Remora

Powers of Thought

The best American coverage of the protests world wide was carried by the Los Angeles Times. LI would bet that if ten million people around the world had protested in favor of Bush's position in Iraq, the Washington Post and the New York Times would have been alight with celebratory headlines. But no, we will give no headlines for peace marchers. Heavens.

The LA Times went with an honest report. It didn't mix protest against Tony Blair's policy in London with machine gun toting thugs marching in Baghdad as a species of the same thing. We liked these grafs in Sebastian Rotella's story:

"Leslie Druce, 70, marched in London carrying a placard that proclaimed "Bush and Blair ... Liars and Bullies."

"They treat us like we have no power of thought," Druce said. "Who are they kidding? Do they really feel threatened by the Iraqis? The U.S. could be such a power for good in the world, but Bush has chosen to be the bully boy instead. It really bothers me that Bush has used Blair as a veil of decency through all of this."

Many protesters were members of Blair's Labor Party who have broken with their leader over the war.

"We voted for Blair, but on this he's totally wrong. It's immoral," said Peter Burton, who made the 237-mile trip to London from his Exeter home along with his wife, Rita. "He has totally misjudged how dangerous this is to the Middle East and how destabilizing this has been to the United Nations. And we believe in the United Nations."

There is, in politics, one rule of success that seems pretty constant. You have to help your friends. Eventually, the consistent, serial betrayal of allies will undermine even the most secure of empires. The D.C. cenacle of belligerents has concluded that their only friends are to the right: the frothing academics in various conservative think tanks or the Likudniks at the Weekly Standard. Hence the unceasing flow of vituperation directed, for instance, at France. This has taken on a logic of its own that is undermining its objective. The creation of an atmosphere in which all impediments to war with Iraq are treated as the hostile and nasty acts of terrorists is going to make it impossible to justify retaining that closeness to Bush's administration that Rumsfeld's 'New Europe' has been trying to impress upon the world. You know that when even Chili goes against you at the U.N., something is seriously wrong.

Speaking of France...

A wonderful example of how polemical talent cannot survive its own debauch is Christopher Hitchens recent screed about Chirac, which was published, appropriately enough, on the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Hitchens used to know something about the deadly insult: the polemicists great truth is that truth itself must, given the moral occassion, exaggerate. But insult without the backing of truth, insult in the service of a blind and conniving power, destroys even the truths it embraces. As Mary McCarthy once said about Lilian Hellman, every word she says is a lie, including "the" and "a," So, too, in this incredibly silly piece about the ever corrupt Chirac, entitled Saddam's pal, Chirac the Rat. Among the carious verbiage we loved this passage:

"However, the conduct of Jacques Chirac can hardly be analysed in these terms. Here is a man who had to run for re-election last year in order to preserve his immunity from prosecution, on charges of corruption that were grave. Here is a man who helped Saddam Hussein build a nuclear reactor and who knew very well what he wanted it for. Here is a man at the head of France who is, in effect, openly for sale. He puts me in mind of the banker in Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale: a man so habituated to corruption that he would happily pay for the pleasure of selling himself.

Here, also, is a positive monster of conceit. He has unctuously said that "force is always the last resort". Vraiment? This was not the view of the French establishment when troops were sent to Rwanda to try to rescue the client regime that had just unleashed ethnocide against the Tutsi. It is not, one presumes, the view of the French generals who are treating the people and nation of Cote d'Ivoire as their fief. It was not the view of those who ordered the destruction of an unarmed ship, the Rainbow Warrior, as it lay at anchor in a New Zealand harbour after protesting against the French official practice of conducting atmospheric nuclear tests in the Pacific. (I am aware that some of these outrages were conducted when the French Socialist Party was in power, but in no case did Chirac express anything other than patriotic enthusiasm. If there is a truly "unilateralist" government on the UN Security Council, it is France.)"

Of course, as faithful readers of LI know, the corruptions of Chirac are entangled with the corruptions of Hitchen's great "pal," George Bush. Chirac was the first European politician to congratulate Bush after the coup in Florida -- a result that Hitchens, proceeding through his accustomed tergiversation, is surely happy with. After all, democracy has a limit. And among those corrupt supporters of Chirac, we have previously mentioned an arms dealer, Pierre Falcone. Pierre Falcone runs with a highly smelly contingent of criminals including the well known Russian-Israeli Mafioso, Arcadi Gaydamak. Gaydamak can come to the U.S. to parties honoring the likes of his friend, Ariel Sharon, and remain unmolested by the FBI, which is so vigilant, otherwise, in incarcerating brown skinned working class men who happen to speak Arabic. Falcone is in jail in France, but his wife, beauty queen, Sonia, lives in Arizona and is highly active in Republican circles.

Here's a corpwatch article that fills in the details:

"According to Global Witness, the links between Angola's corrupt government and the Bush administration are just as odorous as those linking Luanda's leadership to past and current members of the French government, both Socialist and Gaullist. In addition to the French oil giant Total-Fina-Elf, oil companies like Chevron, Texaco, Philipps Petroleum, Exxon Mobil, and BP-Amoco -- all with close links to Bush and his White House oil team -- were heavily involved in propping up dos Santos in return for profitable off-shore oil concessions.After transferring some $770 million in oil revenues to their own private bank accounts, dos Santos and his cronies became convinced that pluralism in their country would be a very dangerous thing for their future business deals. They also quickly abandoned their former Marxist beliefs in favor of the type of capitalist principles embraced by George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac.

Paris, Texas

There are similarities between dos Santos' new relationship with George W. Bush and the Bush family's historical ties to the House of Saud. Both represent the murky nature of oil politics that places US economic, national security, and human rights interests far behind the priority assigned to ensuring maximum corporate profits for a tight-knit and secretive international oil fraternity.Just as Bush's past financial links to the Bin Laden family have been exposed by the media, so too have his links to Angolagate and Falcone. Falcone's wife, Sonia, a former Miss Bolivia and a friend of First Lady Laura Bush, became a big-ticket contributor to Bush's 2000 election campaign. Contributions were made to the campaign through Sonia's Essant� Corporation, a distributor of health, beauty, and sexual pleasure products (such as a cream called Entisse that Essant�'s web site says is guaranteed to duplicate the effects of Viagra). http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=2576 We recommend the whole Corporate Watch article as a nice introduction to the chamber of horrors which financed the Bush campaign."

Thieves can fall out, but it takes the blind vanity of a Hitchens to take the side of one of those thieves as a moral imperative. For those who want to know more about the Chirac-Bush arms connection, read our post of 6/19 last year.

Remora


Michael Kelly's column on Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister, profiles his new left career, from street protests against Vietnam to street protests against the supposed suicide of Ulrike Meinhof. The tone is set by the use of Stern magazine via an article by Paul Berman for the accusation that Fischer beat a policeman -- because, of course, there is no judicial accusation of this act. The tirade was unleashed by Joschka Fischer's reply to Donald Rumsfeld. Here's the beginning graf:

"Excuse me. I am not convinced."
-- German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, lecturing to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in Munich last week, after Rumsfeld's argument for war against Iraq.

Mr. Rumsfeld may have convinced the leaders of 18 European nations, but not you, Mr. Fischer. It's personal. This seems to me the right way to look at it. The question of failing to convince must be seen in the context of whom we have failed to convince."

We, in turn, have a question: who is the "we" to whom Kelly is referring? To determine this, let's ask, on a personal level, about Mr. Rumsfeld, who may have convinced the prime minister of Spain, but not 70% of the population; who may have convinced the prime minister of the Netherlands, but not 72% of the population; who may have convinced Tony Blair, but not the 52% that see him as George Bush's poodle ; who may have convinced Berlusconi, but not 72.7% of Italians.

Mr. Kelly's column then references pictures published by Stern that purportedly show Mr. Fischer in various criminal acts:

Sometimes "who" explains "why."Mr. Fischer, who are you?

You are the foreign minister of Germany. You have been that since 1998, when Germany's left-wing Greens party, of which you are a leader, won enough in the polls to force the Social Democratic Party into the so-called Red-Greens coalition government.

But for the formative years of your political life, you were no man in a blue government suit. You were a man in a black motorcycle helmet. That is what you were wearing on that day in April 1973 when you were photographed, to quote the New Left historian Paul Berman, "as a young bully in a street battle in Frankfurt."In 2001, Stern magazine published five photographs of you in action that day. What these pictures depicted was described by Berman in a deeply informed 25,000-word article, "The Passion of Joschka Fischer" (The New Republic, Sept. 3, 2001). The photos showed you, Mr. Fischer, inflicting a "gruesome beating" on a young policeman named Rainer Marx: "Fischer and other people on the attack, the white-helmeted cop going into a crouch; Fischer's black-gloved fist raised as if to punch the crouching cop on the back; Fischer's comrades crowding around; the cop huddled on the ground, Fischer and his comrades appearing to kick him . . ."

Thus, according to Kelly, Mr. Fischer. Well, on the principle that who's lead to why's, perhaps we should find out who Mr. Rumsfeld is, the man who was appointed to be Secretary of Defense after the Supreme Court forced the nation to ignore the popular vote totals in favor of the dubious balloting practices of Florida and elevated George Bush to the Presidency. Let's start with a picture, too. How about this one, of Mr. Rumsfeld as Reagan's "personal envoy" shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in 1983? No black gloved fists are involved. Rather, we see only the oiliest cordiality all the way around. The pic was published by CNN, who interviewed Rumsfeld. 1 Here's how that went:

McIntyre [CNN reporter]: Well, let me take you back to about 20 years ago. The date, I believe, was December 20, 1983. You were meeting with Saddam Hussein, I think we have some video of that meeting. Tell me what was going on during this meeting?

Rumsfeld: Where did you get this video, from the Iraqi television?

McIntyre: This is from the Iraqi television.

Rumsfeld: When did they give it to you, recently or back then?

McIntyre: We dug this out of the CNN library.

