Bollettino

Bollettino

We’ve been pondering the headline of the NYT’s Derrida obituary. The headline describes him as an “abstruse theorist” in an obvious and spiteful attempt not to describe him as a philosopher. No surprise that petty malice infected even the headline writer. But it did surprise me somewhat that nowhere on the web, at least that I’ve seen, has there been any attempt to improve on the ‘abstruse’ label. That Derrida’s writings are difficult is well known. Kant’s writings are difficult too. But by now any first year philosophy textbook can simplify Kant into a picture general enough to be taught without too much difficulty.

Surely it isn’t that hard to do the same for Derrida.

If one were to start, the effort would look something like this.

A. Begin where Derrida begins. At the turn of the twentieth century, there was a programmatic turn against the naive positivistic account of the human sciences. In the nineteenth century, it was recognized that history, sociology, linguistics, and philosophy resisted the scientific models produced by the positive sciences – especially physics. Although there were candidates put forward to fill the role of the ‘laws of history’ or the ‘laws of psychology’, there was no agreement on how to find these laws, or if history, psychology, and language were even the kind of things that could be described in terms of laws. This is what Husserl would latter describe as the crisis of the sciences. In addition, there was a distinct tendency towards psychologism – as for instance Mill’s idea that numbers ‘derive’ from from empirical sense data.

There are three figures in the turn against naïve positivism who are symptomatic of what was to come to dominate 20th century philosophy: Frege, Husserl, and Saussure. Interestingly, Frege – whose influence on the development of Anglo philosophy is huge – never attracted Derrida’s attention. But Husserl and Saussure did. Why?

Because Husserl and Saussure advocate treating language as an autonomous entity. By which they meant bracketing psychological and social ‘influences” on language, and examining it as a self contained system.

Why is language important? Because it seems like language, as distinct from history or the mind (with its notorious observation problems), is the closest thing, in the human sciences, to a traditional object of the positive sciences. You can easily make the case that language was law-bound. You can find, seemingly, universals in language. And, with the development of mathematical logic around 1900, it suddenly seemed that logic could actually absorb mathematics. This was exciting insofar as logic itself was recast as the rules for a given formal language. If you consider that physics could just be considered the systematic attempt to mathematize nature, then you see the possibilities. Perhaps the positive sciences and the human sciences spring from one root.

Saussure’s program, then, treated language as autonomous. It depended on a set of strict categorical differences – the two most important of which were those between the synchronic state of language and the diachronic, and between the signifier and the signified – in order so show that language isn’t dependent for its internal workings upon an external referential context.

B. Derrida’s most important move – the one that resonates throughout his philosophy – was to examine Saussure’s set of assumptions. The assumption that, for instance, the synchronic plane of language could be absolutely separated from the diachronic invalidated a whole tradition of philosophical thinking – the Cratylian school, so to speak – which examined the etymology of words in an effort to reconstruct their essences. Derrida did not advocate returning to this school, but questioned those presuppositions by which, in one gesture, Saussure reduced the lexe to a series of distinct, unconnected-but-connected entities. Similarly, Derrida questioned the distinction between the signified and the signifier. There’s an interesting treatment of a Frege’s similar distinction, between concept and object, in an article in Ratio in 2000, by Adrian Moore. Moore has seen what Derrida was doing, and applies his critical stance, although not his method, to Frege.


C. What is the latent metaphysics that Derrida finds behind Saussure? This is a long story, but it is hinted at by the notion that the signifying unit persists as a signifying unity from one synchronic plane to the other. In other words, it constructs an ideal present. Derrida’s skepticism about the ideal present leads him to ask whether the ideal present isn’t an integral part of the code of Western metaphysics. If that Metaphysics is forced to do without it, would it lose its coherence? Now, of course at this point one could ask whether there is such a thing as one Western metaphysics. Derrida essentially accepts Heidegger’s theory that there is – that behind all the metaphysical schools there exists one common program.


D. At this point, Derrida does something interesting – and something that we can recognize, at this point in time, as consonant with the moves made by other skeptics in the Modernist tradition, like Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. He does not assume that proving the falsity of an idea is the extent to which the philosopher can go. Rather, he wants to ask whether the falsity actually has a use value. Assuming, for the moment, that the metaphysics of presence clings to a falsely construed idea of the present. Then why didn’t that falsity collapse the metaphysics from the very beginning? Derrida, like M,N, and F. thinks that one shouldn’t confuse truth with use. In a sense, this is a criticism of the coherence theory of truth from within – which is why, for certain philosophers, it is so hard to understand. That is because a certain notion of the truth is the one supreme philosophic bias. That notion identifies the true with the good. That a system could be coherent and functional by eliding the truth values of its fundamental assumptions – could be set up to systematically protect them from any real investigation – is alien to the philosopher’s self image.

There now. Notice this account doesn’t use the word deconstruction once. Although eventually I would say something about deconstruction – and many other things – if I were giving a full blown account of Derrida, the more important word is “text.” That Derrida repeated uses the word text, and that it is repeatedly transformed into the word language (as, for instance, in the NYT obituary), is all about the underlying metaphysical bias Derrida is exposing.

If LI’s readers want to know why, write and ask me. I’ll then write another post about it. But you know – I haven’t done Derrida for a decade, and I don’t want to do a lot of color by numbers explanations of the guy.

PS- After I wrote this, I received an email from my friend T. in New York, who referred me to a decent obituary of Derrida in the Independent that actually mentions the text/language distinction forever lost in the NYT obituary. http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/story.jsp?story=570707

Bollettino

Me demander de renoncer à ce qui m'a formé, à ce que j'ai tant aimé, c'est me demander de mourir. Dans cette fidélité-là, il y a une sorte d'instinct de conservation. Renoncer, par exemple, à une difficulté de formulation, à un pli, à un paradoxe, à une contradiction supplémentaire, parce que ça ne va pas être compris, ou plutôt parce que tel journaliste qui ne sait pas la lire, pas lire le titre même d'un livre, croit comprendre que le lecteur ou l'auditeur ne comprendra pas davantage et que l'Audimat ou son gagne-pain en souffriront, c'est pour moi une obscénité inacceptable. C'est comme si on me demandait de m'incliner, de m'asservir - ou de mourir de bêtise. -- Jacques Derrida, interview, Le Monde

The headline in the Nouvelle Obs read: Disparition de Jacques Derrida, inventeur de la «déconstruction». Ah, Derrida might very well have smiled at that coupling of inventor and deconstruction. In a series of articles that approached Maurice Blanchot with that typical scrupulousness so maddening to those who expect their philosophers to approach a structure with a machete instead of a scalpel, or at least an ideology with several ID tags to it (ideologies, like the clothes in the marked down section, always flutter their tags), Derrida had already sussed out the venir and its variants, playing, as usual, on etymologies under the sign of the warning sign of the Sausserian arbitraire.

I devoted a good three years to the man – this is how long it took me to write, in my off and on fashion, my master’s thesis. I saw him give a talk, once, at NYU – the room was absolutely crowded with students. I’m not sure if they knew he was going to be speaking in French. And remember, this is Derrida’s French, a language that was born from the unnatural coupling of Mallarme and Heidegger.

Derrida didn’t deliver a shock to my system, the way Deleuze did, but I still love the man.

From the AP we read: “On the third stage of his asian tour in China, Jacques Chirac expressed his sadness in learning of the decease of this universal thinker, who will remain, according to the president, an “inventor, a discoverer, a master of an extraordinary fecundity.” ‘With him, France has given the one one of the great contemporary philosophers, one of the major figures of the intellectual life of our time,” he emphasized, recalling that Jacques Derrida was ‘read, admired, translated, published, taught and discussed all over the world.”

He was 74, and died of cancer of the pancreas.

The NObs lists some of his works, leaving out – weirdly enough – La Grammatologie. We do like the prudent way they define deconstruction:

He is the author of numerous books, among which are Writing and Difference, Dissemination, Margins of Philosophie, Glas, The Truth in Painting, For Paul Celan, On the Spirit, Heidegger and the Question, Inventions of the other, From right to philosophy (Du droit a la philosophie – long before he wrote this tome, I entitled my Master’s thesis – Droigt d’auteur reserve – it is a rather untranslatable pun, pointing to the place of droit – law, right, norms – and fingers – as in point out, montrer a droigt – in Derrida. The reserve part – the part maudit, the part of property, the part of dissemination – was the subdued key. But I digress), Specters of Marx. Jacques Derrida proposed, launching himself from classic philosophic texts, a deconstruction, which is to say a critique of the presuppositions of discourse. (la parole).

There are a lot of shark reactions besides that of Chirac. Jack Lang, who I do like, claimed to be floored by the death of Derrida. The mayor of Paris and one of the heads of the French communist party also chipped in their accolades.

Interesting how they flock about the term deconstruction. In France, I imagine Derrida’s real importance, outside of philosophy, wasn’t deconstruction,. but decentering. All power to the marges was the slogan of the ultra left wing in Italy in 1970, which was borrowed from J.D. That idea filtered through the left in various ways. The reception of Foucault, who didn’t like Derrida’s work, was contextualized, I think, partly in Derridian terms in the early seventies. Although perhaps I am getting that relationship optimistically backwards. American Foucaultians and Derridians have a dog and cat relationship, which isn’t known to people outside the community.

Of course, the right, who know Derrida from some article that somebody who read somebody else’s article who read a page of Marges de la philosophie, at most, will have a wonderful time jumping up and down on his grave. Bastards.

Read the NYT obit for an example. The level of intellect displayed in it, and the incredibly blah blah blah stupidity about Paul de Man (gee, the Derrida didn't trample all over his best bud when it was discovered that long before JD met him, he wrote for a collaborationist Belgian newspaper. How dare he! Denunciation is, as the House Unamerican Committee and Bill Keller know, the only way to really purify the heart!). But obits in the NYT are pretty meaningless.

Well, Jacques, I’m getting drunk tonight for you. Good night, ladies, good night sweet ladies, good night good night.

