elegy for the unibomber

Last night I was tired, so I dropped in at Waterloo’s for a drink and a bite. There was a boy band playing there – all pretty boys of @ 18-20 in age. Blond hair, rosy skin, perfect teeth, oh the excellent line of credit that had gone into their making, playing C & W about a quite other life of drinking and the degrading frisks of Eros in dubious locales. They all played well, and sang enthusiastically. The parents of one of the musicians were sitting there, with the Mom quite happily bobbing her head to it all. As I sat there and watched, the family of another of the singers came in, with two seventeen year old girls at that stalky, shoulders up age, and one of them happily flashed a smile at the group of singers, which the boys then industriously pretended not to see. A minute later through the entrance trooped three other boys, around 20 or so, wearing U.T. shirts and looking vaguely fraternity-ish, and the group immediately came to life, the singer giving them a happy shout out. Their buds were here! Validation!

And I thought, Freud had it so wrong. The interminably unanswered question is: what do males want?

That war is an organizing principle above the structures of the state has everything to do with male desire, the joker in the human pack, begging for it knows not what and quick to anger and long melancholic years when it doesn’t get it.

But… I don’t have time to go into this at the moment. Must get to work!

Oh, and the picture up there at the top of this post is my friend D., who raised me from a pup. D. is presently working on a masterpiece that crosses the boundaries of all medias and in fact pours gasoline on them and tops it off with a lit match entitled, Elegy for the Unibomber.

That was quick! Conventional Wisdom continues walking off the cliff in Iraq

Now that the electorate has clearly spoken, it is time for the second phase to kick in. In this phase, D.C. Court society resolutely misinterprets or lies about what they said, thus allowing themselves to continue to be centrists (which is a compound of being for hollowing out Social Security via a fleabag sleight of hand trick and resolutely supporting the continuing influx of defense spending to swell D.C.’S real estate prices and steak dinner prices). The Washington Post has done a particularly excellent job in this regard, coming out with stories about how all of the Iraqis now fear the withdrawal of American support, which derives from talking to a handful of American paid Iraqi parasites and ignoring what is said in Iraq’s papers, for instance – for a rundown of which, see Juan Cole.

But to really see the genius mind of Conventional Wisdom at work, LI urges readers to go to the Q and A with WP’s politics journalist, Michael Fletcher. It is a piece of art not unlike Keat’s ode to a Grecian Urn, if that Urn were a tin chamber pot in which reposed the collected excreta of WP’s op ed belligeranti:

“New Haven, Conn.: Fletcher:
I still don't see a mandate from these elections, and I still don't see people clamoring for a troop withdrawl. This war is winable, so what if the President got rid of the Secty of Defense? He needed another quarterback, and history is filled with this happening. Why are Demcocrats acting as this is "proof" of something?
Michael Fletcher: I don't know that Democrats are acting as if Rumsfeld's removal is "proof" of anything. And exit polls found something like a third of voters want to withdraw from Iraq now--something that, of course, does not seem to be in the cards. The only proof evident in Rumsfeld's removal, to me, seems to be that the laws of gravity apply to the Bush administration as they do to everything else. The president has long ignored the clamor to remove Rumsfeld. But now he has. And he's replaced him with someone with more of a reputation for consensus building. So that's something.”
…
“New Haven: Over 55% of the electorate, according to exit polls favors withdrawing SOME or ALL troops. Even in Montana, 50% favors withdrawing SOME or ALL.
Michael Fletcher: Fair enough. I should have said about a third of voters favored immediate withdrawal of all troops. But either way, I doubt that either option is in the cards right now.”
Of course not. Once you have fucked up on the higher level, the course is clear. You go back to the teacher again and again. You point out how this is going to hurt your grade average. You show that in other classes, you got such high scores that the school paid your cocaine bill. And then you threaten.
The reality principle is about the fact that American soldiers will remain there and die and do nothing. Or rather, they will contribute to the killing of tens of thousands of more Iraqis, but these deaths will be in vain. Just as the American deaths will be in vain. Even Chalabi and the Meatman himself, Saddam Hussein, have figured out that the only course in Iraq at the moment is negotiations between all parties. You don’t have to read Thomas Hobbes to know that security is the foundation of any state – if you can’t go outside, you have entered a death spiral indifferent to the ideological labels you give it. But the Fletchers of D.C. are going to throw many more bodies – just not their own – into the death spiral:
“Huntington Beach, Calif.: I may be in a minority, but I think this election hurts McCain's chances in 2008. He is calling for MORE troops. Considering the mood of the electorate, I think that attitude is a non-starter. Giuliani is too liberal for the GOP. I think the money on that side is on Mitt Romney. Your thoughts?
Michael Fletcher: I think it's too early to say. What if more troops were sent and they were able to quell the insurgency and other bloodshed, however unlikely that may seem?”

Ah, always bet on the horse with the outside chance – especially if it has three legs and rickets. That’s why the Fletchers of the world are where they are, while the measly 55 percentile is laughable. What do those people know about world affairs?

the superannuated apocalypse now

LI talked with his brother, who is doing a job in a hotel in Florida with his other brother, tonight. I thought I’d lay my latest rap on him, but he found it unlikely. Actually, my bro was oddly out of the loop about this election – he’s feeling rather burned about America in general. But anyway, I told him that the Dems had won, and this and that and the other thing, and then we talked about Rumsfeld resigning and Gates taking his place.

That’s when I proposed that this was obviously a superannuated version of Apocalypse Now. The vanity war has made some folks some money, and they had to give it to Jr – he wanted a war – to get what they wanted. But the tax cuts and the legal restructuring of things like the bankruptcy law and environmental regulation are so yesterday’s news, and the damned vanity war is starting to upset people. Good contractor money there, but now we are coming down to dribs and drabs. And we are definitely going to have to pony up for Schumer to avoid major investigations of where that money went to or what it bought.

So Gates has a mission. He has one more mission. He has to go up the river again and he has to tell Jr. that the vanity war has to wind down. He has to convey that the message isn’t just that his father is concerned. Sure, his father is always fucking concerned. The message is that other people are concerned. Other people are saying that it is time to shut down this particular operation because, frankly, there’s nothing more to wring out of it. It is like, we need a new model war at least. Something quicker, something that won’t take up so much shelf space. Guys are getting restless. Nobody is saying stripping away that dividend tax wasn’t fucking manna from the Gods. Nobody is saying Jr. has let them down. And everybody knows that Jr. wanted his own war and he worked for it, and haven’t they been like supernice to give it to him? And everybody appreciates trying to pull the old pump and dump scheme with Social Security. But for example. Why didn’t the doggies eat the poisoned dog food? Maybe they are getting spooked with this fucking war for no reason. Is what guys are saying. And so Gates has to go up there, he has to reason with Jr. He has to go by the heads on the poles in the yard – there’s Colin Powell, there’s the fucker from Alcoa, Secretary of Treasury, what’shisname, and there’s 650,000 creepy Iraqis. Jr.’s sitting there, at first Gates is thinking shit, he’s going to read to me from Eliot and there’s going to be copyright problems with this movie and I am liable up to my ass, but no, its from the Stranger. It’s, Jr. says, French. The native woman he’s shacked up with, she gives him a French book. Do you read French, Gates, Jr. says and Gates doesn't know if this conversation is really about French. Gates only knows that everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I never wanted another.

And of course Jr. says, it’s my war. He says, Dad got his fucking war. He got his fucking missiles. Missiles like with nuclear stuff in them. So uberdangerous we were all supposed to piss our pants. That's the great George Bush for you. He’s never home, then he comes home, oh, let's move to D.C. and play Vice President, and then he’s all president and shit, and then he doesn’t even keep it. He doesn’t even know how to keep it, Gates. I stole it, okay? I did that. Me. Well, the boys helped me do that. But at least then I kept it. They love me. And he’s telling me what to do? Me? And of course Gates is thinking of the last time he talked to Condi, and how she said, What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say? That he was a kind man? That he was a wise man? That he had plans? That he had wisdom? Bullshit man! And Gates has to buckled down, he has to breathe out, let’s do it, he remembers Sr saying he's out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct. And he is still in the field commanding troops, and so Gates says to him the guys are serious this time, Jr., and Jr is saying did they say why, Gates, why they want to terminate my command? Gate’s knows he has to go through with this dialogue:
Gates: I was sent on a classified mission, sir.
Jr: It's no longer classified, is it? Did they tell you?
Gates: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
Jr: Are my methods unsound?
Gates: I don't see any method at all, sir.

At which point we definitely have to cue to:

“The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on

He took a face from the ancient gallery

And he walked on down the hall

He went into the room where his sister lived, and...then he


Paid a visit to his brother, and then he

He walked on down the hall, and

And he came to a door...and he looked inside

Father, yes son, I want to kill you

Mother...I want to...fuck you”

But my brother didn’t buy any of it.

the prophet jonah and his pet raven watch fox news

Readers of the Genealogy of Morals will remember Nietzsche’s quotes from Tertullian to the effect that one of the supreme pleasures of heaven will lie in watching the torments of the damned. In the first essay, Nietzsche introduces the concept of ressentiment as the key to the slave uprising in morals:

"The slave uprising in morals begins with that fact that Ressentiment itself become creative and gives birth to values: Ressentiment is natural to those to whom real reaction, that of the act, is forbidden, and who can only keep themselves guiltless through an imaginary revenge."

Well, darlin’, isn’t that just LI? whose reactions have to be swallowed – along with blood and shit and poverty – in a truly indigestible bolus, caught as we are like one of nature's most unlucky passengers - a passenger pigeon, a bison - in a nation that seems hell bent on mass murder and the mortal fouling of the planet as it careens here and there, throwing unparalleled pelf in the way of unimaginably vulgar plutocrats. Our only the power is that of writing stuff – a power compounded of vocables and saliva, and not much different in kind than a Bronx cheer.

