Bollettino

Chalabi has made his maiden speech. Supposedly he views himself as another Charles DeGaulle, leading the Free French into Paris. That is, if DeGaulle were willing to sell Paris to Walt Disney, and settle for a constitution written by George Patton.

The Independent carries a story about Chalabi's "I have returned" moment:

"The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has reportedly proposed to President George Bush that an interim Iraqi authority composed of exiled leaders should be installed quickly in the southern part of the country, partly to deflect international criticism that the US wishes to remain in control of Iraq indefinitely.

But in an interview, Mr Chalabi said he believed that US forces would need to remain in Iraq for at least two years before the situation was sufficiently stable for an Iraqi security force to police the country. He said it was essential that fair elections were held and that a democratic government was elected before the US forces pulled out.

"I'm not prepared to give a time frame. But we expect to have a constitution ratified within two years," he said in the interview last Thursday at a fortified complex in the Kurdish-controlled mountains of north-eastern Iraq before he flew to Nasiriyah."

A thumbsucker in the Globe includes, as does every story about Chalabi, the always interesting information that Chalabi is wanted in Jordan for fraud. The fraud charge is considered tres declasse by Chalabi's supporters, who always raise a stink when it is mentioned in, say, Congress. The Globe contains at least one hilarious graf illustrating Chalabi's brilliance:

"MIT-educated economist, Chalabi impresses friends and foes alike with his keen grasp of Iraqi and Islamic history. A London-based consultant recalled how the dissident once launched into a vivid dinnertime narrative of the seventh-century battle in which an army of the caliphate massacred a small band of revolutionaries led by Husayn, the son of the Prophet Mohammed's nephew. ''Chalabi is a secular Muslim, but he was as emotional as a cleric,'' the consultant said."

A keen grasp, eh? The story of Husayn's martyrdom is as obscure to Shi'a as, say, the story of the birth of Jesus is to Iowa Lutherans.

We have come to the endgame in this phase of the War. The real struggle, right now (the one, that is, without those pesky Iraqi civilian casualties piling up in the streets -- which figure neither in the calculus of meat machine Saddam, far gone in his pataphysical phase, nor the American press, which has lavished more ink on the rescue of one American POW than on all the crushed bodies of Iraq combined), is between the State Department and the Pentagon -- and the Pentagon's implantation of Chalabi is obviously a pre-emptive strike. Arab Gateway's Iraqi opposition site features a handy scorecard of all your favorite Iraqi revolutionary groups. Make your bets today!

Bollettino

The open moment




"Skepticism about American postwar plans is rising even among some of the Iraqis whom the U.S. favors. Adnan Pachachi, 79, Iraq's Foreign Minister from 1966-67 and a possible top leader in a new government, launched an effort on Mar. 30 to head off a colonial-style administration. "Very soon there will be a void in the power structure of Iraq, and Iraqis should fill that void," Pachachi told BusinessWeek. "It is not in the interest of the U.S. to prolong its military presence. Their soldiers will be exposed to greater danger as time goes on."

A chilling prediction, perhaps, which few in Washington would have heeded just a short time ago. But it's time for the U.S. to come to grips with what it doesn't know about Iraq. That attitude adjustment won't turn postwar Iraq into a model republic. But it may keep those surprises from multiplying. "

We are definitely in an open moment. But alas -- to look at the pressure exerted from the anti-war movement is to see blindness. To look at the Bush administration is to see monomania. And to look at Blair is to see .... well, Blair, in whom no man of sense could vest any hope. Saddam has turned into a pure meat machine, a maw for shredding Iraqi lives. The war goes on there, of course -- blood and human beings and all, even if they are not American POWs, merely Baghdadis -- but the real war has definitely geared up: the one between the State Department and the Pentagon. The Pentagon has made a strike against Powell with the shipping of Chelabi's INC to Southern Iraq. Supposedly they are going to embrace their brothers, and tell them of the good things coming under Proconsul Smilin' Jay Garner. The joys, the joys! Privatizing the oil industry, enjoying the Iraqocentric (and oh so coincidentally Pentagon approved) foreign policy of the various geriatric American military men who will fill that ministry, und so weiter. The Wash Times is onto the the involutions of this bureaucratic struggle:

"...the State Department has been working with Adnan Pachachi, a former Iraqi government minister now in his 80s who has been living in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates. Mr. Pachachi, a Sunni, was nominated Feb. 28 � at a meeting in northern Iraq attended by State Department and White House officials � to be part of a leadership council that would succeed ruler Saddam Hussein.
"There's a deep and messy war in the administration, and it's in the weeds" � hard to see and harder to figure out, said one Republican congressional aide.
Working feverishly to set up a post-Saddam government is President Bush's special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, the man behind the rebuilding of Afghanistan."

Those credentials aren't exactly gold. Here's a recent AP story about Afghanistan:


"The soldiers and police who were supposed to be the bedrock of a stable postwar Afghanistan have gone unpaid for months and are drifting away.At a time when the United States is promising a reconstructed democratic postwar Iraq, many Afghans are remembering hearing similar promises not long ago.Instead, what they see is thieving warlords, murder on the roads, and a resurgence of Taliban vigilantism.

"It's like I am seeing the same movie twice and no one is trying to fix the problem," said Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghanistan's president and his representative in southern Kandahar. "What was promised to Afghans with the collapse of the Taliban was a new life of hope and change. But what was delivered? Nothing. Everyone is back in business."

Bollettino

Speaking of my omniscience, he modestly said... We were talking to a friend a couple of days ago about the debt that Iraq owes. And we said that given the amount, and the inability of Iraq to get out of that amount without significant imput from the American taxpayer, surely there will be a move to declare Saddam's debts null and void. Which will be a little hard to explain, since up until now, every nation that has emerged from a dictatorship has had to pay the debts accrued by the dictator. A policy supported vehemently, up until now, by the US government.

Well, congratulations to the New Yorker's Suriowieki to figure out that it was time to, uh, change the rules -- a tune which we are confident will soon turn into a chorus in the press. Since Surowiecki is, to put it mildly, a lackey for the most unbridled laissez faire policies this side of the Irish famine, the twist he undergoes is pretty humorous.

First, Suriowiecki quotes the polyvalent precedent of the liberation of Cuba which the US effected by an invasion that, at least, had the formal excuse that Americans could believe that they were attacked first. Cuba had a mountain of debt. The US, taking over the island, took over the debt. The US repudiated the debt on the grounds that it was unjustly accrued.

Now for the parallel case:

"In 1979, when Saddam Hussein took power, Iraq�thanks to the oil boom of the seventies�had a foreign surplus of about thirty-five billion dollars. A decade later, after the war with Iran, it had a foreign debt of some fifty billion dollars. And today, after more war and a dozen years of missed interest payments, the country owes, by many estimates, more than a hundred billion dollars. Its creditors, which include Kuwait, Bulgaria, and the Korean conglomerate Hyundai, are already jockeying for position to be repaid after the war."

Well, this isn't a situation that would normally stir the bowels of compassion in a man of Suriowiecki's iron trust in the terms of international finance. Yet he makes an uncharacteristically humane argument:

"Even if the Iraqi people could afford to pay back Saddam�s debts, it�s hard to see why they should. Most of the money that Iraq borrowed in the past twenty years went either to Saddam�s military misadventures in Iran and Kuwait or to his internal security apparatus. Asking the Iraqi people to assume Saddam�s debts is rather like telling a man who has been shot in the head that he has to pay for the bullet.

"Oddly, though, that�s pretty much what international custom seems to require. Lenders and borrowers still believe that debt belongs to a state, not to a regime. As a result, only a handful of countries have ever repudiated their debts. Even when tyrannical regimes have been deposed�Somoza in Nicaragua, Mobutu in Zaire, the apartheid system in South Africa�their successors have dutifully, if reluctantly, assumed their debts."

Notice -- this is a matter of "international custom." It has nothing whatsoever to do with official US policy over the last thirty years -- a policy that has benefited the biggest loaners, who just happen to be American banks and institutions. I wonder if the fact that these aren't the biggest creditors to Iraq has anything to do with Surowiecki's sudden concern for Iraq's fiscal health?

The obvious problem here is that "international custom" just might get a little upset over the US wiping the slate clean of debt Iraq owes in order for the US not to have to transfer the tremendous amount of money they would have to transfer in order to fullfill the promise to "reconstruct' Iraq. Surowiecki, of course, is aware of precedent, so he immediately separates out cases like, uh, Argentina, where no wiping of the slate is possible:

I"t might be time to change all that and consider an old idea that has recently been resurrected: the doctrine of odious debts. First articulated in the twenties by a former tsarist minister named Alexander Sack, the doctrine holds that a country is not responsible for debts incurred by a �despotic regime� and used for purposes �contrary to the interests of the nation.� Both criteria have to be met for the debt to be considered odious. (In other words, profligate Argentina couldn�t repudiate its debt, because it�s a democracy.)""

Profligate Argentina, eh? As we remember it, a lot of Argentina's debt in the eighties went to paying off military equipment bought by the military and paid for by loans from Citicorps. This money went repatriating back to the US by two routes -- since the US is the largest exporter of military hardware in the world. And Suriowiecki's same odious debt NGOs are well aware of that. On the Odious debt site,
Argentina's debts are indeed on consigned to the devil's portion.

"In July 2000, the Argentine Federal Court sent down a landmark ruling that will have far-reaching repercussions for odious debt campaigners worldwide. The court held that a substantial portion of Argentina�s foreign debt is rooted in fraudulent and illegitimate loans amassed during the country�s military period.
"In his decision, Judge Jorge Ballestero held that many loans to Argentina were part of "a damaging economic policy that forced [Argentina] on its knees through various methods . . . and which tended to benefit and support private companies - national and foreign - to the detriment of society and state companies." The ruling puts blame on the shoulders of corrupt civil servants as well as International Financial Institutions such as the IMF."

