Bollettino
Casualty counts: "At least 3,240 civilians died across Iraq during a month of war, including 1,896 in Baghdad, according to a five-week Associated Press investigation.The count is still fragmentary, and the complete toll if it is ever tallied is sure to be significantly higher."
Hobhouse
The extraordinary things you can find on the Internet. John Cam Hobhouse is a name that will be familiar to any Byron devotee. He was the occassion for some of Byron's best, because most spiteful and most explicit, letters. Well, there is a site that is putting up his diary. A rum thing, as Hobhouse himself might have said. Mr. Roast Beef in Venice is pretty funny. The first entries, which describe a circumcision with all the fuss of a man who is both a prude and bears a strong prejudice against Jews -- Hobhouse's snooty anti-semitism is of a very English kind - is a complete hoot. We recommend it. Here are a couple of grafs from it:
I went to the circumcision room � the rabbins were not to be known by their dress, nor did I make out that any ceremony had commenced, when two men in plain clothes sat down next to each other and sung recitative out of two little books, talking to each other and the company at intervals. Presently two enormously stout fellows threw strips of silk over their shoulders, and one, sitting down in a chair, put three or four pillows on his knees. The instruments were in a dish prepared � a sort of thin prong to hold the prepuce over the glass and prevent the latter from being cut, a sharp thin knife, a pair of scissors and a lancet, together with some balsam and a rag. The poor little red child, only eight days old, was brought in � the singing continued between the two who now stood up and approached the man with the pillows � the infant being stripped below was then laid on the pillows � the rabbins stood by and sung � the operator in half minute threw the prepuce, a considerable piece of flesh, in the plate, and I saw the infant covered with the blood. He screamed violently � the operator then ran his thumbnail violently round between the teguments of the [ ]ended rim of the flesh and sucked the parts. Owing to some mistake, the wine with which he was to wash his mouth was not ready, and was at last given to him in some confusion by the rabbins, who still continued their mummery and recitative, the child screaming and the father crying in the corner.
A Jew told Lewis [ Monk Lewis, staying with Byron at that moment] that the fault of the family was troppo di sensibilit�15 � the operator then powdered the wounded part and then covered it with a balsamed rag and powdered it again � then bandaged it up raw and bloody and delivered the child to a nurse. The singing ceased, and the men pulled off their silk and the ceremony was declared over.
The foreskin was carefully preserved in a bottle, and became the trophy of the operator who I understood had 800 such, and would bury them with him. Lewis, however, supposed that the prepuce is buried with its original owner. We made enquiries, and found that any man may operate who has served an apprenticeship and has suffered his thumbnail to grow to a proper length. I was shown a thumbnail then in a state of pupillage for the purpose: long, dirty.
This is a brutal ceremony � lasts longer than I thought and is more bloody � and I should think, painful. It is the height of indecency to ask women to assist at it. My young ladies, the doctor�s daughters, told me that the moment the child was taken out of the room � on a signal given, all the women cried, or seemed to cry, and continued until the young Jew was brought back. The name is given on this occasion. The conversazione lasted for some time � afterwards cakes and chocolate and water dashed with aniseed were handed round and the ladies and gentlemen began again to mix and to make merry upon the morning�s exploit. I came home and read a little, dined, walked out by myself in the evening � supped at Byron�s � read Tales of my Landlord at night."
Hobhouse has always been simply a name to me. The site is devoted to Hobby-O. As is evident from the diary, although prudish, Hobhouse was not a man to blanche at a description. He wanted Byron's memoirs published -- but of course they were burnt by the odious Thomas Moore, sentimental fig eater that he was. LI, in this age in which the forces of progress have once again joined up with the forces of puritanism to try to ban everything that can be construed as unhealthy (such as smoking in bars -- a ban which we trust, here in Austin, is on its way to being overturned, thanks to the defeat of Margot Clarke for City Council), while of course hypocritically ignoring what is really unhealthy - namely, the conditions in which our meat is slaughtered, or our petrochemicals are woven into useable molecular patterns down there in Cancer Gulch in Louisiana, or the way in which each American citizen drains as much energy from Gaia in a year as a sperm whale -- anyway, LI has a lively sympathy for figures who live in ages of transition between a dominant proper appreciation of the body's appetites and a dominant abhorrence of same, finds Hobhouse an interesting figure. The diary entries on the web were supposedly repressed when his diary came to be published:
"John Cam Hobhouse�s diary is one of the two major texts written about Byron by his contemporaries which has (July 2002) still to see the full light of day � though it is about much more than Byron, for Hobhouse became, as he cast off his Byronic shackles, a significant political figure in his own right. The sections on his two Napoleonic French excursions � on both of which he went without Byron � are worth books in themselves. His weeks in Newgate, just before he was elected MP for Westminster, will be included. However, the extent to which he played Sancho to Byron�s Quixote - Pylades to Byron�s Orestes - Hal to Byron�s Falstaff - Horatio to Byron�s Hamlet - Celia to Byron�s Rosalind � cannot be exaggerated, and will have justice done to it."
Go to it, reader. Download. Enjoy.
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
Tuesday, June 10, 2003
Bollettino
Further thoughts on Israel and Palestine.
As we said before, we doubt that the roadmap to peace is either a roadmap, or one that leads to peace. The problem, as we see it, of Israel and Palestine is that both are states claiming legitimacy as representatives of a mystical ethnic group: the Jews, on the one side, the Palestinians, on the other. This isn't to say that ethnic division isn't sufficient for the claim of nationhood - this would be way too unrealistic. Our point, rather, is that ethnic purity is not a claim that a nation can put forward - at least, a civilized nation. We've seen this war fought before - in 1860, in the U.S. - in 1939, in Europe - and in the innumerable small skirmishes that make up the resistance to apartheid, in South Africa.
Martha Nussbaum wrote a famous essay on the cosmopolitan alternative to nationalism - at least it was famous in the 90s. She references the cynic, Diogenes, as the first man who said he was a citizen of the world - and she digs into what that meant for the Stoics, who adopted it during the eclipse of Greek state-nation power. The stoic ideal had, of course, a tremendous influence on the humanists, and on the philosophes. Since the Bush White House is supposedly bursting at the seams with eager Straussians, perhaps they will want to plunge into their copies of Kant's essay on Perpetual Peace - a sort of cosmopolitan manifesto, insofar as Kant was capable of writing a manifesto. The first two points are interesting:
1. "No Treaty of Peace Shall Be Held Valid in Which There Is Tacitly Reserved Matter for a Future War"; and 2. "No Independent States, Large or Small, Shall Come under the Dominion of Another State by Inheritance, Exchange, Purchase, or Donation" One can take the last point as the typical reactionary defense formation of the small German states in the face of the threat of Prussia - or France. But Kant, who is a thoroughgoing philosopher, binds the second point to the wording of his more famous categorical imperative. Just as the duty forbids treating a person as an object, so, too, the usurpation of the power of one state by another is a violation of a state's subjective autonomy: it is to treat the state as a thing: "A state is not, like the ground which it occupies, a piece of property (patrimonium). It is a society of men whom no one else has any right to command or to dispose except the state itself. It is a trunk with its own roots. But to incorporate it into another state, like a graft, is to destroy its existence as a moral person, reducing it to a thing; such incorporation thus contradicts the idea of the original contract without which no right over a people can be conceived."
We've never thought Kant's argument about thinghood, and its morally low status, was very convincing; but we recognize its resonance with the whole moral thematic of liberal politics. Actually, if it wouldn't entail a long detour, we think we could make a convincing case for cynical thinghood as the moral basis of cosmopolitanism -- but never mind that. The thing to hold in mind here, qua Israel and Palestine, is that enforced respect which, at least, allows the cosmopolitan moment. Practically, that would mean the building of certain transnational institutions between Palestine and Israel, such as a court that could fairly try both the encouragers of suicide bombing and the killing of civilians by soldiers. This would provide another route for retaliation, instead of the routes followed by both parties, as in today's paper -- and tomorrow's, and tomorrow's...
LI doesn't believe our suggestion is going to be followed, of course � we hasten to say that. But we do think a real peace plan would address the causes of hostility, instead of endlessly bargaining settlers against the repression of terrorists. Finally, there's a lot to be said for Kant's sixth point:
"6. "No State Shall, during War, Permit Such Acts of Hostility Which Would Make Mutual Confidence in the Subsequent Peace Impossible: Such Are the Employment of Assassins (percussores), Poisoners (venefici), Breach of Capitulation, and Incitement to Treason (perduellio) in the Opposing State";
These are dishonorable stratagems. For some confidence in the character of the enemy must remain even in the midst of war, as otherwise no peace could be concluded and the hostilities would degenerate into a war of extermination (bellum internecinum). War, however, is only the sad recourse in the state of nature (where there is no tribunal which could judge with the force of law) by which each state asserts its right by violence and in which neither party can be adjudged unjust (for that would presuppose a juridical decision); in lieu of such a decision, the issue of the conflict (as if given by a so-called "judgment of God") decides on which side justice lies. But between states no punitive war (bellum punitivum) is conceivable, because there is no relation between them of master and servant."
Oops. The Straussians aren't going to like that phrase about there being "no relation between them of master and servant." Kant, as always, goes too far! Out with the guy -- let's get another court philosopher. How about Tom DeLay?
Further thoughts on Israel and Palestine.
As we said before, we doubt that the roadmap to peace is either a roadmap, or one that leads to peace. The problem, as we see it, of Israel and Palestine is that both are states claiming legitimacy as representatives of a mystical ethnic group: the Jews, on the one side, the Palestinians, on the other. This isn't to say that ethnic division isn't sufficient for the claim of nationhood - this would be way too unrealistic. Our point, rather, is that ethnic purity is not a claim that a nation can put forward - at least, a civilized nation. We've seen this war fought before - in 1860, in the U.S. - in 1939, in Europe - and in the innumerable small skirmishes that make up the resistance to apartheid, in South Africa.
Martha Nussbaum wrote a famous essay on the cosmopolitan alternative to nationalism - at least it was famous in the 90s. She references the cynic, Diogenes, as the first man who said he was a citizen of the world - and she digs into what that meant for the Stoics, who adopted it during the eclipse of Greek state-nation power. The stoic ideal had, of course, a tremendous influence on the humanists, and on the philosophes. Since the Bush White House is supposedly bursting at the seams with eager Straussians, perhaps they will want to plunge into their copies of Kant's essay on Perpetual Peace - a sort of cosmopolitan manifesto, insofar as Kant was capable of writing a manifesto. The first two points are interesting:
1. "No Treaty of Peace Shall Be Held Valid in Which There Is Tacitly Reserved Matter for a Future War"; and 2. "No Independent States, Large or Small, Shall Come under the Dominion of Another State by Inheritance, Exchange, Purchase, or Donation" One can take the last point as the typical reactionary defense formation of the small German states in the face of the threat of Prussia - or France. But Kant, who is a thoroughgoing philosopher, binds the second point to the wording of his more famous categorical imperative. Just as the duty forbids treating a person as an object, so, too, the usurpation of the power of one state by another is a violation of a state's subjective autonomy: it is to treat the state as a thing: "A state is not, like the ground which it occupies, a piece of property (patrimonium). It is a society of men whom no one else has any right to command or to dispose except the state itself. It is a trunk with its own roots. But to incorporate it into another state, like a graft, is to destroy its existence as a moral person, reducing it to a thing; such incorporation thus contradicts the idea of the original contract without which no right over a people can be conceived."
We've never thought Kant's argument about thinghood, and its morally low status, was very convincing; but we recognize its resonance with the whole moral thematic of liberal politics. Actually, if it wouldn't entail a long detour, we think we could make a convincing case for cynical thinghood as the moral basis of cosmopolitanism -- but never mind that. The thing to hold in mind here, qua Israel and Palestine, is that enforced respect which, at least, allows the cosmopolitan moment. Practically, that would mean the building of certain transnational institutions between Palestine and Israel, such as a court that could fairly try both the encouragers of suicide bombing and the killing of civilians by soldiers. This would provide another route for retaliation, instead of the routes followed by both parties, as in today's paper -- and tomorrow's, and tomorrow's...
LI doesn't believe our suggestion is going to be followed, of course � we hasten to say that. But we do think a real peace plan would address the causes of hostility, instead of endlessly bargaining settlers against the repression of terrorists. Finally, there's a lot to be said for Kant's sixth point:
"6. "No State Shall, during War, Permit Such Acts of Hostility Which Would Make Mutual Confidence in the Subsequent Peace Impossible: Such Are the Employment of Assassins (percussores), Poisoners (venefici), Breach of Capitulation, and Incitement to Treason (perduellio) in the Opposing State";
These are dishonorable stratagems. For some confidence in the character of the enemy must remain even in the midst of war, as otherwise no peace could be concluded and the hostilities would degenerate into a war of extermination (bellum internecinum). War, however, is only the sad recourse in the state of nature (where there is no tribunal which could judge with the force of law) by which each state asserts its right by violence and in which neither party can be adjudged unjust (for that would presuppose a juridical decision); in lieu of such a decision, the issue of the conflict (as if given by a so-called "judgment of God") decides on which side justice lies. But between states no punitive war (bellum punitivum) is conceivable, because there is no relation between them of master and servant."
Oops. The Straussians aren't going to like that phrase about there being "no relation between them of master and servant." Kant, as always, goes too far! Out with the guy -- let's get another court philosopher. How about Tom DeLay?
Monday, June 09, 2003
Bollettino
First, the weekend casualty count. One soldier and five others were wounded near Tikret on Saturday, which provoked the usual wierd dissimilarity in casualty count reports -- and this from this morning:
"BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Unidentified gunmen shot and killed a U.S. soldier at a checkpoint in western Iraq, a military statement said Monday. U.S. troops returned fire, killing one person and capturing a second.
An undetermined number of attackers pulled up late Sunday to the roadblock near the Syrian border and requested medical help for a person in the car. They then pulled pistols and shot the soldier, said a statement released by the U.S. Central Command.
Troops responded, killing one person and capturing a second. At least one other assailant fled in the vehicle."
Second, Lew Wasserman.
We read the excerpts from Connie Bruck's bio in the New Yorker. Frankly, we were a bit disappointed. Lew Wasserman was the evil genius head of MCA. The man, if Dan Moldea is to be believed, who made Ronald Reagan. The man, we believe, who created the blue-print for the business organization of the nineties: that blending of technostructure and entrepreneurial scurrying, with its outrageous bonuses and its hole-ridden accounting. The conduit for the mob style in American capitalism -- which is appropriate, as the mob simply decoded and encoded the older style of American capitalism, the strike breaking formula from the 1880s and 90s, applying that violence towards the tender markets in those chemistry experiments we all love to perform on our bodies.
Richard Schickel, one time movie reviewer for Life Magazine, has a nice review in the LAT. Here are two grafs rendering a thumbnail sketch that is a pleasant reminder of what Luce magazine writers could do, unloosed on a subject:
"Wasserman was a sleek, taciturn man, except when people gave him answers he didn't want to hear. Then he became a screaming tyrant, capable of reducing grown men to tears. He would not take "no" for an answer. Or, for that matter, a busy signal. His secretary was obliged to fake emergencies so Lew could break right through to his next victim. Since power begets power, he became the man Washington listened to on all sorts of matters. There's no doubt that all his libidinal energy went into the business. He and his wife had separate bedrooms, and, according to Bruck, she had a number of discreet affairs, which her husband tolerated. Why not? He knew no stud, however adorable, could match the potency of his power.
Was some of that power derived from organized crime? MCA in its band-booking days had a rich web of connections with Chicago's gangland, and the mobsters moved west about the time MCA did. Bruck, like Kennedy before her, labors hard to link Wasserman and his company to the "outfit." We do not for a moment doubt that link. After all, his best friend for 50 years was Sidney Korshak, whose position as mouthpiece for the Chicago syndicate was a matter of long-standing suspicion. But no more than Kennedy can she document a connection. That's the way these things work -- a nod, a smile, a frown, and useful outcomes occur. It may be that ultimate power resides in the ability to make underlings anticipate its desires."
First, the weekend casualty count. One soldier and five others were wounded near Tikret on Saturday, which provoked the usual wierd dissimilarity in casualty count reports -- and this from this morning:
"BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Unidentified gunmen shot and killed a U.S. soldier at a checkpoint in western Iraq, a military statement said Monday. U.S. troops returned fire, killing one person and capturing a second.
An undetermined number of attackers pulled up late Sunday to the roadblock near the Syrian border and requested medical help for a person in the car. They then pulled pistols and shot the soldier, said a statement released by the U.S. Central Command.
Troops responded, killing one person and capturing a second. At least one other assailant fled in the vehicle."
Second, Lew Wasserman.
We read the excerpts from Connie Bruck's bio in the New Yorker. Frankly, we were a bit disappointed. Lew Wasserman was the evil genius head of MCA. The man, if Dan Moldea is to be believed, who made Ronald Reagan. The man, we believe, who created the blue-print for the business organization of the nineties: that blending of technostructure and entrepreneurial scurrying, with its outrageous bonuses and its hole-ridden accounting. The conduit for the mob style in American capitalism -- which is appropriate, as the mob simply decoded and encoded the older style of American capitalism, the strike breaking formula from the 1880s and 90s, applying that violence towards the tender markets in those chemistry experiments we all love to perform on our bodies.
Richard Schickel, one time movie reviewer for Life Magazine, has a nice review in the LAT. Here are two grafs rendering a thumbnail sketch that is a pleasant reminder of what Luce magazine writers could do, unloosed on a subject:
"Wasserman was a sleek, taciturn man, except when people gave him answers he didn't want to hear. Then he became a screaming tyrant, capable of reducing grown men to tears. He would not take "no" for an answer. Or, for that matter, a busy signal. His secretary was obliged to fake emergencies so Lew could break right through to his next victim. Since power begets power, he became the man Washington listened to on all sorts of matters. There's no doubt that all his libidinal energy went into the business. He and his wife had separate bedrooms, and, according to Bruck, she had a number of discreet affairs, which her husband tolerated. Why not? He knew no stud, however adorable, could match the potency of his power.
Was some of that power derived from organized crime? MCA in its band-booking days had a rich web of connections with Chicago's gangland, and the mobsters moved west about the time MCA did. Bruck, like Kennedy before her, labors hard to link Wasserman and his company to the "outfit." We do not for a moment doubt that link. After all, his best friend for 50 years was Sidney Korshak, whose position as mouthpiece for the Chicago syndicate was a matter of long-standing suspicion. But no more than Kennedy can she document a connection. That's the way these things work -- a nod, a smile, a frown, and useful outcomes occur. It may be that ultimate power resides in the ability to make underlings anticipate its desires."