So it was a great pleasure to see the governing class given a great slap last night. I watched the returns at a friend’s house, and got to see names on actual tv, live. Now I know what Katie Couric and Ken Olberman sound like. I finally got to see a Colbert routine. And I got to see Fox election central, with the puzzling succession of news hosts – each looking more Martian than the other. Was it just the reception on that particular tv set, or has Fox discovered a whole new breed of Caucasion male - with a skin color like some outer space alloy and the eyes of a Manga nightmare?

I was pretty bummed about the Texas Governor’s race, which essentially dooms hundreds of thousands of kids to further misery as the testing shibboleth rolls over their organisms, and all for squat. But besides that result, which was pretty much a strangling foretold, the night went well.

When I got back home, I decided to follow Tertullian’s advice and my own deep slavish instincts, last night I made the rounds of the conservative blogs, wanting to hear the shrieks of the justly punished, the gnashing of teeth, the moans. But though I longed to rejoice in the pain of mine enemies – hey, give me his head and I’ll scrape the skin off to make a drinking cup of his fucking skull – I couldn’t, for some reason, warm myself here. LI would have made up exactly the same excuses, and have exactly the same idea that really, really my friends all my ideas are agreed to by a vast majority of Americans.

Well, of course they aren’t. Tough titty for the vast majority of Americans.

I can only hope that the Senate falls, and that finally some real oversight kicks in – although it is about 500 billion dollars late. If, as I suspect, next year will contain the impact from the end of the real estate bubble, the discontent with Iraq and the Bush ideology, with its caste system veneration of the wealthy, might suffer for it. I’m going to entertain a hope (why not?) that a sense of reality will actually dawn among the D.C. dregs, that talks with Iran will lead to recognition of Iran, that the U.S. will encourage all Iraqi factions to negotiate while withdrawing American troops, and that the trillion dollars earmarked for the military this year marks the crescendo of the atrocity orgy.

I want a good Daddy! and a Good Mommy!

There is a curious dream that is dreamt among my liberal brethren. Every election year it will be expressed, in a distressed tone of voice of a man invoking Miss Manners. In this dream, elections are not bloody things involving people, but rather, dressed up events involving earnest high school students debating the finer points of property tax law.

The NYT has an oped piece by Barry Schwartz that is as relentlessly programmatic in this respect as a clock is with regard to midnight and noon. First, of course, we begin with a lament about the election year party. This year, we asked everybody to bring healthful dishes and non-alcoholic beverages. We also tried to supply some hymn books and pamphlets on abstinence. But to no avail!

“SWARTHMORE, Pa. -- ANOTHER national election season has come to an end -- the sorriest, sleaziest, most disheartening and embarrassing in memory. The best one can hope for is a candidate who is a complete cipher. How has American electoral politics come to this?”

Sleaziness – as in actually looking up the records of the cut outs that we are going to send to Washington, D.C., on their all expense paid internship for various lobbying firms – is, contrary to the shocked Mr. Schwartz, not the problem with our system – it is the lack of willingness to be really sleazy. That is, to have a good, warts and all impression of the candidate, the kind of impression one has of one’s fellow employees. The system that doles out the power tries as hard as it can to deny us any glimpse into the backstage of its 24/7 impression management.

Schwartz illustrates the sad sadness of violating Mom’s rule (if you can’t say something good about somebody, don’t say anything at all!) with a psychological study showing that positives and negatives stand out given changing instructions in the way we are to evaluate people (via a hypothetical child custody decision balancing the traits of Parent A and Parent B) - even though the list of negatives and positives are stable. Now, one would think that this would reconcile him to humanity’s perpetual need for sleaze – or at least make him curious about the arts by which we do gain our impressions of people, and how these are reflected in elections. But not Mr. Schwartz. He goes from telling us about human nature to urging us to forget human nature and to treat elections as a technocrat would treat putting together a toy railroad set for the kids. Such is his love of humanity that he urges us to slough it off when electing our rulers. Such is LI’s contempt for the technocratic viewpoint, however, that we find this advice, to say the least, ludicrous.

“If somehow the cynicism lifted, and we saw ourselves charged with the task of deciding who to say yes to, we'd have more candidates like Parent B. Just one negative feature would not be enough to disqualify someone, in our minds. There would be little to gain by capturing and broadcasting ''macaca moments,'' or subtly invoking old Southern fears of black men cavorting with white women. Candidates would be able to take positions and speak their minds. This might lead to the arrival of candidates who actually have positions and minds. We might even be willing to risk generating a little enthusiasm at the prospect of being led by them.”

Actually, not only do I have little enthusiasm for being “led” by those I vote for – they can suck my big cock (oops - this is not tea party language) - they can, uh, kiss my ass if they think I’m voting for them as “leaders”. I vote for representatives, that is all. I can fucking lead my own self. That Schwarz can so easily equate the publicity given to a candidate given to uttering racist statements with a racist advertisement tells us all I need to know about his own ability to evaluate Parent A and Parent B. It sucks. And I’m not looking, myself, for a big Daddy or Mommy to govern me. I already have a Dad and a Mom.

The Schwartzes of the world - the snooty reformers, always looking to get politics out of the hands of the unwashed - inject liberalism with that reputation it seemingly can't shake: its allergy to the people it supposedly wishes to benefit. He is the perfect complement to the millionaire rightwing populist. The two of them drive me fucking nuts.

Electing a new heaven on earth - uh, someday

"Now God defend! What will become of me! I have neither consulted with the stars nor their urinals, the almanacks. A fine fellow, to neglect the prophets who are read in England every day! They shall pardon me for this oversight. There is a mystery in their profession they have no to much as herar of – “the Christian starry Heaven” – a new Heaven fancied on the whole earth.”

Thomas Vaughan, the alchemist, whose merit as one of the greatest writers of English prose is obscured because he wrote about, well, alchemy, wrote the above words in the 1650s, I think. Vaughan was quite a guy. He died of getting an overdose of mercury vapor up his nose, after a standard stormy life trying to balance natural magick, a clerical position, and reactionary politics. He was “ousted” from the clergy in Wales for “drunkenness, swearing, incontinency, and carrying arms for the king.” Well, how is LI to resist a compagnon de route like this? Before he died, Vaughan dreamed he was pursued by a stone horse – which is the same dream his wife had before she died. O for a life of portents and poetry.

Anyway, LI’s purpose in citing Vaughan is to disclaim any foresight into the results of tomorrow’s election, and to mildly decry the newspaperly madness of following the polls. For a political blog, we haven’t really spent a lot of time on the election, it seems. The reason is that our regular readers are no doubt going to vote, as we did last Friday, for liberal or lefty types, with here and there an exception, and those readers who aren’t going to vote that way are probably not going to be persuaded by us, and … we just don’t practice an election-centric politics.

In our own case, we are more concerned that the library here in Austin finally gets a shot of money (although the odds are probably against this) and that the highways don’t (although the odds are probably for this). We live in a district that the Stalinist Reps gerrymandered into a perpetual Republican fief, so our vote counts for nothing against the dickhead who represents us. And, finally, the one vote we were looking forward to – voting for Kinky Friedman for Governor – we didn’t cast, as K.F. turned sour in this election and displayed a peculiar tone deafness about racism. So it was back to voting for Bell, the Dem candidate, who actually did something that made us happy: he came out foursquare against the testing mania in the public schools. In fact, the only person who likes the test industry’s grip on the poor 1st through 7th graders is our utterly ridiculous Governor, Perry. May he suffer someday for all the miseries he has put these thousands of children through.

The races we were interested in were mostly elsewhere. We are especially happy that Eliot Spitzer looks like a walk in NY. In fact, New York voters have the luxury of voting strategically. We talked to a friend up there who is voting Green, and that seemed fine to LI – Spitzer’s win being pretty much locked in, the question is, how can you take your microscopic vote and use it to encourage a leftward tilt?

On the other hand, the race that would be difficult for us is also in New York. That’s the one between Pirro and Cuomo. On the one hand, Cuomo is undoubtedly the better candidate, even though we are fed up with inheritors of political capital running for office. On the other hand, Pirro seems to be one of those unique people who is happy about turning her life into a public sit com. We’ve totally enjoyed her pursuit of her wayward creep of a husband, Al – the detectives, the weeping to gossip columnists, the tapes and videocameras. As attorney general, Pirro would make her philandering hubby’s life a living hell. She’d be able to get favors from state troopers. Her so called best friend, that fucking bottle blonde, shamelessly flirting with Pirro’s hubby under her very eyes! Well, time to look at your tax returns, baby. On the other hand, the argument could be made that being the attorney general of New York entails other duties than exacting personal revenge on your spouse and the bitches that throw themselves in his way. Hmm. On the one hand, civic duty, on the other hand, the howl of the redneck in my blood, that fan of mudwrestling and the NY Post. I have no idea how I’d vote.

I do know that the urinal of the popular will, the polls, should not obsess any properly constituted mind.

sitting in the monad - The NYT celebrates its fave Iraqi, Chalabi, one more time

The horrendous Dexter Filkins is at it again. The NYT Magazine profile of Chalabi is an indulgence verging on an impudence – after all, why not devote that space to a basically meaningless story about Filkins fave guy? Here’s one of our favorite passages in this extended exercise in bosculating Chalabi’s golden fanny:

“When the election came, Chalabi was wiped out. His Iraqi National Congress received slightly more than 30,000 votes, only one-quarter of 1 percent of the 12 million votes cast — not enough to put even one of them, not even Chalabi, in the new Iraqi Parliament. There was grumbling in the Chalabi camp. One of his associates said of the Shiite alliance: “We know they cheated. You know how we know? Because in one area we had 5,000 forged ballots, and when they were counted, we didn’t even get that many.” He shrugged.

But the truth seemed clear enough: Chalabi was finished. Chalabi, who could plausibly claim that he, more than any other Iraqi, had made the election possible, had been shunned by the very people he had worked so hard to set free.”

To set them free! Doesn’t it make you feel all Country and Western?