And here is a report on the situation from Arnaud Zacharie:

"Evidence now exists , resulting from a judicial enquiry over 18 years, following a legal process initiated back in 1982 by a journalist, Alejandro Olmos.; the Argentine debt crisis has its origin in wastage and fraudulent misuse of funds featuring the Argentine government, the IMF, private banks in the North and the American Federal Reserve. That is why the Argentine Federal Court has declared the debt contracted by the Videla regime"unlawful", as being contrary to the legislation and Constitution of the country. The court recommends Congress to employ this judgment to negotiate the cancellation of this execrable debt."

It is interesting that in the course of the War, various liberal claims have been suddenly taken up by conservatives -- such as the idea that the Iraqi sanctions were murderious -- but the idea of debt forgiveness has to be one of the oddest, as well as one of the most self-serving, instances of using progressive notions for imperialist ends. However, we do hope, as this train gets going, that it is hopped onto by the jubilee debt forgiveness people, the Indonesians, the Pakistanis, and many, many others.

Bollettino

Was LI harsh about the intertwining of colonial and financial interests in Iraq in our last post? We have an irrepressible lowness of mind, which gets a sick kick out of reading such items as this, from a column by Hussein Ibish in today's LA Times:

"The management of the port of Umm al Qasr, one of the few places in Iraq under complete Western control, has produced a split between British and American authorities. The British view is that the Iraqi manager, who has been in his position for years, is capable of doing the job. Our government insisted, however, in providing a lucrative contract to run the port to Stevedoring Services of Seattle."

So, of course, we wondered, who is Stevedoring Services? Phillip Mattera, of the Corporate Research Project, tracks down the ideology of this company:

"Stevedoring Services of America (SSA), the contractor chosen for this task, has never worked in a war zone, but it has been in the middle of another kind of struggle: the battle between labor and management in the West Coast ports of the United States. In fact, Seattle-based SSA -- the largest marine terminal operator in the country -- was considered the main corporate culprit in the lockout of dockworkers last fall; the International Longshore and Warehouse Union accused the company of union-busting. �While most employers want to work with us to implement new technologies,� ILWU President James Spinosa said last September, �SSA is undermining negotiations because their primary interest is breaking the union.� ILWU spokesman Steve Stallone was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle as saying� �It�s ideological with these people. They are ideologically anti-union and anti-ILWU.�

SSA has a reputation in the region -- much as a dead rat behind the wall soon gets a reputation in a household. SSA was involved in a dispute in Bangladesh, according to Mattera, that involved a proposal to build a 500 million dollar containerized terminal. When Bangledesh's government seemed unappreciative of SSA's hardball tactics, the US ambassador there operated as a useful company cut-in, uttering a few threats of her own.

The company is privately held. The founder, Jon Hemingway, is, you might have guessed, a Bush man. During the Dockworkers lock-out, the Seattle paper published a little profile of the company. We especially like the trick they pulled in New Zealand --declaring bankruptcy, then reforming and rehiring their workers on a non-union basis. Nice way to violate contract law and get away with it, guys! No wonder President Bush loves ya.

So... it looks suspicious. Luckily, we know Smilin' Jay Garner, the choice of the Iraqi people, would never allow his country to be violated by predatory American companies with ties to the White House. It would just go against his grain.

Bollettino

As the H.G. Wells aspect of the War deepens -- is this the War between the Worlds, or is it the end of the Island of Doctor Moreau? -- it seems to be the case that all of Saddam's horses and all of his men can't put the guy's moustache together again. If, in fact, the war was directed by a double, with the Old Man conveniently buried under the ruins of some bunker, Smilin' Jay Garner should definitely hire that guy in one of the Gunga Din posts the Americans are preparing for a grateful, liberated Iraqi people. In fact, if he has any contacts in the double biz for a Bush look-alike...

Speaking of Smilin' Jay, since Democracy is being determined by American military forces, you would think that we would seek to win hearts and minds with a reality tv show in which four or five ex Ceos of various military hardware companies vied to be proconsul of Iraq. It could be like Survivor. A comic bit could involve all of them trying to speak arabic -- laughter all around, and it will be a two-fer: not only will it show that Americans have a sense of humor about the whole thing, but it will be an invitation to Iraqis to join in the laughter.

Winning their hearts and minds in the fog of war, of the fog of war journalism, is oh so hard. We need, as Rumsfeld might say, to think outside the box, here, guys.

The Republican Guard turned out to be a dud. The fedayeen, on the other hand, is scrapping out there in the countryside, and we doubt that Baghdad's fall is going to put a stop to them. The Guardian's Rory McCarthy reports that the Coalition of the Willing is beginning to understand that the second phase of the war is beginning. This phase does not contain Saddam Hussein. It contains an American occupying force and their consorts, hauled in from the swamps of the Potomac, and eager to make some bucks on the Iraqi frontier.
"If they blend into the city and become sleepers they could generate an enduring, destabilising influence in the aftermath," a senior British officer said. "We can envisage an aftermath in which some of these irregulars might re-emerge to champion some sort of cause."

Before the war few senior officers believed they would face such strong resistance from the paramilitaries ahead of the final battle for Baghdad. In fact, three groups, the Saddam Fedayeen, the Special Security Organisation and the Ba'ath party militia, emerged immediately, even in the very south of the country, as a significant fighting force. Militia groups are still holed up in the southern city of Basra, as well as other towns on the route north, including Nassiriya, Najaf and Kerbala."

The Saddam-ist tendency will do much better without the old man around to bloodily dodder about. And they will certainly gain traction from the resistance to Smilin Jay. Mother Jones reports that there is even a dumpjaygarner web site. Well, that sounded to us like a thing of beauty and a joy for ever, so we clicked on over to it, and signed a letter to dump the guy. The letter goes to George Bush, so there 's no chance it will be heard, or have an effect -- but there's always the possibility leadership doubles will rise up and overthrow him, so we sent it anyway. And finally, The NYT published an extended trawl through the wonderland of Wolfowitz, giving us such tidbits as this:
-- Iraqi freedom fighters (these are tough guys -- they jog on some of toughest paths by the Potomac every day, five miles sometimes) by unanimous verdict, give the information ministers post to Robert Reilly, formerly of the Voice of America.

---Timothy Carney, former U.S. ambassador to Sudan, just seems so right to take on Iraq's Ministry of Industry. Hey, he's just the kind of guy to throw an impartial glance at all those plans to re-build the Iraq we bombed to shit... until he finds, by utter coincidence, an engineering conglomerate with close ties to the Bush administration to do the work!

---Iraqis have long had their eye on Robin Raphel, ex ambassador to Tunisia. Finally a chance to get him to work for them! Yes, in the post of Ministry of Trade. Shi'ites will no doubt be in the dancing and flower throwing mood when Robin ascends to the seat -- they've longed for him, as we all know, for years.

---Ministry of Foreign Affairs was, of course, a tough one. Now, liberals, who no doubt would like some mamby pamby quota system to throw up an Iraqi as Minister for Iraq's Foreign Affairs, are going to grumble. Let em grumble -- the Supreme Court will sort em out! Ha ha! But we know the grateful Iraqi masses can't wait for Kenton Keith to take the reins there. No doubt Keith will be much more understanding, shall we say -- enthusiastic, even -- about what Donald Rumsfeld calls the "so called Occupied Territories."

So, in the words of our Prez himself, "And the liberation of millions is the fulfillment of America's founding promise." So modest, our Bush. The fullfillment of so many dreams -- the starry dreams of Raytheon, of Brown and Root, of Fluor, Inc. -- are embodied in the sturdy of these men and women, standing straight for their companies and their country.

Bollettino

My friend H. writes in to tell us to knock off "Saddam the H." -- too much H. ambiguity going on. Well, soon we will be able to draw a line through Saddam's name. In our humble opinion, if he isn't dead, he might as well be. As we've said, monotonously, the war's second phase -- Iraqi liberation by Iraqis -- succeeded its first phase -- Saddam the letter-after-G's mother of all battles --so quickly that they were one and the same.
H. also wondered about the oil, and the fires that didn't consume the oilfields. We don't know why the fires weren't started. But we are interested in the fate of the oil, too. Anatole Kaletsky, the financial editor of the London Times, has a sanguine view of the economic consequences of the War. But it seems to us it is not only sanguine -- it seems improbable. In the Times, he lays out, justly, the present state of play on the battlefield Iraq. The oil fields of Iraq are securely under American control.

"Financial markets think only of profits and economic prospects � and the threat to the global economy from the war has diminished almost to vanishing point in the past ten days, regardless of what may or may not be happening on the streets of Baghdad. To understand what I mean it is sufficient to glance at the map on the right. This shows the main oilfields, pipelines and pumping stations of Iraq. As is evident, the great bulk of Iraq�s oil assets are in the southeast and north, around Basra and Kirkuk. Indeed, the four great oilfields of the Basra region � Rumaila, West Qurna, Majnoon and Nahr Umar � account for about two thirds of Iraq�s oil production of 3.5 million barrels a day. The giant Kirkuk oilfield, the first to be developed in the Middle East and, 80 years later, still one of the most productive, provides about half the remaining output. This leaves less than 15 per cent of Iraq�s oil output coming from the other fields dotted around the centre of the country, including the large, but relatively underdeveloped, production area in east Baghdad."

The seizure of thes fields undamaged, Kaletsky writes, will quickly bring about pre-91 levels of oil production. And that is that, as far as Iraq's economic importance is concerned.