Rumsfeld: I see. Isn't that interesting. There I am.

McIntyre: So what was going on here, what were you thinking at the time?

Rumsfeld: Well, Iraq was in a battle, a war, with Iran."

To explain about the who, the Rumsfeld who was being browbeaten, Mr. Kelly has it, by the bullying Mr. Fischer, scum that arose from the very streets, here's a little background from the Washington Post:

"Among the people instrumental in tilting U.S. policy toward Baghdad during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war was Donald H. Rumsfeld, now defense secretary, whose December 1983 meeting with Hussein as a special presidential envoy paved the way for normalization of U.S.-Iraqi relations. Declassified documents show that Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad at a time when Iraq was using chemical weapons on an "almost daily" basis in defiance of international conventions."

Interesting, as Rummy might say. So, shall we add up atrocities so far? On the one hand, we have Mr. Fischer supposedly beating up a policeman and attending a rally in which someone was killed. On the other hand, we have our Defense secretary being wined and dined by Saddam Hussein, whose case he later represented to his boss, President Reagan, while, what was it? 300, 000? 500,000 Iraqi and Iranian casualties were, even at that time, piling up. Interesting.

Ah, and it gets more interesting, doesn't it? Return with us to March 24, 1984. On that day the UN released a report on the Iraqi use of chemical weapons. Does Mr. Kelly find those kind of weapons shocking? Does he find them cause, now, to invade Iraq? Well, on March 24, 1984, Mr. Rumsfeld didn't. No, Mr. Rumsfeld was returning ot Baghdad on that day to resume meetings with Iraqi ministers.

Interesting. And did that meeting have consequences? Oh, yes it did. Here is the chronology from the cooperative research site:

November 26, 1984. The United States Government re-established full diplomatic ties with Baghdad [Gwertzman 11-27-1984] even though it was fully aware that Iraq was using chemical weapons in its war against Iran.


1985. U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz successfully convinced Rep. Howard Berman to drop a House bill that put Iraq back on the State Department's list of states that sponsor terrorism. Shultz argued that the United States was actively engaged in "diplomatic dialogue on this and other sensitive issues," and asserted that "Iraq has effectively distanced itself from international terrorism." The Secretary of State further claimed that if the U.S. discovered any evidence implicating Iraq in the support of terrorist groups, the U.S. Government "would promptly return Iraq to the list." [Jentleson 1994 p. 54]


Here's how Kelly's column ends:

"So, that's who you are, Mr. Fischer, the man we haven't convinced. You are the man for whom Munich wasn't enough, the man who needed Entebbe to convince him that murdering Jews was wrong. You ask to be excused. You have been excused."

And here's how we will end this post: "So that's who you are, Mr. Rumsfeld, the man who wants to convince us now to go to war, but who once found nothing inexcusable in a relationship with a country who was daily using chemical weapons to fight an aggressive war in 1983; the man who, in 1984, acting as a go-between, was instrumental in sealing a "special relationship" between Iraq and the United States which, by happy coincidence, preceded the use of scud missiles against Iran to the extent that perhaps 300 rained down upon Teheran in 1988; the man whose boss, President Bush, was clearly using the jingoistic side of the potential war to defeat the wan opposition in November, 2002; the man who now tells us that war is so urgent that it should be fought in a matter of days, but who once was so careless of the Iraqi use of the weapons of mass destruction that he made it an opportunity for profit on the part of American military contractos. You tell us that the European opposition isn't inexcusable. Well, no, Mr. Rumsfeld, it isn't inexcusable. Your hypocrisy, though, is."

Dope


A few days ago we mentioned McClellan and Grant as the two poles of the American attitude towards war. The more we've mulled over this point, the more we think there is a tasty essay here. The point is simple. Empires persist because of a willingness of the citizens of the empire to endure a certain constant level of casualties in the course of maintening the empire. If we take the British empire, for instance, its expansion through numerous small wars in the nineteenth century was made possible, at home, because of a willingness to sanction an annual tribute of British lives to the ideal of maintaining and expanding the empire in India, Central Asia, and Africa. From the Sepoy Mutiny to the Boer War, this willingness was often tested, and rarely provoked the kind of backlash that would rein in the imperial ambitions of the British Government.

In contrast, the United States did not seek that kind of empire. Briefly, the U.S. embarked on an expansion at the turn of the century, but in comparison to the French, the British, and even the Germans, the American effort was relatively minor. A recent book by a Wall Street Journal writer, Max Boot, documents the many small wars that America has engaged in to shore up the idea that Empire is, indeed, in the American grain. However, more significant is the rarity of any long-term occupation resulting from those wars. Occupation means more than soldiers being stationed in a place -- it means the gradual transfer of a whole administrative apparatus. This was the backbone of the British empire, but only the Phillipines, and, briefly, Cuba, tempted the Americans to do likewise. There's a reason for that: while Americans have traditionally shyed away from situations that involve attrition over the long term. It is that reflex which dooms the imperial project.

It is not that Americans are averse to bloodshed. While the British were constructing their empire out of multitudinous border wars, Americans did endure, in the Civil War, violence of a much more concentrated and horrific kind. And in the twentieth century, the U.S. engagement in World War I and II also saw committment to wars which were comparable, in terms of casualties, to any of the participants. However, I think the pattern of American behavior is more normally represented by the Korean and Vietnam war. In both wars, the reality of high casualties and the expectation that optimal victory would exact more of the same had a determining effect on the American conduct of the war. General Westmoreland once said, famously, that more American lives were lost on the highways during the sixties than were lost in the Vietnam war. This was taken, and should be taken, to be a callous statement. Nevertheless, the callousness it reflects is necessary for any sustained imperial effort. There are no painless empires.

This American pattern is often ignored by American policy makers. The latest example is the kind of ambitious policy in the Middle East being promoted by the circle around Paul Wolfiwitz. According to this circle, America is, in reality, an empire. So using that imperial power, we can remake social and political situations that we don't like in our image. The language of empire now fills our foreign policy journals, as well as conservative weeklies. The opposition to the Bush administration's aggressive plans in the Middle East has concentrated mainly on the cost of war in the narrow sense -- the cost, that is, of invading and defeating Iraq. However, the real question is about the cost of the war in the larger sense -- the cost of exposing an occupying force to the constant attrition of a guerilla war, and to the unexpected violence of factional conflict. This is where the imperial model has failed in the recent past, from Saigon to Somalia. Empires require some legitimation that goes beyond the mere aggrandizement of power. Americans have never accepted any legitimation, over the long run, except national defense. Neither glory nor ideology have garnered American support for a war.

To explain the paradox of American power -- that combination of a high level of military spending with a low level of acceptable risk -- I believe this, it is useful to use McClellan and Grant to represent the two poles of the American dialectic. Both McClellan and Grant started from the same premise: the prerequisite to fighting a war was amassing a force disproportionately greater than the enemy's. However, while the strategic premise was the same, the tactics were much different. McClellan Civil War career has become infamous for the chances he refused to take. He was tender for the lives of his men. It was a this caution that doomed his Virginia campaign of 1862. As one private wrote, "We are at a loss to imagine whether this is strategy or defeat." (Gallagher)

Grant's tactics were very different. He used the advantage of a more numerous army to raise the level of casualties he would accept. This made it possible to continue inflicting casualties on the enemy in a more prolonged way than was ever seen before, in the campaign. The general stress broke the army of Northern Virginia. It is easy to forget that Grant's ultimate success was preceded by general shock at the the bloodletting he was prepared to countenance -- a shock that so shook the Union side that Lincoln, in the middle of the election campaign of 1864, thought he was going to lose. Grant's position was made plain in a telegram Sherman, with whom he was in perfect agreement, sent to Halleck, one of the incompetent Union commanders, after Vicksburg:

``War is upon us, none can deny it. It is not the choice of the Government of the United States, but of a faction; the Government was forced to accept the issue, or to submit to a degradation fatal and disgraceful to all the inhabitants. In accepting war, it should be `pure and simple' as applied to the belligerents. I would keep it so, till all traces of the war are effaced; till those who appealed to it are sick and tired of it, and come to the emblem of our nation, and sue for peace. I would not coax them, or even meet them half-way, but make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it....

This is the kind of language spoken by legendary American commanders, like Sherman, Grant, Patton and Macarthur. The words are stirring. We shouldn't be deluded, however, into thinking that the feelings are typical. McClellan's caution has never been submerged by Grant's boldness in the mix of American foreign policy and military strategy. In fact, it is the McClellan pole that drives the fundamental US military strategy of the moment: replacing the manpower of battle with military technology. The goal is to achieve Grant's objective with McClellan's tenderness for American life. This works in the case of those military engagements that can be decided solely by weaponry. However, occupation is, by definition, not one of those strategies. In fact, by raising the optimistic vision of a bloodless (at least for our side) war, it prepares the guerillas advantage -- blows struck against the occupying forces will be illogically magnified because they are judged against the background of a military technical utopia.

The best argument against the imperial design of the Wolfiwitzes is to appeal to the reality of this American pattern, in which the cost of an enterprise is judged rigidly against the benefit it brings. The benefit brought by regime change in Iraq is obvious -- but the benefit wrought by invading and occupying Iraq is not. The landscape, as it appears to D.C. foreign policy honchos, is one of overwhelming American power. But the landscape since 9/11 has changed. Guerillas may not possess nuclear missiles, but they can forge the weapons of mass destruction out of boxcutters and American airliners. in treating Iraq as though it were merely a problem amenable to a Grant-like solution, we are putting ourselves into a situation in which all alternatives are impalatable. Assuming that 9/11, and the suicide bombers in Israel, are omens of things to come, the occupying U.S. forces in Iraq will be subject to the constant low attrition of guerilla warfare, with its morale breaking concomitants: a desire to strike blows against a dispersed enemy driving general dispersed acts of mayhem against the native population, which in turn creates mutual distrust between American forces and the native population, which in turn creates a gap between the ostensible reasons for the American presence (that they somehow 'represent' the aspirations of the native people) and the reality of it. Bush is edging into a situation in which the choices will be an unacceptable withdrawal from Iraq, and an unacceptable occupation of Iraq.

