Bollettino

LI recently wrote a review of Niall Ferguson’s latest book, Colossus, for the National Post. In the review, I gingerly tiptoed around one of the obvious flaws in the book – Ferguson knows little and cares less about American history. This is fine with me. Let each do the work he loves.

Ferguson has never made any bones about the fact that he wants to be the AJP Taylor of the Right. Unfortunately, he seems headed for being the Toynbee of the Right -- hot, donnish air spread over big and vacuous ideas. He is exploiting his serious status as a historian (a man who knows things) to build a shaky and unworthy career for himself as a pundit (a man who quotes men who know things). He should really try to refrain from drawing conclusions from American history until he has an undergraduate level familiarity with it. But there he is, again, in Slate, blithely going on about, of all things he doesn’t know about, John Quincy Adams.

Here, astonishingly, is what he says about JQA:

“The lineal antecedent of the Bush administration's current policy is revealed here to be John Quincy Adams, "the most influential American grand strategist of the nineteenth century." (Although Americans are generally wary of the hereditary principle, they do like it to apply in the realm of foreign policy.)
According to Gaddis, Adams' strategy—partly inspired by one of the first nasty "surprises" in American history, the torching of the White House by the British in 1814—had three distinctive components. It allowed for pre-emption, on which basis South Florida and Texas were annexed; unilateralism, hence the Monroe Doctrine instead of an Anglo-American condominium in Latin America; and American hegemony, which came a lot later, but which Adams and his contemporaries fondly imagined.”

This is, well, whacky, and only a man who draws his American history through the very narrow straw provided by books by foreign policy scholars would have written something that is both so weird (South Florida? Does Ferguson know where Florida is? He had the same problem in his book) and that so misstates Adams contribution to American’s expansionist policy. The misstatemeht is symptomatic of Ferguson's real disinterest with American history. Ferguson has never had much time for race as a historical category. Sure, he mentions it in Empire, but he much prefers to talk about markets. That, plus Ferguson's tendency to make lawyer like arguments -- he loves to weed through his facts -- show through in the way he does American history.

Historians get a feel for facts. For instance, even if an American historian knew little about Adams and Texas, he'd suspect the annexation story and the South Florida story for the same reason: Adams was prominently and famously anti-slavery. Annexation, in the pre-civil war days, was driven largely by the South - in search of new territories, and seeking to enlarge the sphere of slave economies. These things came together in Adams famous opposition to annexing Texas. Adams knew very well that the Texas revolt was caused in part by the fact that the Americans in Texas were bringing their slaves into a state in a nation that had abolished slavery. All of which adds up to what Adams really did – which was to prevent a pre-emptive annexation of Texas by Andrew Jackson. Actually, the last is a bit speculative, but the latest historian of the Texas revolution, H.W. Brands, in his book Lone Star Nation, makes a pretty good case for it. The speculative part is that Jackson was moving towards annexation. The part that isn’t speculation is that Adams clearly blocked the annexation of Texas to the U.S., and he did it because of slavery. An excerpt from Adam’s speech on the subject:

“Annexation, had been put off with a sort of Return Jonathan refusal. He had been told with Solemnity of face that there was a doubt of the Constitutional power of Congress and the President to accept the proposal and moreover that they could not think of it now because it would risk a war with Mexico, and violate the sacred Faith of Treaties. But Mr. Jefferson had shewn how a Constitutional Camel could be Swallowed for the sake of Louisiana by palates accustomed to strain at a gnat, and the Chairman of the late Committee of Foreign Affairs professed his readiness to swallow another for the sake of Texas. And as to the war with Mexico, one President had told Congress seven months before that it would be justifiable, and his successor, even while alleging this pretence of War and the Sacred Faith of Treaties, was about to tell Congress not only that he himself agreed with his Predecessor that War would have been justifiable the Winter before, but that...both Houses of Congress had been of the same opinion, and that it was now not only more justifiable but indispensable because the last magnanimous Appeal to the Justice and the fears of Mexico, heralded by a Courier from that Department of State, with the indulgence of one week for an answer, had totally failed.”