Saturday, June 07, 2003
A couple of years ago, in Los Angeles, LI had breakfast with a man who was full to the gills of injuries Israel had received from Yassar Arafat. LI, not as knowledgeable about this subject, was full, at least to the butt, with the ills Israeli had inflicted on Palestinians. The conversation proceeded down the usual dead end, although we didn�t end up throwing the usual acrimonious phrases at each other. It was breakfast, and it was L.A., for God�s sake.
We've thought about this argument since then. Since Bush made his Middle Eastern tour, the newspapers have been dutifully filled with analyses of the chances, this time, that the roadmap to peace will get us somewhere. And readers, I would guess, except for those most passionately involved in the issues, have drifted off. In the reign of good King Jimmy Carter, this was a new and vibrant thing. Since, it has become one of the ornaments of American presidencies � each one of them has to have their brand new plan for peace in the Middle East. Each one, of course, fails.
It is easy to say peace, and there is no peace. Jeremiah is still right, but since God is dead, I demand another explanation (Or was that Isaiah?) In our humble opinion, the main issue isn�t the settlements. It isn�t the violence. It is the very framework from which each side works. Unlike India, or France, or China, Israel and Palestine both base themselves on an ideal of ethnic purity � but unlike Japan, which can get away with that, they are not on an island out in the Pacific. The ideal has a necessary evolutionary function, but both sides have passed beyond that point. Only when that framework is loosened will there really be two states. There�s a name for this ad hoc loosening of the rituals of ethnic identity: cosmopolitanism.
In an article provocatively entitled, Citizens of Nowhere in Particular, published a few years ago in National Identities, a scholar from UVA, Sophia Rosenfeld, examined how the cosmopolitan image declined in the latter half of the Enlightenment era. Here is how she puts the problem:
Despite the internationalism of the great literary figures of the age, from Hume
to Voltaire, and their much vaunted universalist philosophical orientation, the political
stance associated with explicit cosmopolitanism seems to have come under increasing
suspicion as the Old Regime in Europe drew to a close. In 1762 the Dictionnaire de
l�Acade�mie franc�aise defined the cosmopolitan as �someone who adopts no country
[patrie] � and is not a good citizen.� That same year, from a very different vantage
point, Rousseau noted in his Social Contract that a cosmopolitan was, in fact, someone
who �pretended to love the whole world in order to have the right to love no one.�
The reason for the emergence of such attitudes lies most obviously in the growing
power of the concept of the nation, an idea just beginning to take on its modern
meaning at this same moment. In the late eighteenth century, the nation and one�s
fellow nationals were already on their way to forming a critical focus for individual
political loyalties. Since then it has nearly become an article of faith that the nation
alone provides the framework in which the political identity and, consequently, political
engagement and participation associated with citizenship becomes possible for private
persons and, eventually, the masses. For only the nation seems to supply the rootedness
and emotional centering, along with the guarantee of rights, that the identity of
�citizen�, with all its potential for sacrifice, requires.
Rousseau, of course, is at the center of this moment, with that most powerful of the inventions in the realm of the sentiments, �love.� And of course the series of personal contradictions that immediately pop up: who, after all, was more rootless than Rousseau? A sometimes citizen of Geneva who spent his intellectual years in France, wrote the constitution of Corsica, and fought, in his last years, the multiple humiliations inflicted upon him by every royal or republican power with which he came in contact. Romanticism might be defined as Rousseau�s dream of the anti-Rousseau � the man whose social conditions allowed him to live.
Rosenfeld asks, sensibly, why we still accept Rousseau�s idea that the cosmopolitan is the opposite of the citizen:
�But has geographical rootedness always been the only truly viable foundation for
political activism? And must this necessarily remain the case even as the particularistic
humanism associated with national interests comes under increasing criticism in the
contemporary world? Perhaps the time has come to reconsider the history and potentiality
of transnational identity and transnational concerns as alternative (though closely
related) contexts for the development of political engagement. Or, to put it slightly
differently, perhaps it is time to look again at the relationship of universalism to both
localism and nationalism in the emergence of the modern understanding of the citizen
as commentator on and participant in the business of rule.�
Like any smart academic confronting an arbitrary, but emotionally defended, binary, she goes back to see how it was historically constructed � how these opposites found each other (it should be noted that deconstruction is the opposite of marriage counseling � in deconstruction, the divorce comes before the marriage, in marriage counseling, it comes after). Why did the Voltarian gesture of adhering to humanity gave way to the Rousseauian accusation of the emotional nullity of such a stance? A nullity, we are to understand, that is a facet of selfishness. A purely intellectual concern with a people we can�t communicate with, and whose ways we don�t know, must be the terminus of a flight from real caring � from authenticity. This theme is common to both Dickens and Heidegger. It is the common wisdom of modernity, reinforced by a thousand satirical portraits. Hell, it is the wisdom of the Pixies � there�s a beautifully acidic Pixies song that goes; �she�s a real left-winger/cause she�s been down south/held peasants in her arms�� that I always loved, because it described the bad faith endemic among a certain kind of politically active student current in the 80s.
(To be continued)
We've thought about this argument since then. Since Bush made his Middle Eastern tour, the newspapers have been dutifully filled with analyses of the chances, this time, that the roadmap to peace will get us somewhere. And readers, I would guess, except for those most passionately involved in the issues, have drifted off. In the reign of good King Jimmy Carter, this was a new and vibrant thing. Since, it has become one of the ornaments of American presidencies � each one of them has to have their brand new plan for peace in the Middle East. Each one, of course, fails.
It is easy to say peace, and there is no peace. Jeremiah is still right, but since God is dead, I demand another explanation (Or was that Isaiah?) In our humble opinion, the main issue isn�t the settlements. It isn�t the violence. It is the very framework from which each side works. Unlike India, or France, or China, Israel and Palestine both base themselves on an ideal of ethnic purity � but unlike Japan, which can get away with that, they are not on an island out in the Pacific. The ideal has a necessary evolutionary function, but both sides have passed beyond that point. Only when that framework is loosened will there really be two states. There�s a name for this ad hoc loosening of the rituals of ethnic identity: cosmopolitanism.
In an article provocatively entitled, Citizens of Nowhere in Particular, published a few years ago in National Identities, a scholar from UVA, Sophia Rosenfeld, examined how the cosmopolitan image declined in the latter half of the Enlightenment era. Here is how she puts the problem:
Despite the internationalism of the great literary figures of the age, from Hume
to Voltaire, and their much vaunted universalist philosophical orientation, the political
stance associated with explicit cosmopolitanism seems to have come under increasing
suspicion as the Old Regime in Europe drew to a close. In 1762 the Dictionnaire de
l�Acade�mie franc�aise defined the cosmopolitan as �someone who adopts no country
[patrie] � and is not a good citizen.� That same year, from a very different vantage
point, Rousseau noted in his Social Contract that a cosmopolitan was, in fact, someone
who �pretended to love the whole world in order to have the right to love no one.�
The reason for the emergence of such attitudes lies most obviously in the growing
power of the concept of the nation, an idea just beginning to take on its modern
meaning at this same moment. In the late eighteenth century, the nation and one�s
fellow nationals were already on their way to forming a critical focus for individual
political loyalties. Since then it has nearly become an article of faith that the nation
alone provides the framework in which the political identity and, consequently, political
engagement and participation associated with citizenship becomes possible for private
persons and, eventually, the masses. For only the nation seems to supply the rootedness
and emotional centering, along with the guarantee of rights, that the identity of
�citizen�, with all its potential for sacrifice, requires.
Rousseau, of course, is at the center of this moment, with that most powerful of the inventions in the realm of the sentiments, �love.� And of course the series of personal contradictions that immediately pop up: who, after all, was more rootless than Rousseau? A sometimes citizen of Geneva who spent his intellectual years in France, wrote the constitution of Corsica, and fought, in his last years, the multiple humiliations inflicted upon him by every royal or republican power with which he came in contact. Romanticism might be defined as Rousseau�s dream of the anti-Rousseau � the man whose social conditions allowed him to live.
Rosenfeld asks, sensibly, why we still accept Rousseau�s idea that the cosmopolitan is the opposite of the citizen:
�But has geographical rootedness always been the only truly viable foundation for
political activism? And must this necessarily remain the case even as the particularistic
humanism associated with national interests comes under increasing criticism in the
contemporary world? Perhaps the time has come to reconsider the history and potentiality
of transnational identity and transnational concerns as alternative (though closely
related) contexts for the development of political engagement. Or, to put it slightly
differently, perhaps it is time to look again at the relationship of universalism to both
localism and nationalism in the emergence of the modern understanding of the citizen
as commentator on and participant in the business of rule.�
Like any smart academic confronting an arbitrary, but emotionally defended, binary, she goes back to see how it was historically constructed � how these opposites found each other (it should be noted that deconstruction is the opposite of marriage counseling � in deconstruction, the divorce comes before the marriage, in marriage counseling, it comes after). Why did the Voltarian gesture of adhering to humanity gave way to the Rousseauian accusation of the emotional nullity of such a stance? A nullity, we are to understand, that is a facet of selfishness. A purely intellectual concern with a people we can�t communicate with, and whose ways we don�t know, must be the terminus of a flight from real caring � from authenticity. This theme is common to both Dickens and Heidegger. It is the common wisdom of modernity, reinforced by a thousand satirical portraits. Hell, it is the wisdom of the Pixies � there�s a beautifully acidic Pixies song that goes; �she�s a real left-winger/cause she�s been down south/held peasants in her arms�� that I always loved, because it described the bad faith endemic among a certain kind of politically active student current in the 80s.
(To be continued)
Friday, June 06, 2003
Bollettino
As usual, the LA Times is way ahead of the East Coast in describing hostilities in J-Lo Bremer's 'post-hostile" Iraq. The story, by Michael Slackman, is full of information -- that magic missing ingredient in most of the stories about Iraq! As LI has pointed out like a maniac, we live in a situation in which major newspapers -- the USA Today, the NYT, the Wash Post -- can't seem to agree on how many American casualties have occured in the last week. This is a little astonishing, and says something about the shadow of amnesia that has so quickly fallen over what is happening in Iraq. The LAT says that "about 40" American deaths, from accidents and hostile fire, have occured since Bush's infamous declaration that hostilities are at an end. That compares with 100 deaths while hostilities were going on.
LI also points you, today, to a nice little piece about Ollie North's drug trafficking record. Apparently -- ah, the bizarro aspects of the All American heart! -- North had been hired to give a guest lecture at a major Salvation Army event. The Salvation Army? The author of the piece, Celerino Castillo 3rd, a former DEA agent, and others naturally protested. The Salvation Army is not the Salvation Death Squad was the burden of their song -- justly. Castillo is releasing info that has been reclassified, conveniently enough, by the Bush administration -- information on that slander on America's name, the contra -coke connection.
LI posted a little astonished reaction to Mark Bowden's book on Pablo Escobar a couple of days ago. One of the truly egregiously stupid bits in the book was the implication that the Sandinistas were in it with Escobar, channeling that cocaine into sweet little American noses. As anybody who remembers that period knows, that is a laughably grotesque mistatement of the lay of the land. Bowden's "pro-democracy" Contras were financed, in part, through drug deals. As any drug dealer from the time knew, it definitely helped having the CIA helping squash your indictment. That's the simple fact. Here's a graf from Castillo's piece:
"Several years ago, the extreme right arm of the Christian Coalition selected to support Oliver North for U.S. Senate. Their support backfired and North became one of two Republicans who lost the elections that year. During North�s campaign, I traveled to Virginia, went out to the �grassroots� communities and educated them on who Oliver North really was. I went as far as challenging North for a debate. Of course, he refused. My first question would had been: Why did you campaign to obtain the release of Honduran army general Jose Bueso-Rosa from a federal prison, after his arrest for smuggling 763 pounds of cocaine and for murder? Bueso-Rosa�s partner in the venture was international arms dealer Felix Latchinian, who in turn was an ex-business partner of CIA agent (Cubano) Felix Rodriguez. During the 70s and 80s, Felix Rodriguez was tied to several terrorist organizations who terrorize both the United States and Latin America. Felix Rodriguez, also known as Max Gomez, was in charge of the Contra�s supply network in El Salvador, which was also involved in drug trafficking. If this sounds complicated just remember that all this drug trafficking was paid for with your taxpayer dollars."
From the Wilderness, a group ardently pursuing the Contra-Coke connection, cites the CIA report that was issued, with minimum fanfare, on the same day the House voted to impeach Clinton -- a great day to release a report that basically confirms the paranoid lefty belief in the CIA's complicity in drug-running.
"As reported by Associated Press, the report, "portrays the spy agency as reluctant to inform Congress or law enforcement of suspected drug activity by Nicaraguan Contra forces." The AP story continued to say that, "In classified briefings on Capitol Hill, CIA officials typically acknowledged only one major case of narcotics involvement by an anti-Sandinista group - the so called ADREN [sic] 15th of September group, which was disbanded in 1982. But the newly declassified report links to drug allegations 58 other individuals belonging to various Contra groups."A telling passage of the CIA report itself states that "In six cases CIA knowledge of allegations or information indicating that organizations or individuals had been involved in drug trafficking did not deter their use by CIA. In at least two of those cases, CIA did not act to verify drug trafficking allegations or information even when it had the opportunity to do so."In an apparent confirmation of Gary Webb's Dark Alliance series The New York Times, in a brief story, picked out a paragraph from the report which acknowledged that Contra leaders in California and the Bay area specifically planned to deal drugs to raise money for the Contras."
The From the Wilderness people are trippy with info. Here they are howling at Ollie North's scent again:
"In another section [of the CIA report] on major trafficker Moises Nunez, who was being investigated for shipment of hundreds of kilos of cocaine through firms named Frigorificos de Puntarenas and Ocean Hunter (also NHAO contractors), the CIA lays out North yet again. They describe how cocaine was reportedly received at air strips owned by John Hull in Costa Rica and taken to ships owned by these two firms. The CIA report then states, "On March 25, 1987, CIA questioned Nunez about narcotics trafficking allegations against him."Nunez revealed that since 1985, he had engaged in a clandestine relationship with the National Security Council (NSC). Nunez refused to elaborate on the nature of these actions, but indicated it was difficult to answer questions relating to his involvement in narcotics trafficking because of the specific tasks he had performed at the direction of the NSC (emphasis mine). Nunez refused to identify the NSC officials with whom he had been involved."
Oliver North was the point man at NSC for all Contra support activities."
Oh, and one more irony, just for those who collect them. The name of Ollie North's inhouse death squad assistance bureau, at the NSC, was: The Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office.
As usual, the LA Times is way ahead of the East Coast in describing hostilities in J-Lo Bremer's 'post-hostile" Iraq. The story, by Michael Slackman, is full of information -- that magic missing ingredient in most of the stories about Iraq! As LI has pointed out like a maniac, we live in a situation in which major newspapers -- the USA Today, the NYT, the Wash Post -- can't seem to agree on how many American casualties have occured in the last week. This is a little astonishing, and says something about the shadow of amnesia that has so quickly fallen over what is happening in Iraq. The LAT says that "about 40" American deaths, from accidents and hostile fire, have occured since Bush's infamous declaration that hostilities are at an end. That compares with 100 deaths while hostilities were going on.
LI also points you, today, to a nice little piece about Ollie North's drug trafficking record. Apparently -- ah, the bizarro aspects of the All American heart! -- North had been hired to give a guest lecture at a major Salvation Army event. The Salvation Army? The author of the piece, Celerino Castillo 3rd, a former DEA agent, and others naturally protested. The Salvation Army is not the Salvation Death Squad was the burden of their song -- justly. Castillo is releasing info that has been reclassified, conveniently enough, by the Bush administration -- information on that slander on America's name, the contra -coke connection.
LI posted a little astonished reaction to Mark Bowden's book on Pablo Escobar a couple of days ago. One of the truly egregiously stupid bits in the book was the implication that the Sandinistas were in it with Escobar, channeling that cocaine into sweet little American noses. As anybody who remembers that period knows, that is a laughably grotesque mistatement of the lay of the land. Bowden's "pro-democracy" Contras were financed, in part, through drug deals. As any drug dealer from the time knew, it definitely helped having the CIA helping squash your indictment. That's the simple fact. Here's a graf from Castillo's piece:
"Several years ago, the extreme right arm of the Christian Coalition selected to support Oliver North for U.S. Senate. Their support backfired and North became one of two Republicans who lost the elections that year. During North�s campaign, I traveled to Virginia, went out to the �grassroots� communities and educated them on who Oliver North really was. I went as far as challenging North for a debate. Of course, he refused. My first question would had been: Why did you campaign to obtain the release of Honduran army general Jose Bueso-Rosa from a federal prison, after his arrest for smuggling 763 pounds of cocaine and for murder? Bueso-Rosa�s partner in the venture was international arms dealer Felix Latchinian, who in turn was an ex-business partner of CIA agent (Cubano) Felix Rodriguez. During the 70s and 80s, Felix Rodriguez was tied to several terrorist organizations who terrorize both the United States and Latin America. Felix Rodriguez, also known as Max Gomez, was in charge of the Contra�s supply network in El Salvador, which was also involved in drug trafficking. If this sounds complicated just remember that all this drug trafficking was paid for with your taxpayer dollars."
From the Wilderness, a group ardently pursuing the Contra-Coke connection, cites the CIA report that was issued, with minimum fanfare, on the same day the House voted to impeach Clinton -- a great day to release a report that basically confirms the paranoid lefty belief in the CIA's complicity in drug-running.
"As reported by Associated Press, the report, "portrays the spy agency as reluctant to inform Congress or law enforcement of suspected drug activity by Nicaraguan Contra forces." The AP story continued to say that, "In classified briefings on Capitol Hill, CIA officials typically acknowledged only one major case of narcotics involvement by an anti-Sandinista group - the so called ADREN [sic] 15th of September group, which was disbanded in 1982. But the newly declassified report links to drug allegations 58 other individuals belonging to various Contra groups."A telling passage of the CIA report itself states that "In six cases CIA knowledge of allegations or information indicating that organizations or individuals had been involved in drug trafficking did not deter their use by CIA. In at least two of those cases, CIA did not act to verify drug trafficking allegations or information even when it had the opportunity to do so."In an apparent confirmation of Gary Webb's Dark Alliance series The New York Times, in a brief story, picked out a paragraph from the report which acknowledged that Contra leaders in California and the Bay area specifically planned to deal drugs to raise money for the Contras."