Bollettino

Curious omission

LI has just finished reviewing a rather depressing novel set in Liberia. This summer, we were supposed to review another depressing book by Douglas Farah, the WP reporter, Blood From Stones, about the “secret financial network of terror.” Farah’s beat was West Africa, and he links the arms and diamond merchants in that area to both the Hezbollah and Al Qaeda networks. We were not totally convinced by the story line he is pushing – evidence for a strong alliance between a Shi’ite group and a group well known for massacring Shi’ites in Pakistan and Afghanistan seems to me, at best, shaky, a matter of individual initiatives and an attempt at Pan-Islamic solidarity is rhetorical rather than real, and at worse, tendentious, an attempt to drag into America’s scope enemies who are really enemies of Israel and various factions in Lebanon. However, in the course of the report, Farah extensively describes the horrors of the West African breakdown and its financing through slave labor in the illicit diamond trade, as well as lumbering, and of course the ever present trade in drugs.

If our mind hadn’t been so focused, perhaps we wouldn’t have noticed that in two debates, there has been no mention whatsoever of the U.S. joke “intervention” in Liberia. This summer, Jonathan Stack and James Brabazon made a documentary showing U.S. forces waiting in the coastal waters while Liberians were slaughtered by militias. Here’s the first graf from the Times review of the documentary:

“In their brave film ''Liberia: An Uncivil War'' Jonathan Stack and James Brabazon make us witnesses to the continuing implosion in one of Africa's failed states. But they do something else as well in the documentary that has its premiere tonight on the Discovery Times Channel. They also show how the United States has turned its back on the land it created as a colony in 1821. In one of the film's many riveting images, three United States warships loom in the haze off Liberia's coast while thousands of civilians are slaughtered on shore by a ragtag army wielding American-made weapons.’

There wasn’t a question for Bush about this. Here are a two other grafs from that review:

“When President Bush embarks on an African trip in July 2003, he comes under pressure to resolve the Liberian crisis and vaguely promises to send in peacekeepers after Mr. Taylor has left. But Mr. Taylor perfectly plays President Bush, asserting that to leave before the peacekeepers arrive would be irresponsible. Buoyed by his countrymen's hope that United States marines are on the way, Mr. Taylor maneuvers himself into a position to buy time for a better deal (he's eventually given asylum in Nigeria) while blaming the United States for not intervening (the marines wait for Mr. Taylor's departure before landing shortly after the bloodbath and staying for about a month).

The film makes clear how easy it would have been to prevent the spasm of violence that swept through Monrovia, Liberia's capital, in July 2003. With President Bush in Africa and United States troopships in Liberian waters, the stars seemed aligned for the United States to help the people of its historically closest African ally. Rebel youths on bridges aimlessly firing a few mortars and grenade launchers would certainly have been no match for the heavily armed marines for whom the streets were lined with cheering, expectant citizens. But all hopes were dashed when the rebels arrived.”

The free people of a freedom loving Liberia have two strikes against them, however, insofar as the democracy loving people of the Pentagon are concerned. They are black – which means, as far as the U.S. is concerned, who cares. And they made the mistake of living in a country without significant reserves of petroleum.

Searching around for more about the recent history of Liberia, I came upon a fine article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It is a pre-9/11 article by Michael Klare entitled :The Kalashnikov Age. It makes the same point that LI has often made – the bogus classification of some weapons as WMD and some weapons as not responds more to the Western need to market weapons than any real mass destructiveness. So far, the most mass destructive weapon unleashed on the planet is the AK-47.

“ON CHRISTMAS EVE 1989, CHARLES Taylor marched into Liberia with a ragtag invasion force of some 150 amateur soldiers--members of the self-styled National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL)--and set out to conquer the country. In the months that followed, Taylor seized control of the Liberian hinterland, exacting tribute from its inhabitants, recruiting additional soldiers, and killing all who stood in his way. As many as 200,000 people died in the cataclysm, and millions more were driven from their homes. Taylor had unleashed the most deadly combat system of the current epoch: the adolescent human male equipped with a Kalashnikov--an AK-47 assault rifle.”

Klare’s statistics graf bears out my hyperbole:

“Most of the casualties in these conflicts are non-combatants. Civilians constituted only five percent of the casualties in World War I, but they constitute about 90 percent of all those killed or wounded in more recent wars. Children have been particularly victimized by these conflicts: According to the U.N. Development Program, as many as two million children are believed to have been killed--and 4.5 million disabled--in armed conflict since 1987; another million have been orphaned, and some 12 million left homeless.”

It must be admitted that the disabling of these children was accomplished not only by weapons sold to various criminals and criminal governments by western arms dealers, but also by the handy machete. There’s nothing like a machete or an ax to sever the arms and hands of human beings. As we known, in Sierra Leone and in Liberia, child soldiers were ordered to do such things. Here’s a graf from Farah’s book:

In April, 2000, in front of her battered plastic tent at the Amputtees and War Wounded Camp in Freetown, Kadia Tu Fafanah, a forty-one year old mother of nine, described how two preteen boys of the RUF used an ax to hack her legs off above the knees, leaving only two stumps:….

“It was Wednesday, January 20, 1999” Fafanah said as she sat facing a small cooking fire… “They put us in a house to burn, about one hundred of us, but it wouldn’t light. So they put the men in one line and shot them. I tried to run away, but I fell in a gutter. The children caught me. The amputated five others, but I was punished more for trying to run away. The took both my legs. They were small boys and they held me down while one cut me off.”

Here’s how they prepare the kids for what they call ‘mayhem days”: “They [children interviewed by Farah] said they were given colored pills, most likely amphetamines and razor blade slits near their temples, where cocaine was put directly into their bloodstreams. The ensuing days would be a blur: the children often remembered only the feeling of being invincible, before the drugs wore off.”

It would be interesting to Kerry and Bush talk about Liberia, but we doubt the subject is going to come up. Here’s a link to recent news from the country.

Bollettino

Say, how much is the interest on that debt?

LI won’t watch tonight’s debate. Our last non-watching of the debate was an outstanding success – our candidate romped. We aren’t going to jinx Kerry now.

However, we have been succumbing to a bad case of ISD – Internal Speechmaking Disorder. This is a disease that strikes thousands of talk radio listeners and bloggers every year. Tragically, there is little that can be done about it. Symptoms are uncontrollable daydreams about speaking oneself on the podium, or having one’s candidate speak on the podium saying terribly clever and devastating things that one makes up oneself. Usually, the opposing guy in the daydream is struck dumb. He’s shown up. He’s ashamed forever and ever.

Under our ISD compulsion, we’d recommend that Kerry’s people look at the stark article about Bush’s fiscal policy in the WP this morning. It really just recaps what we know: that the surplus, which was estimated at a trillion dollars when Bush came into office, and that was still estimated at 300 billion dollars after his first year in office, when he pushed through the first rounds of tax cuts, have turned into a 450 billion dollar deficit. One figure, though, was striking:

“When Bush took office in January 2001, the government was forecasting a $5.6 trillion budget surplus between then and 2011. Instead, it is now expecting to accumulate an extra $3 trillion in debt -- including a record $415 billion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. The government has to borrow an average of more than $1.1 billion a day to pay its bills, and it spends more on interest payments on the federal debt each year -- about $159 billion -- than it does on education, homeland security, justice and law enforcement, veterans, international aid, and space exploration combined.”

We hope one of Kerry’s handlers clipped that graf. What does it mean? It means this. The lion’s share of the tax cuts, as we know, went to the top ten percent income bracket. Those are tax cuts on income, on dividends, etc. Estimate that as at around 500 billion to a trillion dollars. The other tax cuts went to the below 200 thou a year crowd – bottoming out at the ones who made 20 thou or so. The poorest, of course, got next to nothing.

What this means is that, of the taxes that remain, the middle class is paying about 2 to 3 percent of its tax dollars on nothing but interest. And who owns those government bonds? The wealthiest ten percent. So, in one of history’s sweeter deals, the same people who got the largest tax cuts used some of that money to loan to the government, which went into debt to make the tax cuts, in order to gain even more money now that the government can’t afford to pay for its operations on interest. Is this the exacta or what?

And what operations that same Government, manned by a Republican executive and a Republican legislature, has bequeathed to us:
“The four tax cuts account for about 30 percent of the change. The remaining 20 percent was spending, including the cost of the war in Afghanistan and the preemptive invasion of Iraq. Since 2001, government spending has risen 23 percent, from $1.86 trillion to $2.29 trillion this year. Defense spending increased 48 percent, while non-defense spending went from $343 billion in 2001 to $436 billion, a 27 percent increase.
Congress has allocated $174 billion so far for the Iraq war alone, with another emergency spending request expected early next year. Among the larger non-defense items Bush signed were a multiyear extension of agriculture subsidies and a prescription drug benefit for Medicare, the largest expansion of an entitlement program since the 1960s.”

Enron had a few good years when it was doing this kind of thing – but it all unravels sooner or later.

In the last debate, Bush said that Homeland Security would just cost too darn much. In the WP story, they confirm that, in the belt tightening measures the Bush people are planning for 2005, Homeland security will get a cut.

Remember, though, the world is safer now than it was three years ago!

Bollettino

Streaks

LI intermittently tries to see things from the view of the Bush supporter. This isn't from any impulse to fairness, but from the same novelistic curiosity that makes a man slow down to look at a car wreck.

Now, here's the problem: Any non-Bush supporter looks at the news from, say, about January of this year, and asks: how can anyone support the contention that: a, the war was justified, and b., that it is going well, when all the evidence seems to be against it.

We think we know where to look for an answer: not in evangelical Christianity. Not in Dick Cheney's brainwashing powers. But in sports. That's right. We need to look at Bush's belief that the war is chugging along splendidly not in the light of information we have about the war, but in the light of the metaphysical belief, in sports, in the streak.

There’s an interesting paper by Bruce Burns, at Michigan State, on “heuristics as belief and behavior.” It is Burns contention that:

a, the hot hand belief in basketball – that is, the belief that there is a dependency between a player’s shots such that it makes empirical sense to talk about a “hot hand”, or a winning streak, has been disproven; and that

b., it nevertheless might be an advantageous strategy for a basketball team to operate with the belief that there are hot hands.

