Bollettino
Reason no. 500 for an accelerated pull out.
Gideon Rose, the managing editor of Foreign Affairs, ruminates about the duties of empire in Slate. The point he makes is that the US lacks the mechanism for imperial rule in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. This is such an excellent point that it should have been in the forefront of anti-war politics. Allowing Bush to announce how the invasion of Iraq was going to be managed and how much it was going to cost in his own good time crippled the anti-warriors.
However, Rose is not an antiwarrior. He is a belligeranti deluxe. His idea, which has surely been nursed in many a defense department funded forum, is that we need to spend the money, and create the agencies, to be a real empire:
"This simply will not do. Bungling the peace in Afghanistan would be a tragedy; bungling the peace in Iraq would be a catastrophe. So unless the Bush administration changes its mind and decides to hand off responsibility to the United Nations and the rest of the international community, it will have to do much of the work of postwar nation-building itself. Interestingly, one result of going it alone might be to force the United States to finally develop the institutions required to run what is now a de facto empire (albeit one designed to be temporary and managed on behalf of the dominions rather than the metropolis)."
Notice, especially -- stare hard at -- rub eyes and stare again at - the dishonest parenthetical remark that closes this pathetic piece of special pleading. On the one hand, let's be hard nosed empire builders; on the other hand, lets do it all for our adorable child-states. Self interest, which is the glorified principle of all capitalism, is suddenly shunted into the background, as in the hush of our good intentions we 'elect' such as Smilin' Jay Garner to head our democratic middle eastern property. Meanwhile, of course, the term democratic is hollowed out even more, feeding a more and more coercive mindset back into the homecountry. When democratic becomes, by definition, what the US does - because we are democratic, natch -- it loses all connection with representative government. The solution to the peace in Iraq is simple. Iraq isn't a dominion. It should elect its own, it should govern itself, it should not be a place where American troops become guardians of the dreams of all the Roses and Wolfowitzes.
This is how you make music in D.C. ears right now:
"As Rachel Bronson of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote last fall, Washington needs to develop "a greater appreciation for the fact that intervention entails not simply war-fighting, but a continuum of force ranging from conventional warfare to local law enforcement." That means creating plenty of units in unsexy job categories such as civil affairs and military police�the sort of folk we could use to run Baghdad today. (If George Steinbrenner were in Rumsfeld's position, he might just buy or trade for the Italian Carabinieri.)
Taking interventions seriously would mean changes outside the Pentagon as well. As Andrew Bacevich of Boston University notes, "imperial governance is a politico-military function," so the State Department has to be a critical player in the game. That means the absurdly low funding of State should be increased, as should policy integration between State and Defense both at home and in the field. "The empire may need proconsuls," Bacevich says, "but it will need them to take a perspective that looks beyond military concerns." The foreign service will need to cultivate old-fashioned political officers who know their way around a country's hinterlands and people as well as its capital and elites. And the White House will have to get used to the lengthy, costly, and often thankless engagement with the world that nation-building necessarily involves."
The pseudo-scientific lingo of political science, especially in that rarified pie slice of it called foreign policy, is always a skin bracer. The white man's burden is rhetorically clouded, here, for one audience only: the American citizen. The imperial sleight of hand works only if the citizen picks up the burden, while the policy wonks and CEOs pick the bones of whatever country we happen to crush. On the day after reading of the award of a 600 million dollar contract to Bechtel, Rose's article does exude a certain smell. Empire is not, for the bumpkins out there, about asserting American power and interest. It isn't about lucrative contracts for a diverse array of hungry American firms. It isn't about oil for the oilman, and saber rattling for the saber manufacturer. No, it is about "thankless engagement." With a sigh, we continue on, never expecting thanks from those Shiites we are forced to spank. And even as we let a thousand INC paramilitaries.bloom, we have to remember that Iraqis, like Palestinians, are notoriously ungrateful for the things we do for them, and have to sometimes be sternly fired upon by soldiers, especially if they start crowding together.
Meanwhile, Chalabi's INC becomes more unbelievable every day. Is this some old CIA training film, circa Teheran, circa 1954, or what? First the paramilitary group. Then the cries of Chalabi, Chalabi -- ringing out from people who one can reasonably assume had never heard of Chalabi before being informed by some friendly US military attaches. Then the advance, in uniform, armed, on Baghdad, and the comic opera seizure of power -- a sort of Mussolini meets the Three Stooges kind of move. Then the takeover of certain of Saddam's houses, such as Uday's hunting club, in which Chalabi gave a press conference today, blessed again by American soldiers, all in the wealthiest suburbs. The overwhelming impression is of Ba'athist pageantry, usurped by a man who has learned how to use the word democratic to cover the complexion of what is, in truth, run of the mill third world fascism. Now, one should never bet too much against third world fascism, especially when it is blessed by US advisors. From Mobutu to Suharto, it has had a pretty good run. But Iraq is not Guatamala in 1956.
Chalabi knows that without the US military, his group would be in danger of meeting the fate accorded to less guarded sheiks and imams the US has parachuted into the hinterlands -- the rush of a crowd, gunfire, daggers drawn, etc. So in his first Baghdad press conference, after modestly disclaiming his own role in the interim government, he proposed that the Americans soon let Iraq rule itself. However, he coyly left out a date for the withdrawal of American troops. He is obviously counting on said troops hanging around a long, long time. He wants the troops to root out Baathists, disarm the Iraqi army, and dismantle the structure of terror. Of course, in a disarmed Iraq, only the INC paramilitaries would have arms. A nice deal, all the way around.
Surely it is time for one of the ex-left wing hawks to write a scathing article about the ninnies in the press who are expressing doubts about Chalabi, hero of the suffering people of Iraq! We look forward to Hitchens barking up something like this in his throwaway column in the Mirror.
Saturday, April 19, 2003
Friday, April 18, 2003
Bollettino
It's Mornin' in Baghdad
Two papers confirm the claims of Baghdad's new mayor. The NYT reports that the INC in Mosul is receiving American military help, and refers to Baghdad's new mayor as a done deal. The London Times article ledes with an (unconsciously?) ironic statement:
"BAGHDAD was given its first lesson in democracy yesterday when self-appointed leaders emerged from nowhere to fill the power vacuum left by Saddam Hussein�s regime.
Amid the confusion caused by the absence of any authority � other than the US military � Iraqi citizens discovered that they had a governor, a mayor and even a religious leader to look after affairs. Mohammad Mohsen Zubaidi, an exiled political leader, announced that he was now running Bahgdad as the city�s governor, elected by a mysterious council of �religious and community leaders."
What reader in democracy is the London Times using? Machiavelli's The Prince? What seems to be happening is that the Pentagon is boosting the legitimacy of the INC paramilitaries where it can. In Iraq's open moment, the performative is up for grabs. You remember the performative, boys and girls, don't ya? JL Austin, the Oxford philosopher, created the term to designate those speech acts for which the truth condition is their own pronunciation in the appropriate context. For instance, saying I do at a wedding ceremony, or christening a ship, means that it is true that the speaker is married, and it is true that the ship has a certain name.
The contexts in Iraq have been blown to hell or looted, or are floating around the relics market, along with cuneiform tablets and golden figurines from Ur. We'll see if Mohammad Mohnsen Zubaidi has picked up on the one context left standing -- American military might.
It's Mornin' in Baghdad
Two papers confirm the claims of Baghdad's new mayor. The NYT reports that the INC in Mosul is receiving American military help, and refers to Baghdad's new mayor as a done deal. The London Times article ledes with an (unconsciously?) ironic statement:
"BAGHDAD was given its first lesson in democracy yesterday when self-appointed leaders emerged from nowhere to fill the power vacuum left by Saddam Hussein�s regime.
Amid the confusion caused by the absence of any authority � other than the US military � Iraqi citizens discovered that they had a governor, a mayor and even a religious leader to look after affairs. Mohammad Mohsen Zubaidi, an exiled political leader, announced that he was now running Bahgdad as the city�s governor, elected by a mysterious council of �religious and community leaders."
What reader in democracy is the London Times using? Machiavelli's The Prince? What seems to be happening is that the Pentagon is boosting the legitimacy of the INC paramilitaries where it can. In Iraq's open moment, the performative is up for grabs. You remember the performative, boys and girls, don't ya? JL Austin, the Oxford philosopher, created the term to designate those speech acts for which the truth condition is their own pronunciation in the appropriate context. For instance, saying I do at a wedding ceremony, or christening a ship, means that it is true that the speaker is married, and it is true that the ship has a certain name.
The contexts in Iraq have been blown to hell or looted, or are floating around the relics market, along with cuneiform tablets and golden figurines from Ur. We'll see if Mohammad Mohnsen Zubaidi has picked up on the one context left standing -- American military might.
Bollettino
Apparently, American troops are better at protecting the furnishings of Saddam's palaces than such trifling landmarks as the Baghdad Museum and library. Lolling about the place, General Franks --entering Baghdad under heavy guard -- is confident, as is his commander in chief, that the War is over.
As is the press. The main question asked by Slate's Chris Suellentrop right now is when are we going to roast those Syrians. That's fairly representative of media opinion.
Well, in the face of such unanimity, and given the nature of the unanimous, we have a hard time buying the pitch.
The occupation of Iraq differs from that of Germany or Japan, and is like that of Afghanistan, in that the other side disappeared. It's evanescence was taken, in Afghanistan, as surrender -- and for all practical purposes, the US definitely achieved its goal in Afghanistan. It denied a haven to Al qaeda. It overturned Alqy's protectors.
In Iraq, the forces of Saddam are through. But the War still rumbles, in Mosul, in Baghdad, in Basra. These are weeks of shifting. We don't think the War part 2 is necessary. We think it is preventable. We think the factional struggles that racked Northern Iraq don't have to be replicated on a national scale with quite that fury. But we also think that the longer the Americans display their insensibility to their situation in Iraq, as long as they sign contracts that seemingly are premised on the assumption of months, if not years, of occupation, we creep ever closer to a pot shot war. One in which Americans casualties will be higher than the pot shot war in Afghanistan, and Iraqi casualties, as seems to be the destiny of wars waged in Iraq, will be much higher still. There's probably some calculable multiple, now, of American to Iraqi deaths.
This story from Mosul is ominous enough not to have received much attention in the American press:
"Whatever the cause, the two shootings have killed 17 Iraqis and wounded 39, according to Dr. Ayad Ramadhani, director of the city's general hospital, who said the toll from Tuesday's shooting rose overnight to 13 from 10.
American officials said they believed that seven people died in the incident on Tuesday, but they had no figures for Wednesday's deaths.
All of the shootings occurred outside the governor's office in downtown Mosul, which was occupied by American troops on Tuesday. Iraqi witnesses said that in Wednesday's incident, Iraqi policemen who had surrounded looters in a nearby bank building had fired shots in the air to disperse a crowd. The Americans, thinking they were under fire, started shooting, they said. Among the wounded were the two police officers who fired the warning shots, a 12-year-old boy and 61-year-old man.
Maj. Steve Katz, a special operations civil affairs officer, said that despite the shooting, most Iraqis were still welcoming American forces here."
The smiley face that is being painted relentlessly across this occupation is treacherous. Welcomes, after all, presage stays. Making oneself at home. Sampling the home cooking. Electing the new "mayor" of Baghdad, and following him with a couple of jeep loads of Chalabi bullyboys, armed and clothed by the Pentagon.
In the meantime, where is Smilin' Jay's prefector in Northern Iraq? Isn't General "Loose" Bruce Moore supposed to be in charge up there? Although Loose Bruce is a hard man to keep tabs on. In a recent Glaswegian spreadsheet about the Military-Industrial complex about to run Iraq from the banks of the Potomac , Loose rated merely a mention. No company ties, no nothing. But if they keep mowing down Iraqis for unprofessional displays of impolitic fervor, eventually Loose Bruce will have to say something.
Apparently, American troops are better at protecting the furnishings of Saddam's palaces than such trifling landmarks as the Baghdad Museum and library. Lolling about the place, General Franks --entering Baghdad under heavy guard -- is confident, as is his commander in chief, that the War is over.
As is the press. The main question asked by Slate's Chris Suellentrop right now is when are we going to roast those Syrians. That's fairly representative of media opinion.
Well, in the face of such unanimity, and given the nature of the unanimous, we have a hard time buying the pitch.
The occupation of Iraq differs from that of Germany or Japan, and is like that of Afghanistan, in that the other side disappeared. It's evanescence was taken, in Afghanistan, as surrender -- and for all practical purposes, the US definitely achieved its goal in Afghanistan. It denied a haven to Al qaeda. It overturned Alqy's protectors.
In Iraq, the forces of Saddam are through. But the War still rumbles, in Mosul, in Baghdad, in Basra. These are weeks of shifting. We don't think the War part 2 is necessary. We think it is preventable. We think the factional struggles that racked Northern Iraq don't have to be replicated on a national scale with quite that fury. But we also think that the longer the Americans display their insensibility to their situation in Iraq, as long as they sign contracts that seemingly are premised on the assumption of months, if not years, of occupation, we creep ever closer to a pot shot war. One in which Americans casualties will be higher than the pot shot war in Afghanistan, and Iraqi casualties, as seems to be the destiny of wars waged in Iraq, will be much higher still. There's probably some calculable multiple, now, of American to Iraqi deaths.
This story from Mosul is ominous enough not to have received much attention in the American press:
"Whatever the cause, the two shootings have killed 17 Iraqis and wounded 39, according to Dr. Ayad Ramadhani, director of the city's general hospital, who said the toll from Tuesday's shooting rose overnight to 13 from 10.
American officials said they believed that seven people died in the incident on Tuesday, but they had no figures for Wednesday's deaths.
All of the shootings occurred outside the governor's office in downtown Mosul, which was occupied by American troops on Tuesday. Iraqi witnesses said that in Wednesday's incident, Iraqi policemen who had surrounded looters in a nearby bank building had fired shots in the air to disperse a crowd. The Americans, thinking they were under fire, started shooting, they said. Among the wounded were the two police officers who fired the warning shots, a 12-year-old boy and 61-year-old man.
Maj. Steve Katz, a special operations civil affairs officer, said that despite the shooting, most Iraqis were still welcoming American forces here."
The smiley face that is being painted relentlessly across this occupation is treacherous. Welcomes, after all, presage stays. Making oneself at home. Sampling the home cooking. Electing the new "mayor" of Baghdad, and following him with a couple of jeep loads of Chalabi bullyboys, armed and clothed by the Pentagon.
In the meantime, where is Smilin' Jay's prefector in Northern Iraq? Isn't General "Loose" Bruce Moore supposed to be in charge up there? Although Loose Bruce is a hard man to keep tabs on. In a recent Glaswegian spreadsheet about the Military-Industrial complex about to run Iraq from the banks of the Potomac , Loose rated merely a mention. No company ties, no nothing. But if they keep mowing down Iraqis for unprofessional displays of impolitic fervor, eventually Loose Bruce will have to say something.
Thursday, April 17, 2003
Bollettino
Forged in Ireland
Brigadier Gordon Kerr operated a special unit for the British in Northern Ireland, the Force Research Unit. Research means different things to different people. For some research means a library; for others, research means going through files in some archive. For others, research is a sedate and secluded career among test tubes. For the Brigadier, apparently, research meant hiring killers among the Protestant paramilitaries to track down and kill dissident Catholics.
At least, that is the rumor about a suppressed report, today.
Among the victims of Kerr's research was one Pat Finucanne. The BBC admirably compressed report about researching Finucane starts like this:
"Loyalist paramilitaries shot Mr Finucane 14 times as he sat eating a Sunday meal at home, wounding his wife in the process. The couple's three children witnessed the 1989 attack. In its statement claiming the killing, the UFF said they had killed "Pat Finucane, the IRA officer".
While Mr Finucane had represented IRA members, the family vehemently denied the allegation - and have been supported in this by the police. But, what has made the investigation into his murder so important to many in Northern Ireland is that it lies at the heart of allegations that some members of the security forces collaborated with loyalist paramilitaries to the extent that they could have stopped the killing if they had so wished."
The last extenuating clause --"they could have stopped the killing if they had so wished" -- is apparently a sop thrown to elements of the "security forces" who consider that they did a wonderful job in Ulster. It is the language used by Stevens in the non-release of his report, today. The Guardian story begins like this:
"The murders of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane in February 1989 and Protestant student Brian Lambert in November 1987 by paramilitaries "could have been prevented" if the security forces had not been involved in the plots, Sir John said.
"Sir John carried out a four-year inquiry into allegations of widespread collusion between Special Branch, army officers and Protestant terrorists. He concluded there was damning proof of the use of agents in assassinations and withholding evidence."
Another Guardian story fingers one of Kerr's researchers -- a Brian Nelson
"An FRU agent, Brian Nelson, infiltrated and effectively ran the Ulster Defence Association, a loyalist terror group. Sir John's team believes that Nelson, who died last week, was responsible for at least 30 murders, and that many of the victims he helped to identify were not involved in terrorism."
As Steven's investigation was going on, Kerr spoke up for Nelson:
"Sir John believes that he has debunked the claim by Brigadier Gordon Kerr, who ran the FRU at the time of Finucane's murder, that Nelson saved more than 200 lives while he was operating in Northern Ireland. His team has found evidence he saved two: one of them was Gerry Adams. Finucane was killed by loyalist terrorists guided to him by Nelson.
Sir John's detectives uncovered evidence that some police officers wanted Finucane killed and that the force had been warned he was a target: at least two of the loyalists involved were police informers. But nothing was done to stop the murder."
Paul Foot's column is a little more cut to the chase about the Nelson-Kerr connection. Nelson wasn't just your average researcher/killer -- he organized arms shipments to the Protestant paramilitaries, under the benign protection of his fellow Researchers, and no doubt kept his group up to snuff with recruitment drives and plans for strategic attacks. All the gentlemen involved seem to have learned a lot from the Argentine military of the 1970s. In order to uphold their honor they were forced, alas, to frame an Army officer who was appalled at the collusion in assassination and gang warfare and threatened to grass. They framed the man for murdering his best friend, and had him sent away to prison for ten years. When Nelson was finally brought in on the charge of four murders, his researching buddy, Kerr, spoke up for him in court.