The From the Wilderness people are trippy with info. Here they are howling at Ollie North's scent again:
"In another section [of the CIA report] on major trafficker Moises Nunez, who was being investigated for shipment of hundreds of kilos of cocaine through firms named Frigorificos de Puntarenas and Ocean Hunter (also NHAO contractors), the CIA lays out North yet again. They describe how cocaine was reportedly received at air strips owned by John Hull in Costa Rica and taken to ships owned by these two firms. The CIA report then states, "On March 25, 1987, CIA questioned Nunez about narcotics trafficking allegations against him."Nunez revealed that since 1985, he had engaged in a clandestine relationship with the National Security Council (NSC). Nunez refused to elaborate on the nature of these actions, but indicated it was difficult to answer questions relating to his involvement in narcotics trafficking because of the specific tasks he had performed at the direction of the NSC (emphasis mine). Nunez refused to identify the NSC officials with whom he had been involved."
Oliver North was the point man at NSC for all Contra support activities."
Oh, and one more irony, just for those who collect them. The name of Ollie North's inhouse death squad assistance bureau, at the NSC, was: The Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office.
Bollettino
LI is frankly indifferent to the fall of Howell Raines. We are interested, however, in the space it takes up. Since we are living in a shift in cultural power to the right -- which is reflected in the gradual erosion of the great establishment liberal papers, which are either turning hawkish -- the WashPost -- or are finding organizational problems used as fulcrums to create press coverage that leans to the right -- the NYT - we are interested in criticism that is happening outside the box. As James Wolcott, in a surprisingly toothy article in Vanity Fair puts it, the press is entirely down on both knees before the Bush P.R. machine. Wollcott is not coy about the implication of fellatio, which is still the primo image of servitude in this culture, for reasons we aren't going to explore right now. Anyway, we think it is odd, to say the least, that the press scandals du jour are about the misdeeds of some minor hacks, since really, Blair's mendacity about the sniper didn't 'do' anything, and Rick Bragg's prose extravaganzas about the swampy inlets of Dixie did even less -- but Miller's reports on Iraq, which simply channeled the standard pap from Chalabi, did a lot. John Power at the LA Weekly delivers left view of the sitch:
"This fixation [on the Times] comes as no real surprise; The New York Times occupies a privileged place in our ruling elite�s psyche. It is the establishment organ, the paper that must be reckoned with by anyone interested in wielding power (or even in distributing an indie movie). For those on the right, The Times is a perpetual bugbear and indispensable target � its pre-eminence lets them feel beleaguered even when they are running things. To them, The Times� recent tailspin is sheer jouissance, the giddy B-side of Fox News� orgasmic ascent. They�ll be breathing hard about it for months.
"Not so the establishment liberals, who have long treated the paper as a beacon of enlightenment. Indeed, it wasn�t so long ago that KCRW used to read Times stories aloud on the air (God, that was embarrassing), like dispatches to a primitive local culture. If you believe Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, The Times is the liberals� catnip, so you can imagine the head-clutching agony that greeted the sobering discovery that its reporters could be every bit as reliable as, oh, Geraldo Rivera."
Powers makes the point that the NYT is boring, arrogant, and reliably voices elitist positions -- whether these come out as left or right is secondary.
Anybody who has had the misfortune of running into a NYT man at a conference will have had a taste of what it must be like to be a peasant running into a Marquis at an inn. Arrogance is too mild a word. And we have to agree that the Times, since 9/11 at least, has not been the same. It has been boring. It has been incurious, to say the least, about the mounting list of the administration's lies and spin. It's coverage of the corporate scandals never scratched the surface -- try as some excellent reporters in the business section did to connect the dots. It's coverage of Iraq has been lackluster, riddled with error, and is now in full amnesia stage -- support the troops, but put the casualty counts near the real estate ads. Long ago Joan Didion pointed out that the NYT is not nearly as good as the LAT. We agree. Here's Power's view:
"Anxious to defend their profession�s honor, media columnists have spent weeks moralizing about Blair and Bragg�s dishonesty without ever grappling with the underlying reality that Michael Wolff first pointed out in New York magazine. The print world increasingly cares less about accurate reporting and more about vivid prose. Reporters� careers rise or fall on what Wolff calls their �tradecraft,� the ability to sweeten reality with style-conscious writing, even if that sometimes means pushing a bit beyond the literal facts to a kind of more artistic �truth.� (Think of all those stage-directed White House conversations in Bob Woodward�s books.) In their different ways, the run-amok Blair and vainglorious Bragg just pushed too far."
Actually, we wish this were the truth. But we think that the problem is very different. That "tradecraft" has become so cliche-bound that it is as unlikely a medium in which to broadcast the "truth" as a set of plumber's helpers would be with which to play Beethoven's nineth. The media has generated a whole subculture of experts whose job is to be quoted in the media. Thus, about Iraq, you were much more likely to hear what the 'Arab street' was thinking from a reporter who couldn't speak arabic, quoting a general who couldn't speak Arabic, quoting a think tank honcho who couldn't speak arabic. The astonishng thinness of context of the discourse about Iraq, leading up to, into, through, and passed the War is amazing.
The press in this country has always been opportunistically oppositional. Now, however, as they clot together in behemoth corporations like so many cholesterol molecules around a fat man's heart, they have become simply opportunistic. And being run, for the most part, by illiterate CEOs, they are eager to participate in the systematic looting of the American population's narrative intelligence -- its ability to read, to follow complex stories, to develop a rich sensibility about causes and psychology and fate and tragedy, etc., etc. The level of storytelling intelligence has been steadily lessened in this country, even as the amount of text, and the numbers passing through college, explode. Newspapers, which developed as the enlightenment develped the story sense -- for every newspaper, with its columns of different stories, its material organization, requires a reader who has, at least in a historical sense, passed the Tristam Shandy threshhold of narrative understanding -- have no interest in seeding future readers. They believe that appealing to younger readers means dumbing down the story-lines -- which is about arrogance. As anyone knows, kids develop, or don't, the ability to narrate as they get older. If they are stuck in an environment in which that narrative ability is contextually retarded, they will respond with less ability. That's why education has traditionally been about older people teaching younger people. It is now about older people exploiting younger people for money. And that is disgusting.
Luckily while the narrative sense might atrophy, the tacit knowledge that one is being robbed is still operative -- hence, the great turn-off with regard to the press. Dumbness is not fate -- but it will be selected, in the market, if the level of the market's taste is debauched.
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/29/on-powers.php
LI is frankly indifferent to the fall of Howell Raines. We are interested, however, in the space it takes up. Since we are living in a shift in cultural power to the right -- which is reflected in the gradual erosion of the great establishment liberal papers, which are either turning hawkish -- the WashPost -- or are finding organizational problems used as fulcrums to create press coverage that leans to the right -- the NYT - we are interested in criticism that is happening outside the box. As James Wolcott, in a surprisingly toothy article in Vanity Fair puts it, the press is entirely down on both knees before the Bush P.R. machine. Wollcott is not coy about the implication of fellatio, which is still the primo image of servitude in this culture, for reasons we aren't going to explore right now. Anyway, we think it is odd, to say the least, that the press scandals du jour are about the misdeeds of some minor hacks, since really, Blair's mendacity about the sniper didn't 'do' anything, and Rick Bragg's prose extravaganzas about the swampy inlets of Dixie did even less -- but Miller's reports on Iraq, which simply channeled the standard pap from Chalabi, did a lot. John Power at the LA Weekly delivers left view of the sitch:
"This fixation [on the Times] comes as no real surprise; The New York Times occupies a privileged place in our ruling elite�s psyche. It is the establishment organ, the paper that must be reckoned with by anyone interested in wielding power (or even in distributing an indie movie). For those on the right, The Times is a perpetual bugbear and indispensable target � its pre-eminence lets them feel beleaguered even when they are running things. To them, The Times� recent tailspin is sheer jouissance, the giddy B-side of Fox News� orgasmic ascent. They�ll be breathing hard about it for months.
"Not so the establishment liberals, who have long treated the paper as a beacon of enlightenment. Indeed, it wasn�t so long ago that KCRW used to read Times stories aloud on the air (God, that was embarrassing), like dispatches to a primitive local culture. If you believe Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, The Times is the liberals� catnip, so you can imagine the head-clutching agony that greeted the sobering discovery that its reporters could be every bit as reliable as, oh, Geraldo Rivera."
Powers makes the point that the NYT is boring, arrogant, and reliably voices elitist positions -- whether these come out as left or right is secondary.
Anybody who has had the misfortune of running into a NYT man at a conference will have had a taste of what it must be like to be a peasant running into a Marquis at an inn. Arrogance is too mild a word. And we have to agree that the Times, since 9/11 at least, has not been the same. It has been boring. It has been incurious, to say the least, about the mounting list of the administration's lies and spin. It's coverage of the corporate scandals never scratched the surface -- try as some excellent reporters in the business section did to connect the dots. It's coverage of Iraq has been lackluster, riddled with error, and is now in full amnesia stage -- support the troops, but put the casualty counts near the real estate ads. Long ago Joan Didion pointed out that the NYT is not nearly as good as the LAT. We agree. Here's Power's view:
"Anxious to defend their profession�s honor, media columnists have spent weeks moralizing about Blair and Bragg�s dishonesty without ever grappling with the underlying reality that Michael Wolff first pointed out in New York magazine. The print world increasingly cares less about accurate reporting and more about vivid prose. Reporters� careers rise or fall on what Wolff calls their �tradecraft,� the ability to sweeten reality with style-conscious writing, even if that sometimes means pushing a bit beyond the literal facts to a kind of more artistic �truth.� (Think of all those stage-directed White House conversations in Bob Woodward�s books.) In their different ways, the run-amok Blair and vainglorious Bragg just pushed too far."
Actually, we wish this were the truth. But we think that the problem is very different. That "tradecraft" has become so cliche-bound that it is as unlikely a medium in which to broadcast the "truth" as a set of plumber's helpers would be with which to play Beethoven's nineth. The media has generated a whole subculture of experts whose job is to be quoted in the media. Thus, about Iraq, you were much more likely to hear what the 'Arab street' was thinking from a reporter who couldn't speak arabic, quoting a general who couldn't speak Arabic, quoting a think tank honcho who couldn't speak arabic. The astonishng thinness of context of the discourse about Iraq, leading up to, into, through, and passed the War is amazing.
The press in this country has always been opportunistically oppositional. Now, however, as they clot together in behemoth corporations like so many cholesterol molecules around a fat man's heart, they have become simply opportunistic. And being run, for the most part, by illiterate CEOs, they are eager to participate in the systematic looting of the American population's narrative intelligence -- its ability to read, to follow complex stories, to develop a rich sensibility about causes and psychology and fate and tragedy, etc., etc. The level of storytelling intelligence has been steadily lessened in this country, even as the amount of text, and the numbers passing through college, explode. Newspapers, which developed as the enlightenment develped the story sense -- for every newspaper, with its columns of different stories, its material organization, requires a reader who has, at least in a historical sense, passed the Tristam Shandy threshhold of narrative understanding -- have no interest in seeding future readers. They believe that appealing to younger readers means dumbing down the story-lines -- which is about arrogance. As anyone knows, kids develop, or don't, the ability to narrate as they get older. If they are stuck in an environment in which that narrative ability is contextually retarded, they will respond with less ability. That's why education has traditionally been about older people teaching younger people. It is now about older people exploiting younger people for money. And that is disgusting.
Luckily while the narrative sense might atrophy, the tacit knowledge that one is being robbed is still operative -- hence, the great turn-off with regard to the press. Dumbness is not fate -- but it will be selected, in the market, if the level of the market's taste is debauched.
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/03/29/on-powers.php
Thursday, June 05, 2003
Bollettino
Casualty report:
- Assailants opened fire with a rocket-propelled grenade Thursday, killing one American soldier and wounding five, the U.S. military said. It was the latest attack in a tense city where resistance against American occupation has been vocal and sometimes violent. -- AP
Forgery
Here's a story from the forgery front. It comes from Dennis Dutton from the usually more high brow Aesthetics-online site:
"The murder of Eric Hebborn on January 11th brought to a close one of the most illustrious careers of any twentieth-century forger. His body was found on a street in Rome, the city where he had lived since the 1970s, with his skull broken, probably by a hammer blow from behind. Only a few weeks before, he had published his second book, Il Manuale del Falsario (The Faker�s Handbook), a set of complete instructions on how to forge and market fake drawings and paintings from the European tradition."
Hebborn, Dutton reports, was an English eccentric on the grand, decadent scale. They always somehow drift to Italy -- the Aleister Crowleys, the Baron Corvos. Dutton was a working class boy. He was seduced, early, into the pleasures of fraud:
"While still a student, he went to work for a picture restorer named George Aczel. Restoration, it developed, meant much more that cleaning and retouching, and soon young Eric was painting large areas of old works, cleverly extending cracking into newly painted surfaces, and even �improving� old paintings by augmenting them. An insignificant landscape became, with the addition of a balloon in its grey sky, an important (and expensive) painting recording the early history of aviation. As Hebborn says, �a cat added to the foreground guaranteed the sale of the dullest landscape� Popular signatures came and unpopular signatures went� Poppies bloomed in dun-coloured fields.�
Count on a murderer for a purple style, Nabokov's Humbert says in Lolita. Dutton remarks that Hebborn's art, under the disguise of more expensive signatures, was authenticated by such experts as his Highness's official art historian and Communist spy, Anthony Blunt, and by Sir John Pope Hennessy, a big name in art collecting circles.
Life was good for Hebborn for a while. He had a fellow forger as a lover, he had the ready, it was Rome in the sixties and seventies. We particularly like Dutton's account of all that:
His loves included a relationship with Graham [the fellow forger] that lasted for some years, until Graham became �sexually tired of me, and was constantly looking about for a change�even girls.� After that, he seems to have settled down with Edgar, and though he spent a night in Sir Anthony Blunt�s bed, nothing happened due to due to the drunken condition of both. �Brewer�s droop,� Hebborn calls it.
Humpty Dumpty always has his fall. Hebborn, of course, revenged himself on the art world by revealing his bad seed, and fingering paintings that probably aren't forgeries. While a hammer blow is certainly not the gentlest way to depart this mortal coil, Hebborn does not seem to have had an unhappy life, much as he was the occassion for it in others.
James Fuentes story of a more up to the minute forgery -- the forgery of Jean Michel Basquiat paintings, no less -- is much sadder. It comes from Blow Up, an on-line mag.
"Alfredo Martinez convinced art collector, Leo Malca, to purchase two paintings by Jean Michel Basquiat in the late winter of 2002 for a bargain price of $38,500. The pieces belonged to Tom Warren, a staff photographer at Sotheby�s and the forthcoming yearbook of New York�s cultural elite, The New York School. The work in question had appeared that December in an exhibition Martinez co-curated with me entitled, �Welcome to the Playground of the Fearless.� Alfredo took charge of returning the pieces to Warren, but before doing so, made his own versions. After returning Warren�s paintings, he mentioned that there was interest in the work from collectors who saw the show. He said he wanted to make copies of the certificates of authenticity before shopping the work around. Tom handed over the certificates, which Alfredo went on to forge as well. He then returned falsified certificates to Tom and sold fake paintings � with real certificates � to Malca. "
Martinez, like Hebborn, was a determined outsider to the art world. This is not your highness's grandmother's art world -- this is the disco art world that Warhol invented, and the devil has kept going ever since. This is Martinez's art career:
"Alfredo Martinez�s art career began in 1994 when his work was shown at the Pat Hearn Gallery. The show was �Skater Angels,� curated by David Greenberg and Diego Cortez. He went on to participate in the seminal �Bong Show� at Alleged Gallery, where artists such as Tom Sachs and Mike Kelly made elaborate bongs as sculpture. He reached the height of legitimacy after participating in two group shows � �Agent Artist� in 1994 and �Generation Z� in 1999 � at P.S.1, an affiliate of the Museum of Modern Art. In the summer of 1999, famed art critic Roberta Smith reviewed an exhibition he curated, �Ne'er Do Wells,� for The New York Times. That same year, a dot-com millionaire by the name of Joshua Harris financed an indoor firing range designed by Alfredo for a millennial project entitled �Quiet.� Alfredo personally sound-proofed it and had it staffed with ex-Navy Seals. He literally shot his way through the new millennium with high powered, automatic weapons.
These were noteworthy achievements for someone who never graduated high school. In a community where an MFA may not even get you up to bat, Alfredo managed to go pretty far in the art world with no formal education. In this regard, he was a true folk artist � an elitist term synonymous with �outsider,� a derelict. The NY Post once described Alfredo as, �a hulking 300 pound gun-toting Puerto Rican madman.� Manhattan District Attorney, Andrew De Vore, described him as �homeless.� I consider Alfredo what I consider every good artist to be: a magician."
The heights of legitimacy. LI wonders what it looks like from such peaks.
Casualty report:
- Assailants opened fire with a rocket-propelled grenade Thursday, killing one American soldier and wounding five, the U.S. military said. It was the latest attack in a tense city where resistance against American occupation has been vocal and sometimes violent. -- AP
Forgery
Here's a story from the forgery front. It comes from Dennis Dutton from the usually more high brow Aesthetics-online site:
"The murder of Eric Hebborn on January 11th brought to a close one of the most illustrious careers of any twentieth-century forger. His body was found on a street in Rome, the city where he had lived since the 1970s, with his skull broken, probably by a hammer blow from behind. Only a few weeks before, he had published his second book, Il Manuale del Falsario (The Faker�s Handbook), a set of complete instructions on how to forge and market fake drawings and paintings from the European tradition."
Hebborn, Dutton reports, was an English eccentric on the grand, decadent scale. They always somehow drift to Italy -- the Aleister Crowleys, the Baron Corvos. Dutton was a working class boy. He was seduced, early, into the pleasures of fraud:
"While still a student, he went to work for a picture restorer named George Aczel. Restoration, it developed, meant much more that cleaning and retouching, and soon young Eric was painting large areas of old works, cleverly extending cracking into newly painted surfaces, and even �improving� old paintings by augmenting them. An insignificant landscape became, with the addition of a balloon in its grey sky, an important (and expensive) painting recording the early history of aviation. As Hebborn says, �a cat added to the foreground guaranteed the sale of the dullest landscape� Popular signatures came and unpopular signatures went� Poppies bloomed in dun-coloured fields.�
Count on a murderer for a purple style, Nabokov's Humbert says in Lolita. Dutton remarks that Hebborn's art, under the disguise of more expensive signatures, was authenticated by such experts as his Highness's official art historian and Communist spy, Anthony Blunt, and by Sir John Pope Hennessy, a big name in art collecting circles.
