Bollettino
The second term
LI would like to think that the defeat of George Bush is still a good bet. But we can’t trick our gut feeling. That our worst president – vacuous, dishonest, corrupt – is going to really win, instead of fake win, this election fills us with political despair. It is as though we’d been condemned to eke out the rest of our life on a diet of nothing but potato chips. Endless non-nutrition.
However, the polls record the obvious. Kerry’s strategy for defeating Bush has been a series of unbelievable miscalculations. It has not only eroded Kerry’s own image as a “leader” – those questions about leading the country can go up or down – but it has locked in an image of him as a loser. The worst numbers for Kerry are not in the for or against categories – they are in the question about who is going to win. This is a measurement of the sense of the race. The only way to dislodge an incumbent is to make the incumbent seem vulnerable. Here are the latest NYT numbers:
“The poll found that 61 percent of respondents expected Mr. Bush to win the election this fall; in March, shortly after Mr. Kerry clinched the Democratic nomination, just 44 percent thought Mr. Bush would win.”
The last election left a widespread taste of coup in the mouth. Coups work not so much because the coup’s leadership is popular as because the coup projects an image of inevitability. The image of force, of there being no alternative, has the effect of keeping people who oppose established power below the threshold where that dissatisfaction magically transforms itself from an intellectual mood into social action.
One wonders: what was the thinking behind making Kerry a Vietnam hero? The man’s credentials spring not from what he did to gain his medals, but from his coming home and articulating the reasons the Vietnam war was evil. And, in fact, his Senate career was not a mindless jog. Kerry’s book about terrorism, which he put out in the nineties, should have been the center of portraying the man as a leader against terrorism, and should have been contrasted with Bush's own record at every turn. He could well have pointed to it, and pointed to the inability of the present administration to constrain Al Qaeda and its affiliated terrorist network, and hammered Bush at every appearance with the demand that Al Qaeda be taken care of. Apparently, the Dems are so paralyzed by the idea of an October surprise that they have colluded, out of fear, in keeping Osama bin Laden's name out of this race.
The coulda beens pile up. He could have made the 9/11 commission’s report into what it actually was – a searing indictment of Bush. He could have turned around the rightwing meme about law enforcement as a mamby pamby way of “warring” against terrorism by showing that the real criteria in judging the war against terrorism is whether it works or not – not whether it is tough enough or not. As Kerry should know – I get this from his own book – terrorist organizations of the Al Qaeda variety rely on the same cell structure that the Mafia relied on. The victories over the Mafia in the nineties were achieved by international cooperation between law enforcement groups in Italy, Brazil, the UK, the USA, and other countries. They pooled information, for one thing, coordinated trials, coordinated investigations, and eventually rooted out the patrons of the Mafia. His book could have put real flesh on the hollowness of Kerry's line about internationalizing Iraq. By not foregrounding the criticism of Iraq in the larger criticism of the war on terror, Kerry essentially handed the issue to Bush.
Instead of playing to his strength, Kerry played to his weakness – his desire to pander. Pandering to the testosterone charged veteran constituency of Bush’s was never going to pick them off – it was simply going to get them talk radio riled against the anti-war protestor.
All of which means – it is time for lefties to start thinking about the landscape of Bush’s second administration. We’ll consider this in some posts next week.
PS -- there's a nice discussion of this over at Pierrot's Folly.
Saturday, September 18, 2004
Friday, September 17, 2004
Bollettino
As many of LI’s readers know, the House refused to renew the ban on automatic weapons. We can now – or soon – buy as many Uzis as we want to.
The ban, we know, was largely symbolic, and contained enough hedges and exceptions that any gun dealer worth his bullets could find his way around them. It is doubtful that gun bans led to the decrease in the murder rate in the 90s. LI’s skepticism about gun control is such that we don’t care, one way or another, about the end of this provision of the Brady law.
The ancient equivalent of the automatic weapon was the polybolos. There’s an interesting rundown on military weaponry, and Archimedes inventions of clever weapons to outwit the Romans, in David Frye’s contribution to the October issue of Military history. He gives a nice survey of the situation in the Mediterranean in 200 BC, when the Romans encountered the resistance of Carthage to their empire building.
“Archimedes was a product of an age like none other in the history of the ancient world. He was born into the Hellenistic era, when Hellenistic culture was spreading rapidly across the Western world. It was an extraordinary period, an age of boundless ambition and audacity, when politicians, artists, writers, philosophers and even mathematicians refused to be held back by the conventions of the past. It was an era, too, of astonishing growth in military technology.
Hellenistic engineers inherited from earlier times a form of the catapult that resembled a large crossbow. They would not remain satisfied with that design for long. Like Hellenistic-era thinkers in every other field, they felt that they should not merely copy but improve the traditional form of things. Recognizing the limitations of the old design, they replaced the bow with two arms that were propelled by springs of twisted rope. Over time, their experimentation with new materials enabled them to fire heavier bolts, and eventually stone balls, over longer distances. Animal sinews and even human hair were pressed into service.
Hellenistic ingenuity was not limited to the search for better torsion springs, however. The Alexandrian inventor Ktesibios developed radically new catapults, one of which was powered by bronze springs, the other by pneumatic pistons. But even his efforts seem primitive compared to the designs of Dionysius of Rhodes. In an effort to improve the rate of artillery fire, Dionysius actually automated several steps (including the locking of the bowstring, the placing of the missile in the groove and the pulling of the trigger) in catapult operation. Those tasks that he did not fully automate he at least speeded up by adding a chain drive. Dionysius' new design was called the polybolos, or multishooter. It was arguably history's first automatic weapon.”
We’ve always found Archimedes a fascinating figure, and the conjunction of Roman expansion and Late Hellenistic culture one of the more unfortunate of history’s coincidences. Rome, with its genius for practicality, rather stifled the flowering of Greek thinking that was built upon a tradition that the West, since the Renaissance, has been trying to restore -- the two centuries after Aristotle. Stoic logic was a victim of the Roman hegemony. And Archimedes, himself, comes down to us as a piecemeal figure, half magus, half the familiar absent minded professor.
Plutarch (who must, bien sur, be read in Sir Thomas North’s translation) gives this account of Archimedes peculiarities:
“For all that he hath written, are geometricall proposicions, which are without comparison of any other writings whatsoever: bicause the subject whereof they treate, doeth appeare by demonstracion, the matter giving them the grace and the greatnes, and the demonstracion proving it so exquisitely, with wonderfull reason and facilitie, as it is not repugnable. For in all Geometry are not to be founde more profounde and difficulte matters wrytten, in more plaine and simple tearmes, and by more easie principles, then those which he hath invented. Now some do impute this to the sharpnes of his wit and understanding, which was a naturall gift in him: other do referre it to the extreame paines he tooke, which made these things come so easily from him, that they seemed as if they had bene no trouble to him at all. For no man livinge of him selfe can devise the demonstracion of his propositions, what paine soever he take to seeke it: and yet straight so soone as he commeth to declare and open it, every man then imagineth with him selfe he could have found it out well enough, he can then so plainly make demonstracion of the thing he meaneth to shew. And therfore that me thinks is like enough to be true, which they write of him: that he was so ravished and dronke with the swete intysements of this Sirene, which as it were lay continually with him, as he forgate his meate and drinke and was careles otherwise of him selfe, that oftentimes his servants got him against his will to the bathes, to washe and annoynt him: and yet being there, he would ever be drawing out of the Geometricall figures, even in the very imbers of the chimney.”
The sweet enticements of the Siren has been many a man's downfall.
Archimedes death is as symbolically significant as Socrates. War, theory and instruments -- the dark matrix out of which capitalism would arise -- are prefigured in this small butchery.
Here’s how Plutarch reports it:
“Syracusa beinge taken, nothinge greved Marcellus more than the losse of Archimedes. Who beinge in his studie when the citie was taken, busily seekinge out by him selfe the demonstracion of some Geometricall proposition which he hadde drawen in figure, and so earnestly occupied therein, as he neither sawe nor hearde any noyse of enemies that ranne uppe and downe the citie, and much lesse knewe it was taken: He wondered when he sawe a souldier by him, that had him go with him to Marcellus. Notwithstandinge, he spake to the souldier, and bad him tary untill he had done his conclusion, and brought it to demonstracion: but the souldier being angry with his aunswer, drew out his sword, and killed him.
Others say, that the Romaine souldier when he came, offered the swords poynt to him, to kill him: and that Archimedes when he saw him, prayed him to hold his hand a litle, that he might not leave the matter he looked for unperfect, without demonstracion. But the souldier makinge no reckening of his speculation, killed him presently. It is reported a third way also, sayinge, that certeine souldiers met him in the streetes going to Marcellus, carying certeine Mathematicall instrumentes in a litle pretie coffer, as dialles for the sunne, Sphaeres and Angles, wherewith they measure the greatnesse of the body of the sunne by viewe: and they supposing he hadde caried some golde or silver or other pretious Juells in that litle coffer, slue him for it. But it is most true, that Marcellus was marvelous sorie for his death, and ever after hated the villen that slue him, as a cursed and execrable persone: and howe he made also marvelous much afterwards of Archimedes kinsemen for his sake.”
As many of LI’s readers know, the House refused to renew the ban on automatic weapons. We can now – or soon – buy as many Uzis as we want to.
The ban, we know, was largely symbolic, and contained enough hedges and exceptions that any gun dealer worth his bullets could find his way around them. It is doubtful that gun bans led to the decrease in the murder rate in the 90s. LI’s skepticism about gun control is such that we don’t care, one way or another, about the end of this provision of the Brady law.
The ancient equivalent of the automatic weapon was the polybolos. There’s an interesting rundown on military weaponry, and Archimedes inventions of clever weapons to outwit the Romans, in David Frye’s contribution to the October issue of Military history. He gives a nice survey of the situation in the Mediterranean in 200 BC, when the Romans encountered the resistance of Carthage to their empire building.
“Archimedes was a product of an age like none other in the history of the ancient world. He was born into the Hellenistic era, when Hellenistic culture was spreading rapidly across the Western world. It was an extraordinary period, an age of boundless ambition and audacity, when politicians, artists, writers, philosophers and even mathematicians refused to be held back by the conventions of the past. It was an era, too, of astonishing growth in military technology.
Hellenistic engineers inherited from earlier times a form of the catapult that resembled a large crossbow. They would not remain satisfied with that design for long. Like Hellenistic-era thinkers in every other field, they felt that they should not merely copy but improve the traditional form of things. Recognizing the limitations of the old design, they replaced the bow with two arms that were propelled by springs of twisted rope. Over time, their experimentation with new materials enabled them to fire heavier bolts, and eventually stone balls, over longer distances. Animal sinews and even human hair were pressed into service.
Hellenistic ingenuity was not limited to the search for better torsion springs, however. The Alexandrian inventor Ktesibios developed radically new catapults, one of which was powered by bronze springs, the other by pneumatic pistons. But even his efforts seem primitive compared to the designs of Dionysius of Rhodes. In an effort to improve the rate of artillery fire, Dionysius actually automated several steps (including the locking of the bowstring, the placing of the missile in the groove and the pulling of the trigger) in catapult operation. Those tasks that he did not fully automate he at least speeded up by adding a chain drive. Dionysius' new design was called the polybolos, or multishooter. It was arguably history's first automatic weapon.”
We’ve always found Archimedes a fascinating figure, and the conjunction of Roman expansion and Late Hellenistic culture one of the more unfortunate of history’s coincidences. Rome, with its genius for practicality, rather stifled the flowering of Greek thinking that was built upon a tradition that the West, since the Renaissance, has been trying to restore -- the two centuries after Aristotle. Stoic logic was a victim of the Roman hegemony. And Archimedes, himself, comes down to us as a piecemeal figure, half magus, half the familiar absent minded professor.
Plutarch (who must, bien sur, be read in Sir Thomas North’s translation) gives this account of Archimedes peculiarities:
“For all that he hath written, are geometricall proposicions, which are without comparison of any other writings whatsoever: bicause the subject whereof they treate, doeth appeare by demonstracion, the matter giving them the grace and the greatnes, and the demonstracion proving it so exquisitely, with wonderfull reason and facilitie, as it is not repugnable. For in all Geometry are not to be founde more profounde and difficulte matters wrytten, in more plaine and simple tearmes, and by more easie principles, then those which he hath invented. Now some do impute this to the sharpnes of his wit and understanding, which was a naturall gift in him: other do referre it to the extreame paines he tooke, which made these things come so easily from him, that they seemed as if they had bene no trouble to him at all. For no man livinge of him selfe can devise the demonstracion of his propositions, what paine soever he take to seeke it: and yet straight so soone as he commeth to declare and open it, every man then imagineth with him selfe he could have found it out well enough, he can then so plainly make demonstracion of the thing he meaneth to shew. And therfore that me thinks is like enough to be true, which they write of him: that he was so ravished and dronke with the swete intysements of this Sirene, which as it were lay continually with him, as he forgate his meate and drinke and was careles otherwise of him selfe, that oftentimes his servants got him against his will to the bathes, to washe and annoynt him: and yet being there, he would ever be drawing out of the Geometricall figures, even in the very imbers of the chimney.”
The sweet enticements of the Siren has been many a man's downfall.
Archimedes death is as symbolically significant as Socrates. War, theory and instruments -- the dark matrix out of which capitalism would arise -- are prefigured in this small butchery.
Here’s how Plutarch reports it:
“Syracusa beinge taken, nothinge greved Marcellus more than the losse of Archimedes. Who beinge in his studie when the citie was taken, busily seekinge out by him selfe the demonstracion of some Geometricall proposition which he hadde drawen in figure, and so earnestly occupied therein, as he neither sawe nor hearde any noyse of enemies that ranne uppe and downe the citie, and much lesse knewe it was taken: He wondered when he sawe a souldier by him, that had him go with him to Marcellus. Notwithstandinge, he spake to the souldier, and bad him tary untill he had done his conclusion, and brought it to demonstracion: but the souldier being angry with his aunswer, drew out his sword, and killed him.
Others say, that the Romaine souldier when he came, offered the swords poynt to him, to kill him: and that Archimedes when he saw him, prayed him to hold his hand a litle, that he might not leave the matter he looked for unperfect, without demonstracion. But the souldier makinge no reckening of his speculation, killed him presently. It is reported a third way also, sayinge, that certeine souldiers met him in the streetes going to Marcellus, carying certeine Mathematicall instrumentes in a litle pretie coffer, as dialles for the sunne, Sphaeres and Angles, wherewith they measure the greatnesse of the body of the sunne by viewe: and they supposing he hadde caried some golde or silver or other pretious Juells in that litle coffer, slue him for it. But it is most true, that Marcellus was marvelous sorie for his death, and ever after hated the villen that slue him, as a cursed and execrable persone: and howe he made also marvelous much afterwards of Archimedes kinsemen for his sake.”
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Bollettino
"It is difficult to set any limit upon the capacity of men to deceive themselves as to the relative strength and worth of the motives which affect them: politicians, in particular, acquire so strong a habit of setting their projects in the most favourable light that they soon convince themselves that the finest result which they think may conceivably accrue from any policy is the actual motive of that policy. As for the public, it is only natural that it should be deceived. All the purer and more elevated adjuncts of Imperialism are kept to the fore by religious and philanthropic agencies: patriotism appeals to the general lust of power within a people by suggestions of nobler uses, adopting the forms of self-sacrifice to cover domination and the love of adventure. So Christianity becomes "imperialist" to the Archbishop of Canterbury, a "going out to all the world to preach the gospel"; trade becomes "imperialist" in the eyes of merchants seeking a world market.
It is precisely in this falsification of the real import of motives that the gravest vice and the most signal peril of Imperialism reside. When, out of a medley of mixed motives, the least potent is selected for public prominence because it is the most presentable, when issues of a policy which was not present at all to the minds of those who formed this policy are treated as chief causes, the moral currency of the nation is debased."
- Hobson, Imperialism
Hobson’s Imperialism is the last, fine fruit – well, not last: more like an autumn crabapple -- of a liberal, anti-imperialist tradition that goes back to Cobden and to the Burke of the bold, endangering speeches for the American colonists. Hobson saves his most sardonic comments for the rhetoric of imperialism, which by the end of the Boer war had come off the instruments of death it served. The mass murders of white descendents of Europeans in British Concentration Camps concentrated the European mind as the robbery of India, the robbery of Africa, and the robbery of China had not. It had even penetrated the notoriously unconcentrate-able British one.
In Hobson’s spirit, we thought we would ponder the wonderful value that has been squeezed from the little verb ‘give’ in this, our New Crusading époque. A verb of many uses, a fundamental verb. In German, es gibt means “there is” – and there is nothing more fundamental than there is, right? To give is to engage in a transaction. There is a school of anthropology which has investigated gift giving at length. Marcel Mauss saw the key to the gift, its dialectical endpoint, in the potlatch ceremony among the Kwaikutl, a feasting occasion that results in the seeming impoverishment of the richest Kwaikutl, who give their things away, even down to acts of pure destruction, such as burning canoes. All are losses which, according to Mauss, are recuperated by the accompanying gain of prestige.
We wonder if there isn't some submodality of the gift presiding over our fundamental giving relationship with the hapless Other lately. The pontificators favorite verb is "give": giving freedom to, giving independence to, giving democracy to – these are all gifts that are showered, like so much litter thrown out of speeding SUV's, on the fortunate third world every day by generous editorial writers, columnists, and politicians of the first (most important) world.
To instance this wonderful generosity, I could skim the blogosphere and come away, like the grinch, with multitudinous gifts. Bloggers are always giving something – from independence to Kurds to land on the west bank to Israelis. Oddly enough, there’s no mention of selling – it is always giving. This indicates the natural goodness, one supposes, of Western man. Alas, the conclusion to be drawn from this hollow charity -- the absurdity of the writer's position -- is very rarely drawn by the spirited weblogger. That we write from the nervous breakdown of weakness, from an insistent impotence, that we thrust ourselves into a sterile, exhausted discourse designed, basically, by thieves and madmen -- is, finally, the only good we -- us writers -- produce. Somehow, however, this escapes the swarms of givers. They give and give, and nothing is given -- and they give and they give, and no gratitude is given back. Or as Jesus, in one of his more Shakespearian moments, once put it: "They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept."