Burns states his thesis from the outset:

“The aim of this paper is to make this point by presenting an analysis of a
behavior that can be shown mathematically to improve the outcome for a decision maker, and thus is adaptive. The fact that the behavior may be supported by a false belief is irrelevant to whether the behavior is adaptive or not, though the false belief may actually be beneficial to the extent to which it helps to maintain the adaptive behavior.”

Burns makes a distinction between normative and adaptive views of heuristics. It is interesting, because the divide between them reflects almost exactly the divide between those who can’t understand how anyone could see the war as going well, and those who think that those who think the war isn’t going well are making the war go badly. The two sides are divided by mutual exasperation. Interestingly, when Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky showed, in 1985, that hot hands don’t exist as statistically valid entities, the hottest objections they received were from basketball players and coaches. There is an ethos around sports that would make this kind of statement not only unbelievable, but, in itself, a kind of bad luck. It is that sports ethos that Bush, an owner, after all, of a baseball team, and a cheerleader in his prep school days, reverts to in his stump speeches, which the journalists all cover for their religious aspects.

Burns thesis, it would seem, would bulster the pro-war case. He divides his paper into five sections:

“The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how the hot hand behavior is adaptive, to
examine what general implications this analysis has for understanding people's reactions to streaks, and more broadly what implications this has for different approaches to decision making. Therefore the remainder of the paper is divided into five sections. The first section explains the adaptive approach to decision making and what it means to say that the hot hand behavior is adaptive. The second section supports the claim that the behavior is adaptive by showing this must be true if Gilovich et al's (1985) data are accurate. Most importantly, this is done by developing a Markov model of basketball shooting. In the third section this model is generalized to sequences of choices so as to determine the conditions under which following streaks should be adaptive. From these are generated empirical predictions regarding the conditions under which people will be likely to follow to streaks, and some empirical evidence regarding these is described. The implication of this analysis is that a belief in streaks may arise because following
streaks is adaptive, so in the fourth section is reported a study of people's attitudes regarding the hot hand belief in basketball and the hot hand behavior. This study examined the connection between the belief and the behavior as a function of basketball experience. The final section discusses how treating the hot hand as a belief or a behavior highlights the importance of a critical difference between the different approach to decisions making: that what is normative is not necessarily what people should do.”

The last sentence, of course, is the shocker. It is absolutely shocking to the liberal sensibility, which is built on precisely the opposite idea. We will explore that a little bit in another post.

Bollettino

‘… in the dunghill of despotism among the other yet unhatched eggs of the old serpent.'
- Coleridge

The Spectator, the right wing British rag, has a great book review section (and hey, I got another book review to do for the New Yorker – so give LI a break. We do know from our book reviewing). It is definitely worth registering with those guys, because it is one of the treats of the Net.

The Spectator has a nice review of William Hague’s new bio of William Pitt the Younger. Hague, you’ll remember, used to be a Tory up and comer. Didn’t he run against Tony Blair back in the stone age? He still sits on the opposition bench. Apparently, the boredom of sitting out in 32° F draft year after year took its toll. An American politician would try to get a part in a cop drama. The British always turn to writing long bios. Michael Foot did H.G. Wells. Hague has done Pitt the Younger.

Pitt a revolting character, a sneaking, pallid man with all the charm of a snake farm operator. He enacted Burke’s mad reactionary fantasy of opposing the French Revolution and putting half the aristocracy of Europe on the dole, thus striking a precedent for today’s corporate welfare. And of course Pitt was a great squasher of the romantic poets. We grudgingly admit, however, that he had a certain financial touch.


“William Pitt the Younger always was the politician’s politician: an MP at 21, prime minister at 24 and dead at 46, with only two years out of office in between. Pitt dominated British politics for his entire adult life. He lived for the House of Commons and for the daily grind of government service. He was the greatest political orator of his day. Yet he had few recreations, and virtually no experience of the world. His friendships were distant. He wrote no intimate letters. He read little. He knew nothing of music or painting. He never loved any one. His was a life at once unfulfilled in private and triumphantly successful in public. One has heard of such people at Westminster today. But, on the whole, the 18th century could do better than that.”

We were reminded of another fortunate son in this graf:

“Hague’s main weakness is the same as Pitt’s. He is not really at home with the complex diplomatic and military manoeuvres among the states of Europe during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Yet these were the dominant events of Pitt’s later career, and proved to be the tragedy of his public life. Pitt’s skills were in the arts of peace. He was an outstanding administrator. He brought to the government’s finances a combination of imagination and intellectual rigour which had never previously been applied to them at that level, and would never be applied to them again until the time of Peel. But he was obliged to deploy the resources which he had so carefully husbanded in a long and destructive war.”

Indeed. Piqued by the review, we looked around for other recent articles about Pitt the Younger. We found an article in History Today, Sept. 1998, by Stuart Anderson about the Anti-Jacobin hysteria of 1798.

“The inaugural issue of the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine for July 1798 carried an engraving of a famous Gillray cartoon. It depicts the `High Priest of the THEOPHILANTHROPES, with the Homage of Leviathan and his suite'. Leviathan has the face of the Duke of Bedford, on whose back ride Charles James Fox, John Thelwall and other figures waving revolutionary caps. Some appended verses help to identify other participants: the `wandering bards' Samuel Coleridge and Robert Southey, Charles Lloyd (their protege) and Charles Lamb; the Unitarian chemist Joseph Priestley and those exponents of the `New Morality', Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Gilbert Wakefield and Thomas Holcroft. Mary Wollstonecraft's Wrongs of Woman is among a pile of pamphlets spilling from a `Cornucopia of Ignorance', while representatives of the radical press cluster round Louis Marie de La Revelliere-Lepaux, the `holy hunchback' of the French Directory. A sack stuffed with ecclesiastical mitres and communion plate, labelled `Philanthropic Requisitions', implies the imminent confiscation of church property in order to relieve the poor.”

Canning, Pitt’s friend, wrote for this rag. It is nice to think that the crew Gillray pilloried have long outlived their detractors, and that Canning is more famous for being satirized by Shelly than he is for his Tory slanders. Not that the Anti-Jacobin was totally devoid of talent – Cobbett wrote for them.

Pitt, goaded by the tragic promptings of Burke, subvented reaction in England during the French Rev. The rhetoric of reaction has a distinctly contemporary feel.

“The year 1797 had not only witnessed the Nore and Spithead mutinies in the Royal Navy's own fleets, but also saw French armies triumph all over Europe--except in Wales. The French landing at Fishguard in February had been a fiasco, with their surrender two days later, but, as publication of Admiral Hoche's orders in the Anti-Jacobin show, only a contrary wind had diverted them from attacking Bristol. The editor's stated aim at this critical time was `to invigorate the Exertions of our Countrymen against every Foe, Foreign and Domestic'. Among the domestic foes, it seems, were the Romantic poets. The first two issues of the weekly focused on `Jacobin poetry'--poems of social protest such as Robert Southey's `The Widow'--where the poets were accused of demanding an increase in misery in order to make political protest more effective.”

Shades of Hitchens! – the accusation in the last sentence has gone directly into the Bush-ite playbook. No wonder Gingrich has expressed an odd affection for Pitt the Younger.

LI hopes that England was a little more groovy for our blogging pal Paul Craddick, who has just returned from the archaically sceptered isle.

Bollettino

So Sahib Bremer, late of Baghdad, tells a bunch of Indiana insurance men that there were too few soldiers to occupy Iraq back in the beginning, and that maybe the eight billion dollars worth of looting that Donald Rumsfeld thought was such a joke, back in May 2003 (Hey, I musta seen the same vase on tv bein’ taken out of the museum fifty times! and all the cued and oiled press goes, badda badda bing, wow, that’s a hot one!) just might have led to a general air of lawlessness.

No shit, Sherlock.

There are, in LI’s opinion, two options for the U.S in Iraq.

One option is simply retreat. Getting out of there, in an orderly fashion, by the end of next year. The second option is a huge increase in the U.S. force in Iraq.

The option that is unacceptable is the current Bush plan: the indefinite stay of a relatively small force. Let’s call this the let it bleed option.

To see why this is so, let’s look at Samarra, the victory the U.S. is currently touting – right on the smoking heels of our great victory in Najaf. Basically, holding Samarra for the length of a photo op is worthless. The insurgents, at this point, aren’t in search of a permanent base – they can be satisfied with securing a permanent possibility of return. So far, nothing I’ve read about Samarra tells me that they’ve lost this possibility. If, going with option no. 1, we seriously want to have an Iraqi force strong enough to hold the villes in the hinterlands, our guess is that we are going to have to accept the resurrection, in modified form, of the Ba’athist party – that mix of secular nationalism and Sunni Islamism that has traditionally recruited from the army. In other words, given the current political fracturing in Iraq, a big, efficient army is going to be a hell of a political attractor. The 2003 plan seems to have been to let Chalabi fill the secular vacuum created by the fall and decimation of the Ba’athists. That was never going to happen. It shows that, contrary to appearances, the problem with Bush isn’t that he is dumb, the problem is that he let intellectuals – the Wolfowitzs, Perles, and even Hitchenses – play far too big a role planning the war. These people have no experience running big projects of any sort, and so no notion of how to do it.

Allawi is now supposed to play the Chalabi part, but nothing, so far, tells us that he is going to succeed. The American fantasy is that we are going to create a modern but non-political army. This hasn’t happened in Northern Iraq, where the major Kurdish parties evolved from militias and are still tied to warlords, and it isn’t going to happen in Iraq.