This situation should look familiar. It is Vietnam.

Remora
Peace, he said tediously, again, and again, and again...



This is a heartening story. The antiwar demonstrations are supposed to be huge this weekend. Here's the Guardian forecasting the demo weather:

"Many countries will witness the largest demonstrations against war they have ever seen. The majority will be small but 500,000 people are expected in London and Barcelona, and more than 100,000 in Rome, Paris, Berlin and other European capitals. In the US, organisers were yesterday anticipating 200,000 marching in New York if permission is given. A further 100,000 are expected to march in 140 other American cities."

We wonder, though, why these vast masses seem to have no healthy effect on their leaders. Tony Blair might be threatened, but Berlusconi and Aznar, among others, seem to be doing just fine. There's a sense in which it seems that opinion, in Europe, is moving in suspended animation, while the leadership, elected by the good burgers to their offices every manjack, seem not to care.

And another anti-war story in the Observer, by Mary Riddell, deserves to be read -- if not for its argument, at least for its style. Here is the heart of the thing, beginning with the Colin Powell speech:


"All suspicion and no proof, Le Monde complained the next day. That is not quite fair. It is true that, in trying to hitch Iraq to the war on terror, Bush and Blair have offered the long-running impression of a Jane Austen matriarch attempting to betroth an ageing daughter to a regency buck. Once again, Secretary Powell offered no credible evidence that Saddam and al-Qaeda are an item. Otherwise, his case was plausible, if you discount the toytown security dossier compiled by the internet pirates of Downing Street. Saddam, as we knew, has chemical and biological weapons. He is a murderous tyrant bent on obfuscation. Powell's assertions of mobile laboratories and field officers whispering of nerve agents did not sound mad. The absence of even a smoking catapult may not matter. You can buy almost the entire Powell package, agree that victory might be swift and still reject the case for war.

It is late. We are past the five to mid night set by Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector. Saddam's attempts to turn back time are likely to be spurned by Bush. The 'Screaming Eagles', the 101st Airborne Division whose 36-hour deployment capacity makes it the harbinger of war, have landed. In this time of nemesis, doves are pitied, or reviled in the case of Tony Benn and his Listen with Saddam broadcast, suitable for credulous under-fives.

And still the case for peace is stronger than the argument for war. The imperative of smashing Saddam before he goes for us ignores three caveats. There is no sign he plans to do so. Pre-emption encourages the bellicose, from Washington to Pyongyang, to arm up and strike first. And we have been here before."

There are polemics and there are polemics. The only kind worth a shit, in the end, are the thick ones -- dense with cross-references, sublimated madness, indignation lighting up the flow charts of reason like search lamps illuminating a landing area for risky craft. Riddell writes like that

Here is the opposition. From the Telegraph, we have this incomparable bit of propaganda:

Next Saturday, more than half a million people are expected to march to Hyde Park Corner. They will be demonstrating against the attempts of George W Bush and Tony Blair to prevent a man who is a proven mass murderer from holding on to his weapons of mass destruction.

Here are some of the facts the half a million or so marchers do not recognise: Saddam Hussein has already demonstrated his willingness to use chemical weapons; he has started two wars with unprovoked attacks on neighbouring countries; he was the only Arab head of state who openly celebrated the suicide hi-jackers who killed nearly 3,000 people in the US on September 11, 2001; he was also the only one who made Osama bin Laden his "man of the year". And, for those who care about the UN, Saddam Hussein has blatantly violated UN Resolution 1441."

Those are some facts all right. We especially like the "man of the year" thingy. We thought Time Magazine was the only institution bold enough to make such choices -- but no! Saddam is encroaching on Time's turf! So we turned to google, and sure enough -- Saddam has a site, Mykindofmanoftheyearohdear.com. It goes back to 1971, when, of course, Charles Manson swept the field. As S.H. said, at the time, Fearfully cool, the way he whacked those weak American sonovabitch! It was a mother of a whacking, if I say so myself. Charlie, I like the Beatles too, which I listen to in my secular Ba'athist military headquarters before I go out bashing Kurd head -- but I can't compare my fanaticism to yours, brother!" Other men of the year have included Pol Pot, John Gacy, and -- a special twofer -- those Columbine cuties, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. As Saddam said at the time, 'these two remind me of myself in my youth, except of course I was sexually much more fertile, like unto the bull. Ah, like them, I lacked only one thing -- a nice bazooka! Dad wouldn't give it to me! Ay, he regretted his fiendish stinginess as soon as I became Supreme Commander of All I Survey! But again I say, do not blame this killing, may God Bless it, on Eric and Dylan's listening of the riotous sounds of Marilyn Manson! He has stolen too much, may he die and suffer in the fires of hell, from Kraut Rock, this so called Marilyn! Eric and Dylan would never be so fooledly foolish! As for Nine Inch Nails, what can I say? They were once as tough as a corps of Republican Guards, and now are as wimpy as, well, the Kuwaiti Army.

Notes

The Lion and the Lizard

My friend, H., who is traveling about the world, is not yet writing for the Iranian. This is a pity, since the Iranian is one of the most interesting sites on the web, and if H. ever comes across these words, we'd like to know why he hasn't contacted them yet. Why, H.?

There's a sad essay by Abbas Milani, a Persian (he insists on Persian) intellectual, who dilates on the varied glories of Persian culture -- glories which are reflected in a mirror we know, the mirror of Western writers. After tracing fragments of the Persian interlocutor in this history -- a figure that I must imagine from footprints and echoes, since I am ignorant of the very rudiments of Persian history -- he ends with this coda:

"Furthermore, as the West began to take its leap into modernity, we fell into a dread abyss of tyranny, religious fanaticism and irrationalism. We have yet to altogether free ourselves from these benighted conditions. Khayam could have been referring to our time, when he wrote, "They say the lion and the lizard Keep/the court where Jamshid gloried and drank deep."

Maybe on nights like these we are allowed to dwell on the glories of our past; we are, after all, gathered here to help support the education of a new generation of Persians, whose critical understanding of the accomplishments of our much abused nation will make them wise and gallant torch-bearers in the long, complicated, sometimes terrible, often glorious march of our history and heritage."

The lion and the lizard are at least respectably iconic beasts. What can we say of the ruinous Bush administration, except that the armadillo and the diamond back rattler seem to keep their swampy watch/where Lincoln once made his melancholy round.

And getting back to Italy...
When LI first started this site, we served up several juicy meditations about the intricacies of Italian politics. We were brought up short by Alan, who now runs the Gadflybuzz site. Alan advised us that Italian politics was probably repulsing more readers than it was drawing.

Alas, this was good advice. So we lowered ourselves to comment on, well, American current events. Not as exciting, not as exciting. Italian politics is so exciting that it eventually wears down the participant. This might be the reason that more isn't being made out of the latest scandal to exhibit the unhealthy roots of Berlusconi's fortune, and its prolongation in his government's evident plan to nurture corruption. Here's the latest, from the World Press:


"On Jan. 7, 2003, Antonino Giuffre�once a key aide to the fugitive Mafia kingpin Bernardo Provenzano, now an informer�confirmed that Mafia figures had been in contact with members of Berlusconi's Fininvest company to negotiate the terms of their political support for Berlusconi�s election campaign. He also clearly stated that several Mafiosi, including a Palermo boss named Stefano Bontade, had met the Italian premier at his villa outside Milan many years before Berlusconi entered politics in 1993. According to Giuffre�s testimony, Bontade used to go to Berlusconi�s villa to visit his friend (and Mafioso) Vittorio Mangano, who was employed as the stable manager at Berlusconi�s country estate, Villa D�Arcore.

Giuffre is testifying in the ongoing trial of Senator Marcello Dell�Utri, who stands accused of laundering mob money through Publitalia, the publishing company he formerly managed. Publitalia, which is Italy�s largest publishing house, is owned by Berlusconi�s company Fininvest. Prosecutors allege that the Sicilian-born Dell�Utri was very close to top mobsters and allowed the Mafia to use Fininvest accounts to launder dirty money."

Anybody who has followed Berlusconi's fine effort to instantiate Marx's dictum in the 18th Brumaire (Hegel says somewhere that all great events and personalities in world history reappear in one fashion or another. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce) will know that the man's fortune has been entangled with suspect mysteries and peripheral frauds from the beginning. That, in fact, the impetus to his political career might well have been simply to avoid trial. But the latest is truly fascinating. Here's another graf from the story:

On Nov. 27, Berlusconi himself was questioned during Dell�Utri�s trial. He exercised his �right to silence,� refusing to reveal the source of 99 billion lira (US$55.3 million) used to build his empire between 1978 and 1983. Prosecutors suspect that the money came from Mafia boss Bontade. According to Rome�s center-left La Repubblica (Nov. 28) �the Italian premier had the right to refuse to answer, but he also had the moral duty to clarify the issue since he is the prime minister of a democratic nation.�

On Dec. 3, La Repubblica revealed what Giuffre had told the police a month earlier: �The Mafia have chosen to support (and vote for) Forza Italia because the Mafia always choose the best horse. Boss Bernardo Provenzano managed to find three direct channels to the leader of Forza Italia, Silvio Berlusconi.�

Italy, though, is strangely quiet. As Berlusconi throws his unconditional support (although no Italian soldiers) behind Bush, as he refuses to divest himself of his media empire, as he pushes throught he worst kind of anti-labor legislation, Italy takes it. This is the politics of numbness, the anaesthetic that follows the revelation of systemic corruption. It is never counted on by the reformer, whose sense of shock is enlivened, rather than deadened, by the intensity of the injury. Freud's paper on War Trauma, written in 1915, certainly applies to the infamous system of corruption that has formed Belusconi as its clown-herald, and that is now debauching the rights of labor in Rome. Substitute, in the following quote, politics for war, and you will have the attitude towards corruption that emancipates it from the indignation it deserves:

"War carries off the levels of silt deposited by civilization and leaves in us only the primitive man. It puts us in the attitude of the hero who doesn't believe in the possibility of his own death; it shows us, in the stranger, the enemy, who will will either have to eliminate or at least wish to eliminate. It counsels us to guard our cold bloodedness in the face of the death of beloved persons. But war doesn't let itself be suppressed. There will be as many wars and there will be differences well enough dug between the conditions of existence of peoples and in as much as they feel towards one another a deep enough antipathy. The question posed in these conditions is the following: given that war is inevitable, wouldn't we do better to accept it, and even to adapt ourselves to it?"