This case indicates some of the features that are no doubt in crystallization as Richard Perle's friend Ahmed Chelabi forms his own paramilitary group in Iraq. Apparently, Chelabi has sent a representative to Baghdad to claim dibs on the governance of that new American territory.
The deep collusion between army units and paramilitaries, the assassination of selected targets as the army officially presents itself as a neutral party, the importation of arms, and especially the nature of the targets -- lawyers, students, any educated person who is willing to speak out -- no doubt this is what is up next for the INC. Interesting. As Angus Calder showed long ago, Ireland was the site where the prototype of British imperialism was perfected in the seventeenth century -- the ethnic cleansing of the North American indians, for instance, followed on plans made by Raleigh, originally, for the ethnic cleansing of Catholic Irish -- and this was true down to the nomenclature. Raleigh's idea was to set up protestant plantations, as he called them, in Ireland. The Elizabethan effort floundered, but many of the elements of it became standard issue imperialist tools. Even down to the nineteenth century -- the British response to famine in Ireland being repeated in India, almost laissez faire impulse for laissez faire impulse.
Forged in Ireland
Brigadier Gordon Kerr operated a special unit for the British in Northern Ireland, the Force Research Unit. Research means different things to different people. For some research means a library; for others, research means going through files in some archive. For others, research is a sedate and secluded career among test tubes. For the Brigadier, apparently, research meant hiring killers among the Protestant paramilitaries to track down and kill dissident Catholics.
At least, that is the rumor about a suppressed report, today.
Among the victims of Kerr's research was one Pat Finucanne. The BBC admirably compressed report about researching Finucane starts like this:
"Loyalist paramilitaries shot Mr Finucane 14 times as he sat eating a Sunday meal at home, wounding his wife in the process. The couple's three children witnessed the 1989 attack. In its statement claiming the killing, the UFF said they had killed "Pat Finucane, the IRA officer".
While Mr Finucane had represented IRA members, the family vehemently denied the allegation - and have been supported in this by the police. But, what has made the investigation into his murder so important to many in Northern Ireland is that it lies at the heart of allegations that some members of the security forces collaborated with loyalist paramilitaries to the extent that they could have stopped the killing if they had so wished."
The last extenuating clause --"they could have stopped the killing if they had so wished" -- is apparently a sop thrown to elements of the "security forces" who consider that they did a wonderful job in Ulster. It is the language used by Stevens in the non-release of his report, today. The Guardian story begins like this:
"The murders of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane in February 1989 and Protestant student Brian Lambert in November 1987 by paramilitaries "could have been prevented" if the security forces had not been involved in the plots, Sir John said.
"Sir John carried out a four-year inquiry into allegations of widespread collusion between Special Branch, army officers and Protestant terrorists. He concluded there was damning proof of the use of agents in assassinations and withholding evidence."
Another Guardian story fingers one of Kerr's researchers -- a Brian Nelson
"An FRU agent, Brian Nelson, infiltrated and effectively ran the Ulster Defence Association, a loyalist terror group. Sir John's team believes that Nelson, who died last week, was responsible for at least 30 murders, and that many of the victims he helped to identify were not involved in terrorism."
As Steven's investigation was going on, Kerr spoke up for Nelson:
"Sir John believes that he has debunked the claim by Brigadier Gordon Kerr, who ran the FRU at the time of Finucane's murder, that Nelson saved more than 200 lives while he was operating in Northern Ireland. His team has found evidence he saved two: one of them was Gerry Adams. Finucane was killed by loyalist terrorists guided to him by Nelson.
Sir John's detectives uncovered evidence that some police officers wanted Finucane killed and that the force had been warned he was a target: at least two of the loyalists involved were police informers. But nothing was done to stop the murder."
Paul Foot's column is a little more cut to the chase about the Nelson-Kerr connection. Nelson wasn't just your average researcher/killer -- he organized arms shipments to the Protestant paramilitaries, under the benign protection of his fellow Researchers, and no doubt kept his group up to snuff with recruitment drives and plans for strategic attacks. All the gentlemen involved seem to have learned a lot from the Argentine military of the 1970s. In order to uphold their honor they were forced, alas, to frame an Army officer who was appalled at the collusion in assassination and gang warfare and threatened to grass. They framed the man for murdering his best friend, and had him sent away to prison for ten years. When Nelson was finally brought in on the charge of four murders, his researching buddy, Kerr, spoke up for him in court.
This case indicates some of the features that are no doubt in crystallization as Richard Perle's friend Ahmed Chelabi forms his own paramilitary group in Iraq. Apparently, Chelabi has sent a representative to Baghdad to claim dibs on the governance of that new American territory.
The deep collusion between army units and paramilitaries, the assassination of selected targets as the army officially presents itself as a neutral party, the importation of arms, and especially the nature of the targets -- lawyers, students, any educated person who is willing to speak out -- no doubt this is what is up next for the INC. Interesting. As Angus Calder showed long ago, Ireland was the site where the prototype of British imperialism was perfected in the seventeenth century -- the ethnic cleansing of the North American indians, for instance, followed on plans made by Raleigh, originally, for the ethnic cleansing of Catholic Irish -- and this was true down to the nomenclature. Raleigh's idea was to set up protestant plantations, as he called them, in Ireland. The Elizabethan effort floundered, but many of the elements of it became standard issue imperialist tools. Even down to the nineteenth century -- the British response to famine in Ireland being repeated in India, almost laissez faire impulse for laissez faire impulse.
Bollettino
Reviews, reviews. We went gleefully after Remnick on the Lenin issue a couple of days ago. Now it is Paul Berman's turn. Except... surely Scialabba's review in the Nation is misinterpreting the guy. Does Berman really believe that he can decode, in Lincoln's decision to persevere in waging war against the South, the choice to "repair the Founders' mistake and render "the whole concept [of liberal society] a little sturdier." In so doing, it took on a "universal mission": "the defense of democratic self-rule...for the entire planet"? Tell me I am not reading that.
Scialabba, with the crashing understatement of Stanley meeting Livingston in the jungles of Central Africa, writes, "This is a dubious interpretation of the Civil War..." Hmm, that's for sure. When Hegel decided that the miserable king of Prussia was the end of history, or when Goethe decided Napoleon was the spirit of history on horseback, surely the one had the excuse of syncophancy, and the other the excuse of Sturm und Drang. But Berman should have lived long enough not to let such heady nonsense escape onto a published page.
Scialabba coolly disses Berman's anti-Chomsky-ism (sure to make the book a rave for the New Republic crowd):
Perhaps because Berman dislikes being reminded forcefully of the enormous factual record that demonstrates the absurdity of this claim [the record of American subversion of liberties and defense of oligarchies during the last one hundred years], Terror and Liberalism includes a lengthy attack on Noam Chomsky. Ten pages of this slender book are devoted to painting Chomsky as a prime specimen of the left-wing "simple-minded rationalist," whose inability to comprehend the "mystery, self-contradiction, murk, or madness" of totalitarian movements leads him to attribute all the evil in the world to the "greed" of "giant corporations and their intellectual and governmental servants."
"After the Indochina war, Berman writes, Chomsky had no way to explain the atrocities in Cambodia. He therefore set out, basing himself on his "customary blizzard of... obscure sources" (an ungracious remark, this, coming from the author of so lightly documented and empirically thin a book as Terror and Liberalism), to demonstrate that "in Indochina, despite everything published in the newspapers...that genocide never occurred," or if it did, was all America's fault."
However, to return to our little hobbyhorse about Lenin, Scialabba seems more than willing to play Berman's game of pulling Lenin out of historical context. While S. disputes Berman's typology of totalitarianism as a popular pathology depending on the charisma of an obviously mad leader, he gives us this explanation of Bolshevism:
"The fit with Bolshevism is far from perfect. For one thing, the proletariat was not exactly the people of God. It never dwelt in peace and simplicity; it was born with the modern world, from the chaos and upheaval of industrialization. For another thing, Lenin was not exactly the Leader Berman says he was: "a superman," "a god," "a nihilist," "a genius beyond all geniuses...the man on horseback who, in his statements and demeanor, was visibly mad, and who, in his madness, incarnated the deepest of all the anti-liberal impulses, which was the revolt against rationality." Lenin was certainly an arrogant, cold-hearted son of a bitch, and it would have been much better for the world if he had fallen off (or under) that train before it reached the Finland Station. But he was not "mad" or a "nihilist," he did not regard himself as a god, and he was annoyed when other people did (or pretended to). Most important, Bolshevism was not exactly a "pathological mass movement," which, according to Berman, is the fundamental characteristic of all totalitarianisms and precisely what liberal intellectuals consistently fail to understand about them. Bolshevism was pathological all right, but it was not a mass movement. It was an elite, skillfully and ruthlessly controlling demoralized and apathetic masses. It was, as Nicolas Werth wrote in The Black Book of Communism, "a state against its people."
'Demoralized and apathetic masses"? Somehow, in the history of the Russian Revolution, the small, hardly worth mentioning fact of the war against Germany and Austria goes out of focus fast. The masses were demoralized, but not by the Bolsheviks - they were demoralized by the war. The 'party elite' would never have been able to take over a streetcorner if they hadn't relied on a strong military contingent. The demoralized and apathetic masses belonged to the Mensheviks. The aspirations of the Russian bourgoisie were crystalized in literature rathen than politics -- which is why we are rather fond of the Russian bourgoisie. Nabokov jr is much more representative of their abilities than Nabokov sr., try as the latter did to implant a form of parliamentarianism on Russian soil.
Sweeping historical views, such as Berman's seems to be, whiCh attempt to synchronize morality and history -- modifications of the Whig version of history, in other words -- always seem to leave out wars, famines, and the rest of it. If Berman really thinks France was disarmed pre-WWII because French leftists were pacifists, he has reached the acme of silliness. Alain's pacifism was much less debilitating to the French than the unwillingness of the British to combine with France to enforce the provisions of the Versailles treaty that France, after all, had insisted on. The reason for that is that Britain didn't want to spend the money necessary to have the military might to confront Hitler. If Berman thinks Blum didn't want to support the Popular side in Spain, he definitely has lost his connection to the long, lone song of leftist libertarianism. We follow that songline faithfully. Pity that he's lost it.
Reviews, reviews. We went gleefully after Remnick on the Lenin issue a couple of days ago. Now it is Paul Berman's turn. Except... surely Scialabba's review in the Nation is misinterpreting the guy. Does Berman really believe that he can decode, in Lincoln's decision to persevere in waging war against the South, the choice to "repair the Founders' mistake and render "the whole concept [of liberal society] a little sturdier." In so doing, it took on a "universal mission": "the defense of democratic self-rule...for the entire planet"? Tell me I am not reading that.
Scialabba, with the crashing understatement of Stanley meeting Livingston in the jungles of Central Africa, writes, "This is a dubious interpretation of the Civil War..." Hmm, that's for sure. When Hegel decided that the miserable king of Prussia was the end of history, or when Goethe decided Napoleon was the spirit of history on horseback, surely the one had the excuse of syncophancy, and the other the excuse of Sturm und Drang. But Berman should have lived long enough not to let such heady nonsense escape onto a published page.
Scialabba coolly disses Berman's anti-Chomsky-ism (sure to make the book a rave for the New Republic crowd):
Perhaps because Berman dislikes being reminded forcefully of the enormous factual record that demonstrates the absurdity of this claim [the record of American subversion of liberties and defense of oligarchies during the last one hundred years], Terror and Liberalism includes a lengthy attack on Noam Chomsky. Ten pages of this slender book are devoted to painting Chomsky as a prime specimen of the left-wing "simple-minded rationalist," whose inability to comprehend the "mystery, self-contradiction, murk, or madness" of totalitarian movements leads him to attribute all the evil in the world to the "greed" of "giant corporations and their intellectual and governmental servants."
"After the Indochina war, Berman writes, Chomsky had no way to explain the atrocities in Cambodia. He therefore set out, basing himself on his "customary blizzard of... obscure sources" (an ungracious remark, this, coming from the author of so lightly documented and empirically thin a book as Terror and Liberalism), to demonstrate that "in Indochina, despite everything published in the newspapers...that genocide never occurred," or if it did, was all America's fault."
However, to return to our little hobbyhorse about Lenin, Scialabba seems more than willing to play Berman's game of pulling Lenin out of historical context. While S. disputes Berman's typology of totalitarianism as a popular pathology depending on the charisma of an obviously mad leader, he gives us this explanation of Bolshevism:
"The fit with Bolshevism is far from perfect. For one thing, the proletariat was not exactly the people of God. It never dwelt in peace and simplicity; it was born with the modern world, from the chaos and upheaval of industrialization. For another thing, Lenin was not exactly the Leader Berman says he was: "a superman," "a god," "a nihilist," "a genius beyond all geniuses...the man on horseback who, in his statements and demeanor, was visibly mad, and who, in his madness, incarnated the deepest of all the anti-liberal impulses, which was the revolt against rationality." Lenin was certainly an arrogant, cold-hearted son of a bitch, and it would have been much better for the world if he had fallen off (or under) that train before it reached the Finland Station. But he was not "mad" or a "nihilist," he did not regard himself as a god, and he was annoyed when other people did (or pretended to). Most important, Bolshevism was not exactly a "pathological mass movement," which, according to Berman, is the fundamental characteristic of all totalitarianisms and precisely what liberal intellectuals consistently fail to understand about them. Bolshevism was pathological all right, but it was not a mass movement. It was an elite, skillfully and ruthlessly controlling demoralized and apathetic masses. It was, as Nicolas Werth wrote in The Black Book of Communism, "a state against its people."
'Demoralized and apathetic masses"? Somehow, in the history of the Russian Revolution, the small, hardly worth mentioning fact of the war against Germany and Austria goes out of focus fast. The masses were demoralized, but not by the Bolsheviks - they were demoralized by the war. The 'party elite' would never have been able to take over a streetcorner if they hadn't relied on a strong military contingent. The demoralized and apathetic masses belonged to the Mensheviks. The aspirations of the Russian bourgoisie were crystalized in literature rathen than politics -- which is why we are rather fond of the Russian bourgoisie. Nabokov jr is much more representative of their abilities than Nabokov sr., try as the latter did to implant a form of parliamentarianism on Russian soil.
Sweeping historical views, such as Berman's seems to be, whiCh attempt to synchronize morality and history -- modifications of the Whig version of history, in other words -- always seem to leave out wars, famines, and the rest of it. If Berman really thinks France was disarmed pre-WWII because French leftists were pacifists, he has reached the acme of silliness. Alain's pacifism was much less debilitating to the French than the unwillingness of the British to combine with France to enforce the provisions of the Versailles treaty that France, after all, had insisted on. The reason for that is that Britain didn't want to spend the money necessary to have the military might to confront Hitler. If Berman thinks Blum didn't want to support the Popular side in Spain, he definitely has lost his connection to the long, lone song of leftist libertarianism. We follow that songline faithfully. Pity that he's lost it.
Wednesday, April 16, 2003
Bollettino
Paul Foot's column in the Guardian ejects some salvoes at the League of Leftist Warmongers -- presumably Nick Cohen. Foot's thesis is that Democracy only grows from below. This is pretty much our thesis, too. But our second thesis -- that time and circumstance dictate events, not iron laws abstracted from the flow of history - modifies our first one. We don't think that Northern Iraq, in which, after faction and civil discord, a civil society was beginning to peep out, is anamolous.
Foot's claim arises from two questions put to an imaginary LLW opponent:
"As I understand the LLW position, they would, in general, prefer tyrants to be overthrown by the people they oppress. At times, however, they complain the tyranny is so savage, so universally terrifying that it has to be overthrown by superior military force from elsewhere. So the only way to topple Saddam was by US military might. Two points arise. First, in Iran in 1979 the people themselves toppled the tyranny of the Shah - a tyranny every bit as terrifying as that of Saddam Hussein (and imposed and sustained, incidentally, by the US). Second, what guarantee is there that any sustainable democracy will now succeed in Iraq?"
Foot answers his questions by claiming that, 1, it was possible for Saddam to be overthrown the old fashioned way, and that 2., Iraq's hell will be giving way to further hells:
"In the event, all that has been created on the pile of corpses in this war (and most people die in such a war not by being shot or bombed directly, but from loss of limb, blood, disease or plague) is a political vacuum into which plunge a host of contractors, bounty hunters, looters and minorities terrified of another round of persecution. In this chaos, the only beneficiaries are the millionaires and their toadying politicians who caused it in the first place. Our political leaders promise elections, as though poor dismembered Iraq can be compared to East Germany or Czechoslovakia or Indonesia or Serbia after their tyrants were deposed in the 1980s and 1990s. In all those countries, elections followed close on the end of the dictatorships. But in all those countries the tyrants were toppled by movements from below. In Iraq, as in Afghanistan, the tyrants were toppled from above, by stronger military power in other countries. In Afghanistan, they are still waiting for elections and will wait a long time yet, but not as long, I expect, as in Iraq."
Where Foot finds a political vacuum, we find an open moment. We are more comfortable with the term civil society than democracy because democracy has come to mean elections. Elections are fine, but they aren't sufficient to create real liberty. In fact, they can impede real liberty, especially when they are used as excuses to strip a political system of the various subsystems that countervail established power.
Among those subsystems is a sense of humor. One of the things we have liked about the last week is that, even through the fog of war reporting, there seems to be a lot of Iraqi humor directed at the momentous events that dim the lights in every household every night. It seems grotesque to speak of humor when, as Foot puts it, the corpses are heaped everywhere. But how else to explain this article by NYT reporter Ian Fisher:
"The Americans are the ones who have been looting and taking things out of the stores and giving them to families," said Amer Karim, 30, who was himself selling two industrial ceiling fans and a new telephone in a street market in the Kadhimiya section of Baghdad. "So anyone who is selling these things didn't really loot it."
Or the rumor that Saddam Hussein has taken refuge in the USA?
Surely Iraqis who are getting used to being accosted by arrogant newsmen looking for pathos and gratitude have got Fisher's number. And surely that is a sign of the times.