Notice, however, that Kagan, Ferguson's interlocutor, doesn't correct him. As AJP Taylor once said, foreign policy mandarins know little about their own country, and a little more about other countries -- which is a distinct limitation on their policy formulations.

That's surely the case here.

Now, one might say, in Ferguson's defense, that Adams did, after all, construct what is known as the Monroe doctrine. But this simply reinforces the point about how complicated the American expansionist idea was, and how even in practice it was even attended with sometimes crippling tensions. While Adams, like many Americans, probably did assume that the U.S. would, at some point, take over the whole of North America, in fact his career is about the gradual dissolution of this idea, rather than its triumph. Ignorant of the way dialectical tug in American history, Ferguson justs sees an analogy with the British Empire. If that analogy wasn't there, frankly, Ferguson wouldn't be interested.

Ferguson should get safely back to his field in pronto time. The next time he writes for Slate, they might match him with someone who knows something about American history.

Bollettino

Josh Marshall, of Talking Points Memo, pointed us to this very illuminating Salon article on Ahmed Chalabi by an enterprising journalist named John Dizard. It is worth seeing the ad (for the one day’s free membership!) to read the article, which provides an x ray of the motives of Bush’s Pentagon pump house gang. Our idea about the obsession with Iraq on the part of the Wolfowitzies was that, in part, Wolfowitz wanted to impose a coherent policy on the Middle East that would make it easier to accommodate our policy towards both Israel and Saudi Arabia. If Dizard is to be believed, however, the motives were much shabbier and stupider – basically, the idea was to find a way around forcing Israel to cede the West Bank to the Palestinians.

Dizard gets some great quotes. Here’s one from Douglas Feith’s former law partner, who happens to have been Chalabi’s nephew’s partner, too, L. Marc Zell:

“Zell outlines what Chalabi was promising the neocons before the Iraq war: "He said he would end Iraq's boycott of trade with Israel, and would allow Israeli companies to do business there. He said [the new Iraqi government] would agree to rebuild the pipeline from Mosul [in the northern Iraqi oil fields] to Haifa [the Israeli port, and the location of a major refinery]." But Chalabi, Zell says, has delivered on none of them. The bitter ex-Chalabi backer believes his former friend's moves were a deliberate bait and switch designed to win support for his designs to return to Iraq and run the country.”

And here is Dizard’s analysis of the neo-con set of motives:

“Why did the neocons put such enormous faith in Ahmed Chalabi, an exile with a shady past and no standing with Iraqis? One word: Israel. They saw the invasion of Iraq as the precondition for a reorganization of the Middle East that would solve Israel's strategic problems, without the need for an accommodation with either the Palestinians or the existing Arab states. Chalabi assured them that the Iraqi democracy he would build would develop diplomatic and trade ties with Israel, and eschew Arab nationalism.”

If that really sums up the grand Wolfowitzian strategy – they truly are nuts.

This is hard for even someone as cynical as LI to swallow, but Dizard makes a good case. If this was, indeed, the motive, than it would explain the otherwise puzzling loyalty to a man whose greatest accomplishment was escaping Jordan in the trunk of a car to enjoy the fruits of his numerous swindles in other, less threatening, climes. But Dizard does provide a reason for one of the most puzzling aspects of the war: why it was waged when it was waged in the first place. LI had imagined, when Bush was elected on a non-interventionist platform, that he was a traditional Republican in the semi-isolationist mode. It never crossed our mind that he imagined he was Woodrow Wilson’s retarded brother. How he went from the Taft wing to the Daffy wing of the party is a big puzzle, and Dizzard provides some of the key background information.