Remora

The NYT does a soft soap job on Jose Maria Aznar, who represents the dwindled ghost of Francisco Franco and is otherwise employed as the Prime Minister of Spain, in today's paper. As part of the comedy of human relations, we are told that the U.S. is shifting its strategic priorities to such as Aznar, and Burlesque-oni in Italy, and whoever in Poland. What this could possibly mean, in military or economic terms, is beyond LI. Are they planning on kicking the Daimler factory out of South Carolina and alluring in its place, uh, the Polish branch of Fiat? Beyond rhetorical support, we know that Aznar is not so incautious as to commit the Spanish army to the invasion of Iraq. Like his model, Franco, who wisely avoided involvement in that unpleasantness known as World War II in spite of his debt to two of the war's big players, Aznar realizes the exchange value of rhetoric, in this case, is way beyond its real value. Pen a letter, get your profile in the Times. The idea is, surely Bush can do something for the most syncophantic of his allies. However, that is one problem with the administration's unipolar policy. Allies are not rewarded on the Cold War scale anymore. Instead, promises slowly melt into cheap dribs and drabs of aid. Krugman has a column about Bush's followup today that sums it up.


To return to the Aznar soft soaping: in the last grafs of the piece, the picture changes, somewhat:

"This does not always play well at home, especially in an atmosphere of prewar tension heightened by popular opposition to a war in Iraq. Opinion polls show that more than 70 percent of Spaniards oppose intervention in Iraq.

Asked about anti-Americanism in Spain, Mr. Aznar said: "There might be people who believe that to ensure peace and security in the world, we must distance ourselves from the U.S., but I don't see it like that. I believe that rifts between the U.S. and Europe have signaled bad times for global peace."

Mr. Aznar's arguments in support of force to disarm Mr. Hussein are dismissed by other Spanish political parties. Most scorn what they see as Mr. Aznar's willingness to fall into line with Washington.

The opposition Socialist leader, Jos� Luis Rodr�guez Zapatero, accused Mr. Aznar of seeking support for "whatever Mr. Bush says." Guillerme V�zquez of the Galician Nationalist Bloc told Mr. Aznar, "You are the voice of your master," while Gaspar Llamazares, leader of the United Left Party, called him "a vassal" of the United States. "

Vassal is a good one, but 'voice of your master" isn't. Aznar is, to say the least, not in the inner circle of his master; he's no where near the voice box. The article makes the obligatory reference to Bush's spanish speaking skills. It makes no reference to his last spanish language buddy, Mexican President Fox. If Aznar wants to find out what being close to the inner circle and then being discarded like a stray piece of toilet paper feels like, he might ask Fox.

Remora

First, let's note that the D.C. crowd that has told us, for months, that France wouldn't go eye to eye with the U.S. over Iraq seem to be wrong. And the LI, of course (our record is as perfect as the Wizard of Oz's) spotted this assumption for what it was: baseless confidence.

However, there is trepidation all over Europe about this. Tageszeitung, which is certainly a lefty paper, calls the way the German's casually told the press, first, about the Franco-German initiative Stuemperei -- bungling.


"And even the healthy suggestion that Washington with its power dynamic driving it to war should be braked by the massive strengthening of the inspection regime in Irak has been, almost certainly, condemned to fail through the manner in which the whole undertaking was pursued by Berlin."

The editorialist for Point could work for the Washington Post, so eager is he for this war, so repelled is he that Chirac would desert the American side for the confused pacificism of those Germans


"L'�tonnant, chez nous, est d'avoir paru �pouser d'aussi pr�s la contorsion �lectoraliste allemande d'un chancelier chancelant, encore �trill�, dimanche dernier, dans son propre fief de Basse-Saxe. Etonnant, encore, d'avoir n�glig� � ce point l'�cart des nations latines - Italie, Espagne, Portugal -, dont la solidarit� importe tant � la France dans les �quilibres europ�ens. Par quelle outrecuidance euphorique avons-nous pu ignorer la division europ�enne que nous allions ainsi fomenter ? Quant au l�galisme international invoqu� pour l'Irak, convenons que nous l'avions ailleurs, et par deux fois, �corn� : d'abord en d�cidant de recevoir � Paris le tyran zimbabw�en Mugabe ; ensuite en nous abstenant dans le vote bouffon qui allait porter la Libye � la pr�sidence de la Commission des droits de l'homme des Nations unies."

(Astonishingly, we appear to have nearly espoused the German electoral contorsions of a tottering chancellor, still injured by the results, last sunday, of the elections in his own fief, Lower Saxony. And even more astonishing, we have neglected to this point the latin nations: Italy, Spain and Portugal -- whose solidarity means so much to France in the european balance of power. By what overbroiled euphoria could we have ignored the european divisions that we are fomenting? As to the international legalism invoked for Iraq, lets agree that we have not been so tender two other times, recently: firstly, in deciding to receive Mugabe in Paris, and then in abstaining in the clownish vote that carried Libya to the post of presidency of the commisssionof the rights of man at the UN.)


Finally, the Independent columnist Donald Macintyre is most distressed at the French German proposal, too. He contrasts the U.N's finest hour (which turns out to be the Bush I coalition) with today's mess:

How different now. "It's the UN that's really on the line," says Professor Michael Mandelbaum, one of America's best foreign policy specialists.

"Transatlantic relations will be noisy and contentious. But they'll be like the workings of a democracy, where disputes ultimately are secondary to what bind the parties together.

"Iraq is now shaping up for the UN's credibility as the 1930s Manchurian crisis did for the League of Nations. The odd thing is that those who profess to love the UN the most (ie the French) are undermining it, while those that don't greatly like it (the US), are trying to give it teeth. If it fails, no one would lose more than the French."

The latter is something we doubt. It is clearly the intent of the US, under the present regime, to go it alone if it feels like it. Columnists have decided to loftily eliminate popular sentiment from the equation. But is it true that, say, in Spain, where 70% of the population opposes any war, France is losing respect? I think not. Bush is urging a course upon the nations of Europe which is directly opposed to the popular sentiment, and has been for the past year. We've already seen Schroeder get re-elected on the strength of that sentiment -- in spite of his economic record. Of course, the Spanish and the Italians prime ministers, signing love letters to the US via the Wall Street Journal, is one thing -- paying for invading Iraq is quite another thing. For that, America wants to turn to Old Europe. But Old Europe doesn't want to spring for this party.

Dope

We've been preparting to review Neill Ferguson's Empire for a certain paper. So we have been drifting through The Cash Nexus, Ferguson's hefty volume about money and power in the world system since 1700. We found the chapter on state deficits quite helpful in getting our bearings about the coming red inkiness that will be the legacy of the Bush era.

Ferguson points out that governments in the early modern period were quite cavalier about owing money. The French defaulted on their debts almost every decade, until Louis XVI fatally called a halt to the practice. It was the refusal of France's creditor's to lend more money that prompted the court to call the Estates General into session, and we know that heads literally rolled after that. So never say that a national debt has no effect on our real lives. although that is the current smoke drifting out of D.C. Interesting, too, is the US history of debt. After the Civil War, the debt level was around 50% of GNP -- which was extraordinarily low for a state the size of the U.S. We suspect that this figure is not quite accurate -- does it include Confederate debts that were repudiated, as well as the distributed debts of the states? The federal system has a way of spreading out the true indebtedness of the government, just as it spreads out the tax burden. Interestingly, for a Tory, Ferguson is pretty calm himself about governmental borrowing -- not for him the nostrums of the balanced budget. Which already puts him ahead of the IMF crowd, at least.

However, looking over his dense stats, the one thing that stands out is that debt and the military are indissolubly linked, the price of the latter being paid for by the former, and the former then driving the policies that inevitably resulting in the use of the latter. The cash nexus, here, is an arms nexus. From the money spent by the British establishment to destroy Napoleon to the money spent by LBJ to destroy Ho Chi Minh, it is obvious that "defense" -- or, to give it another, more appropriate name, "offense" -- has driven government economics. A level can be reached at which the commonwealth is ruined to the extent that it can no longer re-arm -- but this simply means that others will arm in its place, and often on its soil. Germany has been the most pacific of nations during the last fifty years, but it has also been the place with the largest concentration of tactical nuclear missiles, as well as a vast staging area for US and, until 1989, Russian troops.

Pacifists often act as though war is simply a matter of directed violence; what they ignore is that violence is a functioning part of a larger culture: that it creates an order; that that order creates dependents on the order; and that those dependents have a tradition to draw on that is quite attractive to the leaders of a state, who are often (as in the case of Cheney, et al) one and the same people. The unimaginableness of an economy from which violence had been eliminated acts on states to create seemingly irrational situations. Whatever else we say about Saddam Hussein, we have to say that his resistance to exploring weapons research for weapons he cannot effectively use -- since he has been in no position to use them for the past ten years -- shows that he is, even fatally, addicted to the cash-arms nexus.

Peacetime economics has not actually happened, at least in the modern era. We wonder what it would look like.

