dyncorps has established a solid record in Columbia (where they spray herbicide for the US Gov, and have had a suit, brought against them by Ecuadorian peasants for the collateral damage to livestock, crops, and human babies (not important ones -- just Ecuadorians), blocked by the US Gov; and in Bosnia, where Corp Watch culled these interesting tidbits:
"...Kathryn Bolkovac, a U.N. International Police Force monitor filed a lawsuit in Britain in 2001 against DynCorp for firing her after she reported that Dyncorp police trainers in Bosnia were paying for prostitutes and participating in sex trafficking. Many of the Dyncorp employees were forced to resign under suspicion of illegal activity. But none were prosecuted, since they enjoy immunity from prosecution in Bosnia.
Earlier that year Ben Johnston, a DynCorp aircraft mechanic for Apache and Blackhawk helicopters in Kosovo, filed a lawsuit against his employer. The suit alleged that that in the latter part of 1999 Johnson "learned that employees and supervisors from DynCorp were engaging in perverse, illegal and inhumane behavior [and] were purchasing illegal weapons, women, forged passports and [participating in] other immoral acts."
Shucks, if this isn't just the kind of company in whose company Dick Cheney has always shown himself to be a grateful guest! Dick's company, after all, has had a bit of a tohu-bohu about its own private army's doin's in Angola.
Insight also features a story about the Dyncorps contract. It is very interesting:
Insight has learned that the U.S. State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs has issued a $22 million contract to DynCorp Aerospace Operations (UK) Ltd., a subsidiary of Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), to "re-establish police, justice and prison functions in postconflict Iraq." "The contract," according to one congressional aide who asked not to be identified, "was sole-sourced for one year. But this contract could come to $500 million before it's through."
"There are some strange things about how this contract was issued," the aide continues, "because why would CSC use an offshore subsidiary. Is it so they won't have to pay taxes on this money? Also, why wasn't this contract put up for bid? Why was DynCorp the chosen recipient?"
Indeed, DynCorp has many federal contracts. But sole-sourcing of this contract has raised eyebrows for some at the State Department and in Congress where aides want answers about this deal and others coming down the pike."
On to the eternal battle: winning hearts and minds for at least the two more weeks that the US press will pay attention to the effort! Although one does wonder if any noise will be made at all about the US doing business with an obvious tax shelter. Last year, there were even some virtuous noises made about such things. But that was soooooooo l'an dernier!
Bollettino
A couple of weeks ago, LI was circulating a little op ed piece to various outlets, desperately hoping for a hit. This was before the War. The op ed began:
"For those who doubt that the Bush administration is invading Iraq to install a democracy, there were two telling stories in the last week of February. One, a small story about Post Saddam Iraq in the March 3 Business Week, contained a comparison of the cost of reconstructing and holding together Iraq and the revenues currently produced by Iraqi oil fields:
"Unless oil prices stay at current high levels, Iraq's oil income of around $15 to $20 billion per year isn't likely to be enough to pay for food and other needed imports as well as rebuilding and development costs. That tab is estimated at $20 billion a year over several years."
The other story was in the Washington Times. A congressional committee was grilling Paul Wolfowitz, the ideologue behind Bush's rush to war. Wolfowitz was stonewalling about the cost of the war and the occupation. At one point, however, the committee did break on through to the other side - getting a revealing glimpse of the thought process that is taking place at the highest levels of Bush's White House. Wolfowitz testified "it is wrong to believe that the United States will foot the bill for occupation. He said Iraq itself generates $15 billion to $20 billion annually in oil exports and has up to $20 billion in assets frozen because it invaded Kuwait in 1991."There's a lot of money there, and to assume we're going to pay for it is wrong," he said."
So the scenario we are being told will bring in democracy looks something like this. Post-Saddam Iraq will be ruled by some junta of Iraqi exiles whose first exercise of power, supervised by their American superiors, is to hand over the only source of income Iraq has, in order to pay for the war that installed them in power.