Kaletsky is right to point out that Iraq's significance, for the World Economy, is all about bubblin' crude. However, it is hard to imagine that instability in post -Saddam Iraq -- an Iraq that seems, by American account, to be here, since Saddam the H. has been laid to rest in the rubble -- is not going to impinge on oil flow. However, the Bush-ites, ever eager to make Iraq a colony of D.C.'s wildest wishes, has already sharpened up a plan for that oil. As per usual, they've dug up some self-interested old capitalist crony of (no doubt) Rumsfeld, and they've got lawyers working on how to transfer the oilfields to American power -- for the benefit, of course, of the Iraqi people, always first in our minds and hearts. The WP has a nice article today about the picking of Philip J. Carroll, former Shell executive. Here's one of the deeper-in grafs:


"Carroll, the former Shell executive, who retired last year as chief executive of Fluor Corp., would report to retired Army lieutenant general Jay M. Garner, named by the Pentagon to direct postwar reconstruction as head of a new Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. Fluor, an engineering and construction firm, is one of the companies bidding for reconstruction contracts. Carroll declined to comment today.

"If it's correct, it's a splendid choice," said Thomas F. "Mack" McLarty III, the Clinton White House chief of staff who is now president of Kissinger McLarty & Associates. "I think he's particularly well suited. He's thoroughly knowledgeable in the industry. He's had a proven record of success."

The Iraq war, it is turning out, is just an M&A of Rumsfeld, Inc. In gratitude for his outstanding work, we are waiting to see if Bush gives the country to him. A sort of stock option to keep his interests aligned with the company's, as it were.

Bollettino

MSNBC�s Michael Morin makes the LI case that the War, if it isn�t being seen as a Liberation, will be seen as an invasion. Of course, a piece like this should have been run in February � it was all entirely predictable then. That is, we knew that the D.C. ultra-hawks didn�t know a thing about Iraq. They showed no knowledge of the place, beyond their conviction that Saddam the H. was a bloody tyrant. So they made up an alternative Iraq. In this Iraq, America and American ways were much loved. They were so loved that the people would beam with joy as Smilin� Jay Garner assumed the proconsul�s role. They were so loved that the two years of occupation the Rumsfeldian plan calls for would be, itself, a love fest � imagine the scene! Starving and semi-starving Iraqis would look upon the act of divvying up oilfields to private American companies as the least they could do to say, well, thanks old buddy! And as for using the territory as a staging ground for future American liberations of various other Moslem countries � why, there�d be no Turkish tergiversations about that!

Morin has a nice graf about the future � which is within twenty miles of Baghdad, apparently, if we can trust today�s news.

� The quick victory many had hoped for � one that swept Saddam and his cronies from power, accompanied by mass surrenders and an outburst of relief on the part of ordinary Iraqis � would have been viewed as almost a mandate for the war. Its critics at home and among U.N. Security Council members would have been muted.
So far, quite the opposite has occurred.
Iraq�s own plan to resist the invasion has entranced the Arab world and other countries who felt the U.S.-led war bordered on bullying.
Within Iraq itself, the bitterness of the resistance being put up to U.S. and British troops, even in regions where Saddam�s rule is heavily resented, does not bode well for postwar forces.�

Compare Morin to Kanan Malikya�s latest

Those who imply that a rising surge of ''nationalism'' is preventing Iraqis from greeting American and British troops with open arms are wrong. What is preventing Iraqis from rising and taking over the streets of their cities is confusion about American intentions. That is confusion created by the way this war has been conducted and by fear of the murderous brown-shirt thugs, otherwise known as Saddam's Fedayeen, a militia loyal to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who control the streets of Iraqi cities and who are conducting the harassing attacks on American and British soldiers.

The coalition forces have not yet sent clear and unmistakable signals to the people of Iraq that, unlike 1991, there will be no turning back before Saddam Hussein's regime has been overturn. But in order to do this effectively they must count on the Iraqi opposition, which has so far been marginalized.

Iraqis do not get CNN. They have not heard, as we have, constant iterations of how Hussein's demise is imminent. More important, they have not seen evidence of his difficulties, as they did in 1991, when they revolted after two months of not seeing his image on TV or hearing him and his henchmen on the radio. Coalition forces so far have been content to position themselves outside cities in southern Iraq; only after incessant urging from members of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) have they finally begun to disrupt Iraqi TV, Hussein's principal means for not losing face in Iraq. And above all, coalition forces have not allowed Iraqis to go in and organize the population, something they are eager and willing to do.�

LI is, oddly enough, in agreement with the ultrahawks on this issue -- at least insofar as the employment of Iraqi troops is concerned. We have a feeling that the reason the Free Iraqi troops have not been �embedded� � Frank Gaffney�s term in the Washington Times � is that the Coalition forces fear that they will fall on their faces. This has happened before, as we know. Here�s a link to a history of the INC � the Iraqi opposition group that Kanan Malikya and Ahmad Chalabi belong to. Now, it looks pretty bad � these are by no means the Garibaldis of Iraq. Rather, the INC looks more like the anticommunist Chinese groups set up by the CIA in the fifties � groups which were invariably defeated, due to an absolute disconnect between the people and their supposed champions. Luce, the owner of Time, etc., was the godfather of those earlier groups. The INC started out with a less elevated patronage:

�The agency turned to Washington insider John Rendon, whose "strategic communications" consulting firm The Rendon Group had provided support in 1988 to "spin" both the Panamanian and American media during Panama's doomed presidential election campaign. One of Rendon's most recent clients, in fact, had been the Kuwaiti royal family to help them in creating a sympathetic image in the U.S. during the Gulf War. This was a man not only with a proven track record but who also had experience in the Middle East. If anyone could get the job done, it was John Rendon.
Rendon and his team worked with the CIA to build the Al-Mu'tamar al-Watani al-Iraqi (Iraqi National Congress - INC) in 1991, and according to ABC News, "provided it with its name and more than US$12 million in covert funding between 1992 and 1996." Intelligence officers correctly saw Iraqi Kurd factions as the most potent force against Hussein's autocracy, but needed a platform for which to unite them under. So they recruited Ahmad Chalabi, an American-educated Arab Shi'ite banker who has extensive ties with Iraqi Kurds, to head the INC so that it could bring together Kurds, Iraqi Shiites, and dissident Sunni Muslims against Hussein.�

According to the Clandestine Radio article, Chalabi nearly defeated the Republican Guard in 1995. His defeat was caused by lack of American air support. This is the spin put on it ever since, by Chalabi's Perle-ish friends. According to the BBC, however, the Chalabi offense did have limited support, but was defeated anyway. Chalabi seems to have put together his troops and made his deals with the Kurds on the promise of US air support, even though there was no such promise. Thinking that a fait accompli would draw in the Americans, he attacked with 15,000 troops and was defeated.

Zero hour has been striking -- in fact, it has been striking for the last two weeks -- and the Kurds seem to be able to coordinate with the Americans to move towards Kirkuk. We wonder if Chalabi's absence from that advance is wholly fortuitous. The man might not be very liked in Northern Iraq, after the 1995 debacle.

Bollettino

In all the American media attention given to the suicide bomber, little has been made of the fact that the guy was a Shi'ite. Hmm. The Guardian carries a thumbsucker by the usually reliable Dilip Hiro that reports on the theologico-politico complexities into which Americans, whistling like Donnie Rumsfeld soaping himself up in the shower, have wandered

"Earlier, any prospects of an uprising in the predominantly Shi'ite city of Basra disappeared on Tuesday when Grand Ayatollah Mirza Ali Sistani issued a fatwa, calling on "Muslims all over the world" to help Iraqis in "a fierce battle against infidel followers who have invaded our homeland". Sistani is based in Najaf, the third holiest place of Shi'ite Muslims, and it is likely that Nomani, a Shi'ite, was following his fatwa. As the only grand ayatollah of Iraq, Sistani is the most senior cleric for Iraqi Shi'ites, who form 70% of ethnic Arabs in Iraq. Any Anglo-American attempt to devalue Sistani's opposition to the invasion - by saying he's a Saddam stooge, for example - will boomerang because of his status; there are only five grand ayatollah's in the world.

By now it is apparent that the Anglo-American decision-makers made a monumental miscalculation by imagining that Iraqis in the predominantly Shi'ite southern Iraq would welcome their soldiers as liberators. It stems from their blind faith in the unverified testimonies of the Iraqi defectors combined with their failure to realise the complexity of the task of overthrowing President Saddam Hussein's regime."

Bollettino

As liberation nears, and the irrepressible Iraqi will turns to the man whose picture is, secretly, in every Iraqi home (we mean smilin' Jay Garner, the American proconsul in waiting, who, if he could speak Arabic, would give a big shout out to all his Shi'ia buddies) we should contemplate how gracefully America is monetizing that gratitude. There's a nice piece by Frida Berrigan in In These Times (for which yours truly has written) concerning the Cheney-Halliburton connection. Dick Cheney chose to take his compensation from Halliburton (for moving down to a post as a Halliburton lobbyist - oops, I mean as Vice President of the United States), which comes out to between $100,000 and $1,000,000 per annum. And Brown and Root, everybody's favorite engineering squad, and a Halliburton subsidiary, seems on schedule for cleaning up in the great post-liberation afterwards:

"Critics argue that the U.S. Agency for International Development ignored the expertise and experience of well-regarded NGOs with decades of experience in humanitarian work in Iraq in their secretive contract process. USAID asked just five for-profit corporations to submit bids for $900 million in reconstruction contracts for the initial phase of work, scheduled to last just six months. Of course, these companies will be best situated to win billions in future contracts. An American Academy of Arts and Sciences report estimated that the reconstruction of Iraq could cost anywhere from $30 billion to $105 billion over the next decade.

KBR not only has the corner on postwar reconstruction, they were also granted a potentially huge contract to fight oil well fires throughout Iraq, even though they did not submit a bid for the job. In November, the Pentagon hired KBR to write a classified contingency plan for dealing with the fires, allowing the company to position itself for this job long before the war was a fait accompli. President Bush just asked Congress for $500 million for oil field repair, and KBR is standing by to take the money."