With all that unreciprocated giving, it is predictable that a subtheme would start to grow. We give the Iraqis democracy, and they try to blow up our soldiers. So it is only right and fair that we bomb their cities, destroy their mosques, and in general make Iraq a better place for all.
However, the blogosphere is too easy, so I decided to skim the higher reaches of doxa. Here, for instance, is Mark Steyn talking about Palestine:
“For 10 years, the world has been trying to give a state to the Palestinians and the Palestinians keep tossing obstacles in their path.”
Here the giving transaction has the overtones of some didactic tale for Victorian children. How perverse of those Palestinians not to accept such a nice gift! Over those ten years, they have not only tossed obstacles in the path – refusing, for instance, to set up the old Christmas tree and sing the old carols – but they have had to be put down, in their ingratitude, to the extent of 6,000 some deaths. This is a case of giving, you will notice, in which there is an active subject – the world – doing the giving. That the world has a state in its capacious bag is an interesting proposition. Where is that state? Surely this is one of those present giving occassions in which the embarrassed receiver, upon tearing off the gift wrapping, notices marks of use. For instance, there seems to be a fence running through this state. There seem to be settlements on it – in fact, a lot more settlements than there were ten years ago! It is at these moments that the Palestinians probably wish they could write Miss Manners a letter: ‘Recently, we received a state in a big box. Upon opening it, however, we were shocked that it was obviously a little used! Not only that, but the big lug who gave it to us keeps closing his eyes whenever 10 or fifteen of us are murdered in the street by a bomb! Now, we don’t want to seem ungrateful, but is this really proper? Signed, puzzled in Hebron.”
However, Steyn’s 'world' is not usually the giver. Usually, as I said above, the giver is a ‘we’ – a secret sharer, the collective shadow cast upon the world by, well, some alter us. This is from an interview last year with Colin Powell.
“We want to turn Iraq over to the Iraqi people," he said. "But we want to give the people of Iraq a government that they can trust." He said this must be a representative form of government, and one that supports a nation that is living in peace with its neighbors and is free of weapons of mass destruction.”
Well, at least we got our last wish! Apparently we’ve searched up and down, and there’s no weapons of mass destruction there. We hope they are grateful for that, at least. In the meantime, the gift giving here is a little sticky. For instance, we did give the Iraqis a wonderful government that they can trust. But the Iraqis haven’t deserved the gift – they’ve displayed inordinate distrust of the government. Of course, as every parent knows, you promise a gift with such and such a feature, and you go looking for it in the store – but it turns out to be too expensive! Similarly, we were going to give this representative government to the Iraqis, when someone said, hold on there! Will it be representative of the Iraqis? Which made us all think, hmm, if we can’t trust the Iraqis cause they don’t trust the government we gave them, than a representative government would be one that we couldn’t trust. What a brain twister! Which is why we took off the shelf a second rate autocrat and dusted him off. He ought to be just the thing to, well, put down the untrustworthy Iraqis.
Last year, too, the Brits were in a gift giving mood. This is from a communique by British foreign minister Jack Straw:
“The dead and the missing are both the most painful reminder of Saddam’s dictatorship and the greatest symbol of our determination to give Iraq the future its people so richly deserve. I do not underestimate the scale of our task.”
Listening to that last year, I bet you the Iraqis didn’t know that the future we were going to give them looks like, well, yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. However, as Straw promised, this is the future they deserve – which is what they get for not trusting the government that we gave them to trust in the first place. You know, getting a present comes with some responsibilities, too. For instance, wouldn't it be nice if the Iraqis, out of gratitude, offered us military bases so we could give the gift of democracy to Iran? Wouldn't that be decent? It means an awful lot to the guys in the White House who've been giving and giving to the Iraqis.
Finally, in this sweepstakes of giving, having gone down memory lane for our other examples to 2003, when we were all Richard the Lionhearts -- bliss it was then to be crusading for freedom -- you must remember this. Having taken Iraq under our tender loving care, there was much discussion of dividing the booty. However, we are not an immoral people. Whenever we do something immoral, we immediately find a moral reason for it. Our big idea back then was to give the Iraqis a share in the profits we’d make from their oil. Remember those days?
Josh Marshall, back in 2003, jumped whole heartedly on a plan to “give the oil back to the Iraqi people,” as the headline writer for one of his Hill piece aptly put it. Some called it the Alaska plan, because the citizens of Alaska get a share in the profits from the oil pumped up there. Marshall slipped in a phrase in his piece that makes one dream – or at least consider that it all has been a dream, these last terrible four years.. “…a Zogby poll reported that 59 percent of Americans support some form of the Alaska model for Iraq.” Wow! I wonder if the American people had been informed of Hague conventions regarding the constraints on the ability of occupying armies to make fundamental changes in a nation's economic relations? Apparently, that question wasn’t asked. But I think the poll shows us something about the generosity deep in the heart of the Western We – we have always been willing to go to new territories, to take the raw materials from those territories, and to, well, help the natives of those new territories out of their old fashioned ways. And once again we were as willing to do this. One wonders why nobody speaks of it anymore?
"It is difficult to set any limit upon the capacity of men to deceive themselves as to the relative strength and worth of the motives which affect them: politicians, in particular, acquire so strong a habit of setting their projects in the most favourable light that they soon convince themselves that the finest result which they think may conceivably accrue from any policy is the actual motive of that policy. As for the public, it is only natural that it should be deceived. All the purer and more elevated adjuncts of Imperialism are kept to the fore by religious and philanthropic agencies: patriotism appeals to the general lust of power within a people by suggestions of nobler uses, adopting the forms of self-sacrifice to cover domination and the love of adventure. So Christianity becomes "imperialist" to the Archbishop of Canterbury, a "going out to all the world to preach the gospel"; trade becomes "imperialist" in the eyes of merchants seeking a world market.
It is precisely in this falsification of the real import of motives that the gravest vice and the most signal peril of Imperialism reside. When, out of a medley of mixed motives, the least potent is selected for public prominence because it is the most presentable, when issues of a policy which was not present at all to the minds of those who formed this policy are treated as chief causes, the moral currency of the nation is debased."
- Hobson, Imperialism
Hobson’s Imperialism is the last, fine fruit – well, not last: more like an autumn crabapple -- of a liberal, anti-imperialist tradition that goes back to Cobden and to the Burke of the bold, endangering speeches for the American colonists. Hobson saves his most sardonic comments for the rhetoric of imperialism, which by the end of the Boer war had come off the instruments of death it served. The mass murders of white descendents of Europeans in British Concentration Camps concentrated the European mind as the robbery of India, the robbery of Africa, and the robbery of China had not. It had even penetrated the notoriously unconcentrate-able British one.
In Hobson’s spirit, we thought we would ponder the wonderful value that has been squeezed from the little verb ‘give’ in this, our New Crusading époque. A verb of many uses, a fundamental verb. In German, es gibt means “there is” – and there is nothing more fundamental than there is, right? To give is to engage in a transaction. There is a school of anthropology which has investigated gift giving at length. Marcel Mauss saw the key to the gift, its dialectical endpoint, in the potlatch ceremony among the Kwaikutl, a feasting occasion that results in the seeming impoverishment of the richest Kwaikutl, who give their things away, even down to acts of pure destruction, such as burning canoes. All are losses which, according to Mauss, are recuperated by the accompanying gain of prestige.
We wonder if there isn't some submodality of the gift presiding over our fundamental giving relationship with the hapless Other lately. The pontificators favorite verb is "give": giving freedom to, giving independence to, giving democracy to – these are all gifts that are showered, like so much litter thrown out of speeding SUV's, on the fortunate third world every day by generous editorial writers, columnists, and politicians of the first (most important) world.
To instance this wonderful generosity, I could skim the blogosphere and come away, like the grinch, with multitudinous gifts. Bloggers are always giving something – from independence to Kurds to land on the west bank to Israelis. Oddly enough, there’s no mention of selling – it is always giving. This indicates the natural goodness, one supposes, of Western man. Alas, the conclusion to be drawn from this hollow charity -- the absurdity of the writer's position -- is very rarely drawn by the spirited weblogger. That we write from the nervous breakdown of weakness, from an insistent impotence, that we thrust ourselves into a sterile, exhausted discourse designed, basically, by thieves and madmen -- is, finally, the only good we -- us writers -- produce. Somehow, however, this escapes the swarms of givers. They give and give, and nothing is given -- and they give and they give, and no gratitude is given back. Or as Jesus, in one of his more Shakespearian moments, once put it: "They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept."
With all that unreciprocated giving, it is predictable that a subtheme would start to grow. We give the Iraqis democracy, and they try to blow up our soldiers. So it is only right and fair that we bomb their cities, destroy their mosques, and in general make Iraq a better place for all.
However, the blogosphere is too easy, so I decided to skim the higher reaches of doxa. Here, for instance, is Mark Steyn talking about Palestine:
“For 10 years, the world has been trying to give a state to the Palestinians and the Palestinians keep tossing obstacles in their path.”
Here the giving transaction has the overtones of some didactic tale for Victorian children. How perverse of those Palestinians not to accept such a nice gift! Over those ten years, they have not only tossed obstacles in the path – refusing, for instance, to set up the old Christmas tree and sing the old carols – but they have had to be put down, in their ingratitude, to the extent of 6,000 some deaths. This is a case of giving, you will notice, in which there is an active subject – the world – doing the giving. That the world has a state in its capacious bag is an interesting proposition. Where is that state? Surely this is one of those present giving occassions in which the embarrassed receiver, upon tearing off the gift wrapping, notices marks of use. For instance, there seems to be a fence running through this state. There seem to be settlements on it – in fact, a lot more settlements than there were ten years ago! It is at these moments that the Palestinians probably wish they could write Miss Manners a letter: ‘Recently, we received a state in a big box. Upon opening it, however, we were shocked that it was obviously a little used! Not only that, but the big lug who gave it to us keeps closing his eyes whenever 10 or fifteen of us are murdered in the street by a bomb! Now, we don’t want to seem ungrateful, but is this really proper? Signed, puzzled in Hebron.”
However, Steyn’s 'world' is not usually the giver. Usually, as I said above, the giver is a ‘we’ – a secret sharer, the collective shadow cast upon the world by, well, some alter us. This is from an interview last year with Colin Powell.
“We want to turn Iraq over to the Iraqi people," he said. "But we want to give the people of Iraq a government that they can trust." He said this must be a representative form of government, and one that supports a nation that is living in peace with its neighbors and is free of weapons of mass destruction.”
Well, at least we got our last wish! Apparently we’ve searched up and down, and there’s no weapons of mass destruction there. We hope they are grateful for that, at least. In the meantime, the gift giving here is a little sticky. For instance, we did give the Iraqis a wonderful government that they can trust. But the Iraqis haven’t deserved the gift – they’ve displayed inordinate distrust of the government. Of course, as every parent knows, you promise a gift with such and such a feature, and you go looking for it in the store – but it turns out to be too expensive! Similarly, we were going to give this representative government to the Iraqis, when someone said, hold on there! Will it be representative of the Iraqis? Which made us all think, hmm, if we can’t trust the Iraqis cause they don’t trust the government we gave them, than a representative government would be one that we couldn’t trust. What a brain twister! Which is why we took off the shelf a second rate autocrat and dusted him off. He ought to be just the thing to, well, put down the untrustworthy Iraqis.
Last year, too, the Brits were in a gift giving mood. This is from a communique by British foreign minister Jack Straw:
“The dead and the missing are both the most painful reminder of Saddam’s dictatorship and the greatest symbol of our determination to give Iraq the future its people so richly deserve. I do not underestimate the scale of our task.”
Listening to that last year, I bet you the Iraqis didn’t know that the future we were going to give them looks like, well, yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. However, as Straw promised, this is the future they deserve – which is what they get for not trusting the government that we gave them to trust in the first place. You know, getting a present comes with some responsibilities, too. For instance, wouldn't it be nice if the Iraqis, out of gratitude, offered us military bases so we could give the gift of democracy to Iran? Wouldn't that be decent? It means an awful lot to the guys in the White House who've been giving and giving to the Iraqis.
Finally, in this sweepstakes of giving, having gone down memory lane for our other examples to 2003, when we were all Richard the Lionhearts -- bliss it was then to be crusading for freedom -- you must remember this. Having taken Iraq under our tender loving care, there was much discussion of dividing the booty. However, we are not an immoral people. Whenever we do something immoral, we immediately find a moral reason for it. Our big idea back then was to give the Iraqis a share in the profits we’d make from their oil. Remember those days?
Josh Marshall, back in 2003, jumped whole heartedly on a plan to “give the oil back to the Iraqi people,” as the headline writer for one of his Hill piece aptly put it. Some called it the Alaska plan, because the citizens of Alaska get a share in the profits from the oil pumped up there. Marshall slipped in a phrase in his piece that makes one dream – or at least consider that it all has been a dream, these last terrible four years.. “…a Zogby poll reported that 59 percent of Americans support some form of the Alaska model for Iraq.” Wow! I wonder if the American people had been informed of Hague conventions regarding the constraints on the ability of occupying armies to make fundamental changes in a nation's economic relations? Apparently, that question wasn’t asked. But I think the poll shows us something about the generosity deep in the heart of the Western We – we have always been willing to go to new territories, to take the raw materials from those territories, and to, well, help the natives of those new territories out of their old fashioned ways. And once again we were as willing to do this. One wonders why nobody speaks of it anymore?
Monday, September 13, 2004
Bollettino
We are late linking to the American Academy of Arts and Science’s Bulletin for Spring, 2004. However, we would urge our readers to check out the article on McCarthy and McCarthyism. Nathan Glazer and Anthony Lewis contribute two not very rocking speeches in commemoration of the McCarthy-Army hearings, fifty years ago – but Sam Tannenhaus, one of the right’s best up and coming intellectuals, contributes a pretty sterling piece, especially considering that it remains under the 2,000 word mark.
For Tannenhaus, the problem posed by McCarthy is a part of a larger historical conundrum: how did the American right move from isolationist in the thirties to the interventionist anti-communism of the Cold War era?
“One of the mysteries to me, as I write about American conservatism, is how quickly and seamlessly the American Right moved from an isolationist, anti-interventionist position leading up to Pearl Harbor to an extreme interventionist position afterwards, particularly when it came to the Soviet Union. Why was it that, suddenly, conservatives wanted to fght the “great war” they hadn’t wanted to fght before?The answer is that most of them didn’t. Robert Taft and Joe McCarthy both opposed the Korean War initially. Yet some of us remember that when Douglas MacArthur wanted to take the war to China, Harry Truman fired him, and MacArthur became a martyr to the Right. In fact, the American conservative movement opposed almost all those interventions early on, and McCarthy identifed the perfect surrogate enemy. McCarthy’s approach was, in its
crude way, a very clever formulation. Basically, he said, “Why send American soldiers to die in Korea when all the Communists we have to fear are here at home? If we can get Dean Acheson and George Marshall and all the other bad guys out of the State Department, they won’t lure us into these death traps overseas.”
In other words, isolationism never really went away; it remained one of the submerged themes in American foreign policy that is still evident today. Isolationism was reborn as unilateralism. In fact, the two consort fairly easily. In the years leading up to World War II, the antiwar argument from the Right was that we did not want to involve ourselves in European wars. It actually doesn’t take a great leap from that to say we, alone, will fight the Cold War: We’ll oppose nato and the Marshall Plan as, again, the conservatives did and we’ll make it our single crusade against the enemy. And we are seeing this again in the war in Iraq.”
This, we think, is a fairly profound thesis. And Tannenhaus adds to it the fact that McCarthyism captured a very anti-elitist populism that was, in the 30s, the property of the left. In fact, Glazer and Lewis unconsciously underline Tannanhaus’ point: their speeches are larded with “respected” figures, like the President of GE and Walter Lippman, who opposed McCarthy. That opposition isn’t contemptible – far from it, we should all be grateful to the Liberal elite that tore McCarthy down -- but its language is revealing. The liberal elite had forged a culture that was quite comfortable with the state of affairs in the country, the balance between public and private power, because they dominated both spheres. It is interesting – as we have noted before – that conservative movements have depended so heavily on oil money. Much of that money comes from an entirely different sphere than that moved in by the president of GE, or by Eisenhower.
That sphere, we think, was and is caught up with Iraq as an intervention of another kind – one that brings democracy, one that builds a Marshall Plan. This rhetorical dressing is almost irresistible to the John Kerrys of the world – even though the Kerrys know, in their gut, that oil wealth doesn’t mean it when they say, Marshall Plan, or democracy. But the meaninglessness of these phrases is hard to get across in a campaing that is all phrases. And – discouragingly – that credibility gap will not disturb their constituencies at all. Nobody on the Right has even for a moment objected to the fact that the Bush administration’s announcement of a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan was followed by (unbelievably enough) a budget that proposed zero dollars for the country. Do people in Waycross, Georgia, planting their Bush signs in their front lawns really want to put their tax dollars towards a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan? Hell no. But they do like the ring of the idea. Similarly, the war party in the media is compulsively scornful of those people who “would have left Saddam Hussein in power” in Iraq, instead of supporting democracy – but they are absolutely uninterested in whether, indeed, the mechanisms of democracy are really being set up in Iraq. Tannenhaus throws a little light on the roots of this schizoid response.
We are late linking to the American Academy of Arts and Science’s Bulletin for Spring, 2004. However, we would urge our readers to check out the article on McCarthy and McCarthyism. Nathan Glazer and Anthony Lewis contribute two not very rocking speeches in commemoration of the McCarthy-Army hearings, fifty years ago – but Sam Tannenhaus, one of the right’s best up and coming intellectuals, contributes a pretty sterling piece, especially considering that it remains under the 2,000 word mark.
For Tannenhaus, the problem posed by McCarthy is a part of a larger historical conundrum: how did the American right move from isolationist in the thirties to the interventionist anti-communism of the Cold War era?