Paul Foot's column in the Guardian ejects some salvoes at the League of Leftist Warmongers -- presumably Nick Cohen. Foot's thesis is that Democracy only grows from below. This is pretty much our thesis, too. But our second thesis -- that time and circumstance dictate events, not iron laws abstracted from the flow of history - modifies our first one. We don't think that Northern Iraq, in which, after faction and civil discord, a civil society was beginning to peep out, is anamolous.
Foot's claim arises from two questions put to an imaginary LLW opponent:
"As I understand the LLW position, they would, in general, prefer tyrants to be overthrown by the people they oppress. At times, however, they complain the tyranny is so savage, so universally terrifying that it has to be overthrown by superior military force from elsewhere. So the only way to topple Saddam was by US military might. Two points arise. First, in Iran in 1979 the people themselves toppled the tyranny of the Shah - a tyranny every bit as terrifying as that of Saddam Hussein (and imposed and sustained, incidentally, by the US). Second, what guarantee is there that any sustainable democracy will now succeed in Iraq?"
Foot answers his questions by claiming that, 1, it was possible for Saddam to be overthrown the old fashioned way, and that 2., Iraq's hell will be giving way to further hells:
"In the event, all that has been created on the pile of corpses in this war (and most people die in such a war not by being shot or bombed directly, but from loss of limb, blood, disease or plague) is a political vacuum into which plunge a host of contractors, bounty hunters, looters and minorities terrified of another round of persecution. In this chaos, the only beneficiaries are the millionaires and their toadying politicians who caused it in the first place. Our political leaders promise elections, as though poor dismembered Iraq can be compared to East Germany or Czechoslovakia or Indonesia or Serbia after their tyrants were deposed in the 1980s and 1990s. In all those countries, elections followed close on the end of the dictatorships. But in all those countries the tyrants were toppled by movements from below. In Iraq, as in Afghanistan, the tyrants were toppled from above, by stronger military power in other countries. In Afghanistan, they are still waiting for elections and will wait a long time yet, but not as long, I expect, as in Iraq."
Where Foot finds a political vacuum, we find an open moment. We are more comfortable with the term civil society than democracy because democracy has come to mean elections. Elections are fine, but they aren't sufficient to create real liberty. In fact, they can impede real liberty, especially when they are used as excuses to strip a political system of the various subsystems that countervail established power.
Among those subsystems is a sense of humor. One of the things we have liked about the last week is that, even through the fog of war reporting, there seems to be a lot of Iraqi humor directed at the momentous events that dim the lights in every household every night. It seems grotesque to speak of humor when, as Foot puts it, the corpses are heaped everywhere. But how else to explain this article by NYT reporter Ian Fisher:
"The Americans are the ones who have been looting and taking things out of the stores and giving them to families," said Amer Karim, 30, who was himself selling two industrial ceiling fans and a new telephone in a street market in the Kadhimiya section of Baghdad. "So anyone who is selling these things didn't really loot it."
Or the rumor that Saddam Hussein has taken refuge in the USA?
Surely Iraqis who are getting used to being accosted by arrogant newsmen looking for pathos and gratitude have got Fisher's number. And surely that is a sign of the times.
Bollettino
Our friend D. says he hates it when we get all maudlin over our own poverty and misery, so we have avoided talking about all that tasteless stuff. But recently our poverty and misery are getting out of hand. In the past month, we have received a total of 225 dollars from those who we have contracted to write for -- out of a total of 1000 dollars owed. On this amount, a man with our daily calory intake ... not to mention our need for alcohol ... cannot exist.
So anybody who has a tip about jobs in the Austin area -- preferably ones that don't involve a tremendous loss of vital fluids -- should write us at rgathman@aol.com.
Thanks.
Our friend D. says he hates it when we get all maudlin over our own poverty and misery, so we have avoided talking about all that tasteless stuff. But recently our poverty and misery are getting out of hand. In the past month, we have received a total of 225 dollars from those who we have contracted to write for -- out of a total of 1000 dollars owed. On this amount, a man with our daily calory intake ... not to mention our need for alcohol ... cannot exist.
So anybody who has a tip about jobs in the Austin area -- preferably ones that don't involve a tremendous loss of vital fluids -- should write us at rgathman@aol.com.
Thanks.
Bollettino
The BBC news, doing its best to subvert the brightest and best that has been thought or spun -- at least if we confine this kind of thing, which can get out of hand, to the set of responsible Pentagon apparatchiks that operate in the circle around Wolfowitz -- featured a story on the Shi'ite protest of the Founding Convention at An Nasiriyah, under Smilin' Jay Garner, as always Iraq's number one choice for el jefe supremo. Jay, in an exclusive with the Scotsman, confided that he was reminded of the Philadelphia convention of 1787 himself:
"But General Jay Garner insisted that United States-style democracy could sprout on the shards of Saddam Hussein�s government.
"I don�t think they had a love-in when they had Philadelphia in 1787," he said before he left. "Anytime you start the process it�s fraught with dialogue, tensions, coercion, and should be."
Iraq, he suggested, could be the richest country in the Middle East within a few years."
That Jay, always with the history of Iraq at his fingertips -- and, of course, due to some thousands-weight of smart bombs and the cluster kind, Philadelphia in 1787 is, practically, Iraq's history now.
The Christian Science Monitor features this quote on the Philadelphia like meeting:
"Tuesday's meeting of Iraqis and Iraqi exiles in the shadow of the ancient ziggurat of Ur was simply the beginning of what is likely to be a lengthy process. Its ultimate aim, according to US officials: build a government in which all Iraqis, be they Sunni, Shiite, or Kurd, feel they have a representative voice."There are some very dangerous cleavages there," says Rashid Khalidi, a historian of the Middle East at the University of Chicago. "If exploited by outside forces they could cause problems."
Outside forces! Yikes! Like, say, a large superpower about 8,000 miles away, pulling all the strings?
Sorry about that. We've canned the pipsqueak that stole in and wrote that line. A cheap shot at our brave attempts to forge an Iraq fit for the vision of Iraq's corps of eager beaver proconsuls in D.C. An Iraq in which every corporation could participate in the sweet, sweet air of freedom sweeping that great Middle Eastern piece of real estate; in which, privatized, the natural resources of that great country can flow as the invisible hand intended them to; in which, angry at the wickedness of their neighbors, the government might even support staging surgical improvements, via the latest weaponry, in Damascus and Teheran, if this is so suggested by a close ally.
In other events celebrating the dawn of democracy, the NYT reported that "similar demonstrations [to those staged by the Shi'ites] were under way in Baghdad. In Mosul, an angry crowd stoned an Iraqi opposition leader praising the arrival of United States marines. A gun battle ensued in which 10 Iraqis were reported killed and 16 were wounded.
"The senior Shiite cleric in the holy city of Najaf, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sestani, sent a message through his son today saying he was in hiding until the religious strife that has included murders and demonstrations there subsided."
A gun battle? No doubt instigated by Rashid Kalidi's "outside forces." Although according to the WP, the NYT story reports that US Marines were the gunners. Here's another story, from Australia, about these confusing, although unimportant, events:
"US forces accused of shooting on an angry crowd in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul overnight said they had come under fire from at least two gunmen and fired back, but did not aim at the crowd.
The shots came as the newly-appointed governor of the city was making a speech from the building housing his offices which was deemed too pro-US by his listeners, witnesses said."There were protesters outside, 100 to 150, there was fire, we returned fire," a US military spokesman said."
Although the returned fire was trained on a roof, apparently ten to twelve people in the crowd died. But the reporting on this incident reminds us -- do we hear an echo here -- of the way Palestinian deaths somehow involve rockthrowing crowds, totally innocent gunplay by soldiers, and the miraculous, and unimportant, deaths of ten here, three there.
So it goes as Philadelphia like feelings permeate the junketeers of freedom over there, and all of us over here. God bless and good night.
The BBC news, doing its best to subvert the brightest and best that has been thought or spun -- at least if we confine this kind of thing, which can get out of hand, to the set of responsible Pentagon apparatchiks that operate in the circle around Wolfowitz -- featured a story on the Shi'ite protest of the Founding Convention at An Nasiriyah, under Smilin' Jay Garner, as always Iraq's number one choice for el jefe supremo. Jay, in an exclusive with the Scotsman, confided that he was reminded of the Philadelphia convention of 1787 himself:
"But General Jay Garner insisted that United States-style democracy could sprout on the shards of Saddam Hussein�s government.
"I don�t think they had a love-in when they had Philadelphia in 1787," he said before he left. "Anytime you start the process it�s fraught with dialogue, tensions, coercion, and should be."
Iraq, he suggested, could be the richest country in the Middle East within a few years."
That Jay, always with the history of Iraq at his fingertips -- and, of course, due to some thousands-weight of smart bombs and the cluster kind, Philadelphia in 1787 is, practically, Iraq's history now.
The Christian Science Monitor features this quote on the Philadelphia like meeting:
"Tuesday's meeting of Iraqis and Iraqi exiles in the shadow of the ancient ziggurat of Ur was simply the beginning of what is likely to be a lengthy process. Its ultimate aim, according to US officials: build a government in which all Iraqis, be they Sunni, Shiite, or Kurd, feel they have a representative voice."There are some very dangerous cleavages there," says Rashid Khalidi, a historian of the Middle East at the University of Chicago. "If exploited by outside forces they could cause problems."
Outside forces! Yikes! Like, say, a large superpower about 8,000 miles away, pulling all the strings?
Sorry about that. We've canned the pipsqueak that stole in and wrote that line. A cheap shot at our brave attempts to forge an Iraq fit for the vision of Iraq's corps of eager beaver proconsuls in D.C. An Iraq in which every corporation could participate in the sweet, sweet air of freedom sweeping that great Middle Eastern piece of real estate; in which, privatized, the natural resources of that great country can flow as the invisible hand intended them to; in which, angry at the wickedness of their neighbors, the government might even support staging surgical improvements, via the latest weaponry, in Damascus and Teheran, if this is so suggested by a close ally.
In other events celebrating the dawn of democracy, the NYT reported that "similar demonstrations [to those staged by the Shi'ites] were under way in Baghdad. In Mosul, an angry crowd stoned an Iraqi opposition leader praising the arrival of United States marines. A gun battle ensued in which 10 Iraqis were reported killed and 16 were wounded.
"The senior Shiite cleric in the holy city of Najaf, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sestani, sent a message through his son today saying he was in hiding until the religious strife that has included murders and demonstrations there subsided."
A gun battle? No doubt instigated by Rashid Kalidi's "outside forces." Although according to the WP, the NYT story reports that US Marines were the gunners. Here's another story, from Australia, about these confusing, although unimportant, events:
"US forces accused of shooting on an angry crowd in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul overnight said they had come under fire from at least two gunmen and fired back, but did not aim at the crowd.
The shots came as the newly-appointed governor of the city was making a speech from the building housing his offices which was deemed too pro-US by his listeners, witnesses said."There were protesters outside, 100 to 150, there was fire, we returned fire," a US military spokesman said."
Although the returned fire was trained on a roof, apparently ten to twelve people in the crowd died. But the reporting on this incident reminds us -- do we hear an echo here -- of the way Palestinian deaths somehow involve rockthrowing crowds, totally innocent gunplay by soldiers, and the miraculous, and unimportant, deaths of ten here, three there.
So it goes as Philadelphia like feelings permeate the junketeers of freedom over there, and all of us over here. God bless and good night.
Tuesday, April 15, 2003
Bollettino
Smilin' Jay
Smilin' Jay made his debut as the embodiment of the Iraqi Geist at a meeting of all allowable Iraqi political groups today. At this meeting he spoke for all of when he pledged, as head of the US led Iraqi government, never to install a US led government in Iraq. Lately, the Bush administration has been lessening the gap between the claim and its contradiction. It took three weeks between the time they pledged to use Iraqi oil revenues to pay for the invasion and the moment in which they disclaimed ever intending to use Iraqi oil revenues to pay for the invasion. Since the Bush administration is run by business types, they know that in today's competitive marketplace, it's an "I want it yesterday" kind of atmosphere. They are simply transferring those principles of free enterprise to their own dealing in mendacity. A credibility gap is only as big as the time it takes to contradict one falsehood with another.
As for the meeting, like unto the sacred Philadelphia convention that whelped our own republic -- if, that is, that convention had been led by a French marquis, and backed up with two hundred thousand french troops -- the NYT has the grafs:
"Many of those who did not attend said they opposed United States plans to install the retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner to run an interim administration in Iraq.
General Garner, wearing an Iraqi flag pin on his blue shirt, opened the conference by saying, ``A free and democratic Iraq will begin today.''
He added, ``What better place than the birthplace of civilization could you have for the beginning of a free Iraq?''
This is particularly rich considering the US decision to stand by while the Baghdad museum was looted. This Chicago Sun-Times article details the damage. The last three grafs are a fair indication of the Bush-ite attitude towards the birthplace of civilization:
"U.S. forces are making a belated attempt to protect the National Museum, calling on Iraqi policemen to turn up for duty. There is no pay, but 80 have volunteered.
"The Americans were supposed to protect the museum," Amin said. "If they had just one tank and two soldiers, nothing like this would have happened. I hold the American troops responsible.
"The Americans knew that the museum was at risk and could have protected it, said Patty Gerstenblith, a professor at DePaul School of Law in Chicago who helped circulate a petition before the war, urging that care be taken to protect Iraqi antiquities. ''It was completely inexcusable and avoidable,'' she said."
Well, you just can't pay police to hang around a palace of dusty junk. You get Dyncorps to do it! and pay them out of future oil revenues. An especially brilliant plan, this one, of guarding a looted museum. Those future retarded looters are gonna get it.
Smilin' Jay
Smilin' Jay made his debut as the embodiment of the Iraqi Geist at a meeting of all allowable Iraqi political groups today. At this meeting he spoke for all of when he pledged, as head of the US led Iraqi government, never to install a US led government in Iraq. Lately, the Bush administration has been lessening the gap between the claim and its contradiction. It took three weeks between the time they pledged to use Iraqi oil revenues to pay for the invasion and the moment in which they disclaimed ever intending to use Iraqi oil revenues to pay for the invasion. Since the Bush administration is run by business types, they know that in today's competitive marketplace, it's an "I want it yesterday" kind of atmosphere. They are simply transferring those principles of free enterprise to their own dealing in mendacity. A credibility gap is only as big as the time it takes to contradict one falsehood with another.
As for the meeting, like unto the sacred Philadelphia convention that whelped our own republic -- if, that is, that convention had been led by a French marquis, and backed up with two hundred thousand french troops -- the NYT has the grafs:
"Many of those who did not attend said they opposed United States plans to install the retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner to run an interim administration in Iraq.
General Garner, wearing an Iraqi flag pin on his blue shirt, opened the conference by saying, ``A free and democratic Iraq will begin today.''
He added, ``What better place than the birthplace of civilization could you have for the beginning of a free Iraq?''
This is particularly rich considering the US decision to stand by while the Baghdad museum was looted. This Chicago Sun-Times article details the damage. The last three grafs are a fair indication of the Bush-ite attitude towards the birthplace of civilization:
"U.S. forces are making a belated attempt to protect the National Museum, calling on Iraqi policemen to turn up for duty. There is no pay, but 80 have volunteered.
"The Americans were supposed to protect the museum," Amin said. "If they had just one tank and two soldiers, nothing like this would have happened. I hold the American troops responsible.
"The Americans knew that the museum was at risk and could have protected it, said Patty Gerstenblith, a professor at DePaul School of Law in Chicago who helped circulate a petition before the war, urging that care be taken to protect Iraqi antiquities. ''It was completely inexcusable and avoidable,'' she said."
Well, you just can't pay police to hang around a palace of dusty junk. You get Dyncorps to do it! and pay them out of future oil revenues. An especially brilliant plan, this one, of guarding a looted museum. Those future retarded looters are gonna get it.
Bollettino
Let�s overturn some silver plated pieties, shall we?
David Remnick�s review of Annie Applebaum�s history of the Gulag is so riddled with disingenuous passages and distortions that it could have been written for a particularly dim Tory publication in 1930.
If there is one atrocity against the human race that we ought to know more about, it is the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn�s history weighs on that history like a nightmare �and it should. It is a great work of art. I am almost tempted to say, alas. The standard histories of the holocaust, like Raul Hilberg, are not works of art. So that any account of the Gulag, in the west, has to wrest it from Solzhenitsyn. There are, of course, histories about aspects of the Stalinist terror, from Robert Conquest to Zhores Medvedev; however, I believe Annie Applebaum has written the first popular history of it.
I�m not going to comb through this review. That seems pointless. When Remnick gets to the meat of the Gulag � the meat of the meatgrinder � you don�t have to put a bodyguard on him. It is only when he is revving up, getting into his anti-Bolshie mode, that he starts throwing spitballs.
The intro serves up a familiar Remnick motif: the anxiety to blame Lenin. Lenin, in Remnick�s view, is the father of the Gulag. To do this, however, he has to deal with the fact that, under Lenin, atrocities were mainly embedded in the Civil War. If one compares the number of prisoners in camps under Lenin to, say, the number in France�s penal colonies, there isn�t much of a difference. Lenin, of course, died in 1924. Remnick starts out with Dmitri Likhachev, a man who was imprisoned at the Solovki Islands in 1928. Here�s how Remnick puts it:
�He was living proof that the Gulag had been the invention not of Stalin but, rather, of Lenin, the Bolshevik founder, because, he said wearily, �I was a prisoner at Lenin�s first concentration camp.�
As almost always, when Remnick gets on this topic, you can bet that the omission of the fact that Lenin died four years before Likhachev was sent to Solovki is malignant. But if the confusion of dates is leading the witness, Remnick�s riff on the origin of the term concentration camp is leading the witness to drink, and heavily, and all from the waters of oblivion.