The bloodier option is to increase American forces in Iraq. The increase would be for the purpose of suppressing the insurrection. In order to do this, however, the Americans are going to have to abandon their current military strategy. Samarra, again, is a good illustration. To take Samarra again, the Americans killed at a minimum 200 Iraqis – maybe up to 500. They lost one soldier, I believe. This is typical of the American style – overwhelming force. This style has been developed to win battles, and indeed, if there are battles to be fought, it will be successful. However, this isn’t that kind of war, and the immediate military success leads to long term disaster. As, for instance, in the however many Iraqi relatives of the dead in Samarra who are now prepared to help, in some way, the insurgents. The unspoken problem in Iraq – unspoken by the U.S. press –is that, to successfully engage with the insurgents – to specifically target them -- means sacrificing those tactics that maximize the preservation of American lives.

The calculus in a normal war is to take out as many of the enemy while preserving as many of your own men as possible. But in a war of ambushes and spotty advances, that strategy has to be redone from the bottom up. So far, the military has rigidly pretended that they are fighting the war game that says, here are the vast Nazi forces, and here are the good guys, and here is the convenient plain on which we can mass our artillery. So, we are admirably following the second part of the conventional principle – but, alas, for every American soldier preserved some x number of Iraqi are killed who are not part of an enemy army. And given the composition and tactics of the Iraqi insurgents, we know that this will be the case. The greater part of the dead will be Iraqi civilians. To the Americans these are collateral casualties, to the Iraqis these are Mom, Pop, Sister and Brother. The number of the collateral casualties is going to rise dramatically if the Americans continue to fight the way they’ve been fighting. This means that either the morale of the population as a whole will collapse – which has happened after ten years in Liberia -- or that the morale of the population will stiffen into the resolution to throw out the occupiers, no matter what.

Now, here is what we are told is happening. We are going to create simultaneously that mass of casualties AND an American-loving democracy. This is a psychological long-shot that only Judith Miller would be gullible enough to believe. If the Americans are going to do crowd control by, in effect, machine gunning the crowd, they will be forced back into the old pattern of finding a puppet – a Thieu like figure – who they can pretend is somehow legitimated by grossly fixed elections. The effect of that legitimation will be merely to pacify the American public, not to convince the Iraqi public. We can already see that pattern forming with Allawi.

To sum up, then – option two is costly, and – if it is pursued rationally, without regard to maximizing the preservation of American life – bloody. There will be a definite rise in the number of American deaths in places like Samarra, and a definite fall in the number of Iraqi deaths. You can’t jigger these numbers, you can’t make them go away, if the goal actually is to “let the free people of Iraq have their freedom,” in the inimitable speech of the Prez.

Given these parameters, and given the fact that there is no courage in D.C. to accept that these are, indeed, the two options, we imagine the "Let it bleed' option will be pursued until the helicopters are evacuating personnel from the rooftop of the American embassy in the Green Zone. As for Allawi – he better not sell his exile apartments. He’ll be needing them.

Bollettino

What country actually financed Al Qaeda and got special thanks in the bipartisan commission on 9/11? What country’s secret service was connected with the hijackers, and might even have wired them a bit of bread now and then, to keep them going in those cold nights that sweep down from the American hinterland? Not Iraq. Not Iran. Not even Saudi Arabia. Pakistan.

Since then, the U.S. has given the Pakistan government a premium perverse incentive to look for Osama bin Laden at least until 2050, at which point the IP rights on Osama’s Buns of Steel video run out. Check out this Slate story about the latest Pakistan arms fair. You can’t get better than an arms fair – you can smell the death of the peasantry in the air! Cotton candy and mustard gas for everyone!


“As delegations from a veritable Who's Who of pariah states—North Korea, Myanmar, Iran, Zimbabwe, Sudan—make the rounds, a Pakistani company shows off its new cluster bombs (which, the company press release notes, "can be used against soft targets"). A Bangladeshi delegation looks approvingly at a display of Pakistani tanks.

Pakistan's missiles, including the nuclear-capable Shaheen II, are displayed outside, behind a sign reading "Technological Demonstration—Not for Sale." It seems to be an oblique reference to the most notorious past IDEAS exhibitor—A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program and now the apparent mastermind of a global nuclear smuggling network. Four years ago, his company, Khan Research Laboratories, was at IDEAS handing out glossy brochures advertising specialized equipment for making a nuclear bomb.”

Bush claims that he does know Saddam Hus… Osama bin Laden attacked us. He knows that! He was told it on that scary plane ride he had that day. But he seemingly doesn’t know that our great ally is a big backdoor for arms to every regime he ever marked down as evil. Or, rather, he doesn’t care. Because the truth is, nothing changed in the Bush White House on 9/11. For those guys, terrorism is still small potatoes, and the real deal is the same plan Wolfowitz hauled out for Daddy in 92 – hyperpowerdom, concentrating on making sure that no “rival superpower” emerges to challenge the U.S. In other words, through the murk, the great neocon fear is still Russia and China. But by one of those ticking contradictions by which the coyote in the Road Runner cartoon is undone, the “easy conquest’ of Iraq has made the U.S. much more dependent on China, which has basically floated the financing of the war and the tax cuts by buying U.S. dollars and t notes.
…

Another floating bit of news for the past couple days has amused LI: Chalabi, according to a couple of stories, is courting Muktada al Sadr. And so Hitchen’s Lion of Freedom lies down with the Shari’a lamb of God, while Islamofascism comes full circle. Or something like that. It was all nonsense anyway. But the neocons, who have the sense of reality of Kamenev and Zinoviev in 1936, don’t really care. They do care about retaining courtier’s status in Bush’s court. They do intend to keep on the Wolfowitz course. And if this country gets ruined on its way to greatness, well, it is a survival of the fittest world out there.

Bollettino

But draw near hither, ye sons of the sorceress, the seed of the adulterer and the whore – Isaiah

For long ago I broke your yoke
and burst your bonds;
but you said, ‘I will not serve.’
yes, on every high hill
and under every green tree
you bowed down like a whore.
Yet I planted you a choice vine,
wholly of pure seed.
How then have you turned degenerate
and become a wild vine? – Jeremiah

A plea for whores

The poetic revolution, in contrast to the political one, sinks to the very bottom of language, its lowest level, where the neurons are barely firing in the sludge, where it is perpetually 3 am in the stall in the bar’s bathroom, down, down to the era that invented agriculture, the just out of Eden moment when insults were designed, to render its essential act. The derangement of all the senses, the transvaluation of values, has to begin somewhere. I begin at the word “whore”.

Interesting, that word. It has been adopted enthusiastically, I’ve noted, by bloggers on both the left and the right. The media are whores. The lawyers are whores.

Myself, I think the media, the lawyers, the celebrities, the politicians, the all in all, wander around with the same zombified relation to sex, the same splitting headach fear of orgasm, that makes the system work. I would not call them whores, although I might call them johns.

The word whore comes out of the King James Version of the bible. Now, 17th century England was not quite the same as 4th century B.C. Judea – 17th century whores were caught up in a system of exchange that was, in many ways, significantly different. But across the two thousand years there were still enough similarities that tyou could still put your fingers on the word and feel the vibe, the fear of Babylon, in it. For Isaiah or Hosea, for the prophets, the whore spoke in the tongues of pussyland of different Gods, the gods of other people, and that was the burden and the curse that went into the whore, that made her particularly unclean. Yahweh didn’t disbelieve in those other gods, but he certainly didn’t want them poaching among his people. His were a people who obscured, by a system of taboos, the secretions and glimpses of the flesh, and had built a story about those taboos that sited them at the center of the cosmic order, the dawning moment when Adam and Eve discovered that they were naked. A story, admittedly, handed down from other sources in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but a story that loaned its emblematic force to their prohibitions and insults.

Some of that mana has survived through the millennia. The whore is not yet totally exchangeable with the prostitute. The whore’s power is also to give sex – a power that implies a system of giftgiving that has been officially buried beneath capitalism, except at Christmastime, where the dread has been drained, with a marketer's precision, from the gift. Psychologically, the dread is, of course, very much alive, a Caspar the Ghost who is not at all friendly and stinks like a corpse, which is why Christmas is the true holiday of depression. In the universe of the blues, Baby Jesus is really baby Melancholia, world without end.

The whore’s power, of course, systematically enrages the outliers, whose very existence is on the border between the supposed givens of the official ideology and the givens of our experience of the system itself. The outliers can’t manage that much schizophrenia, but they function to guard the borders for us. Thus, the whore becomes the perpetual target of the serial killer and the cop.

Myself, I am for the whore. I am for the party that uttered the Non serviam: Henry Miller’s party, Rimbaud’s, Joyce’s, the devil’s.

Bollettino

(Sorry in advance to everybody out there who is bored stiff with political posts. LI is, at the moment, swept up in the mad estrus of this campaign)

Mining the debate transcript for gold – or, in Bush’s case, fool’s gold – is easy.

From what we have read, little attention has been paid, so far, to this incredibly revealing exchange:

“LEHRER: New question, Mr. President, two minutes. You have said there was a "miscalculation" of what the conditions would be in postwar Iraq. What was the miscalculation, and how did it happen?

BUSH: No, what I said was that, because we achieved such a rapid victory, more of the Saddam loyalists were around. I mean, we thought we'd whip more of them going in.

But because [Gen.] Tommy Franks did such a great job in planning the operation, we moved rapidly, and a lot of the Baathists and Saddam loyalists laid down their arms and disappeared. I thought they would stay and fight, but they didn't.”

“I thought they would stay and fight”? Could this possibly be correct? Could Bush really have thought that an enemy force, exposed to the withering technological superiority that made any battle like stand against the Americans suicidal, would cheerfully fall into bowling pin formation and wait for us to knock them over? Apparently, yes. Apparently, the “bring em on” remark stems not from callousness but from a deep seated cluelessness about the nature of warfare. The only thing sillier than that remark – and it is one of the silliest remarks ever uttered by an American president – is the little lie in it about laying down their arms. This makes it seems like the American force was big enough to have received a traditional surrender. Of course, it wasn’t and they didn’t. The arms were kept, the soldiers didn’t ‘disappear” – they were never captured to begin with – the arms dumps from which the insurgents resourced their violence were unguarded, and are, basically still, and the situation, ripe for guerilla fighting, is now such that the American military is doing something no invading force has ever done before: bombing the cities that they occupy.