Sweet! Of course, it helps that Iraqi proconsul Garner is himself making a small pile on the war. As is Richard Perle. Berrigan could have included a link to Waters website, where there is a press release concerning her amendment. Here?s the link. We don't imagine this story is going to be coming to your local paper anytime soon.

Bollettino

Men have no right to what is not reasonable and to what is not for their benefit; for though a pleasant writer said, Licet perire poetis, when one of them, in cold blood, is said to have lept into the flame of a volcanic revolution, Ardentum figidus Aenam insulit, I consider such a frolic rather as an unjustifiable poetic licence, than as one of the franchises of Parnassus; and whether he were a poet, or divine, or politician, that chose to exercise this kind of right, I think that wise, because more charitable thoughts would urge me rather to save the man, than to preserve his brazen slippers as the monuments of his folly. � Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France.

We received an email from an old friend, C. a couple of days ago. Among other remarks, C. said that he wasn�t as far to the left, of course, as LI. Moi, was our startled response. So we asked our friend S. When she said that of course, we were as left as they come, we explained that at least our anti-war impulse comes from a very Tory side of our character. The War violates American tradition; the War's shapers seek the installation of a new order from above, by state dictate, in Iraq; and the War's effects will be to initiate an enterprise founded, essentially, on a doctrine of might is right. Isn�t this the blank white face that Burke discerned behind the theorists and the idealists of the French Revolution as well as behind the krewe of British looters in Bengal? We are not Tory enough to accept Burke uncritically about the French Revolution, but we understand, in our middle age, a bit more about the damage done by the frolics of the intellectual in power. This war, in particular, has been designed, argued for, and implemented through the agency of a small, distinct cabal of such intellectuals. We know who they are because they are quite proud of who they are. We know how they spread their particular brand of fever. We know how they took advantage of an attack on this country, and we know that they did this with intent. And we know that their ideas are bad � and we will know this ever more intimately as those ideas are brought to the bloody test of reality in Iraq, where they will fail to meet even the most basic challenges of common sense. We know that their manners are appalling. We know that manners express, here, something deep about their desires. It isn�t just that the Bush administration fumbled the diplomatic niceties in the build-up to war � the message conveyed by all that Rumsfeldian bullying was that diplomatic niceties were so much sugarcoating, so much falsity, to be carelessly thrown over the new world order. Burke would have been the first to spot the rooted viciousness here. When your diplomats talk like thugs, generally you can bet they will act like thugs. Words dispose towards acts. Power lust is the enemy of all mankind, whenever it appears. It�s the booted devil in the horde, the militia, the brigade, the onslaught. It�s the killer in our midst. And it is impossible not to observe this lust at work in every facet of the appalling rush towards War � a rush that has now been quietly retired from the journalist�s lexicon in favor of the rush, as it were, towards Baghdad.

We didn�t convince S.

Bollettino

We have come to expect the worst from the Bush administration. For months, the British papers have claimed that the hawks around Rumsfeld take seriously the various scenarios of world domination and Middle Eastern conquest promulgated by the likes of Wolfowitz and Donald Feith. These are Kraus's Likudniks -- a group who feels that Israel is America's 51st state. Or 50th -- this group doesn't include liberal Massachussetts in the USA. The claims are proving all too accurate. This weekends salvos with Syria are evidence of more madness. Here's today's report in the NYT:



Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. had started the war of words on Friday, when he accused Damascus of shipping sensitive military technology to the Iraqi Army, specifically night-vision goggles. These shipments, Mr. Rumsfeld said, "pose a direct threat to coalition forces." He added, "We consider such trafficking as hostile acts and will hold the Syrian government responsible."

The United States military considers its night vision technology to be a major advantage over the Iraqis. But today, a senior American commander serving in the Gulf said he had seen no evidence that the Iraqi Army has obtained night-vision goggles.

"We have not to my knowledge seen any at this point," Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said during a news briefing in Qatar."

Another interesting article in the Al Ahram Weekly -- to which we were pointed by Slate --
gives a little photo op of who is dissing whom in the Iraqi opposition. As we've said before, this opposition is spending its credility with the abandon of a junkie with a stolen platinum MasterCard. The most interesting quote comes from "Kamil Al-Mahdi, a professor of Middle East Economics at Exeter Universityand a member of the liberal Iraqi opposition in exile."

"There were those within the ranks of the Iraqi opposition who portrayed this war to be a walk in the park for the allied troops. Hence, Americans were led to believe that the Republican Guard units would soon switch sides and this would be coupled with a Shi'ite uprising in the south against Saddam. But to their surprise, this did not materialise, at least until now."
Al-Mahdi said that the fact that the opposition in exile miscalculated the strength of the Iraqi resistance is strong proof of how they have lost touch with reality in Iraq. "They can no longer claim to say they represent either the interests or the will of the Iraqi people. It will be very difficult to impose them as the new rulers of Iraq after Saddam is gone," Al-Mahdi said."

Kamil Mahdi wrote a prescient article for CounterPunch a month ago. In it, he seems to predict that the US would use an Iraqi mercenary force -- which hasn't happened yet. But the idea that the war would entail high Iraqi casualties seems to be pretty much on target. . About the Iraqi opposition, he wrote this:


Now that the US has a new policy, it intends to implement it rapidly and with all its military might. Despite what Blair claims, this has nothing to do with the interests and rights of the Iraqi people. The regime in Iraq is not invincible, but the objective of the US is to have regime change without the people of Iraq. The use of Iraqi auxiliaries is designed to minimise US and British casualties, and the result may be higher Iraqi casualties and prolonged conflict with predictably disastrous humanitarian consequences. The Bush administration has enlisted a number of Iraqi exiles to provide an excuse for invasion and a political cover for the control of Iraq. People like Ahmad Chalabi and Kanan Makiya have little credibility among Iraqis and they have a career interest in a US invasion. At the same time, the main forces of Kurdish nationalism, by disengaging from Iraqi politics and engaging in internecine conflict, have become highly dependent upon US protection and are not in a position to object to a US military onslaught. The US may enlist domestic and regional partners with varying degrees of pressure.

Post

When this War began, Mr. Limited Inc and Mr. Gadfly had a little discussion about the nature of forecasts. Mr. Limited Inc took exception to Mr. Gadfly's idea that nothing could be known about what the future held. Au contraire mon frere, we said. We know that one thing will happen and then another thing will happen. This might seem like a whole lotta null set, but it is really a whole lotta structure. We reject radical skepticism about the structure of the future. However, to be honest, we are making a point that is besides the point for Mr. Gadfly, who was pointing out something about knowledge. . Nobody in the U.S. knows enough about Iraq, and nobody in Iraq knows enough about the U.S., to make any wise prediction as to the outcome, on a realtime basis, of their encounter. This is actually a very strong point. We even think it is one of the strongest points that can be made.

But we think our point is also strong. Structure is important because, while it doesn't give us a picture of the substance of future events, it gives us a rule about how they must unfold. Ignoring the "then and then and then" structure puts a plan on a collision course with reality. When a plan violates the principle that the past has already happened (or, in other words, when a plan is premised on an incompletely known past, or a past that has been distorted by the planner in some way), it will fail, even if its outcome, by happy chance, occurs. If I try to burn down a building on a stormy day with wet matches, the building is not going to torch -- but a lightening stroke might do the trick. Plans have a trajectory over time. Planners who aren't sensitive to the temporal nature of the plan's actualization are also in violation of the above rule, although in a subtler sense -- they are adding to the past as they try to control a process that is going on into the future. We have to understand, in other words, how to sum over probabilities, and how to revise ourselves when those probabilities are realized over time.

This is why, so often, business plans go awry. Businessmen are peculiarly prone to becoming prisoners of the superlative. They are addicts of the vision statement, in which �best practices", "superb performance", and the "highest levels of excellence" vie with each other to debauch meaning. They throw around locutions like �"world class," and they are big believers in a crude version of William James' Will to Believe -- they like to think that wishing on a star will make your wish come true, or at least true enough that they can get sell their options on the star before it twinkles out. Ross Perot is the echt businessman. He came dancing out of that culture, he mouthed that culture's platitudes, and he seemed to speak a slightly deranged variant of the English tongue. Bush has the same problem. Language is always such a naysayer. But all too often, the vision statement fails. The dogs won't eat the dogfood. The punchdrunk won't drink the punch. What to do? After all, one has just indulged in an orgy of orgulousness? At this point, you look around for traitors. Failure becomes a question of disloyalty.

This is pertinent: after all, we are being directed in this war by the CEO mindset armed.

This is important if, as we think is the case, we are seeing the war split into two. One is the war against Saddam the Horrific. The other is the war against the post-Saddam guerrilla. The latter has no name, yet; the incipient program is simply, repel the invader. As the invader triumphs, setting up a state run by Rumsfeld's creepy buddy, Jay Garner (who has a first class ticket to Bushs monster ball, being one of the numerous hawks who have day jobs as Perlish vultures), we will have a new war. In this one, the Iraqi state will be our ally against Iraqi "terrorists" -- that is, the people who are firing on American forces and their Iraqi collaborators. In the new war, the goal will be a lot clearer -- it will be to repel the occupiers. As the krewe of Iraqi exiles preferred by the Pentagon are installed (over the resistance of other Iraqis) get set up, the traditional lines of the conflict will become clear a client state, an imperialist sponsor, and the usual poisonous symbiosis between them, with the client depending on the sponsor to sustain it at the same time that that dependence renders it illegitimate.

Slate's Fred Kaplan wrote an interesting report, last week, on how the military gamed its own war game on Iraq. The war game pitted two teams -- the blues, representing true blue America, and the reds, representing red as in blood Saddam H. As soon as the red team started acting in such a fashion as to upset the blue team, the rules were changed, moves were disallowed, and in general the pre-ordained triumph of the blues was vindicated at the expense of the game's realism.