�The concentration camp, as both a term and a concept, has complicated beginnings. It was first used to refer to a form of incarceration, when the Spanish military during the Cuban insurrection, Americans in the Philippines, and the British during the Boer War established what were called �concentration camps.� These camps were harsh places, where many prisoners died, but they did not begin to suggest the horror that �concentration camp� would soon convey.�
As a moral tergiversator, Remnick is operating on a grand scale. The reason that so many became communists in the 1930s was exactly this kind of distortion of the evidence made one believe that anticommunists were inherently incapable of telling the truth. Concentration camps in British and American hands, we are given to believe by the bland Remnick, were mild things. �Many prisoners died there�� Hmm. According to Niall Ferguson�s handy Empire, 27,927 Boers died in the camps, or 14 percent of the entire Boer population. Since this happened in 1900, and Lenin was alive, perhaps he was, in some mysterious way, responsible. 14,000 of the black prisoners died, too, by the way, 81 percent children. These deaths were not the fault of commisars, but of good old British upper class politicians. The imprisoned, by the way, consisted mostly of women and children. Why? Because the Boers were, by this time, fighting a guerilla war against the British army. So the British took their families prisoner in order to subdue them. Like the empire itself, the concentration camp system happened in a fit of absent mindedness � for instance, the absence of mind that would provide little provision, and no medical care, for those prisoners.
Now, let�s see how that compares to Lenin�s real concentration camp totals. Solovki was started a year before Lenin�s death. There were, according to Annie Applebaum�s introduction, eighty one camps started under Lenin, after 1921. However, even she doesn�t claim these camps were killing on the Boer camp level. They weren�t even, by her account, on the Czarist level:
�Still, in the nineteenth century, katorga [political exile] remained a relatively rare form of punishment. In 1906, only about 6,000 katorga convicts were serving sentences; in 1916, on the eve of the Revolution, there were only 28,600. Of far greater economic importance was another category of prisoner: the forced settlers, who were sentenced to live in exile, but not in prison, in underpopulated regions of the country, chosen for their economic potential. Between 1824 and 1889 alone, some 720,000 forced settlers were sent to Siberia. Many were accompanied by their families. They, not the convicts laboring in chains, gradually populated Russia's empty, mineral-rich wastelands.�
To really talk about the Gulag is to talk about Prison. Since America is the world incarceration leader, it is difficult to do in the American context. The americans contend that putting a man in prison because he is a Trotskyist is the height of unreason, while putting him in prison because he injects opiates in his veins is common sense. Americans conted that leaving a man to almost freeze to death in the snow on a work detail is torture, while immersing him in 23 hours of solitary darkness per diem, as is the fate of many of NY's worst criminals, is a refreshing response to liberal leniety. We consider that there is no topic like prison to bring out all the disgusting sophistries in a society. But certain things are clear:
- Lenin early on adapted all the techniques that were employed by the �bourgeois� powers, including executing deserters, terrorizing prisoners, and throwing into prison dissenters.
- Stalin�s name is connected by an indissoluble link to the Gulag because he took the prison camp and made it the central characteristic of his rule. That simply isn�t true of Lenin.
- The rhetoric of atrocity is diseased from the very beginning if the standards by which one condemns it are jiggered in favor of societies one favors. One of the many admirable things about Ferguson�s book is that, though he is a Conservative, he doesn�t do a lot of jiggering. One of the awful things about all of Remnick�s Russian writings is he does nothing but.
Let�s overturn some silver plated pieties, shall we?
David Remnick�s review of Annie Applebaum�s history of the Gulag is so riddled with disingenuous passages and distortions that it could have been written for a particularly dim Tory publication in 1930.
If there is one atrocity against the human race that we ought to know more about, it is the Gulag. Solzhenitsyn�s history weighs on that history like a nightmare �and it should. It is a great work of art. I am almost tempted to say, alas. The standard histories of the holocaust, like Raul Hilberg, are not works of art. So that any account of the Gulag, in the west, has to wrest it from Solzhenitsyn. There are, of course, histories about aspects of the Stalinist terror, from Robert Conquest to Zhores Medvedev; however, I believe Annie Applebaum has written the first popular history of it.
I�m not going to comb through this review. That seems pointless. When Remnick gets to the meat of the Gulag � the meat of the meatgrinder � you don�t have to put a bodyguard on him. It is only when he is revving up, getting into his anti-Bolshie mode, that he starts throwing spitballs.
The intro serves up a familiar Remnick motif: the anxiety to blame Lenin. Lenin, in Remnick�s view, is the father of the Gulag. To do this, however, he has to deal with the fact that, under Lenin, atrocities were mainly embedded in the Civil War. If one compares the number of prisoners in camps under Lenin to, say, the number in France�s penal colonies, there isn�t much of a difference. Lenin, of course, died in 1924. Remnick starts out with Dmitri Likhachev, a man who was imprisoned at the Solovki Islands in 1928. Here�s how Remnick puts it:
�He was living proof that the Gulag had been the invention not of Stalin but, rather, of Lenin, the Bolshevik founder, because, he said wearily, �I was a prisoner at Lenin�s first concentration camp.�
As almost always, when Remnick gets on this topic, you can bet that the omission of the fact that Lenin died four years before Likhachev was sent to Solovki is malignant. But if the confusion of dates is leading the witness, Remnick�s riff on the origin of the term concentration camp is leading the witness to drink, and heavily, and all from the waters of oblivion.
�The concentration camp, as both a term and a concept, has complicated beginnings. It was first used to refer to a form of incarceration, when the Spanish military during the Cuban insurrection, Americans in the Philippines, and the British during the Boer War established what were called �concentration camps.� These camps were harsh places, where many prisoners died, but they did not begin to suggest the horror that �concentration camp� would soon convey.�
As a moral tergiversator, Remnick is operating on a grand scale. The reason that so many became communists in the 1930s was exactly this kind of distortion of the evidence made one believe that anticommunists were inherently incapable of telling the truth. Concentration camps in British and American hands, we are given to believe by the bland Remnick, were mild things. �Many prisoners died there�� Hmm. According to Niall Ferguson�s handy Empire, 27,927 Boers died in the camps, or 14 percent of the entire Boer population. Since this happened in 1900, and Lenin was alive, perhaps he was, in some mysterious way, responsible. 14,000 of the black prisoners died, too, by the way, 81 percent children. These deaths were not the fault of commisars, but of good old British upper class politicians. The imprisoned, by the way, consisted mostly of women and children. Why? Because the Boers were, by this time, fighting a guerilla war against the British army. So the British took their families prisoner in order to subdue them. Like the empire itself, the concentration camp system happened in a fit of absent mindedness � for instance, the absence of mind that would provide little provision, and no medical care, for those prisoners.
Now, let�s see how that compares to Lenin�s real concentration camp totals. Solovki was started a year before Lenin�s death. There were, according to Annie Applebaum�s introduction, eighty one camps started under Lenin, after 1921. However, even she doesn�t claim these camps were killing on the Boer camp level. They weren�t even, by her account, on the Czarist level:
�Still, in the nineteenth century, katorga [political exile] remained a relatively rare form of punishment. In 1906, only about 6,000 katorga convicts were serving sentences; in 1916, on the eve of the Revolution, there were only 28,600. Of far greater economic importance was another category of prisoner: the forced settlers, who were sentenced to live in exile, but not in prison, in underpopulated regions of the country, chosen for their economic potential. Between 1824 and 1889 alone, some 720,000 forced settlers were sent to Siberia. Many were accompanied by their families. They, not the convicts laboring in chains, gradually populated Russia's empty, mineral-rich wastelands.�
To really talk about the Gulag is to talk about Prison. Since America is the world incarceration leader, it is difficult to do in the American context. The americans contend that putting a man in prison because he is a Trotskyist is the height of unreason, while putting him in prison because he injects opiates in his veins is common sense. Americans conted that leaving a man to almost freeze to death in the snow on a work detail is torture, while immersing him in 23 hours of solitary darkness per diem, as is the fate of many of NY's worst criminals, is a refreshing response to liberal leniety. We consider that there is no topic like prison to bring out all the disgusting sophistries in a society. But certain things are clear:
- Lenin early on adapted all the techniques that were employed by the �bourgeois� powers, including executing deserters, terrorizing prisoners, and throwing into prison dissenters.
- Stalin�s name is connected by an indissoluble link to the Gulag because he took the prison camp and made it the central characteristic of his rule. That simply isn�t true of Lenin.
- The rhetoric of atrocity is diseased from the very beginning if the standards by which one condemns it are jiggered in favor of societies one favors. One of the many admirable things about Ferguson�s book is that, though he is a Conservative, he doesn�t do a lot of jiggering. One of the awful things about all of Remnick�s Russian writings is he does nothing but.
Monday, April 14, 2003
Bollettino
Dyncorps to the rescue!
Corp watch continues its excellent coverage of the looting in Iraq -- that is, the looting by major corporations in cahoots with the Bush-ites. Apparently Dyncorps, a corporation that is one of the growing number of private military organizations that have taken the paramilitary out of the primitive era of random torture and put it on a paying basis is heading for Iraq, to guard the streets and prisons of Smilin' Jay Garner's fair democracy.
Dyncorps has established a solid record in Columbia (where they spray herbicide for the US Gov, and have had a suit, brought against them by Ecuadorian peasants for the collateral damage to livestock, crops, and human babies (not important ones -- just Ecuadorians), blocked by the US Gov; and in Bosnia, where Corp Watch culled these interesting tidbits:
"...Kathryn Bolkovac, a U.N. International Police Force monitor filed a lawsuit in Britain in 2001 against DynCorp for firing her after she reported that Dyncorp police trainers in Bosnia were paying for prostitutes and participating in sex trafficking. Many of the Dyncorp employees were forced to resign under suspicion of illegal activity. But none were prosecuted, since they enjoy immunity from prosecution in Bosnia.
Earlier that year Ben Johnston, a DynCorp aircraft mechanic for Apache and Blackhawk helicopters in Kosovo, filed a lawsuit against his employer. The suit alleged that that in the latter part of 1999 Johnson "learned that employees and supervisors from DynCorp were engaging in perverse, illegal and inhumane behavior [and] were purchasing illegal weapons, women, forged passports and [participating in] other immoral acts."
Shucks, if this isn't just the kind of company in whose company Dick Cheney has always shown himself to be a grateful guest! Dick's company, after all, has had a bit of a tohu-bohu about its own private army's doin's in Angola.
Insight also features a story about the Dyncorps contract. It is very interesting:
Insight has learned that the U.S. State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs has issued a $22 million contract to DynCorp Aerospace Operations (UK) Ltd., a subsidiary of Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), to "re-establish police, justice and prison functions in postconflict Iraq." "The contract," according to one congressional aide who asked not to be identified, "was sole-sourced for one year. But this contract could come to $500 million before it's through."
"There are some strange things about how this contract was issued," the aide continues, "because why would CSC use an offshore subsidiary. Is it so they won't have to pay taxes on this money? Also, why wasn't this contract put up for bid? Why was DynCorp the chosen recipient?"
Indeed, DynCorp has many federal contracts. But sole-sourcing of this contract has raised eyebrows for some at the State Department and in Congress where aides want answers about this deal and others coming down the pike."
On to the eternal battle: winning hearts and minds for at least the two more weeks that the US press will pay attention to the effort! Although one does wonder if any noise will be made at all about the US doing business with an obvious tax shelter. Last year, there were even some virtuous noises made about such things. But that was soooooooo l'an dernier!
Dyncorps to the rescue!
Corp watch continues its excellent coverage of the looting in Iraq -- that is, the looting by major corporations in cahoots with the Bush-ites. Apparently Dyncorps, a corporation that is one of the growing number of private military organizations that have taken the paramilitary out of the primitive era of random torture and put it on a paying basis is heading for Iraq, to guard the streets and prisons of Smilin' Jay Garner's fair democracy.
Dyncorps has established a solid record in Columbia (where they spray herbicide for the US Gov, and have had a suit, brought against them by Ecuadorian peasants for the collateral damage to livestock, crops, and human babies (not important ones -- just Ecuadorians), blocked by the US Gov; and in Bosnia, where Corp Watch culled these interesting tidbits:
"...Kathryn Bolkovac, a U.N. International Police Force monitor filed a lawsuit in Britain in 2001 against DynCorp for firing her after she reported that Dyncorp police trainers in Bosnia were paying for prostitutes and participating in sex trafficking. Many of the Dyncorp employees were forced to resign under suspicion of illegal activity. But none were prosecuted, since they enjoy immunity from prosecution in Bosnia.
Earlier that year Ben Johnston, a DynCorp aircraft mechanic for Apache and Blackhawk helicopters in Kosovo, filed a lawsuit against his employer. The suit alleged that that in the latter part of 1999 Johnson "learned that employees and supervisors from DynCorp were engaging in perverse, illegal and inhumane behavior [and] were purchasing illegal weapons, women, forged passports and [participating in] other immoral acts."
Shucks, if this isn't just the kind of company in whose company Dick Cheney has always shown himself to be a grateful guest! Dick's company, after all, has had a bit of a tohu-bohu about its own private army's doin's in Angola.
Insight also features a story about the Dyncorps contract. It is very interesting:
Insight has learned that the U.S. State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs has issued a $22 million contract to DynCorp Aerospace Operations (UK) Ltd., a subsidiary of Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), to "re-establish police, justice and prison functions in postconflict Iraq." "The contract," according to one congressional aide who asked not to be identified, "was sole-sourced for one year. But this contract could come to $500 million before it's through."
"There are some strange things about how this contract was issued," the aide continues, "because why would CSC use an offshore subsidiary. Is it so they won't have to pay taxes on this money? Also, why wasn't this contract put up for bid? Why was DynCorp the chosen recipient?"
Indeed, DynCorp has many federal contracts. But sole-sourcing of this contract has raised eyebrows for some at the State Department and in Congress where aides want answers about this deal and others coming down the pike."
On to the eternal battle: winning hearts and minds for at least the two more weeks that the US press will pay attention to the effort! Although one does wonder if any noise will be made at all about the US doing business with an obvious tax shelter. Last year, there were even some virtuous noises made about such things. But that was soooooooo l'an dernier!
Bollettino
A couple of weeks ago, LI was circulating a little op ed piece to various outlets, desperately hoping for a hit. This was before the War. The op ed began:
"For those who doubt that the Bush administration is invading Iraq to install a democracy, there were two telling stories in the last week of February. One, a small story about Post Saddam Iraq in the March 3 Business Week, contained a comparison of the cost of reconstructing and holding together Iraq and the revenues currently produced by Iraqi oil fields:
"Unless oil prices stay at current high levels, Iraq's oil income of around $15 to $20 billion per year isn't likely to be enough to pay for food and other needed imports as well as rebuilding and development costs. That tab is estimated at $20 billion a year over several years."
The other story was in the Washington Times. A congressional committee was grilling Paul Wolfowitz, the ideologue behind Bush's rush to war. Wolfowitz was stonewalling about the cost of the war and the occupation. At one point, however, the committee did break on through to the other side - getting a revealing glimpse of the thought process that is taking place at the highest levels of Bush's White House. Wolfowitz testified "it is wrong to believe that the United States will foot the bill for occupation. He said Iraq itself generates $15 billion to $20 billion annually in oil exports and has up to $20 billion in assets frozen because it invaded Kuwait in 1991."There's a lot of money there, and to assume we're going to pay for it is wrong," he said."
So the scenario we are being told will bring in democracy looks something like this. Post-Saddam Iraq will be ruled by some junta of Iraqi exiles whose first exercise of power, supervised by their American superiors, is to hand over the only source of income Iraq has, in order to pay for the war that installed them in power.
Surely, in Wolfowitz's remark, we see the specter of a lie. The question is, what lie is it? Is it a lie to the American people that the cost of this war, like the Gulf War, will be borne by others - or is it the lie that America is going to change the regime in Iraq to a democratic one? Both can't be true."
Of course, nobody took or even nibbled at my bait. However, now that the first phase of the War has been signed on the dotted line, the outlets that I sent it to are starting to publish op eds that gingerly examine exactly the difference between the Bush pronouncements about paying for the war in the magic pre-war time and after the guns have fallen silent. Happily, it looks like Wolfowitz's lie was that the Americans were going to eat up Iraqi oil to pay for the invasion. That doesn't look possible even for an administration that always jettisons finesse for rudeness, and holds as pre-eminate the satisfaction of its gross appetites.
This is not to say that, in our design of the Wolfowitz paradox, we weren't extending an almost rebarbative amount of generosity towards the good intentions of the D.C. warriors. Democracy, in D.C. speak, is still Smilin' Jay Garner. The gap between democracy as a recognizable form of government and the governance of proconsuls has still not registered in the minds of the press corps.
But onto the oil. This is from the AP:
"U.N. experts visiting Iraq in 2000 noted severe corrosion, blowouts and pollution in the oil fields and concluded some wells had been irreparably damaged. Daily capacity has been falling by 100,000 barrels a year since a 1990 peak of 3.5 million barrels a day.Even agriculture is in trouble. The United Nations estimated before the war that less than half the total cultivable area of Iraq is farmed, largely due to extreme soil salinity and waterlogging caused by poor irrigation practices.
Many people are counting on oil money to help rebuild the country. Yet Khadduri points out Iraq's oil production is worth at most $22 billion a year.Preliminary estimates on the cost of rebuilding Iraq range from $20 billion a year for the first few years to as much as $600 billion over a decade. On top of that, oil has to pay for food, education, medical care and other necessities -- plus $200 billion or more in debts owed to countries like Russia, France and China and compensation claims to Kuwait and others.``People overblow, overestimate the thing about the oil as if it's going to be manna from heaven,'' Khadduri said. ``The bonanza people are talking about, I don't see it, not in foreseeable future.'' "
Now, of course we aren't saying that Wolfowitz came out and said, hey, I was lying about how we were going to pay for this thing. We still expect the US to try to loot Iraq. The massive looting, the riot of looting, is even now being quietly set in motion by the Pentagon and the US Aid office, with their juicy contracts for "rebuilding' the country. Cameras should be stationed there. The Shi'a chest pounding is nothing compared to the War profiteering chest pounding, a sound of truly religious import, that booms out of certain Executive office divisions in D.C.
And then there is the Bush estimate for reconstructing Iraq.
Readers, Guess how much the Bush administration estimates this will cost:
1. 98.6 billion dollars
2. 15 billion dollars
3. 6 billion dollars
4. 3.6 billion dollars
5. 890 million dollars.
If you guessed no. 4, give yourself an Afghanistan knit pat on the back. Since we went into the War on fraudulent premises, it is only fitting that we are going out of the War on fraudulent forecasts.