“One of the mysteries to me, as I write about American conservatism, is how quickly and seamlessly the American Right moved from an isolationist, anti-interventionist position leading up to Pearl Harbor to an extreme interventionist position afterwards, particularly when it came to the Soviet Union. Why was it that, suddenly, conservatives wanted to fght the “great war” they hadn’t wanted to fght before?The answer is that most of them didn’t. Robert Taft and Joe McCarthy both opposed the Korean War initially. Yet some of us remember that when Douglas MacArthur wanted to take the war to China, Harry Truman fired him, and MacArthur became a martyr to the Right. In fact, the American conservative movement opposed almost all those interventions early on, and McCarthy identifed the perfect surrogate enemy. McCarthy’s approach was, in its
crude way, a very clever formulation. Basically, he said, “Why send American soldiers to die in Korea when all the Communists we have to fear are here at home? If we can get Dean Acheson and George Marshall and all the other bad guys out of the State Department, they won’t lure us into these death traps overseas.”
In other words, isolationism never really went away; it remained one of the submerged themes in American foreign policy that is still evident today. Isolationism was reborn as unilateralism. In fact, the two consort fairly easily. In the years leading up to World War II, the antiwar argument from the Right was that we did not want to involve ourselves in European wars. It actually doesn’t take a great leap from that to say we, alone, will fight the Cold War: We’ll oppose nato and the Marshall Plan as, again, the conservatives did and we’ll make it our single crusade against the enemy. And we are seeing this again in the war in Iraq.”
This, we think, is a fairly profound thesis. And Tannenhaus adds to it the fact that McCarthyism captured a very anti-elitist populism that was, in the 30s, the property of the left. In fact, Glazer and Lewis unconsciously underline Tannanhaus’ point: their speeches are larded with “respected” figures, like the President of GE and Walter Lippman, who opposed McCarthy. That opposition isn’t contemptible – far from it, we should all be grateful to the Liberal elite that tore McCarthy down -- but its language is revealing. The liberal elite had forged a culture that was quite comfortable with the state of affairs in the country, the balance between public and private power, because they dominated both spheres. It is interesting – as we have noted before – that conservative movements have depended so heavily on oil money. Much of that money comes from an entirely different sphere than that moved in by the president of GE, or by Eisenhower.
That sphere, we think, was and is caught up with Iraq as an intervention of another kind – one that brings democracy, one that builds a Marshall Plan. This rhetorical dressing is almost irresistible to the John Kerrys of the world – even though the Kerrys know, in their gut, that oil wealth doesn’t mean it when they say, Marshall Plan, or democracy. But the meaninglessness of these phrases is hard to get across in a campaing that is all phrases. And – discouragingly – that credibility gap will not disturb their constituencies at all. Nobody on the Right has even for a moment objected to the fact that the Bush administration’s announcement of a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan was followed by (unbelievably enough) a budget that proposed zero dollars for the country. Do people in Waycross, Georgia, planting their Bush signs in their front lawns really want to put their tax dollars towards a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan? Hell no. But they do like the ring of the idea. Similarly, the war party in the media is compulsively scornful of those people who “would have left Saddam Hussein in power” in Iraq, instead of supporting democracy – but they are absolutely uninterested in whether, indeed, the mechanisms of democracy are really being set up in Iraq. Tannenhaus throws a little light on the roots of this schizoid response.
Bollettino
Our friend T., in Nyc, wrote us a nice email about our last post. This is it.
Dear LI,
Thank you for stating my every fear in a solemn and muted post.
Amongst all those things that the unalayzed members of this current (and yet to be) regime do not admit is Zizek's observation that three widely-touted examples of democracy, touted each in their own particular and peculiar time, Taiwan, South Korea and Argentina were, each in their time, military dictatorships: this fact will NEVER be acknowledged, although it ought to be for it could save lives. But who is it that has had enough analysis to analyze this precedent?
A reminder, a quote that I sent to you about this time last year [the last clause I know for September 11 is a necessary point of reference for me, like any anniversary of a (literally) meaningful event; it is a period of extremely private sadness; it is, of course, something that I will not give-up, it is a Thing that permits me relief from every other concern or anxiety; nevertheless, it is a unique Thing that, pondering it, forces me to think therefrom to every other concern or anxiety] from The Emperor - there, then, at the end of Selasssie-I's reign, summer '74: "Mediocrity is dangerous: when it feels itself threatened it becomes ruthless... [F]ear and hatred bind them, and the barest forces prod them to action: meanness, fierce egotism, fear of losing their privileges and being condemned. Dialogue with such people is impossible, senseless." All of which, as you state so well and clearly, has nothing to do with Strauss or democracy. Yes, these are mediocre, ruthless, hateful, neurotically fierce, hysterically fearful, and, stylelessly, black on black; 'denial' is not a rich enough term."
Our friend T., in Nyc, wrote us a nice email about our last post. This is it.
Dear LI,
Thank you for stating my every fear in a solemn and muted post.
Amongst all those things that the unalayzed members of this current (and yet to be) regime do not admit is Zizek's observation that three widely-touted examples of democracy, touted each in their own particular and peculiar time, Taiwan, South Korea and Argentina were, each in their time, military dictatorships: this fact will NEVER be acknowledged, although it ought to be for it could save lives. But who is it that has had enough analysis to analyze this precedent?
A reminder, a quote that I sent to you about this time last year [the last clause I know for September 11 is a necessary point of reference for me, like any anniversary of a (literally) meaningful event; it is a period of extremely private sadness; it is, of course, something that I will not give-up, it is a Thing that permits me relief from every other concern or anxiety; nevertheless, it is a unique Thing that, pondering it, forces me to think therefrom to every other concern or anxiety] from The Emperor - there, then, at the end of Selasssie-I's reign, summer '74: "Mediocrity is dangerous: when it feels itself threatened it becomes ruthless... [F]ear and hatred bind them, and the barest forces prod them to action: meanness, fierce egotism, fear of losing their privileges and being condemned. Dialogue with such people is impossible, senseless." All of which, as you state so well and clearly, has nothing to do with Strauss or democracy. Yes, these are mediocre, ruthless, hateful, neurotically fierce, hysterically fearful, and, stylelessly, black on black; 'denial' is not a rich enough term."
Saturday, September 11, 2004
Bollettino
Perhaps LI’s mood, lately, has effected our vision. We are seeing black in black. Our worst case scenario for this election seems to be coming true. Not only does Bush seem to be winning it, but he seems on the verge of winning it by a large margin.
So, is this just a case of a population taking a large detour from the reality principle – a mass neurosis? Mass neurosis among males has another name – war. Tom Friedman, the warmonger, gave as his reason for supporting the war in Iraq that we had to attack somebody after 9/11. You don’t have to charge 150 per to recognize a classic case of substitution and compulsion when it drops a bomb on you, or shanghais your kids making part time money in the Guard into a pointless death in the desert. We fight one war – a real one – with a comic dearth of troops and follow up, prolong it by way of incompetent mercenaries in Peshawar, while we turn our soldiers into mercenaries for an ex-Ba’athist president-for-life in waiting in Najaf, Mosul, Fallujah, and all the other names that grace the obituaries or the medical charts for the one limbed, the brain damaged, the scorched, and we crown this accomplishment with an election in which the moderate promises that he will have our soldiers out of there by 2008.
In the NYRB, this week, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. ponders how we got here in a review of The Vulcans. His answer, depressingly enough, is that we can lay a heaping helping of blame on Leo Strauss.
LI believes that Leo Strauss has as much to do with strategy in the Middle East as, say, the Shriners or the Freemasons. A lot of neoconservatives connected because they went to Chicago and took classes with Leo, or with one of the Straussians. The emphasis here should be on connection. Strauss’ idea of the noble lie, if that is his idea – wasn’t like Edison trying out that one last filament in the light bulb. The idea that you get ahead by telling people what they want to hear, while you are really pursuing another agenda, could have been jotted on a cocktail napkin by any Madison Avenue exec worth his expense account in the last one hundred years. We have serious doubts Paul Wolfowitz needed Hegel's Gesammelte Werke to figure out how to push a war through the soft maze of a D.C. establishment filled with corrupt know it alls and brownosers who all benefit from the military industrial complex -- otherwise known as metro D.C.'s major employer.
A more serious problem with Schlesinger’s article is that it accepts the Bush administration’s premises that the invasion of Iraq was about spreading democracy. Again, a brief glance at America’s history will tell us that none of the one hundred fifty some American military interventions were fought, according to American politicians, for anything else. We defeated the Indians, drove back the Mexicans, and penetrated the jungles of the Philippines for democracy. One imagines that if we had been able to poll Atilla’s horde, they would have mentioned “bigger horses” as a key motivator. Such is progress that our desire for a transportation system that guarantees all Americans the ability to make it on their own, at 65 mph, from LA to NYC, in metal capsules weighing 9 to 10 thousand pounds is now called democracy. In fact, the Pentagon pump house boys did, for a while, convince themselves that Iraqi households were filled with covert Republicans – and we don’t mean the Guard. That was because the only Iraqi they met socially was one named Chalabi. But even Paul Wolfowitz is not completely insane. The thought was that a new order in the Middle East could be implemented by an aggressive America with little native opposition, so that Israel would assume a first rank position, in alliance with Iraq and, eventually, a Pahlavi-ist Iran and a broken up Syria. This fits nicely with the traditional American pattern. In theory, it is a policy that could deliver on America’s two major interests – preserving Israel’s power, and preserving the state of the world’s oil economy – with a bonus – it would free us, to a certain extent, from an onerous relationship with Saudi Arabia.
Democracy, here, is merely a codeword for privatization. This can be thought of as the ultimate wave of privatization – taking away the oil from the various Middle Eastern governments that control it. The plan was, in fact, coherent with Cheney’s domestic plan, which had its meltdown in California in 2001, and will no doubt be back again in 2005.
The Wolfowitz doctrine hasn’t worked. It fact, it has exploded spectacularly, and will no doubt continue to create chaos down the road. However, this is neither because of democracy nor Strauss. Wolfowitz, a man who thinks Suharto (the one dictator outside of Mao who could compete with Saddam Hussein in the ‘Australian crawl through a sea of blood’ event) was a great man, could give a tinker’s damn about democracy. The American occupation of Iraq has been notable for a lot of things – the air bombing of cities we already occupy is one of them, that’s unique -- but democracy is not among them. The word has, of course, been used a lot, but to mistake that for the real thing is to mistake the phrase “yours sincerely” in everyday correspondence for a court administered oath. If democracy had been happening in Iraq, the most unpopular political figure in Iraq, Allawi, would not be running the place; the Iraqis themselves would be spending their oil money, instead of not having the power even to inquire into how it is spent; and the largest government building in Iraq, a palace paid for by Iraqi money for the past twenty five years, would not presently be the American embassy.
Of course, to admit that we aren’t fighting for democracy in Iraq would be to commit the sin against the holy ghost and the founding fathers, which is perhaps why an old Democratic politburo member like Schlesinger goes on about Leo Strauss. But perhaps, just as in psychoanalysis, the cure will only start when we admit what we really desire.
I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for that moment.
Perhaps LI’s mood, lately, has effected our vision. We are seeing black in black. Our worst case scenario for this election seems to be coming true. Not only does Bush seem to be winning it, but he seems on the verge of winning it by a large margin.
So, is this just a case of a population taking a large detour from the reality principle – a mass neurosis? Mass neurosis among males has another name – war. Tom Friedman, the warmonger, gave as his reason for supporting the war in Iraq that we had to attack somebody after 9/11. You don’t have to charge 150 per to recognize a classic case of substitution and compulsion when it drops a bomb on you, or shanghais your kids making part time money in the Guard into a pointless death in the desert. We fight one war – a real one – with a comic dearth of troops and follow up, prolong it by way of incompetent mercenaries in Peshawar, while we turn our soldiers into mercenaries for an ex-Ba’athist president-for-life in waiting in Najaf, Mosul, Fallujah, and all the other names that grace the obituaries or the medical charts for the one limbed, the brain damaged, the scorched, and we crown this accomplishment with an election in which the moderate promises that he will have our soldiers out of there by 2008.
In the NYRB, this week, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. ponders how we got here in a review of The Vulcans. His answer, depressingly enough, is that we can lay a heaping helping of blame on Leo Strauss.
LI believes that Leo Strauss has as much to do with strategy in the Middle East as, say, the Shriners or the Freemasons. A lot of neoconservatives connected because they went to Chicago and took classes with Leo, or with one of the Straussians. The emphasis here should be on connection. Strauss’ idea of the noble lie, if that is his idea – wasn’t like Edison trying out that one last filament in the light bulb. The idea that you get ahead by telling people what they want to hear, while you are really pursuing another agenda, could have been jotted on a cocktail napkin by any Madison Avenue exec worth his expense account in the last one hundred years. We have serious doubts Paul Wolfowitz needed Hegel's Gesammelte Werke to figure out how to push a war through the soft maze of a D.C. establishment filled with corrupt know it alls and brownosers who all benefit from the military industrial complex -- otherwise known as metro D.C.'s major employer.
A more serious problem with Schlesinger’s article is that it accepts the Bush administration’s premises that the invasion of Iraq was about spreading democracy. Again, a brief glance at America’s history will tell us that none of the one hundred fifty some American military interventions were fought, according to American politicians, for anything else. We defeated the Indians, drove back the Mexicans, and penetrated the jungles of the Philippines for democracy. One imagines that if we had been able to poll Atilla’s horde, they would have mentioned “bigger horses” as a key motivator. Such is progress that our desire for a transportation system that guarantees all Americans the ability to make it on their own, at 65 mph, from LA to NYC, in metal capsules weighing 9 to 10 thousand pounds is now called democracy. In fact, the Pentagon pump house boys did, for a while, convince themselves that Iraqi households were filled with covert Republicans – and we don’t mean the Guard. That was because the only Iraqi they met socially was one named Chalabi. But even Paul Wolfowitz is not completely insane. The thought was that a new order in the Middle East could be implemented by an aggressive America with little native opposition, so that Israel would assume a first rank position, in alliance with Iraq and, eventually, a Pahlavi-ist Iran and a broken up Syria. This fits nicely with the traditional American pattern. In theory, it is a policy that could deliver on America’s two major interests – preserving Israel’s power, and preserving the state of the world’s oil economy – with a bonus – it would free us, to a certain extent, from an onerous relationship with Saudi Arabia.
Democracy, here, is merely a codeword for privatization. This can be thought of as the ultimate wave of privatization – taking away the oil from the various Middle Eastern governments that control it. The plan was, in fact, coherent with Cheney’s domestic plan, which had its meltdown in California in 2001, and will no doubt be back again in 2005.
The Wolfowitz doctrine hasn’t worked. It fact, it has exploded spectacularly, and will no doubt continue to create chaos down the road. However, this is neither because of democracy nor Strauss. Wolfowitz, a man who thinks Suharto (the one dictator outside of Mao who could compete with Saddam Hussein in the ‘Australian crawl through a sea of blood’ event) was a great man, could give a tinker’s damn about democracy. The American occupation of Iraq has been notable for a lot of things – the air bombing of cities we already occupy is one of them, that’s unique -- but democracy is not among them. The word has, of course, been used a lot, but to mistake that for the real thing is to mistake the phrase “yours sincerely” in everyday correspondence for a court administered oath. If democracy had been happening in Iraq, the most unpopular political figure in Iraq, Allawi, would not be running the place; the Iraqis themselves would be spending their oil money, instead of not having the power even to inquire into how it is spent; and the largest government building in Iraq, a palace paid for by Iraqi money for the past twenty five years, would not presently be the American embassy.
Of course, to admit that we aren’t fighting for democracy in Iraq would be to commit the sin against the holy ghost and the founding fathers, which is perhaps why an old Democratic politburo member like Schlesinger goes on about Leo Strauss. But perhaps, just as in psychoanalysis, the cure will only start when we admit what we really desire.
I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for that moment.
Friday, September 10, 2004
Bollettino
A tape that the murderers made in Beslan has been released. An account in the Independent describes it as a minute long pan showing the hostages in the gym, and the bombs strung up on the basketball hoops.
It seems to LI that the disaster of last Friday was fatally bound up with the way the murderers strung the bombs. It was as simple as that. In an overheated school with 1,200 prisoners and dissension among the murderers themselves, there was every chance of accident. The point at issue, in the media, was whether the Security forces responded too hastily to the initial explosions heard in the school. Yet given the circumstances, it is hard to see how the crisis could have proceeded to a peaceful settlement, given the criminal nature of the terrorists, the lies of the government, and the fury of the inhabitants of Beslan. Reports from the survivors claim that when the murderers disagreed among themselves, some were even murdered by the chief.
There are two different interpretations that have immediately latched onto the murder of, according to Gazeta.ru, 600 people. One is the official line, which is spoken by Putin: the terrorists were composed of Arabs as well as Chechens, showing that Al Qaeda was behind the taking of the school. The other is that the murderers were a group composed of the usual ethnic mix of Basaev’s militia. The latter school blames everything on Putin’s policy in Chechnya.
LI believes this, from what we have read so far: when a war is fought that employs the scorched earth tactics that the Russians have employed in Chechnya since 1999, it changes the composition of the resisting force in an almost Darwinian fashion. Moderates are selected out by the very intensity and scope of the fighting. This happened, for instance, in Cambodia in 1970 – the U.S. forces, which attacked with random bombing the communist sanctuaries in Cambodia, aiding the government that had deposed Sihanouk, picked off those groups that were adverse to the hardcore Khmer Rouge. The latter were as hostile to the Vietnamese communists as they were to the Americans. Villages that were bombed provided sources of manpower and rage for the Khmer Rouge, which gained in power only after that incursion, and those bombings, occurred.
Similarly, the destruction of Chechnya has no doubt played into the hands of Basaev and strengthened that network that relies on contacts between diaspora Chechens and terrorist militias like Al Qaeda.
However, the proof that Al Qaeda had a hand in the Beslan crime is only inferential. If the school, as has been reported, was so infiltrated this summer by undercover terrorists that they were able to bury arms under the floor of the school, that is the kind of preparatory work that sounds very much in the Al Qaeda vein. On the other hand, Basaev has learned a lot about murdering over the last decade, and he has been spectacularly successful at it in the last year.
One should also never estimate the purely criminal element involved here. The thieve’s world is a real world, with a top – which has gone on to own most of Russia’s industries – and a bottom, which has joined, for one motive or another, numerous bands.
If readers can get it, read the London Times article by Loretta Napoleoni about the Al Qaeda connection. Two grafs:
“In the early 1990s the Northern Alliance -then funded by the Russians -blocked the advance of the Taleban. To weaken the coalition of warlords from the North, al-Qaeda and its Muslim sponsors decided to force the Russians to fight on a new front by fostering a conflict in the Caucasus: the fight for independence in Chechnya provided the golden opportunity.