Dizard’s article doesn’t just nail the neo-cons. It gave LI a small dialectical shock, too. The policy of rapprochement with Iran that Chalabi and his minions are pursuing in Iraq is, obviously, a good thing for Iraq. It is hard to imagine an Iraq that wouldn’t try to seal some type of alliance with Iran. It is a natural fit, and we have always maintained that an autonomous Iraq can be expected to take that direction. A democratic Iraq is not going to spontaneously embrace Israel.

According to Dizard:

“The crux of the conflict is Iran, and whether the U.S. should try to make a deal with the Islamic Republic to enlist its support for peace in Iraq. Before and immediately after the war, the neoconservative position was that U.S. empowerment of the long-disenfranchised Shia community would make possible an Iraqi government that would make a "warm peace" with Israel. This in turn would pressure the rest of the Arab world to make a similar peace, without the need to concede land to the Palestinians.
This was, of course, a pipe dream: The Shia community in Iraq, like the Sunni community, is overwhelmingly anti-Israel, and the entire range of its leadership has close ties with Iran. Belatedly realizing that Chalabi's promise to build a secular, pro-Israel Shiite government is not going to come true, in the past couple of months the neocons in the Defense Department have tried to come up with a new plan. Feith, Wolfowitz and others are backing away from the Shia, due to their ties to Iran as well as Chalabi's deceptions. They are trying to cobble together a coalition of rehabilitated Sunni Muslim Iraqi Army officers and Kurdish leaders backed by their militias that would have Shia participation, but in a reduced role. For proponents of this strategy, the front-runner to be prime minister of the next version of the transitional government is Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, the founder and leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.”

One should read the Dizzard article, and then read this mish-mash of lukewarm Democratic centrism by Lawrence J. Korb in the LA Times, today. If you want to know why Kerry is well on his way to losing the election, the Korb article provides the mindset. We particularly like this graf:

“The Bush administration has still not explained why it was mistaken about the primary reasons for going to war. Even in the face of recent setbacks, it has yet to acknowledge that creating a stable Iraq will be a long, difficult and costly endeavor and cannot be accomplished by an artificial deadline like June 30. The president has not recognized that we may have to live with an Iraq that is not a Jeffersonian democracy.”

The supposed sarcasm of the last sentence discloses, in actuality, a deep gullibility. When Howard Dean had his moment of genius about the war, it was in enacting what Husserl called an “epoche” – a bracketing of suppositions in order to understand a phenomenon. Dean bracketed the rhetoric about democracy and freedom, and looked at the “thing itself” – and he found, not democracy and freedom, but the usual shabby American colonial venture, circa 1953, in Iran, and 1956, in Guatamala. The same rushing in of corporate interests, the same lack of interest in setting up representative bodies, the same exercise in re-naming (in order to secure freedom of press, for instance, we have to close newspapers or “direct” the ones our corporations are contracted to “manage” ; in order to save Falluja, we have to destroy Falluja, etc.)

Democrats aren’t necessarily averse to these projects – in fact, they have often benefited handsomely from them. As David Brooks points out, admiringly, in his column in the NYT today, Kerry is campaigning on a Joe Lieberman like platform about Iraq. Korb’s little essay in the LAT ends, predictably, with a Kerry-esque flourish:
“Not learning from our mistakes in Vietnam would be the real disservice to our troops and the country. In fact, learning from those mistakes might be the best, if not the only, way to understand how we got into the current mess in Iraq and how we might get out of it.”
Of course, we have to learn. We have to learn and learn. We have to process. We have to process and process. We can’t promise anything, or plan anything, that would come down to: Getting Out of Iraq. Rather, the Kerry plan entails staying there and learning and processing and internationalizing and just having the most marvelous learning and processing time. Of course, regrettably, collateral casualties (you know, butchered Iraqis, butchered American soldiers) will be incurred in the learning process, but education comes at a steep price.

ps -- for confirmation of the appalling state of the Dem establishment, read Harold Meyerson's op ed piece in the Washington Post today. We loved the verbs in this sentence: "
Kerry's views on Iraq reflect those of the Democratic foreign policy elites, who largely maintain an embattled Wilsonian optimism about the prospects -- or at least, the necessity -- of shaping Iraq into a unified, pluralistic democracy." Shaping, eh? Perhaps those Democratic foreign elites ought to analyze the grammar of the word -- on the one side, the active, muscular, thinking force -- on the other side, the inert mass. Sound like colonialism yet?