The NYT article that fills in the preliminary figures reminds us that the main influence of Enron on the Bush-ites has still not been plumbed to its full and slimy depths. Just as Enron inflated itself through mark to market accounting, crediting as current revenue future estimates of revenue, so, too, the Bush administration's supply side optimism is a variation of the same thing. The way the Bush-ites get the 3.6 billion dollar figure is by subtracting, from future costs, estimates of future "earnings," so to speak -- that is, that Iraq, under the new regime of course, will pay back whatever money the US plows into the place.
Just as Enron was able to manipulate the yield curve to hit any profit target it wanted to, the administration simply marks the curve to show not only projected oil revenues nobody else is projecting, but some kind of market bonanza happening in Iraq.
Has the sheer idiocy at the core of optimism ever been so blatant, so easy to expose, or so oddly accepted, once so exposed, by a public that seems to have lost its sense of revulsion in its instinct for obediance? We think not.
A couple of weeks ago, LI was circulating a little op ed piece to various outlets, desperately hoping for a hit. This was before the War. The op ed began:
"For those who doubt that the Bush administration is invading Iraq to install a democracy, there were two telling stories in the last week of February. One, a small story about Post Saddam Iraq in the March 3 Business Week, contained a comparison of the cost of reconstructing and holding together Iraq and the revenues currently produced by Iraqi oil fields:
"Unless oil prices stay at current high levels, Iraq's oil income of around $15 to $20 billion per year isn't likely to be enough to pay for food and other needed imports as well as rebuilding and development costs. That tab is estimated at $20 billion a year over several years."
The other story was in the Washington Times. A congressional committee was grilling Paul Wolfowitz, the ideologue behind Bush's rush to war. Wolfowitz was stonewalling about the cost of the war and the occupation. At one point, however, the committee did break on through to the other side - getting a revealing glimpse of the thought process that is taking place at the highest levels of Bush's White House. Wolfowitz testified "it is wrong to believe that the United States will foot the bill for occupation. He said Iraq itself generates $15 billion to $20 billion annually in oil exports and has up to $20 billion in assets frozen because it invaded Kuwait in 1991."There's a lot of money there, and to assume we're going to pay for it is wrong," he said."
So the scenario we are being told will bring in democracy looks something like this. Post-Saddam Iraq will be ruled by some junta of Iraqi exiles whose first exercise of power, supervised by their American superiors, is to hand over the only source of income Iraq has, in order to pay for the war that installed them in power.
Surely, in Wolfowitz's remark, we see the specter of a lie. The question is, what lie is it? Is it a lie to the American people that the cost of this war, like the Gulf War, will be borne by others - or is it the lie that America is going to change the regime in Iraq to a democratic one? Both can't be true."
Of course, nobody took or even nibbled at my bait. However, now that the first phase of the War has been signed on the dotted line, the outlets that I sent it to are starting to publish op eds that gingerly examine exactly the difference between the Bush pronouncements about paying for the war in the magic pre-war time and after the guns have fallen silent. Happily, it looks like Wolfowitz's lie was that the Americans were going to eat up Iraqi oil to pay for the invasion. That doesn't look possible even for an administration that always jettisons finesse for rudeness, and holds as pre-eminate the satisfaction of its gross appetites.
This is not to say that, in our design of the Wolfowitz paradox, we weren't extending an almost rebarbative amount of generosity towards the good intentions of the D.C. warriors. Democracy, in D.C. speak, is still Smilin' Jay Garner. The gap between democracy as a recognizable form of government and the governance of proconsuls has still not registered in the minds of the press corps.
But onto the oil. This is from the AP:
"U.N. experts visiting Iraq in 2000 noted severe corrosion, blowouts and pollution in the oil fields and concluded some wells had been irreparably damaged. Daily capacity has been falling by 100,000 barrels a year since a 1990 peak of 3.5 million barrels a day.Even agriculture is in trouble. The United Nations estimated before the war that less than half the total cultivable area of Iraq is farmed, largely due to extreme soil salinity and waterlogging caused by poor irrigation practices.
Many people are counting on oil money to help rebuild the country. Yet Khadduri points out Iraq's oil production is worth at most $22 billion a year.Preliminary estimates on the cost of rebuilding Iraq range from $20 billion a year for the first few years to as much as $600 billion over a decade. On top of that, oil has to pay for food, education, medical care and other necessities -- plus $200 billion or more in debts owed to countries like Russia, France and China and compensation claims to Kuwait and others.``People overblow, overestimate the thing about the oil as if it's going to be manna from heaven,'' Khadduri said. ``The bonanza people are talking about, I don't see it, not in foreseeable future.'' "
Now, of course we aren't saying that Wolfowitz came out and said, hey, I was lying about how we were going to pay for this thing. We still expect the US to try to loot Iraq. The massive looting, the riot of looting, is even now being quietly set in motion by the Pentagon and the US Aid office, with their juicy contracts for "rebuilding' the country. Cameras should be stationed there. The Shi'a chest pounding is nothing compared to the War profiteering chest pounding, a sound of truly religious import, that booms out of certain Executive office divisions in D.C.
And then there is the Bush estimate for reconstructing Iraq.
Readers, Guess how much the Bush administration estimates this will cost:
1. 98.6 billion dollars
2. 15 billion dollars
3. 6 billion dollars
4. 3.6 billion dollars
5. 890 million dollars.
If you guessed no. 4, give yourself an Afghanistan knit pat on the back. Since we went into the War on fraudulent premises, it is only fitting that we are going out of the War on fraudulent forecasts.
The NYT article that fills in the preliminary figures reminds us that the main influence of Enron on the Bush-ites has still not been plumbed to its full and slimy depths. Just as Enron inflated itself through mark to market accounting, crediting as current revenue future estimates of revenue, so, too, the Bush administration's supply side optimism is a variation of the same thing. The way the Bush-ites get the 3.6 billion dollar figure is by subtracting, from future costs, estimates of future "earnings," so to speak -- that is, that Iraq, under the new regime of course, will pay back whatever money the US plows into the place.
Just as Enron was able to manipulate the yield curve to hit any profit target it wanted to, the administration simply marks the curve to show not only projected oil revenues nobody else is projecting, but some kind of market bonanza happening in Iraq.
Has the sheer idiocy at the core of optimism ever been so blatant, so easy to expose, or so oddly accepted, once so exposed, by a public that seems to have lost its sense of revulsion in its instinct for obediance? We think not.
Saturday, April 12, 2003
Bollettino
Some crimes insist on remaining unsolved. Jack the Ripper's crimes are the paragon of such. The Black Dahlia case is another.
In the WP, see the article about Steve Hodel, an LA PI who claims to have solved the case. His solution is that... well, his Dad cut Elizabeth Short in two in 1947. Oddly enough, this is the same claim (although different father) made by another, earlier solver of the Black Dahlia case by Janice Knowlton.
The article exudes a jaded fascination not so much with the case as with the California obsession about murderous parents. Southern California has always advertised itself as a state of mind -- it came into being as a human entity only after it had been projected as a state of mind, notoriously enough. Perhaps for this reason, psychological aberrance so easily leaks into sociological norm. So this is the hotbed of repressed memory, the place where all the young and the restless -- if they are affluent enough - eventually remember that Dad murdered a playmate, or was an officer in the local Satanic Ritual Club and Rotary Cotillion. Who knew the conjunction of Freud and Raymond Chandler would lead to this? Still, there's an air of desuetude upon that meeting of Noir and the DSM. Haven't we rollerdexed our way through more fashionable syndromes? Repressing, on the way, the repressed memory one.
There is one paragraph in the piece that is unctuous and stupid and worthy of protest. Before describing what happened to Elizabeth Short, there's this sentence: "Children should stop reading here." As if. That children might be reading a newspaper, instead of playing the Black Dahlia video game or whatever, is improbable in itself. But that the paper feels called upon to censor the flow of its own information, such as it is, is bogus to the extent that any sensible child should mistrust the paper thereafter.
Some crimes insist on remaining unsolved. Jack the Ripper's crimes are the paragon of such. The Black Dahlia case is another.
In the WP, see the article about Steve Hodel, an LA PI who claims to have solved the case. His solution is that... well, his Dad cut Elizabeth Short in two in 1947. Oddly enough, this is the same claim (although different father) made by another, earlier solver of the Black Dahlia case by Janice Knowlton.
The article exudes a jaded fascination not so much with the case as with the California obsession about murderous parents. Southern California has always advertised itself as a state of mind -- it came into being as a human entity only after it had been projected as a state of mind, notoriously enough. Perhaps for this reason, psychological aberrance so easily leaks into sociological norm. So this is the hotbed of repressed memory, the place where all the young and the restless -- if they are affluent enough - eventually remember that Dad murdered a playmate, or was an officer in the local Satanic Ritual Club and Rotary Cotillion. Who knew the conjunction of Freud and Raymond Chandler would lead to this? Still, there's an air of desuetude upon that meeting of Noir and the DSM. Haven't we rollerdexed our way through more fashionable syndromes? Repressing, on the way, the repressed memory one.
There is one paragraph in the piece that is unctuous and stupid and worthy of protest. Before describing what happened to Elizabeth Short, there's this sentence: "Children should stop reading here." As if. That children might be reading a newspaper, instead of playing the Black Dahlia video game or whatever, is improbable in itself. But that the paper feels called upon to censor the flow of its own information, such as it is, is bogus to the extent that any sensible child should mistrust the paper thereafter.
Bollettino
Of the essays I wish I�d written, one of them is by the Carlos Ginzburg, the Italian historian, and it has the wonderful title, Killing a Chinese mandarin. It was puvblished in Critical Inquiry in 1994, but I just came across it.
There�s a moral Gendankenexperiment that appears in several French texts. Ginzburg traces the figura in it to some texts of Diderot; he traces the idea of it back to Aristotle�s remarks on pity and distance, in time or space, in the Rhetoric.
The situation in Diderot is that a man murders another man in Paris. He then flies to China. At that difference, safe from the consequences of what he has done, does the murderer feel remorse? Would it be more natural to feel that the episode was simply closed, and unpleasant?
Ginzburg shows that Diderot recurs to this topic several times, most notably in Lettres sur les aveugles� There, Diderot makes the startling suggestion that if one is, structurally, incapable of distinguishing between a man pissing and a man bleeding to death, then the pity one feels is similarly diminished.
This is a variation of Aristotle�s point about natural law: it is natural to feel pity for those with whom one is close, but not for those who are far away. The largeness of the distance, or what I would call its familiarity or unfamiliarity, determines the moral emotion. And as the moral emotion is what is called upon in moral judgment, this makes it difficult to judge actions at a distance.
Ginzburg next moves to Chateaubriand, who gives us the classical form of the thought experiment in The Genius of Christianity: �Conscience! Is it possible that thou canst be but a phantom�? I ask my own heart, I put to myself this question: if thou couldst by a mere wish kill a fellow creature in China, and inherit his fortune in Europe, with the supernatural conviction that the fact would never be known, wouldst thou consent to form such a wish?
Balzac transforms this passage in several ways in Pere Goriot. Rastignac is tormented by the idea that he could become rich through a scheme that he knows will involve, indirectly, a murder. He meets his friend Bianchon and tells him of his doubts about this. Bianchon asks, �have you read Rousseau?�
�Yes.�
�Do you remember that passage in which he asks the reader what he would do if he could become wealthy by killing an old Chinese mandarin, without leavihg Paris, just by an act of will?�
Isn�t this, in one striking image, the whole history of European colonialism?
Ginzburg is quite aware of this. He develops the idea, further, with quotes from Hume and Benjamin. However, you will notice that I have done a little transforming of my own during the course of this reprise of Ginzburg�s essay. For at no point does he make the leap, as I have, from distance to familiarity.
It is a subtle part of the thought experiment that the victim be a Chinese mandarin. And not a French merchant, for instance, in Canton. I think there is a reason for this hint of exoticism. The distance between Paris and China is simply a metric fact leaving its impress on the imagination. But what kind of fact is the distance between a Frenchman and a Chinese Mandarin? Familiarity, I would like to claim, is inseparable from some image of proximity and distance. But these images point to a certain work � the calculating, as it were, work of sentiment. And that seems to violate the idea that pity is an immediate response. That pity requires no extra energy. That pity is, in a sense, free.
When, in fact, distance has been abolished � when the lyncher is face to face with the victim, or the tv viewer is face to face with the obliterated Iraqi soldier (admittedly, a different kind of elimination of distance), why doesn�t the natural law kick in?
One of the odder features of the age of lynching in the South was that, far from being a dirty secret, postcards were made of lynchings and sold door to door. The image of a strung up, gutted, burned black man, which can�t be seen without horror even by, presumably, Mississippi senators, was once a familiar popular image. I would say that image contributed to the spirit of lynching by affecting a form of de-familiarization. By compulsively asserting a metaphysical distance between lyncher and victim, pity was, as in an odd behavioralist experiment on reactions in rats, erased by being overloaded.
I�m still not sure that all pity is like this. The immediacy of pity seems such a standard characteristic of it that I am afraid of violating an essential semantic norm by saying that pity requires some calculating function. Still, let�s say I am right. The art, then, is to stimulate the great rat, Public Opinion, in just the right way. That didn't happen before the war. The management of stimulus was, frankly, a disaster. The press assumed the rat had been sufficiently stimulated, and then one day looked out its window and beheld a million peace marchers.
So how is the rat being treated now? The thing to look for, if you do want to manage pity � if you want to create a kind of horror, and you want a population to go along � the thing to manage, then, is the initial moment in which the image is received. In this, the Bush administration has been pretty brilliant. The last three weeks, as we keep getting told again and again, the other parts of the world were seeing a different kind of war than we were. The images flooding the airwaves in Pakistan, for instance, were all of Iraqis variously blown apart. Suddenly, however, these images have started flooding the American airwaves, too. Suddenly it is all right for the Sun, in Britain, to publish a huge photo of a burned Iraqi child. Because we have been through a ritual period of blaming all violence on the other side. Even that the other side resisted, the message is, makes them to blame for violence. That period has been successful. The press has been cooperative. And, consequently, this has become a war without casualties. A cakewalk.
America is an odd country for such things. We have decided that the familiarity of the images of 9/11 are a kind of gold standard of pity. No American really feels obliged to remember, say, the deaths in the Moscow theater which the Chechen rebels took last year. Those who mention such things are treated as fools. It is as if they were turning around the moral thought experiment: in this one, the Chinese mandarin kills the European. An odd thing about the Western notion of distance: it isn't commutative.
Of the essays I wish I�d written, one of them is by the Carlos Ginzburg, the Italian historian, and it has the wonderful title, Killing a Chinese mandarin. It was puvblished in Critical Inquiry in 1994, but I just came across it.
There�s a moral Gendankenexperiment that appears in several French texts. Ginzburg traces the figura in it to some texts of Diderot; he traces the idea of it back to Aristotle�s remarks on pity and distance, in time or space, in the Rhetoric.
The situation in Diderot is that a man murders another man in Paris. He then flies to China. At that difference, safe from the consequences of what he has done, does the murderer feel remorse? Would it be more natural to feel that the episode was simply closed, and unpleasant?
Ginzburg shows that Diderot recurs to this topic several times, most notably in Lettres sur les aveugles� There, Diderot makes the startling suggestion that if one is, structurally, incapable of distinguishing between a man pissing and a man bleeding to death, then the pity one feels is similarly diminished.
This is a variation of Aristotle�s point about natural law: it is natural to feel pity for those with whom one is close, but not for those who are far away. The largeness of the distance, or what I would call its familiarity or unfamiliarity, determines the moral emotion. And as the moral emotion is what is called upon in moral judgment, this makes it difficult to judge actions at a distance.
Ginzburg next moves to Chateaubriand, who gives us the classical form of the thought experiment in The Genius of Christianity: �Conscience! Is it possible that thou canst be but a phantom�? I ask my own heart, I put to myself this question: if thou couldst by a mere wish kill a fellow creature in China, and inherit his fortune in Europe, with the supernatural conviction that the fact would never be known, wouldst thou consent to form such a wish?
Balzac transforms this passage in several ways in Pere Goriot. Rastignac is tormented by the idea that he could become rich through a scheme that he knows will involve, indirectly, a murder. He meets his friend Bianchon and tells him of his doubts about this. Bianchon asks, �have you read Rousseau?�
�Yes.�
�Do you remember that passage in which he asks the reader what he would do if he could become wealthy by killing an old Chinese mandarin, without leavihg Paris, just by an act of will?�
Isn�t this, in one striking image, the whole history of European colonialism?
Ginzburg is quite aware of this. He develops the idea, further, with quotes from Hume and Benjamin. However, you will notice that I have done a little transforming of my own during the course of this reprise of Ginzburg�s essay. For at no point does he make the leap, as I have, from distance to familiarity.
It is a subtle part of the thought experiment that the victim be a Chinese mandarin. And not a French merchant, for instance, in Canton. I think there is a reason for this hint of exoticism. The distance between Paris and China is simply a metric fact leaving its impress on the imagination. But what kind of fact is the distance between a Frenchman and a Chinese Mandarin? Familiarity, I would like to claim, is inseparable from some image of proximity and distance. But these images point to a certain work � the calculating, as it were, work of sentiment. And that seems to violate the idea that pity is an immediate response. That pity requires no extra energy. That pity is, in a sense, free.
When, in fact, distance has been abolished � when the lyncher is face to face with the victim, or the tv viewer is face to face with the obliterated Iraqi soldier (admittedly, a different kind of elimination of distance), why doesn�t the natural law kick in?
One of the odder features of the age of lynching in the South was that, far from being a dirty secret, postcards were made of lynchings and sold door to door. The image of a strung up, gutted, burned black man, which can�t be seen without horror even by, presumably, Mississippi senators, was once a familiar popular image. I would say that image contributed to the spirit of lynching by affecting a form of de-familiarization. By compulsively asserting a metaphysical distance between lyncher and victim, pity was, as in an odd behavioralist experiment on reactions in rats, erased by being overloaded.