Having cast my lot with the black magicians, I've been trying to come up with a spell to launch a meme from this tiny blog. The meme would be about the failure of the MSM, from the beginning, to comprehend Iraq. The evidence for that failure would be the incredibly exaggerated role assumed by Chalabi in reports about Iraq after the invasion that kept appearing in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and other major media. At the same time, the way Chalabi himself was perceived in Iraq didn't even figure in those reports. For instance: for years, LI has maintained that the legitimacy of the supposed American project of bringing 'democracy' to Iraq, still hailed by the belligeranti, was undermined from the beginning by trying to set up a notorious thief as our proxy in Iraq. Filkins remarks, sort of as an afterthought in one place, that he was amazed at how the Iraqis all seemed to know that Chalabi was convicted in Jordan of stealing up to 40 million dollars from the bank he founded. Now, this isn't a small and insignificant piece of information - even though Filkins treats it as such, devoting a total of four sentences to it. This is a huge piece of information. It is about how the Iraqis were seeing things. If the MSM were really curious about the supposed American project, this kind of information was vital feedback for Americans.

In fact, however, the MSM is simply an adjunct of the conventional wisdom of whatever court faction wants to bamboozle us this time. And so in all those stories about Chalabi, none of them were about the perception current in Iraq from the beginning that he was a huge thief. It is also true that he is a huge thief, but the perception was more important. You can't conduct an occupation that is legitimated on helping the occupied and then try to elevate a thief to the position of ruler.

Well, we were reminded by the sorry ass stroy of this post, filed after the Iraqi election, 1/26/06. I totally regret the severe underestimate of Iraqi casualties:

the shame of the press
Imagine that the entertainment sections of the NYT, the Washington Post, and the LA Times had all devoted most of their coverage to the choice of Jessica Simpson as best actress in the run up to the Oscars. Suppose that they did this in spite of the fact that there was abundant evidence that Jessica Simpson was not considered even an outlying candidate for best actress by insiders. Suppose that she got not a single vote.

If this had happened, it would be a major media scandal. There would be questions about the honesty of the critics involved, and whether there had been some kind of quid pro quo with Simpson’s PR people, or some studio. Certainly there would be, at least, some comment to explain the bizarre behavior of the critics.

Now consider the Iraqi elections. Again. The results are now, semi-officially, in. In the run up to the election, did we have American papers running big profiles of, say, Abdul Aziz Hakim? He is the head of SCIRI. Or how about Ibrahim Jaafari? The head of Dawa. No. As has been the case for three years, the overwhelming amount of media in this country went to … Ahmed Chalabi. A man whose party did not earn enough votes to even give him a seat in the Iraqi parliament. Enter Chalabi’s name in the Factiva database, and you get 27, 925 entries. Enter Hakim’s name in the database, you get 1232 entries. The 27 to 1 disproportion between the man who couldn’t even gain a seat with the votes of the exiles and the man who the Washington Post calls “the most powerful Shiite politician” is an accurate reflection of the delusiveness of the media, which not only bought the Bush administration’s illusions and lies at the beginning of the war but has added to it their own so that Americans trying to understand what is happening in Iraq have as much chance of getting good information from, say, the U.S. Defense department – which is, remember, run by the worst and most mendacious Secretary of Defense in our history, and staffed with his appointees -- as from the NYT.

Let’s take a look, for comedy’s sake, at Dexter Filkins, the NYT’s Iraq reporter who is bad enough to surely merit some kindly nickname by our prez. Here, before the elections, is a typical Filkins lede. On December 12, 2005, under the headline, Boys of Baghdad College Vie for Prime Minister, Filkins wrote:

“The three Iraqi political leaders considered most likely to end up as prime minister after nationwide elections this week -- Ayad Allawi, Ahmad Chalabi and Adel Abdul Mahdi -- were schoolmates at the all-boys English-language school in the late 1950's, fortunate members of the Baghdad elite that governed Iraq until successive waves of revolution and terror swept it away.”

Imagine someone including, in a story about the three most likely Democratic presidential candidates, the name Dennis Kucenich. You get the picture. Filkins is the clown prince of the Iraqi reporting team for the NYT. Edward Wong is a better reporter – one doesn’t feel like he takes massive doses of acid before he files his stories. But his story before the election, with the headline Iraq’s Powerful Shiite Coalition shows Signs of Stress before the Election (9 December) goes on for ten grafs before we get the inevitable:

“This time, though, the rivalries have grown more heated and the potential for an irreparable split is greater, Iraqi and Western officials say. Many coalition members have broken away and started their own parties, and there has been a palpable drop in support among moderate voters and the leading ayatollahs, who are disenchanted with the performance of the current Shiite government.

“A fracturing of the conservative coalition could set the conditions for a realignment of Iraq's political spectrum, creating an opening for a more secular Shiite candidate like the former prime minister, Ayad Allawi, or even Ahmad Chalabi, the former Pentagon favorite, to assemble enough allies to claim the top spot in the new government.”

On November 30, 2005, ABC’s Nightline did its duty to inform its audience of the impending election in Iraq by doing a whole show entitled: “THE POWER BROKER A LOOK AT AHMED CHALABI.” Of course, the advantage of this is you don’t have to hire a translator – translating is so boring on TV, and it might give the viewing audience the idea that Iraqis don’t normally speak English.

Here is a typical snippet from that show:
“CYNTHIA MCFADDEN (ABC NEWS)
(OC) Terry, you've been spending lots of time with one of the more controversial and powerful figures in Iraq. And you have his story tonight.
TERRY MORAN (ABC NEWS)
(OC) Ahmed Chalabi, Cynthia. He is quite a character. He was in exile from this country for more than 40 years. Saddam Hussein's archenemy. He's now a candidate. It is election season here. You sense it in the air. People talk about it in cafes. There's posters and banners. And Chalabi wants to run the country he left for 40 years. No matter what you think of him, he's a man to be reckoned with.
TERRY MORAN (ABC NEWS)
(VO) There is no one else in Iraq like him. And that may be a good thing. Ahmed Chalabi is the canniest, wiliest, most effective, most elusive political player in the new Iraq. And he just might be the man best-positioned to help the US achieve its goal of a stable, secular, democratic government here. Or maybe not. You never know what Ahmed Chalabi could do next.”

Actually, to give a little credit where credit is due, John Burns, the pro-war NYT correspondent, did appear and say reasonable things on the Charlie Rose show – things that were entirely unreflected in the coverage of the election by his paper:

“CHARLIE ROSE: How does the election look today, and how do you measure that this new parliament or assembly, whatever they`re going to call it, might elect Chalabi?
JOHN BURNS: No, I don`t think. Personally, I don`t think that there`s the remotest chance of that. Mr. Chalabi`s party, I would think, would be lucky to get two seats.
What he will do with those two seats and with his own good self after that I don`t know. He envisages himself as a compromise candidate for prime minister. I think that`s probably beyond the reach of even so canny a politician as Mr. Chalabi.
I think that this election is likely to produce an unsurprising result. I think we`ve seen it before.”

The Washington Post, meanwhile, focused on an unlikely pro-Israel candidate running in Basra (wow, how about that for giving us a feeling about the country) and unleashed their no. 1 Iraqi expert and all around Middle Eastern savant – I am talking, of course, about the ever repugnant Sally Quinn – to do a 2000+ word profile of Chalabi on November 17, 2005. Quinn famously did a profile of Chalabi in 2003 in which he the varieties of his silky genius were highlighted, and contrasted, comically, with the boobish Iraqi pols that he brought with them – many didn’t speak English or possess table manners! And the grease in their hair! My how we laughed. 30-50, 000 Iraqi deaths later, we return to this always risible subject.

This is Quinn, speaking with the collective wisdom of D.C.:

“Spending time with Ahmed Chalabi is like disappearing down the rabbit hole. People are either throwing him tea parties or crying "off with his head."

Normally in Washington, people ask not to be identified when they have something negative to say about a person in the news. With Chalabi, it's the opposite. On the heels of his week-long visit to the United States, few want to be quoted by name saying anything positive. Yet suddenly many have positive things to say.
It was only a year and a half ago that his Baghdad office and home were raided and trashed by U.S. and Iraqi forces. He had gone from being the darling of the neo-cons to a pariah. Many thought he was dead politically.

But today he is a strong contender for prime minister in next month's elections, and highly placed sources say he has become the choice of many U.S. officials to lead the country. He has managed to resurrect himself because he is seen as the one person who can get U.S. troops out of Iraq, and Washington is pragmatic enough to recognize that.”

Can one love enough that last sentence? I don’t think so. Quinn is a rare human being: she is the local genius of the Washington Post, the very distillation of its editorial and journalistic attitude. Shameless, hubristic, triumphantly bigoted, privileged, and convinced that insider knowledge = real knowledge. Of course, insider knowledge is really a pack of the delusions and panics that make the governing class at this particular point in time a thing for the angels to both weep and laugh over.

Now, here’s LI’s bet. Our bet is that not once, not once in the next week or month will there be any discussion whatsoever of the curiously distorted coverage of the Iraqi election going into it, and the more than curious inflation of stories about a man whose main achievement seems to be to have gotten to know American journalists. Nobody will ask, why is it that there are not 2,000 word portraits of Hakim in the WP style section? Why isn’t there a series in the NYT, the men who run Iraq? The obvious answer is that the American public can’t bear too much reality – at least, that is what our guardians think. So much better to make up the country of Iraq lock stock and barrel and present it, a steaming pile of horseshit, to the American citizenry – just so we don’t get too worried about what we are sending Americans to die for, or to be head injured for, or to be legless for, or to have their spines broken for, or to be permanently traumatized for.”

welcome to the rabies festival

A couple of days ago, LI made the argument that U.S. policy in Iraq had brought about civil war, instead of preventing it. And, furthermore, that the common view, which is that the U.S. has spent its entire time trying to prevent a civil war, was wrong – that the U.S. intention, per the criminals in the White House, corresponded to a weakening of Iraq that would entail, at the least, factionalization, and more probably, violence on a civil war scale. Brian, in a comment on this post, logically reduced LI’s argument to the one that the U.S. intended the partitioning of Iraq.