The Chechen Islamist guerrilla groups were then weak and poorly funded; bin Laden and his network of sponsors strengthened them militarily and financially. In 1994, some Islamist elements in Pakistan's intelligence agency, ISI, began nurturing Shamil Basayev, a young Chechen fighter. Trained and indoctrinated in the Amir Muawia camp, near Khost in Afghanistan, Basayev returned to Chechnya to form the first army of Chechen jihad.”
It is a source of continuous amazement, to LI, that America’s alliance with Pakistan causes no comment in the press whatsoever. The evidence continues to mount that if there was one state, pre 9/11, that was devoting its resources to international terrorism, it was the state into which we have poured six billion dollars since 9/11.
As for our other ally: “Veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad soon arrived in Chechnya, among them the Jordanian-born Khattab (a pseudonym), whom Basayev had met and befriended in Pakistan. Khattab was close to bin Laden and his network of financiers and administered the money. In 1995, a Saudi charity funded his journey to Chechnya, together with several training camps, while bin Laden contributed $25million towards the jihad in Chechnya.”
A tape that the murderers made in Beslan has been released. An account in the Independent describes it as a minute long pan showing the hostages in the gym, and the bombs strung up on the basketball hoops.
It seems to LI that the disaster of last Friday was fatally bound up with the way the murderers strung the bombs. It was as simple as that. In an overheated school with 1,200 prisoners and dissension among the murderers themselves, there was every chance of accident. The point at issue, in the media, was whether the Security forces responded too hastily to the initial explosions heard in the school. Yet given the circumstances, it is hard to see how the crisis could have proceeded to a peaceful settlement, given the criminal nature of the terrorists, the lies of the government, and the fury of the inhabitants of Beslan. Reports from the survivors claim that when the murderers disagreed among themselves, some were even murdered by the chief.
There are two different interpretations that have immediately latched onto the murder of, according to Gazeta.ru, 600 people. One is the official line, which is spoken by Putin: the terrorists were composed of Arabs as well as Chechens, showing that Al Qaeda was behind the taking of the school. The other is that the murderers were a group composed of the usual ethnic mix of Basaev’s militia. The latter school blames everything on Putin’s policy in Chechnya.
LI believes this, from what we have read so far: when a war is fought that employs the scorched earth tactics that the Russians have employed in Chechnya since 1999, it changes the composition of the resisting force in an almost Darwinian fashion. Moderates are selected out by the very intensity and scope of the fighting. This happened, for instance, in Cambodia in 1970 – the U.S. forces, which attacked with random bombing the communist sanctuaries in Cambodia, aiding the government that had deposed Sihanouk, picked off those groups that were adverse to the hardcore Khmer Rouge. The latter were as hostile to the Vietnamese communists as they were to the Americans. Villages that were bombed provided sources of manpower and rage for the Khmer Rouge, which gained in power only after that incursion, and those bombings, occurred.
Similarly, the destruction of Chechnya has no doubt played into the hands of Basaev and strengthened that network that relies on contacts between diaspora Chechens and terrorist militias like Al Qaeda.
However, the proof that Al Qaeda had a hand in the Beslan crime is only inferential. If the school, as has been reported, was so infiltrated this summer by undercover terrorists that they were able to bury arms under the floor of the school, that is the kind of preparatory work that sounds very much in the Al Qaeda vein. On the other hand, Basaev has learned a lot about murdering over the last decade, and he has been spectacularly successful at it in the last year.
One should also never estimate the purely criminal element involved here. The thieve’s world is a real world, with a top – which has gone on to own most of Russia’s industries – and a bottom, which has joined, for one motive or another, numerous bands.
If readers can get it, read the London Times article by Loretta Napoleoni about the Al Qaeda connection. Two grafs:
“In the early 1990s the Northern Alliance -then funded by the Russians -blocked the advance of the Taleban. To weaken the coalition of warlords from the North, al-Qaeda and its Muslim sponsors decided to force the Russians to fight on a new front by fostering a conflict in the Caucasus: the fight for independence in Chechnya provided the golden opportunity.
The Chechen Islamist guerrilla groups were then weak and poorly funded; bin Laden and his network of sponsors strengthened them militarily and financially. In 1994, some Islamist elements in Pakistan's intelligence agency, ISI, began nurturing Shamil Basayev, a young Chechen fighter. Trained and indoctrinated in the Amir Muawia camp, near Khost in Afghanistan, Basayev returned to Chechnya to form the first army of Chechen jihad.”
It is a source of continuous amazement, to LI, that America’s alliance with Pakistan causes no comment in the press whatsoever. The evidence continues to mount that if there was one state, pre 9/11, that was devoting its resources to international terrorism, it was the state into which we have poured six billion dollars since 9/11.
As for our other ally: “Veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad soon arrived in Chechnya, among them the Jordanian-born Khattab (a pseudonym), whom Basayev had met and befriended in Pakistan. Khattab was close to bin Laden and his network of financiers and administered the money. In 1995, a Saudi charity funded his journey to Chechnya, together with several training camps, while bin Laden contributed $25million towards the jihad in Chechnya.”
Thursday, September 09, 2004
Bollettino
The WP gives one of those “let’s pretend to care about the casualties’ articles that are bound to occur as US casualties hit 1,000 – and will reoccur at 1,500 and 2,000 – that contains some astonishingly stupid grafs generated by the WP line that “nobody” could have guessed what a butcher shop Iraq was going to become.
“Before the war, predictions by even the most skeptical Bush administration critics did not include scenarios of escalating violence this long after the invasion, or of the U.S. military issuing a news release such as the one it sent out Tuesday morning, headlined "Fighting Continues in Eastern Baghdad." In addition, several cities near Baghdad have slipped from U.S. control in recent months and have become "no-go zones" for U.S. troops.
"No one that I know of, to include the most pessimistic experts, predicted a full-scale insurgency would break out within a couple of months of the overthrow of the old regime," said Steven Metz, a guerrilla warfare expert at the Army War College.
Now, Metz said, "the current situation may be sustained for a very long time."
Really? So nobody could have predicted this, eh? Hmm. LI remembers writing several posts pointing out that occupations generally become more, not less dangerous as they are prolonged. We like to think of ourselves as gifted – but we aren’t that gifted. We were stating a generalization known to any military historian who bothered to look. And, according to our blog, last May, after Baghdad fell, Adnan Pachachi said this to Business Week: . "Very soon there will be a void in the power structure of Iraq, and Iraqis should fill that void, It is not in the interest of the U.S. to prolong its military presence. Their soldiers will be exposed to greater danger as time goes on."
Ah, but Pachachi was, let’s face it, an Iraqi – what important D.C. thinktank had he ever published an important paper in? What important dinner had Sally Quinn ever invited him to?
As the Iraq war continues to wend its corrupt, corpse laden way through the American body politic, it just may have one healthy effect – to generate disgust with the D.C. elite that governs this country. A brain dead, arrogant, bribe-able mass of second raters if ever there was one, comparable to the French governing elite on the eve of World War II.
As for predictions – this gets us close to a topic we are going to do a post about later. But we reprint here a post we wrote last year, Monday, March 31, 2003:
When this War began, Mr. Limited Inc and Mr. Gadfly had a little discussion about the nature of forecasts. Mr. Limited Inc took exception to Mr. Gadfly's idea that nothing could be known about what the future held. Au contraire mon frere, we said. We know that one thing will happen and then another thing will happen. This might seem like a whole lotta null set, but it is really a whole lotta structure. We reject radical skepticism about the structure of the future. However, to be honest, we are making a point that is besides the point for Mr. Gadfly, who was pointing out something about knowledge. . Nobody in the U.S. knows enough about Iraq, and nobody in Iraq knows enough about the U.S., to make any wise prediction as to the outcome, on a realtime basis, of their encounter. This is actually a very strong point. We even think it is one of the strongest points that can be made.
But we think our point is also strong. Structure is important because, while it doesn't give us a picture of the substance of future events, it gives us a rule about how they must unfold. Ignoring the "then and then and then" structure puts a plan on a collision course with reality. When a plan violates the principle that the past has already happened (or, in other words, when a plan is premised on an incompletely known past, or a past that has been distorted by the planner in some way), it will fail, even if its outcome, by happy chance, occurs. If I try to burn down a building on a stormy day with wet matches, the building is not going to torch -- but a lightening stroke might do the trick. Plans have a trajectory over time. Planners who aren't sensitive to the temporal nature of the plan's actualization are also in violation of the above rule, although in a subtler sense -- they are adding to the past as they try to control a process that is going on into the future. We have to understand, in other words, how to sum over probabilities, and how to revise ourselves when those probabilities are realized over time.
This is why, so often, business plans go awry. Businessmen are peculiarly prone to becoming prisoners of the superlative. They are addicts of the vision statement, in which �best practices", "superb performance", and the "highest levels of excellence" vie with each other to debauch meaning. They throw around locutions like �"world class," and they are big believers in a crude version of William James' Will to Believe -- they like to think that wishing on a star will make your wish come true, or at least true enough that they can get sell their options on the star before it twinkles out. Ross Perot is the echt businessman. He came dancing out of that culture, he mouthed that culture's platitudes, and he seemed to speak a slightly deranged variant of the English tongue. Bush has the same problem. Language is always such a naysayer. But all too often, the vision statement fails. The dogs won't eat the dogfood. The punchdrunk won't drink the punch. What to do? After all, one has just indulged in an orgy of orgulousness? At this point, you look around for traitors. Failure becomes a question of disloyalty.
This is pertinent: after all, we are being directed in this war by the CEO mindset armed.
This is important if, as we think is the case, we are seeing the war split into two. One is the war against Saddam the Horrific. The other is the war against the post-Saddam guerrilla. The latter has no name, yet; the incipient program is simply, repel the invader. As the invader triumphs, setting up a state run by Rumsfeld's creepy buddy, Jay Garner (who has a first class ticket to Bushs monster ball, being one of the numerous hawks who have day jobs as Perlish vultures), we will have a new war. In this one, the Iraqi state will be our ally against Iraqi "terrorists" -- that is, the people who are firing on American forces and their Iraqi collaborators. In the new war, the goal will be a lot clearer -- it will be to repel the occupiers. As the krewe of Iraqi exiles preferred by the Pentagon are installed (over the resistance of other Iraqis) get set up, the traditional lines of the conflict will become clear a client state, an imperialist sponsor, and the usual poisonous symbiosis between them, with the client depending on the sponsor to sustain it at the same time that that dependence renders it illegitimate.
Slate's Fred Kaplan wrote an interesting report, last week, on how the military gamed its own war game on Iraq. The war game pitted two teams -- the blues, representing true blue America, and the reds, representing red as in blood Saddam H. As soon as the red team started acting in such a fashion as to upset the blue team, the rules were changed, moves were disallowed, and in general the pre-ordained triumph of the blues was vindicated at the expense of the game's realism.
Kaplan restrains himself when it comes to the Strangelovian name of the Red commander Van Riper, one "p" away from Ripper, if you can believe it �Here are three grafs that tell a lot about Bush's War:
For instance -- and here is where he displayed prescience - Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to Red troops, thereby eluding Blue's super-sophisticated eavesdropping technology. He maneuvered Red forces constantly. At one point in the game, when Blue's fleet entered the Persian Gulf, he sank some of the ships with suicide-bombers in speed boats. (At that point, the managers stopped the game, "refloated" the Blue fleet, and resumed play.)
"Robert Oakley, a retired U.S. ambassador who played the Red civilian leader, told the Army Times that Van Riper was "out-thinking" Blue Force from the first day of the exercise.
"Yet, Van Riper said in his e-mail, the game's managers remanded some of his moves as improper and simply blocked others from being carried out. According to the Army Times summary, "Exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue, and on several occasions directed [Red Force] not to use certain weapons systems against Blue. It even ordered him to reveal the location of Red units."
Finally, Van Riper quit the game in protest, so as not to be associated with what would be misleading results.��
The blue game is the one they are reporting 24/7 in the American news media. We wonder how long it is going to take before the Red game is reported. Iraq, as we keep reminding our loyal band of readers, is not Afghanistan - or not, at least, the Afghanistan of our dream war. In reality, Afghanistan is heating up again -- we simply aren't paying attention to it. As why should we - we aren't planning on making Afghanistan an American protectorate. That cow doesnt milk, as we say in Texas. Or is it that cow doesn't hunt dogs? We always mix up our folksy phrases.
The WP gives one of those “let’s pretend to care about the casualties’ articles that are bound to occur as US casualties hit 1,000 – and will reoccur at 1,500 and 2,000 – that contains some astonishingly stupid grafs generated by the WP line that “nobody” could have guessed what a butcher shop Iraq was going to become.
“Before the war, predictions by even the most skeptical Bush administration critics did not include scenarios of escalating violence this long after the invasion, or of the U.S. military issuing a news release such as the one it sent out Tuesday morning, headlined "Fighting Continues in Eastern Baghdad." In addition, several cities near Baghdad have slipped from U.S. control in recent months and have become "no-go zones" for U.S. troops.
"No one that I know of, to include the most pessimistic experts, predicted a full-scale insurgency would break out within a couple of months of the overthrow of the old regime," said Steven Metz, a guerrilla warfare expert at the Army War College.
Now, Metz said, "the current situation may be sustained for a very long time."
Really? So nobody could have predicted this, eh? Hmm. LI remembers writing several posts pointing out that occupations generally become more, not less dangerous as they are prolonged. We like to think of ourselves as gifted – but we aren’t that gifted. We were stating a generalization known to any military historian who bothered to look. And, according to our blog, last May, after Baghdad fell, Adnan Pachachi said this to Business Week: . "Very soon there will be a void in the power structure of Iraq, and Iraqis should fill that void, It is not in the interest of the U.S. to prolong its military presence. Their soldiers will be exposed to greater danger as time goes on."
Ah, but Pachachi was, let’s face it, an Iraqi – what important D.C. thinktank had he ever published an important paper in? What important dinner had Sally Quinn ever invited him to?
As the Iraq war continues to wend its corrupt, corpse laden way through the American body politic, it just may have one healthy effect – to generate disgust with the D.C. elite that governs this country. A brain dead, arrogant, bribe-able mass of second raters if ever there was one, comparable to the French governing elite on the eve of World War II.
As for predictions – this gets us close to a topic we are going to do a post about later. But we reprint here a post we wrote last year, Monday, March 31, 2003:
When this War began, Mr. Limited Inc and Mr. Gadfly had a little discussion about the nature of forecasts. Mr. Limited Inc took exception to Mr. Gadfly's idea that nothing could be known about what the future held. Au contraire mon frere, we said. We know that one thing will happen and then another thing will happen. This might seem like a whole lotta null set, but it is really a whole lotta structure. We reject radical skepticism about the structure of the future. However, to be honest, we are making a point that is besides the point for Mr. Gadfly, who was pointing out something about knowledge. . Nobody in the U.S. knows enough about Iraq, and nobody in Iraq knows enough about the U.S., to make any wise prediction as to the outcome, on a realtime basis, of their encounter. This is actually a very strong point. We even think it is one of the strongest points that can be made.
But we think our point is also strong. Structure is important because, while it doesn't give us a picture of the substance of future events, it gives us a rule about how they must unfold. Ignoring the "then and then and then" structure puts a plan on a collision course with reality. When a plan violates the principle that the past has already happened (or, in other words, when a plan is premised on an incompletely known past, or a past that has been distorted by the planner in some way), it will fail, even if its outcome, by happy chance, occurs. If I try to burn down a building on a stormy day with wet matches, the building is not going to torch -- but a lightening stroke might do the trick. Plans have a trajectory over time. Planners who aren't sensitive to the temporal nature of the plan's actualization are also in violation of the above rule, although in a subtler sense -- they are adding to the past as they try to control a process that is going on into the future. We have to understand, in other words, how to sum over probabilities, and how to revise ourselves when those probabilities are realized over time.
This is why, so often, business plans go awry. Businessmen are peculiarly prone to becoming prisoners of the superlative. They are addicts of the vision statement, in which �best practices", "superb performance", and the "highest levels of excellence" vie with each other to debauch meaning. They throw around locutions like �"world class," and they are big believers in a crude version of William James' Will to Believe -- they like to think that wishing on a star will make your wish come true, or at least true enough that they can get sell their options on the star before it twinkles out. Ross Perot is the echt businessman. He came dancing out of that culture, he mouthed that culture's platitudes, and he seemed to speak a slightly deranged variant of the English tongue. Bush has the same problem. Language is always such a naysayer. But all too often, the vision statement fails. The dogs won't eat the dogfood. The punchdrunk won't drink the punch. What to do? After all, one has just indulged in an orgy of orgulousness? At this point, you look around for traitors. Failure becomes a question of disloyalty.
This is pertinent: after all, we are being directed in this war by the CEO mindset armed.
This is important if, as we think is the case, we are seeing the war split into two. One is the war against Saddam the Horrific. The other is the war against the post-Saddam guerrilla. The latter has no name, yet; the incipient program is simply, repel the invader. As the invader triumphs, setting up a state run by Rumsfeld's creepy buddy, Jay Garner (who has a first class ticket to Bushs monster ball, being one of the numerous hawks who have day jobs as Perlish vultures), we will have a new war. In this one, the Iraqi state will be our ally against Iraqi "terrorists" -- that is, the people who are firing on American forces and their Iraqi collaborators. In the new war, the goal will be a lot clearer -- it will be to repel the occupiers. As the krewe of Iraqi exiles preferred by the Pentagon are installed (over the resistance of other Iraqis) get set up, the traditional lines of the conflict will become clear a client state, an imperialist sponsor, and the usual poisonous symbiosis between them, with the client depending on the sponsor to sustain it at the same time that that dependence renders it illegitimate.
Slate's Fred Kaplan wrote an interesting report, last week, on how the military gamed its own war game on Iraq. The war game pitted two teams -- the blues, representing true blue America, and the reds, representing red as in blood Saddam H. As soon as the red team started acting in such a fashion as to upset the blue team, the rules were changed, moves were disallowed, and in general the pre-ordained triumph of the blues was vindicated at the expense of the game's realism.