Surely, in Wolfowitz's remark, we see the specter of a lie. The question is, what lie is it? Is it a lie to the American people that the cost of this war, like the Gulf War, will be borne by others - or is it the lie that America is going to change the regime in Iraq to a democratic one? Both can't be true."
Of course, nobody took or even nibbled at my bait. However, now that the first phase of the War has been signed on the dotted line, the outlets that I sent it to are starting to publish op eds that gingerly examine exactly the difference between the Bush pronouncements about paying for the war in the magic pre-war time and after the guns have fallen silent. Happily, it looks like Wolfowitz's lie was that the Americans were going to eat up Iraqi oil to pay for the invasion. That doesn't look possible even for an administration that always jettisons finesse for rudeness, and holds as pre-eminate the satisfaction of its gross appetites.
This is not to say that, in our design of the Wolfowitz paradox, we weren't extending an almost rebarbative amount of generosity towards the good intentions of the D.C. warriors. Democracy, in D.C. speak, is still Smilin' Jay Garner. The gap between democracy as a recognizable form of government and the governance of proconsuls has still not registered in the minds of the press corps.
But onto the oil. This is from the AP:
"U.N. experts visiting Iraq in 2000 noted severe corrosion, blowouts and pollution in the oil fields and concluded some wells had been irreparably damaged. Daily capacity has been falling by 100,000 barrels a year since a 1990 peak of 3.5 million barrels a day.Even agriculture is in trouble. The United Nations estimated before the war that less than half the total cultivable area of Iraq is farmed, largely due to extreme soil salinity and waterlogging caused by poor irrigation practices.
Many people are counting on oil money to help rebuild the country. Yet Khadduri points out Iraq's oil production is worth at most $22 billion a year.Preliminary estimates on the cost of rebuilding Iraq range from $20 billion a year for the first few years to as much as $600 billion over a decade. On top of that, oil has to pay for food, education, medical care and other necessities -- plus $200 billion or more in debts owed to countries like Russia, France and China and compensation claims to Kuwait and others.``People overblow, overestimate the thing about the oil as if it's going to be manna from heaven,'' Khadduri said. ``The bonanza people are talking about, I don't see it, not in foreseeable future.'' "
Now, of course we aren't saying that Wolfowitz came out and said, hey, I was lying about how we were going to pay for this thing. We still expect the US to try to loot Iraq. The massive looting, the riot of looting, is even now being quietly set in motion by the Pentagon and the US Aid office, with their juicy contracts for "rebuilding' the country. Cameras should be stationed there. The Shi'a chest pounding is nothing compared to the War profiteering chest pounding, a sound of truly religious import, that booms out of certain Executive office divisions in D.C.
And then there is the Bush estimate for reconstructing Iraq.
Readers, Guess how much the Bush administration estimates this will cost:
1. 98.6 billion dollars
2. 15 billion dollars
3. 6 billion dollars
4. 3.6 billion dollars
5. 890 million dollars.
If you guessed no. 4, give yourself an Afghanistan knit pat on the back. Since we went into the War on fraudulent premises, it is only fitting that we are going out of the War on fraudulent forecasts.
The NYT article that fills in the preliminary figures reminds us that the main influence of Enron on the Bush-ites has still not been plumbed to its full and slimy depths. Just as Enron inflated itself through mark to market accounting, crediting as current revenue future estimates of revenue, so, too, the Bush administration's supply side optimism is a variation of the same thing. The way the Bush-ites get the 3.6 billion dollar figure is by subtracting, from future costs, estimates of future "earnings," so to speak -- that is, that Iraq, under the new regime of course, will pay back whatever money the US plows into the place.
Just as Enron was able to manipulate the yield curve to hit any profit target it wanted to, the administration simply marks the curve to show not only projected oil revenues nobody else is projecting, but some kind of market bonanza happening in Iraq.