This says everything about Bush’s confusion between cheerleading, at which he is very good, and leading. LI is extremely dubious about the business literature re leading – actually, about all biz literature tout court, which we have, at one point in our life, had to review, discovering the seven efficient joys of management babble – but there is one principle that seems pretty well tested. While one hopes for the best case scenario, one plans to avoid the worst.

However, Bush’s administration has only one way to deal with the worst case scenario: denial. Optimism and denial seem to be the hallmarks of their failure in almost every department. Which isn’t odd – optimism and denial seem to be the hallmarks of Bush’s career up to the governorship. The leadership style that doomed his first company, and that doomed his Harkin oil role, is the same style, amplified, that has doomed his Iraq project.

The mindset of blind optimism was written all over Bush’s performance. For instance, he repeated, to a question about the future in the case that Kerry was elected, that he planned on being elected himself. Period. Well, the weave of American history through the numerous duds and dudes that have been our presidents has had one unifying note: every president who was succeeded by a candidate from the opposite party has made way, however ungracefully, for that candidate. There have been no scorched earth presidencies. Until now. How appropriate: a president who came in on a coup is basically running on a coup platform. Any military junta worth its salt guards its position by threatening to destroy the mechanisms of the state if it is overthrown.

As we have said before, the best way to look at the Bush presidency is not to find parallels with past American presidencies, but parallels with coups in third world states. That's the pattern of his patter.

Bollettino

LI, being a superstitious type, takes some credit for Kerry’s victory in the debate yesterday. We’ve noticed that Kerry is better when LI isn’t observing him. Here’s a mystery for quantum political mechanics.

We did briefly turn on the radio, and heard Bush extensively hum and then haw. We also heard him actually have to say the name Osama bin Laden, which he characteristically botched – surely Bush’s bad conscience, like Macbeth’s, reveals itself in such telling verbal cues and phantoms:

Is this a dagger which I see before me,/
The handle toward my hand? Come , let me clutch thee:/
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still./
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible/
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but/
a dagger of the mind…/

Ah, the Osama of the mind – is that a beret moustache ensemble he is sporting, or a beard and a long white robe? At least we know one thing: Bush could well say, I have thee not and yet I see thee still.

In any case, we are happy. It isn’t so much a Kerry victory we want – although we do want that – as to make the inevitable avoidable. We want to expand the flaw in the glacier, the gaps in the avalanche, the thing that springs up in the masses and says: things don’t have to be like this.

It is a beginning.

Our other clue that Bush must have truly fallen flat is the media treatment of the debate, which echoes the treatment of the State of the Union address, or the interview with Tim Russert. It is at these times that the public glimpses the child prince who leads us, who is, above all else, childish. The media just hates the glimpse behind the curtain, and does what it can to mitigate our reasonable disgust. The cause, we think, lies not with the prejudices of the characters who make up the media elite. It is curious that journalists, by the bias inherent in their training and culture, tend to be liberal, but the current commentariat skews heavily to the right. We think that the reason for this is found not in the ideological commitments of the press per se – it makes sense to us that the dressage of journalism would skew to the left, just as the dressage of the oil executive would skew to the right, personal taste and ties being the largest sociological factor in ideological worldview -- but in its function. The media assumes a function in democracies that the court used to hold in monarchies. Since the legitimacy talk in democracies is oriented towards the value of truth, rather than the value of order, the press and tv news, etc., front the truth function – but in reality, they exist to support order. Since Reagan’s presidency, the new order has triumphed. It is the order of a radical inequality in wealth between classes, and a corresponding destruction of the New Deal view of government as a force that countervails corporate power. Clinton accepted the force of things, but sustained, in a minor key, the countervailing ethos.

Interestingly, the press frenzy about Clinton was basically a courtier’s frenzy. The glimpse behind the curtain showed us a bit of plebian sex. The reflex courtier’s action to this was to expel the king in order to preserve the court. Bush, on the other hand, is such a creation of the court that the press’s courtier heart can’t help but love him. Thus, the absurd mismatch between describing him as a swaggerer, as a tough hombre, and his real appearance, which has an effect of anything but. He is of a type quite common in Texas, a man whose trust fund operated to permanently arrest his emotional development. LI has been around these types for twenty some years, and we like them. They are great partiers. They are the heirs who become Buddhists, or goldbugs, or potsmoking evangelicals, etc., etc. They have no sense that intellectual consistency is a constraint, because they have no sense that the intellect has any real autonomy. Their instinct echoes Hume’s famous phrase. For them, reason truly is a slave to the passions. Hume thought this was good – he had no tolerance for the proto-liberal project of theory. He was a thorough going Tory. But Hume might be unpleasantly surprised at the culture of feelings his protest has spawned. The hibernation of reason has produced the illusion that the world of feelings corresponds to the world as it is – a position Hume was careful to skirt. By an ironic dialectical twist, theory now has its revenge, as the proof of its rightness or wrongness becomes dependent on the strength of the good feelings it summons. Our child prince is not so much a compassionate conservative as a sentimental one, thus combining the worst of all possible worlds.

Bollettino

Let others analyse the debates. LI is much too fearful to watch them – or listen on the radio. One reaches a point of saturation with the maunderings of Bush. Lately, Kerry has been on a roll. We hope that he continues to press the attack in this debate. But we are afraid of the timing – it is late to have to press the attack. The time for that was, properly, during and after the convention…

Well, no bitching, now. We cross our fingers.

And on to … Madame Bovary.

There is nothing better than reviewing the translation of an old classic. First, it allows the translator to discretely reveal his or her own incredible erudition. Second, one can pick at the text – curiously, few reviewers of novels really seem to care about close reading the things. Close reading your average novel, admittedly, is like trying to find a plot in the clothes going around in a drier. It isn’t worth it. But when it is worth it, it is worth it all the way – or so we have found. We are never happier than with a good or great novel to review, and an angle – a way of reading it that we want to bring out in the review.

The Atlantic this month offers Clive James on a new translation of Madame B. We have a few points to pick with him.

One of those points is about cliché.

“Minting his every phrase afresh, Flaubert avoided clichés like poison. "Avoid like poison" is a cliché, and one that Flaubert would either not have used if he had been composing in English or have flagged with italics to show that he knew it came ready-made.”

This is of course exactly wrong. Flaubert’s love/hatred of bêtise would never stoop to italicizing a cliché – indeed, that would be doubling the howler. James has obviously forgotten that the clichés in Flaubert come, so often, in conversation, or in the reproduction of somebody else’s writing. To italicize, here, would ruin the whole texture of the thing. Cliches are very much like in jokes – to hear them as clichés requires that you have educated your hearing in a certain way. This has now become a little flattened -- any tv writer worth his subscription to teen People can create a "like" hobbled debutante for cheap giggles. But Flaubert, like Swift, felt cliches the way other people feel a toothache, or some other shooting body pain that somehow has to be compulsively played with -- they are both hilarious and deadly – a p.o.v. not unsimilar to Bloy’s. Leon Bloy, you will recall (no you won’t – as I pointed out above, vigorously exercising one’s erudition in some subject or other is one of the joys of reviewing the translations of the classics. Hey, James goes on about the texture of Turgenev’s prose in Russian, so I have an excuse) thought of clichés as encoding a deadly, satanic wisdom by which the bourgeoisie was drawing down upon its head the divine condemnation it so richly deserved. Flaubert had a more resigned, secular view of the bourgeoisie – he just thought of them as ending civilization and inaugurating a thousand year Reich of banality, or something like that.

This is why Flaubert’s richest use of the cliché is just in contexts in which he does not, grossly, underline it. The italics would ruin the whole thing. Funny that James doesn’t see that.

Then there is the matter of translation. James, I think justly, court-martials certain choices of the newest translator, Margaret Mauldon. Here he pops off, rather deliciously, with some needed pendantic intervention, as the AA people put it:

“Professor Malcolm Bowie, who wrote the informative introduction, makes much ado in his back-of-the-jacket blurb about Flaubert's precision, which the professor assures us is matched by Mauldon's brand-new and meticulously accurate translation of the actual work. Any reader wishing to believe this is advised to start on page one. He had better not open the book accidentally at page 178, on which we find Emma's lover Rodolphe justifying to himself his decision to ditch her. Rodolphe is supposed to be a creep, but surely he never spoke the French equivalent of late-twentieth-century American slang: "And anyway there's all those problems, all that expense, as well. Oh, no! No way! It would have been too stupid."

Just to be certain that Rodolphe never spoke like a Hollywood agent, we can take a look at the same line in the original: "Et, d'ailleurs, les embarras, la dépense ... Ah! non, non, mille fois non! Cela eût été trop bête!" The perfectly ordinary, time-tested English idiom "No, no, a thousand times no!" would have fitted exactly.”

So far, he has Mauldon in a corner and she is going down under the assault of the furious fisticuffs, or something like that. But then James refers to the previous Oxford translation, from the fifties. And here, we think, he isn’t using his ear:

“In Alan Russell's translation of Madame Bovary, first published by Penguin in 1950, there is no "No way!" Probably the phrase did not yet exist, but almost certainly Russell would not have used it even if it had. What he wrote was "No, no, by Heaven no!" Not quite as good as "a thousand times no!" perhaps, but certainly better than "No way!": better because more neutral, in the sense of being less tied to the present time.”

To my ear, that “heaven’s no” is just so fake British toff-ish. Is Rodolphe an equivalent of a fake British toff? No, we imagine him to be much more in the vein of a provincial Musset – without the poetic genius. Often, Musset himself seems to forget the poetic genius, using it as an excuse for being a leach, letch and toady. No, the “heavens” comes, faintly but distinctly, from a whole other realm – it is something that a much more naïve, much more egocentric and less self-reflective man would say. Something, in short, that we can imagine in Trollope, but not in Flaubert. Not, we hasten to say, in this context, with this character – surely the cieux! exclamation is in Flaubert somewhere, perhaps in Salambo.

There. We’ve forgotten the debates. We’ve almost forgotten the current bêtise. But not quite.