That made me think about the difference between intentions and conditions. And that made me think, golly, I’ll just write a whole fucking post on this intrinsically fascinating topic!

It is the LI position that the larger, institutionalized social forces, like the state, or businesses, or parties, operate in reality not to institute some rigid intention or goal, but to produce the conditions that will make push forward the self-organizing of a set of goals. But that this never seems to be the case. It always seems that institutions, like people, follow some intention.

Francois Jullien is the guy who has started LI thinking about these things, got us out of our shitty trance, shook us awake for a fleeting shitty moment. In “A treatise on efficacy” Jullien compares the Western and Chinese notions of how states and enterprises operate. For instance, he considers Sun Tzu’s notion that the general, before battle, should “ban omens and dismiss all doubts.”

“The whole of this Chinese thought is prompted by a single concept: whatever happens “in any case” “cannot not happen” (once all the conditions are ascertained); in other words, it is “ineluctable” (bi)

“This idea of the ineluctability of processes and so also of success for whoever is capable of profiting from it recurs constantly throughout all Chinese thinking. Even a thinker such as Mencius subscribes to this logic of consequentiality, despite the fact that he adopts a position altogether opposed to the theses of the strategists, since he considers that sovereignty depends not on the relation of forces and therefore the art of warfare, but on the sway exercised by morality. Or rather, morality is itself a force, and a particularly strong one, because it possesses great influence and uses this to effect, in a diffuse and discrete fashion. Be concerned for your people, Mencius tells the ruler, share your pleasures with them, and you will inevitably progressively come to rule over all other princes. That is because all peoples will desire to pass under your authority; they will open their doors to you and will be unable to resist you. Through violence, you will inevitably eventually come to grief, for the power at your disposal is limited and arouses rivalry.”

Okay. When we put up quotations here, we have this audio-visual image in our head – the quote hangs there, on the screen, as we mouth into the dark, Professor Unrath on his downers. In reality, of course, the quote falls behind us – like landscape revealed in the window of a bus, falling away from the passenger who tries to keep it in his visual space for the longest. Sorry Charley. Anyway, to illustrate the importance of the ineluctability of processes, LI is thinking: for a long time – for three years, actually – we have felt something like the very chiton scraped off our nerves whenever we read the inevitable sign off line of the pro-war or MSM set about Iraq. The deal will be some fucking essay or news report considering another fucking disaster. Or announcing the administration’s latest move, which has the integrity, coherence and logic of some mad male masturbator’s theory of bitches, caught on the q.v. as he retires to the institutions communal bathroom. And yet, after the careful, pawful consideration, with the utmost respect for the sacred powers that be, of this luminous turd, one that will have negative consequences even relative to the very goals it is supposedly designed to support, the belligeranti and the sheepsouled journalist then elevate themselves, as though they were standing above mere probability and bowels, and will pretend that war is some crazy ass amalgam of miracles and chances and write something to the effect that - but suppose Iraq gets better in the next three months, or – but things can still turn around in Iraq. Oh fucking A. Oh my right and left buttocks. Oh my very dick, let it gangrene and fall off me – for this is the crazy motherfucker of the thing that makes me think I have wandered into a vast den of the lobotomized, a zombie zone, where the disconnect between the conditions that are ascertained and the supposed uncertainty of what follows from them has become the gospel that we believe, in spite of the mounting pile of corpses (smell the magic!) in front of our very eyes. In this sad and idiot bombed zone, the zone of the mind, where the terrorists are D.C. courtiers and the target is your synapses, the melancholy of that sign off optimism is that, really, it is an invitation to lose it all right there. Take out cock, pussy, cerebellum, inner organs, and all the change and keys in your pocket, put it in the tray, and let the monsters of the governing class eat it all right before your astonished, or actually tranquilized, eyeballs. What the fuck? Why not believe anything? It is as if I decided to build a birdhouse, but couldn’t predict, before I finished it, whether it was actually a supersonic automobile.

Now, why - as we pass into the interns’ white chambers and calmly discuss today’s autopsy, stripping off our green rubber gloves – why have dialectics and structure, or the Way and process – why have they so utterly vanished in Middle Class America? White magicians and black know that dialectics and structure haven’t vanished from reality itself. But LI suspects that the disappearance of the political power of the working class is intimately related to the fall of dialectics and structure, or process and the way, and the rise of a peculiar seriality interiorized in the very heart of middle class existence. Our friend, IT, has written a dissertation that tells part of that history. The repressed, in the U.S., is dialectics and structure, and our great post-industrial growth industry is in managing the return of that particular repressed, which takes all kinds of threatening forms in the rabies festival (in which LI has a tent at least) outside the gated community.

A subject to which we will return later.

the sleeper cell

“Beyond the social level of the public, neighborly sphere there is, once again, the political level. All states have the propensity to protect themselves with the very mechanisms that are so feared at the neighborly level: secret services are part of any state apparatus. Their agents – who may be ‘sleepers’ (programmed and waking up only once alerted), “moles” (actively digging for information under a surface of normalcy), or simple analysts (plowing through often public information and in the process extracting potential secrets…) – ideally never emerge as actors. Their working identity is to remain secret so as not to jeopardize the protective functions of the state, and the underlying purpose is to allow members of the polity to remain safe, even ignorant, of the threats to their normal lives.” – Regina Bendix, Sleeper’s Secrets, Actor’s Revelations

Cruel age! Do you feel how black and low, how heavy the heavens are on the head of man? The poor little children, from their first years, are imbrued with horrible ideas, trembling in their cradles. The pure virgin, innocent, who feels damned by the pleasure the Spirit inflicts upon her. The wife in the marriage bed, martyred by his attacks, resisting and yet, for some moments, feeling in herself… A horrid affair known by those who have the tenia. To feel in oneself a double life, to distinguish the movements of the monster, sometimes agitated, sometimes with a soft tenderness, undulant, which is even more disquieting, making one feel one is at sea! Thus, one scurries about lost, having a horror of oneself, wishing to escape oneself, to die… - Michelet, The Witch

Regina Bendix is an ethnographer. Her essay on the notion of the “sleeper” – as in “sleeper cell” – really jacked me up. Bendix first covers the folkloric bases, listing the various sleepers from mythology, like the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, and then asks about its use after 9/11. LI read those articles about sleeper cells of terrorists too, but so asleep were we that we never thought about the notion of the sleeper as a secret identity. Bendix’s essay concentrates mostly on the self-identity of the sleeper. LI, however, went off on another train of thought. For if the sleeper is the name of the one who disguises himself to be like the rest of us, surely that implies we are sleepers – that we even, in a sense, recognize this in the metaphorical unconscious. Nietzsche, in The Use and Abuse of History, has a wonderful passage about human beings as a herd, in which the vocables of the German have a tinge of the ox and the cow – the passage seems to be transcribed from the human moo. However, the idea of a sleeper as a watcher, the sleeper as the man awake, or the man who can awake, awaited, of course, the great surveillance discourses of the twentieth century.

And after all, sleep does bind us. The night comes down, and at a certain point we can say, everybody is asleep, and be pretty confident that we are mostly right. But we don’t say, everybody is awake, because even in the daylight we have a sneaking suspicion that waking is a much harder state to define. Sleep is our team identity. We are all sleepers. And we can’t even say for sure that we sleep alone, although we take that on trust. Perhaps we fall into the collective sleep.

LI, though, wants to be a sleeper – wants to be the agent whose duty is to pretend to be asleep, and to be really, all of the time, awake. That agent, as Michelet implies, is the devil, or of the devil’s party: “To feel in oneself a double life, to distinguish the movements of the monster, sometimes agitated, sometimes with a soft tenderness, undulant…” Witches, once; and now, here, today, the American loser at the present moment, stinking quietly away somewhere, or the tattoos and dyed hair waifs and strays, embodying some kind of possession or addiction. In the double life of the sleeper, the best disguise, is to seem like one is not asleep at all – to grind one’s teeth like the underground man at every insult.

But I don't know if I have that much jam.

wormwood under the ice cream

And the name of that star is called Wormwood; and the third part of the waters became wormwood, signifies the infernal falsity from which their self-derived intelligence is derived, and by which all the truths of the Word are falsified. – Emmanuel Swedenborg. The Apocalypse revealed

Robert Kagan is a bloody old soul, one of war’s puppet intellectuals – not The war, not the war in Iraq, but war as a system, the War system in which we live – and as such, he sometimes speaks the truth. Ask Belzebuub about the anatomy of the fly, and ask Kagan about the tendency of Americans to … well, not fight so much as rain destruction down on their supposed enemies. His column about the Republicans, the Dems, and the American love of war – or, rather, War’s love of America – is right on target:

“In this respect, there is even less debate over the general principles of American foreign policy than during the Vietnam era. In those days, opponents of the war insisted that not just President Richard Nixon was rotten but that the "system" was rotten. They did not just reject the Vietnam War, they rejected the whole containment strategy of Dean Acheson and Harry Truman, which, they rightly claimed, helped produce the intervention in the first place. They rejected the idea that the United States could be a benevolent force in the world.

Today Democrats insist that the United States will be such a force as soon as George W. Bush leaves office. Although they pretend they have a fundamental doctrinal dispute with the Bush administration, their recommendations are less far-reaching. They argue that the United States should generally try to be nicer, employ more "soft power" and be more effective when it employs "hard power." That may be good advice, but it hardly qualifies as an alternative doctrine.
Many around the world will thrill at the defeat of Republicans next week. They should enjoy the moment while they can. When the smoke clears, they will find themselves dealing with much the same America, with all its virtues and all its flaws.”

War’s puppet here can display his tone of preening certainty because he knows the props and devises of court society. It is a society surrounded, on every side, by the prosperity brought on by war system. The harms are all out in the beyond, which is a place tv cameras roam for the odd freak footage.
...