Has the sheer idiocy at the core of optimism ever been so blatant, so easy to expose, or so oddly accepted, once so exposed, by a public that seems to have lost its sense of revulsion in its instinct for obediance? We think not.
A couple of weeks ago, LI was circulating a little op ed piece to various outlets, desperately hoping for a hit. This was before the War. The op ed began:
"For those who doubt that the Bush administration is invading Iraq to install a democracy, there were two telling stories in the last week of February. One, a small story about Post Saddam Iraq in the March 3 Business Week, contained a comparison of the cost of reconstructing and holding together Iraq and the revenues currently produced by Iraqi oil fields:
"Unless oil prices stay at current high levels, Iraq's oil income of around $15 to $20 billion per year isn't likely to be enough to pay for food and other needed imports as well as rebuilding and development costs. That tab is estimated at $20 billion a year over several years."
The other story was in the Washington Times. A congressional committee was grilling Paul Wolfowitz, the ideologue behind Bush's rush to war. Wolfowitz was stonewalling about the cost of the war and the occupation. At one point, however, the committee did break on through to the other side - getting a revealing glimpse of the thought process that is taking place at the highest levels of Bush's White House. Wolfowitz testified "it is wrong to believe that the United States will foot the bill for occupation. He said Iraq itself generates $15 billion to $20 billion annually in oil exports and has up to $20 billion in assets frozen because it invaded Kuwait in 1991."There's a lot of money there, and to assume we're going to pay for it is wrong," he said."
So the scenario we are being told will bring in democracy looks something like this. Post-Saddam Iraq will be ruled by some junta of Iraqi exiles whose first exercise of power, supervised by their American superiors, is to hand over the only source of income Iraq has, in order to pay for the war that installed them in power.
Surely, in Wolfowitz's remark, we see the specter of a lie. The question is, what lie is it? Is it a lie to the American people that the cost of this war, like the Gulf War, will be borne by others - or is it the lie that America is going to change the regime in Iraq to a democratic one? Both can't be true."
Of course, nobody took or even nibbled at my bait. However, now that the first phase of the War has been signed on the dotted line, the outlets that I sent it to are starting to publish op eds that gingerly examine exactly the difference between the Bush pronouncements about paying for the war in the magic pre-war time and after the guns have fallen silent. Happily, it looks like Wolfowitz's lie was that the Americans were going to eat up Iraqi oil to pay for the invasion. That doesn't look possible even for an administration that always jettisons finesse for rudeness, and holds as pre-eminate the satisfaction of its gross appetites.
This is not to say that, in our design of the Wolfowitz paradox, we weren't extending an almost rebarbative amount of generosity towards the good intentions of the D.C. warriors. Democracy, in D.C. speak, is still Smilin' Jay Garner. The gap between democracy as a recognizable form of government and the governance of proconsuls has still not registered in the minds of the press corps.
But onto the oil. This is from the AP:
"U.N. experts visiting Iraq in 2000 noted severe corrosion, blowouts and pollution in the oil fields and concluded some wells had been irreparably damaged. Daily capacity has been falling by 100,000 barrels a year since a 1990 peak of 3.5 million barrels a day.Even agriculture is in trouble. The United Nations estimated before the war that less than half the total cultivable area of Iraq is farmed, largely due to extreme soil salinity and waterlogging caused by poor irrigation practices.
Many people are counting on oil money to help rebuild the country. Yet Khadduri points out Iraq's oil production is worth at most $22 billion a year.Preliminary estimates on the cost of rebuilding Iraq range from $20 billion a year for the first few years to as much as $600 billion over a decade. On top of that, oil has to pay for food, education, medical care and other necessities -- plus $200 billion or more in debts owed to countries like Russia, France and China and compensation claims to Kuwait and others.``People overblow, overestimate the thing about the oil as if it's going to be manna from heaven,'' Khadduri said. ``The bonanza people are talking about, I don't see it, not in foreseeable future.'' "
Now, of course we aren't saying that Wolfowitz came out and said, hey, I was lying about how we were going to pay for this thing. We still expect the US to try to loot Iraq. The massive looting, the riot of looting, is even now being quietly set in motion by the Pentagon and the US Aid office, with their juicy contracts for "rebuilding' the country. Cameras should be stationed there. The Shi'a chest pounding is nothing compared to the War profiteering chest pounding, a sound of truly religious import, that booms out of certain Executive office divisions in D.C.