I�m still not sure that all pity is like this. The immediacy of pity seems such a standard characteristic of it that I am afraid of violating an essential semantic norm by saying that pity requires some calculating function. Still, let�s say I am right. The art, then, is to stimulate the great rat, Public Opinion, in just the right way. That didn't happen before the war. The management of stimulus was, frankly, a disaster. The press assumed the rat had been sufficiently stimulated, and then one day looked out its window and beheld a million peace marchers.
So how is the rat being treated now? The thing to look for, if you do want to manage pity � if you want to create a kind of horror, and you want a population to go along � the thing to manage, then, is the initial moment in which the image is received. In this, the Bush administration has been pretty brilliant. The last three weeks, as we keep getting told again and again, the other parts of the world were seeing a different kind of war than we were. The images flooding the airwaves in Pakistan, for instance, were all of Iraqis variously blown apart. Suddenly, however, these images have started flooding the American airwaves, too. Suddenly it is all right for the Sun, in Britain, to publish a huge photo of a burned Iraqi child. Because we have been through a ritual period of blaming all violence on the other side. Even that the other side resisted, the message is, makes them to blame for violence. That period has been successful. The press has been cooperative. And, consequently, this has become a war without casualties. A cakewalk.
America is an odd country for such things. We have decided that the familiarity of the images of 9/11 are a kind of gold standard of pity. No American really feels obliged to remember, say, the deaths in the Moscow theater which the Chechen rebels took last year. Those who mention such things are treated as fools. It is as if they were turning around the moral thought experiment: in this one, the Chinese mandarin kills the European. An odd thing about the Western notion of distance: it isn't commutative.
Friday, April 11, 2003
Bollettino
We�ve just finished a review of Niall Ferguson�s Empire for the National Post.
Ferguson is a fascinating historian. We took a few potshots at him in the review, since we don�t view being merely laudatory as an interesting response to a book this good. One of the things the book did remind us of was that the first wave of globalisation, which gained force in the latter half of the 19th century, was broken by the Conservatives, not be anti-globalizing leftists. Joseph Chamberlain devised a tariff happy Conservative-Unionist platform that lost to the Liberals in the Post Boer period, but that ultimately pointed British policy in the direction of setting up cozy Empire trade barriers. Ferguson is no ideologue about this issue. He points out that the trade barriers probably cushioned Great Britain from the magnitude of slump that afflicted both Germany and the U.S.
We aren�t ideologues on this issue, either. We�d like to see labor and environmental groups internationalized on the lines of capital � so we want globalization to proceed on one level, at least. However, it is hard not to see that the fads of the moment � the boycott of French goods, the pressure to annul Saddam�s debt, etc. � are crystallizing into the traditional nationalist objection to globalization; and that that objection is always poisonous. The NYT has been running a series of little articles about the War views of various CEOs. The conventional wisdom is that the lack of War views stems from the internationalization of these CEO�s companies. Well, watch out for what you wish for. When the Battle in Seattle was shaping up, we were all for the anti-globalizing forces. But we were for them as a brake on the impoverishment of the American working class. We find it very worrisome that anti free trade rhetoric is now being appropriated by the right. In fact, the much vaunted re-building of Iraq, if it happens (and we have our doubts that Iraq will be rebuilt anytime soon, especially under Smilin� Jay Garner � rebuilding is notoriously hard to do in the midst of insurgency), might be a tipping point for the retreat from free trade, especially as the American government tries to game the rules to punish European companies for European politics.
Ronnie Lipschutz has a provocative essay on this topic which begins:
"At the beginning of the 21st century," the history books of the future may record,
"the United States made its bid for Imperium. The attacks of September 11, 2001
brought home to Washington, DC the very real risks of a largely self-regulating global
market system, including both the disaffection it generated and the openings it
provided to those disaffected. In the wake of September 11th, Washington has been
putting in place a new global system in which the United States is not only hegemonic
but also establishes rules that will bind all other countries. Within Imperium,
international law is unnecessary because there is no longer an international system or
global republic, and there are no sovereign territories. This essay is intended more as
a provocation than a systematic analysis of a process underway. It raises questions
about the policies, methods, and intentions of the United States and argues that the bid
for Imperium is connected with the processes of globalization and the vulnerabilities
that it has created. The self-disciplining structure of global neo-liberal
governmentality has failed and, to remedy this, the Bush Administration is seeking to
re-establish sovereignty abroad and, perhaps, a police state at home.�
We are far from a police state yet � but the thesis that the neo-liberalism of the nineties is under concerted attack by the Bush administration bears looking into. We were especially reminded of pre-1914 rhetoric by today�s meeting in St. Petersburg of the Coalition of the Unwilling. It doesn�t seem to occur to American commentators that France and Germany could accrue any advantages outside of the American sphere. It is as if America tacitly owned the world. This is evidently not true. While it is true that French investors, like investors world wide, have put a large bet on the U.S. economy, it is evidently a mature economy. The disadvantages for France in disobeying the dictates of the Bush-ites have been much publicized, but just the gaudiness of the use of force has the effect of making France, Germany and Russia that much more bound together. The idea of hostile trade blocs smells like the 1920s all over again.
We�ve just finished a review of Niall Ferguson�s Empire for the National Post.
Ferguson is a fascinating historian. We took a few potshots at him in the review, since we don�t view being merely laudatory as an interesting response to a book this good. One of the things the book did remind us of was that the first wave of globalisation, which gained force in the latter half of the 19th century, was broken by the Conservatives, not be anti-globalizing leftists. Joseph Chamberlain devised a tariff happy Conservative-Unionist platform that lost to the Liberals in the Post Boer period, but that ultimately pointed British policy in the direction of setting up cozy Empire trade barriers. Ferguson is no ideologue about this issue. He points out that the trade barriers probably cushioned Great Britain from the magnitude of slump that afflicted both Germany and the U.S.
We aren�t ideologues on this issue, either. We�d like to see labor and environmental groups internationalized on the lines of capital � so we want globalization to proceed on one level, at least. However, it is hard not to see that the fads of the moment � the boycott of French goods, the pressure to annul Saddam�s debt, etc. � are crystallizing into the traditional nationalist objection to globalization; and that that objection is always poisonous. The NYT has been running a series of little articles about the War views of various CEOs. The conventional wisdom is that the lack of War views stems from the internationalization of these CEO�s companies. Well, watch out for what you wish for. When the Battle in Seattle was shaping up, we were all for the anti-globalizing forces. But we were for them as a brake on the impoverishment of the American working class. We find it very worrisome that anti free trade rhetoric is now being appropriated by the right. In fact, the much vaunted re-building of Iraq, if it happens (and we have our doubts that Iraq will be rebuilt anytime soon, especially under Smilin� Jay Garner � rebuilding is notoriously hard to do in the midst of insurgency), might be a tipping point for the retreat from free trade, especially as the American government tries to game the rules to punish European companies for European politics.
Ronnie Lipschutz has a provocative essay on this topic which begins:
"At the beginning of the 21st century," the history books of the future may record,
"the United States made its bid for Imperium. The attacks of September 11, 2001
brought home to Washington, DC the very real risks of a largely self-regulating global
market system, including both the disaffection it generated and the openings it
provided to those disaffected. In the wake of September 11th, Washington has been
putting in place a new global system in which the United States is not only hegemonic
but also establishes rules that will bind all other countries. Within Imperium,
international law is unnecessary because there is no longer an international system or
global republic, and there are no sovereign territories. This essay is intended more as
a provocation than a systematic analysis of a process underway. It raises questions
about the policies, methods, and intentions of the United States and argues that the bid
for Imperium is connected with the processes of globalization and the vulnerabilities
that it has created. The self-disciplining structure of global neo-liberal
governmentality has failed and, to remedy this, the Bush Administration is seeking to
re-establish sovereignty abroad and, perhaps, a police state at home.�
We are far from a police state yet � but the thesis that the neo-liberalism of the nineties is under concerted attack by the Bush administration bears looking into. We were especially reminded of pre-1914 rhetoric by today�s meeting in St. Petersburg of the Coalition of the Unwilling. It doesn�t seem to occur to American commentators that France and Germany could accrue any advantages outside of the American sphere. It is as if America tacitly owned the world. This is evidently not true. While it is true that French investors, like investors world wide, have put a large bet on the U.S. economy, it is evidently a mature economy. The disadvantages for France in disobeying the dictates of the Bush-ites have been much publicized, but just the gaudiness of the use of force has the effect of making France, Germany and Russia that much more bound together. The idea of hostile trade blocs smells like the 1920s all over again.
Bollettino
The British Medical Journal has published a scathing denunciation of the American torture of various prisoners of war. Naipaul has written of the irony of third world revolutionaries depending on the liberality of the system against which they operate. That irony, at least, is being systematically broken in the case of the American torture of Al qaeda operatives in Cuba. While Bush can threaten Iraq forces for harming American POWs, who is going to ensure the humane treatment of Afghanistan POWs? Surely not the Al qaeda leaders, who have shed the forms of legitimacy that would have provided some protection for their followers. Protection should be provided by our second thoughts -- by those reactions to our first, immediate anger by which civilization continues. That isn't happening, though.
"The New York Times and International Herald Tribune last month published apparently well founded accounts of the techniques applied to Abu Zubaydah and other Al Qaeda suspects in US custody. These included deprivation of food, water, sleep, and light; covering subjects' heads with black hoods for hours at a time; forcing them to stand or kneel in unnatural positions in extreme cold or heat; keeping them naked; prolonged chaining or shackling; hooking them up to sensors during serial interrogations; and denial of medical attention. There have been persistent reports of beatings at some US operated centres, and a military pathologist has determined that the deaths of two prisoners at Bagram, Afghanistan, last December were homicides. At Bagram "disorientation is a tool of interrogation and therefore a way of life." At Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where around 650 men continue to be held, largely in solitary confinement and beyond the jurisdiction of US law, there have been 20 suicide attempts so far."
The only good news, here, is that the barbaric treatment of these prisoners is consistent with the barbaric norm in the U.S. Our prisons are a standing scandal.
It is time to normalize the POW regime of these prisoners. And it is time to face up to the fact that, if they cannot be released, it is because the war in Afghanistan is still going on, in spite of the general media consensus that we won it in a cakewalk.
The British Medical Journal has published a scathing denunciation of the American torture of various prisoners of war. Naipaul has written of the irony of third world revolutionaries depending on the liberality of the system against which they operate. That irony, at least, is being systematically broken in the case of the American torture of Al qaeda operatives in Cuba. While Bush can threaten Iraq forces for harming American POWs, who is going to ensure the humane treatment of Afghanistan POWs? Surely not the Al qaeda leaders, who have shed the forms of legitimacy that would have provided some protection for their followers. Protection should be provided by our second thoughts -- by those reactions to our first, immediate anger by which civilization continues. That isn't happening, though.
"The New York Times and International Herald Tribune last month published apparently well founded accounts of the techniques applied to Abu Zubaydah and other Al Qaeda suspects in US custody. These included deprivation of food, water, sleep, and light; covering subjects' heads with black hoods for hours at a time; forcing them to stand or kneel in unnatural positions in extreme cold or heat; keeping them naked; prolonged chaining or shackling; hooking them up to sensors during serial interrogations; and denial of medical attention. There have been persistent reports of beatings at some US operated centres, and a military pathologist has determined that the deaths of two prisoners at Bagram, Afghanistan, last December were homicides. At Bagram "disorientation is a tool of interrogation and therefore a way of life." At Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where around 650 men continue to be held, largely in solitary confinement and beyond the jurisdiction of US law, there have been 20 suicide attempts so far."
The only good news, here, is that the barbaric treatment of these prisoners is consistent with the barbaric norm in the U.S. Our prisons are a standing scandal.
It is time to normalize the POW regime of these prisoners. And it is time to face up to the fact that, if they cannot be released, it is because the war in Afghanistan is still going on, in spite of the general media consensus that we won it in a cakewalk.
From our far flung correspondents
Our friend H. writes, from Germany:
"I am glad it is coming to an end. After all, as the old saying goes, tis
better to be rulled by a just infidel then an unjust muslim. But a few
points have been interesting for me. Folks oscillated between elation at
the fact that Saddam was gone and doing the traditional hitting of their
chest shi'ia rutine almost defiently. THen there was the matter of Iraqi
flag being toyed with by a few people at the base of the statue, and of
course the sand from Karbala or Najaf, can't quite remember (the exhibition
of which would have been a crime under Saddam) and yes, you are right in
observing that they know exactly what is expected of them. THis is standard
issue streetsmarts under authoritarian rule--something I was reminded again
while living in Tunis something still familiar to all working in any
American factory. And then, let us not forget the staged managed nature of
at least some of the activities for media consumption. Remeber, the Bush
and co were counting on these scenes to help dissipate the unprecedented
anger at the States. Don't think they would have left that to chance do you?
They are not called Psyops for nothing. Amazing what a few dollar bills
can accomplish.(same set up in Iran 1953)[an educated guess especially
supported by attack and looting today of the French cultural center and the
German embassy. Accidents? I doubt it.)
I would presume some are shell shocked, but this is the only thing that
truly puzzles me about the Iraqis. I can't read the faces of those damned
Iraqis. THey are calm, collected. I would have expected a bit more frenzy,
but they are proving inscrutable. And that, I was thinking, is a good sign.
I am assuming, in a few weeks, the Occupiers will find more than they
bargained for. Happens each and everytime you release pent up energies. I
sense they are conserving energy, and letting enemies duke it out. But once
the fear is shattered, no stopping the rapid explosion of hope, optimism and
want. THe only thing they appear excited about is looting...this is the
begining of a positive move and I doubt they can be easily
contained.(killing of the Shi'i clergies to start with).. Pity the price
though....it should be running in the tens of thousands(of dead). One thing
I am sure of. Stability is not what the neocons will get in the Middle
East.
Arabs once again will realize the only thing their rulers are good for is
being parasites...enjoying all the priviledges and running at the first
sight of trouble. And soon as the Islamic idiots too realize that the
suicide missions and the rush to heaven is the Islamic version of the old
Middle Eastern habit of the leaders using them as cannon fothers, who knows,
what they'll do...perhaps something good will come of this after all.
Our friend H. writes, from Germany:
"I am glad it is coming to an end. After all, as the old saying goes, tis
better to be rulled by a just infidel then an unjust muslim. But a few
points have been interesting for me. Folks oscillated between elation at
the fact that Saddam was gone and doing the traditional hitting of their
chest shi'ia rutine almost defiently. THen there was the matter of Iraqi
flag being toyed with by a few people at the base of the statue, and of
course the sand from Karbala or Najaf, can't quite remember (the exhibition
of which would have been a crime under Saddam) and yes, you are right in
observing that they know exactly what is expected of them. THis is standard
issue streetsmarts under authoritarian rule--something I was reminded again
while living in Tunis something still familiar to all working in any
American factory. And then, let us not forget the staged managed nature of
at least some of the activities for media consumption. Remeber, the Bush
and co were counting on these scenes to help dissipate the unprecedented
anger at the States. Don't think they would have left that to chance do you?
They are not called Psyops for nothing. Amazing what a few dollar bills
can accomplish.(same set up in Iran 1953)[an educated guess especially
supported by attack and looting today of the French cultural center and the
German embassy. Accidents? I doubt it.)
I would presume some are shell shocked, but this is the only thing that
truly puzzles me about the Iraqis. I can't read the faces of those damned
Iraqis. THey are calm, collected. I would have expected a bit more frenzy,
but they are proving inscrutable. And that, I was thinking, is a good sign.
I am assuming, in a few weeks, the Occupiers will find more than they
bargained for. Happens each and everytime you release pent up energies. I
sense they are conserving energy, and letting enemies duke it out. But once
the fear is shattered, no stopping the rapid explosion of hope, optimism and
want. THe only thing they appear excited about is looting...this is the
begining of a positive move and I doubt they can be easily
contained.(killing of the Shi'i clergies to start with).. Pity the price
though....it should be running in the tens of thousands(of dead). One thing
I am sure of. Stability is not what the neocons will get in the Middle
East.
Arabs once again will realize the only thing their rulers are good for is
being parasites...enjoying all the priviledges and running at the first
sight of trouble. And soon as the Islamic idiots too realize that the
suicide missions and the rush to heaven is the Islamic version of the old
Middle Eastern habit of the leaders using them as cannon fothers, who knows,
what they'll do...perhaps something good will come of this after all.
Bollettino
So what is up with the stock market? There we have a honey of a victory, hanging right above them, CNN and Fox news anchors dancing in the streets, and all they can come up with is 20 some measly points?
Perhaps they aren�t into the whacked optimism purveyed in today�s Floyd Norris column. Floyd, who likes the middle, has jabbed to the left (his exposes about Tyco) and jabbed to the right (his cheerleading about the ever enduring consumer), and here he is definitely in full apologia mode. However, the optimism is always tempered by the conditional modal -- might, may, could -- because nobody believes in Dow 36,000 any more. His guess is that the economy is now set to roar back. The consumer is ready� the businesses are ready� and the international situation is ready�
But we have our doubts. Maybe the traders were leafing through their Fortunes this week. The traditional Fortune 500 issue is the big seller. This year�s included the kind of downer article on American capitalism that even Marxists aren�t writing any more. How�s this for a set of figures? The Fortune 500 profits sank a whopping 62% last year. The explanation Fortune favors is that the previous years were bogus � a lot of revenue and profit inflatin� going on. This is the kind of thing to give us all the creeps � that feeling of the presence of the impalpable which overcomes Hamlet on spying his dead dad. The figures are incredibly bad, the more you press them. Here�s another one for the record books: �In fact, it appears that at least $310 billion of 2001�s energy related revenues were overstated.�
The question is this: is there a lag between stock prices and the �new� accounting? If there is � if it gradually begins to dawn on investors that not only is next year not going to get any better, but, retrospectively, the past is getting worse and worse -- well, then we will see the bottom of the market. And we won�t like it.