Which brings me to what I was going to write in this post, and which I just wrote, part of, to our far flung correspondent, Mr. T. in NYC. A little personal reminiscence from the fumes of last night:

… Last night, I went to see Maidstone, that rarely seen Norman Mailer film. Which was great - it was funny, Mailer was in his prime asshole decade, the misogyny was over the top, and the way he kept taking the piss out of people, just begging for some hitback, and the end of the film, which is famous, lived up to its sheer... weirdness. Rip Torn tries to kill Mailer in front of his family with a hammer. Or at least flails away at him, drawing some blood and much wrestling – with Mailer sincerely trying to save his head. I saw this with my friend A., who doesn’t love Mailer – but I do. I long for that spirit to be set lose in the U.S. again. That is, the spirit of testing oneself, instead of immediately responding to vulnerability by seeking absolute cures: gated communities, ever more technically advanced militaries, ever fewer rights, ever creeping encroachments on what we do by the Polizei.

And then I went to the continental club and listened to James McMurtry. Anyway, dancing and hopping away to McMurtry, and seeing the usual UT undergrads there, so damn and briefly happy, such plausible lovely girls, such awkward guys, and the stuffed milk fed sports bodies raising their beers every time McMurtry mentioned the joy of shooting guns, drinking beer, or the state of his hardon, I started thinking about the ice cream we live in and how I just fail to enjoy it - in fact, under all that ice cream, I feel there is an apocalypse, that the structures are falling in very, very slow motion. And so all our personal agonies all seem to dissolve in sugars – but the sugars, I think, really mirror the agonies, they don’t destroy them. They will crystalize later - or so some daemon tells me.

And I wondered if this is just because I'm mildly deranged.

And then I got home and decided that it didn't matter, since the apocalypse under the ice cream is my subject, God fuckin' damn it.

civil war in Iraq - as planned

One war disguised the other in Iraq.

One war spanned the invasion to the fall of Baghdad. America’s reason to invade was, of course, a sham, but there are degrees of shamming. Where fraud does converge with truth is the American determination to overthrow Saddam Hussein. This war could be called the formal war of the U.S. against Iraq. The second war operated behind this war, and then came out into the open in the occupation. This was the substance of America's war against Iraq, and it was waged against the very existence of Iraq. It proceeded by zigzags, but with the general goal of reducing Iraq to a weak network of independent states, all of which would be colonies of the U.S. in much the way Kuwait is. Call it the Kuwaitization of Iraq. It was as brutal and as immoral a plan as any hatched by the Nazi Wehrmacht. It has resulted, so far, in some 300,000 to 600,000 deaths. Its genealogy is rooted in the American sponsorship of death squads that was one of the common features of the Cold War era, except that the dirty wars Americans sponsored in the seventies and eighties were never on this extensive a scale. Pentagon planners were no doubt expecting that the reduction of Iraq would result in some minor, some Guatamalan sized death pile – 100,000 butcheries, tops.

However, once you treat a country the way Milosovic treated Yugoslavia, you get a Yugoslavian situation.

Think LI is exaggerating? Let’s look at two interesting pieces of evidence that the U.S. plan was, all along, the crushing of Iraq, its disassembly, and the creation of perpetually vulnerable smaller states that the U.S. could “manage” – steal from, leave in utter poverty, and site bases on.

The first is this surprisingly candid interview, today, with Jay Garner, the first overseer of the second war. Jay Conan, of NPR, is the questioner.

“CONAN: And I also mentioned that you were involved in the establishment of the no-fly zone and the secure area in the north of Iraq after the war in 1991. And as we think about the future of Iraq, does the current - the present of Kurdistan in Northern Iraq, does the point that way at all, do you think?

Lt. Gen. GARNER: Oh, absolutely. I think the plan – the talk now to partition the country – I don’t like the word partition, but I think divide into federal districts or federal entities. You know, we’re already partitioned. Anybody that don’t think that partition exists is - either hasn’t been there, or they had their eyes closed when they were there. But to have a Kurdish area, a Sunni area, and Shia area, with Baghdad separate with a decentralized government, federal government over it I think is the way to go.

CONAN: Yet this process of partitioning, it’s not clearly demarcated in most areas of the country. Obviously, the Kurds still have a major problem…

Lt. Gen. GARNER: Oh, I think what you do, you have a referendum and you say – and in the referendum, you vote on what area want to be – to live in.

CONAN: Well, right now, people are being asked to – forced to move from the areas at gun point.

Lt. Gen. GARNER: And so – but if you allow them to vote what area – it means you would end up probably redrawing some provincial boundaries. But yeah, right no, you see a lot of shifting going on. You see some of Sadr’s people moving up around Karkuk to try to influence like that.”

Interestingly, what Garner proposes for Iraq is what the U.S. violently opposes in Israel - a right of return that would displace the Israelis. Why not just say, look, Israelis that arrived from Russia will just have to go back there. And so on...

So, after instituting a plan for the dissolution of the state, Americans are surprised that Iraq is falling into civil war. Must be those awful savage Muslims, right? Cynicism and incompetence are the muses of this particular war.

But more... We've seen the mindset of America's first overseer, in 2003. In 2004 began the process of constitution making. Here, we have plenty of evidence from Peter Galbraith’s book on Iraq. I’ve interviewed Peter Galbraith. He’s a personable guy. He’s also the son of one of my heroes. But wherever Galbraith goes, trouble follows. When he was the ambassador to Croatia, as Roger Cohen has written in his book on the Yugoslavian wars, he either turned a blind eye or actively cooperated in defying the arms embargo on Croatia. In 1994, remember, Croatia was ruled by Tudjman, who was bent on ethnically cleansing Croatia of Serbs. Tudjman approached Galbraith to request that the U.S. not block the transfer of Iranian arms to Croatia. Galbraith transmitted this message to Clinton, and the U.S. government decided to defy the arms embargo imposed in 1991.

This is normal among the ‘humanitarian interventionist’ crowd: its appeal to only those international laws that it decides not to break, its friendliness towards a certain kind of warlord, and its magnification of conflict, a consequence that it then uses to proceed with its ‘humanitarian’ plans.

Here, to refresh all of our memories, is a report from the Hague war crimes trial from 2004:

“Belgrade, 18 October: The minutes of a meeting between the late Croatian president Franjo Tudjman and the Croatian military leadership, which took place on the northern Adriatic archipelago of Brijuni on 31 June 1995, were admitted as evidence during the testimonies of Croatian Army general Imra Agotic and former US ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith at the Hague war crimes tribunal in the autumn of 2002, a Belgrade lawyer has said.

"I am profoundly irritated by the cynicism with which the Croatian public perceives as a sensational discovery what preceded Operation Storm in the Krajina (Serb-occupied territory of Croatia) in the summer of 1995," Branislav Tapuskovic, a lawyer and former friend of the court in the trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague, has said in an interview with the Belgrade-based newspaper Vecernje novosti published on Monday [18 October].

The authenticity of the minutes of the meeting, where Tudjman said that "the Serbs should be dealt such blows as to practically disappear", was never disputed and it was perfectly evident from this record that there was a plan to launch Operation Storm with the prior consent of the United States and Germany, the lawyer said.

The former head of Tudjman's office, Hrvoje Sarinic, has confirmed that the Americans set territorial limits and ordered that the Croatian forces should stop before Banja Luka. That part of the trial was public, it was televised, and the records made available to me by the Hague tribunal's prosecution were hundreds of pages long," Tapuskovic said.”

This is the same Galbraith who advises the Kurdish government, and – as shown in his latest book on Iraq – has actively tried to get the Kurds to impose the most drastic kind of partition on Iraq.

This essay by Zaid Al-Ali tracks Galbraith’s interventions in the illegal construction of the constitution last year – illegal by the rules laid down by the invaders themselves. al-Ali quotes this astonishing passage:

“But Galbraith's own account suggests that he (acting in an individual capacity), practically formulated the position of the Kurdish leadership himself, and in so doing had a crucial impact on the substance of the Iraqi constitution. He writes:

"I realized that the Kurdish leaders had a conceptual problem in planning for a federal Iraq. They were thinking in terms of devolution of power - meaning that Baghdad grants them rights. I urged that the equation be reversed. In a memo I sent Barham (Salih) and Nechirvan (Barzani) in August (2003), I drew a distinction between the previous autonomy proposals and federalism: ‘Federalism is a ‘bottom up' system. The basic organizing unit of the country is the province or state. [...] In a federal system residual power lies with the federal unit (i.e. state or province); under an autonomy system it rests with the central government. The central government has no ability to revoke a federal status or power: it can revoke an autonomy arrangement. [...] The Constitution should state that the Constitution of Kurdistan, and laws made pursuant to the Constitution, is the supreme law of Kurdistan. Any conflict between laws of Kurdistan and the laws of or Constitution of Iraq shall be decided in favor of the former.' These ideas eventually became the basis of
Kurdistan's proposals for an Iraq constitution."”

al-Ali analyzes this passage with a certain scholarly softness, instead of screaming at the top of his lungs – LI’s own favorite method of communication. He writes of the ‘ethical’ problem here. Damn right. Fucking right. Fucking terribly, terribly right. And he concludes:

“From the extract set out above, it should also be obvious that Galbraith went beyond the objectives that his Kurdish patrons initially wanted to achieve. Indeed, whereas the Kurds requested of Galbraith that he provide advice on how to structure Iraq's federal system of government, his proposed course of action - which included allowing the Kurdish constitution to be the supreme law in Kurdistan - actually amounts to establishing a confederal system of government, which is far from being the same thing.”

To conclude: the civil war isn’t a terrible product of the savage factions in Iraq, those beheading beasts, as a bulwark against which the humane Americas have to stay in Iraq. The civil wars are a logical product of American policy in Iraq from the beginning of the occupation. This is sometimes disguised under the American ‘suggestion’ of federalism, but the American object in Iraq was and still is the fundamental undermining of that country as a sovereign entity. Period. So much for the sliminess of the Bush objective. As in any Bush program, however, the sliminess of the goal is undermined by the vast incompetence of the means – and so, instead of the atomization of Iraq enforced by U.S. troops, we have the factionalization of Iraq in which U.S. troops are used, now by this side, now by that, as a trump card.

abandoning iraq is the same as occupying iraq

“We've got five years, my brain hurts a lot…” – David Bowie

“The message to the Baghdad morgue was simple - they could do what they liked with the plastic handcuffs, but the metal ones were expensive and needed to be returned. Such is the murderous state of affairs in Iraq at the moment that the demand, made by a militia gunman who is also believed to be a member of the Special Police Commandos, hardly caused a stir.