Bollettino

The wonderful thing about money

George Packer’s article about the ethnic discontents in Kirkuk is a study in what happens when justice is conceived of as the restoration of the past. Kirkuk was Arabized under Saddam. The program Saddam followed doesn’t seem too different from the programs by which the Israelis displaced the Palestinians, or the way American city planners, in the fifties, displaced blacks in urban centers. Of course, neither the Israelis nor the Americans, in the end, used poison gas -- one should always remember that the degree of violence, here, makes all the difference. But one should also remember that the degree of violence doesn't transform anything basic about the relation between the exploiters and the exploited.

Packer's article is all a tissue of miseries, and of injustice piled on injustice. Kirkuk is now claimed by the Kurds and the Turkomen, while at the same time it is nominally under the control of the Iraqi state.

Packer mentions, in passing, a British woman, Emma Sky, who exists in the narrative as a counter-narrator. Her story is not the grim one in which Packer evidently believes, but a liberal story.

“The first representative of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Kirkuk, and the most influential advocate for the city with Paul Bremer, the head of the C.P.A., was Emma Sky, a slim, brown-eyed, thirty-six-year-old Englishwoman. Sky speaks some Arabic and once worked with Palestinians in the West Bank; though she opposed the invasion of Iraq, she volunteered to join the occupation authority. Upon arriving in Kirkuk, she saw that the most urgent task was to reassure alienated Arabs and Turkomans that the triumphant attitude of their Kurdish neighbors did not mean there was no future for them here. As Sky travelled around the province, her prestige among Arabs soared. Ismail Hadidi, the deputy governor and an original Arab, gave her his highest praise: “We deal with her as if she’s a man, not a woman.”

"Sky believes passionately that Kirkuk can be a model for an ethnically diverse Iraq. “People have to move away from this zero-sum thinking,” she told me in Baghdad. “Kirkuk is where it all meets. It all comes together there. Yes, you can have a country of separate regions, where people don’t have to deal with other groups. But can you have a country where people are happy with each other, where people are at ease with each other? I think Kirkuk is going to tell you what kind of country Iraq is going to be.” Compared with the problems in Israel and Palestine, Sky said, Kirkuk’s can be solved relatively easily. “Kirkuk you can win. Kirkuk doesn’t have irreconcilable differences—yet.”

We don’t know if Packer, who evidently believes the situation in Kirkuk is tending unstoppably towards a mini-civil war, or Sky is right. But we do know that the Kirkuks of the world are monuments to a world before money. That’s a very attractive world to the romantic consciousness. Myself, having little or no money most of the time, I often rage against filthy lucre. But it does embody one great and peaceable characteristic: by abstracting the possessors of it into the pure subjects beloved by Kantian idealism, it uproots this whole world of hatreds.

Surely a similar thought (minus the crack about Kantian idealism) must have occurred to Adam Smith, given the similar history of Scotland. The Scottish highlands were being decimated by the English in Saddam-ist style in the eighteenth century, since the highlanders language, customs and loyalties were suspect to London. This, of course, motivated (to use a bland word for having a bayonet thrust in your ass) the great Highlands immigrations to America. The breaking up of the clans, and the re-structuring of property claims, left a huge impress even now on Scotland.

“Scotland has the most unequal distribution of land in western Europe and it is even more unequal than Brazil which is well-known for its land injustices. In a country of over 19 million acres, over 16 million acres is privately owned rural land. Two-thirds of this land is owned by 1252 landowners, (0.025% of the population). And these estates are extremely large. One quarter of the privately owned rural land is in estates of 30,700 acres and larger, owned by just 66 landowners (Wightman: 1999).”


Smith may not have sympathized with the Highland clans, and certainly, as an ideologist, he was ready to do a death dance over the complicated feudal system of land ownership. However, chapter 4 of The Wealth of Nations is still one of the great analyses of the kinds of civilization that are defined by their internal structures of production and their external chances for exchange – it is the kind of analysis that we now call Marxist – and in that chapter Smith says much that is relevant to the current situation in Kirkuk. To quote a little of this chapter here would mean choosing not to quote it all – and it is all quotable. Smith takes for granted that vanity is as great a mover of human history as sympathy, and he shows the stages by which the great landed proprietors essentially gave away their power over their retainers, a power that rested upon a certain socially necessary generosity, in order to divert wealth to their own individual satisfactions. In order for this to be accomplished, there had to be a market that would supply such luxuries and goods as would be worth spending money on. The culture of consumerism, once it got a foothold, inevitably decayed the culture of feudal power, without central authority having to lift a finger.

We think this model is full of exceptions, but it is still a wonderfully organized vision of social change. Here Smith comes to the end of the process he is describing. He pulls back, and extends his gaze to other, pre-capitalist societies around the world:

“The tenants having in this manner become independent, and the retainers being dismissed, the great proprietors were no longer capable of interrupting the regular execution of justice, or of disturbing the peace of the country. Having sold their birth-right, not like Esau, for a mess of pottage in time of hunger and necessity, but, in the wantonness of plenty, for trinkets and baubles, fitter to be the playthings of children than the serious pursuits of men, they became as insignificant as any substantial burgher or tradesmen in a city. A regular government was established in the country as well as in the city, nobody having sufficient power to disturb
its operations in the one, any more than in the other.

It does not, perhaps, relate to the present subject, but I cannot help remarking it, that very old families, such as have possessed some considerable estate from father to son for many successive generations, are very rare in commercial countries. In countries which have little commerce, on the contrary, such as Wales, or the Highlands of Scotland, they are very
common. The Arabian histories seem to be all full of genealogies; and there is a history written by a Tartar Khan, which has been translated into several European languages, and which contains scarce any thing else; a proof that ancient families are very common among those nations. In countries where a rich man can spend his revenue in no other way than by
maintaining as many people as it can maintain, he is apt to run out, and his benevolence, it seems, is seldom so violent as to attempt to maintain more than he can afford. But where he can spend the greatest revenue upon his own person, he frequently has no bounds to his expense, because he frequently has no bounds to his vanity, or to his affection for his own person. In
commercial countries, therefore, riches, in spite of the most violent regulations of law to prevent their dissipation, very seldom remain long in the same family. Among simple nations, on the contrary, they frequently do, without any regulations of law ; for among nations of shepherds, such as the Tartars and Arabs, the consumable nature of their property necessarily
renders all such regulations impossible.”

"No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless. – Abraham Lincoln, Message to Congress, 1862

The reference to other nations is by no means incidental to Lincoln's understanding of what was at stake in America's conflict. In history's ongoing struggle between despotism and self-government, he was prepared to believe that America was earth's "last best hope"-not as the world's economic colossus or imperial hegemon but as an exemplar of what politics, with all its limitations, can accomplish. – Jean Bethke Elshtain


My way of living leads me to be about the courts of justice; and there, I have sometimes seen a good lawyer, struggling for his client's neck, in a desperate case, employing every artifice to work round, befog, and cover up, with many words, some point arising in the case, which he dared not admit, and yet could not deny. Party bias may help to make it appear so; but with all the allowance I can make for such bias, it still does appear to me, that just such, and from just such necessity, is the President's struggle in this case. – Abraham Lincoln, Speech on the War with Mexico, 1848

LI was reading James Chace’s review of John Gaddis’ brief for Bush’s foreign policy in the NYRB yesterday, when we came across the “last best hope of the earth” quotation, and realized something: we'd been seeing that phrase a lot. The more we thought about it, the more we thought that the use and misuse of this phrase tells us a lot about the neo-con use and misuse of history. The neo-cons, it seems, have gotten into Lincoln’s phrase like termites getting into a house. Elshtain is typical of the lot. The quote above is from the exile Clinton years, where the longing for a grand purpose -- in other words, Machtlust -- was in the air.

Notice how Elshtain uses it to defend an imperialist view of America’s destiny. Notice, too, that the spiritual heirs of Jeff Davis, having taken over the present GOP, have decided to take over its past, too. In the context of Lincoln’s message to Congress, it is hard to see the message that Elshtain implies: that of considering America eschatologically justified in pursuing a messianic foreign policy. One recalls that the Abraham Lincoln Elshtain is remaking in the image of an anti-communist stalwart was, in reality, the Congressman who lost his seat by strongly and stoutly opposing the Mexican war.

The Mexican war is, in fact, a much better analogy to the imperialist adventure in Iraq than the Civil War. One should recall that the original Texas revolt against Mexico was motivated, in part, by a genuine desire to throw off the yoke of Mexico’s tyrant, Santa Ana, and, in part, by a genuine desire to throw off the yoke of that Mexican law that forbade slavery. The Truth goes marching on.

In any case, if we took Elshtain’s distortion of Lincoln’s words at face value, we ought to ask: how true are they? Is America the earth’s last best hope?

The short answer is no. Not the last – many hopes have arisen since the civil war. Gandhi, for instance, not only provided a definite hope for mankind, but turned – not to Abraham Lincoln, but to Tolstoy and Ruskin. And Gandhi’s example, in turn, became the great hope of – the Civil Rights movement in the heart of the last great hope itself, America, which was toiling in the maze of official apartheid up through the sixties.

Did the US bring hope to Central and South America since the time of Lincoln? No. It has brought tyranny, mass murder, and mass exploitation. The record of US imperialism in Central America is comparable to Stalin’s record of “liberation” in Eastern Europe – a dismal chronicle of small killings and large thefts. And that policy has left behind the same impoverishment. Did the US bring hope to Europe? Yes. In World War I and II, the U.S., both from policy and from the domestic renewal of the democratic temperament, used its force against the worst of the earth’s forces. The Cold War is a much more mixed story. The struggle between superpower’s tempered the American tendency to obnoxiousness (see Central and South America, above). From force of circumstance, America favored global policies that were certainly to the advantage of Europe.
Our reference to struggle brings out another point lost in the messianic drool of such as Elshtain. To talk of America as the bearer of moral, or universal, interests is much like talking about some tech company as the bearer of scientific advances. It is a misunderstanding of the role of competition in the whole system. We understand that companies work best when they compete, and work worst when they monopolize. Likewise, when the U.S. monopolizes, as it has done in South and Central America, it rapidly degenerates into an oppressor. Like other imperial oppressors, it justifies its extortions and the blind triumph of its advantage by an appeal to universal, or moral, values. In reality, those values only serve particular national interest. Conservatives, who are skeptical of the Gnostic elevation of the state to the status of some mystical representative of reason, do characteristically tread a dialectical circuit that brings them, in pursuit of their own sense of order, to their own form of gnosticism – a patriotism that assumes exactly the same role as that accorded the state by liberal thinkers. You can see this happening with Burke, as he moves from opposition to the French Revolution to support for Pitt’s ideological war against the French Revolution. The principles that cause Burke to decry the power grab of the ‘theorizers” in the Reflections fall to the rhetoric of a crusade that can only be justified on the grounds of “theory” – and so Burke undermined his own position, and supported acts of the state which brought to an end the traditional English order for which he fought.