Kaplan restrains himself when it comes to the Strangelovian name of the Red commander Van Riper, one "p" away from Ripper, if you can believe it �Here are three grafs that tell a lot about Bush's War:
For instance -- and here is where he displayed prescience - Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to Red troops, thereby eluding Blue's super-sophisticated eavesdropping technology. He maneuvered Red forces constantly. At one point in the game, when Blue's fleet entered the Persian Gulf, he sank some of the ships with suicide-bombers in speed boats. (At that point, the managers stopped the game, "refloated" the Blue fleet, and resumed play.)
"Robert Oakley, a retired U.S. ambassador who played the Red civilian leader, told the Army Times that Van Riper was "out-thinking" Blue Force from the first day of the exercise.
"Yet, Van Riper said in his e-mail, the game's managers remanded some of his moves as improper and simply blocked others from being carried out. According to the Army Times summary, "Exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue, and on several occasions directed [Red Force] not to use certain weapons systems against Blue. It even ordered him to reveal the location of Red units."
Finally, Van Riper quit the game in protest, so as not to be associated with what would be misleading results.��
The blue game is the one they are reporting 24/7 in the American news media. We wonder how long it is going to take before the Red game is reported. Iraq, as we keep reminding our loyal band of readers, is not Afghanistan - or not, at least, the Afghanistan of our dream war. In reality, Afghanistan is heating up again -- we simply aren't paying attention to it. As why should we - we aren't planning on making Afghanistan an American protectorate. That cow doesnt milk, as we say in Texas. Or is it that cow doesn't hunt dogs? We always mix up our folksy phrases.
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
Bollettino
LI decided that, due to world events, the best thing to do at the moment would be to read some Tolstoy. So we’ve been reading a novella – The Cossacks – and the Prisoners of the Caucasus. We were pointed to the latter story by an essay in Russian Studies in Literature, Spring 2004 by Paula A. Michaels (Prisoners of the Caucasus: From Colonial to Postcolonial Narrative), which considers Tolstoy’s stories and two films which derive from it.
Now, we are grateful for Ms. Michaels pointer. But we read the story in a state of recoil from Ms. Michaels article.
You see, Ms. Michaels is infected with the American penchant for fundamentalism. Fundamentalist Christians read the bible literally – fundamentalist academics operate with the same procedures, but (usually) different sacred text. In Ms. Michaels case, Edward Said’s Orientalism is holy writ, and she happily applies it like a treasure map on which the magic x that marks the spot stands for racism. Thus, she can guide herself through any text unfortunate enough to fall into her hands.
Ms. Michaels dutifully -- and this was useful to LI -- gives us an account of a narrative type in Russian literature – the captive of the Tartars. She shows how the two films deriving from Tolstoy’s story give us a more modern, sensitive account of the thing. And she tells us what she thinks of Tolstoy’s story, premised on two suppositions. Tolstoy can only be, a., using the protagonist to reflect his own feelings, and b., a racist imperialist Russian. She has no intention of wrestling with her texts as fictions. That fiction has its own world, in which irony, allegory, and the sudden evanescence and reconstruction of ideological lines are commonplace, is not acceptable, and is sent back to the back of the classroom if it raises its hand. Fiction, obviously, isn’t serious. Fundamentalism takes texts much more “seriously” than they take themselves – and if they engage in shenanigans, so much the worse for them! Here is how Ms. Michaels sums up the story:
“As already mentioned, Tolstoy’s tale, not surprisingly, portrays
the Caucasian natives in ways conventional for nineteenth-century
European Orientalist literature. His narrator, Zhilin, repeatedly
describes his captors as ill-smelling, suggesting that they are uncivilized,
dirty, and diseased and reflecting his revulsion for them.
While some Caucasian characters are given names, other are impersonally
referred to as the “red-faced Tatar” or the “red-bearded
Tatar.” When the brother of the “red-bearded Tatar” is killed by
Russian soldiers, a funeral procession is described in detail. Not
only does this finely drawn picture impart authority to the author
and his narrator, but it increases the reader’s alienation from the
exotic subjects filtered through an ethnographic lens. Here and
elsewhere, the reader encounters the Caucasian natives solely
through the narrator’s representation of them and their ways. As
Zhilin does not speak their language, they are rendered largely
mute in this tale. When they do speak broken Russian, their simple
phrases and grammatical errors infantilize them for the reader.
Tolstoy juxtaposes the anonymity, exoticism, and childlike barbarism
attributed to the Tatars to the cleverness, bravery, and determination
of his Russian protagonist. From the very beginning,
they encounter a wily adversary as Zhilin proves to be a tough
negotiator over the ransom price. Zhilin goes on to demonstrate
his skillful hands and agile mind by repairing his captor’s watch,
healing the sick, and making a toy for Abdul Murat’s son. These
acts build bridges between himself and his captors, integrating him
into their community to some extent and cultivating their trust in
him. He proves, however, that these acts are part of a crafty plan
when he uses their trust, particularly that of Abdul Murat’s children,
to facilitate his escape. When read against the images of the
mute and childlike Tatars, there is no mistaking Tolstoy’s imperialist
stance. The Russians are smarter, more civilized, and worthy
of the empire they have conquered.”
There is, of course, no mistaking… there was no mistaking before the story was read, and certainly none after it was read. We loved her use of "not suprisingly" -- this is the strength of fundamentalism, its elimination of surprise. Once you have your paws on the Truth, you can bat away that imp of the perverse, the writer's impulse to surprise. Ms. Michaels, expert detective, knows that a story is just a stance, an imperialist stance. It is a disguised lecture, or op ed piece.
From that account, one would never expect a text that had paragraphs like this:
Zhilin is captured by a red bearded Tartar who sells him. The Tartar lives in the same village where Zhilin is kept as a captive. One day, Zhillin goes to see how he lives. The old man shoots at him. Afterwards, the man comes to Zhillin’s master to complain about him. Zhillin’s master explains to his Russian captive:
"'He is a great man!' said the master. 'He was the bravest of our fellows; he killed many Russians and was at one time very rich. He had three wives and eight sons, and they all lived in one village. Then the Russians came and destroyed the village, and killed seven of his sons. Only one son was left, and he gave himself up to the Russians. The old man also went and gave himself up, and lived among the Russians for three months. At the end of that time he found his son, killed him with his own hands, and then escaped. After that he left off fighting, and went to Mecca to pray to God; that is why he wears a turban. One who has been to Mecca is called "Hadji," and wears a turban. He does not like you fellows. He tells me to kill you. But I can't kill you. I have paid money for you and, besides, I have grown fond of you, Iván. Far from killing you, I would not even let you go if I had not promised.' And he laughed, saying in Russian, 'You, Iván, good; I, Abdul, good!'"
Luckily for all of us, as Ms. Michael notes, Russian scholars have fully absorbed the lesson that Russian literature is only the clothing around various hegemonic and racist postures. Time marches on, and we, who breathlessly keep up with it, can certainly put our noses in the air when considering the, well, 19th century and before then. Yuck!
“Extending the arguments of Edward Said, literary scholars in recent
years have well documented the ways in which prerevolutionary
Russian literature can be understood as an expression of
imperial identity.5 The same kinds of representations that Said noted
in the scholarly and artistic literature of Western Europe are readily
detectable in the Russian case. Nineteenth-century Russian imperial
expansion brought writers, adventurers, ethnographers, military
men, missionaries, and others into contact with a variety of
ethnic groups, which Russians filtered through their own shifting
sense of ethnic and national identity.”
Tolstoy’s barbarous times are passed, and now we can make multi-culty films of his novel and show him up for the imperialist stancist he is –even if, in the decade we are making these films, we are also plowing the Chechen fields with corpses. The stance we take, us moderns, is that we are infinitely more progressive than the likes of Tolstoy. As one of Flannery Connor’s characters says, when she is told that the monks of old slept in their coffins, “they warn’t as civilized as we are.”
Reading Ms. Michael’s essay made me sad. There is one thing you will never get a fundamentalist – Christian, Moslem or academic – to believe in: literature. Entertainment is fine, they have their favorite tv shows, but literature? you must be kidding me.
So I moved on, looking for another essay. Which I’ll save for another post.
LI decided that, due to world events, the best thing to do at the moment would be to read some Tolstoy. So we’ve been reading a novella – The Cossacks – and the Prisoners of the Caucasus. We were pointed to the latter story by an essay in Russian Studies in Literature, Spring 2004 by Paula A. Michaels (Prisoners of the Caucasus: From Colonial to Postcolonial Narrative), which considers Tolstoy’s stories and two films which derive from it.
Now, we are grateful for Ms. Michaels pointer. But we read the story in a state of recoil from Ms. Michaels article.
You see, Ms. Michaels is infected with the American penchant for fundamentalism. Fundamentalist Christians read the bible literally – fundamentalist academics operate with the same procedures, but (usually) different sacred text. In Ms. Michaels case, Edward Said’s Orientalism is holy writ, and she happily applies it like a treasure map on which the magic x that marks the spot stands for racism. Thus, she can guide herself through any text unfortunate enough to fall into her hands.
Ms. Michaels dutifully -- and this was useful to LI -- gives us an account of a narrative type in Russian literature – the captive of the Tartars. She shows how the two films deriving from Tolstoy’s story give us a more modern, sensitive account of the thing. And she tells us what she thinks of Tolstoy’s story, premised on two suppositions. Tolstoy can only be, a., using the protagonist to reflect his own feelings, and b., a racist imperialist Russian. She has no intention of wrestling with her texts as fictions. That fiction has its own world, in which irony, allegory, and the sudden evanescence and reconstruction of ideological lines are commonplace, is not acceptable, and is sent back to the back of the classroom if it raises its hand. Fiction, obviously, isn’t serious. Fundamentalism takes texts much more “seriously” than they take themselves – and if they engage in shenanigans, so much the worse for them! Here is how Ms. Michaels sums up the story:
“As already mentioned, Tolstoy’s tale, not surprisingly, portrays
the Caucasian natives in ways conventional for nineteenth-century
European Orientalist literature. His narrator, Zhilin, repeatedly
describes his captors as ill-smelling, suggesting that they are uncivilized,
dirty, and diseased and reflecting his revulsion for them.
While some Caucasian characters are given names, other are impersonally
referred to as the “red-faced Tatar” or the “red-bearded
Tatar.” When the brother of the “red-bearded Tatar” is killed by
Russian soldiers, a funeral procession is described in detail. Not
only does this finely drawn picture impart authority to the author
and his narrator, but it increases the reader’s alienation from the
exotic subjects filtered through an ethnographic lens. Here and
elsewhere, the reader encounters the Caucasian natives solely
through the narrator’s representation of them and their ways. As
Zhilin does not speak their language, they are rendered largely
mute in this tale. When they do speak broken Russian, their simple
phrases and grammatical errors infantilize them for the reader.
Tolstoy juxtaposes the anonymity, exoticism, and childlike barbarism
attributed to the Tatars to the cleverness, bravery, and determination
of his Russian protagonist. From the very beginning,
they encounter a wily adversary as Zhilin proves to be a tough
negotiator over the ransom price. Zhilin goes on to demonstrate
his skillful hands and agile mind by repairing his captor’s watch,
healing the sick, and making a toy for Abdul Murat’s son. These
acts build bridges between himself and his captors, integrating him
into their community to some extent and cultivating their trust in
him. He proves, however, that these acts are part of a crafty plan
when he uses their trust, particularly that of Abdul Murat’s children,
to facilitate his escape. When read against the images of the
mute and childlike Tatars, there is no mistaking Tolstoy’s imperialist
stance. The Russians are smarter, more civilized, and worthy
of the empire they have conquered.”
There is, of course, no mistaking… there was no mistaking before the story was read, and certainly none after it was read. We loved her use of "not suprisingly" -- this is the strength of fundamentalism, its elimination of surprise. Once you have your paws on the Truth, you can bat away that imp of the perverse, the writer's impulse to surprise. Ms. Michaels, expert detective, knows that a story is just a stance, an imperialist stance. It is a disguised lecture, or op ed piece.
From that account, one would never expect a text that had paragraphs like this:
Zhilin is captured by a red bearded Tartar who sells him. The Tartar lives in the same village where Zhilin is kept as a captive. One day, Zhillin goes to see how he lives. The old man shoots at him. Afterwards, the man comes to Zhillin’s master to complain about him. Zhillin’s master explains to his Russian captive:
"'He is a great man!' said the master. 'He was the bravest of our fellows; he killed many Russians and was at one time very rich. He had three wives and eight sons, and they all lived in one village. Then the Russians came and destroyed the village, and killed seven of his sons. Only one son was left, and he gave himself up to the Russians. The old man also went and gave himself up, and lived among the Russians for three months. At the end of that time he found his son, killed him with his own hands, and then escaped. After that he left off fighting, and went to Mecca to pray to God; that is why he wears a turban. One who has been to Mecca is called "Hadji," and wears a turban. He does not like you fellows. He tells me to kill you. But I can't kill you. I have paid money for you and, besides, I have grown fond of you, Iván. Far from killing you, I would not even let you go if I had not promised.' And he laughed, saying in Russian, 'You, Iván, good; I, Abdul, good!'"
Luckily for all of us, as Ms. Michael notes, Russian scholars have fully absorbed the lesson that Russian literature is only the clothing around various hegemonic and racist postures. Time marches on, and we, who breathlessly keep up with it, can certainly put our noses in the air when considering the, well, 19th century and before then. Yuck!
“Extending the arguments of Edward Said, literary scholars in recent
years have well documented the ways in which prerevolutionary
Russian literature can be understood as an expression of
imperial identity.5 The same kinds of representations that Said noted
in the scholarly and artistic literature of Western Europe are readily
detectable in the Russian case. Nineteenth-century Russian imperial
expansion brought writers, adventurers, ethnographers, military
men, missionaries, and others into contact with a variety of
ethnic groups, which Russians filtered through their own shifting
sense of ethnic and national identity.”
Tolstoy’s barbarous times are passed, and now we can make multi-culty films of his novel and show him up for the imperialist stancist he is –even if, in the decade we are making these films, we are also plowing the Chechen fields with corpses. The stance we take, us moderns, is that we are infinitely more progressive than the likes of Tolstoy. As one of Flannery Connor’s characters says, when she is told that the monks of old slept in their coffins, “they warn’t as civilized as we are.”
Reading Ms. Michael’s essay made me sad. There is one thing you will never get a fundamentalist – Christian, Moslem or academic – to believe in: literature. Entertainment is fine, they have their favorite tv shows, but literature? you must be kidding me.
So I moved on, looking for another essay. Which I’ll save for another post.
Bollettino The most depressing news of the day comes from the NYT article about the one murderer who was taken in Beslan. “Among the most arresting television images here on Monday, along with the parade of coffins and the keening of crowds of mourners, was the face of a terrified man, gripped tightly by two masked soldiers, who was identified as the only hostage-taker to be captured alive."By God, I did not shoot!'' he mumbled when asked if he had fired on fleeing hostages. "By God, I have not killed!''Asked by the soldiers if he had not had pity on the children he had held for 51 hours without food or water, he pleaded: "Yes, I did have pity! I have children, too.''Speaking in a slurred voice, he said, "They gathered us in a forest, a person known as 'commander,' and they said that we must seize a school in Beslan.'' He said the orders had come from Aslan Maskhadov, a Chechen rebel leader, and Shamil Basayev, a militant warlord.”Maskhadov is not just a “Chechen rebel leader,” but was the president of the late Chechen Republic in 1999. At that time, it was Maskhadov who was accusing the Russians of surreptitiously supporting Basayev, who was attacking villages in Daghestan with his usual brutality. Maskhadov, at that time, declared his hostility to Basayev and his ‘criminal gang’ quite clearly. He was not able to control him, however, and soon the Russian attack on Chechnya brought down the fragile Chechen state. Fastforward five horrible years. Maskhadov’s forces have kept distinct from Basayev’s. The Institute for War and Peace Reporting, which has some of the best sources about the Chechen conflict, reported in March that Russian attacks on Maskhadov’s forces were weakening them, and consequently strengthening Basayev’s “extremist” forces. “The capture this week of the pro-independence Chechen defence minister Magomed Khambiev, following on from the death of influential commander Khamzat Gelayev, has radically changed the balance of forces within the rebel movement fighting the Russians. The developments have strengthened the extremist wing of the Chechen rebel movement and badly weakened pro-independence president Aslan Maskhadov, and may have far-reaching consequences for the future of the conflict in Chechnya Maskhadov, a moderate nationalist who is still resisting the Russians more than four years after the start of the second conflict but rejects terrorist methods, has now lost two of his closest supporters. He must now rely on only two commanders for close backing, Vakha Arsanov and Isa Munayev. By contrast, the radical Islamist side has four powerful figures in Shamil Basayev, Saudi-born Abu Walid, Dokku Umarov and Abdul-Malik Mezhidov.”If the man quoted by the NYT is telling the truth, the alliance of Maskhadov and Basayev spells the end of the ‘rational’ Chechen resistance, and its collapse into an utter nihilism that threatens to create more Beslans. The thought is almost unbearable. If the man’s confession was, on the contrary, ‘fed’ to him by way of extensive beating, then we see the continuance of Putin’s strategy, which has always been to demonize the Chechens in order to stir up a genocidal hatred of them. Our instinct is that the second possibility is the more probable. It is, to say the least, odd that the NYT seems so ignorant of Maskhadov’s name. The best commentary on the response to Beslan, and its larger meaning, comes from Figaro, a conservative paper. Laure Mandeville’s article intelligently recognizes that the Western voices condemning the Children’s Massacre at Beslan have not been raised, in the past, to prevent that train of causes that led up to the massacre: “In France, only the president of the UDF, Francois Bayrou and the late president of the Commission on Foreign Affairs, Jack Lang (PS) have shown themselves critical. The first calls the responsible politicians to “adopt new political strategies” in order to avoid “such dramas,” the second denounces the “French authorities” whose “complaisance towards the Putin regime … has ended by becoming simply repugnant.” “Our country should demand explanations from the Russian government on the circumstances of this drama.” The incapacity of the West to ally amicable solidarity to a critique of Putin’s choices in the Caucasus is explained by different and conjoining causes, according to whether one is positioned in Washington or Europe. Even if Americans were recently put in the position of criticizing the decline of liberties in Russia, President Bush – busy with his electoral campaign, the quagmire in Iraq, and his mission as commander in chief of the struggle against international terrorism – has every interest in presenting the crisis in Beslan as a manifestation of the hydra of terror. Europe, under the influence of France and Germany, has difficulty putting in question the ‘anti-war axis’ Paris-Berlin-Moscow that presidents Chirac and Schroeder went to celebrate at Sotchi a week ago. However, true questions must be posed about both the taking of the hostages and the upcoming dangers arising from the Russian political strategy in the Caucasus.