There was a similar lack of shock when a dozen bodies were brought in with identification cards showing that each had the name Omar. The catch here was that Omar is a Sunni name, and this fact was enough to seal their fate at Shia checkpoints.

Baghdad is full of checkpoints. Leaving the Hamra Hotel, where the dwindling band of British journalists outside the Green Zone stay, means negotiating the Badr Brigade, their Shia competitors the Mehdi Army of Moq-tada al-Sadr, and the Kurdish peshmerga. The Iraqi police and the government paramilitaries, in the meantime, have their own barriers. And there are others: the Shia Defenders of Khadamiya, set up by Moq-tada's cousin Hussein al-Sadr, and the government-backed Tiger and Scorpion brigades. They all have similar looks: balaclavas or wrap-around sunglasses and headbands, black leather gloves with fingers cut off, and a very lethal arsenal of weapons. When not manning checkpoints, they hurtle through the streets in 4x4s, scattering the traffic by firing in the air. Out of sight, they stand accused of arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings.” – Independent, Operation enduring chaos - Kim Sengupta

LI often reads op ed pieces that begin, the United States must not abandon Iraq.

This impassioned moral plea from the smug, who are not about to leap out of their chairs to volunteer to go over and help save Iraqis, ignores the fact that the United States has already abandoned Iraq. The occupation and the abandonment have been as one thing, a dialectical entity, a living breathing monstrosity condoned by the Americans, paid for by the Americans, ruthlessly put through by the Americans, and for which America’s loss of prestige is way too little a punishment, one of the signs that this country has soured in its very pores and ouns. The abandonment started with the looting. It went through de-structuring the government. It went through the inability to even control the weapons, the random imprisonment of innocents, and the inability to imprison criminals, the razing Fallujah, the berms around Sunni cities mostly because they are Sunni, the outsourcing of American troops as instruments of ethnic cleaning, the dirty and appalling laws allowing mercenaries carte blanche in Iraq, and the now institutionalized Green Zone mentality, an almost perfect imitation of that of the Ba’athist oligarchs. Somehow, the message of the Lancet study hasn’t sunk in. The right is still attacking it, comically enough, as a dartboard approach – this is the same right that continually cites polls using sampling methods that are much narrower in scope. LI is rather suspicious, actually, of polls, and we read with interest all of the controversy surrounding the Lancet study. None of the complaints against it really confronted did more than cast into doubt some marginal process issues.
If one accepts the Lancet study, or even halves its equilibrium point to 300,000 extra fatalities, the great fact is not so much that Americans have killed a great number of Iraqis – it is that a far greater number have been killed by other Iraqis since the Americans liquidated security in the country in 2003 and signally failed, themselves, to fill that gap. And that vast number of deaths has worked like acid on the innumerable threads that keep any society together.

The question, then, isn’t about abandoning Iraq, but whether the malign and awful invaders are going to continue to sit on that country like a nightmare the people cannot get rid of.

“Iraq's savage sectarian war is now regarded as a greater obstacle to any semblance of peace returning than the insurgency, and was the main reason for the Americans recently pouring 12,000 troops into the capital - an operation that, they now acknowledge, has failed.

"Yet, ironically, the death squads are the result of US policy. At the beginning of last year, with no end to the Sunni insurgency in sight, the Pentagon was reported to have decided to train Shia and Kurdish fighters to carry out "irregular missions". The policy, exposed in the US media, was called the "Salvador Option" after the Ameri-can-backed counter-insurgency in Latin America more than 20 years ago, which led to 70,000 deaths and countless instances of human rights abuse.

"Some of the most persistent allegations of abuse have been made against the Wolf Brigade, many of whom were formerly in Saddam's Baathist forces. Their main US adviser until April last year was James Steele, who, in his own biography, states that he commanded the US military group in El Salvador during the height of the guerrilla war and was involved in counter-insurgency training. The complaints against Iraqi special forces continue. At the end of last year, while in Iraq, I interviewed Ahmed Sadoun who was arrested in Mosul and held for seven months before being released without charge.

"During that time, he said, he was tortured. He showed marks on his body, which were the results of the beatings and burnings. Mr Sadoun, 38, did not know which paramilitary group, accompanied by American soldiers, had seized him, but the Wolf Brigade was widely involved in suppressing disturbances in Mosul at the time.”

We know how the death squad template was imported. Next question: Where do the militias get their arms?

This is from a NYT story a day ago:

"The American military has not properly tracked hundreds of thousands of weapons intended for Iraqi security forces and has failed to provide spare parts, maintenance personnel or even repair manuals for most of the weapons given to the Iraqis, a federal report released Sunday has concluded.

The report was undertaken at the request of Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who is the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee …
…
The answers came Sunday from the inspector general’s office, which found major discrepancies in American military records on where thousands of 9-millimeter pistols and hundreds of assault rifles and other weapons have ended up. The American military did not even take the elementary step of recording the serial numbers of nearly half a million weapons provided to Iraqis, the inspector general found, making it impossible to track or identify any that might be in the wrong hands.”

Notice, LI still hasn’t listed the combinations in Iraq, as we promised to do yesterday and which we were cocky enough to do in 2003. That is because the situation has retreated to a sheer Brownian motion of violence. Still, that doesn’t mean that there are not more probable outcomes. Realistically, the U.S. is probably going to remain stuck in Iraq, multiplying the violence, for the foreseeable future – both Democrats and Republicans being as one in the D.C. consensus that we must not ‘lose’ in Iraq, which has nothing to do with Iraq, where we have already lost, and everything to do with D.C. Having flourished on the money spouted out by the Pentagon during the past five years like a tick fattening on blood, we have to imagine what D.C. will do by thinking like a tick. If a tick could get up on its hind legs and make speeches to dogs, cattle, and other warm blooded creatures, advising them for their own good, it would sound much like the editors of the Washington Post.

So, we should start our combinations by trying to think like a tick - like the odious bugs who rule us. But thinking like a tick makes my brain hurt a lot, so I will put this off until another post.

In my last post, I reprinted one from 2003 about Iraq in which I played the combinations from the American p.o.v. – that is, I listed some basic possible states (all of them combining different possibilities) that the American war in Iraq could move to. I wrote that the American policy of that time was to bet everything on one of those scenarios, and that the bet was made regardless of the fact that the combination of possibilities seem to rank it pretty low among possible outcomes. And that even then, the Americans were not resourcing or acting in such a way as to make it more possible, or patch over the internal incompossibilities –if anything, American behavior contradicted the America’s preferred goals.

The number one goal, in 2003, was this: “1. American troops withdraw. We leave behind a stable, American friendly democracy, that pays America back its 200 billion dollars [spent on the war], with interest, in a timely matter.”

By the terms of this goal, America lost the war in Iraq in Spring of 2004. In fact, winning and losing are, in a sense, stupid terms for what happened. America became irrelevant in Iraq in 2004. There was not going to be a stable state. There was not going to be an American friendly state. There was not going to be a democracy (in the broad sense – with an independent judiciary, a strong legislature, a unified chain of command over the army, etc., etc.). The Wolfowitzian promise that America would be repaid the money expended on this war was not only not going to happen, but was universally forgotten.

Now, incredibly, for the last two years the Bush administration and the majority of the governing class has pretended that America still has a chance 1. It doesn't. The impossibility is two fold: there is no will to do what would be necessary to achieve 1 in the U.S. And there is no possible way to go from the situation in Iraq back now back to a situation in which 1 is possible. It is like a cracked egg - you can't uncrack it.

In order to obviate the obvious improbability of America achieving 1, the discussion about America’s role in Iraq has been reduced to a question of staying – a wholly abstract question that tells us nothing about what the Americans are staying there to do, how they are going to do, what means they are going to use to do it, etc. Of course, whereever a vacuum of real thought occurs, ethical sentimentalism rushes in. The ethical sentimentalism of the moment is that America owes Iraq. Well, that's the fucking truth. But it is not going to 'repay' Iraq by staying and interfering in the only paths possible to peace in Iraq.

Now, I’d like to put forth another series of combinations, but it is much harder to do at the moment. My preferred combination is not from the American p.o.v. I’d like to see the Americans leave Iraq, and the Iraqis themselves hold unconditional talks between factions not to create an absolute peace, but to create the conditions for peace talks. I’d like to see the factions agree on lowering the level of violence in their areas, as well as agreeing not to attack other areas. As in Lebanon, the first step to peace is not an absolute solution to the question of power, but, first, a recognition of who has power. Only then will Iraq be able to move towards folding the militias into a reconstituted army and actually creating a new Iraqi state. I have a strong suspicion that the new Iraqi state will include Northern Iraq in name only.

It would be a D.o.G. [delusion of grandeur] to think that the Americans would cooperate on what Iraq really needs right now, however. The U.S. is still unwilling to accept reality – that is, the lesser degree of their power and influence in the Middle East. Just as Thomas Friedman and Paul Wolfowitz wanted, the Americans blindly smashed an order in the Middle East, but it turns out that this order was the optimal order for American influence. To try to prolong American hegemony in the Middle East in a new, Bushian order will sap the political will of the Americans and, in the long run, be a tremendous waste of their resources. It won’t work. However, that it won’t work still is not evident to the American governing class.

Anyway, I’m going to try to list some combinations with various American policy changes in Iraq, just to see what they would look like. In the next post, I think.

from the past

LI likes to go through the early years, sometimes, to see what we got right and what we got wrong. This post, from 2003, right after Bush's first request for an 80 billion dollar supplemental for the war, got one thing very wrong: under the influence of the Gulf war, we really figured that the U.S. would try to squeeze back the money for the Gulf War II. Otherwise, the combinations look pretty good.