Samuel Brittan has an interesting review of Ferguson's book that seems, now, to be pretty prescient. Here's a graf that we especially liked:

"In conclusion Ferguson moves onto more interesting ground in his theory of "under-stretch". He looks at a world full of rogue states and genocidal regimes. In deliberate contrast to Kennedy, he considers that this world can only be made safe if the US and its allies are prepared to restore defence budgets which have shrunk so much since the end of the Cold War. I wonder. In the Kosovo conflict which the West only won - if it did win - by luck and bluff, it was not the lack of military spending but the refusal to risk a single American casualty which handicapped the campaign."

Unexpectedly, the American aversion to risk has so far magnified casualties of those who oppose American forces, by upping the amount of firepower thrown upon them, as well as stimulating technologies that will massively decimate them. This is solidly in the American military tradition. It takes Grant's inelegant, but efficient, military strategy of overwhelming might and tries to eliminate its glaring vice, to American eyes: the high casualties. You might say it is Grant's strategy combined with McClellan's timidity. The failure of this strategy in Vietnam stemmed from the fact that a rate of small casualty losses, strung out over an extended period, has an effect on the morale equal to large casualties suffered over a short period. We think this hypothesis is about to be tested.

Remora

All Terrorism, all the time

There's a profile of the dangerous Mr. Zoellick, Bush's free trade ambassador, in the NYT today, penned by ELIZABETH BECKER and EDMUND L. ANDREWS

Inevitably, Zoellick spouts the Bush line about what he does:

"The long-term war against terrorism has to include trade, openness and development," he said in a recent interview."

I can't wait until somebody tells us that the war against terrorism has to include privatizing social security. Or has it already happened?

Anyway, the profile is worth reading not only to find out what Zoellick is up to, but also because there's an unexpected bitchiness in the thing. This is our favorite part"

"A prolific writer and a man driven to make his mark on the world stage, Mr. Zoellick has been plagued throughout his career with assertions that he lacks the kind of bonhomie and people skills that would help him widen his influence inside the administration and build broad-based coalitions outside it.

"I am a big fan and friend of Bob's, but I have to say it is amazing he's gotten as far as he has, given the number of enemies he's made," said a former official who spoke on the condition of anonymity."

Also, in terms of in-fighting: Zoellick distances himself from the debacle of blocking generic anti-AIDS drugs to third world countries -- one of the many sterling skuzzy moments of our administration's recent history.

Oddly, the article doesn't mention Bob's Enron connection. However, he's mentioned in the Harvard Watch report, the one that fingered Harken/Harvard connection. Here's his bio through the lens of Enron.
Robert B. Zoellick
Harvard affiliation
: J.D., MPP, Harvard; former director and faculty member of Harvard's
Belfer Center
Enron affiliation
: U.S. Trade Representative; Enron Advisory Board; board member of Alliance
Capital, major Enron shareholder
Zoellick sits precariously at the nexus of Harvard, the Bush White House and Enron. While at Harvard, Zoellick directed a pro-corporate energy research center funded by Enron's largest shareholder.

Remora

Ah, for the time to make a long, leisurely post about the tax shelter shell game that was apparently played by Ernst and Young! To sing of how they roped in the greedy, incompetent CEO class (their pockets bulging with stock option money they evidently did nothing to earn, and that soon receded into the electronic ether from whence it came, paper wealth to paper loss, dust to dust, worldcom without end, amen)! I mean, is LI above smirking at such a relic of the nineties as this piece of news, from the NYT business section?


"Two firms being sued, Ernst & Young and KPMG, offered shelters that they said would make taxes on salaries, stock option profits and capital gains from the sale of a business either shrink to pennies on the dollar or disappear.

:The fees and savings on taxes can be enormous. Ernst & Young charged some clients $1 million just to hear a sales pitch, according to court papers. And the firms made millions from the sale of each shelter. The shelters allowed accounting firms, their clients and the law firms that blessed the deals to share money that otherwise would have gone to the government."

As Oscar Wilde once said about the death of Nell, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at all of this. To our tender hearted president, however, this is no laughing matter. With the Great Giveaway, we can see a day coming when the rich will no longer be suckered into tax shelters like these -- the government itself will provide the ultimate tax shelter by abolishing their taxes, and hence wiping away the tears of such paragons of virtue as Sprint's former CEO, Ronald T. LeMay. NYT columnist
Floyd Norris reports:

"Thanks to the clever Ernst tax strategy, it appears that Mr. LeMay may have paid no taxes on the $149 million in profits he recorded by exercising his stock options in 1999 and 2000. That meant he did not have to sell shares to pay the taxes, as it appears he did in prior years, when his profits were far smaller."

We imagine the reader in the White House, starting this story (Once upon a time, Mr. President, there was a valiant prince of the Spint Corporation, Ron LeMay, who for his various manly virtues earned himself $149 million dollars. That was his money, right Mr. President? Well, just think, there were some tailors that came along, Ernst and Young were their names, and they promised to weave Mr. LeMay a beautiful invisible suit, which they called a Tax Shelter. Isn't that sweet, Mr. President? But listen to what happened to our poor and noble knight!) will splutter with indignation at how it all turned out so badly. Mr. Norris explains where the $149 million came from:

"In his years at Sprint, Mr. LeMay was well paid, but his annual cash compensation never exceeded $2.7 million. It was stock options that offered him the opportunity to become really wealthy.

"It was emblematic of the times that Sprint's board was willing to award millions of options to Mr. LeMay in 2000, the same year he gained a paper profit of $127 million by exercising options. But he obviously wanted more, and he acted as if there was no chance that his tax strategy would fail or his Sprint shares would fall."

Ah, yes. It is for the victims of the stock crash like these that Bush is acting like Providence itself. Only problem is, his drunk driving of the national treasury isn't going to help with his buds in the end. It's a typical frathouse beer run -- Junior is going to get into trouble before it is all over.

Note

Our best friend Dave leaves a message on the recorder: your last refutations didn�t refute anything.
Ah, he knows how to stick the knife into LI�s heart. We imagine that we are the great refuters, the universal refuters. Like a village wrestler, our world is bounded by our strength, and our strength is untested by the wide world. So� it turns out we didn�t present an overwhelming case for peace in our last couple of posts. But� we can�t help but think that the real value of the post that Dave is referring to (not the Kipling post, surely, which wasn�t a refutation) is our use of the words "surreption" and "clanculation." Long after our Mesopotamian misadventure has sunk to the dusty status of the War of Jenkins Ear, we like to imagine that the OED will have an entry for clanculation, quoting, well, we blush to say, but LI. What are current events compared to the long history of the language?

Remora

And now, for an entre-act in LI's unremitting stream of anti-belligerent propaganda:

There's a nice essay about Kipling in Hudson Review -- one with which LI disagrees mutitudinously, but one which we urge our readers to look at. Or those of our readers who have read Kipling. The concentration here is on Kim, but we must admit never to have finished Kim. Our Kipling is the Kipling of the short stories. We were recently reading the short stories again (background to our endless paper about James Fitzjames Stephen) so that we came to the Hudson Review essay with some thoughts of our own.

Every essay about Kipling begins with the same note: he was a secret pleasure, for political reasons, of the dominant literary class. His art, by achieving an uncritical popularity, became, perforce, suspect among those who were popular only, sometimes, among the critics. He was admired by Eliot, Orwell, and Wilson. The politics of these tropes goes back to that certain pall of resentment that seems to hang over the rightwing writer --- as though, having once and for all dissented from the pursuit of happiness (that liberal buNch of bunk), he were virtuously intent on the pursuit of gloom. Recently, Weekly Standard writers like Christopher Caldwell have pondered the reversal of fortune between left and right -- pointing out how much happier, and more fun, right wing publications are than left wing ones. There is some justification for this -- the left has its puritanical side, as well as its factious inquisitions, and cycles through periods of paranoid dread, and the right, with reason, believes itself politically dominant right now -- but in the sphere of culture, the right is far from happy and gay. One has merely to read the New Criterion to discover that the barbarians are at the gates and have the tenure, drat their hides.

Clara Claibourne Park is an exceptionally good writer, however, and goes through the minefield pretty easily. She isn't intent on scoring points -- a rare quality in Kipling scholarship. She takes as her guide to Kipling two studies -- Harry Ricketts� Rudyard Kipling, and David Gilmour�s The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling.

Her comments on Gilmour mix appreciation and disavowal. To our taste, however, there is not enough disavowal. For instance, here:

"Gilmour is not afraid to take on �The White Man�s Burden.� It is important, of course, to correct the common impression that by �lesser breeds without the law� Kipling meant Britain�s colonial subjects. Rather, the phrase was aimed at European imperialists (probably German) less responsible than the British. For �in spite of the prejudice and violence of expression, the message of �The White Man�s Burden� is idealistic.�

'Take up the White Man�s Burden,
The savage wars of peace,
Fill full the mouth of famine,
And bid the sickness cease . . .'

Long before, barely out of his teens, Kipling had written from India a passionate reply to his cousin Margaret Burne-Jones, who had asked, �Do the English as a rule feel the welfare of the natives at heart?� �For what else do the best men . . . die from overwork and disease, if not to keep the people alive in the first place and healthy in the second [?] . . . Do you know how many Englishmen, Oxford men expensively educated, are turned off . . . to make their own arrangements for the cholera camps; for the prevention of disorder; or for famine relief, to pull the business through or die, whichever God wills [?]� Gilmour reminds us that Kipling wrote in a world �without Oxfam or the United Nations�; he leaves it to us to substitute AIDS for cholera, and to recall the disorder unprevented in Nigeria, in Kashmir, and in other places that maps once tinted red�not least Zimbabwe, the land once part of Cecil Rhodes�s dream and now its own people�s nightmare."