…In holding to its diplomatic formulas, the West is pretending to forget that Moscow is reaping what it has sown. The late Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov, while condemning the taking of hostages, has underlined the role of Russia in radicalizing the guerrillas. “The cause of the Beslan tragedy and the infinite spiral of violence in Chechnya and in the region is the political strategy of Putin’s, who is guilty of massive crimes,” Mashkadov protests. “A quarter of the Chechen population, among which we count 40,000 children, have been exterminated in the last ten years.” (No one knows how many Chechens have disappeared since the beginning of the conflict in 1994.)”The truth is, Beslan reveals the radical dissymmetry between the moral and the political world. In the moral world, nothing justifies the murder of children, and their parents. Nothing justifies murder. Nothing justifies the murder of innocents. Nothing justifies the murder of the guilty. Dickering with blood – the pretence that the absolute prohibition on murder can only be guarded by its state sanctioned violation – is an appeal from principle to history that history repudiates. There is no final murder – murders come in terms of ‘another.” Another murder, another murder, another murder – this is how the series has unrolled since Cain. But if Cain was the first murderer, he was also the first politician, with the politician’s eternal question: am I my brother’s keeper? And the politician’s eternal impulse to limit brotherhood, to initiate hatred, to turn it into systematic gain.
Sometimes, LI thinks that the post 9/11 landscape is characterized by one thing: we have reached the exhaustion point in the political system globally. And as the strains appear, in Iraq, Ossetia, Chechnya, Moscow, New York, etc., we, who have been raised specifically not to perceive these questions or to answer them, cocooned in suburbs and by infinite tv, are experiencing a vast, unconscious helplessness. This is not our field. This is not our expertise. These emotions that are called up can find no objective satisfaction, except in childish calls for aggression, to which the state responds with the child's favorite toys: the bomber, the neat always improved missile, the gun. To be met with the improvised bomb, the hostage, the box cutter.
And for most, I think the answer has to be: turn away. Don’t look. I can't really say I think that impulse is wrong. But at the moment, I am having trouble making my own internal migration.
…In holding to its diplomatic formulas, the West is pretending to forget that Moscow is reaping what it has sown. The late Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov, while condemning the taking of hostages, has underlined the role of Russia in radicalizing the guerrillas. “The cause of the Beslan tragedy and the infinite spiral of violence in Chechnya and in the region is the political strategy of Putin’s, who is guilty of massive crimes,” Mashkadov protests. “A quarter of the Chechen population, among which we count 40,000 children, have been exterminated in the last ten years.” (No one knows how many Chechens have disappeared since the beginning of the conflict in 1994.)”The truth is, Beslan reveals the radical dissymmetry between the moral and the political world. In the moral world, nothing justifies the murder of children, and their parents. Nothing justifies murder. Nothing justifies the murder of innocents. Nothing justifies the murder of the guilty. Dickering with blood – the pretence that the absolute prohibition on murder can only be guarded by its state sanctioned violation – is an appeal from principle to history that history repudiates. There is no final murder – murders come in terms of ‘another.” Another murder, another murder, another murder – this is how the series has unrolled since Cain. But if Cain was the first murderer, he was also the first politician, with the politician’s eternal question: am I my brother’s keeper? And the politician’s eternal impulse to limit brotherhood, to initiate hatred, to turn it into systematic gain.
Sometimes, LI thinks that the post 9/11 landscape is characterized by one thing: we have reached the exhaustion point in the political system globally. And as the strains appear, in Iraq, Ossetia, Chechnya, Moscow, New York, etc., we, who have been raised specifically not to perceive these questions or to answer them, cocooned in suburbs and by infinite tv, are experiencing a vast, unconscious helplessness. This is not our field. This is not our expertise. These emotions that are called up can find no objective satisfaction, except in childish calls for aggression, to which the state responds with the child's favorite toys: the bomber, the neat always improved missile, the gun. To be met with the improvised bomb, the hostage, the box cutter.
And for most, I think the answer has to be: turn away. Don’t look. I can't really say I think that impulse is wrong. But at the moment, I am having trouble making my own internal migration.
Monday, September 06, 2004
Bollettino
LI has been grimly trying to accommodate ourselves to the thought that Bush will be the president for the next four years. This looks more and more probable. The NYT includes a story about the laughable Kerry campaign – a campaign that has spent a month focusing on foreign policy without suggesting what Kerry’s foreign policy would actually be, which is quite a feat – with a story of how the Kerry-ites are trying to reinvigorate themselves by connecting to Clinton. The story includes this immortal line:
“On Saturday, Mr. Johnson drew applause from Democrats assembled for a weekly strategy meeting at Mr. Kerry's headquarters when he reassured aides that the campaign had settled on a clear line of attack against Mr. Bush, people at the meeting said. “
Is there anything more pathetic?
Since the Dems rolled over about Iraq – after all, isn’t the real issue that Kerry was a GENUINE hero back in the days when Mick Jagger was young? – the media has been left in a vacuum. As the Post explained long ago about its systematically flawed coverage of the WMD issue, since both ‘sides’ – there are only two sides, Democrat and Republican, in our wondrous freedom loving Flatland for the media – agreed about the issue, the newspaper found it hard to get outside of the narrative, which would mean taking seriously the protests of all those silly anarchist types in the street. My God, the Post didn’t even want to report on them – much less take a thing they said seriously. Since the two sides again agree that the occupation of Iraq was a good idea from the beginning, merely flawed by a few Iraqi bad eggs, the sidelessness of it all has pushed stories about Iraq into the B section. There were a thousand American wounded last month. Today, seven Americans died in a bomb near Fallujah – yesterday, another helicopter was downed. These are all yawners to the media, and evidently to Kerry. At least, we haven’t heard him refer to those injuries, or to Najaf, or to anything pertinent happening in Iraq. He does think it would be nice if more wine was served among the coalition of the willing.
Looking back on the Democratic primaries, one has to marvel at the Howard Dean effect. For a brief time, he galvanized the party into something that looked like life. It lumbered around like life, and it even occasionally spouted a truth that was like life – as in Dean’s derided opinion that capturing Saddam Hussein wouldn’t make Americans any safer. I am not sure of the numbers, but I believe since the capture more Americans have been killed than before – but to contemplate this is the utmost impoliteness, and it isn’t countenanced at tables in D.C. Why, it makes one sound like Michael Moore. So the Dem party walked and talked, and we all thought: the zombie days are passed. LI thought, at the time, that this was so obviously a good thing that maybe the former zombie would drop by a spine store and pick up a spare. Alas, then came the convention, with Kerry reporting for duty in what has turned out to be Daschle’s Navy -- a wacky bunch of hapless vets who just can't get it together in the face of mighty Bush and his fiercesome genius, Karl Rove (who is to genius as Schlitz is to beer -- the cheapest variety).
At least LI is hoping for some consolation in the upcoming Dem defeat -- that is, that Daschle will be going down with the ship. But that is, perhaps, to project more rationality on this party than it possesses.
LI has been grimly trying to accommodate ourselves to the thought that Bush will be the president for the next four years. This looks more and more probable. The NYT includes a story about the laughable Kerry campaign – a campaign that has spent a month focusing on foreign policy without suggesting what Kerry’s foreign policy would actually be, which is quite a feat – with a story of how the Kerry-ites are trying to reinvigorate themselves by connecting to Clinton. The story includes this immortal line:
“On Saturday, Mr. Johnson drew applause from Democrats assembled for a weekly strategy meeting at Mr. Kerry's headquarters when he reassured aides that the campaign had settled on a clear line of attack against Mr. Bush, people at the meeting said. “
Is there anything more pathetic?
Since the Dems rolled over about Iraq – after all, isn’t the real issue that Kerry was a GENUINE hero back in the days when Mick Jagger was young? – the media has been left in a vacuum. As the Post explained long ago about its systematically flawed coverage of the WMD issue, since both ‘sides’ – there are only two sides, Democrat and Republican, in our wondrous freedom loving Flatland for the media – agreed about the issue, the newspaper found it hard to get outside of the narrative, which would mean taking seriously the protests of all those silly anarchist types in the street. My God, the Post didn’t even want to report on them – much less take a thing they said seriously. Since the two sides again agree that the occupation of Iraq was a good idea from the beginning, merely flawed by a few Iraqi bad eggs, the sidelessness of it all has pushed stories about Iraq into the B section. There were a thousand American wounded last month. Today, seven Americans died in a bomb near Fallujah – yesterday, another helicopter was downed. These are all yawners to the media, and evidently to Kerry. At least, we haven’t heard him refer to those injuries, or to Najaf, or to anything pertinent happening in Iraq. He does think it would be nice if more wine was served among the coalition of the willing.
Looking back on the Democratic primaries, one has to marvel at the Howard Dean effect. For a brief time, he galvanized the party into something that looked like life. It lumbered around like life, and it even occasionally spouted a truth that was like life – as in Dean’s derided opinion that capturing Saddam Hussein wouldn’t make Americans any safer. I am not sure of the numbers, but I believe since the capture more Americans have been killed than before – but to contemplate this is the utmost impoliteness, and it isn’t countenanced at tables in D.C. Why, it makes one sound like Michael Moore. So the Dem party walked and talked, and we all thought: the zombie days are passed. LI thought, at the time, that this was so obviously a good thing that maybe the former zombie would drop by a spine store and pick up a spare. Alas, then came the convention, with Kerry reporting for duty in what has turned out to be Daschle’s Navy -- a wacky bunch of hapless vets who just can't get it together in the face of mighty Bush and his fiercesome genius, Karl Rove (who is to genius as Schlitz is to beer -- the cheapest variety).
At least LI is hoping for some consolation in the upcoming Dem defeat -- that is, that Daschle will be going down with the ship. But that is, perhaps, to project more rationality on this party than it possesses.
Sunday, September 05, 2004
Bollettino
We are still stunned here about events in Beslan. The best report about the hostage taking is this extremely frightening story in the Washington Post. According to the people the Post interviewed, there were no “Arabs” at the scene, just Basaev’s Chechen jihadists. However, given the grotesque and largescale nature of the seizure of the school and the segregation of the hostages, it is hard to tell whether the Russian claim is correct or not.
LI has been rather stunned, too, by the ignorance or indifference shown in the American response to Beslan. For example: one of the blogs we go to daily, Crooked Timber, is made up of some of the Internet’s best and brightest academic bloggers, yet in the two comments they have posted so far, it is as if no background knowledge about Chechnya whatsoever has penetrated to this group – and, by inference, outside of the small circle that has been concerned with the inhumane and sinister war that has devastated Chechnya since 1995. The CT post on the school begins with a point that is simply nonsense … “the hideous events in Beslan are the property of the people who lived there” … as if victimage was a sort of intellectual property right – and proceeds to make two points that seem particularly ill judged:
“2) Should we expect, going forward, that all other conflicts involving Muslims on one side will be similarly compromised, and what should policy-makers do differently because of this?
3) What the hell has gone wrong with the particular strain of Islam which apparently tells people it’s OK to kill children, and what can be done about it?”
LI isn’t sure what ‘strain’ is being talked about. And as for what the hell has gone wrong, that is a long story of Western complacency about the destruction of Chechnya as well as a story about how the circle around Yeltsin protected itself from prosecution for its massive thievery and abuses of power, with the complicity of the Clinton administration and the EU. It is a story about the roots of Putin’s own power, and a story about the covert cooperation between the Russian security forces and the guerrillas around Basaev in the nineties, who wished to drive a wedge into Chechen society.
Perhaps the idea of the Moslem strain CT mentions relates vaguely to the significant differences between, on the one hand, the Wahabi faction – or vakhabi -- which has penetrated into the Chechen struggle via Basaev and various foreign fighters, and the dominant form of Islam in Chechnya, the Sufi brotherhoods, who have developed a form of resistance to the Russians that goes back two hundred years. For the Sufis, it is ridiculous to talk about jihad. The vakhabi faction is vehemently opposed to the cult of saints, to Sufi ritual, and to the theology of Sufism in general. There have been clashes between the two groups. LI, no expert on Chechnya, has at least been to the library in the last two or three years and read up on the topic in two or three books. One would think that among the CT collective, somebody would know something about Chechnya. Apparently not.
The vakhabis are supported by two factors. One is that the Russian government has used them on the principle of divide and conquer. Thus, in the late nineties, the circle around Yeltsin kept an odd connection going to Basaev. Berezhovsky, the ignominious oligarch, was the point man. He was definitely involved in some manner that has yet to be cleared up with Basaev’s incursion into Daghestan – the formal cause of the second Chechen war. The vakhabis have also received massive financial support from the usual suspect – Saudi Arabia.
This is one summing up of the religious aspect of the Chechen conflict (one that, in LI’s opinion, gives far too much intellectual leeway to the assumption of the generosity of Russian intentions) by four scholars at the William R. Nelson Institute at James Madison University:
Thus, Vakhabites challenged the official Chechen leadership (President Maskhadov and its supporters) and posed a serious threat to the foundations of the Chechen society. As a result, official Grozny was becoming more and more critical of vakhabism in its statements and declarations. However, Maskhadov took no decisive action, as he feared that would exacerbate the situation in the republic. Confrontation between traditionalists and radicals resulted in violence several times; for instance, as noted above, Vakhabites clashed with Sufi Muslims in May, 1998 in Gudermes and Urus-Martan and then again in Gudermes in July, 1998 (approximately 50 people were killed that day). Fearing that fundamentalists will destabilize the situation in the republic and attempt to rebel against Grozny, Maskhadov declared the state of emergency, dissolved and disarmed the Shariat Guards and Islamic regiment, and ordered to exile the well-known warlord Khattab, a mercenary from Jordan who allegedly cooperated with radicals. On July 23, 1998 there was an attempt in Grozny to assassinate Maskhadov, an attempt probably organized by Vakhabites. Observers from Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Chechnya itself agreed that at that point the republic was on the brink of civil war.
Despite their relatively strong positions, Vakhabites were not able to assert their influence throughout the republic, much less impose their ideology in its entire territory. However, they went ahead with their plans to occupy neighboring Russian regions and invaded Daghestan in August, 1999. Although members of Sufi brotherhoods may have participated in the invasion as well, the idea and its implementation are blamed by the Russian government and the local population primarily on Vakhabites. Subsequent investigations and the fact that the officials Grozny from the very beginning announced that they did not have anything to do with the events in Daghestan and condemned the aggression further convinced Moscow that fundamentalists had started their jihad and the situation in Chechnya was out of control. Vakhabites were perceived as a major threat to peace and stability in the Northern Caucasus and the territorial integrity of the Federation. The invasion of Daghestan and the Vakhabites' plans to wage a holy war against Russia until the creation of a "purely" Islamic state in its southern territories were the top reasons that prompted the federal government to start a military operation in Chechnya immediately after the defeat of those who attacked Daghestan.
As the federal troops advanced into Chechnya, however, they had to fight not only Islamic extremists but also the members of Sufi brotherhoods who, like in 1994-1996, Russian control for various reasons opposed. Unlike fundamentalists, Sufi Muslims do not fight for a religious cause and tend to have more reasonable positions on issues. Moreover, their dissatisfaction with the situation in the republic in the 1996-1999 period encouraged them to cooperate in a number of cases with the Russians. As a result, many of the Sufi communities engaged in negotiations with the federal representatives and avoided armed conflict. Some of them openly supported the military operation and organized volunteer troops to fight against both Sufi and Vakhabite rebels on the Russian side.”
We think that the “some” fighting on the Russian side were definitely in minority. The Russian occupation, which has seen the planned destruction of major Chechen cities, massacres of Chechen men, and the routinization of kidnapping by the Russian army, has alienated the vast mass of Chechens.
As for Basaev, the Jamestown Newsletter, which is a very good source for information about Chechnya, has published an interview with a French journalist, Sophie Shihab, who is very conversant with the situation in Chechnya.
“On Berezovsky’s responsibility for the outbreak of the second war: “It has never been proved, but it has also never been disproved – and the evidence for it is considerable…The offensive [of Basaev’s forces into Dagestan] provided the pretext for renewing the war. Very soon the rumor circulated that Basaev was financed by the Russian warmongers, headed by Berezovsky….There is a whole pile of evidence suggesting the common responsibility of Berezovsky and the FSB…for the attacks in Russia in August and September of 1999, which precipitated the war and the election of Putin. Thus were created bonds between them, but also hatred. Their lines [i.e., Putin’s and Berezovsky’s] diverged in December 1999, when Berezovsky, conscious that the generals around Putin had taken the initiative away from him, announced that he favored negotiations with the most radical Chechens. But even in exile Berezovsky has kept major financial interests, and thus political power, within Russia. And his impunity on the subject of Chechnya, like Putin’s, remains complete.”
LI hopes that this post isn’t taken to excuse what happened in Beslan. Our point is, rather, that what happened in Beslan has causes that go to the heart of the legitimacy of Putin’s government. There is a demonic synergy between Basaev’s terrorists and Putin’s FSB. Many of Putin’s more curious actions, which have been attributed to his desire for power – his war on Berezovsky, for instance, and on the other oligarchs – can be explained as compulsive acts of disguising by a man who legitimized his power with a massive lie, precipitating an at first popular war against a suspect people. Putin, like Claudius, the King of Denmark, believes, evidently, that arms provide the kind of authority that covers all crime, and that he can drown his guilt in other people's blood. But such rulers are always beset with ghosts. Beslan, the planes that were downed, the black widows blowing themselves up in stadiums and subways, the siege at the theatre, all are the unending results of that primal crime.
We’ve pushed this point over and over again in various posts we’ve written about Chechnya. For those who are interested, look up our posts starting at October 17, 2003.
We are still stunned here about events in Beslan. The best report about the hostage taking is this extremely frightening story in the Washington Post. According to the people the Post interviewed, there were no “Arabs” at the scene, just Basaev’s Chechen jihadists. However, given the grotesque and largescale nature of the seizure of the school and the segregation of the hostages, it is hard to tell whether the Russian claim is correct or not.