The moral frivolousness of the war in Iraq requires two delusions. One is the delusion that America is a moral, instead of a political, entity. The other, and dependent delusion is that America thus represents the desire, or the hopes, of the Iraqi people. And so Americans shield themselves from the emotional and political results of slaughtering masses of Iraqi civilians in pursuit of a goals that are, really, of no business to this country – for instance, the war against the ‘thuggish’ Sadr on behalf of the ‘thuggish’ Allawi. In his wildest dreams, Lincoln couldn’t have imagined that the last best hope on earth would leave the scorching mark of its inspiration on the town of Najaf, located in a far away Ottoman province. The triumph of the filibusters in the GOP is one of the sadder signs of our political degeneracy.

Bollettino

Last week we wrote a review of Capote’s Letters for the Chicago Sun-Times. Lately, there’s been a significant dip in the quantity of LI’s review-writing. This is a good thing – writing reviews is generally a stinky business, unappreciated, underpaid, taking up a huge amount of time, in terms of reading and research and getting the first damn paragraph down, for comparatively little payback in terms of even the most miserly of nature’s rewards, the writer’s self satisfaction at a thing finally and forthrightly said.

In the course of our research, we read Plimpton’s Capote. It is one of those have recorder, will transcribe kind of books. Like Edie. Norman Mailer told an anecdote about meeting Capote in Brooklyn. Mailer at the time was renting a studio in a working class part of Brooklyn. Capote came over, and the two decided to get a drink, so they went to the neighborhood bar, ‘down on Montague Street near Court – a big Irish bar with a long brass rail at which were lined up fifty reasonably disgruntled Irishmen drinking at three thirty in the afternoon.” So Mailer and Capote went there, Capote wearing a gaberdine cape. “He strolled in looking like a beautiful faggot prince. It suddenly came over me. My God, what have I done? I walked behind him as though I had very little to do with him. And Truman just floated through. As he did, the eyes – it was like a movie shot – every eye turned automatically to look at him with a big Irish “I’ve seen everything now”. … It took me half an hour for the adrenaline to come down. I figured people would get rude and I’d get into a fight.”

That, to my mind, is what the fifties was about. Drinking, fighting in bars. There is an image of the fifties as a peaceful time that is based on crime statistics. You can clean out the toilet with those figures – the wifebeating, the kids beating the hell out of each other on street corners, the gaybaiting, little Southern town pinchings and lynchings of blacks, none of that was going to be picked up by the cops, or put into some lousy copbook.

In the summer issue of the Gettysburg Review, this came home for us in a really wonderfully understated essay, Learning to Fight, by a former basketball player, James McKean,. author of a book of essayes entitled Home Stand: A Memoir of Growing Up. Here’s the intro graf:

“Five paragraphs into Richard Ford's New Yorker essay "In the Face," I realized it had taken me years to recognize such men and even longer to stay the hell away from them. Analyzing his own penchant for confrontation and physical violence, Ford explains how he grew up in the fifties in Mississippi and Arkansas, where hitting someone in the face "meant something." It meant you were brave, experienced, impulsive, dangerous, and moving toward "adulthood, the place we were all headed-a step in the right direction." Oh no, I thought, here we go again. By the end of the essay, where he says that he himself is a man "who could be willing to hit you in the face" in response to "some enmity, some affront, some inequity or malfeasance," I wanted to find an Exit sign.”

McKean strings together a number of incidents around the fact that his height has, all through his life, flashed out a mysterious insult that seems to stop a certain type of man in his path – it is as if his physically towering there had been taken as just the kind of affront or inequity that this kind of man must take care of, Richard Ford style, by striking out. McKean grew up in Washington state – where my friend D. currently lives. I know from D’s stories about the life in his little town that Washington is a good state to live in if you want to get in a brawl with a drunk. It isn’t all sobersided living there, reader. McKean grew up there in the fifties, and sixties, and he well describes an aspect of the world that I remember from boyhood, a world in which there were other boys around who would actually hit you. Girls too. A world in which it was possible that you would be dragged off your bike by some larger kid and have to decide where to kick, bite or gouge the said kid. A fist could materialize suddenly from out of nowhere, or a spitball, or a stone, it could come out of the universe and upside your head. Myself, I can't say that I was beat up as a boy. I had my defensive wiles. But I was keenly aware of those lower down the food chain, the perpetually bullied. My fighting was confined to the house, where I battled my brothers. Luckily for them, and for me, my brothers are twins. My ability as an older brother to bully them was limited by the alliance between them that made them two bodies instead of one. And of course there is the fact that they became fairly physically strong, and I'm still the same old skinny shit with a wet paperbag punch.

I probably wouldn't have been good with just one younger male body to boss around. A rough sense of justice gets knocked into you by fair fights. Odd, that world. It is a struggle to concretely realize those chemicals, those aggressions and fears, in an imaginative sense when you have shuffled off that larval stage. Probably if LI were a dad, it would be easier. But being childless, we don’t have tons of contact with boys, and boy’s life. I have my doubts that it is as rough for your average middle class son as it used to be. The civilizing process, and the traumatic circle the wagons style of living popular in the suburbs, has probably doused a lot of the adrenaline raising moments. Or has it?

McKean’s essay makes it clear that being a shade under seven feet has its disadvantages. For one thing, short aggressive guys feel called upon to take you on, or even to suddenly pop you – which is how McKean lost a front tooth.

Here’s another graf and a half

“What I never developed, however, was a lightning bolt right hand. Growing straight up, I had too much else to learn. I remember being sixteen, carefree for a moment in the summer, listening to "Duke of Earl" as I strode through my mother's kitchen, heedless and head bobbing, only to crack my forehead on the top of the dining room door. My eyes crossed. The house shook. Ears ringing and lights popping, I had discovered the edge of the world at last. The standard world, that is, for all manufactured things are measured to a norm. As I kept growing, the world stuck out its knees and elbows. Nothing fit. Not dothes, not cars, not the desks at school. All the tables for measuring height and weight stopped before I stopped. When I sat down in the movie theater, the people behind me groaned and moved five seats over. …

No sleeping bags or backpacks. No spelunking. No basements. No cabin cruisers. No airplane seats. No slow dancing cheek to cheek. No calm and carefree moments while navigating the world, for there were lamps and tables and chairs and glassware balanced everywhere-a panorama of traps. My reach far exceeded my grasp, and bless the poor wreckage in between.”

LI highly recommends searching out this essay.

Bollettino

Here’s an item that hasn’t gotten much American press. From Jacques Follorou in Le Monde:

The Brother of Osama bin Laden issued summons by French court.

Yselam Bin Laden, the half brother of Osama, residing in Switzerland, has been issued a warrant to appear as a witness in a court in Paris Monday, September 27, by Prosecuting Judge, Renaud Van Rymbeke, in regard to his financial ties with the leader of the 9/11 attacks.

… Yeslam Bin Laden, who has already appeared before a magistrate, has indicated that he has not had contact with his half brother for twenty years. In a letter to Le Monde, he has claimed that the activity of his firm was limited to a pool by subscription of investments recommended by well known, established banks.

On September 6, an expert collaborating with Swiss authorities, Jean-Charles Brisard, communicated to Van Rymbeke some facts which seem to contradict this story. According to him, the Swiss authorities have obtained from UBS bank in Geneva, in the course of their own investigation, documents showing that Yeslam and Osama deposited a sum in that establishment as part of a common account between 1990 and 1997.

Opened on August 17, 1990, this account figured among 54 others created to protect the funds of the Bin Laden family according to Brisard, who is working for a lawyer representing 9/11 victims. According to him, UBS documents indicate that Omar and Haider bin Laden, two other brothers of Osama, confirmed its opening. On August 17, 1990, a first deposit of 450,000 dollars was made, and Yeslam and Osama were the sole authorized signatories for it. Finally, UBS confirmed to a general commission in Berne that Osama bin Laden was the unique “economic beneficiary.”

One of the more comic aspects of the brouhaha that arose around Fahrenheit 9/11 was the often repeated comment that the Saudis who were airlifted out of the country in the week after the attack had been thoroughly questioned by the FBI. This killer factoid was solemnly brandished, a gun still smokin’ by the cohort of the usual talking heads. They went about their 'factchecking" with all the asinine assurance that marks the mulish stupidity of the D.C. commentariat, moving mechanically from one talking point to the next. .

UBS, you will recall, is the financial giant which currently boasts former Senator Gramm of Texas on its roster of employees. They scored that coup after they swallowed Enron’s electronic energy marketing division, which was put on the market after Enron, which boasted Wendy Gramm, the Senator's wife, on its board of directors, went belly up. Apocalypse is a party where everybody knows everybody else's money.

Bollettino

LI has been trying, and failing, to say something with some reach, some truly novelistic depth, about the symbiotic relationship between the fantasies of Bush’s supporters and the essential falsity of Bush’s vision of Iraq – a falsity that can be summed up as the large, enduring and apparently insurmountable incongruity between means and ends in Iraq.