Kaplan restrains himself when it comes to the Strangelovian name of the Red commander Van Riper, one "p" away from Ripper, if you can believe it �Here are three grafs that tell a lot about Bush's War:

For instance -- and here is where he displayed prescience - Van Riper used motorcycle messengers to transmit orders to Red troops, thereby eluding Blue's super-sophisticated eavesdropping technology. He maneuvered Red forces constantly. At one point in the game, when Blue's fleet entered the Persian Gulf, he sank some of the ships with suicide-bombers in speed boats. (At that point, the managers stopped the game, "refloated" the Blue fleet, and resumed play.)

"Robert Oakley, a retired U.S. ambassador who played the Red civilian leader, told the Army Times that Van Riper was "out-thinking" Blue Force from the first day of the exercise.

"Yet, Van Riper said in his e-mail, the game's managers remanded some of his moves as improper and simply blocked others from being carried out. According to the Army Times summary, "Exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue, and on several occasions directed [Red Force] not to use certain weapons systems against Blue. It even ordered him to reveal the location of Red units."

Finally, Van Riper quit the game in protest, so as not to be associated with what would be misleading results.��

The blue game is the one they are reporting 24/7 in the American news media. We wonder how long it is going to take before the Red game is reported. Iraq, as we keep reminding our loyal band of readers, is not Afghanistan - or not, at least, the Afghanistan of our dream war. In reality, Afghanistan is heating up again -- we simply aren't paying attention to it. As why should we - we aren't planning on making Afghanistan an American protectorate. That cow doesnt milk, as we say in Texas. Or is it that cow doesn't hunt dogs? We always mix up our folksy phrases.

Bollettino

After the pointless maundering in the pre-war period, the mainstream press is beginning to get what LI, with our lack of knowledge of battlefields and Iraqi culture, has been harping on for months: just because the media has decided that the war will end with the end of Saddam H. doesn't mean the War has decided the same thing. The reports of the first suicide bombing draw us ever nearer to a world in which we Our Palestinians have to be controlled, through increasing use of our soldiers, and to the detriment of our moral character, our economy, and our security.

The NYT gets it, almost. Here's a think piece that could of been ripped out of this weblog over the past two months. Well, no, it isn't as stylishly written.

Other reports corroborate the direction that the war, as well as its aftermath, promises to take: Iraqi militiamen, in civilian clothes, firing weapons and disappearing inside the anonymity of the local populace. So-called civilians riding in buses to move toward contact. Enemy combatants mixing among women and children. Children firing weapons. Families threatened with death if a soldier does not fight. A wounded American soldier commenting, "If they're dressed as civilians, you don't know who is the enemy anymore."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/30/weekinreview/30WEBB.html

Bollettino

In the buildup to the war, the tipping point, for most Americans, was the idea that Al qaeda and Saddam H. were joined at the hip. In the 48 hour ultimatum speech, Bush must have repeated this charge ten times � or was that in the �your 48 hour ultimatum is pre-approved!� speech? I get them all confused. In any case, whenever Bush insistently repeats a fact, you know that it is spurious. It is almost a 100% proof. Any antiwar activist can tell you that the Al Qaeda link has been laughably tenuous.

What hasn�t been asked, however, is why. Why shouldn�t Saddam have supported Al-q.?
The usual answer is that Osama bin and Saddam H. have a Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan relationship. In the one corner is the ugly infidel, in the other corner the minion of Saudi irredentism.

That doesn�t convince LI. Middle Eastern politics is a patchwork of alliances between people who would like nothing better than to stick the steak knife into each others backs. The most notorious example is Israel and Iran in 1980. There was no love lost between the countries, but since countries don�t exchange bodily fluids, merely goods, that was no problem. As we all know, Ayatollah Homeinii got his arms from Israel.

The weird thing about Iraq in 98 and 99 is that it seems to have gone out of its way to avoid Osama bin. If Atta did meet with an Iraqi diplomat in Prague in April, 2001, as has been endlessly speculated, we shouldn�t assume that the momentum was all with Iraq � it might have been Atta who was making an ouverture.

We have a theory.

Our theory is that the nineties anti-terrorist strategy worked. Or at least it mostly worked. The strategy posited making state�s pay for sponsoring terrorism. How? By squeezing them. The Economist, in its May 26, 2001 issue, had a little article about the Bush administration�s tweaking of sanctions.

�Ever since the UN's weapons inspectors were expelled from Iraq two and a half years ago, sanctions have lost their original purpose of ensuring that the country was declawed of its weapons of mass destruction (see article). They now merely help to devastate Iraq's economy and bolster its cruel dictatorship. A change is called for.
America and Britain think they have found the right one. They are hoping this week to persuade not just the other three permanent Security Council members, Russia, China and France, but also Iraq's neighbours, that there are more effective ways of squeezing Mr Hussein's regime. And they hope to do this before the current oil-for-food protocol, with its crude and leaky web of rules, exceptions, bribes and cudgels, comes up for its six-monthly renewal on June 4th. America and Britain hope the changes will shift the blame for Iraqi deprivation

Basically the new smart sanctions are a more flexible and, it has to be presumed, more efficient version of the oil-for-food arrangement which allows Iraq to import food and medicine and some humanitarian goods in exchange for its oil. Under the new proposals, Iraq would be able to import all the goods it wants, except for weapons and dual-use stuff.�

That was the state of play pre 9.11. There were two triumphs for the sanctionists in the nineties: Libya and South Africa. Libya is the relevant case. Libya basically caved, in order to avoid the Iran-Libya sanctions act, and the EU equivalents.

Iraq�s was the secret surrender that seemed to make sanctions do-able. Given the precarious flow of money into Iraq, Saddam H. had every reason to keep Osama bin at arm�s length.

Now, here�s where strategy meets reality. Affecting a disconnect between the state and paramilitary groups sets those groups free. They are no longer limited, in their ambitions, by the caution of tyrants. The refusal to do anything to benefit the Middle East � and this scales up to sucking money from Gulf state treasuries for unnecessary arms to refusing to protect the Palestinians � preserved the angry, and oh so recruitable context of hostility. Hence, migration to semi-states, like Afghanistan and Sudan, on the part of Osama bin. Hence, the build up of cells in South East Asia. One of those stories that is being overshadowed by the War is a thoughtful piece by AP journalist John Solomon
claiming that al-q. was recentering its operations in Southeast Asia in 2001. The graf is buried in an article about Moussaoui and the possibility that the hijacker team was planning a second wave of attacks.

�Some of that same evidence, gathered during raids and arrests in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore and the Philippines, also has led authorities to suspect al-Qaida's financing and operational planning has been shifting from Afghanistan and the Middle East to southeast Asia.�
LI�s theory would posit that the paramilitary network would use second line government officials and sympathizers in countries like Malaysia to design their campaign. This doesn�t mean we should attack Malaysia, by the way � we�ve already tried Southeast Asia, and though the beaches are a lot better than Iraq�s, the people can be a bitch when you are relocating them to safe villages. It does indicate that squeezing a state that has surrendered, like Iraq, sends a signal that sanctions are simply the prelude to greater degrees of violence.
The omni-menace coming out of the White House has surely speeded up the building of missiles in N. Korea, and the attempt to make atom bombs in Iran, while the invasion of Iraq has simply sanctified the disconnect between paramilitary groups and states. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, we are being led by a crew of idiots!
Excuse me. So sorry about that. Remove the man shouting from the mezzanine. Where was I? Oh yes. The problem with our theory is pretty clear. We cannot, Perle like, make any money out of it. Life really is a bummer.

Bollettino

"cacerolada"

We had a friend who used to get so wrapped up in soap operas that she would write to them, adumbrating her own original views of the ongoing dilemmas agonizing the characters. It was as if she considered these characters real in the sense that they could benefit from her advice. In a way, LI thinks that we are engaged in a similar bout of unfettered fantasy. All we do on this site, lately, is ruminate endlessly about a war we are powerless to change.

So -- we recognize we are demented. Okay? Sometimes, common sense dictates that fantasy overwhelm common sense.

So let's zip around to interesting stories. The NYT has a small piece about a Spanish protest that seems much more clever than lying down in the streets. Banging pots. We always love pot banging. Pot banging doesn't have an ideology. They banged pots against Allende in Chili. I'm sure there was some pot banging in Venezuala last year. Surely this goes way back. In Piero di Cosimo's The Discovery of Honey, circa 1499, Satyrs bang pots to drive bees to a tree. I wonder if the custom of banging those pots is related to this obvious folk custom? Of course, in the Allende case, it was supposed to represent the empty pots of the middle class.

In any case... now they are banging pots against our intrepid coalition ally, Aznar, the man whose support for Bush has resulted in Spain sending a battalion of spirtual troops to accompany our boys. Yes, the ghosts of Cortez and Franco have been dispatched, post haste, to Kuwait --- that'll put the fear of God into em!


Here are the intro grafs:

"ADRID, March 27 � The lights in Madrid and Barcelona went off tonight and the kitchenware came out, as thousands of people responding to a call for an antiwar blackout banged pots and pans together in a noisy protest against the war in Iraq. An environmental group urged citizens to join in a noise-making "cacerolada" in Madrid's Plaza Mayor at 10 p.m., to coincide with another call to turn out the lights.

But the protest seemed to spread spontaneously across the city, with many neighborhoods resounding to the sound of banging metal. Adding to the cacophony in Catalonia, drivers honked their horns, while fire-stations sounded their sirens."