This won't do. India, as we know, suffered a series of famines after the Mutiny was put down that are to be measured in the millions of casualties: 6 million, perhaps, for the 1875-1876 famine, and 4 million for the famines of the 1890s, under Curzon. The fact of famine is invariably treated, by the colonial apologists, as a natural given -- something that happened because of the weather. And that the British, heroically gallant, were helping out about. It is never pointed out that the money the British were using was from taxes collected from Indians. It is never pointed out that there is no reason to think that if the Indians had succeeded, after the Mutiny of 1857, in throwing off the British, that they wouldn't have been as successful as the Russians in attracting financing for railroads and other technology. That is, it isn't pointed out by those for whom the British Raj was a pageant staged by PBS. However, as long ago as the 1780s, Edmund Burke was not having this myth of British altruism. As he pointed out in his speech in support of Fox's Reform of the East India Company, hunger that is caused by natural calamity is magnified by political calamity. He describes the Company's policy of invariable greed as having this effect on a (somewhat idealized) countryside:

This object required a command of money; and there was no Pollam, or castle, which in the happy days of the Carnatic was without some hoard of treasure, by which the governors were enabled to combat with the irregularity of the seasons, and to resist or to buy off the invasion of an enemy. In all the cities were multitudes of merchants and bankers, for all occasions of monied assistance; and on the other hand, the native princes were in condition to obtain credit from them. The manufacturer was paid by the return of commodities, or by imported money, and not, as at present, in the taxes that had been originally exacted from his industry. In aid of casual distress, the country was full of choultries, which were inns and hospitals, where the traveller and the poor were relieved. All ranks of people had their place in the public concern, and their share in the common stock and common prosperity; but the chartered rights of men, and the right which it was thought proper to set up in the Nabob of Arcot, introduced a new system. It was their policy to consider hoards of money as crimes; to regard moderate rents as frauds on the sovereign; and to view, in the lesser princes, any claim of exemption from more than settled tribute, as an act of rebellion. Accordingly all the castles were, one after the other, plundered and destroyed. The native princes were expelled; the hospitals fell to ruin; the reservoirs of water went to decay; the merchants, bankers, and manufacturers disappeared; and sterility, indigence, and depopulation, overspread the face of these once flourishing provinces."

Burke put his finger on the essentials of the system. Kipling's India was the result of a revolution. The revolution came from above, through the British administration. Its goal was to create an export economy and a completely monetized internal market. To do this, it was necessary to get the peasantry to think in terms of money, instead of in terms of sufficiency. To effect this, the British demanded their tax in money, not goods. In order to get money, the peasants turned to a new class, the money-lenders promoted by the British with the idea that these money-lenders would invest in the land and become a rural middle class. They didn't. The system of subsistence was intentionally uprooted, and a system put in place that exposed the peasantry to the cycle of the climate, and the possibility of food shortage, without the traditional buffers to hardship. As we've mentioned before, Mike Davis's documentation in The Victorian Holocaust is quite overwhelming. Of the famines that occured in 1876, Robert Conquest's term, terror-famine, seems appropriate. Conquest, setting out the case against Stalin's agricultural policy, says this, in the Harvest of Sorrow: "... in 1932-3 came what may be described as a terror-famine inflicted on the collectivized peasants of the Ukraine and the largely Ukrainian Kuban... by methods of setting for their grain quotas far above the possible, removing every handful of food, and preventing help from the outside..."

Similarly, the much vaunted British technology -- i.e. the trains -- operated, in 1876, to take grain AWAY from effected areas in accordance with the British policy of export; the state operated to ensure a free market by making sure that grain distribution was kept to a minimum -- as Viceroy Lytton put it, the relief camps were like picnics, and so they were made unpleasant places indeed. A pound of grain a day was the amount given to the unfortunates at these camps -- was, indeed, all the food distributed to them, so that they died numerously. As Davis has pointed out, the Nazis distributed food more generously at Dachau. There's no getting over the failure of British policy in India. There is only... forgetting it. So Park can bear with much more equanimity than LI Gilmour's absurd assertions. As in this graf:

"For us, of course, the deterrents to the imperialist worldview are appreciable, to say the least. Current history, however, gives some weight to Gilmour�s observation that �when all appropriate qualifications are made, minorities usually fare better within imperial or multinational systems than in nations dominated by the ethos or ethnicity of a majority,� particularly when we are thinking about Bosnia, or Saudi Arabia�or India and Pakistan."

That India is, if anything, a society in which majorities are vigorously disputed -- much more vigorously than in, say, the apartheid South of my youth -- should be pointed out. As is the fact that the most various multi-national empire in Europe, the Austro-Hungarian one, saw born in it and nurtured by its politics one Adolf Hitler. Not a high recommendation, we'd say.

Remora

"Thus the word of the LORD came to me:

Son of man, you live in the midst of a rebellious house; they have eyes to see but
do not see, and ears to hear but do not hear, for they are a rebellious house." -- Ezekiel

My ears heard Colin Powell make a long speech to the UN and basically re-iterate the Bush administration's position, exemplifying it with some examples culled from military telecommunications that mean very little. Actually, they mean more than the administration may want them to mean. If the Iraqi military is calling each other up saying hey, haul those nerve gas cannisters that we are going to use on the Kurds over to site 7, you would think the U.S. would have a much easier time making its case, at least in as far as the surreption and clanculation of the famed Weapons of Mass Destruction are concerned.

However, LI's ears aren't Vernon Loeb's, the Washington Post's excitable National Security correspondant. In his online Q and A after the speech, Loeb seemed to forget, for a moment, that he is not (officially) employed as a propagandist for the Bush administration. Here's what he had to say about the pesky naysayers of pacifistic nostrums:

Wheaton, Md.: Is the issue with the world community really about evidence? It seems pretty clear that those nations, such as France, will never support the U.S. effort. Why waste any more time trying to convince them?

[V.L.] No, I think presenting evidence is very important, and I think Powell was quite eloquent in bolstering his case using evidence that this is not some academic exercise for the United States, but a very visceral one, in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. I think Powell's remarks will have a persuasive effect on many around the world, and while they may not convince the French government, I bet France will not exercise its Security Council veto to nix a second U.N. resolution authorizing war, if it comes to that."

But, of course, Mr. Loeb is, primarily, a journalist -- a hardheaded kind of guy who'd never shill for his country:

Vernon Loeb: I found Powell's case quite persuasive, partly because he made repeated reference to information developed by other countries and by U.N. inspectors. I mean, nothing he said struck me as particularly far-fetched. As a journalist, I try to be skeptical about everything I hear from the U.S. government, but in this case, Powell's case passed the test. As for U.S. Special Forces, they are in Iraq already, and they will play a very important part in any war, attacking important weapons sites and leadership targets, among many others things."

Well, the convinced will hear what convinces them. LI, convinced that the war in the offing is a big mistake, did not hear what would convince us that we were wrong -- i.e., that Iraq is planning to attack a specific target. In fact, the schizophrenic position of this administration is quite clear about this. We must attack Iraq right now because they are so weak (that is, they are less of a danger to their neighbors than they were before the Gulf War) in order to prevent them from someday getting strong. Since any nation with the potential resources of Iraq has the potential for getting strong, this argument goes without saying. The problem is with the assumption behind it, which is grossly insane. Nor did we hear anything that would make us think that weapons inspectors aren't efficient -- the kind of chaotic removal of weapons, if Powell is right, that has been happening in Iraq is itself disruptive to any well planned use of the weapons. We did, however, have a feeling that the U.N. will not be doing this with another country for a long time. The next Iraq will have no advantage in disarming itself and revealing its every defense secret to a country that then uses this information to attack it. We are watching a unique moment in history -- oh boy.

Remora

Cupidity on a scale unexampled...

Last week, with little fanfare, FERC released information conclusively showing that Reliant closed down electric generating plants in order to create artificial energy shortages, and thus raise prices, in California in the great energy heist of 2000.

Jason Leonard of Counterpunch has a nice, detailed article about this. Here's the smoking gun graf -- of course. You can't have a scandal without a smoking gun, anymore:

"This latest smoking gun in the ongoing investigation into California's energy crisis, a transcript of a conversation between a trader and a power plant operator at Houston-based Reliant Energy in which the two discuss shutting down some of the company's power plants in California between June 20 and 22, 2000 to create an artificial shortage so the price of power would skyrocket, was released by the FERC Friday. The tactic worked. It caused power prices to reach "unjust and unreasonable" levels in California, which under the Federal Power Act is illegal.

We "started out Monday losing $3 million... So, then we decided as a group that we were going to make it back up, so we turned like about almost every power plant off. It worked. Prices went back up. Made back about $4 million, actually more than that, $5 million," the Reliant trader says in a tape-recorded conversation on June 23, 2000.

As we pointed out yesterday, Adam Smith shrewdly advanced the proposition that a government of traders is a government with an incentive to work against the interests of the governed. This plays itself out in the punishment of Reliant the fine against them, as Leonard puts it (reaching for the cliche) is a slap on the wrist.

"Reliant cut a deal with FERC, agreeing to refund California $13.8 million to settle the issue and will not be penalized under federal laws."

Our point, yesterday, was that while the United States itself might not have a primary interest in spending 100 billion dollars to accrue the oilfields and reserves of Iraq, its actions could well be drvien by the mindset of oilmen who arise from a culture in which that interest is lively. As we know, the foundation of Bush's personal fortune was laid in Bahrain, the small Gulf principality with which Harken cut a suspiciously profitable deal in 1990. To say this is not to say that the Blood for Oil equation is a sufficient account of the Iraq crisis -- really, there are other factors here than the culture from which Cheney and Bush have sprung -- but it is to say that there exists a bias here critically skewing the way this administration is moving towards war. This war resembles, in its causes, the Boer War, which was also driven by a combination of greed and jingoism. The greed part of the equation is continuous between domestic and foreign policy, and has a similar form: the sinister contiguity of the Bush "emergency energy policy," designed by the lugubrious Cheney in secret council with his energy pals, and the brownouts in California, is reproduced in the plan to target Iraq, which we've been assured was initiated in the aftermath of 9/11 even though there was no link between Iraq and 9/11 -- or, at least, less of a link than between, say, Saudi Arabia and 9/11. Again, we have Cheney as the hawk, again we have distorted information driving the operation, again we have a president reluctantly taking action he manifestly wants to take.