This should set a fine limit on Rumsfeld's colonialist fantasies. Although Rumsfeldians throughout history have bankrupted states pursuing the holy grail of absolute power, and there's nothing to say that the US is immune. There's surprisingly little concern about the new coalition of the unwilling -- France, Germany and Russia. The idea that the US, with Iraq, is gonna be coming into the big bucks any day now is absurd. If France and Germany truly re-orient themselves to Russia and China, this could be bad news for the US economy in the long run. To imagine that the Russian market pales in comparison to what Smilin' Jay Garner is gonna sweat out of those Iraqis is the kind of delusion that we thought George Bush, sr., whooped out of his boy in George Jr. drunk drivin' days. Perhaps not. Which will make the next year bitter for all of us.
So what is up with the stock market? There we have a honey of a victory, hanging right above them, CNN and Fox news anchors dancing in the streets, and all they can come up with is 20 some measly points?
Perhaps they aren�t into the whacked optimism purveyed in today�s Floyd Norris column. Floyd, who likes the middle, has jabbed to the left (his exposes about Tyco) and jabbed to the right (his cheerleading about the ever enduring consumer), and here he is definitely in full apologia mode. However, the optimism is always tempered by the conditional modal -- might, may, could -- because nobody believes in Dow 36,000 any more. His guess is that the economy is now set to roar back. The consumer is ready� the businesses are ready� and the international situation is ready�
But we have our doubts. Maybe the traders were leafing through their Fortunes this week. The traditional Fortune 500 issue is the big seller. This year�s included the kind of downer article on American capitalism that even Marxists aren�t writing any more. How�s this for a set of figures? The Fortune 500 profits sank a whopping 62% last year. The explanation Fortune favors is that the previous years were bogus � a lot of revenue and profit inflatin� going on. This is the kind of thing to give us all the creeps � that feeling of the presence of the impalpable which overcomes Hamlet on spying his dead dad. The figures are incredibly bad, the more you press them. Here�s another one for the record books: �In fact, it appears that at least $310 billion of 2001�s energy related revenues were overstated.�
The question is this: is there a lag between stock prices and the �new� accounting? If there is � if it gradually begins to dawn on investors that not only is next year not going to get any better, but, retrospectively, the past is getting worse and worse -- well, then we will see the bottom of the market. And we won�t like it.
This should set a fine limit on Rumsfeld's colonialist fantasies. Although Rumsfeldians throughout history have bankrupted states pursuing the holy grail of absolute power, and there's nothing to say that the US is immune. There's surprisingly little concern about the new coalition of the unwilling -- France, Germany and Russia. The idea that the US, with Iraq, is gonna be coming into the big bucks any day now is absurd. If France and Germany truly re-orient themselves to Russia and China, this could be bad news for the US economy in the long run. To imagine that the Russian market pales in comparison to what Smilin' Jay Garner is gonna sweat out of those Iraqis is the kind of delusion that we thought George Bush, sr., whooped out of his boy in George Jr. drunk drivin' days. Perhaps not. Which will make the next year bitter for all of us.
Thursday, April 10, 2003
Our far flung correspondents
My friend Tom makes a Lacanian analysis of the Baghdad statue destroying party yesterday. We were corresponding about coining a new word for throwing down statues (he suggested de-erection -- we suggested tumescoclasm) - and we referred him to Fred Kaplan's article in Slate. This is his reply.
"The crowds seemed to know what was expected of them. A man went up to one of the marines, whose tanks now controlled the circle and both sides of Sadoon Road, a main artery in east Baghdad, and asked for permission to destroy the statue."
Thanks for the hint toward Kaplan's piece - not bad for an on-the-spot report; esp. his comparative recollections from 1991. Of course, of course, I am looking forward to a somewhat more Lacanian reading of this type of event from Zizek. Like I always say (rather: I promise to say it like this from this point forward, for this is the inaugural use): while you can have too much psychotherapy, you can never have too much psychoanalysis because you can always be dead wrong.
Yes, damned right Fred Kaplan, that Marine is a "moron" for draping the stars and stripes over the face of the statue (let's skip the obvious issues of The Face and erasure here; they aint that much fun), but not for reasons of painting a "picture of neo-colonialism"; no, he is a moron for therapeutic reasons.
Lets face it, the picture of colonialism, neo-, retro-or other, is quite complete; it is developed, mounted, framed and hung for exhibition.
Let me back-up, step aside and circle away from my point. I'm thinking now of Zizek's Introduction to his book Tarrying With the Negative. I'm envisioning an image similar to the one he recalls in this Intro.: the celebrations in the streets of Bucharest after the overthrow of Ceausescu; a national flag waving above the crowd; the red star, the symbol of Communism, has been cut-out of the field. Z. declares that this is a "sublime" (yes, Kantanian sense) image: a moment just following the departure of the Master-Signifier, when It has yet to be replaced, an "open" moment, a moment of "becoming" wherein the incompleteness of the Big Other became apparent.
There is somewhere else in Zizek's books where he gives his account (his imaginings) of the beginning of the Iranian revolt against the Shah. He imagines a provincial police check-point where some one Irani defies the police, he will not follow the order to leave the area. Therefrom, the assembled crowd confronts the police and attack the police station. This is proposed as the first (given ordinal preference merely for conveniences of logical sequence) instance of the demise of the power of the absolute injunctions of the Big Other; that it is only from one such moment that the revolution could take place at all. The falling of statues comes only much much later.
From a statue to a gap in the flag (thus my proposal: de-erection). Whether it was Lenin or Stalin, whether it was brought down by hand tools or cranes or Finnish engineers contracted by Estonians, without drinking too deeply of fantasia, I think that it was done locally, by some version of "the people". Thus, those Iraqis in Firdouz square were (they have been and will be) deprived their "open" moment free of the previous concrete contingencies of threat and collaboration; they are occupied, the Master-Signifier is torn by an invading force, they had to ask permission to be granted but a moment of pleasure. The psycho-social trauma is perverse and boundless: the only relief granted by the "taking" of Baghdad is a relief from a compound terror (arbitrariness compounded): life under S.H. and foreign military violence; but terror remains in town. One species of inhumanity immediately replaced by another; inhumanities of epic proportions. The US (in the guise of the military) is the evil therapist: the one who needs the needs of the analysand; the one who establishes new dynamics of dependencies; the one who authors new fantasies under threat of violence.
Took me a long time to get not very far; these things sometimes steep for days, and then finally saturate me. Really, I promise, I have not converted to or taken vows as an orthodox Lacanian; its just a way for me to keep seeing the world as filled with people and pleasures and pains and not merely architecture.
My friend Tom makes a Lacanian analysis of the Baghdad statue destroying party yesterday. We were corresponding about coining a new word for throwing down statues (he suggested de-erection -- we suggested tumescoclasm) - and we referred him to Fred Kaplan's article in Slate. This is his reply.
"The crowds seemed to know what was expected of them. A man went up to one of the marines, whose tanks now controlled the circle and both sides of Sadoon Road, a main artery in east Baghdad, and asked for permission to destroy the statue."
Thanks for the hint toward Kaplan's piece - not bad for an on-the-spot report; esp. his comparative recollections from 1991. Of course, of course, I am looking forward to a somewhat more Lacanian reading of this type of event from Zizek. Like I always say (rather: I promise to say it like this from this point forward, for this is the inaugural use): while you can have too much psychotherapy, you can never have too much psychoanalysis because you can always be dead wrong.
Yes, damned right Fred Kaplan, that Marine is a "moron" for draping the stars and stripes over the face of the statue (let's skip the obvious issues of The Face and erasure here; they aint that much fun), but not for reasons of painting a "picture of neo-colonialism"; no, he is a moron for therapeutic reasons.
Lets face it, the picture of colonialism, neo-, retro-or other, is quite complete; it is developed, mounted, framed and hung for exhibition.
Let me back-up, step aside and circle away from my point. I'm thinking now of Zizek's Introduction to his book Tarrying With the Negative. I'm envisioning an image similar to the one he recalls in this Intro.: the celebrations in the streets of Bucharest after the overthrow of Ceausescu; a national flag waving above the crowd; the red star, the symbol of Communism, has been cut-out of the field. Z. declares that this is a "sublime" (yes, Kantanian sense) image: a moment just following the departure of the Master-Signifier, when It has yet to be replaced, an "open" moment, a moment of "becoming" wherein the incompleteness of the Big Other became apparent.
There is somewhere else in Zizek's books where he gives his account (his imaginings) of the beginning of the Iranian revolt against the Shah. He imagines a provincial police check-point where some one Irani defies the police, he will not follow the order to leave the area. Therefrom, the assembled crowd confronts the police and attack the police station. This is proposed as the first (given ordinal preference merely for conveniences of logical sequence) instance of the demise of the power of the absolute injunctions of the Big Other; that it is only from one such moment that the revolution could take place at all. The falling of statues comes only much much later.
From a statue to a gap in the flag (thus my proposal: de-erection). Whether it was Lenin or Stalin, whether it was brought down by hand tools or cranes or Finnish engineers contracted by Estonians, without drinking too deeply of fantasia, I think that it was done locally, by some version of "the people". Thus, those Iraqis in Firdouz square were (they have been and will be) deprived their "open" moment free of the previous concrete contingencies of threat and collaboration; they are occupied, the Master-Signifier is torn by an invading force, they had to ask permission to be granted but a moment of pleasure. The psycho-social trauma is perverse and boundless: the only relief granted by the "taking" of Baghdad is a relief from a compound terror (arbitrariness compounded): life under S.H. and foreign military violence; but terror remains in town. One species of inhumanity immediately replaced by another; inhumanities of epic proportions. The US (in the guise of the military) is the evil therapist: the one who needs the needs of the analysand; the one who establishes new dynamics of dependencies; the one who authors new fantasies under threat of violence.
Took me a long time to get not very far; these things sometimes steep for days, and then finally saturate me. Really, I promise, I have not converted to or taken vows as an orthodox Lacanian; its just a way for me to keep seeing the world as filled with people and pleasures and pains and not merely architecture.
Bollettino
"For many years, the lodging-house where Hazlitt died - his landlady, eager to let his room, hid his body under the bed while she showed it to would-be tenants - has been known as Hazlitt's Hotel."
Run, do not walk, to Tom Paulin's piece on Hazlitt (which was given as a speech for the ceremony marking the erection of a monument to Hazlitt) in the Observer. It came out last week. We missed it. But we read it this morning, and we are still throbbing in the thrall of the thing. Appreciation -- and not the royal osculation of the ass practiced by blurb writers and friends of friends in the book reviews -- is a pretty rare and lonely art. It requires catching the writer both in the gloss of one's own fine perception of him, and standing enough outside that gloss to see him, or at least glimpse him, as alien. You have to tread a fine zigzag. Well, Paulin does. He's magnificent. And Hazlitt deserves every encomium, poor man. Hazlitt is the writer's writer, the one who dies for all of us who are choking to death on the miserable dribbles of freelance work upon which we expend every fine sentence, every formal tact, that we can, and get away with it.
We've been a Hazlitt reader for years. Like Paulin, the puzzle of Hazlitt is how he can be neglected when Coleridge, whose scholarly insusurrations weigh like lead on the heart of his readers, is studied all too multitudinously. Perhaps that is a bit unfair. However, to read Paulin on Hazlitt is to immediately want to read Hazlitt, whereas to read Richard Holmes on Coleridge is to think what a relief it is that we now don't have to read Coleridge.
One of Hazlitt's essays that Paulin mentions which sounds like fun for this War season is On the Connection between Toad-eaters and Tyrants -- especially as we have just experienced an immense hopping of toad-eaters claiming to be against tyrants. The essay begins with a pretty brisk jab:
" ...the progress of knowledge and civilization is in itself favourable to liberty and equality, and that the general stream of thought and opinion constantly sets in this way, till power finds the tide of public feeling becoming too strong for it, ready to sap its rotten foundations, and "bore through its castle-walls;" and then it contrives to turn the tide of knowledge and sentiment clean the contrary way, and either bribes human reason to take part against human nature, or knocks it on the head by a more summary process. Thus, in the year 1792, Mr Burke became a pensioner for writing his book against the French Revolution, and Mr Thomas Paine was outlawed for his Rights of Man. Since that period, the press has been the great enemy of freedom, the whole weight of that immense engine (for the purposes of good or ill) having a fatal bias given to it by the two main springs of fear and favour."
That seems exactly right, even, sad to say, about Burke. In 1792, Burke was in the process of turning his hatred of the French Revolution, a hatred sprung from his detestation of a government by theory, into a war against the principles of the French revolution, which was, clearly, the mirror image of government by theory --a war for the sake of theory. Hazlitt's summation of the "history and mystery of literary patriotism and prostitution for the last twenty years" is masterful: he understands how deadly the convergence between the polemical impulse and the interest of the powerful can become, and what disaster it can cause. We've seen that happen in the last year, with much, much more trifling men than Coleridge or Burke or Wordsworth. The horde of belligerati contain hardly one man who is worth reading twice; and most of them, like Andrew Sullivan, aren't worth reading once. No one would do it if they didn't agree with Andrew S.'s opinions -- and that is the lowest form of writing. Hitchens, Cohen, and Berman are on a higher plane, but --- except for Berman -- they have pretty much lowered themselves to the Sullivan standard.
But the most famous passage in the essay is one of those jets of political fantasia which remind us of Troilus and Cressida for its eloquence, bitterness, and partial truth:
"Man is a toad-eating animal. The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself: the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave. It is not he alone, who wears the golden crown, that is proud of it: the wretch who pines in a dungeon, and in chains, is dazzled with it; and if he could but shake off his own fetters, would care little about the wretches whom he left behind him, so that he might have an opportunity, on being set free himself, of gazing at this glittering gew-gaw "on some high holiday of once a year." The slave, who has no other hope or consolation, clings to the apparition of royal magnificence, which insults his misery and his despair; stares through the hollow eyes of famine at the insolence of pride and luxury which has occasioned it, and hugs his chains the closer, because he has nothing else left."
Hazlitt wrote this at a dreadful time, from his perspective. The restoration of the Bourbons, the seeming burial of all the liberal ideals of the French revolution in England, made him feel that his time was being carried backwards into the abyss of brute force that, in Republican mythology, was the actual situation under Charles I, replayed in the worst days of George III. The thing was... Hazlitt was wrong about his time. Wrong in an interesting way.
But this would carry us into the depths of an essay that I am, as always, perpetually working on. We don't want to go there.
"For many years, the lodging-house where Hazlitt died - his landlady, eager to let his room, hid his body under the bed while she showed it to would-be tenants - has been known as Hazlitt's Hotel."
Run, do not walk, to Tom Paulin's piece on Hazlitt (which was given as a speech for the ceremony marking the erection of a monument to Hazlitt) in the Observer. It came out last week. We missed it. But we read it this morning, and we are still throbbing in the thrall of the thing. Appreciation -- and not the royal osculation of the ass practiced by blurb writers and friends of friends in the book reviews -- is a pretty rare and lonely art. It requires catching the writer both in the gloss of one's own fine perception of him, and standing enough outside that gloss to see him, or at least glimpse him, as alien. You have to tread a fine zigzag. Well, Paulin does. He's magnificent. And Hazlitt deserves every encomium, poor man. Hazlitt is the writer's writer, the one who dies for all of us who are choking to death on the miserable dribbles of freelance work upon which we expend every fine sentence, every formal tact, that we can, and get away with it.
We've been a Hazlitt reader for years. Like Paulin, the puzzle of Hazlitt is how he can be neglected when Coleridge, whose scholarly insusurrations weigh like lead on the heart of his readers, is studied all too multitudinously. Perhaps that is a bit unfair. However, to read Paulin on Hazlitt is to immediately want to read Hazlitt, whereas to read Richard Holmes on Coleridge is to think what a relief it is that we now don't have to read Coleridge.
One of Hazlitt's essays that Paulin mentions which sounds like fun for this War season is On the Connection between Toad-eaters and Tyrants -- especially as we have just experienced an immense hopping of toad-eaters claiming to be against tyrants. The essay begins with a pretty brisk jab:
" ...the progress of knowledge and civilization is in itself favourable to liberty and equality, and that the general stream of thought and opinion constantly sets in this way, till power finds the tide of public feeling becoming too strong for it, ready to sap its rotten foundations, and "bore through its castle-walls;" and then it contrives to turn the tide of knowledge and sentiment clean the contrary way, and either bribes human reason to take part against human nature, or knocks it on the head by a more summary process. Thus, in the year 1792, Mr Burke became a pensioner for writing his book against the French Revolution, and Mr Thomas Paine was outlawed for his Rights of Man. Since that period, the press has been the great enemy of freedom, the whole weight of that immense engine (for the purposes of good or ill) having a fatal bias given to it by the two main springs of fear and favour."
That seems exactly right, even, sad to say, about Burke. In 1792, Burke was in the process of turning his hatred of the French Revolution, a hatred sprung from his detestation of a government by theory, into a war against the principles of the French revolution, which was, clearly, the mirror image of government by theory --a war for the sake of theory. Hazlitt's summation of the "history and mystery of literary patriotism and prostitution for the last twenty years" is masterful: he understands how deadly the convergence between the polemical impulse and the interest of the powerful can become, and what disaster it can cause. We've seen that happen in the last year, with much, much more trifling men than Coleridge or Burke or Wordsworth. The horde of belligerati contain hardly one man who is worth reading twice; and most of them, like Andrew Sullivan, aren't worth reading once. No one would do it if they didn't agree with Andrew S.'s opinions -- and that is the lowest form of writing. Hitchens, Cohen, and Berman are on a higher plane, but --- except for Berman -- they have pretty much lowered themselves to the Sullivan standard.
But the most famous passage in the essay is one of those jets of political fantasia which remind us of Troilus and Cressida for its eloquence, bitterness, and partial truth:
"Man is a toad-eating animal. The admiration of power in others is as common to man as the love of it in himself: the one makes him a tyrant, the other a slave. It is not he alone, who wears the golden crown, that is proud of it: the wretch who pines in a dungeon, and in chains, is dazzled with it; and if he could but shake off his own fetters, would care little about the wretches whom he left behind him, so that he might have an opportunity, on being set free himself, of gazing at this glittering gew-gaw "on some high holiday of once a year." The slave, who has no other hope or consolation, clings to the apparition of royal magnificence, which insults his misery and his despair; stares through the hollow eyes of famine at the insolence of pride and luxury which has occasioned it, and hugs his chains the closer, because he has nothing else left."