And then there is the Bush estimate for reconstructing Iraq.
Readers, Guess how much the Bush administration estimates this will cost:
1. 98.6 billion dollars
2. 15 billion dollars
3. 6 billion dollars
4. 3.6 billion dollars
5. 890 million dollars.
If you guessed no. 4, give yourself an Afghanistan knit pat on the back. Since we went into the War on fraudulent premises, it is only fitting that we are going out of the War on fraudulent forecasts.
The NYT article that fills in the preliminary figures reminds us that the main influence of Enron on the Bush-ites has still not been plumbed to its full and slimy depths. Just as Enron inflated itself through mark to market accounting, crediting as current revenue future estimates of revenue, so, too, the Bush administration's supply side optimism is a variation of the same thing. The way the Bush-ites get the 3.6 billion dollar figure is by subtracting, from future costs, estimates of future "earnings," so to speak -- that is, that Iraq, under the new regime of course, will pay back whatever money the US plows into the place.
Just as Enron was able to manipulate the yield curve to hit any profit target it wanted to, the administration simply marks the curve to show not only projected oil revenues nobody else is projecting, but some kind of market bonanza happening in Iraq.
Has the sheer idiocy at the core of optimism ever been so blatant, so easy to expose, or so oddly accepted, once so exposed, by a public that seems to have lost its sense of revulsion in its instinct for obediance? We think not.
Saturday, April 12, 2003
Bollettino
Some crimes insist on remaining unsolved. Jack the Ripper's crimes are the paragon of such. The Black Dahlia case is another.
In the WP, see the article about Steve Hodel, an LA PI who claims to have solved the case. His solution is that... well, his Dad cut Elizabeth Short in two in 1947. Oddly enough, this is the same claim (although different father) made by another, earlier solver of the Black Dahlia case by Janice Knowlton.
The article exudes a jaded fascination not so much with the case as with the California obsession about murderous parents. Southern California has always advertised itself as a state of mind -- it came into being as a human entity only after it had been projected as a state of mind, notoriously enough. Perhaps for this reason, psychological aberrance so easily leaks into sociological norm. So this is the hotbed of repressed memory, the place where all the young and the restless -- if they are affluent enough - eventually remember that Dad murdered a playmate, or was an officer in the local Satanic Ritual Club and Rotary Cotillion. Who knew the conjunction of Freud and Raymond Chandler would lead to this? Still, there's an air of desuetude upon that meeting of Noir and the DSM. Haven't we rollerdexed our way through more fashionable syndromes? Repressing, on the way, the repressed memory one.
There is one paragraph in the piece that is unctuous and stupid and worthy of protest. Before describing what happened to Elizabeth Short, there's this sentence: "Children should stop reading here." As if. That children might be reading a newspaper, instead of playing the Black Dahlia video game or whatever, is improbable in itself. But that the paper feels called upon to censor the flow of its own information, such as it is, is bogus to the extent that any sensible child should mistrust the paper thereafter.
Some crimes insist on remaining unsolved. Jack the Ripper's crimes are the paragon of such. The Black Dahlia case is another.
In the WP, see the article about Steve Hodel, an LA PI who claims to have solved the case. His solution is that... well, his Dad cut Elizabeth Short in two in 1947. Oddly enough, this is the same claim (although different father) made by another, earlier solver of the Black Dahlia case by Janice Knowlton.