I'm listening to Powell give his speech to the U.N., and I'm amazed by the quality of it. That Powell denounces Iraq for chemical warfare that the U.S. tacitly condoned, and that Western companies, in the eighties, profited from is deeply cynical move. And I'm thinking of the last paragraph of this story about the timing of the war in the NYT:


"Waiting months, however, seems unlikely, and from a strictly military standpoint inadvisable. The Bush administration has yet to lay out all of the evidence about Iraq's weapons programs or its links to terrorists but it has already laid the groundwork for an early war. The military preparations have a momentum and dynamic of their own. The administration will not want to keep the military in idle for long so the diplomats will also not have long. The forces are getting in place. The gun is cocked. Nobody can tell the future, but the forecast is for war."

Remora

It was Napoleon who made the phrase "nation of shopkeepers" famous. As it happened, he was quoting Adam Smith -- who coined the phrase in the chapter that considers the motives animating the building of empires. The passage is arresting:


"To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers. Such statesmen, and such statesmen only, are capable of fancying that they will find some advantage in employing the blood and treasure of their fellow-citizens to found and maintain such an empire. Say to a shopkeeper, "Buy me a good estate, and I shall always buy my clothes at your shop, even though I should pay somewhat dearer than what I can have them for at other shops"; and you will not find him very forward to embrace your proposal. But should any other person buy you such an estate, the shopkeeper would be much obliged to your benefactor if he would enjoin you to buy all your clothes at his shop. England purchased for some of her subjects, who found themselves uneasy at home, a great estate in a distant country."

LI has been thinking about this passage in relation to the question of Blood for Oil. In the mainstream press, the issue of Iraqi oil is delicately circumvented with the assurance that the Bush administration would, in pursuing its war, spend more money than the oil is worth. However, as Smith points out, the point of the imperial project, from the viewpoint of the shopkeeper, is to unload the unavoidable costs of conquest on the imperial power while enjoying the fruits of those conquests. The war against Iraq might not be a project fit for a nation of oilmen, but it is extremely fit for a nations whose government is influenced by oilmen.

US policy towards the Middle East cannot and should not avoid the issue of oil. That the U.S. should be spending billions trying to find alternatives to Middle Eastern oil is one part of the political equation; that it should be trying to maintain such relationships with oil producing countries as to mitigate disturbances in the supply of oil is the other side of the equation. We were reading a book on America's imperial power by Raymond Aron, the French gaullist, the other day and were struck by how clearly Aron saw this issue. We were also struck by Aron's remembrance of the U.S. role in the Suez crisis (which was almost twenty years past when the book came out in 1974) -- you remember, the objection lodged by Eisenhower against the attack on Egypt coordinated by a coalition of France, Britain and Israel. That objection was a brilliant stroke on Eisenhower's part. For decades, the U.S. was able to support Israel and Saudi Arabia simultaneously. Aron thought that the Suez incident precipitated the French distrust of American intentions that resulted in De Gaulle's rupture with NATO. Interestingly, the US commentators on the French objection of Bush's war all assume that the French will simply adhere to the fait accompli of an invasion, without pondering the advantages France could reap by not doing that. The advantages would be along lines similar to those that accrued to the U.S. after 1956: the oil producing nations would be able to turn to France/Europe to mitigate the unilateral weight of the U.S. The French, we are assured, would lose out on Iraq's oil wealth. But that of course assumes that 1., the post Saddam government would be pro-American into the foreseeable future, and 2., that the Persian Gulf states would be unappreciative of France's bucking the American initiative.

This view seems to have no supporters, or even thinkers, in the U.S. More typical -- in fact, almost uniform -- is the view of Chris Suellentrop at Slate, who after giving the reasons for France's recalcitrance -- it all has to due with wounded pride, which is a not so subtle way of dividing the case between the belligerents and their opponents as a case of passion (that womanly emotion) on the one side, and reason (represented by, I suppose, Cheney) on the other side. After exploring this worn topic, Suellentrop concludes:

"Which is why, in the end, France will go along with the Bush administration on Iraq. If France vetoes a Security Council resolution, and the Bush administration goes to war anyway, France will have been proved powerless. But if it accedes to the war after demanding more evidence, it will be able to claim that it influenced American policy�whether it's true or not. Germany will likely stand on principle and oppose the war. But France would never do such a thing. As a U.N. diplomat said last week, "It matters to matter for France."

Our assurance that the World will line up behind Bush depends on Bush's successful conclusion of a war that will be successful if the World lines up behind Bush. Otherwise, America occupies Iraq alone, and the mess will be to the advantage of any nation bold enough to play the game among the Arab states.

Remora
Deficits and us

LI is not a deficit hawk. We felt that the budget surplus under Clinton was a mark of shame, rather than a badge of honor -- it represents the lost opportunity of finally implementing a true national health care system, which in the end would be a much more valuable asset to this country than paying down on the national debt. Our idea is that the question of the deficit has to start with the premise that all deficits are not equal. One has to judge a deficit on the basis of where the money has gone, and where it will go. The supply siders have formed a meretricious cult around a fundamental truth: a budget is part of an ongoing process. It is embedded in a history. Deficits now may make way for surpluses later. Why? Because the money borrowed was spent wisely. What is wise spending? Spending that benefits the general welfare in health, education, science, infrastructure, etc. What is unwise spending? Spending that leads to death, or increases inequality, or is so excessive in one department that other necessary departments are squeezed to accomodate it. The idea that deficits should be judged wholly on whether they squeeze credit for private enterprise is probably deficient both on the evidence and on its motivated neglect of what state spending does. It is accounting that only concentrates on expenditure. It is, in other words, religion rather than rationality.

Judging, then, by our criteria, we find the Bush maladministration of the budget one of the most shocking large facts of the age. And the bodyguard of lies that have surrounded the looting of the Treasury are so blatant, and so unexamined, that we have to go all the way back to... well, the days of the New Economy, when Enron was Fortune's most innovative company in the U.S.A.

So, a little history.
Last year, in July, the Bush administration floated the news story that the surplus of 2001 was being reversed, slightly.


"The Bush administration expects the federal government to post a deficit of $165 billion this fiscal year, a 56 percent increase over earlier projections due in part to a surprise downturn in tax revenue caused by the stock market sell-off, officials said."

Now, when earlier projections are that much off, what you want is a new model. Did the 165 billion dollar deficit, in fact, eventuate? According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the budget deficit for 2002 was probably about 16 billion over that.

Excluding the surpluses in Social Security, the budget is in deficit by $181 billion in the current fiscal year, 2002; such deficits are projected to continue for the following seven years, with surpluses not reappearing outside Social Security until 2010. The cumulative non-Social Security deficit over the period 2002-2011 is projected to total $700 billion. This outlook is a remarkable change from the projection CBO made only one year ago, when it projected surpluses outside of Social Security totaling $3.1 trillion over the ten-year period 2002-2011.

Just two weeks ago, the Bush backgrounders were telling the press to expect a budget deficit of around 200 billion for 2003. Now the budget has been officially presented. Guess what? Just as, last year, the real budget deficit was grossly larger than the one projected by the government, so, too, the new projection is about 50% bigger than it was just two weeks ago. My my, how an AOL-like sum of money can just pass through your fingers!


"WASHINGTON -- Due in large part to his proposed $670 billion tax-cut plan, President Bush's fiscal year 2004 budget will post a record deficit of $307 billion on spending of $2.23 trillion, according to budget documents distributed Monday. In addition, the budget makes no provision for the cost of fighting a war against Iraq. However, in his budget message, Mr. Bush argued the deficit wasn't all that large. "Compared to the overall federal budget and the $10.5 trillion national economy, our budget gap is small by historical standards," Mr. Bush said in his budget message."

Not putting in the cost of the war in Iraq was a bit of imbecile brilliance that is sure not to attract attack from the belligerent press. Don't look for the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal to editiorialize about the fiction of ignoring a figure that is potentially half the size of the budget deficit. Alas, we suspect that the Dems will simply take the Hoover route and attack the deficit itself. That you run a deficit in a recession is ... well, what you do. That you spend money in such a way that you eventually make it back, in increased tax revenue, to pay for State services, is the key, here. The Great Giveaway will simply dissipate wealth among the most profligant, shift equity investment to companies that will have to borrow to increase capital expenditure, and operate as a salve to the massively bad investments of the dishonest upper ten percentile. This is Moral Hazard writ large.

Remora

Yesterday, LI went with a friend car-buying. The friend thought she�d like to buy a car from a dealer in Georgetown; or at least check out his lot. He told us, casually, that he�d come in at eight, and on the way in had seen the Shuttle break up in the sky.

That is all we can contribute about the sad news � a bystander of a bystander�s account. We hope this doesn�t interrupt the shuttle for too long � and we wonder how the three crew members up there on the shuttle are going to get home.

We suggest an article from, of all places, the Cato Institute today. The libertarian think tank is better known for coming up with hairbrained schemes to privatize social security than for its dovishness. But there is a considerable tradition on the American right that suspects that the impulse driving imperialism is a kissing cousin to the impulse driving big government elsewhere. This ties in with a Burkean suspicion of all schemes to better mankind that impose an order of ideas from above. Russell Kirk, America�s premiere Burkean, was, in his time, an anti-imperialist. And so, apparently, is Gene Healy, senior editor of the Institute, whose anti-war plea looks like � well, like LI could have signed it. As LI has done in several posts, Healy works out the worst case scenarios for the war itself. He doesn�t believe that these worst case scenarios will be realized. He believes, as we do, that Saddam Hussein will be defeated with a minimum of American (as opposed to expendable Iraqi) casualties. And he thinks that we are then in for it:

�In the best-case scenario, Hussein doesn't pass WMD off to terrorists and he never gets to launch the Scuds. Shortly after the air war begins, he's deposed by a Republican Guard coup. We take Baghdad without a single U.S. battlefield casualty. Triumphalism is in the air, and the chorus of self-congratulatory "I-told-you-so's" rings out in op-ed pages and TV talk shows across the land.
But our troubles are just beginning.