“Monday, September 08, 2003


All right. Let's do a review. The war was supposed to bring some benefits. There would be costs, there would be benefits. Now we have a better picture of both, and we have a sense of how -- from the American perspective -- they are defined. One of the great benefits of the war was the bringing down of Saddam H. The cost, in human lives and in dollars, hasn't yet been toted up -- on the Iraqi side it may never be -- but as of today we have some feel for it.

So, the Bush administration has defined the ultimate benefit in Iraq in terms of several abstractions and one pre-war claim. The pre-war claim is that Iraqi oil will pay for the war and the American contribution to Iraq. In other words, we are spending about 150-200 billion dollars on Iraq, but we will receive that money back. The abstractions can be boiled down to: a democratic, American friendly country. Like Iran under the Shah, only with elections.

Given these baselines, we can come up with combinations of possible outcomes, assign them probabilities, and ask which one will give us both 1) the greatest benefit and 2) the best odds.

I can think of five basic combinations.

1. American troops withdraw. We leave behind a stable, American friendly democracy, that pays America back its 200 billion dollars, with interest, in a timely matter.

2. American troops withdraw. The government that is left behind is less friendly to America than Kuwait, but more friendly than Iran. It is, however, stable, and has certain democratic aspects. The 200 billion dollars is not paid back.

3. American troops leave. The American friendly democracy that is left behind tries to repay the American debt, causing a nation wide rebellion. It is overthrown by a government that is hostile to America.

4. American troops leave. Iraq is riven with conflict. The 200 billion dollars is gone. The conflict lasts for a long time, is destabilizing, and no side in it is openly pro-American.

5. American troops don't leave, but have to stay indefinitely, due to conflict. Another 100 billion dollars is spent on Iraq, but the nation is riven with conflict. Casualties mount. No stability, no democracy, and increasing harm to American forces.

One can argue that there are innumerable subsets. There are. But I imagine each one simply enriches the detail of one or another item on this list.

The problem with the Bush solution is simple. It bets everything on 1. Myself, I think one has about the same chance as Dennis Kucinich has of being the next US president.

The second option is much more possible. But humans drive their own history -- it will definitely be made impossible the more Bush bets on 1. The other three options are progressively worse for American interests. And for Iraq.

So, rationally, for our 150-200 billion dollars -- money we are not going to see again -- I'd say the reasonable thing to do is to take 2 as a scenario and try to improve it. That means ... well, it means handing power over to the Iraqi cabinet, and letting Bremer tell rotary clubs in Indiana all about his splendid plan for an Iraqi constitution. It means getting real about the money -- this money isn't coming back. It means letting the Iraqis decide what kind of economy they want -- from the contractors they hire to repair oil wells to the market system they are comfortable with. Of course, the "Iraqis" don't operate in isolation. But we should certainly not get into a situation in which there is a puppet Iraqi elite that simply obeys Americans, and thus abruptly abridges its shelf life. The commentary I've read about Iraq is truly odd -- it is as if nobody even thinks about what happens when the Americans withdraw. The Americans are not going to enforce a permanent solution to the Iraq problem -- period. The arguments are all about the chaos that will ensue if we withdraw right now, and how we have to do this, and how we have to do that... But by the force of things (ah, Lucretian phrase!) the Iraqis are the ones who will be there when the Americans are long gone. The american exit strategy better be shaped with that reality in mind.”

halloween

Here’s a Halloween story for you all. From Histoire curieuse et pittoresque des sorcier, devins, magiciens, astrologues, voyants, revenants, etc., by Mathias de Giraldo

Un pâtre du village de Blow, près de la ville de Kadam, en Bohème, apparut quelque temps. Il appelait certaines personnes, qui ne manquaient pas de venir dans la huitaine. Les paysans de Blow déterrerent ce pâtre et le réinhumererent avec un pieu qu’ils lui passerent à travers le corps. Cet homme, en cet état, se moquait de ceux qui lui faisaient subir ce traitement, et leur disait qu’il avaient bonne grace de lui donner ainsi un bâton pour se defender contre les chiens. La même nuit il se releva, et effraya par sa presence plusieurs personnes, et en suffoqua plus qu’il n’avait fait jusqu’alors. On le livra ensuite au bourreau, qui le mit sur une charrette pour le transporter hors du village et l’y brûler. Ce cadaver hurlait comme un furieux, et remuait les pieds et les mains comme un vivant, et losqu’on le perca de nouveau avec des pieux, il jeta de tres-grands cris, et rendit du sang vermeil et en grande quantité. Enfin on le brula, et cette exécution mit fin aux apparitions et aux infestations de ce spectre.

“A village shepherd from Blow, near to the village of Kadam, in Bohemia, appeared for a while [after his death]. He called upon certain persons, who did not fail to come to him within eight days. The peasants of Blow dug up the shepherd and re-buried him with a steak through his body. That man, in that estate, mocked them, thanking them for giving him a stick with which to defend himself against dogs. The same nite he rose and frightened several people, and suffocated more than he’d done before. They finally gave him to the executioner, who put him on a cart to transport him out of the village and burn him. The cadaver screamed like a maniac, and moved his hands and feet like a live person, and when they pierced him with stakes again, he emitted loud cries, and spewed out scarlet blood, in great quantities. At last they burned him, and that execution put an end to the apparitions and infestations of this specter.”

PS
And a little Halloween Borgesian touch for LI’s far clung correspondent in NYC, Mr. T. This is from Lew Spence’s encyclopedia of the occult. I’d like to find one of these folks.

Almoganenses is the name given by the Spaniards to certain people who, by the flight and song of birds, meetings with wild animals, and various other means, foretold coming events, whether good or evil. "They carefully preserve among themselves," says Laurent Valla, "books which treat of this science, where they find rules of all sorts of prognostications and predictions. The soothsayers are divided into two classes, one, the masters or principals, the other the disciples and aspirants."
Another kind of knowledge is also attributed to them, that of being able to indicate not only the way taken by horses and other beasts of burden which are lost, but even the road followed by one or more persons. They can specify the kind and shape of the ground, whether the earth is hard or soft, covered with sand or grass, whether it. is a broad road, paved or sanded, or narrow, twisting paths, and tell also how many passengers are on the road. They can thus follow the track of anyone, and cause thieves to be pursued and apprehended. Those writers who mention the Almoganenses, however, do not specify either the period when they flourished, or the country or province they occupied, but it seems possible from their name and other considerations that they were Moorish.

marabout hideousness

"And the Iraqi says, "What do you mean this is a show?'"

On April 18, 1999, in the NYT Magazine section, there was a brief article by Teller about Robert-Houdin’s trip to Algeria:

“On Oct. 28, 60 burnoose-clad chieftains and their retinues arrived at Algiers's Bab Azoun Theater to see Houdin. The magician began with a few pleasant surprises: he produced cannonballs and bouquets from a hat; he threw coins into the air, which then appeared in a crystal box suspended above the audience; he filled an empty silver punch bowl with steaming coffee -- a great hit with the Arab java lovers.

Having tantalized the audience with humor, Houdin began the psychological assault. He brought out a strongbox with a ring for a handle, and placed it on the floor. He asked for a muscular volunteer to come up onstage and lift the chest. A volunteer, a particularly burly man, did so easily.

Then Houdin waved his wand at the volunteer and said, ''Voila! You are weaker than a woman; now, try to lift the box.'' With a disdainful swagger, the volunteer seized the handle again, but though he sweated and strained, though his compatriots cheered him on, he could not move the chest. After a few minutes he suddenly screamed, fell to his knees, tore his hands from the ring and fled, crying for Allah to save him.

Houdin followed this trick by catching a marked bullet in an apple, and by making a member of the audience vanish. By the end of the show, the chieftains were exclaiming, ''Shaitan!'' (the Arabic equivalent of ''Satan'') as they ran for the exits in terror.
But Houdin was a magician, not a politician, so he had a conscience. After the show he sent translators to explain to the spectators that his tricks were just like the tricks of the marabouts -- theater and science, not the supernatural. (A powerful electromagnet under the stage kept the box on the ground; an electrical shock sent the strongman running.) In this case, a magician revealing his tricks paid off. Three days after the performance, 30 of the most powerful chieftains presented Houdin with an illuminated manuscript praising his art and pledging their steadfast allegiance to France.”

Since that article appeared in the golden age of Good King Bill, our politicians have invaded Mohammedan countries as the best damn team of stage magicians ever assembled – for instance, doing the disappearing army trick in Iraq. However, to LI, Teller’s story – which of course derives from Robert-Houdin’s excellent memoirs (sadly, to those who’ve emailed asking about said memoirs, Dover Press apparently has discontinued printing them – although this is a great opportunity for some Publishing company to hire LI to translate them for a whole new audience!) – puts into question the fissure between magic and politics, magic and the marketplace, magic and rational choice, etc. For it is the story of a type: it is the story of white magic that is favored by historians and the writers of Ripley’s believe it or not as well. It is the superstitious native vs. the rational white man. It is the script of a thousand Tarzan movies, and returns (turned about, satanically, the seachange undergone by the repressed) as voodoo attacks, or the Cat Woman, or I walked with a Zombie, or the Night of the Living Dead. It has a lively, marginal existence, and a happy ending – they always bring the illuminated manuscript in the end, and they always pledge their steadfast allegiance to France – or even better, Uncle Sam!
…
I’ve noticed that the disgruntlement with the ingratitude of the marabout has seeped far into the belligeranti culture. It was always going to happen. In the first few weeks of the occupation, when the looting broke out, there was the beginning of the narrative of Iraqi ‘immaturity’ – plus the shame of so many of the small dicked males in said soon to be paradise of free enterprise that it took the White Gods to drive Saddam into his spiderhole. However, we were going to be on the case in a jiffy, teaching the Iraqi policeman to respect democracy as much as American policemen do, and things like that. Oh, the things we wanted to teach the Iraqis! Our hearts were so open. We even wanted to play sex games with them at Abu Ghraib, or at least according to Representative Shays from Connecticut. How American is that? Not only fun now, but later on, you can have repressed memories therapy and learn what has been fucking up your whole life. So it is a twofer.