The article exudes a jaded fascination not so much with the case as with the California obsession about murderous parents. Southern California has always advertised itself as a state of mind -- it came into being as a human entity only after it had been projected as a state of mind, notoriously enough. Perhaps for this reason, psychological aberrance so easily leaks into sociological norm. So this is the hotbed of repressed memory, the place where all the young and the restless -- if they are affluent enough - eventually remember that Dad murdered a playmate, or was an officer in the local Satanic Ritual Club and Rotary Cotillion. Who knew the conjunction of Freud and Raymond Chandler would lead to this? Still, there's an air of desuetude upon that meeting of Noir and the DSM. Haven't we rollerdexed our way through more fashionable syndromes? Repressing, on the way, the repressed memory one.
There is one paragraph in the piece that is unctuous and stupid and worthy of protest. Before describing what happened to Elizabeth Short, there's this sentence: "Children should stop reading here." As if. That children might be reading a newspaper, instead of playing the Black Dahlia video game or whatever, is improbable in itself. But that the paper feels called upon to censor the flow of its own information, such as it is, is bogus to the extent that any sensible child should mistrust the paper thereafter.
Friday, April 11, 2003
Bollettino
Of the essays I wish I�d written, one of them is by the Carlos Ginzburg, the Italian historian, and it has the wonderful title, Killing a Chinese mandarin. It was puvblished in Critical Inquiry in 1994, but I just came across it.
There�s a moral Gendankenexperiment that appears in several French texts. Ginzburg traces the figura in it to some texts of Diderot; he traces the idea of it back to Aristotle�s remarks on pity and distance, in time or space, in the Rhetoric.
The situation in Diderot is that a man murders another man in Paris. He then flies to China. At that difference, safe from the consequences of what he has done, does the murderer feel remorse? Would it be more natural to feel that the episode was simply closed, and unpleasant?
Ginzburg shows that Diderot recurs to this topic several times, most notably in Lettres sur les aveugles� There, Diderot makes the startling suggestion that if one is, structurally, incapable of distinguishing between a man pissing and a man bleeding to death, then the pity one feels is similarly diminished.
This is a variation of Aristotle�s point about natural law: it is natural to feel pity for those with whom one is close, but not for those who are far away. The largeness of the distance, or what I would call its familiarity or unfamiliarity, determines the moral emotion. And as the moral emotion is what is called upon in moral judgment, this makes it difficult to judge actions at a distance.
Ginzburg next moves to Chateaubriand, who gives us the classical form of the thought experiment in The Genius of Christianity: �Conscience! Is it possible that thou canst be but a phantom�? I ask my own heart, I put to myself this question: if thou couldst by a mere wish kill a fellow creature in China, and inherit his fortune in Europe, with the supernatural conviction that the fact would never be known, wouldst thou consent to form such a wish?
Balzac transforms this passage in several ways in Pere Goriot. Rastignac is tormented by the idea that he could become rich through a scheme that he knows will involve, indirectly, a murder. He meets his friend Bianchon and tells him of his doubts about this. Bianchon asks, �have you read Rousseau?�
�Yes.�
�Do you remember that passage in which he asks the reader what he would do if he could become wealthy by killing an old Chinese mandarin, without leavihg Paris, just by an act of will?�
Isn�t this, in one striking image, the whole history of European colonialism?
Ginzburg is quite aware of this. He develops the idea, further, with quotes from Hume and Benjamin. However, you will notice that I have done a little transforming of my own during the course of this reprise of Ginzburg�s essay. For at no point does he make the leap, as I have, from distance to familiarity.
It is a subtle part of the thought experiment that the victim be a Chinese mandarin. And not a French merchant, for instance, in Canton. I think there is a reason for this hint of exoticism. The distance between Paris and China is simply a metric fact leaving its impress on the imagination. But what kind of fact is the distance between a Frenchman and a Chinese Mandarin? Familiarity, I would like to claim, is inseparable from some image of proximity and distance. But these images point to a certain work � the calculating, as it were, work of sentiment. And that seems to violate the idea that pity is an immediate response. That pity requires no extra energy. That pity is, in a sense, free.