Meyerson -- whose thesis is, basically, that Kerry is no flip flopper -- as if this was what mattered -- then present the dissident foreign policy view. Surprisingly, this dissident view doesn't entail having any confidence in a people to self organize -- doesn't entail applying the lessons of the Civil Rights movement in this country to Iraq -- doesn't entail any of the traditional methods used by the left in the past, including unionization, consciousness raising, and the like. I mean, doing things like that implies that the inert mass might not be so inert.

No, the new thing is to just segregate the inert mass into separate little cultural piles. Here's Meyerson, showing that the D.C. Dems are as brain-dead as the Pentagon pump house gang:

"A relative handful of the party's foreign policy mavens -- most prominently, Les Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Peter Galbraith, former U.S. ambassador to Croatia -- have a more chastened perspective. Heirs of such Vietnam-era realists as Sen. J. William Fulbright and political scientist Hans Morgenthau, they argue that Iraq is more nearly three countries than one -- a Shiite south inclined toward some form of Islamic rule, though not necessarily a theocratic republic; a democratic Kurdish north; and a Sunni-dominated middle with large non-Sunni minorities. No region will accept the domination of another, and striking a politically acceptable balance between majority rule and minority rights under these circumstances is all but impossible. You can't do nation-building, they conclude, when the nation doesn't want to be built.

Gelb has argued for letting Iraq devolve into three separate states. Galbraith, fearing that an independent Kurdistan would soon be invaded by a Kurdophobic Turkey, calls for establishing one state with a common foreign policy but consisting of three largely autonomous regions in all other matters. The realists acknowledge that there would be dreadful consequences from either kind of devolution -- certainly, women in the Shiite south would have their freedoms and lives ratcheted backward by several centuries -- but that this is going to be the eventual outcome in any case."

Those dirty, wife beating Shia, and democratic Kurds -- surely that is the verdict of contemporary history?
Or ... perhaps it is the verdict of forgetting contemporary history. Galbraith's article, for instance, mentions the first democratic elections held in Iraq, in 1992, in Kurdistan -- but forgets to mention that the two dominant Kurd war lords, dissatisfied with the results, soon went to war, and have since established their separate territories in Northern Iraq. Democracy at its finest! But why remember the facts?

Meanwhile, in Southern Iraq, elections -- which have been held on a local level -- show no strength for a theocratic party ratcheting women's rights back to the stone age, but a lot of strength for lefty parties with a strong stake in civil society.

Meyerson's article is more evidence, if we need it, that the Kerry flip flop which we should be angry about was his devious stance on Iraq. During the primaries, he allowed himself to be presented as a critic of the war. Little did we know his position was about the same as Bush's.

Bollettino

LI wasn’t planning on writing about the Abu Ghraib tortures, but it is too good an opportunity to ask about U.S. prisons to pass up. After all, the outcry has been confined mainly to the Iraq context, and whether the U.S. contractors and reservists exercizing their talents for cornpone sadism are the equivalent of Saddam H.’s vast torture machine. But while Saddam was constructing his prisons, the U.S. was very busily constructing theirs. And while we know very little about whether Iraqis regularly joked about prisoners in Saddam’s system getting their arms threshed into bloody pulps and their genitals electrocuted, we do know that it has been a huge joke, in the U.S., that prisoners routinely get raped in U.S. jails. That a former prison guard from one of our private prisons in Virginia has spread the practice to Abu Ghraib shouldn’t surprise anyone.