Life was good for Hebborn for a while. He had a fellow forger as a lover, he had the ready, it was Rome in the sixties and seventies. We particularly like Dutton's account of all that:
His loves included a relationship with Graham [the fellow forger] that lasted for some years, until Graham became �sexually tired of me, and was constantly looking about for a change�even girls.� After that, he seems to have settled down with Edgar, and though he spent a night in Sir Anthony Blunt�s bed, nothing happened due to due to the drunken condition of both. �Brewer�s droop,� Hebborn calls it.
Humpty Dumpty always has his fall. Hebborn, of course, revenged himself on the art world by revealing his bad seed, and fingering paintings that probably aren't forgeries. While a hammer blow is certainly not the gentlest way to depart this mortal coil, Hebborn does not seem to have had an unhappy life, much as he was the occassion for it in others.
James Fuentes story of a more up to the minute forgery -- the forgery of Jean Michel Basquiat paintings, no less -- is much sadder. It comes from Blow Up, an on-line mag.
"Alfredo Martinez convinced art collector, Leo Malca, to purchase two paintings by Jean Michel Basquiat in the late winter of 2002 for a bargain price of $38,500. The pieces belonged to Tom Warren, a staff photographer at Sotheby�s and the forthcoming yearbook of New York�s cultural elite, The New York School. The work in question had appeared that December in an exhibition Martinez co-curated with me entitled, �Welcome to the Playground of the Fearless.� Alfredo took charge of returning the pieces to Warren, but before doing so, made his own versions. After returning Warren�s paintings, he mentioned that there was interest in the work from collectors who saw the show. He said he wanted to make copies of the certificates of authenticity before shopping the work around. Tom handed over the certificates, which Alfredo went on to forge as well. He then returned falsified certificates to Tom and sold fake paintings � with real certificates � to Malca. "
Martinez, like Hebborn, was a determined outsider to the art world. This is not your highness's grandmother's art world -- this is the disco art world that Warhol invented, and the devil has kept going ever since. This is Martinez's art career:
"Alfredo Martinez�s art career began in 1994 when his work was shown at the Pat Hearn Gallery. The show was �Skater Angels,� curated by David Greenberg and Diego Cortez. He went on to participate in the seminal �Bong Show� at Alleged Gallery, where artists such as Tom Sachs and Mike Kelly made elaborate bongs as sculpture. He reached the height of legitimacy after participating in two group shows � �Agent Artist� in 1994 and �Generation Z� in 1999 � at P.S.1, an affiliate of the Museum of Modern Art. In the summer of 1999, famed art critic Roberta Smith reviewed an exhibition he curated, �Ne'er Do Wells,� for The New York Times. That same year, a dot-com millionaire by the name of Joshua Harris financed an indoor firing range designed by Alfredo for a millennial project entitled �Quiet.� Alfredo personally sound-proofed it and had it staffed with ex-Navy Seals. He literally shot his way through the new millennium with high powered, automatic weapons.
These were noteworthy achievements for someone who never graduated high school. In a community where an MFA may not even get you up to bat, Alfredo managed to go pretty far in the art world with no formal education. In this regard, he was a true folk artist � an elitist term synonymous with �outsider,� a derelict. The NY Post once described Alfredo as, �a hulking 300 pound gun-toting Puerto Rican madman.� Manhattan District Attorney, Andrew De Vore, described him as �homeless.� I consider Alfredo what I consider every good artist to be: a magician."
The heights of legitimacy. LI wonders what it looks like from such peaks.
Wednesday, June 04, 2003
Bollettino
LI recommends a story in the Nation, today, about the unbelievable attempt... well, unbelievable is a strong word ... disgusting attempt ... well, disgusting needs a little gas poured on it, and a lit match tossed towards it, to become the right word... the predictably Bushian attempt (ah, that's it) to allocate money to the drug czar's office for any kind of advertising he's see's fit to put on. The bill would allow advertising, funded by the Federal Government, to attack candidates who advocate legalizing drugs.
This is unique.
"The ads, mostly on television, have stirred controversy since Walters took over and began running strident drugs-equal-terrorism spots that declare that personal use of marijuana supports terrorism. The House Government Reform Committee tabled action on HR 2086 after negotiations broke down over how far ONDCP could use its social marketing muscle to influence elections. The two parties will attempt some sort of compromise when the matter is considered during the first week in June, but it's hard to see how the Republicans' goal of allowing Walters sole discretion to use the ads to "oppose any attempt to legalize" drugs can be squared with Democrats' opposition to even more overt White House electioneering than in the past. The media campaign cost taxpayers $930 million during its first five years; Republicans seek to boost its five-year funding through fiscal year 2008 to $1.02 billion. (Actual total media time and space will be closer to $2 billion since, by statute, ONDCP makes its ad buys at fifty cents on the dollar.)
"By Walters's lights, even allowing dying cancer or AIDS patients some pot to alleviate their pain is de facto legalization. Until drug reform lobbyists sounded the alarm and Democrats dug in their heels, starting this fall he could have used the ads to urge voters to reject initiatives permitting medical marijuana or mandating treatment rather than jail for nonviolent drug addicts. The ads might also have been used against such candidates as Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank and Texas Republican Ron Paul, who have introduced legislation banning federal prosecution of pot-using patients in states that have legalized medical cannabis. Said Steve Fox, director of government relations at the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), "It's now clear that this media campaign is about politics, not prevention." And, tossing aside seventy years of broadcasting law by exempting ONDCP from the requirement to identify itself as the ad sponsor, the proposed bill would shred the principle that viewers are entitled to know who's attempting to persuade them."
To cure that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, you will probably have to light up a joint.
We received a nice email from our fave reader, T. in New York City, yesterday. He wrote about our piece on supporting our boys (until the Commander in Chief says we can forget them):
"The Occupation.....yes, well, you are right, The War is over and The Peace is nowhere to be found...now is a time where casualties are not exactly casualties and where troops (those who deserve our support, unconditionally, as we are told) are cops; cops who have minimal training, as such, and are totally without an Oval Office-sanctioned ideological structure to lean on.... to borrow a riff from good old goddamned Baudrillard: The War Is Not Taking Place."
LI recommends a story in the Nation, today, about the unbelievable attempt... well, unbelievable is a strong word ... disgusting attempt ... well, disgusting needs a little gas poured on it, and a lit match tossed towards it, to become the right word... the predictably Bushian attempt (ah, that's it) to allocate money to the drug czar's office for any kind of advertising he's see's fit to put on. The bill would allow advertising, funded by the Federal Government, to attack candidates who advocate legalizing drugs.
This is unique.
"The ads, mostly on television, have stirred controversy since Walters took over and began running strident drugs-equal-terrorism spots that declare that personal use of marijuana supports terrorism. The House Government Reform Committee tabled action on HR 2086 after negotiations broke down over how far ONDCP could use its social marketing muscle to influence elections. The two parties will attempt some sort of compromise when the matter is considered during the first week in June, but it's hard to see how the Republicans' goal of allowing Walters sole discretion to use the ads to "oppose any attempt to legalize" drugs can be squared with Democrats' opposition to even more overt White House electioneering than in the past. The media campaign cost taxpayers $930 million during its first five years; Republicans seek to boost its five-year funding through fiscal year 2008 to $1.02 billion. (Actual total media time and space will be closer to $2 billion since, by statute, ONDCP makes its ad buys at fifty cents on the dollar.)
"By Walters's lights, even allowing dying cancer or AIDS patients some pot to alleviate their pain is de facto legalization. Until drug reform lobbyists sounded the alarm and Democrats dug in their heels, starting this fall he could have used the ads to urge voters to reject initiatives permitting medical marijuana or mandating treatment rather than jail for nonviolent drug addicts. The ads might also have been used against such candidates as Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank and Texas Republican Ron Paul, who have introduced legislation banning federal prosecution of pot-using patients in states that have legalized medical cannabis. Said Steve Fox, director of government relations at the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP), "It's now clear that this media campaign is about politics, not prevention." And, tossing aside seventy years of broadcasting law by exempting ONDCP from the requirement to identify itself as the ad sponsor, the proposed bill would shred the principle that viewers are entitled to know who's attempting to persuade them."
To cure that sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, you will probably have to light up a joint.
We received a nice email from our fave reader, T. in New York City, yesterday. He wrote about our piece on supporting our boys (until the Commander in Chief says we can forget them):
"The Occupation.....yes, well, you are right, The War is over and The Peace is nowhere to be found...now is a time where casualties are not exactly casualties and where troops (those who deserve our support, unconditionally, as we are told) are cops; cops who have minimal training, as such, and are totally without an Oval Office-sanctioned ideological structure to lean on.... to borrow a riff from good old goddamned Baudrillard: The War Is Not Taking Place."
Tuesday, June 03, 2003
Bollettino
Casualty count today:
"U.S. Soldier Killed in Central Iraq
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:38 a.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A U.S. soldier was shot and killed while on patrol in central Iraq early Tuesday, the military said.
The shooting took place near the town of Balad, about 55 miles north of the capital, said Maj. William Thurmond, a spokesman for the U.S. Army's V Corps."
It is, of course, almost impossible to find this story in today's papers. Just as it seems almost impossible to come up with a casualty count for the last week, with U.S.A. today putting the number at ten killed, and other outlets ranging from 4 to 6. What is interesting is that the same people who, during the war, were adamant about 'supporting the troops" seem quite intent on forgetting them now. Which is just as we suspected. Support the troops until the Commander in Chief grandly ends the war, then ignore their deaths in the non-war that follows. Cute, eh?
Mark Bowden, however, is our subject today.
We were quite pleased that Canada is beginning to loosen up the law on owning pot. We were quite displeased that Canada is strengthening the penalties on selling pot. The drug problem is not just about individual consumption -- it is about the market. As long as the market is officially illegal, drug use can't be regulated, except with the most draconian of all instruments -- the local cops. If one wants to talk about the decay of democratic institutions, you have to start with the drug wars.
There was a little story in the NYTimes magazine by James Traub that made fun of that analogy, so common among academics and artists, between Bush and Hitler. There are obvious reasons to think that analogy is far fetched, and ridiculous. However, Traub's point gets dented when he comes to the "specialness" of 9/11:
"Much of the left seems to feel that the greatest threat to emerge from 9/11 is an untrammeled Bush administration -- as if the destruction of the twin towers was the functional equivalent of the Reichstag fire, as I have heard one of my friends say. And yet even the most devout civil libertarians recognize that the terrorist threat compels rethinking. Norman Siegel, the former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union and a famous First Amendment purist, says, ''The security interests are real, they're legitimate and you have to balance freedom and security in a different way post-9/11.'' Siegel says that he has been hard put to explain to skeptical audiences that the Patriot Act, for all its problems, does not preclude traditional forms of peaceful protest."
Balancing freedom and security pre-9/11 and post 9/11 are the same acts. In fact, that whole sentence is such a radical misunderstanding of what freedom is that we can only recommend Traub for a position in Ashcroft's Justice Department. If we have rights only in a world free from arbitrary acts of violence -- then we will never have our rights. This language was first tried out in the eighties, about drugs. Traub's middle class complacency relies on the fact that he will never be picked up by the FBI as a terrorist suspect, just as the previous complacency about getting rid of 'narco-terrorists' allowed the good bourgeois to snort his cocaine in peace, confident in the assurance that the nearly 2 million and counting persons overflowing the jails would not soon include him or his kids in their number. His kids, if they were picked up, would enjoy the sympathy of the court. If they were white and middle class, they would have an excellent chance of getting rehab. If they were black, they would have an excellent chance of being flushed down the sewer of the juvenile detention system. Freedom, and equality before the law, are intertwined. You can't have one without the other. There is no balancing act.
Which gets me to Mark Bowden. Picking up his book, Killing Pablo, on Pablo Escobar, I expected a good real crime story. Alas, whispers of fascism are rife within the book. The description of the Contras as a pro-democracy group, early on, set the stage. But it is Bowden's gung-ho attitude towards America's 'special forces" in Colombia that is especially frightening. He describes, for instance, a unit hunting Escobar that is composed of a veteran of the Phoenix program, a veteran of American intelligence efforts to overthrow Allende, and then produces these sentences, which really would be appropriate in Weimar: "Counterinsurgency had always flirted with extralegality, whether in the Congo, El Salvador, or Nicaragua. The death squads were horrible, but nothing equaled them for striking fear into the hearts and minds of would-be Marxists."
This is the writer who is reporting in the New Yorker on Iraq.
Traub is right -- we are not in a situation analogous to Germany's. We are in a situation analogous to the dirtiest periods of the Cold War. The repeated lies, the spurious justifications for arbitrary detention, the bigotry, the controls on speech which erode our civil rights, the crony capitalism that shuffles money between the Pentagon and selected defense contractors, and finally, an atmosphere in which a major reporter can float the idea that death squads are efficient instruments of US policy and become a star for the premier liberal weekly -- it is this atmosphere that should wake up the artist, the academic, and the Rotarian. The hour is late, and in D.C., they are always doing something else.
Casualty count today:
"U.S. Soldier Killed in Central Iraq
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:38 a.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A U.S. soldier was shot and killed while on patrol in central Iraq early Tuesday, the military said.
The shooting took place near the town of Balad, about 55 miles north of the capital, said Maj. William Thurmond, a spokesman for the U.S. Army's V Corps."
It is, of course, almost impossible to find this story in today's papers. Just as it seems almost impossible to come up with a casualty count for the last week, with U.S.A. today putting the number at ten killed, and other outlets ranging from 4 to 6. What is interesting is that the same people who, during the war, were adamant about 'supporting the troops" seem quite intent on forgetting them now. Which is just as we suspected. Support the troops until the Commander in Chief grandly ends the war, then ignore their deaths in the non-war that follows. Cute, eh?
Mark Bowden, however, is our subject today.
We were quite pleased that Canada is beginning to loosen up the law on owning pot. We were quite displeased that Canada is strengthening the penalties on selling pot. The drug problem is not just about individual consumption -- it is about the market. As long as the market is officially illegal, drug use can't be regulated, except with the most draconian of all instruments -- the local cops. If one wants to talk about the decay of democratic institutions, you have to start with the drug wars.
There was a little story in the NYTimes magazine by James Traub that made fun of that analogy, so common among academics and artists, between Bush and Hitler. There are obvious reasons to think that analogy is far fetched, and ridiculous. However, Traub's point gets dented when he comes to the "specialness" of 9/11:
"Much of the left seems to feel that the greatest threat to emerge from 9/11 is an untrammeled Bush administration -- as if the destruction of the twin towers was the functional equivalent of the Reichstag fire, as I have heard one of my friends say. And yet even the most devout civil libertarians recognize that the terrorist threat compels rethinking. Norman Siegel, the former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union and a famous First Amendment purist, says, ''The security interests are real, they're legitimate and you have to balance freedom and security in a different way post-9/11.'' Siegel says that he has been hard put to explain to skeptical audiences that the Patriot Act, for all its problems, does not preclude traditional forms of peaceful protest."
Balancing freedom and security pre-9/11 and post 9/11 are the same acts. In fact, that whole sentence is such a radical misunderstanding of what freedom is that we can only recommend Traub for a position in Ashcroft's Justice Department. If we have rights only in a world free from arbitrary acts of violence -- then we will never have our rights. This language was first tried out in the eighties, about drugs. Traub's middle class complacency relies on the fact that he will never be picked up by the FBI as a terrorist suspect, just as the previous complacency about getting rid of 'narco-terrorists' allowed the good bourgeois to snort his cocaine in peace, confident in the assurance that the nearly 2 million and counting persons overflowing the jails would not soon include him or his kids in their number. His kids, if they were picked up, would enjoy the sympathy of the court. If they were white and middle class, they would have an excellent chance of getting rehab. If they were black, they would have an excellent chance of being flushed down the sewer of the juvenile detention system. Freedom, and equality before the law, are intertwined. You can't have one without the other. There is no balancing act.
Which gets me to Mark Bowden. Picking up his book, Killing Pablo, on Pablo Escobar, I expected a good real crime story. Alas, whispers of fascism are rife within the book. The description of the Contras as a pro-democracy group, early on, set the stage. But it is Bowden's gung-ho attitude towards America's 'special forces" in Colombia that is especially frightening. He describes, for instance, a unit hunting Escobar that is composed of a veteran of the Phoenix program, a veteran of American intelligence efforts to overthrow Allende, and then produces these sentences, which really would be appropriate in Weimar: "Counterinsurgency had always flirted with extralegality, whether in the Congo, El Salvador, or Nicaragua. The death squads were horrible, but nothing equaled them for striking fear into the hearts and minds of would-be Marxists."
This is the writer who is reporting in the New Yorker on Iraq.
Traub is right -- we are not in a situation analogous to Germany's. We are in a situation analogous to the dirtiest periods of the Cold War. The repeated lies, the spurious justifications for arbitrary detention, the bigotry, the controls on speech which erode our civil rights, the crony capitalism that shuffles money between the Pentagon and selected defense contractors, and finally, an atmosphere in which a major reporter can float the idea that death squads are efficient instruments of US policy and become a star for the premier liberal weekly -- it is this atmosphere that should wake up the artist, the academic, and the Rotarian. The hour is late, and in D.C., they are always doing something else.
Monday, June 02, 2003
Bollettino
A young man goes to India before he knows much of his own country; but he cherishes in his breast, as I hope every man will, a just and laudable partiality for the laws, liberties, rights, and institutions of his own nation. We all do this; and God forbid we should not prefer our own to every other country in the world! but if we go to India with an idea of the mean, degraded state of the people that we are to govern, and especially if we go with these. impressions at an immature age, we know, that, according to the ordinary course of human nature, we shall not treat persons well whom we have learnt to despise. We know that people whom we suppose to have neither laws or rights will not be treated by us as a people who have laws and rights. -- Edmund Burke, Speech on the Impeachment of Warren Hastings.
Casualty report for today, the 28th day after the end of the War:
Two Iraqi men were killed and two U.S. servicemen injured in an exchange of gunfire at a mosque in Baghdad, witnesses and soldiers said.But the U.S. Central Command said Monday it could not confirm that the incident took place or that there were casualties.