LI has been rather stunned, too, by the ignorance or indifference shown in the American response to Beslan. For example: one of the blogs we go to daily, Crooked Timber, is made up of some of the Internet’s best and brightest academic bloggers, yet in the two comments they have posted so far, it is as if no background knowledge about Chechnya whatsoever has penetrated to this group – and, by inference, outside of the small circle that has been concerned with the inhumane and sinister war that has devastated Chechnya since 1995. The CT post on the school begins with a point that is simply nonsense … “the hideous events in Beslan are the property of the people who lived there” … as if victimage was a sort of intellectual property right – and proceeds to make two points that seem particularly ill judged:
“2) Should we expect, going forward, that all other conflicts involving Muslims on one side will be similarly compromised, and what should policy-makers do differently because of this?
3) What the hell has gone wrong with the particular strain of Islam which apparently tells people it’s OK to kill children, and what can be done about it?”
LI isn’t sure what ‘strain’ is being talked about. And as for what the hell has gone wrong, that is a long story of Western complacency about the destruction of Chechnya as well as a story about how the circle around Yeltsin protected itself from prosecution for its massive thievery and abuses of power, with the complicity of the Clinton administration and the EU. It is a story about the roots of Putin’s own power, and a story about the covert cooperation between the Russian security forces and the guerrillas around Basaev in the nineties, who wished to drive a wedge into Chechen society.
Perhaps the idea of the Moslem strain CT mentions relates vaguely to the significant differences between, on the one hand, the Wahabi faction – or vakhabi -- which has penetrated into the Chechen struggle via Basaev and various foreign fighters, and the dominant form of Islam in Chechnya, the Sufi brotherhoods, who have developed a form of resistance to the Russians that goes back two hundred years. For the Sufis, it is ridiculous to talk about jihad. The vakhabi faction is vehemently opposed to the cult of saints, to Sufi ritual, and to the theology of Sufism in general. There have been clashes between the two groups. LI, no expert on Chechnya, has at least been to the library in the last two or three years and read up on the topic in two or three books. One would think that among the CT collective, somebody would know something about Chechnya. Apparently not.
The vakhabis are supported by two factors. One is that the Russian government has used them on the principle of divide and conquer. Thus, in the late nineties, the circle around Yeltsin kept an odd connection going to Basaev. Berezhovsky, the ignominious oligarch, was the point man. He was definitely involved in some manner that has yet to be cleared up with Basaev’s incursion into Daghestan – the formal cause of the second Chechen war. The vakhabis have also received massive financial support from the usual suspect – Saudi Arabia.
This is one summing up of the religious aspect of the Chechen conflict (one that, in LI’s opinion, gives far too much intellectual leeway to the assumption of the generosity of Russian intentions) by four scholars at the William R. Nelson Institute at James Madison University:
Thus, Vakhabites challenged the official Chechen leadership (President Maskhadov and its supporters) and posed a serious threat to the foundations of the Chechen society. As a result, official Grozny was becoming more and more critical of vakhabism in its statements and declarations. However, Maskhadov took no decisive action, as he feared that would exacerbate the situation in the republic. Confrontation between traditionalists and radicals resulted in violence several times; for instance, as noted above, Vakhabites clashed with Sufi Muslims in May, 1998 in Gudermes and Urus-Martan and then again in Gudermes in July, 1998 (approximately 50 people were killed that day). Fearing that fundamentalists will destabilize the situation in the republic and attempt to rebel against Grozny, Maskhadov declared the state of emergency, dissolved and disarmed the Shariat Guards and Islamic regiment, and ordered to exile the well-known warlord Khattab, a mercenary from Jordan who allegedly cooperated with radicals. On July 23, 1998 there was an attempt in Grozny to assassinate Maskhadov, an attempt probably organized by Vakhabites. Observers from Russia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Chechnya itself agreed that at that point the republic was on the brink of civil war.
Despite their relatively strong positions, Vakhabites were not able to assert their influence throughout the republic, much less impose their ideology in its entire territory. However, they went ahead with their plans to occupy neighboring Russian regions and invaded Daghestan in August, 1999. Although members of Sufi brotherhoods may have participated in the invasion as well, the idea and its implementation are blamed by the Russian government and the local population primarily on Vakhabites. Subsequent investigations and the fact that the officials Grozny from the very beginning announced that they did not have anything to do with the events in Daghestan and condemned the aggression further convinced Moscow that fundamentalists had started their jihad and the situation in Chechnya was out of control. Vakhabites were perceived as a major threat to peace and stability in the Northern Caucasus and the territorial integrity of the Federation. The invasion of Daghestan and the Vakhabites' plans to wage a holy war against Russia until the creation of a "purely" Islamic state in its southern territories were the top reasons that prompted the federal government to start a military operation in Chechnya immediately after the defeat of those who attacked Daghestan.
As the federal troops advanced into Chechnya, however, they had to fight not only Islamic extremists but also the members of Sufi brotherhoods who, like in 1994-1996, Russian control for various reasons opposed. Unlike fundamentalists, Sufi Muslims do not fight for a religious cause and tend to have more reasonable positions on issues. Moreover, their dissatisfaction with the situation in the republic in the 1996-1999 period encouraged them to cooperate in a number of cases with the Russians. As a result, many of the Sufi communities engaged in negotiations with the federal representatives and avoided armed conflict. Some of them openly supported the military operation and organized volunteer troops to fight against both Sufi and Vakhabite rebels on the Russian side.”
We think that the “some” fighting on the Russian side were definitely in minority. The Russian occupation, which has seen the planned destruction of major Chechen cities, massacres of Chechen men, and the routinization of kidnapping by the Russian army, has alienated the vast mass of Chechens.
As for Basaev, the Jamestown Newsletter, which is a very good source for information about Chechnya, has published an interview with a French journalist, Sophie Shihab, who is very conversant with the situation in Chechnya.
“On Berezovsky’s responsibility for the outbreak of the second war: “It has never been proved, but it has also never been disproved – and the evidence for it is considerable…The offensive [of Basaev’s forces into Dagestan] provided the pretext for renewing the war. Very soon the rumor circulated that Basaev was financed by the Russian warmongers, headed by Berezovsky….There is a whole pile of evidence suggesting the common responsibility of Berezovsky and the FSB…for the attacks in Russia in August and September of 1999, which precipitated the war and the election of Putin. Thus were created bonds between them, but also hatred. Their lines [i.e., Putin’s and Berezovsky’s] diverged in December 1999, when Berezovsky, conscious that the generals around Putin had taken the initiative away from him, announced that he favored negotiations with the most radical Chechens. But even in exile Berezovsky has kept major financial interests, and thus political power, within Russia. And his impunity on the subject of Chechnya, like Putin’s, remains complete.”
LI hopes that this post isn’t taken to excuse what happened in Beslan. Our point is, rather, that what happened in Beslan has causes that go to the heart of the legitimacy of Putin’s government. There is a demonic synergy between Basaev’s terrorists and Putin’s FSB. Many of Putin’s more curious actions, which have been attributed to his desire for power – his war on Berezovsky, for instance, and on the other oligarchs – can be explained as compulsive acts of disguising by a man who legitimized his power with a massive lie, precipitating an at first popular war against a suspect people. Putin, like Claudius, the King of Denmark, believes, evidently, that arms provide the kind of authority that covers all crime, and that he can drown his guilt in other people's blood. But such rulers are always beset with ghosts. Beslan, the planes that were downed, the black widows blowing themselves up in stadiums and subways, the siege at the theatre, all are the unending results of that primal crime.
We’ve pushed this point over and over again in various posts we’ve written about Chechnya. For those who are interested, look up our posts starting at October 17, 2003.
Saturday, September 04, 2004
Bollettino
From the Figaro:
“The story resembles a bad film, but it happened, and it is disquieting for the fate of Russian journalism. Wednesday, attempting to go to North Ossetia by airplane, two famous reporters who have continued to cover the fighting against Chechnya independently could not land. This was because of an “aggression’ organized against them by alien muscovite forces. The first, Anna Politkovskaia, is well known for her courage and her pleas against the war in Chechnya.
She has served before as a meditator in the hostage taking in Moscov, October 2002. However this time, this was not possible. For Anna Politkovskaia was poined in the airplane that took her to the North Caucasus, after having drunk some tea. Falling violently ill, she was hospitalized at Rostov, then repatriated to Moscow. The form of the intoxication alerted her paper – the editor in chief of said paper, the Chekotchikhine journal, having been killed by a poison.
The fate of Andrei Babitski is also unclear. This Radio Liberty journalist was stopped by the police at the airport under the pretext that dogs had smelt a suspect odor in his baggage. As he tried, nevertheless, to board the plane, he was attacked by two individuals while a guardsman intervened. With the result that Babitski was accused of hooliganism and is now under provisional arrest. Yesterday, a court condemned him to five days of imprisonment. Why?”
Anna Politkovskaia's book of reportages from Chechnya was one of the best LI has read so far. One wonders: what is happening?
From the Figaro:
“The story resembles a bad film, but it happened, and it is disquieting for the fate of Russian journalism. Wednesday, attempting to go to North Ossetia by airplane, two famous reporters who have continued to cover the fighting against Chechnya independently could not land. This was because of an “aggression’ organized against them by alien muscovite forces. The first, Anna Politkovskaia, is well known for her courage and her pleas against the war in Chechnya.
She has served before as a meditator in the hostage taking in Moscov, October 2002. However this time, this was not possible. For Anna Politkovskaia was poined in the airplane that took her to the North Caucasus, after having drunk some tea. Falling violently ill, she was hospitalized at Rostov, then repatriated to Moscow. The form of the intoxication alerted her paper – the editor in chief of said paper, the Chekotchikhine journal, having been killed by a poison.
The fate of Andrei Babitski is also unclear. This Radio Liberty journalist was stopped by the police at the airport under the pretext that dogs had smelt a suspect odor in his baggage. As he tried, nevertheless, to board the plane, he was attacked by two individuals while a guardsman intervened. With the result that Babitski was accused of hooliganism and is now under provisional arrest. Yesterday, a court condemned him to five days of imprisonment. Why?”
Anna Politkovskaia's book of reportages from Chechnya was one of the best LI has read so far. One wonders: what is happening?
Friday, September 03, 2004
Bollettino
After I wrote the post below, lamenting the lack of attention paid to the connections between the Chechen guerillas and Al Qaeda, I read this dispatch in Liberation:
“Selon l'une des sources d'Itar-Tass, la prise d'otages de Beslan aurait pu être financée par un dignitaire wahhabite, Abou Omar as Seïf, émissaire d'Al Qaïda en Tchétchénie.”
“According to one of Itar-Tass’s sources, the hostage taking in Beslan might have been financed by a wahabi dignitary, Abu Omar as Saif, emissary of Al Qaeda in Chechnya.”
This is the organization that Bush claims to have mightily defeated. Claims, when he can be bothered to speak about the topic at all, to have directed such successful operations against the group that 2/3rds of the leadership has been disabled.
Funny, for a defeated group, they seem to have had a successful week – 2 planes down in Russia, one subway bombing, and now the massacre in Beslan. Further information on the connection between Al Qaida and the Chechen guerillas can be found in this interview Jacques Sapir in Humanite:
“You are talking about people who come from the exterior. Who are they?
Jacques Sapir: There has existed since the beginning of the 20th century a Chechen diaspora in the Middle East. A certain number of the members of this diaspora have been influenced by extremist groups linked to the Al Qaeda network. The disapora Chechens were present at the end of the first Chechen war in the territory of Chechnya. There role, which was then rather feeble up to 1997, has progressively acquired an influence which, while still remaining in the minority, has not stopped growing. The links between these militants and the Jordanian cadre of the Al Qaida leadership could explain the radicalization and the mode of operation of the last terrorist actions.”
(Vous parlez de gens qui viendraient de l’extérieur, qui sont-ils ?
Jacques Sapir. Il existe depuis le début du XXe siècle une diaspora tchétchène au Moyen-Orient. Un certain nombre de membres de cette diaspora ont été influencés par les groupes extrémistes liés à ce qu’on appelle la nébuleuse d’al Qaeda. Ces Tchétchènes diasporiques ont été présents dès la fin de la première guerre de Tchétchénie sur le territoire même de la Tchétchénie. Leur rôle était faible jusqu’en 1997, mais ces groupes ont acquis progressivement une influence qui, tout en restant minoritaire, ne cesse de s’accroître. Le lien entre ces militants et un certain nombres de responsables d’origine jordanienne d’al Qaeda pourraient expliquer la radicalisation et le mode opératoire des dernières actions terroristes.)
After I wrote the post below, lamenting the lack of attention paid to the connections between the Chechen guerillas and Al Qaeda, I read this dispatch in Liberation:
“Selon l'une des sources d'Itar-Tass, la prise d'otages de Beslan aurait pu être financée par un dignitaire wahhabite, Abou Omar as Seïf, émissaire d'Al Qaïda en Tchétchénie.”
“According to one of Itar-Tass’s sources, the hostage taking in Beslan might have been financed by a wahabi dignitary, Abu Omar as Saif, emissary of Al Qaeda in Chechnya.”
This is the organization that Bush claims to have mightily defeated. Claims, when he can be bothered to speak about the topic at all, to have directed such successful operations against the group that 2/3rds of the leadership has been disabled.
Funny, for a defeated group, they seem to have had a successful week – 2 planes down in Russia, one subway bombing, and now the massacre in Beslan. Further information on the connection between Al Qaida and the Chechen guerillas can be found in this interview Jacques Sapir in Humanite:
“You are talking about people who come from the exterior. Who are they?
Jacques Sapir: There has existed since the beginning of the 20th century a Chechen diaspora in the Middle East. A certain number of the members of this diaspora have been influenced by extremist groups linked to the Al Qaeda network. The disapora Chechens were present at the end of the first Chechen war in the territory of Chechnya. There role, which was then rather feeble up to 1997, has progressively acquired an influence which, while still remaining in the minority, has not stopped growing. The links between these militants and the Jordanian cadre of the Al Qaida leadership could explain the radicalization and the mode of operation of the last terrorist actions.”
(Vous parlez de gens qui viendraient de l’extérieur, qui sont-ils ?
Jacques Sapir. Il existe depuis le début du XXe siècle une diaspora tchétchène au Moyen-Orient. Un certain nombre de membres de cette diaspora ont été influencés par les groupes extrémistes liés à ce qu’on appelle la nébuleuse d’al Qaeda. Ces Tchétchènes diasporiques ont été présents dès la fin de la première guerre de Tchétchénie sur le territoire même de la Tchétchénie. Leur rôle était faible jusqu’en 1997, mais ces groupes ont acquis progressivement une influence qui, tout en restant minoritaire, ne cesse de s’accroître. Le lien entre ces militants et un certain nombres de responsables d’origine jordanienne d’al Qaeda pourraient expliquer la radicalisation et le mode opératoire des dernières actions terroristes.)
Bollettino
Perhaps there is something grimly apposite about the fact that the day the Republican Rapture winds down, hundreds of children apparently die in the storming of a school in Ossetia by Russian troops. There’s an odd parallel between Russian and American history – bombs go off in Moscow, in 99, and planes are driven into the WTC in 2001; Chechnya is made a living grave for political reasons in 95, and again in 99, and Iraq is being made into a democracy without democracy in 2004 with the U.S. using Grozny tactics in Falluja and Najaf.
So is this the future?
That convergence has now been broken. The pieces from those other Devil's pacts are now running free. Chechnya was the original victim -- and now any area can be the victim, any group.
The close connection between the war in Chechnya and Al Qaeda’s operation, first in Afghanistan and now in Pakistan, still seems to escape most American commentators. A Chechen faction that saw itself as performing two tasks: destroying the Sufi heresy that predominated in Chechnya, and destroying Russian hegemony in Chechnya, has consistently innovated strategies that are taken up elsewhere by Al Qaeda and its associate groups. The Russians, meanwhile, have reverted, in their war against Chechnya, to the standard of military operation perfected by the Nazis. The destruction of Grozny, unprotested by the world, has left a deep impression on certain groups in the Moslem world.
As for a counter-strategy? How about this?
Wednesday, September 01, 2004
Bollettino
Must recommend an op ed piece in the Asia Times this morning. The intro graf of Ehsan Ahrari’s piece poses the question:
“If national-security issues are driving the US presidential race - and they certainly are - then why is President George W Bush not doing worse than his numbers currently show? …
The security situation in Iraq and Afghanistan is worsening; however, the focus of presidential debate is not whether Bush misled the United States into invading Iraq - by harping on the non-existent weapons of mass destruction, or that he should have stayed in Afghanistan and finished the task of eradicating al-Qaeda and Taliban forces. Bush's misinformation about Iraq and his faux pas regarding Afghanistan have been taken as facts. Yet the voters don't seem to want to punish him. At least that is not the case when one looks at these numbers. Perhaps the fault lies with Kerry.”
You think so? Why, Kerry, as all the Dem blogs assure us, is with us – in his heart. Sure, he would have voted to invade Iraq all over again – but that is a nuanced position! Sure, he has no plan to withdraw American troops – but watch him get French troops in there! Sure, his comments about what is happening in Iraq are undistinguishable, for the most part, from Dick Cheney’s – no support for elections, no comment on the American attempt to change, by invader’s force, Iraq’s whole economy in the face of overwhelming opposition, no grappling with the fact that, according to polls sponsored by the CPA itself before its self-administered euthanasia, the most unpopular force in Iraq right now is the U.S. Army – but he isn’t connected to Halliburton! Kerry’s margarine approach is astonishing – by this point he should have figured out that we actually want to hear about the larger problems posed by Iraq – namely, how to get along in a Middle East that is ruled by elites that are having a hard time holding a pro-U.S. line in the face of mass anger at this country. Kerry’s every instinct, when meeting a crisis, seems to be to form a committee. Surely, though, he can’t be that brain dead. And then there is the record on Israel, which it is just as well we don’t examine – it is too depressing.
Kerry’s me-too-ism has had one advantage over Bush – one’ s impression is that he is a more competent man. Even if Bush’s plans and goals are terribly wrong, the wrong is compounded by the way those plans are carried out – with awful and stupid negligence. Kerry has so far given the impression that he isn’t the type to allow an obvious idiot like Paul Wolfowitz to go around chewing out the Commander in Chief over a purely military question. This image of competence, though, is being damaged by Kerry’s response to the Swift Boat nonsense. If he can’t deal with a little dirty campaigning, voters rightly are going to think, the guy isn’t so competent after all.