In U.S. prisons, discipline, aka torture, is affected not by the guards so much. Being a more self-organizing society than Iraq under Saddam, the guards and the private prison companies had no time for micro-managing torture – they simply put inmates into maximally dangerous situations and waited around for the inevitable assault, the tearing out of eyes, the gang bang sodomy, etc. All funny fodder for our talk shows and movies. According to this Human Rights Watch report, something like 70 percent of the prison population yearly suffers assault. All hilarious stuff, too. But the guards get in their innings:

“In California, for example, not a single local prosecutor has ever prosecuted a guard for prison shootings that have killed thirty-nine inmates and wounded more than 200 over the past decade.”

Of course, this is the active violence that is meted out and condoned by the U.S. system. The part that isn’t considered torture is solitary confinement – which, according to this article for Fortune Magazine, started as a specifically political punishment:

“This use of sensory deprivation was extensive with imprisoned members of the Black Panther party, the Black Liberation Army formations, the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, the American Indian Movement, white activists, jail house lawyers, Islamic militants, and prison activists. At one time or another, they all found themselves living in extended isolation, sometimes for years on end.”

And here’s a pertinent graf from the same Fortune article:

“Many human rights groups have expressed concern over criminal justice policy in the US, which has increasingly, encouraged the use of control units, security housing units and super-max prisons. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the American Friends Service Committee, the National Lawyers Guild, California Prison Focus, and many other groups and individuals have joined with the World Organization Against Torture in expressing concerns about these units. The World Organization Against Torture is currently writing a report on United States compliance with the United Nations Covenants (CAT) in 1994. Areas of concern where the US does not comply with that Convention include punitive violence and brutality in control unit facilities, the practice of cell extractions, the treatment of the mentally ill and the use of brutality through chemical sprays and dangerous methods of restraint. The existence and scope of these conditions is also in opposition to guidelines for treatment set in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) as well as the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners.”

Bollettino

In the nineties, under Clinton, the left Keynsians and the right Keynsians – the liberals and the supply siders – staged a quiet revolution. They revolutionized the standard by which the CPI – the cost of living – was measured. No longer would inflation be considered, as it was by primitive man, an increase in price. Primitive man has a broken club, and he trades 5 clams for it. 3 months before, he traded 2 clams for it. Primitive man scatches his head and makes up a big word: inflation. Today’s economists have to sniff at such foolishness.

Why? Primitive man is forgetting that the shape of the club is getting more pleasing all the time! Yes, one must calculate the relationship between price and quality. As Bill Fleckenstein at MSNBC puts it:

“… you buy a PC with twice as much power, so the government concludes that you really paid only half as much money for it. Hedonics is also the government's way of taking quality improvements and converting them into price declines when calculating the CPI. Sure, that brand-new Chevy you just bought cost 40% more than it used to, but it's a 40%-better car for a variety of reasons. So, the government says, the price didn't really go up. (I have oversimplified these examples, but you get the point.)”

The liberals liked this because, in the 90s, they certainly didn’t want the Fed raising the interest rate. If they were going to have to bite the bullet and balance the budget, they at least wanted an easy money policy. Similarly, the conservatives just loved the idea of not having to pay cost of living clauses in entitlements, balancing the budget on the backs of the increased quality of the goods that the retired and the sick could buy with their reduced money. Economists liked it because it applied the rules of the neo-classical model of marginal utility that they all think founds their discipline as a science.
So the righteous circle – or circle jerk – was formed.

The result is that we are now living in a disconnect between reality and government statistics – and not for the first time. We all know that the stage has been set, with our current administration’s gross overspending, the slipping dollar in an economy that bears a 400 billion dollar yearly trade deficit, and the easy money policy of the Fed, for seventies style inflation. That is, inflation that is not driven by labor costs, but by the sinking costs of money. Yet, according to the statistics, it hasn’t arrived.
That is, according to the reconfigured statistics.

