Remora

This weekend LI talked with a friend who, incautiously, quoted us when talking with another friend about the war. The latter friend said, where does he get his information?! The implication being that we pulled it out of ... the bowels of our imagination. Well, fantasy is something we love to indulge in. But middle age has rather put the kebosh on day dreaming. So we usually look around for info in the usual places.

Information is proving to be a difficulty in this war. The American and British press seem determined to do their patriotic best, whether it is questioning whether Saddam the nefarious is using a body double to do his rousing work (a question that should be directed, we think, at Tony Blair -- surely the real Blair is even now struggling with a duct tape over his mouth and a rope around his wrists in some isolated Scottish castle, much like the kidnapped wife in that Danny DeVito flick, while the Blair substitute, created by Richard Perle out of primitive proteins in some dank basement in Transylvania, is leading the U.K ever closer to 51st state status) or depending on the military to tell us whether the Iraqi tv's broadcast of two downed American helicopter pilots is really two downed American helicopter pilots, or a film cleverly concocted in Baghdad's famous branch of Dreamworks studio. The servility is overwhelming. When General Franks gives his press conferences, the press people now report, with appropriate indignation, that he is greeted with sceptical questions by some of the foreigners present. Shocking.

So the fabulous Iraqi battalion, division, or whatever, consisting of 8,000 men, has surrendered to "coalition" forces at least six times in the press, each time to sort of dwindle away to a bunch of shoemakers and their german shepherd. One of these days a real Iraqi division will surrender to the Americans, and nobody will believe it. So, too, on a day when the stock market loses 300 some points, we have radio newscasters asking journalists sited in Kuwait City, the war seems to be going well from here. What does it look like from there?

What it does look like is a copy of the war that will happen after Saddam H. is history. Treacherous attacks by a subaltern people who don't appreciate the marvels we simply ache to shower them with -- food, democracy, privatized telephone service with 10,000 hours of free long distance calls -- that will eventually wear away the the surface of the military nerve, in the form of the shooting of this or that civilian, and provoke backlash, in the form of the ambush of this or that heroic American, and so on. You know the drill. The huge surprise, so far, is that the American troops haven't had their floral moment -- the Washington Post is getting quite snippy about it. Where are those Iraqi women-'n-children giving our boys the traditional bouquets in Basra and, oh, one of those other desert towns that nobody is going to remember anyway? We can announce, I think, that the problem is that many of those flower arrangements were ordered from busted dot com companies. Seems that Saddam tyrannically prevented the Iraqi masses from accessing the Nets. Hence, behind the times Iraqi women-n-children are ordering their flowers from Grocery.com and Van.com and other now defunct companies. The sorrow and the pity, as they say.


But let's take a breath and remember that our victory is assured, as Blair (II) would put it, and little is really said about who will govern our new staging area for democracy. Michael Young, in Reason, profiles two of American's budding proconsuls. One, Barbara Bodine, our woman in Yemen, gets Young's qualified approval. But of Garner, Young has this to say:


"If Bodine's prospective appointment is designed to reassure the Iraqis of the benign nature of a US occupation, her boss, Jay Garner, will prove a harder sell. Garner famously signed onto an October 12, 2000 statement by the archconservative Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, which praised the Israeli army for having "exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of a Palestinian Authority that deliberately pushes civilians and young people to the front lines."

The statement noted: "What makes the US-Israel security relationship one of mutual benefit is the combination of military capabilities and shared political values�freedom, democracy, personal liberty and the rule of law." That Garner himself benefited from the security relationship is well known: As president of California-based defense contractor SY Technology, he oversaw the company's work on the US-Israeli Arrow missile defense system."

Young also reports that on every missile fired into Iraq for its liberation, Garner's company gets a little tooth fairy money. Putting him, it must be said, in the company of the Bush administration's nearest and dearest as far as war profits are concerned.

We did wonder, though, what Young meant by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Was this latent anti-semitism? Turns out that there really is such an organization. Here's a link.