This weekend the belligerent establishment moved to put down these petty complaints about the Weapons of Auto-Disappearance. The two horse trailers that the NYT's Judith Miller was only able to look at with opera glasses, and while performing a position prescribed by the Kama Sutra for relieving bunions, have suddenly become exhibit A, according to our always valiant president, travelling in that enemy territory known as Europe. Indeed, we have faced many threats as a great people, but we have never faced a threat like this: two trailers that might, at any time, given the right equipment, and some bug spray, and some bacteria, and a teaspoon of sugar, and a couple of big iron pots, and a strainer, and the eye of newt, and the blood of a dog killed under a full moon with St. John's wart -- that might, we said, produce such weapons as would shake us all in our beds. Not perhaps within forty five minutes, as Tony Blair told us, but certainly within forty five years, more or less.
So we have to revise the very reason we went into Iraq, which now turns out to be to get rid of a mass killer. Alas, we got rid of the mass killer years after his last mass kill -- and we sorta might have uh helped him the years of his mass killing youth, but better now than never.Jim Hoagland, who is a middle of the road slice of bacon writing for the Washington Post, puts it like this:
"Three weeks before the war began, a representative Time/CNN poll reported that 83 percent of their sample said "the most compelling reason to disarm Hussein is that he has wantonly killed his own citizens." "Saddam's cruelty" was the top reason for action, followed by 72 percent who felt that a war "would help eliminate weapons of mass destruction."
There was a mosaic of valid reasons for removing Hussein, and most Americans understood and approved of that mosaic. Feigning shock on behalf of "duped" citizens who were fairly clear-eyed about what they were getting into takes some doing.Nor did war opponents Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder base their decisions about whether Iraq possessed programs to produce biological, chemical or nuclear weapons on Secretary of State Colin Powell's powerful presentation at the United Nations. Nor was there ever any significant disagreement within the CIA over the intelligence on weapons programs. Controversy was over terrorist links."
Well, isn't that interesting. We thought controversy had to do with a little thing called pre-emption, and pre-emption, as we remembered it, had to do with imminent threats. Which is why the clear eyed populace had many curious ideas before the War:
"Polling data show that right after Sept. 11, 2001, when Americans were asked open-ended questions about who was behind the attacks, only 3 percent mentioned Iraq or Hussein. But by January of this year, attitudes had been transformed. In a Knight Ridder poll, 44 percent of Americans reported that either "most" or "some" of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens." A New York Times/CBS poll in August, 2002 showed that 62% of Americans thought Saddam had WMD and was targeting the US with them.
Etc. Imagine a poll which asked, given the absense of significant links between Saddam and al Qaeda, and given the lack of any real current Iraqi possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction, should we invade the place? The Hoagland mural would start to flake off in big bits.
The Independent -- naturally, a British paper -- had a big summary, Sunday, of the WMD controversy. Just another episode in the amazing Blair escape artists hour. However, the bigger question is: who cares? The invasion isn't going to be reversed any time soon. The real problem with using big lies as the basis of a major foreign policy decision is that we, Americans and Iraqis, have to live with that decision. This means that America has not only a moral obligation to pay for reconstructing Iraq, but that it is a necessary cost in securing home sweet home. I don't know what the polls say, but I suspect that the Bush administration still believes its own dope about paying for the reconstruction out of Iraqi oil revenues. That is, of course, a pipe dream. As the fool said in King Lear, nothing comes of nothing. If we decided to "implement" democracy in Iraq -- and we have -- we have to face up to the costs. Those costs will be about fifty billion dollars over the course of the next year. But as it becomes more apparent that the clear eyed populace was talked into the deal, it will also be more likely that the clear eyed populace will balk at paying for Bush's Folly.
Walter Mead, who supported the invasion, and wrote a pre-conflict sci fi op ed piece in the Washington Post about the cost of the sanctions in human life, now writes in the LA Times about the triumph the U.S. is experiencing in the rest of the world, as Chirac "frantically" phones the White House and Russia edges towards the U.S. position on Iran. Oh really? Mead obviously reads different papers than LI. But the scariest part of Mead's piece consists of these grafs:
"... But what if things come unglued in Iraq? What if law and order don't return, and the present low level of violence starts to rise and become better organized? What if the body count among U.S. forces continues to increase? Won't American public opinion demand a speedy retreat? And wouldn't a retreat that left Iraq still undemocratic undercut the U.S. further? The short answer is that if Iraqi violence continues to rise, at some point the administration would go to Plan B: Find a general, turn the place over to him and go home. If this happens, it would be a tragedy not only for Iraqis but for the democratic aspirations of the whole Middle East. For Bush, it might not be so bad."
We think Mead is naive in thinking this is a plausible scenario. For Bush, this would be a disaster. The repercussions of getting 160 some thousand American troops out, while trying to 'turn the place" -- which, mind you, officially has no military -- over to a general would be something like the Titanic times ten. Not to mention the spread of chaos throughout the region.
No, we are stuck there. If that is not accepted by the American populace now, in their clear eyed trance, it will become evident over the summer. And if Americans start dying in more than the ones and twos that are reported in less than headline style in the newspapers, the extent of our committment will become all too clear.
A young man goes to India before he knows much of his own country; but he cherishes in his breast, as I hope every man will, a just and laudable partiality for the laws, liberties, rights, and institutions of his own nation. We all do this; and God forbid we should not prefer our own to every other country in the world! but if we go to India with an idea of the mean, degraded state of the people that we are to govern, and especially if we go with these. impressions at an immature age, we know, that, according to the ordinary course of human nature, we shall not treat persons well whom we have learnt to despise. We know that people whom we suppose to have neither laws or rights will not be treated by us as a people who have laws and rights. -- Edmund Burke, Speech on the Impeachment of Warren Hastings.
Casualty report for today, the 28th day after the end of the War:
Two Iraqi men were killed and two U.S. servicemen injured in an exchange of gunfire at a mosque in Baghdad, witnesses and soldiers said.But the U.S. Central Command said Monday it could not confirm that the incident took place or that there were casualties.
This weekend the belligerent establishment moved to put down these petty complaints about the Weapons of Auto-Disappearance. The two horse trailers that the NYT's Judith Miller was only able to look at with opera glasses, and while performing a position prescribed by the Kama Sutra for relieving bunions, have suddenly become exhibit A, according to our always valiant president, travelling in that enemy territory known as Europe. Indeed, we have faced many threats as a great people, but we have never faced a threat like this: two trailers that might, at any time, given the right equipment, and some bug spray, and some bacteria, and a teaspoon of sugar, and a couple of big iron pots, and a strainer, and the eye of newt, and the blood of a dog killed under a full moon with St. John's wart -- that might, we said, produce such weapons as would shake us all in our beds. Not perhaps within forty five minutes, as Tony Blair told us, but certainly within forty five years, more or less.
So we have to revise the very reason we went into Iraq, which now turns out to be to get rid of a mass killer. Alas, we got rid of the mass killer years after his last mass kill -- and we sorta might have uh helped him the years of his mass killing youth, but better now than never.Jim Hoagland, who is a middle of the road slice of bacon writing for the Washington Post, puts it like this:
"Three weeks before the war began, a representative Time/CNN poll reported that 83 percent of their sample said "the most compelling reason to disarm Hussein is that he has wantonly killed his own citizens." "Saddam's cruelty" was the top reason for action, followed by 72 percent who felt that a war "would help eliminate weapons of mass destruction."
There was a mosaic of valid reasons for removing Hussein, and most Americans understood and approved of that mosaic. Feigning shock on behalf of "duped" citizens who were fairly clear-eyed about what they were getting into takes some doing.Nor did war opponents Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder base their decisions about whether Iraq possessed programs to produce biological, chemical or nuclear weapons on Secretary of State Colin Powell's powerful presentation at the United Nations. Nor was there ever any significant disagreement within the CIA over the intelligence on weapons programs. Controversy was over terrorist links."
Well, isn't that interesting. We thought controversy had to do with a little thing called pre-emption, and pre-emption, as we remembered it, had to do with imminent threats. Which is why the clear eyed populace had many curious ideas before the War:
"Polling data show that right after Sept. 11, 2001, when Americans were asked open-ended questions about who was behind the attacks, only 3 percent mentioned Iraq or Hussein. But by January of this year, attitudes had been transformed. In a Knight Ridder poll, 44 percent of Americans reported that either "most" or "some" of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens." A New York Times/CBS poll in August, 2002 showed that 62% of Americans thought Saddam had WMD and was targeting the US with them.
Etc. Imagine a poll which asked, given the absense of significant links between Saddam and al Qaeda, and given the lack of any real current Iraqi possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction, should we invade the place? The Hoagland mural would start to flake off in big bits.
The Independent -- naturally, a British paper -- had a big summary, Sunday, of the WMD controversy. Just another episode in the amazing Blair escape artists hour. However, the bigger question is: who cares? The invasion isn't going to be reversed any time soon. The real problem with using big lies as the basis of a major foreign policy decision is that we, Americans and Iraqis, have to live with that decision. This means that America has not only a moral obligation to pay for reconstructing Iraq, but that it is a necessary cost in securing home sweet home. I don't know what the polls say, but I suspect that the Bush administration still believes its own dope about paying for the reconstruction out of Iraqi oil revenues. That is, of course, a pipe dream. As the fool said in King Lear, nothing comes of nothing. If we decided to "implement" democracy in Iraq -- and we have -- we have to face up to the costs. Those costs will be about fifty billion dollars over the course of the next year. But as it becomes more apparent that the clear eyed populace was talked into the deal, it will also be more likely that the clear eyed populace will balk at paying for Bush's Folly.
Walter Mead, who supported the invasion, and wrote a pre-conflict sci fi op ed piece in the Washington Post about the cost of the sanctions in human life, now writes in the LA Times about the triumph the U.S. is experiencing in the rest of the world, as Chirac "frantically" phones the White House and Russia edges towards the U.S. position on Iran. Oh really? Mead obviously reads different papers than LI. But the scariest part of Mead's piece consists of these grafs:
"... But what if things come unglued in Iraq? What if law and order don't return, and the present low level of violence starts to rise and become better organized? What if the body count among U.S. forces continues to increase? Won't American public opinion demand a speedy retreat? And wouldn't a retreat that left Iraq still undemocratic undercut the U.S. further? The short answer is that if Iraqi violence continues to rise, at some point the administration would go to Plan B: Find a general, turn the place over to him and go home. If this happens, it would be a tragedy not only for Iraqis but for the democratic aspirations of the whole Middle East. For Bush, it might not be so bad."
We think Mead is naive in thinking this is a plausible scenario. For Bush, this would be a disaster. The repercussions of getting 160 some thousand American troops out, while trying to 'turn the place" -- which, mind you, officially has no military -- over to a general would be something like the Titanic times ten. Not to mention the spread of chaos throughout the region.
No, we are stuck there. If that is not accepted by the American populace now, in their clear eyed trance, it will become evident over the summer. And if Americans start dying in more than the ones and twos that are reported in less than headline style in the newspapers, the extent of our committment will become all too clear.
Saturday, May 31, 2003
Bollettino
Casualty counts: LI recommends the WashPost article about lost Iraqi limbs and other matters that, in the post-conflict world, we can perceive to be as utterly trivial as finding the ghostly weapons of mass destruction (which, it turns out, were about to be manufactured en masse in the back of a horse trailor, and in a doghouse in a Basra suburb). Here's a nice three grafs:
To many who lost livelihoods and limbs in the process, a U.S. reconstruction effort in its seventh week should be as much about recompense as restarting electrical grids, pumping stations and a flattened economy. But U.S. officials have made clear to Iraqis that they do not intend to conduct a complete accounting of war damages, nor compensate those who say the occupying army owes them something. While sympathetic to individual hardships suffered as a result of war, U.S. officials say they are wary of beginning a legal process that could entail millions of claims against them.
U.S. officials have approached the issue in much the way they did in Afghanistan, presenting Washington's multibillion-dollar commitment to rebuilding Iraq as compensation enough. But international relief organizations, including the Islamic Red Crescent Society, say the conventions of war hold the United States responsible for paying out such claims.
"The other thing that makes this difficult is the endemic fraud that would creep into this," said John Kincannon, a spokesman for the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance that is overseeing the civilian part of the postwar occupation. "How do you ascertain facts three months after the incident, for example? And once word gets out that the Americans are paying people for damages, where does it stop?"
Where indeed, with these Iraqis? Well, let's serve em up some private enterprise, as Donald Rumsfeld has suggested. Man, among Saddam's other crimes was that heinous one of socializing medecine! Imagine the horror. Imagine the corruption of the work ethic. This, as a former President Bush once said, will not stand -- and neither will the majority of Iraqi casualties, it looks like.
Casualty counts: LI recommends the WashPost article about lost Iraqi limbs and other matters that, in the post-conflict world, we can perceive to be as utterly trivial as finding the ghostly weapons of mass destruction (which, it turns out, were about to be manufactured en masse in the back of a horse trailor, and in a doghouse in a Basra suburb). Here's a nice three grafs:
To many who lost livelihoods and limbs in the process, a U.S. reconstruction effort in its seventh week should be as much about recompense as restarting electrical grids, pumping stations and a flattened economy. But U.S. officials have made clear to Iraqis that they do not intend to conduct a complete accounting of war damages, nor compensate those who say the occupying army owes them something. While sympathetic to individual hardships suffered as a result of war, U.S. officials say they are wary of beginning a legal process that could entail millions of claims against them.
U.S. officials have approached the issue in much the way they did in Afghanistan, presenting Washington's multibillion-dollar commitment to rebuilding Iraq as compensation enough. But international relief organizations, including the Islamic Red Crescent Society, say the conventions of war hold the United States responsible for paying out such claims.
"The other thing that makes this difficult is the endemic fraud that would creep into this," said John Kincannon, a spokesman for the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance that is overseeing the civilian part of the postwar occupation. "How do you ascertain facts three months after the incident, for example? And once word gets out that the Americans are paying people for damages, where does it stop?"
Where indeed, with these Iraqis? Well, let's serve em up some private enterprise, as Donald Rumsfeld has suggested. Man, among Saddam's other crimes was that heinous one of socializing medecine! Imagine the horror. Imagine the corruption of the work ethic. This, as a former President Bush once said, will not stand -- and neither will the majority of Iraqi casualties, it looks like.
Friday, May 30, 2003
Bollettino
Casualty count today, 21 days after Bush proclaimed that the Iraq conflict was officially ended: a "... sixth soldier was killed today, military officials said, when "hostile fire" was directed at a convoy on the main supply route from Kuwait near the town of Anaconda. The unidentified soldier was pronounced dead at the 21st Combat Support Hospital, a military statement said.
Late Wednesday, American troops opened fire on an Iraqi civilian vehicle in Samarra, killing two people and wounding two others. Military officials said the vehicle had failed to stop at a roadblock."
David Corn's column in the Nation surveys the current domestic politics about Iraq. According to a poll conducted by the Washington Post, Americans are by and large "unconcerned" about the failure to come up with the stockpiles of anthrax, or the cans of Raid, or the flyswatters supposedly hidden by the nefarious Saddam and available, according to Tony Blair, for use in 45 minutes. Perhaps the anthrax was hidden in the disappearing bunker where Saddam and his sons were supposedly conferring on the first night of the war. Or, this being Baghdad, perhaps they were all loaded onto flying carpets.
As Corn reports, the outline of Bush's planned reconstruction effort in Iraq is as mysterious as the whereabouts of the WMD. Lugar, the senator from Indiana who periodically surfaces in the op ed pages to represent "moderate" Republicanism (he's been seen in public without a knife between his teeth or lighted sparklers in his beard -- another treasured proof that he is near the American middle) has said that the reconstruction will cost 100 billion dollars over the next five years.
The anti-war movement exhausted itself prematurely, and since the war is over -- in the same way that it began, on the President's word -- it is not re-assembling; but it should. In fact, Iraq is going to have to be occupied by multi-national forces; it is going to have to be ruled by Iraqis; it is going to have to be preserved from corporate looting; and it is going to need an infusion of aid from the U.S. that will amount to at least 50 billion dollars in the next year. This is a four point program of extreme unpopularity in the U.S. -- but it needs to be represented. The alternative is slow death for U.S. forces, mass misery for Iraqis, and more and more bombs going off in more and more places outside of Iraq. The anti-war movement was ultimately re-active -- and, at the time, necessarily so. However, the time has come for something more than the barbaric yawp of a NO!
Patrick Cockburn, the author of Out of the Ashes and the most trustworthy commentator on Iraq working in the press, has a piece in the Independent today on Blair's comic opera re-enactment, in Basra, of Henry V at Agincourt. Here are some grafs:
"There was a brief moment at the time of the fall of Baghdad on 9 April when the US and Britain could have persuaded Iraqis that they were not facing a foreign occupation. But in the weeks since, looting has continued, plans for a representative government have been put on the back burner and the US has tried to rule by fiat. The result is that any political capital gained by the Anglo-American alliance in the war has ebbed away in the eyes of Iraqis.
At the beginning of war, Britain and America dropped leaflets on the Iraqi regular army saying that they were not the target and the war was only against Saddam in Baghdad. But last week Paul Bremer, the American envoy, simply dissolved the Iraqi armed forces which means that hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and above all the largely Sunni-Muslim officer corps, are now out of a job so long as the occupation continues. It is an ominous development if Iraq is ever to return to civil peace. After all, the political and military reasoning behind the invasion was that was the regime could be decapitated because its real support among Iraqis was limited. But the US and Britain have stood by as the Iraqi state machinery - traditionally quite efficient - dissolved. Or they have actively closed it down."
The ending graf is a forecast that is coming true before our eyes:
"Mr Bremer's decision on dissolving the army means that Iraq will be full of soldiers who have every interest in fighting the occupation. Given the unpopularity of the previous regime, the US and Britain today have astonishingly few friends. If they are going to stay, they are going to have to fight."
The great press J-Lo Bremer is getting in the U.S. has to do with the fact that he is authoritarian -- the Press loves that CEO like command, the ukases, the whole we are in charge here bit, and they figure the Gunga Dins over there will love it too. But the chop chop thing seems to LI to be grotesquely miscalculated. Smilin' Jay was a disaster; Bremer is worse, he's the Alexander Haig of Iraq.
Casualty count today, 21 days after Bush proclaimed that the Iraq conflict was officially ended: a "... sixth soldier was killed today, military officials said, when "hostile fire" was directed at a convoy on the main supply route from Kuwait near the town of Anaconda. The unidentified soldier was pronounced dead at the 21st Combat Support Hospital, a military statement said.