Hazlitt wrote this at a dreadful time, from his perspective. The restoration of the Bourbons, the seeming burial of all the liberal ideals of the French revolution in England, made him feel that his time was being carried backwards into the abyss of brute force that, in Republican mythology, was the actual situation under Charles I, replayed in the worst days of George III. The thing was... Hazlitt was wrong about his time. Wrong in an interesting way.
But this would carry us into the depths of an essay that I am, as always, perpetually working on. We don't want to go there.
Bollettino
There's a mass illusion in the Lefty world that the Middle East bleeds for the Palestinians. We really don't think there's any evidence for this. Sure, there is some encouragement of those Palestinians who volunteer to make firecrackers of themselves, and there is much high flying rhetoric, but for the fifty some years of the diaspora there hasn't been any evidence that the Palestinian cause takes precedent over self interest. There is, in other words, a divergence between the symbolism of the cause and the realities of national interest.
We are moved to make these observations by the coverage of Arab disappointment with the end (or at least an image of that final horror) of the Saddam the Meatgrinder regime. If we were Pentagon imperialists, we would certainly encourage the juxtaposition of the reactions of Iraqis and the "Arab street." There is no better foothold for a divide and rule strategy. We can understand the pride in the resistance of the fedayeen, which is of a much more uncertain composition than the Republican guard, and can be plausibly made out to represent a form of feeling not bound up with Saddam's infra-infernalstructure. But for the Republican guard we can only feel what Trotsky felt about the Czar's police force: the military, he said, was salvagable, but as for the police, the only way to salvage them was at the end of a rope thrown around the nearest lamppost.
So -- this is a long winded way of saying we don't put a lot of stock in the idea that Smilin' Jay Garner's relationship with Israel has much bearing on his coming rule in Iraq. There's something rather miserable in rooting for popular antisemitic attitudes to kick in, anyway. No, what will, if not warded off by international pressure, spark the second phase of the war is the simple combination of Iraqi disgruntlement with occupation and the inevitable struggles between factions. As we said in some long lost post, the goal of the anti-occupation movement ought to be: 1. prevent the looting of Iraq by Americans; 2. prevent the deterioration of the civil society that has emerged in Northern Iraq; 3. support the immediate rule of Iraq by Iraqis; 4. enourage the accelerated pullout of Amerian and British troops.
There's a mass illusion in the Lefty world that the Middle East bleeds for the Palestinians. We really don't think there's any evidence for this. Sure, there is some encouragement of those Palestinians who volunteer to make firecrackers of themselves, and there is much high flying rhetoric, but for the fifty some years of the diaspora there hasn't been any evidence that the Palestinian cause takes precedent over self interest. There is, in other words, a divergence between the symbolism of the cause and the realities of national interest.
We are moved to make these observations by the coverage of Arab disappointment with the end (or at least an image of that final horror) of the Saddam the Meatgrinder regime. If we were Pentagon imperialists, we would certainly encourage the juxtaposition of the reactions of Iraqis and the "Arab street." There is no better foothold for a divide and rule strategy. We can understand the pride in the resistance of the fedayeen, which is of a much more uncertain composition than the Republican guard, and can be plausibly made out to represent a form of feeling not bound up with Saddam's infra-infernalstructure. But for the Republican guard we can only feel what Trotsky felt about the Czar's police force: the military, he said, was salvagable, but as for the police, the only way to salvage them was at the end of a rope thrown around the nearest lamppost.
So -- this is a long winded way of saying we don't put a lot of stock in the idea that Smilin' Jay Garner's relationship with Israel has much bearing on his coming rule in Iraq. There's something rather miserable in rooting for popular antisemitic attitudes to kick in, anyway. No, what will, if not warded off by international pressure, spark the second phase of the war is the simple combination of Iraqi disgruntlement with occupation and the inevitable struggles between factions. As we said in some long lost post, the goal of the anti-occupation movement ought to be: 1. prevent the looting of Iraq by Americans; 2. prevent the deterioration of the civil society that has emerged in Northern Iraq; 3. support the immediate rule of Iraq by Iraqis; 4. enourage the accelerated pullout of Amerian and British troops.
Wednesday, April 09, 2003
Bollettino
There's an excellent little book by Italian researcher Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini , "Inevitable Illusions." P.P contends that our usual cognitive mechanism suffers from certain mental "tunnels," especially when it comes to probability, causal inference, and what I would call the narrative urge -- the drive to create, out of events, stories that are consonant with the pattern of stories we like. P.P's section on Predictability in Hindsight seems particularly apposite given the state of the War. The War evolved in two stages: resistance in the South, and less resistance in the center, followed by a wholly unpredicted collapse in Baghdad. The fedayeen, who nobody mentioned in the press pre-war, fought as well as they could; in contrast, the Republican guard, who accrued tons of print, were terrible fighters. The Republican guard fought the American war -- conventional confrontation between two armed forces -- and were wiped.
P.P reports an interesting experiment, comparing two cases. In one case, a real result, and real prior data leading up to the result, was given to the subjects of the experiment, who were then asked if they could have predicted the result from the prior data. In a second case, they gave the same data, but an opposite result (in other words, they lied). In both cases, the subjects were confident, from the data, that they could have predicted the result. As long as we think we have a certain result, we immediately create a plausible backstory; and in the creation of that backstory we become confident of our power to correctly appraise each piece of evidence.
It is this quality that Jack Shafer makes fun of in a recent hit on Johnny Apple, the NYT journalist. You'll remember that Jack Shafer's first hit on Apple made fun of his prediction that Afghanistan would be difficult to govern. You'll rememember we commented that Shafer's remark -- that Afghanistan is comparable to San Francisco in governability -- was the acme of dumbness. Given the firefights this last week in Afghanistan, and the government's own reports on the return of the Taliban, one would think that Shafer's newest piece on Apple would be tempered by the humility induced by his own rashness in pronouncing Afghanistan pacified territory. In fact, Shafer makes the odd assumption that results consequent to American victories are historically, and thus militarily, irrelevant. So for him, the taking of Kabul by the Americans has closed the book on Afghanistan -- an assumption that the soldiers of the British Empire could probably have told him something about. He makes fun of Apple for asking the common sense question about what defines the end of the War. Here is Shafer thinking himself a real cock of the walk:
"By April 6�a whole day later [from the first article Shafer analyzed]�Apple constructs new victory benchmarks for the coalition in "Allies' New Test: How To Define Victory." It's not enough that the Americans and Brits have encircled Baghdad and subdued Basra in less than three weeks of fighting and eviscerated the Iraqi army and its irregulars. His impatient lede asks, "How and when, it seems worth asking, will the United States and its allies know they have won the Iraqi war?"
Apple doesn't answer his own question directly but implies that the allies' recipe for victory pie would have to include a new, democratic government in Iraq; the elimination of Saddam Hussein; the uncovering of his weapons of mass destruction; and the departure of U.S. troops�sooner rather than later.
By defining victory "up," Apple subtly retreats to his original, March 27 position that nothing but quagmire, quagmire, quagmire awaits the United States in Iraq."
You'll notice that Shafer is accusing Apple of doing exactly what the subjects in PPs' experiment did. And you will notice he is making the accusation by ignoring evidence that Apple's original predictions about Afghanistan are coming true, since Shafer has decided that the defeat of the Taliban in 2001 was the definite end of the Taliban -- he's anchored his certainty there. Meaning that he's protecting himself from the Predictability in Hindsight problem by hemming and hawing on his own predictions, and editing facts to reflect badly on Apple.
This will happen a lot for as long as celebrations of the Meat Machine's demise are broadcast on tv and the radio.
There's an excellent little book by Italian researcher Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini , "Inevitable Illusions." P.P contends that our usual cognitive mechanism suffers from certain mental "tunnels," especially when it comes to probability, causal inference, and what I would call the narrative urge -- the drive to create, out of events, stories that are consonant with the pattern of stories we like. P.P's section on Predictability in Hindsight seems particularly apposite given the state of the War. The War evolved in two stages: resistance in the South, and less resistance in the center, followed by a wholly unpredicted collapse in Baghdad. The fedayeen, who nobody mentioned in the press pre-war, fought as well as they could; in contrast, the Republican guard, who accrued tons of print, were terrible fighters. The Republican guard fought the American war -- conventional confrontation between two armed forces -- and were wiped.
P.P reports an interesting experiment, comparing two cases. In one case, a real result, and real prior data leading up to the result, was given to the subjects of the experiment, who were then asked if they could have predicted the result from the prior data. In a second case, they gave the same data, but an opposite result (in other words, they lied). In both cases, the subjects were confident, from the data, that they could have predicted the result. As long as we think we have a certain result, we immediately create a plausible backstory; and in the creation of that backstory we become confident of our power to correctly appraise each piece of evidence.
It is this quality that Jack Shafer makes fun of in a recent hit on Johnny Apple, the NYT journalist. You'll remember that Jack Shafer's first hit on Apple made fun of his prediction that Afghanistan would be difficult to govern. You'll rememember we commented that Shafer's remark -- that Afghanistan is comparable to San Francisco in governability -- was the acme of dumbness. Given the firefights this last week in Afghanistan, and the government's own reports on the return of the Taliban, one would think that Shafer's newest piece on Apple would be tempered by the humility induced by his own rashness in pronouncing Afghanistan pacified territory. In fact, Shafer makes the odd assumption that results consequent to American victories are historically, and thus militarily, irrelevant. So for him, the taking of Kabul by the Americans has closed the book on Afghanistan -- an assumption that the soldiers of the British Empire could probably have told him something about. He makes fun of Apple for asking the common sense question about what defines the end of the War. Here is Shafer thinking himself a real cock of the walk:
"By April 6�a whole day later [from the first article Shafer analyzed]�Apple constructs new victory benchmarks for the coalition in "Allies' New Test: How To Define Victory." It's not enough that the Americans and Brits have encircled Baghdad and subdued Basra in less than three weeks of fighting and eviscerated the Iraqi army and its irregulars. His impatient lede asks, "How and when, it seems worth asking, will the United States and its allies know they have won the Iraqi war?"
Apple doesn't answer his own question directly but implies that the allies' recipe for victory pie would have to include a new, democratic government in Iraq; the elimination of Saddam Hussein; the uncovering of his weapons of mass destruction; and the departure of U.S. troops�sooner rather than later.
By defining victory "up," Apple subtly retreats to his original, March 27 position that nothing but quagmire, quagmire, quagmire awaits the United States in Iraq."
You'll notice that Shafer is accusing Apple of doing exactly what the subjects in PPs' experiment did. And you will notice he is making the accusation by ignoring evidence that Apple's original predictions about Afghanistan are coming true, since Shafer has decided that the defeat of the Taliban in 2001 was the definite end of the Taliban -- he's anchored his certainty there. Meaning that he's protecting himself from the Predictability in Hindsight problem by hemming and hawing on his own predictions, and editing facts to reflect badly on Apple.
This will happen a lot for as long as celebrations of the Meat Machine's demise are broadcast on tv and the radio.
Bollettino
"...war is at us, my black skin, war is at hand from today to tomorrow"-- Paul Bogle
In response to the perennial question War, what is it good for? we have an answer, from WSJ's Alan Murray. Murray writes a weekly column, Political Capital. In this week's column, he gives us a glimpse of the exciting work being done in D.C. Yes, it looks like Iraq is going to benefit not only from democracy, but from a speeded up version of the Reagan revolution!
Throwing off the trammels of the government. Letting the magic of the marketplace do its, uh, magic. Murray gives us historic scenes; Grover Norquist "working on intellectual property laws for a free Iraq.' Undersecretary Treasury secretary John Taylor drafting Iraq's new tax laws. Peter Fisher, yet another undersecretary, writing new securities laws. In fact, the Iraqi democracy has almost everything going for it, except Iraqis. This is a minor lacuna; no doubt, Chelabi is working on rubber stamping Grover's work. . Murray keeps his euphoria under control, but just barely... I mean, we are talking about Iraq becoming the Middle Eastern "Hong Kong!" Great things are in the offing, obviously.
Now, this could all be messed up. Natives have a tendency not to take the long view. Sure, they'll take our food and water, but then they get to resenting the American companies that are exclusively tapped to rebuild their country and begin skulking about with Uzis. As Grover Norquist would say, if he had the time, a free Iraq needs a transition period... yes, to gain the benefits of responsible freedom.
The ardor Murray describes is feverish, and a bit scary. Especially if you are an Iraqi with your own opinions about intellectual property law. Iraq's open moment will come and go before we see it.
D.C., of course, doesn't want us to see it. If the Democrats can shake off their apparent terminal state of stupor, maybe they should say something about that.
"...war is at us, my black skin, war is at hand from today to tomorrow"-- Paul Bogle
In response to the perennial question War, what is it good for? we have an answer, from WSJ's Alan Murray. Murray writes a weekly column, Political Capital. In this week's column, he gives us a glimpse of the exciting work being done in D.C. Yes, it looks like Iraq is going to benefit not only from democracy, but from a speeded up version of the Reagan revolution!
Throwing off the trammels of the government. Letting the magic of the marketplace do its, uh, magic. Murray gives us historic scenes; Grover Norquist "working on intellectual property laws for a free Iraq.' Undersecretary Treasury secretary John Taylor drafting Iraq's new tax laws. Peter Fisher, yet another undersecretary, writing new securities laws. In fact, the Iraqi democracy has almost everything going for it, except Iraqis. This is a minor lacuna; no doubt, Chelabi is working on rubber stamping Grover's work. . Murray keeps his euphoria under control, but just barely... I mean, we are talking about Iraq becoming the Middle Eastern "Hong Kong!" Great things are in the offing, obviously.
Now, this could all be messed up. Natives have a tendency not to take the long view. Sure, they'll take our food and water, but then they get to resenting the American companies that are exclusively tapped to rebuild their country and begin skulking about with Uzis. As Grover Norquist would say, if he had the time, a free Iraq needs a transition period... yes, to gain the benefits of responsible freedom.
The ardor Murray describes is feverish, and a bit scary. Especially if you are an Iraqi with your own opinions about intellectual property law. Iraq's open moment will come and go before we see it.
D.C., of course, doesn't want us to see it. If the Democrats can shake off their apparent terminal state of stupor, maybe they should say something about that.
Tuesday, April 08, 2003
Bollettino
The traditional Greek tragic tetralogy would be ended with a fourth play, a mock tragedy, or satyr play. In the age of the speeded up News cycle, we've put them all on together. Thus, while all eyes are turned to the meatmaster's demise in Baghdad, at home the HealthSouth satyr play is strutting its stuff. And what stuff! Cornpone fraud, served hot and piping, just like Enron used to make it! Except that Richard Scuchy was no Ken Lay. And just as in Enron Rex, there's the accounting and investment banking auxilliaries forming a little chorus. The NYPost publishes a blaring, tabloid style glimpse of UBS Warburg's healthcare and biotech unit, led by Ben Lorello, which basically floated HealthSouth. It is interesting to compare the genteel tone of the NYT's Ben Lorello story and the Post's. The NYT titles its story, Conflict Issue Over Analyst's Deal. This is muffling your scoop in gray flannel indeed. The Post, on the other hands, screams UBS' OWN GRUBMAN. The parallel isn't quite Plutarchian, since it is unclear who plays the role of Grubman, here: Lorello or analyst shill Howard Capek, who kept HealthSouth at a buy when all around were otherwise suspecting that the robbers had taken the safe.
Meanwhile, we've heard a rumor that Scrushy is in hiding. Or in flight. Forbes, last week, published a piece that summarized what Scrushy is facing:
"Under the insider trading charges, the SEC is seeking as much as $743 million from Scrushy, including the return of profits, civil penalty and interest.
The Department of Justice will not settle for just financial penalties in this case, legal experts predicted.
"Federal sentencing guidelines would call for extremely harsh penalties," Nolan said. "There is almost a guarantee of substantial prison time."
Maris said Scrushy could be looking at 10 years behind bars.
"I think we are in a climate where the investing public is expecting to see corporate wrongdoers begin to do something other than pay back portions of the money they have wrongfully gotten," he said."
If Scrushy the satyr debouches into some Caribbean haven, Vesco-like, don't be surprised. Who knows, he might turn up next in Havanna, on the right hand of el jefe.
The traditional Greek tragic tetralogy would be ended with a fourth play, a mock tragedy, or satyr play. In the age of the speeded up News cycle, we've put them all on together. Thus, while all eyes are turned to the meatmaster's demise in Baghdad, at home the HealthSouth satyr play is strutting its stuff. And what stuff! Cornpone fraud, served hot and piping, just like Enron used to make it! Except that Richard Scuchy was no Ken Lay. And just as in Enron Rex, there's the accounting and investment banking auxilliaries forming a little chorus. The NYPost publishes a blaring, tabloid style glimpse of UBS Warburg's healthcare and biotech unit, led by Ben Lorello, which basically floated HealthSouth. It is interesting to compare the genteel tone of the NYT's Ben Lorello story and the Post's. The NYT titles its story, Conflict Issue Over Analyst's Deal. This is muffling your scoop in gray flannel indeed. The Post, on the other hands, screams UBS' OWN GRUBMAN. The parallel isn't quite Plutarchian, since it is unclear who plays the role of Grubman, here: Lorello or analyst shill Howard Capek, who kept HealthSouth at a buy when all around were otherwise suspecting that the robbers had taken the safe.
Meanwhile, we've heard a rumor that Scrushy is in hiding. Or in flight. Forbes, last week, published a piece that summarized what Scrushy is facing:
"Under the insider trading charges, the SEC is seeking as much as $743 million from Scrushy, including the return of profits, civil penalty and interest.
The Department of Justice will not settle for just financial penalties in this case, legal experts predicted.
"Federal sentencing guidelines would call for extremely harsh penalties," Nolan said. "There is almost a guarantee of substantial prison time."
Maris said Scrushy could be looking at 10 years behind bars.
"I think we are in a climate where the investing public is expecting to see corporate wrongdoers begin to do something other than pay back portions of the money they have wrongfully gotten," he said."
If Scrushy the satyr debouches into some Caribbean haven, Vesco-like, don't be surprised. Who knows, he might turn up next in Havanna, on the right hand of el jefe.
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