When, in fact, distance has been abolished � when the lyncher is face to face with the victim, or the tv viewer is face to face with the obliterated Iraqi soldier (admittedly, a different kind of elimination of distance), why doesn�t the natural law kick in?
One of the odder features of the age of lynching in the South was that, far from being a dirty secret, postcards were made of lynchings and sold door to door. The image of a strung up, gutted, burned black man, which can�t be seen without horror even by, presumably, Mississippi senators, was once a familiar popular image. I would say that image contributed to the spirit of lynching by affecting a form of de-familiarization. By compulsively asserting a metaphysical distance between lyncher and victim, pity was, as in an odd behavioralist experiment on reactions in rats, erased by being overloaded.
I�m still not sure that all pity is like this. The immediacy of pity seems such a standard characteristic of it that I am afraid of violating an essential semantic norm by saying that pity requires some calculating function. Still, let�s say I am right. The art, then, is to stimulate the great rat, Public Opinion, in just the right way. That didn't happen before the war. The management of stimulus was, frankly, a disaster. The press assumed the rat had been sufficiently stimulated, and then one day looked out its window and beheld a million peace marchers.
So how is the rat being treated now? The thing to look for, if you do want to manage pity � if you want to create a kind of horror, and you want a population to go along � the thing to manage, then, is the initial moment in which the image is received. In this, the Bush administration has been pretty brilliant. The last three weeks, as we keep getting told again and again, the other parts of the world were seeing a different kind of war than we were. The images flooding the airwaves in Pakistan, for instance, were all of Iraqis variously blown apart. Suddenly, however, these images have started flooding the American airwaves, too. Suddenly it is all right for the Sun, in Britain, to publish a huge photo of a burned Iraqi child. Because we have been through a ritual period of blaming all violence on the other side. Even that the other side resisted, the message is, makes them to blame for violence. That period has been successful. The press has been cooperative. And, consequently, this has become a war without casualties. A cakewalk.
America is an odd country for such things. We have decided that the familiarity of the images of 9/11 are a kind of gold standard of pity. No American really feels obliged to remember, say, the deaths in the Moscow theater which the Chechen rebels took last year. Those who mention such things are treated as fools. It is as if they were turning around the moral thought experiment: in this one, the Chinese mandarin kills the European. An odd thing about the Western notion of distance: it isn't commutative.
Of the essays I wish I�d written, one of them is by the Carlos Ginzburg, the Italian historian, and it has the wonderful title, Killing a Chinese mandarin. It was puvblished in Critical Inquiry in 1994, but I just came across it.
There�s a moral Gendankenexperiment that appears in several French texts. Ginzburg traces the figura in it to some texts of Diderot; he traces the idea of it back to Aristotle�s remarks on pity and distance, in time or space, in the Rhetoric.
The situation in Diderot is that a man murders another man in Paris. He then flies to China. At that difference, safe from the consequences of what he has done, does the murderer feel remorse? Would it be more natural to feel that the episode was simply closed, and unpleasant?
Ginzburg shows that Diderot recurs to this topic several times, most notably in Lettres sur les aveugles� There, Diderot makes the startling suggestion that if one is, structurally, incapable of distinguishing between a man pissing and a man bleeding to death, then the pity one feels is similarly diminished.
This is a variation of Aristotle�s point about natural law: it is natural to feel pity for those with whom one is close, but not for those who are far away. The largeness of the distance, or what I would call its familiarity or unfamiliarity, determines the moral emotion. And as the moral emotion is what is called upon in moral judgment, this makes it difficult to judge actions at a distance.