Late Wednesday, American troops opened fire on an Iraqi civilian vehicle in Samarra, killing two people and wounding two others. Military officials said the vehicle had failed to stop at a roadblock."
David Corn's column in the Nation surveys the current domestic politics about Iraq. According to a poll conducted by the Washington Post, Americans are by and large "unconcerned" about the failure to come up with the stockpiles of anthrax, or the cans of Raid, or the flyswatters supposedly hidden by the nefarious Saddam and available, according to Tony Blair, for use in 45 minutes. Perhaps the anthrax was hidden in the disappearing bunker where Saddam and his sons were supposedly conferring on the first night of the war. Or, this being Baghdad, perhaps they were all loaded onto flying carpets.
As Corn reports, the outline of Bush's planned reconstruction effort in Iraq is as mysterious as the whereabouts of the WMD. Lugar, the senator from Indiana who periodically surfaces in the op ed pages to represent "moderate" Republicanism (he's been seen in public without a knife between his teeth or lighted sparklers in his beard -- another treasured proof that he is near the American middle) has said that the reconstruction will cost 100 billion dollars over the next five years.
The anti-war movement exhausted itself prematurely, and since the war is over -- in the same way that it began, on the President's word -- it is not re-assembling; but it should. In fact, Iraq is going to have to be occupied by multi-national forces; it is going to have to be ruled by Iraqis; it is going to have to be preserved from corporate looting; and it is going to need an infusion of aid from the U.S. that will amount to at least 50 billion dollars in the next year. This is a four point program of extreme unpopularity in the U.S. -- but it needs to be represented. The alternative is slow death for U.S. forces, mass misery for Iraqis, and more and more bombs going off in more and more places outside of Iraq. The anti-war movement was ultimately re-active -- and, at the time, necessarily so. However, the time has come for something more than the barbaric yawp of a NO!
Patrick Cockburn, the author of Out of the Ashes and the most trustworthy commentator on Iraq working in the press, has a piece in the Independent today on Blair's comic opera re-enactment, in Basra, of Henry V at Agincourt. Here are some grafs:
"There was a brief moment at the time of the fall of Baghdad on 9 April when the US and Britain could have persuaded Iraqis that they were not facing a foreign occupation. But in the weeks since, looting has continued, plans for a representative government have been put on the back burner and the US has tried to rule by fiat. The result is that any political capital gained by the Anglo-American alliance in the war has ebbed away in the eyes of Iraqis.
At the beginning of war, Britain and America dropped leaflets on the Iraqi regular army saying that they were not the target and the war was only against Saddam in Baghdad. But last week Paul Bremer, the American envoy, simply dissolved the Iraqi armed forces which means that hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and above all the largely Sunni-Muslim officer corps, are now out of a job so long as the occupation continues. It is an ominous development if Iraq is ever to return to civil peace. After all, the political and military reasoning behind the invasion was that was the regime could be decapitated because its real support among Iraqis was limited. But the US and Britain have stood by as the Iraqi state machinery - traditionally quite efficient - dissolved. Or they have actively closed it down."
The ending graf is a forecast that is coming true before our eyes:
"Mr Bremer's decision on dissolving the army means that Iraq will be full of soldiers who have every interest in fighting the occupation. Given the unpopularity of the previous regime, the US and Britain today have astonishingly few friends. If they are going to stay, they are going to have to fight."
The great press J-Lo Bremer is getting in the U.S. has to do with the fact that he is authoritarian -- the Press loves that CEO like command, the ukases, the whole we are in charge here bit, and they figure the Gunga Dins over there will love it too. But the chop chop thing seems to LI to be grotesquely miscalculated. Smilin' Jay was a disaster; Bremer is worse, he's the Alexander Haig of Iraq.
Thursday, May 29, 2003
Bollettino
Al Jazeera has reported that a U.S. helicopter was shot down, and four soldiers killed, around Hit. The military is saying that a helicopter was damaged, but not by any hostile fire.
Hitchens. LI has an unfortunate bug up our ass about the man. We don't want this site to be another nitpicking place where a lefty guy rants about the multiple sins of right wing media types -- which is why we sprinkle rebarbative posts about micro-history among posts in which a lefty guy rants about the multiple sins of right wing media types.
In any case, there's been a rise in the level of discomfort in Hitchens columns over the last month. Having made a career move as a lefty who moved right to defend western values, he is having to calibrate with the evident contempt for western values, except those associated with the quick buck, by the administration he so fervently supports. In his latest Slate piece, there is, obviously, the fact that a Kissinger associate is now ruling Iraq, that life seems to have turned shitty for your run of the mill Iraqi, and that his favorite multi-millionaire felon, Chalabi, is being shunted aside as the Americans finally have got it through there head that there is no advantage in setting up a figure head if that figure head has no support in the country -- since American muscle will still have to crack Iraqi heads.
Astonishingly, however, Hitchens still construes the anti-war crowd in the image of his polemical fantasy. One of the great arguments against the war was that we simply don't do "post-conflict" situations: we don't pay for cleaning our messes, and we don't distribute tiny driblets of our enormous wealth to areas like Afghanistan and Iraq. We have no sense that there are unrecoverable costs, here -- we want to be paid back, right away. This is the real Vietnam syndrome. This isn't an ideological accusation -- its a summary of historical patterns that reach deeply into American history. Here's Hitchens take on the the state of play among casus belli:
"To some extent, every faction in this debate has been looking down the barrel of a rifle that might backfire. If no weapons of mass destruction are ever unearthed, for example, that still doesn't mean that Iraq even attempted to comply with the terms of U.N. Resolution 1441 and it still makes nonsense of those who prophesied an apocalyptic outcome to any invasion. (This self-canceling propaganda has occurred before: Those who argued that the "real" reason for the removal of the Taliban was the building of a Unocal pipeline have yet to present any hard empirical evidence of such a sinister pipeline being laid, or even planned. Meanwhile, previous opponents of a U.S.-led presence in Afghanistan send me gloating e-mails every day, showing that the state of affairs in that country is far from ideal and that Washington's interest in it is lapsing. Unless this means that they prefer Afghanistan the way it was, as some of them doubtless do, I hope they realize that they seem to be arguing for more and better intervention there, not for less.)
Wow -- how many people were arguing an apocalyptic outcome to an invasion due to WMD? The argument was about fighting in Baghdad -- although the argument was, at no time, that Saddam was going to roll the coalition. The Baghdad fear was reasonable, since urban warfare is messy. However, Saddam 's forces folded, and Baghdad was taken with less casualties that it took to take Nasiryah. So fears there were wrong. Once again, the casualties were all on the Iraqi side. As for the argument about more and better intervention ... ah, finally logic is beginning, oh just beginning, to creep into Hitchens mental processes. A project that is frontloaded by a military display, which can arouse immediate popularity, but devolves into an endless stalemate that slowly lets the situation worsen, and is barely supported, is not a project one supports. To paraphrase Bush's favorite philosopher, no man builds his house on hot air balloons. I supported the war (these kind of "I support" statements strike me as so pompous -- it wasn't like I was building the jet fighters. I said I thought it was a good idea in varfious conversations) in Afghanistan; it is the amazing incompetence of this administration since Tora Bora that should have made anybody wary of invading Iraq. The figures didn't add up before the war -- either in manpower, or in the will to finace the project. Now we are slowly feeling the consequence. If there is an apocalypse there, it will be a slow one. An ambush here, a suicide bomber there. Meanwhile, although Hitchens doesn't talk about it, Rumsfeld (his guy) assures us, from the Wall Street Journal, that we are going to implement "free enterprise" in Iraq. Is that a beautiful thing or what? Maybe we'll even get a few Iraqis to support it, not that we need em.
In other words, the mess is getting messier. Hitchens apparently thinks he can retain his belligerent stance by retroactively attributing to the anti-war party positions that they never held, or by treating claims that have been borne out -- such as the lack of WMD - as so much dross. So let's spell it out: if you go to war for faked reasons and win, you will have all the more problem, politically, garnering support for the kind of costly intervention that will make the nation you have conquered secure -- to say nothing of free and prosperous.
For a man who claims to have studied Marxist dialectics at Oxford, Hitchens is a curiously dull blade about this kind of thing.
Al Jazeera has reported that a U.S. helicopter was shot down, and four soldiers killed, around Hit. The military is saying that a helicopter was damaged, but not by any hostile fire.
Hitchens. LI has an unfortunate bug up our ass about the man. We don't want this site to be another nitpicking place where a lefty guy rants about the multiple sins of right wing media types -- which is why we sprinkle rebarbative posts about micro-history among posts in which a lefty guy rants about the multiple sins of right wing media types.
In any case, there's been a rise in the level of discomfort in Hitchens columns over the last month. Having made a career move as a lefty who moved right to defend western values, he is having to calibrate with the evident contempt for western values, except those associated with the quick buck, by the administration he so fervently supports. In his latest Slate piece, there is, obviously, the fact that a Kissinger associate is now ruling Iraq, that life seems to have turned shitty for your run of the mill Iraqi, and that his favorite multi-millionaire felon, Chalabi, is being shunted aside as the Americans finally have got it through there head that there is no advantage in setting up a figure head if that figure head has no support in the country -- since American muscle will still have to crack Iraqi heads.
Astonishingly, however, Hitchens still construes the anti-war crowd in the image of his polemical fantasy. One of the great arguments against the war was that we simply don't do "post-conflict" situations: we don't pay for cleaning our messes, and we don't distribute tiny driblets of our enormous wealth to areas like Afghanistan and Iraq. We have no sense that there are unrecoverable costs, here -- we want to be paid back, right away. This is the real Vietnam syndrome. This isn't an ideological accusation -- its a summary of historical patterns that reach deeply into American history. Here's Hitchens take on the the state of play among casus belli:
"To some extent, every faction in this debate has been looking down the barrel of a rifle that might backfire. If no weapons of mass destruction are ever unearthed, for example, that still doesn't mean that Iraq even attempted to comply with the terms of U.N. Resolution 1441 and it still makes nonsense of those who prophesied an apocalyptic outcome to any invasion. (This self-canceling propaganda has occurred before: Those who argued that the "real" reason for the removal of the Taliban was the building of a Unocal pipeline have yet to present any hard empirical evidence of such a sinister pipeline being laid, or even planned. Meanwhile, previous opponents of a U.S.-led presence in Afghanistan send me gloating e-mails every day, showing that the state of affairs in that country is far from ideal and that Washington's interest in it is lapsing. Unless this means that they prefer Afghanistan the way it was, as some of them doubtless do, I hope they realize that they seem to be arguing for more and better intervention there, not for less.)
Wow -- how many people were arguing an apocalyptic outcome to an invasion due to WMD? The argument was about fighting in Baghdad -- although the argument was, at no time, that Saddam was going to roll the coalition. The Baghdad fear was reasonable, since urban warfare is messy. However, Saddam 's forces folded, and Baghdad was taken with less casualties that it took to take Nasiryah. So fears there were wrong. Once again, the casualties were all on the Iraqi side. As for the argument about more and better intervention ... ah, finally logic is beginning, oh just beginning, to creep into Hitchens mental processes. A project that is frontloaded by a military display, which can arouse immediate popularity, but devolves into an endless stalemate that slowly lets the situation worsen, and is barely supported, is not a project one supports. To paraphrase Bush's favorite philosopher, no man builds his house on hot air balloons. I supported the war (these kind of "I support" statements strike me as so pompous -- it wasn't like I was building the jet fighters. I said I thought it was a good idea in varfious conversations) in Afghanistan; it is the amazing incompetence of this administration since Tora Bora that should have made anybody wary of invading Iraq. The figures didn't add up before the war -- either in manpower, or in the will to finace the project. Now we are slowly feeling the consequence. If there is an apocalypse there, it will be a slow one. An ambush here, a suicide bomber there. Meanwhile, although Hitchens doesn't talk about it, Rumsfeld (his guy) assures us, from the Wall Street Journal, that we are going to implement "free enterprise" in Iraq. Is that a beautiful thing or what? Maybe we'll even get a few Iraqis to support it, not that we need em.
In other words, the mess is getting messier. Hitchens apparently thinks he can retain his belligerent stance by retroactively attributing to the anti-war party positions that they never held, or by treating claims that have been borne out -- such as the lack of WMD - as so much dross. So let's spell it out: if you go to war for faked reasons and win, you will have all the more problem, politically, garnering support for the kind of costly intervention that will make the nation you have conquered secure -- to say nothing of free and prosperous.
For a man who claims to have studied Marxist dialectics at Oxford, Hitchens is a curiously dull blade about this kind of thing.
Bollettino
Casualty count: 20 American soldiers killed by hostile fire, since Bush proclaimed the end of the Iraq war.
Like UFO Abductions and Elvis sightings, the fiercesome Iraqi WMD have a mock ontology that is the more humorous in that the former are pursued by tabloids like the National Enquirer, while the latter is pursued, gravely, by papers like the Washington Post, which fervently believes, now, that the WMD were spirited away and given to terrorists. That all this WMD might be an exaggeration -- that the shelf life on Saddam's germs might have expired -- that the nuclear materials we should be worried about are in Pakistan -- none of this matters.
Here's a WP report on the latest status of the the Great WMD hoax:
"Pressed in recent congressional hearings and public appearances to explain why the United States has been unable to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, senior Bush administration officials have begun to lay the groundwork for the possibility that it may take a long time, if ever, before they are able to prove the expansive case they made to justify the war."
Richard Cohen, the WP columnist, is sure that the WMD are out there just beyond the perimeter. So he issues Rumsfeld a dressing down today:
"So where are these weapons? Rumsfeld was asked that question after he spoke here to the Council on Foreign Relations. He said they might have been destroyed in advance of the war. He was then asked how it was possible that the hapless Iraqi army, so inept in everything it did, was able to destroy all its chemical or biological weapons so that not a trace could be found -- and the United States never noticed. Rumsfeld ducked the question. Iraq is a big country, he said. As large as California, he said. Blah, blah.
The war in Iraq is usually portrayed as a splendid victory -- and I'm sure it's just a matter of time until some congressman proposes a monument to it on the Mall. But the war was fought -- remember -- to make the world safe from weapons of mass destruction. Yet the Pentagon, which cannot praise its own planning enough, did not allot sufficient troops to secure suspected WMD sites after the war was won.If these weapons existed, where are they? Possibly looted. Possibly in the hands of terrorists. It just could be that instead of containing the problem we have spread it. This is not great planning."
Those terrorists are pretty deft. You would think, in a country as chaotic as the euphemistically named "post-conflict" Iraq, a country that hasn't yet got its oil on-line, that it might be hard to spirit all that WMD out of the country - through our enemies, of course, Syria and Iran, who have no qualms about groups with which they've been in intense conflict lugging around barrels of anthrax. That the WMD might not exist -- that they might be as fictitious, in this war, as the accuracy of the Patriot missile was in the last Gulf war -- is slowly being digested by the press. The press has a responsibility in this case, since it promoted the hoax. The press has to save its ass. Thus, we're guessing that the Washington Post will run a thorough series about the hoaxing of America in, say, 2006. Within the limits prescribed by this and such other minor time lags, we can proudly still maintain that we are the best informed country on earth.
And talking about series -- the Guardian sent a clever chap, John Henley, to whisk around Sierra Leone, Kosovo and Afghanistan, the sites that constitute so many trophies in Tony Blair's career of higher morality -- higher that is than the rest of us. The series is entitled, did we make it better? Here's an interesting couple of grafs from the intro article that frame Henley's journey:
"Since British troops have now also seen action in Iraq - and are likely to find themselves in a few more unhappy spots before peace breaks out on earth - it seemed a good idea to have a closer look at those claims. How much have the people of Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan really benefited from military intervention?
What are their chances for a peaceful, prosperous future? Four years, two-and-a-half years and 18 months on, is life there really safer and better? At first glance, that looks like a decidedly glib question. Of course your life is safer if you're not being shot at. A better question might be: what would life be like in these places if our boys hadn't gone in? But that's one which we can only guess at. So we're left to sift the facts. Facts such as these: if you live to be 38 in Sierra Leone, you've done better than most. If you have a job, even a part-time one, in Kosovo, you're one of only 30% who do. If you can safely drink the water in Afghanistan, you're part of the lucky 9%. Could this be better than it was before?
Casualty count: 20 American soldiers killed by hostile fire, since Bush proclaimed the end of the Iraq war.
Like UFO Abductions and Elvis sightings, the fiercesome Iraqi WMD have a mock ontology that is the more humorous in that the former are pursued by tabloids like the National Enquirer, while the latter is pursued, gravely, by papers like the Washington Post, which fervently believes, now, that the WMD were spirited away and given to terrorists. That all this WMD might be an exaggeration -- that the shelf life on Saddam's germs might have expired -- that the nuclear materials we should be worried about are in Pakistan -- none of this matters.
Here's a WP report on the latest status of the the Great WMD hoax:
"Pressed in recent congressional hearings and public appearances to explain why the United States has been unable to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, senior Bush administration officials have begun to lay the groundwork for the possibility that it may take a long time, if ever, before they are able to prove the expansive case they made to justify the war."
Richard Cohen, the WP columnist, is sure that the WMD are out there just beyond the perimeter. So he issues Rumsfeld a dressing down today:
"So where are these weapons? Rumsfeld was asked that question after he spoke here to the Council on Foreign Relations. He said they might have been destroyed in advance of the war. He was then asked how it was possible that the hapless Iraqi army, so inept in everything it did, was able to destroy all its chemical or biological weapons so that not a trace could be found -- and the United States never noticed. Rumsfeld ducked the question. Iraq is a big country, he said. As large as California, he said. Blah, blah.
The war in Iraq is usually portrayed as a splendid victory -- and I'm sure it's just a matter of time until some congressman proposes a monument to it on the Mall. But the war was fought -- remember -- to make the world safe from weapons of mass destruction. Yet the Pentagon, which cannot praise its own planning enough, did not allot sufficient troops to secure suspected WMD sites after the war was won.If these weapons existed, where are they? Possibly looted. Possibly in the hands of terrorists. It just could be that instead of containing the problem we have spread it. This is not great planning."
Those terrorists are pretty deft. You would think, in a country as chaotic as the euphemistically named "post-conflict" Iraq, a country that hasn't yet got its oil on-line, that it might be hard to spirit all that WMD out of the country - through our enemies, of course, Syria and Iran, who have no qualms about groups with which they've been in intense conflict lugging around barrels of anthrax. That the WMD might not exist -- that they might be as fictitious, in this war, as the accuracy of the Patriot missile was in the last Gulf war -- is slowly being digested by the press. The press has a responsibility in this case, since it promoted the hoax. The press has to save its ass. Thus, we're guessing that the Washington Post will run a thorough series about the hoaxing of America in, say, 2006. Within the limits prescribed by this and such other minor time lags, we can proudly still maintain that we are the best informed country on earth.