We thought we were on to something by thinking about alibis. We thought about how alibis, used by defendants in court, have to be contoured not only to assume the shape of truth, but to assume that shape of truth that one presumes the jury would find truthful. Hence, the overlapping of sometimes contradictory or incompatible accounts. So we rummaged through a bunch of Greek texts from Lysias to Antiphon, looking at defense speeches.

Finally, though, we couldn’t make this post cohere.

So we dropped it. And wheeling about on the web, we came face to face with Perry Anderson’s second article about French intellectual culture, in the LRB. So we thought, as Francophiles, that here was a natural sighting for our put upon readers.

Anderson’s casts the usual saturnine Marxist glance, but there is something a bit too kneejerk about that disenchantment and its garage sale metaphors. He does present us with a nice problem. How is it that France, in the aftermath of 68, tended not to the left, but to the vaguely right? How is it that Francois Furet’s drumming for the French tradition of liberalism, of all things, climbed to play a dominant role in French intellectual politics of the Mitterand era and after?

We don’t care much for Anderson’s hurried dismissal of the 19th century’s liberal thinkers as a group of villainous intellectual pygmies, Constant, Guizot and Tocqueville. It would be nice to see Tocqueville treated without the breathless and inane admiration that he receives from American writers, who overestimate him and never place him in the context of his life’s work. But Anderson’s drive-by knock, that Tocqueville is the hangman of the Roman Republic, is too trifling for words. Similarly, his complaint that Constant colluded to elevate Napoleon to the leadership. He did, but he also put up a pretty gutsy howl against the wars of conquest Napoleon proceeded on – with a better sense of the injury that such militarism does to culture than Marx, who coming a generation later, sighed that Napoleon didn’t occupy Germany long enough.

That remark has had untold pernicious consequences.

We did like Anderson pointing to a fact that is routinely ignored by establishment media like the NYT and the Economist. France has, for the last thirty years, found itself saddled with a governing class who, whether socialist or conservative, ends up trying to institute the neo-liberal project. And for thirty years, the population has refused. Every government that has tried it has been voted out of office, or fallen due to some strike.

That’s rather admirable. Surely if the people of France hadn’t taken the power into their own hands, the French medical system would have become the mess it is in other places in the world – like the U.S. and the U.K. Ditto with the great shift towards privatizing retirement.

So – a nice combination of gossip and a little soupcon of mental nourishment. Check out the article.

Bollettino

The Hobby war

When war broke out in Europe in 1914, the German army at
once took the offensive. According to its doctrine, all acts in battle were to be governed by one thought: forward against the enemy at any cost.8 Since Germany’s strategy was tied to the ‘short war’ concept, the German high command under Helmuth von Moltke the younger gave little thought to the state of public opinion, although it was ready to ‘energetically suppress all attempts to undermine the political truce’. In mid-August 1914 the chief of the general staff of the field army was satisfied with the ‘popular unanimity of enthusiasm’ and ‘the united attitude of the parties and the press towards war’.9 The so-called spirit of 1914 thus entered German war mythology.10
– “Ludendorff and Hitler in Perspective: The Battle for the German Soldier’s Mind, 1917–1944” by
Jürgen Förster

One of the mysteries of the war in Iraq is that the war’s most ardent supporters are also the most ardent supporters of Bush. On the face of it, something is wrong here.

Supporting the war would seem to mean that one desires a winning strategy to a goal.

In this way, supporting the war in Iraq shouldn’t be that different from, say, supporting your local football team. If that team is the best in the country and it went through a series of matches in which it started to lose, fans would soon be asking pointed questions about the coach and about the star players. Money would be brought up – money, in America, is tightly coupled (it is our favorite myth) with merit. Radio station talk shows would be deluged with callers pointing out that the quarterback has a multimillion dollar salary, or the coach has a multimillion dollar salary, and that they aren’t delivering, and what are we going to do about it, etc. , etc.

The analogy is not perfect, of course, but it says something about the rationality of “supporting a side.” The counter-argument would be something like, well, the true fan should bear with the team as if loses, since the moral support thus lent leads to better team performance. The latter is a case of “magic thinking” – that is, the idea that an event can be willed into existence without the intermediation of an act. Mass magic thinking goes into such things as reviving Tinkerbell, dieting, and finding Jay Leno funny.

In the case of Iraq, the criteria for success were laid out, very clearly, by the Bush administration at the beginning of the war. They laid out how much it would cost; they laid out how many troops it would take to win it; and they laid out the goal of installing democracy in Iraq. The last entailed privatizing the economy, federalizing the state, creating a division of power between executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and guaranteeing human rights.

In the past fourteen months, they have been wrong to an n-tuple on the amount it would cost, wrong on the amount of troops it would take to win it, and unable or unwilling to hold an election, or even to make stick the constitution that they so widely publicized before the dissolution of the CPA. (one of the many surprising and interesting things in Peter Galbraith’s NYRB article about Iraq was that the constitution, which made headlines in the NYT as it was being contentiously sewn together, turned out to be illegal. Under international law, the moment sovereignty is transferred from the occupier to the host country, the occupiers laws are null and void. In other words, the Allawi government quietly liquidated the constitution. This provoked not one headline). The markers of the failure are clear not only in money spent, but in terms of lives lost and number wounded.

Now, in this case, failure has many fathers, and they have made themselves prominent. We know who decided to invade and occupy Iraq with 150,000 men: Donald Rumsfeld. We know what happened to the General who claimed that that figure understated the reality by half or a third: he was retired. We know who claimed the war would cost in the region of 10 billion dollars: Paul Wolfowitz. We know who went through the intelligence about Iraq: Douglas Feith. Their actions are in the public record.

And we also know this: not one subordinate has suffered for these failures; not one lesson has been learned. Dramatic tactical shifts have occurred on the field as the U.S. military, responding to political pressure, has started to fight a war that is almost a replica of the Vietnam war – take a territory, withdraw from a territory. However, the overriding feature of this war remains the same: the Bush administration wants to fight it while refusing to finance it, or man it. It is a new thing: a superpower hobby war.

If the pro-war side were animated by the same rationality that dictates the behavior of, say, the fan, one would imagine that, for instance, the warbloggers would be spewing the blackest kind of bile at Bush. One would imagine that there would be widespread demands for more troops to be sent to Iraq – a lot more troops, double the amount now on the ground there. The scandal of not having spent the 18 billion dollars in Iraq that was earmarked for the place a year ago would be constantly a theme. Although the goal of installing democracy is a bit hazy, and the support for it in America seems to be a massive act of bad faith more than anything else, surely there should be widespread unhappiness with fourteen months spent appointing the Iraqi power structure out of a pool of exiles who, every man jack, have created militias for themselves, and, to put it kindly, “usurped’ property for their leaders.

That hasn’t happened. Instead, a curious other thing has happened.

On Paul Craddick’s website a few days ago, Paul linked to an article by Victor Davis Hanson , who has been writing about the war for the NRO for two years now. LI doesn’t much care for Hanson as a military theorist or historian. John Keegan, equally conservative, is infinitely wiser. So is Anthony Beevor. However, the quote Paul extracted seems so typical of the moral frivolity, the non-engagement, of the prowar party that we had to quote it ourselves:

"It is always difficult for those involved to determine the pulse of any ongoing war. The last 90 days in the Pacific theater were among the most costly of World War II, as we incurred 50,000 casualties on Okinawa just weeks before the Japanese collapse. December 1944 and January 1945 were the worst months for the American army in Europe, bled white repelling Hitler's last gasp in the Battle of the Bulge. Contemporaries shuddered, after observing those killing fields, that the war would go on for years more. The summer of 1864 convinced many that Grant and Lincoln were losers, and that McClellan alone could end the conflict by what would amount to a negotiated surrender of Northern war aims."

There’s something so bathetic about these heroic instances, a separation from the reality principle so deep, that it cries out for the proper novelistic treatment. In the Civil War, Lincoln issued the largest call up of volunteers ever effected in the U.S. By 1864, the North had experienced two years of the draft. Grant relied on the manpower that Lincoln was willing to provide him, and in the Virginia campaign lost the equivalent of the number of American soldiers in Iraq. This, to hold a territory that is one tenth the size of Iraq. By WWII, of course, totale Mobilmachung, as Ernst Juenger put it – total mobilization – put all the hostile states on a war footing. Even the Vietnam War was resourced, although Johnson feared to mobilize the country on the scale the war called for.

The case of the Iraq war shows that a superpower can be wealthy enough to start and engage in a losing war for a number of years. Support for the war and Bush is conjoined by one shared mental trait: willing the end and refusing to will the means. Instead of a draft, the pro-war people demand – a comforting analogy. It is as if the doctor prescribed warm milk for gangrene. Instead of holding the people who botched the occupation responsible, instead of drawing the obvious conclusion from their pack of analogies – that the number of soldiers is critical to winning a war -- the prowar side holds that the analogies themselves will win the war. Meanwhile, the military, who insisted for months last year that there were only about 2,000 insurgents – or “terrorists” – in Iraq, can calmly announce that they killed 2,000 insurgents in Najaf in August without anybody raising an eyebrow. Even Hitler’s propaganda machine, at the time of Stalingrad, would have hesitated to put these kind of lies over. But partly that is because the people of Germany were experiencing the war. The chief thing about the war in Iraq so far is that the experience of it is segregated, for the most part, to expendable populations: the Iraqis themselves, and a volunteer army composed mostly of working class kids. Hence, the hobby of killing them off is, at the moment, politically cheap.

And so the prowar people collude in shifting the one criteria that counts in a war – who is wining and who is losing – to the criteria of whether the U.S. is good or not – to the question of how many schools have been built, rather than the question of how many school children have been killed. That school children will be killed is an inevitable corollary to waging a modern war – LI doesn’t doubt that. That is the burden of supporting a war. But that those school children are being killed in a war that is being waged as an expensive hobby, an airplane model war, transforms those deaths into an indictment of post 9/11 America, where obliviousness has been fatally merged with power lust. This war retains its precarious popularity only to the extent that it is conducted frivolously, which is why Bush is the perfect person to wage it.

Our quote, from Jürgen Förster’s article about morale in Germany during two world wars, will be the occasion of our next post.