Welcome to the Occupation �

Healy�s concern about the Occupation is a little different from ours. His concern is that it would fuel Osama bin Laden-ites. He has a few pity observations about that:

"Indeed, it's hard to think of a foreign policy initiative that could do more to empower Al Qaeda than invasion, occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. To see why this is so, it's necessary to examine what motivates Bin Laden's murderous band. Some commentators on the Right have offered a theory of "why they fight" that amounts to "they hate us just because we're beautiful." The cover of the first post-September-11th edition of National Review declared that Al Qaeda attacked us "because we are rich, and powerful, and good." On July 4, 2002, libertarian Brink Lindsey, on his popular weblog brinklindsey.com, titled an entry "Why They Hate Us," and quoted the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal�"

Those who have made a career of studying Al Qaeda do not agree that the primary motivation behind the Bin Ladenists' anti-American jihad is hatred of the West's political and cultural freedom. Peter Bergen, Bin Laden's biographer, and one of the few Westerners to have interviewed him, writes in his book Holy War, Inc. that:

"In all the tens of thousands of words that bin Laden has uttered on the public record there are some significant omissions: he does not rail against the pernicious effects of Hollywood movies, or against Madonna's midriff, or against the pornography protected by the U.S. Constitution. Nor does he inveigh against the drug and alcohol culture of the West, or its tolerance for homosexuals...."

In Healy�s view, Osama�s pre-occupation is with local issues, not the debilitating effect of the Jerry Springer show on the American worship of Allah. This makes such sense that it sounds like it couldn�t be true � it is too far outside of the narcissistic circle of American concerns to think that our concerns aren�t their concerns.

Healy sums up his arguments like this:

�What's utterly unreasonable is to assume, as the administration and its fellow travelers seem to, that the number of recruits to Al Qaeda's murderous jihad is relatively fixed, and will not increase dramatically if the U.S. begins a policy of conquering and occupying Middle Eastern Muslim countries with the avowed purpose of making them secular and free.�

LI agrees with Healy that the probable result of occupying Iraq would be to increase bin Laden�s forces. The more violent result that we fear, however, is that occupying Iraq would inject American soldiers into a bloody civil war, in which not only Iraqi groups would be involved, but also proxies for the powers around Iraq. And that American withdrawal � which will occur if the casualties mount too high, a result easy to obtain by suicide bomber, as recent Israeli history will attest � will hasten a collapse that will inevitably bring the Americans back. In other words, chronic, sporadic violence for years on end, with the brunt of the casualties being borne by the supposedly �liberated� Iraqis.

Remora
Prediction fiction

The NYT reports official preliminary figures show fourth quarter growth at 0.7%. Further in the story we come to these two grafs:

Most economists had predicted a weak figure for the fourth quarter, and none interviewed yesterday said they planned to change their forecasts. Though they expect growth to improve slightly this year, it might not be enough to create jobs until the spring or summer.

Many companies hesitate even to bet on a midyear recovery, said Carl T. Camden, president and chief operating officer of Kelly Services, a leading provider of temporary workers. His clients "talk about things turning around in the third quarter," he said, "and then they realize that's the same speech they gave last year"

So, is that what "most economists" had predicted? Wow, somehow we bet those predictions were revised about two weeks ago. Long range, that isn't what most economists were predicting at all. When Business Week did its annual half year business conditions survey in July, 2002, the picture was a lot rosier:


"BusinessWeek's midyear survey of business economists shows that, on average, the forecasters expect real gross domestic product to grow at a healthy, if unspectacular, 3% annual rate during the second and third quarters, with the pace picking up to 3.5% in the first half of 2003 (table)."

Is LI nitpicking? No. The importance of this is that those messages, percolating out into the national subconscious, set the stage for Bush's push-over midterm election. After all, what is there to worry about when the forecasters are showing a pickup? That, in fact, we got a downturn is now going to be written away as, somehow, a bad call. Well, we would like to point out the ideological biases of the bad callers. The professional Pollyannas -- people like James Suriowiecki of New Yorker and the ever erroneous James Glassman of the Washington Post -- have been assuring us that the CEOs are too worried for their own good -- the recovery is just around the corner. Their reasons aren't found in the economy itself, but in a particular, libertarian philosophy -- the same one underlying Bush's Great Giveaway.

In July, while economists were not -- not is the operative word -- within ballpark range of the end of the year's GDP figures, Mr. Surioweicki published a defense of the New Economy paradigm in Wired. It is a rather funny document.. As with all defenders of discredited doctrines, the first order of business is to redefine the semantics of the doctrine to make it work. So, here is how Suriowiecki goes about it:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.07/Myth_pr.html

"Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, insists that the US can look forward only to "very subdued growth" until it works off "the bubble-induced excesses of the late 1990s."


Don't count on it. In fact, the overall shallowness of the recession and strong productivity growth during the downturn show that the skeptics are wrong. Call it the myth of the myth of the new economy. The naysayers ignore the economic fundamentals that drove the boom, emphasizing instead the over-the-top rhetorical flourishes - and outrageous stock prices - that accompanied it. Because wild-eyed optimists once said technology would change everything, it must have changed nothing. But if it's 2002 and you're still saying that things aren't fundamentally different than they were a decade ago, you're living in a dream world at least as fantastic as anything a new economy fanatic could conjure. I

n reality, 1995 marked the beginning of a long-lived shift in US economic performance. Productivity growth accelerated due to what economists call secular, rather than cyclical, factors. That is, the pace of productivity growth didn't start rising in 1995 because the business cycle had turned upward. It started rising because crucial aspects of the economy had changed. As a result, today's economy can expand much faster than previously thought possible. Between 1972 and 1995, productivity rose a paltry 1.4 percent a year. Between 1995 and 2000, it rose 2.5 percent a year - an increase of 79 percent. "There has absolutely been a sizable change in the secular growth rate of both labor productivity and total factor productivity," says Harvard economist Dale Jorgenson. Many of the truisms of the boom, it turns out, were true.

Now, what those stats aren't telling you is that they are calculated with the assumption that productivity has to be defined differently -- an assumption that kicked in during the late 90s. That assumption is being tested now. Like a lot of the accounting techniques of the 90s, it isn't looking very good.

Further, the New Economy model implied that this new boom in productivity would create a recession proof economy. That is what the New Economy was all about, in spite of Suriowiecki's smoke screen. And it wasn't just about that for bored pundits -- these were the assumptions that underlay AOL buying Time Warner. Hmm, I wonder how that worked out? And I wonder why Suriowiecki's model sorta forgets the slump in equity value that shows no sign of reversing itself right now. In fact, many of the truisms of the boom turned out to apply to the boom, and the boom only. One of the truisms of the post-boom, though, is certainly true for Suriewiecki -- bs in, bs out. Here, for instance, is the dance he does using the cooked productivity figures:

"Note that information technology's benefits increase over time. If you study the relationship of IT spending to productivity over a single year, you'll find that computers deliver benefits roughly equal to their costs."

That is a perfect New Economy sentence. The metric that you use to measure a firm's performance is no longer anything so plebian as profit and loss. Oh no. It is a 'benefit." And oh, this wonderous benefit -- this rise in productivity due to measuring productivity in a new way that i"incorporates" IT -- why, lo and behold, it equals the cost over a single year. This was the kind of thinking that boosted Yahoo stock to what was it, $300 per share? in 2000.

Behind Suriowiecki's nuttiness is one major fact about the current economy: we are being held up not by IT, but by people buying cars and houses. That's it, folks. There's no magic in the figures. The dream world inhabited by Suriowiecki's skeptics seems to be panning out as the real world, brother. Cooked productivity figures don't compare with 0% financing and the incessant barrage of mortgage offers even LI, who doesn't have a pot to piss in, gets regularly every morning in our email.

Alas, Surowiecki's kind of thinking will be used to justify the disastrous divident tax cut. The pied pipers are still out there, boys and girls.

Notes.

We received a nice email from a friend in NY re the previous post. Here it is:

"hi Roger - kind of a sweet post today, if I don't say so myself ....and, ah, evocative; in the sense that your introflashback brought me back to a memory of a moment in Austin in '91: I was sitting in the bar at the union (what the hell was it called?) drinking a beer and "protesting" the gulf war in the same way that all my "political" activity transpired (well, to be sure, very much as I did pretty much everything back then): sitting in a dark room on a sunny day, talking, drinking coffee, smoking, drinking beer, smoking, talking, drinking wine, talking, smoking..... when you happened in and we discussed having the same shameful, horrifying, stultifyingly humiliating realization the night before: that we agreed with Ross Perot - the war is not about oil. Well, were just about to go back to war and it still aint about oil. Trouble is, GW Dauphin and the rest of the cast of characters from '91 might think that it is (well, probably not Colin Powell, he's too focused on the exit strategy to ponder the whys and wherefores). We'll end up just as angry and sad and dumbfounded about the war as we were in '91, and the bullets will fly and the bombs will do what they do, and I will find a dark room on a sunny day and have a beer, alone and silent."

Speaking of exit strategies:
Today, of course, is the day the phone company decided to strike against Limited Inc, depriving us of phone service unless they receive some more of the ready... and of course LI isn't sure there's any ready in the bank. Not to worry, we will be posting from libraries and the like, if we have to... we will fight on the beaches, we will fight on the hills, we will fight in the divorce courts...

The latter is where we will be appearing tomorrow. A friend is divorcing a man who is convinced that LI has carnally known this friend. The man has been dragging said friend -- his ex-wife -- through the nightmare of the legal system in order to extract buckets of the ready. The man seems convinced that the courts are going to reward him for his varied virtues, in spite of the fact that the numbers say otherwise. And that the court will punish LI for our many vices. Drama, that is what we live for on this site, don't you know. Here it is. No wonder lately we are reading Dostoevsky's The Idiot.