And talking about series -- the Guardian sent a clever chap, John Henley, to whisk around Sierra Leone, Kosovo and Afghanistan, the sites that constitute so many trophies in Tony Blair's career of higher morality -- higher that is than the rest of us. The series is entitled, did we make it better? Here's an interesting couple of grafs from the intro article that frame Henley's journey:
"Since British troops have now also seen action in Iraq - and are likely to find themselves in a few more unhappy spots before peace breaks out on earth - it seemed a good idea to have a closer look at those claims. How much have the people of Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan really benefited from military intervention?
What are their chances for a peaceful, prosperous future? Four years, two-and-a-half years and 18 months on, is life there really safer and better? At first glance, that looks like a decidedly glib question. Of course your life is safer if you're not being shot at. A better question might be: what would life be like in these places if our boys hadn't gone in? But that's one which we can only guess at. So we're left to sift the facts. Facts such as these: if you live to be 38 in Sierra Leone, you've done better than most. If you have a job, even a part-time one, in Kosovo, you're one of only 30% who do. If you can safely drink the water in Afghanistan, you're part of the lucky 9%. Could this be better than it was before?
Wednesday, May 28, 2003
Bollettino
Social history has, to a great extent, failed in its proclaimed and relatively simple task of writing history �from the bottom up,� according to historian Sigurdur Magnusson in the Spring, 03�s issue of Social History. LI recommends his article, The Singularization of History, which examines the proliferation of micro-histories and the collapse of the radical impulse that generated them. According to Magnusson, the social history in the seventies and eighties underwent a crisis of confidence in the Annales theory that underlay it. The old school, building on sociology, and Marx, counseled the historian to find episodes demonstrating time, to find these episodes on a significant scale, to subject his matter to categories that could be quantified, and to look for causal explanations that could link up to grander schemes. In the late eighties, under the assault of deconstruction and Foucaultian archaeology, the macro view could no longer be supported. But Magnusson thinks that this only has meant that discredited categories have been imported into microhistories, where one finds, compulsively, the same patterns that used to be adduced in macrohistory. Of course, the Italian historians like Ginzburg who pioneered microhistory were after something different � developing the local according to its own autonomous rules. Which meant a sort of Hegelian immersion in the mindset of the local.
Magnusson is distressed by a general retreat from the assertion of microhistorical autonomy � from, in fact, the vanguard attack of the parts against the whole � to the conservative contemporary atmosphere, which silent accedes to the positivistic values of showing a progress, measuring it with those measures that are generated from thinking of the now as that towards which history moves, and imposing upon the internal structure of microhistory those connections to macro-history that make it comprehensible to us. In other words, the steam has gone out of the left historicist project. Magnusson places himself in the camp of those who view micro-history as requiring other techniques � such as the techniques of the novelist. And he sadly surveys the comrades who have moved on, like Lynn Hunt. At one time Lynn Hunt was a Foucauldian � or a feminist version of one � and now she has become a mild positivist. �Modern,� he quotes her as saying, �is better.� And in a recent essay on gender history, she admonishes feminists to hook up to the macro train about tying �the stories [of women] into much more general narratives of long term social changes�� The fragments are glued together; the urn is as good as new.
Under the influence of our friend, S., we�ve been reading about complex adaptation theory. In particular, we�ve just been perusing a very interesting tome by Frank T. Vertosick, The Genius Within, which argues for a broader conception of intelligence than that which centers intelligence on the brain. Vertosick is arguing for an idea that was entertained by Spinoza and Diderot, and that has a lot of attraction for LI.
There�s a passage on the genotype and phenotype which, I think, might serve as a model for how macro-history and micro-history can be separated and at the same time connected. I�m not sure Magnusson would approve of an organic metaphor. Still, here it is. After talking about what it means that an organism can be cloned from a cell and an ovum, Vertosick makes this comment: �These findings prove beyond all doubt that the mammoth differences between a muscle cell and a neuron are neither genetic nor permanent. Muscle cells and nerve cells are, quite literally, simply the same cell, each temporarily portraying a different role in that elaborate stage production known as the body. The chromosomal makeup of a cell defines its genotype, while the actual appearance and function of a cell defines its phenotype. A cardiac muscle cell and a nerve cell taken from my body are of one genotype, but express very different phenotypes. Differentiation is a quantum thing. In the mature organism, a cell can be a muscle cell or a bone cell, but not something in between. Differentiation has no shades of gray. Moreover, once a cell commits to being a muscle cell, it usually stays a muscle cell forever.�
Of course, the analogy is imperfect, but it seems to me that the autonomy of the local is not an autonomy that is compounded from gender, class, race, etc., but is phenotypic � it expresses the macro-historical genotype in such a differentiated way as to justify the idea that it is an immersive whole, without justifying a nihilistic attitude towards higher, emergent historical structures.
Social history has, to a great extent, failed in its proclaimed and relatively simple task of writing history �from the bottom up,� according to historian Sigurdur Magnusson in the Spring, 03�s issue of Social History. LI recommends his article, The Singularization of History, which examines the proliferation of micro-histories and the collapse of the radical impulse that generated them. According to Magnusson, the social history in the seventies and eighties underwent a crisis of confidence in the Annales theory that underlay it. The old school, building on sociology, and Marx, counseled the historian to find episodes demonstrating time, to find these episodes on a significant scale, to subject his matter to categories that could be quantified, and to look for causal explanations that could link up to grander schemes. In the late eighties, under the assault of deconstruction and Foucaultian archaeology, the macro view could no longer be supported. But Magnusson thinks that this only has meant that discredited categories have been imported into microhistories, where one finds, compulsively, the same patterns that used to be adduced in macrohistory. Of course, the Italian historians like Ginzburg who pioneered microhistory were after something different � developing the local according to its own autonomous rules. Which meant a sort of Hegelian immersion in the mindset of the local.
Magnusson is distressed by a general retreat from the assertion of microhistorical autonomy � from, in fact, the vanguard attack of the parts against the whole � to the conservative contemporary atmosphere, which silent accedes to the positivistic values of showing a progress, measuring it with those measures that are generated from thinking of the now as that towards which history moves, and imposing upon the internal structure of microhistory those connections to macro-history that make it comprehensible to us. In other words, the steam has gone out of the left historicist project. Magnusson places himself in the camp of those who view micro-history as requiring other techniques � such as the techniques of the novelist. And he sadly surveys the comrades who have moved on, like Lynn Hunt. At one time Lynn Hunt was a Foucauldian � or a feminist version of one � and now she has become a mild positivist. �Modern,� he quotes her as saying, �is better.� And in a recent essay on gender history, she admonishes feminists to hook up to the macro train about tying �the stories [of women] into much more general narratives of long term social changes�� The fragments are glued together; the urn is as good as new.
Under the influence of our friend, S., we�ve been reading about complex adaptation theory. In particular, we�ve just been perusing a very interesting tome by Frank T. Vertosick, The Genius Within, which argues for a broader conception of intelligence than that which centers intelligence on the brain. Vertosick is arguing for an idea that was entertained by Spinoza and Diderot, and that has a lot of attraction for LI.
There�s a passage on the genotype and phenotype which, I think, might serve as a model for how macro-history and micro-history can be separated and at the same time connected. I�m not sure Magnusson would approve of an organic metaphor. Still, here it is. After talking about what it means that an organism can be cloned from a cell and an ovum, Vertosick makes this comment: �These findings prove beyond all doubt that the mammoth differences between a muscle cell and a neuron are neither genetic nor permanent. Muscle cells and nerve cells are, quite literally, simply the same cell, each temporarily portraying a different role in that elaborate stage production known as the body. The chromosomal makeup of a cell defines its genotype, while the actual appearance and function of a cell defines its phenotype. A cardiac muscle cell and a nerve cell taken from my body are of one genotype, but express very different phenotypes. Differentiation is a quantum thing. In the mature organism, a cell can be a muscle cell or a bone cell, but not something in between. Differentiation has no shades of gray. Moreover, once a cell commits to being a muscle cell, it usually stays a muscle cell forever.�
Of course, the analogy is imperfect, but it seems to me that the autonomy of the local is not an autonomy that is compounded from gender, class, race, etc., but is phenotypic � it expresses the macro-historical genotype in such a differentiated way as to justify the idea that it is an immersive whole, without justifying a nihilistic attitude towards higher, emergent historical structures.
Tuesday, May 27, 2003
Bollettino
We have not bathed Paul Bremer in our usual appellations, because we can't think what to call him. Alan kidded us about our Smilin' Jay phrase -- he noted that it had not spread over the Internet. In fact, we not only originated it, we were its sole adopters. By some accident, the phrase did fit -- as courtiers in the State and Pentagon continue their gladiatorial leaking contests, we are learning that Garner, with what one report describes as a 'backslapping' style , was as alien to the Iraqi expectation of leadership as Bambi would have been,
J.Paul, however, is more of a Reaganaut. We are assured that his authoritarian style is more to the liking of the masses. While Smilin' Jay imitated Saddam by essentially vanishing into the presidential palaces, Bremer seems intent on imitating Saddam's press secretary, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, by subordinating the standard of veracity to the enthusiasm of the pronouncement. Thus he has dissolved the Iraqi army, suggested that the interim government start on smaller things -- like judging quilting contests or something -- and is continually elaborating the every day in every way, life is getting better and better message. In today's Washington Post, he allows himself the standard rhetorical wallow in the joys of free enterprise. Joys that are being experienced on the street corners of Baghdad, apparently, where looted goods and weaponry are being sold with the kind of pedlar's vigor that once made the Yankee a proverbial figure of fun. There's something a little heart sick about this eloge of commerce among the smoking ruins of the country. The American media has decided to finesse the evident disaster in Iraq by resorting to schizophrenia; they issue one article from their embeds that consists pretty much of occupation p.r. -- then they issue color pieces that are more in the tone of the Lamentations of Jeremiah. No attempt is made to make these p-s.o.v. cohere.
We have not bathed Paul Bremer in our usual appellations, because we can't think what to call him. Alan kidded us about our Smilin' Jay phrase -- he noted that it had not spread over the Internet. In fact, we not only originated it, we were its sole adopters. By some accident, the phrase did fit -- as courtiers in the State and Pentagon continue their gladiatorial leaking contests, we are learning that Garner, with what one report describes as a 'backslapping' style , was as alien to the Iraqi expectation of leadership as Bambi would have been,
J.Paul, however, is more of a Reaganaut. We are assured that his authoritarian style is more to the liking of the masses. While Smilin' Jay imitated Saddam by essentially vanishing into the presidential palaces, Bremer seems intent on imitating Saddam's press secretary, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, by subordinating the standard of veracity to the enthusiasm of the pronouncement. Thus he has dissolved the Iraqi army, suggested that the interim government start on smaller things -- like judging quilting contests or something -- and is continually elaborating the every day in every way, life is getting better and better message. In today's Washington Post, he allows himself the standard rhetorical wallow in the joys of free enterprise. Joys that are being experienced on the street corners of Baghdad, apparently, where looted goods and weaponry are being sold with the kind of pedlar's vigor that once made the Yankee a proverbial figure of fun. There's something a little heart sick about this eloge of commerce among the smoking ruins of the country. The American media has decided to finesse the evident disaster in Iraq by resorting to schizophrenia; they issue one article from their embeds that consists pretty much of occupation p.r. -- then they issue color pieces that are more in the tone of the Lamentations of Jeremiah. No attempt is made to make these p-s.o.v. cohere.
Monday, May 26, 2003
Bollettino
LI has hammered home a theme for a long time on this site. The theme is that talk about U.S. foreign policy has to take into account, firstly, what kind of country the U.S. is. Usually such discussions go on and on about democracy. Well, democracy is important, but it is subordinate to one great constant in U.S. history: the vast indifference of Americans to the rest of the world.
There are subgroups who are very involved with one or another country. The Irish in the last century were ardent about Ireland, the Germans before WWII were ardent about Germany, and the Jews, now, are ardent about Israel. But these are exceptions to the rule. Americans like to think of themselves as generous donors -- but that stopped long ago, by general consent. The Marshall plan was fifty years ago; the last really big flow of foreign aid petered out around the end of the Vietnam war. Both of those generous moments were connected to domestic politics: the Marshall Plan is inconceivable without the Roosevelt's New Deal, which preceded it and established the idea of government spending for big projects; and the foreign aid of the Vietnam era was connected just as intimately to the Great Society.
Those eras are deader than Uncle Sam's generosity to the poor.
This is the essential paralogism of Bush's foreign policy. It aims at establishing American imperial hegemony; but it only funds American military contractors. Contra leftists and rightists, that isn't the same thing. Nor has Bush shown any inclination to spend his political capital by trying to really effect a "Marshall plan" for Afghanistan; Afghanistan is the last thing on his agenda. It's been crossed out.
Meanwhile, the plan for Iraq depends, crucially, on taking money from Iraq and recirculating it back to Iraq. It depends, in other words, on magic. Voodoo economics is rational compared to the American dream of both exploiting and enriching Iraq. It's a pyramid scheme for retards.
What this means, in terms of security, is that the U.S., after much bombing, is reverting to the pre-9/11 situation with regard to such places as Afghanistan; and is going to be tied down, in such places as Iraq, until we decide to blink and go away.
Afghanistan is one of the more interesting studies in how an empire is not built. After the war was canceled on tv (since it was, supposedly, won), it was lost to American vision in the subsequent blackout. Nobody protested. We went elsewhere; the Afghanis, naturally, stayed. There's a very lengthy piece about the aftermath in Afghanistan in the Guardian this Sunday by Peter Oborn. Here's a middle graf that gets into the magical intersection of money and amnesia:
"We interviewed the interim President on the day Baghdad fell. Karzai is tall, good-looking and articulate. He dresses in immaculately pressed shalwar kameez and waistcoat - sheer Afghan chic. The awesome task of creating a modern, democratic Afghan state - and in the process turning 3,000 years of historical development on its head - devolves on him. He is a friend of the West, and that is what makes his criticisms, when they come, so much more devastating. I ask him whether the $5 billion pledged to Afghanistan at the Tokyo donors' conference of 2002 was enough to rebuild his country. 'Definitely not,' says Karzai. 'We believe Afghanistan needs $15-20bn to reach the stage we were in 1979.'
He complains, too, that the money has gone to the wrong places. Rather than make over funds to Karzai's central government, Western donors have preferred to act through outside agencies. 'Last year,' says Karzai, 'we had no control over how this money was spent.' He warns that this lack of trust 'does weaken the presence of the central government in the provinces of Afghanistan'. It is hard to disagree. Even the niggardly World Bank accepts that Afghan reconstruction requires $10bn rather than the $5bn made available at Tokyo, while US Senator Joseph Biden argues that $20bn would be nearer the mark. Earlier this year the aid organization Care International produced a devastating study which contrasted Afghanistan to other post-conflict zones. In a table of aid per person donated by the West, Bosnia came up top, receiving $326 per head. Kosovans received an average $288 while citizens of East Timor got $195 each. Afghans are scheduled to receive just $42 per head over the next five years. This is despite the fact that Afghanistan is almost, as Karzai says, 'the poorest country in the world' and in a far worse state than either Bosnia or Kosovo."
There is something truly curious about the current American situation. Has any empire of comparable military superiority wasted its time more thoroughly than the U.S. has, in the last year? The firefight about connecting Al qaeda to Saddam is typical. Whether you think there is a connection or not -- and we don't think there is -- it is not an important connection, as everybody on both sides knows.
We know quite a bit now about how A-Q operated. We know they moved East after Sudan. We know that Malaysia was a much more important meeting ground for the redoubtable A-Q than Iraq. And yet, I'd guess that not one American in one thousand knows that Malaysia even figures in A-Q's timeline.
Anyway, what Oborn doesn't say is that one of the unexpected results of collapsing the Taliban has been a bumper crop of poppies. The hills are alive with them. And if you want to fund guerrilla activity, nothing is finer than a bumper crop of poppies, or of coca leaf. We figure that money will be reinvigorate A-Q next year, much more than the reaction to the occupation of Iraq.
LI has hammered home a theme for a long time on this site. The theme is that talk about U.S. foreign policy has to take into account, firstly, what kind of country the U.S. is. Usually such discussions go on and on about democracy. Well, democracy is important, but it is subordinate to one great constant in U.S. history: the vast indifference of Americans to the rest of the world.
There are subgroups who are very involved with one or another country. The Irish in the last century were ardent about Ireland, the Germans before WWII were ardent about Germany, and the Jews, now, are ardent about Israel. But these are exceptions to the rule. Americans like to think of themselves as generous donors -- but that stopped long ago, by general consent. The Marshall plan was fifty years ago; the last really big flow of foreign aid petered out around the end of the Vietnam war. Both of those generous moments were connected to domestic politics: the Marshall Plan is inconceivable without the Roosevelt's New Deal, which preceded it and established the idea of government spending for big projects; and the foreign aid of the Vietnam era was connected just as intimately to the Great Society.
Those eras are deader than Uncle Sam's generosity to the poor.
This is the essential paralogism of Bush's foreign policy. It aims at establishing American imperial hegemony; but it only funds American military contractors. Contra leftists and rightists, that isn't the same thing. Nor has Bush shown any inclination to spend his political capital by trying to really effect a "Marshall plan" for Afghanistan; Afghanistan is the last thing on his agenda. It's been crossed out.
Meanwhile, the plan for Iraq depends, crucially, on taking money from Iraq and recirculating it back to Iraq. It depends, in other words, on magic. Voodoo economics is rational compared to the American dream of both exploiting and enriching Iraq. It's a pyramid scheme for retards.
What this means, in terms of security, is that the U.S., after much bombing, is reverting to the pre-9/11 situation with regard to such places as Afghanistan; and is going to be tied down, in such places as Iraq, until we decide to blink and go away.