This is where Ahrari’s piece gets interesting:
“The preceding are some of the reasons Kerry could not establish himself as a distinct and a different leader. But an additional factor should also be considered. The real problem with Kerry's candidacy is that he is a politician whose comfort zone has always been close to the center of a political spectrum. Consequently, he has gotten used to responding to his natural instincts, proclivities and impulses for moderation. In the post-September 11 era, such a politician cannot impress the voters, even when the record of the sitting president on the awesome issues of wars - to be precise, on the post-military campaign performance - in Iraq and Afghanistan is mediocre. The best Kerry seems to be offering to the voters right now is the Democratic Party's version of a mediocre presidential leadership. Why should the American voters defeat the sitting president with a mediocre record on national security and elect a senator who has thus far proved himself to be very much at home with playing it safe, remaining at the center, but never demonstrating courage as a politician to damn the torpedoes and moving full speed ahead on issues of national security? It may still not be too late for Kerry to do just that, accentuate his bold measures, especially regarding Iraq. A 2-5% lead for Bush is entirely spurious; it might dissipate almost instantly, but only if Kerry can imminently articulate the difference between him and his opponent. What should be the specifics of his bold approach? Well, only Kerry can articulate that approach, if he is serious about convincing the voters that there is indeed a Kerry difference that should be in White House for the next four years, instead of George Bush. “
Much better than all the bs that has been emanating, lately, from the lefty cheerleader blogs.
Must recommend an op ed piece in the Asia Times this morning. The intro graf of Ehsan Ahrari’s piece poses the question:
“If national-security issues are driving the US presidential race - and they certainly are - then why is President George W Bush not doing worse than his numbers currently show? …
The security situation in Iraq and Afghanistan is worsening; however, the focus of presidential debate is not whether Bush misled the United States into invading Iraq - by harping on the non-existent weapons of mass destruction, or that he should have stayed in Afghanistan and finished the task of eradicating al-Qaeda and Taliban forces. Bush's misinformation about Iraq and his faux pas regarding Afghanistan have been taken as facts. Yet the voters don't seem to want to punish him. At least that is not the case when one looks at these numbers. Perhaps the fault lies with Kerry.”
You think so? Why, Kerry, as all the Dem blogs assure us, is with us – in his heart. Sure, he would have voted to invade Iraq all over again – but that is a nuanced position! Sure, he has no plan to withdraw American troops – but watch him get French troops in there! Sure, his comments about what is happening in Iraq are undistinguishable, for the most part, from Dick Cheney’s – no support for elections, no comment on the American attempt to change, by invader’s force, Iraq’s whole economy in the face of overwhelming opposition, no grappling with the fact that, according to polls sponsored by the CPA itself before its self-administered euthanasia, the most unpopular force in Iraq right now is the U.S. Army – but he isn’t connected to Halliburton! Kerry’s margarine approach is astonishing – by this point he should have figured out that we actually want to hear about the larger problems posed by Iraq – namely, how to get along in a Middle East that is ruled by elites that are having a hard time holding a pro-U.S. line in the face of mass anger at this country. Kerry’s every instinct, when meeting a crisis, seems to be to form a committee. Surely, though, he can’t be that brain dead. And then there is the record on Israel, which it is just as well we don’t examine – it is too depressing.
Kerry’s me-too-ism has had one advantage over Bush – one’ s impression is that he is a more competent man. Even if Bush’s plans and goals are terribly wrong, the wrong is compounded by the way those plans are carried out – with awful and stupid negligence. Kerry has so far given the impression that he isn’t the type to allow an obvious idiot like Paul Wolfowitz to go around chewing out the Commander in Chief over a purely military question. This image of competence, though, is being damaged by Kerry’s response to the Swift Boat nonsense. If he can’t deal with a little dirty campaigning, voters rightly are going to think, the guy isn’t so competent after all.
This is where Ahrari’s piece gets interesting:
“The preceding are some of the reasons Kerry could not establish himself as a distinct and a different leader. But an additional factor should also be considered. The real problem with Kerry's candidacy is that he is a politician whose comfort zone has always been close to the center of a political spectrum. Consequently, he has gotten used to responding to his natural instincts, proclivities and impulses for moderation. In the post-September 11 era, such a politician cannot impress the voters, even when the record of the sitting president on the awesome issues of wars - to be precise, on the post-military campaign performance - in Iraq and Afghanistan is mediocre. The best Kerry seems to be offering to the voters right now is the Democratic Party's version of a mediocre presidential leadership. Why should the American voters defeat the sitting president with a mediocre record on national security and elect a senator who has thus far proved himself to be very much at home with playing it safe, remaining at the center, but never demonstrating courage as a politician to damn the torpedoes and moving full speed ahead on issues of national security? It may still not be too late for Kerry to do just that, accentuate his bold measures, especially regarding Iraq. A 2-5% lead for Bush is entirely spurious; it might dissipate almost instantly, but only if Kerry can imminently articulate the difference between him and his opponent. What should be the specifics of his bold approach? Well, only Kerry can articulate that approach, if he is serious about convincing the voters that there is indeed a Kerry difference that should be in White House for the next four years, instead of George Bush. “
Much better than all the bs that has been emanating, lately, from the lefty cheerleader blogs.
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Bollettino
Lately, we’ve been reading the collection of Italo Calvino’s bric a brac published this spring as A Hermit in Paris. The book contains some essays, some autobiographical musings, and a journal of Calvino’s first journey to the U.S., in 1959, under the auspices of a Ford Foundation grant. We were fascinated to learn that the Ford Foundation, no doubt doing its cold war duty to advertise the culture of the free world, brought four European writers to America that year: Calvino, Hugo Claus, Arrabal, and Claude Ollier. Gunter Grass was supposed to be part of this merry band, but couldn’t make it. Calvino is nicely bitchy about his comrades -- Claus he doesn’t know and takes for granted is a minor from a minor country, Ollier – the nouveau romaniste -- he considers to be an ignoramus, and Arrabal the anarchist amuses him with his ceaseless complaints (for instance, Arrabal accuses Goytisolo of blocking his career in Francist Spain because he doesn’t write in the socialist realist strain and isn’t anti-Franco enough), in addition to which Calvino relishes the fact that, once the four land in New York, Arrabal is almost physically frightened of the beatniks he meets (like Alan Ginsburg, who comes to a party with a ‘disgusting black straggly beard, mistakes Arrabal for a kindred soul, since Arrabal also boasts a beard, and makes some moves on him): “Ginsburg lives with another bearded man as man and wife and would like Arrabal to be present at their bearded couplings. When I get back to the hotel, I find Arrabal looking frightened and scandalized because they wanted to seduce him.” Arrabal, Calvino claims, reveals that his set of beatniks in Paris are very clean, live in beautifully appointed houses with refrigerators and televisions, and “only dress up in dirty clothes to go out.”
Cold War culture, o saisons! o chateaux! Calvino loves New York. Nevertheless, he pulls himself out of it to travel around the country in 1960. Some of his comments have that visitor from another planet air about them, especially for an American. For instance, Calvino is a communist at this time. So he takes an interest in the 1960 presidential election. It is, he assures people in letters he sends back home, pretty much given that the Republican will win. This is good, because his opponent is a conservative Catholic. Calvino has seen enough conservative Catholics back in Italy. So much for the international charm of JFK.
One of Calvino’s autobiographical essays, Portraits of Duce, was published in the New Yorker last year. It is a catalogue of the images of Mussolini that Calvino remembers from childhood. And of how Mussolini’s face figured as more than an image of fascist power – it infiltrated the space of all faces in Italy in the fascist years.
Here is a graf::
“The other salient feature of these first official images of the dictator was the pensive pose, the prominent forehead seeming to underline his capacity for thought. In one of the affectionate games that people used to play at the time with children of one or two years, the adult would say, "Do Mussolini's face," and the child would furrow his brow and stick out angry lips. In a word, Italians of my generation carried the portrait of Mussolini within themselves, even before they were of an age to recognize it on the walls, and this reveals that there was (also) something infantile in that image, that look of concentration which small children can have, and which does not actually mean that they are thinking intensely about anything.”
This post is sponsored by RWG Communications. Contact us for all your writing needs. This week only: editing for $6.00 per page, with the mention of this ad.
Lately, we’ve been reading the collection of Italo Calvino’s bric a brac published this spring as A Hermit in Paris. The book contains some essays, some autobiographical musings, and a journal of Calvino’s first journey to the U.S., in 1959, under the auspices of a Ford Foundation grant. We were fascinated to learn that the Ford Foundation, no doubt doing its cold war duty to advertise the culture of the free world, brought four European writers to America that year: Calvino, Hugo Claus, Arrabal, and Claude Ollier. Gunter Grass was supposed to be part of this merry band, but couldn’t make it. Calvino is nicely bitchy about his comrades -- Claus he doesn’t know and takes for granted is a minor from a minor country, Ollier – the nouveau romaniste -- he considers to be an ignoramus, and Arrabal the anarchist amuses him with his ceaseless complaints (for instance, Arrabal accuses Goytisolo of blocking his career in Francist Spain because he doesn’t write in the socialist realist strain and isn’t anti-Franco enough), in addition to which Calvino relishes the fact that, once the four land in New York, Arrabal is almost physically frightened of the beatniks he meets (like Alan Ginsburg, who comes to a party with a ‘disgusting black straggly beard, mistakes Arrabal for a kindred soul, since Arrabal also boasts a beard, and makes some moves on him): “Ginsburg lives with another bearded man as man and wife and would like Arrabal to be present at their bearded couplings. When I get back to the hotel, I find Arrabal looking frightened and scandalized because they wanted to seduce him.” Arrabal, Calvino claims, reveals that his set of beatniks in Paris are very clean, live in beautifully appointed houses with refrigerators and televisions, and “only dress up in dirty clothes to go out.”
Cold War culture, o saisons! o chateaux! Calvino loves New York. Nevertheless, he pulls himself out of it to travel around the country in 1960. Some of his comments have that visitor from another planet air about them, especially for an American. For instance, Calvino is a communist at this time. So he takes an interest in the 1960 presidential election. It is, he assures people in letters he sends back home, pretty much given that the Republican will win. This is good, because his opponent is a conservative Catholic. Calvino has seen enough conservative Catholics back in Italy. So much for the international charm of JFK.
One of Calvino’s autobiographical essays, Portraits of Duce, was published in the New Yorker last year. It is a catalogue of the images of Mussolini that Calvino remembers from childhood. And of how Mussolini’s face figured as more than an image of fascist power – it infiltrated the space of all faces in Italy in the fascist years.
Here is a graf::
“The other salient feature of these first official images of the dictator was the pensive pose, the prominent forehead seeming to underline his capacity for thought. In one of the affectionate games that people used to play at the time with children of one or two years, the adult would say, "Do Mussolini's face," and the child would furrow his brow and stick out angry lips. In a word, Italians of my generation carried the portrait of Mussolini within themselves, even before they were of an age to recognize it on the walls, and this reveals that there was (also) something infantile in that image, that look of concentration which small children can have, and which does not actually mean that they are thinking intensely about anything.”
This post is sponsored by RWG Communications. Contact us for all your writing needs. This week only: editing for $6.00 per page, with the mention of this ad.
Sunday, August 29, 2004
Bollettino
A friend of mine who is pretty far to the right sent me an email about Swift Boat Veterans about a month ago. I thought, at the time: you gotta be kidding me. Bush, with an incredibly bad military record, can’t afford to open this little can of worms up.
I was wrong. The Bush campaign correctly gauged Kerry’s weakness – a massive, senatorial vanity that makes Oedipus’ hubris look like the shrinking modesty of a closet virgin. Kerry’s response has been, throughout, a comic exercise in hauteur. It is as if Kerry feels that we will all feel his pain that he, John Kerry, a senator, a presidential candidate, is being unfairly attacked in a tv ad. Wow – a presidential candidate attacked in a slimy way! That he has made this into an issue of Bush condemning or not the ads shows …. well, a pretty bad instinct in Kerry. Hardball does not consist of insisting that your opponent dominate the game. Surely even in the incubator of egocentricity and bad but expensive hair that is D.C., surely someone around Kerry could have gently said: get over it. But no: this utterly boring and irrelevant issue is bearing beautiful fruit for the Bush campaign. Kerry’s partisans are all in a lather – all of them amplifying the vanity response, all of them insisting on the utterly godlike heroism of the young Kerry, deigning to become a grunt from his position of privilege in the Ivies – we all should be so honored! I'm weeping in my whiskey! All of them determined to stick with the story of Kerry the hero unworthily blemished to the very end.
If, instead, Kerry had accepted being attacked, and attacked back – if he hadn’t sanctimoniously “condemned” moveon’s quite mild ads on Bush – he’d be in much better shape. Liberals have a tendency to confuse their arrogance with decency – they love that word decency – when, in reality, their niceness is all context dependent. I say: bring on the dirty campaigning. If I had inherited a million bucks, I could afford to be decent too. Or indecent. The truth is, most of us don’t have any choice about it – that’s what a restricted income does for ya. So we plug up the interstices with a few moral acts, gorge on superstitions in response to our dim awareness that we are vulnerable to everything in this universe and are going to die without having eaten enough, fucked enough, thought enough, or enjoyed any one moment enough, and plug along from one besotted moment to another thinking about sex, if we are lucky and our libido hasn’t been broken by our exhaustion. I really believe that the Dem establishment doesn’t have a clue. Hence, a small town Babbitt like Rove can look like a genius just for acting like a redneck drunk, since this provokes the most maddening, and unintentionally hilarious, responses from Dems. Their noses immediately go in the air. They act sullied. They begin talking about honor, by which they mean – I, me, my ego, my preciousness, was actually INSULTED by that lout. Can you imagine? This righteous indignation plays out as a particularly nauseating blend of petulance. The mask comes down. The hoi polloi insult and are insulted all of the time. It is our art form. And if you can’t deal with that, how are you going to deal with things like, uh, war?
It has still not resonated with the Dems that they are no longer the default party. Incredible as that seems, they still respond to these things as though they were still number one. This happens. Many American manufacturers, faced with competition from the Japanese in the seventies, folded not because the Japanese could make stuff cheaper, but because the Americans were arthritic about service, produced crap, had an executive structure that was stuck in cement, crushed innovation, and had so constituted themselves around a Pavlovian routine – put out crap, get back money – that they were unable to understand the changed circumstances.
This would be extremely funny if we had some other opposition party we could go to. Alas, the Dems are it, and their screw ups are threatening to land Bush, once again, in an office he so richly does not deserve.
Sponsored by RWG Communications. Let us take care of your editing, proofing and translation needs. Specializing in academic and business writing.
A friend of mine who is pretty far to the right sent me an email about Swift Boat Veterans about a month ago. I thought, at the time: you gotta be kidding me. Bush, with an incredibly bad military record, can’t afford to open this little can of worms up.
I was wrong. The Bush campaign correctly gauged Kerry’s weakness – a massive, senatorial vanity that makes Oedipus’ hubris look like the shrinking modesty of a closet virgin. Kerry’s response has been, throughout, a comic exercise in hauteur. It is as if Kerry feels that we will all feel his pain that he, John Kerry, a senator, a presidential candidate, is being unfairly attacked in a tv ad. Wow – a presidential candidate attacked in a slimy way! That he has made this into an issue of Bush condemning or not the ads shows …. well, a pretty bad instinct in Kerry. Hardball does not consist of insisting that your opponent dominate the game. Surely even in the incubator of egocentricity and bad but expensive hair that is D.C., surely someone around Kerry could have gently said: get over it. But no: this utterly boring and irrelevant issue is bearing beautiful fruit for the Bush campaign. Kerry’s partisans are all in a lather – all of them amplifying the vanity response, all of them insisting on the utterly godlike heroism of the young Kerry, deigning to become a grunt from his position of privilege in the Ivies – we all should be so honored! I'm weeping in my whiskey! All of them determined to stick with the story of Kerry the hero unworthily blemished to the very end.
If, instead, Kerry had accepted being attacked, and attacked back – if he hadn’t sanctimoniously “condemned” moveon’s quite mild ads on Bush – he’d be in much better shape. Liberals have a tendency to confuse their arrogance with decency – they love that word decency – when, in reality, their niceness is all context dependent. I say: bring on the dirty campaigning. If I had inherited a million bucks, I could afford to be decent too. Or indecent. The truth is, most of us don’t have any choice about it – that’s what a restricted income does for ya. So we plug up the interstices with a few moral acts, gorge on superstitions in response to our dim awareness that we are vulnerable to everything in this universe and are going to die without having eaten enough, fucked enough, thought enough, or enjoyed any one moment enough, and plug along from one besotted moment to another thinking about sex, if we are lucky and our libido hasn’t been broken by our exhaustion. I really believe that the Dem establishment doesn’t have a clue. Hence, a small town Babbitt like Rove can look like a genius just for acting like a redneck drunk, since this provokes the most maddening, and unintentionally hilarious, responses from Dems. Their noses immediately go in the air. They act sullied. They begin talking about honor, by which they mean – I, me, my ego, my preciousness, was actually INSULTED by that lout. Can you imagine? This righteous indignation plays out as a particularly nauseating blend of petulance. The mask comes down. The hoi polloi insult and are insulted all of the time. It is our art form. And if you can’t deal with that, how are you going to deal with things like, uh, war?
It has still not resonated with the Dems that they are no longer the default party. Incredible as that seems, they still respond to these things as though they were still number one. This happens. Many American manufacturers, faced with competition from the Japanese in the seventies, folded not because the Japanese could make stuff cheaper, but because the Americans were arthritic about service, produced crap, had an executive structure that was stuck in cement, crushed innovation, and had so constituted themselves around a Pavlovian routine – put out crap, get back money – that they were unable to understand the changed circumstances.
This would be extremely funny if we had some other opposition party we could go to. Alas, the Dems are it, and their screw ups are threatening to land Bush, once again, in an office he so richly does not deserve.
Sponsored by RWG Communications. Let us take care of your editing, proofing and translation needs. Specializing in academic and business writing.
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