I am not, of course, saying that we were stupid – the savage knows one thing, and that is fear. But, like the kindest, gentlest Dr. Moreau’s, we were going to train that group of mutants into the best damn step and fetchit nation you ever saw.

But now, three years later – why you just have to go to National Review’s current source of Oriental wisdom, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies to see how damned depressed our belligeranti are becoming. It isn't the war so much - the belligeranti have the stomach for war. They are tough like that. But it is the realization that our gentleness has been misinterpreted as general pussiness by the hideous 'Umma', the insurgents, the cowards and fiends. Andrew McCarthy, a fellow at the institute and an absolute expert in Islam - in his bio, he modestly claims to have seen Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ten times - has been on the case:

“Much of this worldwide community of believers, you may have noticed, has a hard time with some basic tenets of Western civilization — freedom of speech, of religion, separation of church and state, equality between men and women, between Muslims and non-Muslims, and so on. Not exactly what you'd call a running start toward anything we'd recognize as a democracy.

The Umma, moreover, has a hard time with … well, the Umma. Today marks the end of Ramadan, said to be the sacred month in the Islamic calendar. Yet this year, as in many years past, it will be marked in blood. Ironically, just a few days ago Muslim activists were rising up in anger (is there ever a time when they're not rising up in anger?) over the realization that the 2012 Olympics in London will collide with Ramadan, putting observant pole-vaulters at a competitive disadvantage. Fasting obligations, however, seem to detract little from the energy required for slaughter. Shiites and Sunnis in Baghdad have somehow managed to bomb, bludgeon, and behead each other with furious abandon throughout this “holy month.””

Marabout fuckers. The Umma is a wonderful word – sorta like Smersh – and you can tell right away that it is a regular beehive of evil. And he who says evil says the devil – something that the white magicians can’t abide.

McCarthy’s column is about a recent statement by a State Department official that the U.S. has been arrogant and ignorant in Iraq. So not the truth!

“In any event, the Associated Press reported on Sunday that Fernandez now believes he has the problem figured out: We need to talk more. You see, though we have freed 26 million Muslims from Saddam's sadistic tyranny and given them a chance — whether or not they want it — to taste freedom, the United States is ignorant and imperious because we haven't had enough dialogue with the malcontents. But finally, according to Fernandez, “We are open to dialogue.” Why? Because “we all know that, at the end of the day, the solution to the hell and the killings in Iraq is linked to an effective Iraqi national reconciliation[.] … The Iraqi government is convinced of this.”

So there you have it. State's assessment from the senior diplomat responsible for conveying our position: The U.S. is arrogant and stupid, and what we need to pursue is the chatter course preferred by the Iraqi government. And, yes, that would be the same government whose thoroughly ineffective, Hezbollah-supporting, Iran apologist of a leader, Nouri al-Maliki, can't or won't crack down on Shiite militias — particularly the one led by his political ally, Muqtada al-Sadr, who may now outpace al Qaeda and disgruntled Baathists among Iraq's countless destabilizers.”

Truly, the Offending Freedom, er, or Defending Democracies is the think pack to join in this, a trough time in the forty year war to rid the world of terrorism. The sample from McCarthy, by the way, represents the moderate wing of this group of Front Liners.

Lois Poitras

Lois Poitras decided to do something foolhardy, and went to Iraq with a camera, and hung out with an anti-occupation politician during the 2005 election. Contrast this with the home of Kraus and Shafer and Hitchens, Slate, which elected to get its Iraqi election news from correspondant Tamara Chalabi – that’s right, Ahmed’s daughter. How sick is that. And so contrarian! Giggles must have swept the Slate D.C. office – so naughty. Why, it is as funny as making a mousse out of congealed Iraqi blood!

Well, Poitras didn’t do anything so chic and D.C., but spent time –
plebe that she is – in the Adhamiyah section of Baghdad filming … “*Dr. Riyadh* … a Sunni political candidate and medical doctor who sees the effects of war daily. Dr. Riyadh opposes U.S. occupation and calls for civil resistance, while hoping for a democracy based on Islamic principles.” One of the … wait for it … bad guys, must be. Ungrateful for the killing fields which, as Chris Hitchens has pointed out, are just the price people like him are willing to pay to stop Islamofascism.

Anyway, her Q and A here is fascinating, and the film sounds pretty
cool – those of you who get PBS might see if you can tune into some
rerun of My Country, My country.

However, as much as LI finds Poitras and the response to her film
heartening – there is still a part of this country that won’t accept
bullshit lying down – there was a q.and a. to remind us that under the present decider-clown, we are slouching towards giving up our right to freedom of speech at an alarming rate:

“*Fort Thomas, Ky.:* Have you found out yet why you have a score of 400 with Homeland Security? it is an outrage! The film was wondeful I am hoping to get it shown at my daughters HS - Thank you and please send our thanks to the Dr. and his family for sharing their lives with us!

This is an important work.

*Laura Poitras:* The reason I'm on the list is classified. What I was told my a source it that there is an accusation against me. I'm in the process of filing a Freedom of Information Act request which will probably take months or years to process. It is sad and also funny - no one gave me any trouble in Baghdad, but now that I'm home I'm suddenly dangerous. Makes me a little worried about the people who make this
kinds of decisions.”

Mother of mercy - an accusation filed against her. This is where I stick my poll through the screen - notice the chopped off locks? Yesterday, I decided I needed to look like Dreyer's Joan of Arc, got out the scissors, and snip snip snip - anyway, kiddies, here's the plan. Please address Andres Serrano and ask him to make President Bush the honoree of his next art work. An' at this point I withdraw my head, the camera filling with a huge eyelid coming down - wink! on a huge eye, a la a Warner Bros. cartoon, circa 1945 - and we return you to your regularly scheduled post...

The PBS site for the film is here, complete with podcast of conversation with George Packer. Hmm.

And a quote:

Maria Hinojosa: There is a moment in your film, when people are getting ready for the election and they're being spoken to by an American military official who says, "Your elections are going to be the biggest show on earth, they're going to be seen all over. Your show." And the Iraqi says, "What do you mean this is a show?" and he was confused. Tell me about that scene.

Laura Poitras: It was actually a shoot that I fought really hard to get on. Some of the access I got in Iraq came serendipitously, some of it went through repeated, repeated emails. For that particular shoot, I knew that there was going to be training of police before elections, and then I got an email and officially, they said, "No, the training is not going to happen, it's not going to happen." But somebody else sent me an email from the military and said, "Listen, it's happening, you didn't hear it from me." I approached the military and I got in.

It was two days of training where the U.S. State Department and Justice Department had put together a manual for training Iraqi lieutenants. So these were Iraqi police officers who were high up, and the U.S. brought them from all over the country to do this training. I filmed for the whole two days and during this one particular scene, it's a contractor for the Justice and State Departments who was conducting this training and talking about this is going to be such a great show. But then you listen to the conversation that develops, and you realize that the people he's talking to — the Iraqi police — are going to be on the front lines, so these are the people who are going to die in the show.

Maria Hinojosa: That's what he's saying to them, "This isn't a show for us."

Forgive a bit of blind and stupid optimism, but I think the Poitras approach is going to blow up, eventually, the Dracula’s castle the plutocrats are making of this country. We creep up upon them. Loonies such as myself, practicing homemade black magic. Filmmakers getting riffs from war supporters that lead in unexpected directions. My suggestion for a political motto at the moment in these here states is: Brothers and sisters, let's not slaughter other people.

Radical, eh?

Bush, our vanity robot, speaks

Out of curiosity, LI counted the number of times President Bush said “I believe” in today’s press conference. It comes out to 21. As we have said until saying it makes us fucking sick and tired of saying it, Iraq is a vanity war, caused, in part, by the power seized by the executive branch during the cold war that has allowed any president to use U.S. troops as mercenaries to fulfill whatever odious desire he happens to shelter. President Bush is different than most in that he is more emotionally crippled than is even usually the case for a politician – and let’s face it, the skill set for a politician can be pretty much read in the face of a politician -- all the taloned love of self combined with the usual middle manager's enormous and servile fears.

Thus, this war has been reduced, in the unimaginable claustrophobia of the oval office, to what Bush believes. The convergence of an anti-democratic structure and the pathologies of privilege meet and resonate in Bush’s credo, for what he believes in is… Bush. His defense of the entire Iraq war revolves around the phrase, “I believe” … in me. (cue the “Fame, I’m going to live forever!" music). The reiteration of that kind of thing is heady and tempting for the D.C. crowd – finally, the king openly relies on his own Godgiven kingliness, instead of any mere excuse provided by precedent or rationality. This is why Bush, among these syncophants, is known as ‘bold,’ he’s a ‘cowboy’, he’s ‘tough’. The old and reliable eunuch impulses kick in. Isn’t this the whole crowning point of meritocracy, the whole glorious apotheosis? The separation of the wealthy and privileged, finally, from the filth and sloppiness of the American plebe, the vast audience of suckers, who can hardly be relied upon to find their proper places in the American greatness project. Those places are to volunteer to be a soldier, god damn it. Get your fucking ass in uniform, and don’t ask beastly and silly questions about the children of the D.C. privileged. Those questions show such childishness, especially in the divine light radiated out by Bush’s “I believe.”

Well, besides giving Fred Barnes several orgasms with this press conference, we wonder if the drunken wobble of the American greatness project as it reliably produces 300 to 500 Iraqi dead per day isn’t going down just as a matter of course. In a sense, having a vanity robot telling us what he believes, as though this were some transforming data we hadn’t considered before, as if big dick Moses was coming down from the mountain to lay it out before us as we heedlessly danced around a golden calf we are paying Visa, Mastercharge and American Express for, at a new discount rate of 21 percent compounded monthly, and suddenly – ah, the light dawns upon us. Our president BELIEVES – well, we wonder if the suckers and zombies are going to take this bait once more.