Krugman bangs his usual pot in his op ed today. It makes a beautiful sound; but, of course, it could be one hand clapping for all the attention it will get. He points out that Cheney's energy commission, convened during the California brown outs, was thoroughly misguided, mistaking a problem that resulted from industry-wide collusion for one that was caused by too much environmentalism. As Krugman also points out, since Cheney conferred almost solely with the colluders, it isn't surprising that he pooh-poohed the communist, or at least Democrat, idea of corporate manipulation. Who, us manipulate? That view is now the official view of Bush's own FERC. As a final kicker, we won't know whether Cheney's friends profited themselves, or how clued in he was to the reality of the situation, since access to the records of his meetings have been completely blocked.

And finally -- Richard Perle, that patriot of patriots, has reluctantly put personal profit over officially sanctioned warmongering and resigned his semi-official position with the Bush administration. The story here has been building for the last two weeks, ever since Perle stupidly denounced an article by Sy Hersch in the New Yorker by saying that Hersch was a 'terrorist'. Since then, Perle's finances have been investigated by the Times. He's responded not by keeping quiet, but by stirring up the rightwing troops. Here's a bit of the interview he gave NewsMax:

According to a recent editorial by New York Times columnist and full-time Bush-hater Maureen Dowd, Perle may have a conflict of interest in that he is a member of the Pentagon�s Defense Advisory Board. Perle called Dowd�s claims a fabrication. "Absolutely, categorically untrue," he said."Maureen Dowd's view of this is very misleading. Ms. Dowd's recent editorial suggested that I was retained to 'help overcome Pentagon resistance' to the proposed sale of Global Crossing to Hutcheson Whampoa. That is not why I was retained," Perle asserted."I have not been retained by Hutcheson Whampoa, nor have I been retained by Global Crossing to represent them in any way with the U.S. government. I have been retained by Global Crossing to help them put together a security arrangement that is acceptable to the U.S. government."

Which, of course, isn't true. This story burned Perle because the rightwing campers aren't about to get all soft and mushy about Global Crossing. They hate Global Crossing. They hate the idea of Global Crossing going communist. Wierdly enough, the same NewsMax people who are putting Perle under 24 hour protection against the wild Bush haters out there in the spreading darkness published a three parter just last month that could have been entitled, how do I hate thee, Global Crossing? Let me count the ways...

First two grafs went:


"Li Ka Shing has lost the first round in his effort to take over Global Crossing. Li's bid for the defunct telecommunications giant failed before a U.S. national security committee charged with oversight.
"The credit for causing Li's failure must be distributed evenly to both NewsMax and our readers for passing so many valuable tips about the reclusive billionaire to the FBI. In the end, Li had to withdraw his offer to buy Global Crossing because he knew it would fail."

There are certain rules that apply even to the aberrant right. One of them is that your readers can't be passing many valuable tips to the FBI, on the one hand, and then be expected to admire a man hired by the group the FBI is supposed to be suppressing, on the other.

However, this does say something about Perle's hubris. Did he really expect to get away with getting more than a half mill from Global Crossing? He might as well have contracted to do PR work for Saddam Hussein. The man is obviously a little ... shall we say, vain?

The Bush haters (otherwise known as the NYT) had the satisfaction of reporting that Perle has resigned:

"WASHINGTON, March 27 � Richard N. Perle resigned today as chairman of an influential Pentagon advisory board in the wake of disclosures that his business dealings included a recent meeting with a Saudi arms dealer and a contract to advise a communications company that is seeking permission from the Defense Department to be sold to Chinese investors."

However, the letter of the victory is less than the spirit. He is still a member of the damn board. His contract with Global Crossing is premised on him making 600,000 dollars if he gets results. I'd still bet on him making his 600 grand.

Bollettino

Are we so obvious? You know, we thought it was a good gag, pretending that Tony Blair was being played by a double. We thought it rather magnificently parodied the misinformation coming out of the Pentagon, and made a little poison point. But alas, our little jest seems to have been independently discovered by loads of other people. For the funniest double joke, read the Guardian article about the Dubya double.
We admit, these grafs are good:

"Most of those who regularly monitor Mr Bush's speech patterns believe that it was the genuine article who spoke at Central Command HQ in Florida yesterday, pointing to a characteristic tendency toward quasi-biblical phrasing - "There will be a day of reckoning for the Iraqi regime, and that day is drawing in near" - and an almost total absence of words of more than three syllables.

Other experts disagree, pointing out that these consistencies originate with speech writers rather then the president himself, and that Bush's main vocal technique - the bewildered pause - is only too easy to imitate."

Which reminds us -- we heard the Bush-Blair press conference this morning, and the leader of the free world was cruising in his retarded frat boy mode. Bush is obviously petrified by the prospect of getting asked questions by journalists. It tortures him. When asked about the absense of a coalition in this war, Bush responded -- this is from memory: "We got allies. We got allies and allies and allies." He was obviously trying to remember the name of one. Too bad he didn't come up with Cameroon -- just to see how he'd pronounce it. Blair eventually interjected himself, in a fatherly way, and the question was diverted Blairishly, which is almost as good as being answered.

Bollettino

There's a funny article in Slate today going after Johnny Apple, the NYT's instant theory man. Apple's had the black mark on his forehead ever since Bush called him an asshole in a public forum, and was overheard, and was embarrassed. It's an indirect form of lese majeste, but Apple must suffer for it. Jack Shafer, who is doing his duty to guard his country, makes the point that Apple was exaggeratedly negative about our great adventure in Afghanistan -- which is turning, in the light of our current war, into the pundit's golden age. Weren't we the boys back then!

Apple apparently once wrote a piece saying we risked getting into a quagmire in Afghanistan. Look what happened: we toppled the Taliban toute suite! Now Apple writes a piece that we risk getting into a quagmire in Iraq; thus, by the rule of substitution, Saddam Hussein must be in the bag.

This is an excellent example of the reasoning power of those journalists who are embedded in that most dangerous front-line city, D.C. In fact, Shafer seems so emboldened by Apple's piss poor forecasting record that he allows himself a funny:

"Apple's fear that dropping bombs on civilians wouldn't "win Afghan 'hearts and minds' " and that the country would prove ungovernable even if the United States won turned out to be unfounded. Two weeks after his comparison of Afghanistan to Vietnam, the allies liberated Kabul, and 16 months later the place is at least as governable as San Francisco."

Which goes to show that Shafer must explore much rougher sections of San Francisco than are advised even by the most hardcore S/M guides. For the latest on the governability of Afghanistan, here's an excerpt from a recent Boston Globe article:


"KABUL -- US forces have clashed with fighters loyal to an Afghan warlord in an incident that could turn the renegade commander, a former US ally, against the Americans and undermine the shaky peace in a sensitive border area, Afghan officials said yesterday.

There were differing accounts of the fighting, which may have killed as many as 13 of the warlord's men, including his eldest son."

Hmm. I don't remember Willie Brown, the mayor of S.F., experiencing the loss of his son to a firefight with the U.S. army, but I guess we can take Shafer's word that the S.F. and Afghanistan are mirror images of each other. Perhaps Slate, as an experiment, ougt to unscrew the guy from his D.C. desk and lauch him into the streets of Gardez to experience the wonders of the order the contemptible Mr. Apple predicted would be difficult to establish. Here's what is happening there:

"Khan Zadran alienated both the Afghan government and the Americans by rocketing cities to wrest power from his rivals, including a notorious attack on Gardez in which 13 locals were killed. His brutal methods raised questions about the US military's judgment in choosing Afghan allies; he was dropped from the coalition last fall. But his militia fighters still operate roadblocks where local people complain of harassment, extortion, and kidnapping."

The wonders of the democracy that we have unleashed on these people, like the ways of a man with a woman, and the ways of the fish undersea, make me praise the almighty. In fact, it makes me feel all Hitchenish all over!

Belligeranti

There is a tic to which the belligeranti have become much addicted. A rhetorical tic.

To illustrate, take this rather typical piece from Christopher Hitchens. He is in full regalia, bucking us up in a Daily Mirror piece called (hats off to Kipling) We must keep our nerve. Hitchens goes through the drill -- the so called peace marchers are hypocrites. Saddam Hussein is the bloodiest thing since heart surgery sans anaesthetic. Peace marchers love Saddam Hussein. The coalition forces are brave boys. The coalition forces are making fine progress. The Iraqi soldiers are terrorists. The Iraqi people would really be strewing flowers in the streets if they weren't so fearful about the above mentioned tyrant -- did I mention that Saddam Hussein is a bloody tyrant? The peace marchers protested against the Afghanistan war, didn't they, the peace, or so called peace, or really friends of totalitarianism, marchers. They are weak headed or sinister. Etc.

That about covers the cognitive content. He was obviously telephoning this one in. Or perhaps sending it in with an automatic guidance system, like one of his much beloved cruise missiles.

But then C.H. reaches deep into his personal feelings. He, too, would be upset telling Mrs. Bum in East Bum that her hubby or son had lost a leg, or perhaps his or her life, depending, in the course of this bold and just war, if he had to. Yes, if the Government for instance hired him for that job, and he'd been fired from Vanity Fair, or somethihg. Yes, even C.H. might shudder a bit, but he'd do his part. Message: we must keep our nerve.

Then we get the drumroll: "However, there is both honour and glory in being able to demolish the palaces and cellars of a murdering dictatorship, inflicting so few incidental casualties (and taking such obvious care to minimize them) that the propaganda of Saddam's goons can produce almost no genuine victims to gloat over."

And then we get this little driblet of prose:

"I feel disgust for those who blame this week's deaths on the intervention and not on its sole target: Saddam Hussein."

The "I feel disgust" locution, and its cousins, have become very popular among the belligeranti. As we noted in the last post, Kanan Makiya was feeling disgust for all those clueless antiwar friends of his calling him up and saying bummer about the bombing, dude. And Andrew Sullivan feels disgust on almost every post.

