Remora

LI has been desperately searching for something else to write about besides the upcoming war. The reason, of course, is that the war has become naturalized in American politics -- there are no parties that oppose it; like Winter, or the next storm, it is simply coming. This sense of onset -- of a thing that is impervious to human will, even as it is foreseeably disastrous to human beings -- is crucial to power as it is envisioned by dreamers of total authority. Total authority, after all, is a piece of nature. Death, flood, storm, lightning -- the bit players in mad Lear's dance on the heath -- these, once associated, as though by necessity, with the "leader', insinuate themselves into the mood of dissent, turning dissent from the expectation of persuasion to the easy desperation of emotional expression. So dissenters turn to invective and alienating names -- Bush as fascist, or the like. When the opposition indulges wholeheartedly in caricature, it loses its force as opposition. Better to play Lear's fool -- to make that narrow passage between outrageous and salient comments.

Robert Fiske, in the Independent, has some interesting comments on the weapons inspectors -- the supposed dupes of whose works the likes of Cheney (in his incarnation as V.P., not in his incarnation as the Iraq-friendly CEO of Haliburtan) is so scornful. The direction of their dupehood is given a spin by Fiske.



"But for now, the Americans have been sandbagged. It will take at least 25 days to put the UN inspection team together, another 60 for their preliminary assessment � always assuming they are given "unfettered" access to all Iraqi government facilities -- then another 60 days for further inspections. In other words, George Bush's latest war has been delayed by more than five months. Saddam, of course, must have his own worries. Back in 1996, the Iraqis were already accusing the UN inspectorate of working with the Israelis.

Major Scott Ritter, Iraq's nemesis-turned-saviour, was indeed � as an inspector � regularly travelling to Tel Aviv to consult Israeli intelligence. Then Saddam accused the UN inspectors of working for the CIA. And he was right. The United States, it emerged, was using the UN's Baghdad offices to bug Iraq's government communications. And once the inspectors were withdrawn in 1998 and the US and Britain launched "Operation Desert Fox", it turned out that virtually every one of the bombing targets had been visited by UN inspectors over the previous six months. Far from being an inspectorate, the UN lads � though they didn't all know it � had been acting as forward air controllers, drawing up an American hit list rather than monitoring compliance with UN resolutions."

Bush is going to get a fearful opposition to go on record supporting a war in spite of UN inspectors, with the really silly mantra that the UN goal is disarmament, and that the U.S. will be the instrument of that goal in spite of the U.N. The silliness resides in the fact that the two sides are certainly not separate. As the Bush people know, if S.H. did "disarm," the claim would have to be verified by -- arms inspection. In fact, we all know that. The beserk tilt against logic itself, and the demand for encouragement from the Democrats, is a sad spectacle quite in keeping with the beginnings of the Bush regime: from usurpation to tin star militarism. Haven't we seen this Western before?