Ginzburg next moves to Chateaubriand, who gives us the classical form of the thought experiment in The Genius of Christianity: �Conscience! Is it possible that thou canst be but a phantom�? I ask my own heart, I put to myself this question: if thou couldst by a mere wish kill a fellow creature in China, and inherit his fortune in Europe, with the supernatural conviction that the fact would never be known, wouldst thou consent to form such a wish?
Balzac transforms this passage in several ways in Pere Goriot. Rastignac is tormented by the idea that he could become rich through a scheme that he knows will involve, indirectly, a murder. He meets his friend Bianchon and tells him of his doubts about this. Bianchon asks, �have you read Rousseau?�
�Yes.�
�Do you remember that passage in which he asks the reader what he would do if he could become wealthy by killing an old Chinese mandarin, without leavihg Paris, just by an act of will?�
Isn�t this, in one striking image, the whole history of European colonialism?
Ginzburg is quite aware of this. He develops the idea, further, with quotes from Hume and Benjamin. However, you will notice that I have done a little transforming of my own during the course of this reprise of Ginzburg�s essay. For at no point does he make the leap, as I have, from distance to familiarity.
It is a subtle part of the thought experiment that the victim be a Chinese mandarin. And not a French merchant, for instance, in Canton. I think there is a reason for this hint of exoticism. The distance between Paris and China is simply a metric fact leaving its impress on the imagination. But what kind of fact is the distance between a Frenchman and a Chinese Mandarin? Familiarity, I would like to claim, is inseparable from some image of proximity and distance. But these images point to a certain work � the calculating, as it were, work of sentiment. And that seems to violate the idea that pity is an immediate response. That pity requires no extra energy. That pity is, in a sense, free.
When, in fact, distance has been abolished � when the lyncher is face to face with the victim, or the tv viewer is face to face with the obliterated Iraqi soldier (admittedly, a different kind of elimination of distance), why doesn�t the natural law kick in?
One of the odder features of the age of lynching in the South was that, far from being a dirty secret, postcards were made of lynchings and sold door to door. The image of a strung up, gutted, burned black man, which can�t be seen without horror even by, presumably, Mississippi senators, was once a familiar popular image. I would say that image contributed to the spirit of lynching by affecting a form of de-familiarization. By compulsively asserting a metaphysical distance between lyncher and victim, pity was, as in an odd behavioralist experiment on reactions in rats, erased by being overloaded.
I�m still not sure that all pity is like this. The immediacy of pity seems such a standard characteristic of it that I am afraid of violating an essential semantic norm by saying that pity requires some calculating function. Still, let�s say I am right. The art, then, is to stimulate the great rat, Public Opinion, in just the right way. That didn't happen before the war. The management of stimulus was, frankly, a disaster. The press assumed the rat had been sufficiently stimulated, and then one day looked out its window and beheld a million peace marchers.
So how is the rat being treated now? The thing to look for, if you do want to manage pity � if you want to create a kind of horror, and you want a population to go along � the thing to manage, then, is the initial moment in which the image is received. In this, the Bush administration has been pretty brilliant. The last three weeks, as we keep getting told again and again, the other parts of the world were seeing a different kind of war than we were. The images flooding the airwaves in Pakistan, for instance, were all of Iraqis variously blown apart. Suddenly, however, these images have started flooding the American airwaves, too. Suddenly it is all right for the Sun, in Britain, to publish a huge photo of a burned Iraqi child. Because we have been through a ritual period of blaming all violence on the other side. Even that the other side resisted, the message is, makes them to blame for violence. That period has been successful. The press has been cooperative. And, consequently, this has become a war without casualties. A cakewalk.
America is an odd country for such things. We have decided that the familiarity of the images of 9/11 are a kind of gold standard of pity. No American really feels obliged to remember, say, the deaths in the Moscow theater which the Chechen rebels took last year. Those who mention such things are treated as fools. It is as if they were turning around the moral thought experiment: in this one, the Chinese mandarin kills the European. An odd thing about the Western notion of distance: it isn't commutative.
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