Now, disgust has been much discussed in recent years, partly due to William Miller's book, Anatomy of Disgust. I've only read Miller's book on courage, but there is an extensive and interesting essay by Martha Nussbaum on Miller's book that articulates his theory and Nussbaum's objections.

According to Nussbaum:

"Miller's book has three goals: to analyze the emotion of disgust; to give an account of when and where people experience disgust in daily life and in the sexual realm; and to investigate the role of disgust in morals and politics. Many writers about disgust have treated it as a bare feeling, with little or no cognitive content. Miller argues powerfully that this approach is inadequate. Disgust actually has a very complex and sophisticated cognitive content. Disgust is "about something and in response to something." It is not like a stomach flu: it "necessarily involves particular thoughts, characteristically very intrusive and unriddable thoughts, about the repugnance of that which is its object." These thoughts revolve around the notion of a particular type of danger for the self, "the danger inherent in pollution and contamination, the danger of defilement." Disgust evaluates its object both as base and as a threat. Thus it is closely linked both to fear (for the self) and to contempt (for the object).'

Actually, the idea that the antiwar people might contaminate Hitchens or pollute him is not implausible. At one time, after all, he was with the "Left" -- a resume that he is going to retire on. You cannot really be a rightwing writer without once having been a leftist. It gives you credibility. This is a puzzle: on the left, having once been a rightwinger gives you no credibility at all. Why should repentence should be so attractive to one side, and so unattractive to the other? Hmm.

But to get back to the "I am disgusted" locution.

The thing about the Daily Mail column is that clearly Hitchens doesn't really feel disgust. There's no emotional fervor here. Perhaps, however, he is reporting a disgust he once felt, and is simply applying the conventional fiction that that particular feeling is prolonged in the report of it. Interestingly, according to Nussbaum, Miller finds the roots of disgust in a certain aversion to life itself -- its fats and sweats and sperm and smells -- and he also claims that the aversion to life -- a sort of death drive -- is characteristically transposed to sex. Disgust has an important role to play in ascesis -- it is, indeed, the favored disciplinary instrument. From St. Anthony regarding a corpse to Christopher Hitchens regarding a peace marcher, there is a clear conceptual continuity.

Still, let's say that C.H. feels disgust at one remove, why report it?

Miller follows a Freudian path about disgust -- that is, he sees disgust intimately connected to desire. This idea has been done to death in the last twenty years, with a lot of speculation built into the idea of the male gaze. The lure of disgust is not only that one will be disgusted, but that one will be aroused. Was it Martin Amis who wrote that the problem with watching pornography is that you never know when you will see something you like that you don't really ever want to know that you'll like?

Some interesting experiments have been done about the psychology of moral feelings, trying to disentangle, if possible, the emotional content of disgust from that of disapproval. Nicols Shaun, a philosophy professor at Charleston College, has written a little paper on this topic: Norms with Feeling: Towards a Psychological Account of Moral Judgment
Shaun considers a series of experiments involving psychopaths in British prisons (hey, the application of this to Hitchens, Sullivan et al. is up to you, gentle reader) that aimed at filling out a notion of Lorenz's about evolved aversion ot inter-species violence. Now, we think Lorenz's idea about this has been pretty well exploded by every study in ethology since. Still, Shaun's point isn't against Lorenz, it is that the experiments are skewed by a body of assumptions about the relation between affective and normative judgements.

There's a term used by Shaun that makes sense, when applied to the belligeranti -- distress cues. Let's take the idea of pack journalism literally, for a moment --that is, that the kind of pro-war journalism we've seen, and its reception by a circumscribed constituency, has created a pack, which is a particular kind of crowd. In a pack, reporting a distress cue like "I am disgusted" -- which, Derrideans among us would surely agree, encrypts another verbal report, I disgust, and repulses it in the same grammatical moment -- is a signal to attack. If disgust is a fear of contamination, the thing to be destroyed must be destroyed so that it doesn't contaminate. We must, in other words, be Friedenrein, in order to achieve real peace -- that is, peace without pollution.

This little phenomenological excursus is an attempt to understand a puzzling thing about certain of the belligeranti: the obvious, visible decay of their writing abilities. Christopher Cauldwell, who is as pro-war as any Weekly Standard writer, is still a fine writer. There's been no deterioration in his prose that I can spot. Christopher Cauldwell is rarely disgusted -- he is, more frequently, fascinated. He operates as a sort of Malcolm Gladwell of the right. But with Hitchens there has been an alarming collapse. I'd say that counterfeiting the distress cue of "I am disgusted by" -- by keying his piece, and most of his pieces, to pseudo-disgust -- Hitchens old lefty ideology is getting its revenge in creating a lifeless (corpselike, aversive) prose. Interesting that being disgusted by should lead, by such insensible steps, to being disgusting.

Bollettino

Ceasefire and the intellectuals

In Edward Lascelles Life of Charles James Fox, there�s a passage that describes the formation of the peace cabinet. The Whig opposition, at this point, had been guided both philosophically and strategically by Edmund Burke. The great unifying issue was peace with the North American colonies. In 1782, to negotiate the peace, a government formed under Lord Shelburne, but no cabinet post was found for Burke. This has always been a bit of a puzzle for historians. This is Lascelles explanation:

The exalted spirit of Burke might have upheld Whig principles in the Cabinet, but no place was found for him. His omission was probably due less to the aristocratic exclusiveness of a Whig administration than to the fact that the Whigs doubted whether Burke, with all his inspiring genius, possessed either the self-control or the judgment necessary for a cabinet minister.

Now, that is the kind of thing that drives Burke�s fans crazy. Whether it was true of Burke or not, it is surely true that the intellectual vice, in politics, is lack of self-control and judgment. We�ve been pondering this since reading Kanan Makiya�s intemperate, and pretty much politically suicidal, entries in his TNR weblog.

Solzhenitsyn, however he had set his face against the Soviet regime, never wished for bombs to rain down on Moscow. Even Adenauer avoided, as far as we know, celebrating publicly the mass incineration of Dresden. But here is the kind of thing that rolls right off of Makiya�s pen, and is referenced with approval by innumerable belligeranti:

The bombs have begun to fall on Baghdad. Iraqi soldiers have shot their officers and are giving themselves up to the Americans and the British in droves. Others, as in Nasiriyah and Umm Qasr, are fighting back, and civilians have already come under fire. Yet I find myself dismissing contemptuously all the e-mails and phone calls I get from antiwar friends who think they are commiserating with me because "their" country is bombing "mine." To be sure, I am worried. Like every other Iraqi I know, I have friends and relatives in Baghdad. I am nauseous with anxiety for their safety. But still those bombs are music to my ears. They are like bells tolling for liberation in a country that has been turned into a gigantic concentration camp. One is not supposed to say such things in the kind of liberal, pacifist, and deeply anti-American circles of academia, in which I normally live and work. The truth is jarring even to my own ears.'

This is the sadder insofar as it is obviously a case of a man who has lost his sense of limits by allowing himself to be endlessly coddled by the ultra-hawks, who form a sort of guard of enablers around those who they grossly embrace (it is, by the way, a little hard to believe that Makiya is getting a lot of emails from antiwar activists. It must be spam). The same thing has been happening to Blair, even if, for him, the threshold of temptation is much lower. If, as I hope is still possible, a ceasefire is enforced in Iraq � a more interesting possibility at this point than when the war started, and more obviously to the American interest than anyone in the American press is allowing (is there anyone in the American press who is even considering it?) � one of the provisions of it, to please the ever liberating Bush administration, would be to include the exile community in the devolution of the power on the ground to Iraqis.

Self-censorship seems, according to an admiring profile of Kanan Makiya, to be a terrible struggle for the man. It�s easy to understand Makiya having the thought that the bombs should come down � LI has entertained a treasonous thought or too ourselves during the last week. But to express it is merely forging the knife that will be used to cut your throat. For what? What grand gesture needs to be made so badly?

Perhaps there is something to the theory that intellectuals and tyrants are secret sharers of each other�s characters. Tyrants, too, are enamored of metaphors. The elided 'like," the hidden 'as if" -- these seem impossible for the totalitarian mindset to sense. Only the intoxicating power of one's own rhetoric explains how Makiya could move from the idea that "country that has been turned into a gigantic concentration camp" to the idea that the bombing is music to his ears. Guess what? the people the bombs kill -- the school kid, the vending cart guy, the mother -- probably don't think of themselves as concentration camp inmates. In fact, given that metaphor, there is no reason for Saddam H. to build concentration camps, or political prisons -- what, after all, would be the point?

...And so all distinction is overthrown -- a very bad sign of the times.

bollettino

A wonderful reader, Ms. B. Bush from Houston Texas, writes:

"We often say that God has blessed America, but we really don't pay attention to the daily miracles proving that this is indeed so. We are so richly blessed as a nation! But I'm especially heartened by the the way God multiplies our enemies when we kill them. We first noticed this in Vietnam. We would kill 40 Vietcong, and overnight they would multiply to 80, and be reported as 90.. God was working along lines he'd first laid down in the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, except that this time he was working with the U.S. Military; which is, frankly, a more prepared force than the itinerant preacher he favored in times of yore.

The miracle is happening again. Yesterday, the U.S. Military was engaged by the terrorist Iraqis. At first it looked like 150 fell -- but lo and behold! God multiplied those dead. Here's the AP Story:

"Defense officials also revised to 350 the number of Iraqi forces killed in fierce fighting Tuesday for a key Euphrates River crossing about 90 miles south of Baghdad. The number had been widely estimated Tuesday at more than 150 Iraqi fighters and possibly as many as 500. No American casualties were reported from the battle, which pitted an American armored division against Iraqi infantry."