Afghanistan is one of the more interesting studies in how an empire is not built. After the war was canceled on tv (since it was, supposedly, won), it was lost to American vision in the subsequent blackout. Nobody protested. We went elsewhere; the Afghanis, naturally, stayed. There's a very lengthy piece about the aftermath in Afghanistan in the Guardian this Sunday by Peter Oborn. Here's a middle graf that gets into the magical intersection of money and amnesia:
"We interviewed the interim President on the day Baghdad fell. Karzai is tall, good-looking and articulate. He dresses in immaculately pressed shalwar kameez and waistcoat - sheer Afghan chic. The awesome task of creating a modern, democratic Afghan state - and in the process turning 3,000 years of historical development on its head - devolves on him. He is a friend of the West, and that is what makes his criticisms, when they come, so much more devastating. I ask him whether the $5 billion pledged to Afghanistan at the Tokyo donors' conference of 2002 was enough to rebuild his country. 'Definitely not,' says Karzai. 'We believe Afghanistan needs $15-20bn to reach the stage we were in 1979.'
He complains, too, that the money has gone to the wrong places. Rather than make over funds to Karzai's central government, Western donors have preferred to act through outside agencies. 'Last year,' says Karzai, 'we had no control over how this money was spent.' He warns that this lack of trust 'does weaken the presence of the central government in the provinces of Afghanistan'. It is hard to disagree. Even the niggardly World Bank accepts that Afghan reconstruction requires $10bn rather than the $5bn made available at Tokyo, while US Senator Joseph Biden argues that $20bn would be nearer the mark. Earlier this year the aid organization Care International produced a devastating study which contrasted Afghanistan to other post-conflict zones. In a table of aid per person donated by the West, Bosnia came up top, receiving $326 per head. Kosovans received an average $288 while citizens of East Timor got $195 each. Afghans are scheduled to receive just $42 per head over the next five years. This is despite the fact that Afghanistan is almost, as Karzai says, 'the poorest country in the world' and in a far worse state than either Bosnia or Kosovo."
There is something truly curious about the current American situation. Has any empire of comparable military superiority wasted its time more thoroughly than the U.S. has, in the last year? The firefight about connecting Al qaeda to Saddam is typical. Whether you think there is a connection or not -- and we don't think there is -- it is not an important connection, as everybody on both sides knows.
We know quite a bit now about how A-Q operated. We know they moved East after Sudan. We know that Malaysia was a much more important meeting ground for the redoubtable A-Q than Iraq. And yet, I'd guess that not one American in one thousand knows that Malaysia even figures in A-Q's timeline.
Anyway, what Oborn doesn't say is that one of the unexpected results of collapsing the Taliban has been a bumper crop of poppies. The hills are alive with them. And if you want to fund guerrilla activity, nothing is finer than a bumper crop of poppies, or of coca leaf. We figure that money will be reinvigorate A-Q next year, much more than the reaction to the occupation of Iraq.
Saturday, May 24, 2003
Bollettino
The swing set
Ah, so the 600 billion dollar -- Krugman prices it out at 800 billion - tax cut has been passed. The price tag in the headlines is, as everybody knows, a joke. We are in an extremely bizarre time. As the deficit piles up, we get a tax cut that is thinly justified as an attempt to bootstrap the market. Yep, get those equities flyin' again.
At the same time, the Bush administration is gambling with the dollar. This is, perhaps, all they can really do -- the brain-dead people in Bush's Treasury have no other options. So the race is on to press the dollar downward.
Now, LI is a simple country hayseed -- shucks, we just tried to buy the Brooklyn bridge from a passin' stranger yesterday. Yet even we noticed a curious disparity between the two strategies. Like, ain't it true, like they teach in the one room schoolhouse in the Hollow, that when you devalue the dollar, money flows to assets tied to other currencies? And don't that promote a flow out of US Markets and into other markets? And ain't that flow going to accelerate, as the wealthy, who benefit most from the tax cuts, seek a higher ROI than is going to be given by investing in dollar based instruments?
Of course, LI knows we don't have the rocket science of the fiscal system down, like our hero president -- well known fighter pilot and all -- but gee, won't the flight from dollars accelerate as the deficit grows, forcing interest rates upward, and shutting down business borrowing -- thus shuttin' down plant and other investment -- and thus upping cost cutting measures, such as shedding jobs?
So, what is happening here? A conservative Republican government is basically stoking the fires of inflation, in the hopes that we will get the system of production moving -- thus taxing the poor, basically, and the middle class, who are already facing the continuing inflation in housing, education and medicine -- and all of this supposedly in the era of "limited" government. Of course, since no Republican really has the guts to limit government -- they are throwing money hand over fist at Defense, and they absent mindedly voted in various medical benefits last year that add 300 billion dollars to that -- we are faced with pressures all along the financial dams.
Krugman is worried about a deflationary spiral. We personally think that this underestimates the integration of the American economy on other economies. Unlike Japan, we outsourced our manufacturing base long ago. Having depended for a long time on the absurdly low wages of foreign workers to underwrite our service sector economy, we think we are going to feel the effects of that soon.
Incompetent in war, disastrous in peace -- our administration. You gotta love em!
The swing set
Ah, so the 600 billion dollar -- Krugman prices it out at 800 billion - tax cut has been passed. The price tag in the headlines is, as everybody knows, a joke. We are in an extremely bizarre time. As the deficit piles up, we get a tax cut that is thinly justified as an attempt to bootstrap the market. Yep, get those equities flyin' again.
At the same time, the Bush administration is gambling with the dollar. This is, perhaps, all they can really do -- the brain-dead people in Bush's Treasury have no other options. So the race is on to press the dollar downward.
Now, LI is a simple country hayseed -- shucks, we just tried to buy the Brooklyn bridge from a passin' stranger yesterday. Yet even we noticed a curious disparity between the two strategies. Like, ain't it true, like they teach in the one room schoolhouse in the Hollow, that when you devalue the dollar, money flows to assets tied to other currencies? And don't that promote a flow out of US Markets and into other markets? And ain't that flow going to accelerate, as the wealthy, who benefit most from the tax cuts, seek a higher ROI than is going to be given by investing in dollar based instruments?
Of course, LI knows we don't have the rocket science of the fiscal system down, like our hero president -- well known fighter pilot and all -- but gee, won't the flight from dollars accelerate as the deficit grows, forcing interest rates upward, and shutting down business borrowing -- thus shuttin' down plant and other investment -- and thus upping cost cutting measures, such as shedding jobs?
So, what is happening here? A conservative Republican government is basically stoking the fires of inflation, in the hopes that we will get the system of production moving -- thus taxing the poor, basically, and the middle class, who are already facing the continuing inflation in housing, education and medicine -- and all of this supposedly in the era of "limited" government. Of course, since no Republican really has the guts to limit government -- they are throwing money hand over fist at Defense, and they absent mindedly voted in various medical benefits last year that add 300 billion dollars to that -- we are faced with pressures all along the financial dams.
Krugman is worried about a deflationary spiral. We personally think that this underestimates the integration of the American economy on other economies. Unlike Japan, we outsourced our manufacturing base long ago. Having depended for a long time on the absurdly low wages of foreign workers to underwrite our service sector economy, we think we are going to feel the effects of that soon.
Incompetent in war, disastrous in peace -- our administration. You gotta love em!
Bollettino
The Illusory Empire
One of the great problems with political scientists is that they base so much of what they think on analogies that are carefully plucked of all annoying dissimilarities. Take the great Empire boom spawned by the neo-con set. This has been going on for a while now, since one of the Kaplans wrote an article in Foreign Policy about the U.S. as a benign empire. This Kaplan went on to compare the U.S. with Britain in the 19th century. As in all such comparisons, a surface verisimilitude is achieved by comparing military force, and interventions over the globe. What Kaplan didn't mention was that 20 million some Britons left the U.K. to settle all over the globe. He also didn't mention British investment in the colonial enterprise. Both of which are very unlikely to happen to the U.S. any time soon. The U.S. Empire is defined by the fifty states, plus some commonwealths.
Iraq and Afghanistan are test cases of the imperial proposition. So far, what has happened in Afghanistan? The U.S. beat the Taliban and scattered its real foe, Al qaeda. Then we pretty much forwarded a minimum amount of money to the government we installed in Kabul, left a minimum contingent of soldiers there, and watched, with supreme indifference, as the center didn't hold. It is a good bet that some terrorist Rotary club is meeting, once again, between Peshawar and Kabul.
The British sometimes advanced and then abandoned and then re-inserted themselves in territories. The history of what is now Nigeria was full of that kind of thing. But if London had been attacked by a group from Nigeria in 1889, the British would have invaded in force and stayed.
We aren't saying this is a good or a bad thing -- it is a different thing. The Marshalll Plan response was an exception in American history, not the rule. It does not look like Iraq is going to be different. If this Financial Times story is to be believed -- and it is pretty standard for the Biz press view -- Iraq is going to need around one hundred billion dollars in investment in the next couple of years:
"Iraq's reconstruction is routinely costed at as much as $100bn (?86bn, �61bn), making it the largest such project since the Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe after the second world war.
Companies from all over the world have been clamouring for a piece of the work. Iraq is particularly appealing to them because it sits astride the world's second-largest oil reserves. There are also hopes that it could give rise to a robust consumer market."
Well, hope springs eternal, even in a nut house. But the reconstruction projects we have seen so far are coming out at about a billion bucks. And those bucks aren't an investment in Iraq, really -- they are things like starting a tv station for Iraqis, which is really a way of getting some US tax dollars to SAIC. When the money from Iraq's frozen assets runs out, what is the US going to do for the other 99 billion dollars? Take it out of the budget? The scheme to pay for things via Iraq's oil rather misses that, well, if we pay big fat US corporations with that money, nothing will be left for the Iraqis. They won't be able to afford those tv sets to watch SAIC TV. It is what you call a paradox. Or an empty piggy bank.
There's no plan for that whatsoever. There should be. Since the U.S. got into this war, we owe them. You know, for wrecking the cities and all. Things like that. Colonialism would be a step up, actually. Moral responsibility, things like that. So far, we simply have a country eyeing the little money left in a country it is occupying, and thinking of making a dash for it. On the other hand, the Bush-ites are stuck. If they treat Iraq like Afghanistan, the country will surely slip into a virulently anti-American mode. If we try to chintz on reconstruction, we are going to literally starve Iraqis. There's only one source of money left -- U.S. taxpayers.
Of course, there's also the little problem that Iraq, since the prosperous days of the late seventies, has gotten a lot more populous and a lot poorer. That consumer revolution is going to need a lot of very long range credit cards, because these people, like the Saudis, and the Libyans, aren't going to see those days again. The inheritance has been pissed away, mostly on weapons. Saddam or House of Saud, same song and dance.
At the moment, though, the thought is this: We broke it -- we pay for it. Isn't that the rule in this celestial toy shop?
The Illusory Empire
One of the great problems with political scientists is that they base so much of what they think on analogies that are carefully plucked of all annoying dissimilarities. Take the great Empire boom spawned by the neo-con set. This has been going on for a while now, since one of the Kaplans wrote an article in Foreign Policy about the U.S. as a benign empire. This Kaplan went on to compare the U.S. with Britain in the 19th century. As in all such comparisons, a surface verisimilitude is achieved by comparing military force, and interventions over the globe. What Kaplan didn't mention was that 20 million some Britons left the U.K. to settle all over the globe. He also didn't mention British investment in the colonial enterprise. Both of which are very unlikely to happen to the U.S. any time soon. The U.S. Empire is defined by the fifty states, plus some commonwealths.
Iraq and Afghanistan are test cases of the imperial proposition. So far, what has happened in Afghanistan? The U.S. beat the Taliban and scattered its real foe, Al qaeda. Then we pretty much forwarded a minimum amount of money to the government we installed in Kabul, left a minimum contingent of soldiers there, and watched, with supreme indifference, as the center didn't hold. It is a good bet that some terrorist Rotary club is meeting, once again, between Peshawar and Kabul.
The British sometimes advanced and then abandoned and then re-inserted themselves in territories. The history of what is now Nigeria was full of that kind of thing. But if London had been attacked by a group from Nigeria in 1889, the British would have invaded in force and stayed.
We aren't saying this is a good or a bad thing -- it is a different thing. The Marshalll Plan response was an exception in American history, not the rule. It does not look like Iraq is going to be different. If this Financial Times story is to be believed -- and it is pretty standard for the Biz press view -- Iraq is going to need around one hundred billion dollars in investment in the next couple of years:
"Iraq's reconstruction is routinely costed at as much as $100bn (?86bn, �61bn), making it the largest such project since the Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe after the second world war.
Companies from all over the world have been clamouring for a piece of the work. Iraq is particularly appealing to them because it sits astride the world's second-largest oil reserves. There are also hopes that it could give rise to a robust consumer market."
Well, hope springs eternal, even in a nut house. But the reconstruction projects we have seen so far are coming out at about a billion bucks. And those bucks aren't an investment in Iraq, really -- they are things like starting a tv station for Iraqis, which is really a way of getting some US tax dollars to SAIC. When the money from Iraq's frozen assets runs out, what is the US going to do for the other 99 billion dollars? Take it out of the budget? The scheme to pay for things via Iraq's oil rather misses that, well, if we pay big fat US corporations with that money, nothing will be left for the Iraqis. They won't be able to afford those tv sets to watch SAIC TV. It is what you call a paradox. Or an empty piggy bank.
There's no plan for that whatsoever. There should be. Since the U.S. got into this war, we owe them. You know, for wrecking the cities and all. Things like that. Colonialism would be a step up, actually. Moral responsibility, things like that. So far, we simply have a country eyeing the little money left in a country it is occupying, and thinking of making a dash for it. On the other hand, the Bush-ites are stuck. If they treat Iraq like Afghanistan, the country will surely slip into a virulently anti-American mode. If we try to chintz on reconstruction, we are going to literally starve Iraqis. There's only one source of money left -- U.S. taxpayers.
Of course, there's also the little problem that Iraq, since the prosperous days of the late seventies, has gotten a lot more populous and a lot poorer. That consumer revolution is going to need a lot of very long range credit cards, because these people, like the Saudis, and the Libyans, aren't going to see those days again. The inheritance has been pissed away, mostly on weapons. Saddam or House of Saud, same song and dance.
At the moment, though, the thought is this: We broke it -- we pay for it. Isn't that the rule in this celestial toy shop?
Bollettino
Chalabi is, reportedly, a man who likes to play close to the edge. He has a habit of going over it without a parachute. Perhaps he did it again when he attacked Al - Jazeera and the Jordan government with papers the INC had gathered from Saddam's files.
Saddam's files are truly amazing things. They pop up here, labelled in big magic marker, George Galloway bribery papers; they pop up there labelled Al -Jazeera, our contacts in. But where, pray tell, is the folder entitled, Donald Rumsfeld, talks with, 1984; or George Herbert Walker Bush, covert aid supplied by, 1932-1989? I guess those papers just incinerated. And guess what? Neither the Times of London or New York, neither the Daily Telegraph nor the Washington Post, are looking very hard for them.
Although I'd guess, just guess, that the US Military did look for those state secrets.
Well, Chalabi's problem is that he depends too much on the kindness of strangers -- who he then rips off. So, mistaking himself for Donald Rumsfeld, he paper rattled in the direction of Amman. He forgot that Amman can paper rattle back. The Wall Street Journal just got a look at some documents released by the Jordanians in re the case of Petra Bank.
The WSJ report does not show Chalabi as a corrupt man -- rather, he was a businessman in a hurry. And like many such businessmen, he succumbed to the temptation to inflate his business, which required doing an increasing amount of shady legwork inside the business. Plus, he seems to have smuggled money to his family. Two point six million dollars that the bank earned for instance, for snagging a loan to Sudan would be diverted to the Chalabi brothers' pockets. Arthur Anderson audited the bank after Chalabi fled:
"Now in control of Petra Bank, Jordanian authorities asked for an audit. Four months later, Arthur Andersen accountants declared the bank insolvent. Shareholder equity wasn't $50 million as reported, their 267-page report said, but a negative $268 million. They said an additional, hard-to-explain $158 million had flowed out but not come back. Much of that involved "transactions with parties related to the former management of the bank," it said."
Oh my. We do wonder how Chris Hitchens, Chalabi's main press supporter in this country, is going to explain this. In his last column on this subject, Hitchens let slip the fact that Iraq was a partner in the bank. Wow. If this is true, Chalabi, like his friend, Donald Rumsfeld, was working with Saddam in the nerve gas eighties. Since Hitchens didn't footnote his source, we don't know if he learned this from Chalabi himself, but it is a promising clue to Chalabi's sudden interest in overthrowing Saddam.
Chalabi is, reportedly, a man who likes to play close to the edge. He has a habit of going over it without a parachute. Perhaps he did it again when he attacked Al - Jazeera and the Jordan government with papers the INC had gathered from Saddam's files.
Saddam's files are truly amazing things. They pop up here, labelled in big magic marker, George Galloway bribery papers; they pop up there labelled Al -Jazeera, our contacts in. But where, pray tell, is the folder entitled, Donald Rumsfeld, talks with, 1984; or George Herbert Walker Bush, covert aid supplied by, 1932-1989? I guess those papers just incinerated. And guess what? Neither the Times of London or New York, neither the Daily Telegraph nor the Washington Post, are looking very hard for them.
Although I'd guess, just guess, that the US Military did look for those state secrets.
Well, Chalabi's problem is that he depends too much on the kindness of strangers -- who he then rips off. So, mistaking himself for Donald Rumsfeld, he paper rattled in the direction of Amman. He forgot that Amman can paper rattle back. The Wall Street Journal just got a look at some documents released by the Jordanians in re the case of Petra Bank.
The WSJ report does not show Chalabi as a corrupt man -- rather, he was a businessman in a hurry. And like many such businessmen, he succumbed to the temptation to inflate his business, which required doing an increasing amount of shady legwork inside the business. Plus, he seems to have smuggled money to his family. Two point six million dollars that the bank earned for instance, for snagging a loan to Sudan would be diverted to the Chalabi brothers' pockets. Arthur Anderson audited the bank after Chalabi fled:
"Now in control of Petra Bank, Jordanian authorities asked for an audit. Four months later, Arthur Andersen accountants declared the bank insolvent. Shareholder equity wasn't $50 million as reported, their 267-page report said, but a negative $268 million. They said an additional, hard-to-explain $158 million had flowed out but not come back. Much of that involved "transactions with parties related to the former management of the bank," it said."
Oh my. We do wonder how Chris Hitchens, Chalabi's main press supporter in this country, is going to explain this. In his last column on this subject, Hitchens let slip the fact that Iraq was a partner in the bank. Wow. If this is true, Chalabi, like his friend, Donald Rumsfeld, was working with Saddam in the nerve gas eighties. Since Hitchens didn't footnote his source, we don't know if he learned this from Chalabi himself, but it is a promising clue to Chalabi's sudden interest in overthrowing Saddam.
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