Now, the U.S. Military's favor in the eyes of providence in this war is not limited to the dead. No sir, don't you think so! God has been working another miracle in our favor, the miracle of the prisoners. One thousand Iraqi prisoners will surrender to our side, and in an hour's time -- just in time for the media to report it, without fear or favor -- they will have multiplied to 8,000. In fact, the division that is fighting the British in Basra right now was reported to have surrendered lock, stock and barrel on the first day of the invasion. This is theologically puzzling, to me. But this letter, Mr. Limited Inc (what a funny name you have!) is more about a terrible loop hole in the ongoing miracle. It is this: let's say Saddam finds out about all this. He's evil and all. So let's say he surrenders his 60,000 troops to us -- they will multiply eightfold in a mere couple of hours. If he keeps doing this, within a week's time there will be more Iraqis than Americans! This is a weapon of mass destruction he cannot be allowed to get a-hold of!
On to Baghdad, say I, before he surrenders!"

Bollettino

I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk. Let me give simple, responsible reasons: (1) It was a cakewalk last time; (2) they've become much weaker; (3) we've become much stronger; and (4) now we're playing for keeps.
-- Ken Adelman, WP


Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
'cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again
Oh, no!
-- Donna Summer

For the latest cake and casualties from Iraq, here's a link to abtv's shots of civilian casualties. Luckily, we are being protected from this kind of shocking image thing in the States. It might make us reconsider dessert, and it will certainly only help the terrorists. Now back to our regularly scheduled program, Pastries and Politics with President Bush.

Bollettino

We are all anti-monarchists around here. But we've been deeply affected by the NYT article on old peers who are seeking their old seats again in Tony Blair's New-n-improved House of Lords. Politics is one thing -- but seeing the spiritual descendents of Bertie Wooster in a fix is quite another.

"LONDON, March 25 � "Quite obviously, I haven't got a hope of getting elected, or of getting any votes at all," said Viscount Massereene, describing his curiously languid attempt to win back (or not) his former seat in the House of Lords. "I thought I would put my name down as a bit of a statement."

One's heart rather goes out, in a hail fellow well met way, not a get the hankies out way, nothing like that, to Viscount Massereene. Especially when you compare his idea that he would rather like, all things considered, to be as it were warming the old seat up again to the barking of the young, buff shark, obviously some New Labor suit, who sounds like a typical thug:

"It's a farcical situation," said Alex Runswick, policy officer for Charter 88, a group that campaigns for electoral reform. "You've got a situation where 91 hereditary peers who shouldn't be there anyway are able to vote for other people who shouldn't be there either."

Get the old folks out of the home. That's a very typical Blair-ite message -- and of course we are talking of the real Blair, who as readers of this site know is struggling in his bonds in the Scottish castle, and not the Blair double who is conferring today with Bush, and no doubt secretly with his maker, Richard Perle.


Finally, there is this graf. We fell in love with this graf -- we lost our aversion to the aristocracy with this graf:

'Meanwhile, the Earl of Stockton has joined some candidates in sending statements to potential voters, gingerly enumerating his qualifications.

"I hope to steer a rather elegant course between the Scylla of self-promotion and the Charybdis of boastfulness," said the earl, who already has a full-time job as a Conservative member of the European Parliament. "I'm also very fortunate to have a brother-in-law in the Lords who's putting in a good word for me."

The results of the election, decided by a system of weighted voting that is so convoluted as to be unintelligible, will be announced on Thursday."

If we must barge into countries and tell them how to run themselves, surely the plight of the House of Lords should move our Pentagon planners. Any politician who ponders the elegant course between the Scylla of self-promotion and the Charybdis of boastfulness -- and can actually say that, like that, to a reporter -- should be supported with all the weapons in our arsenal.

Bollettino

Nice story in the Scotsman on the spin war, or strategic information operations. Goebbels called it propaganda. Just what you'd expect.

Bollettino

Our Palestinians

Andrew Sullivan is not often quoted in these pages, because we think it is the height of pointlessness to quote Andrew Sullivan. But he does represent a golden mean of Bush-ism, and for that reason we find one of his posts for
Monday extremely interesting. Here it is:

"THE TACTICS OF FAILURE: The setbacks the allies have suffered these last couple of days are all due to one thing: some Saddam units acting as terrorists. By pretending to surrender and then opening fire, by relocating in civilian neighborhoods, by shooting prisoners of war in the head, the soldiers apparently still loyal to Saddam are not reversing the allied advance. What they're doing is trying to inflict sufficient damage to improve their morale and increase the costs of the invasion. They want us to fire into civilian areas; they want us to panic at a few atrocities (as in Somalia); they are counting on an American unwillingness to persevere through serious casualties. And they intend to use the Arab media and their Western sympathizers, i.e. the BBC, NYT, NPR etc., to get this message out. The lesson to learn is that we have cornered the equivalent of a rabid dog. It will fight nastily, brutally and with no compunction. Those units who will go down with this regime will not go down easily. After an initial hope that this thing could be over swiftly, I think it's obvious by now that we're in for a nasty fight - and the Saddamite remnants will ally with the anti-war media to fight dirty and spin shamelessly."

Beyond the standard vitriol about the media, the logic, here, is beginning to appear in the mainstream press too. The steps go like this.

1. Our liberation of Iraq seems to have been shockingly non-floral. The cakewalk through a grateful population doesn't seem to have materialized.

2. The resistance to liberation can only come from evil units "acting as terrorists."

3. Notice how those evil terrorists endanger civilians, which we, all unwillingly, have to shoot.

4. So any terrorist act that seems to emerge from those endangered civilians is probably some kind of disguised Saddamite terrorists. Thus, no reason not to liquidate them.

Now, we don't want to dispute about whether Saddam's troops and militia are using the civilians as shields or not. That seems pretty likely, given Saddam's history. And our point isn't that there are other causes that might be behind Iraqi resistance. Our point is what happens when this kind of logic becomes the dominant way of explaining the war. What is obviously wrong with Sullivan's analysis is that it emphasizes the evil of the tactic at the expense of the success of it. What is secondarily wrong about Sullivan's analysis is that it defines evil in terms of opposition to America, which is good. This is an ideological fantasy; as it infiltrates the cool thinking necessary to analyze events, it skews them until they assume a moral incorrigibility -- they become simply evil, or simply good. This always leads states to disaster.

We think that probably some Iraqis are feeling the prod of the fedayeen bayonette in their backs -- whereas we also think that some Iraqis are resisting on their own, for reasons that range from nationalism to religion. As Americans, to use Kanan Makiya's words, orchestrate the music of liberation -- or in plain english, bomb the shit out of various Iraqi towns -- there is every chance that the mood will turn against the Americans. The sequence of it is foreseeable, the structure is there, and certainly the propagandists, like Sullivan, have armed themselves with justifications. As it does, Iraqis will increasingly be treated as either friends or terrorists. The Iraqis, in other words, will become Our Palestinians.

Bollettino

Note to readers: we are retiring "remora." The Vatican issues daily bulletins of the doings of the pope, and all his little munchkins in Emerald City, and we've decided to borrow that as our name for our own daily bulletins. Dope will continue to be dope. Thanks.

War and language

Tony Blair -- or a man claiming to be Tony Blair -- readers will recall, I hope, that the real Tony Blair, according to some reports, might be struggling with his bonds in a remote castle in Scotland -- calls the upcoming battle for Baghdad crucial. U.S. commanders, including General Franks, our liberator in chief, a man whose press conferences have quickly devolved into those exercises in denial the military specialized in in Vietnam, claim that the speed Americans are making is success in itself. War, according to this scenario, is a kind of motor-race, and we are simply leaving behind, with superb disdain, those "pockets of resistance" that might exist behind the lines due to fear, according to the inestimable Franks. It is fear that has kept Iraqis from showering us with blossoms, fear that has kept them away from the 24 hour florist shops of Basra, Um Qasr, Najaf, and Mosul, which are guarded round the clock by feared units of S. Hussein's terrorist units, the Weapons of Mass Destruction Legion, Lmt., a non-profit terrorist organization incorporated in Delaware.

But consider an absurd idea: that the Iraqis might have another definition of the war. They might even consider that the invasion of their territory is not, uh, liberation.

I know. You will say, who are these people? I mean, who really cares what the Iraqis think? Some of them have been so ignorant as to compare the U.S.'s showing of unlawful prisoners of sorta-war -- the Taliban and such -- and the way they were masked and manacled -- treated to all the comforts of home, in our prisons in Cuba, if home is a small place, nine by nine, kept perpetually dark, and speaking is forbidden there -- with their own showing and treatment of U.S. Pows, which is a war crime according to the Geneva convention. This is the kind of evil moral equivalency, promoted by relativism and deconstruction, that has spread from our universities overseas. This is what happens when you don't root it out here.

Perhaps it is all one of those big funny cultural things. First we bomb them, then we love bomb them -- with the precious gift of Freedom. When you care enough to send the very best, send Freedom -- it is best served with a big Abrams tank, we understand. Talk about gourmet!

Consider the lowly casualty. It has now become the newscaster norm to consider the combat casualty as a thing defined by the government, and its military branch. So the Edinburg News, today, reports on the first British casualty in combat

"A SOLDIER from the Black Watch has been killed in action in southern Iraq, the second Briton killed in combat in 24 hours.

The unnamed soldier, from the 1st Battalion Black Watch, which recruits in Scotland, died near Al Zubayr, 15 miles west of Basra, Iraq�s second city, where British forces have been engaged in heavy fighting."


Later in the story, however, we are told that "the total number of British deaths in the war so far is now 18." Now, granted, some of those deaths were the result of friendly fire, but some were the result of potshots taken by Iraqi guerrillas. Potshots don't count as combat, however. They are way outside the rules. Combat only occurs when the coalition forces engage in coordinated attack, n'est-ce pas? Eventually some genius will come up with the idea that Iraqis are suffering from mass Stockholm syndrome.

We can't wait.