Meanwhile, the great concord of the Clinton era is starting to slip. Because the government can just about make inflation disappear at the drop of a qualitative change, it turns out that there is a lack of at least one external control on federal spending. Moreover, there eventually comes a point when reality kicks in. When consumers are paying higher prices while their economic gurus are claiming that, in actuality, these prices are an illusion, the consumers are eventually going to revolt. In a move that particularly appeals to economists, since it involves three plus variable equations that can only be done by econometricians, even when quality can’t be appealed to, you can appeal to the quality chain. The price of baseballs is going up? But isn’t this a perfect opportunity to switch to tennis balls, the prices of which aren’t going up? And so there is no inflation in the ball market, really. Or so our inflation fighting pals in the Gov. are are determined that we think. They are, in fact, about to bust the back of medical costs by waving just such magic procedures over them, and showing that medical costs are actually at a standstill.

There is a small problem with this: Americans are not inclined, generally, to contemplate appearance and reality while shelling out their money for more expensive stuff. They have a problem with the three variable plus equations. Linear, narrow minded folk, they think the cost of living is about the cost of living. They aren’t with the program.

Gold bugs, who go at economics with sawed off shot guns and usually skew to the right, are pretty incensed, right now, about the CPI shenanigans. This analysis of the CPI is provided by prominent Gold Bug, John Hathaway, at Tocqueville investments, contains three fascinating grafs about the CPI:


“Several years ago, the very important housing component of the CPI was increasing at an annual rate of 4%. Today, that number is 2.2% and heading lower. Housing is weighted at 40.85% of the total CPI. How is it falling when house prices are rising? Simple. The BLI calculates this important component on the basis of “imputed rent” rather than the capital cost of buying a new home. Imputed rent synthesizes the cost of home ownership into a rental factor putting all citizens, both renters and homeowners, on the same footing. The BLS gathers the information for imputed rent, or the “Owners’ Equivalent Rent Index” by asking “each homeowner (surveyed) for their estimate of the house’s implicit rent and what the occupants would get for their rent …. if the owner did rent their home.” (US Department of Labor Program Highlight-Fact Sheet No. BLS 96-5.)

It should be noted that in light of the Federal Reserve’s highly expansionary monetary policy, single-family owner-occupied housing has enjoyed an unprecedented new construction boom. Mr. Banerji observes that a felicitous (for the CPI) consequence of the single family housing boom has been a rise in vacancies and a decline in rental rates for apartment properties. Pressure on the rental market appears to go a long way towards explaining the mystifying decline in the housing component of the CPI. Could it be that the sagging apartment rental market also explains rising bond and equity markets?

There is still more to the tale. Gertrude Stein’s famous dictum: “Rose is a rose is a rose” speaks to the mutation of a word’s meaning over decades or centuries of usage. We can surmise that Big Brother is alive and well at the BLS where a computer is not a computer is not a computer. In other words, added features, memory capacity, and random bells and whistles are not captured in the straightforward list price of a computer. To expunge all continuity of meaning, the BLS brought forth “hedonics”, the science of measuring the value of a product or a service after allowing for qualitative improvements. A laptop with twice the memory as last year’s model sold at the same price this year is counted as a 50% price reduction. This sort of analysis was applied initially to computers and IT equipment. More recently, a broad range of consumer goods including electronics and automobiles has been subjected to hedonic measurement. Health care has been a particularly ill behaved sector of the CPI. Hospital services, nursing homes and adult day care, for example, increased 141.4% over the period 1990 to 2003, versus an average of 46% for all items measured. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Bureau of Economic Analysis is considering adjusting prices of medical services for quality changes (Grant’s Interest Rate Observer-1/30/04.)”

LI agrees with the anger of the gold people – in spite of their odd politics. In fact, we have been expecting inflation as the traditional accompaniment of war for some time now. In WWII, to pre-empt rising prices, FDR instituted rigid price controls and rationing. In the Greenspan era, however, inflation has been spun into nothingness, just as Hathaway describes. But you can only fool investors for so long with these kinds of tricks. Especially when Japan and China, with their trillion dollars of dollars, are going to be holding the bag as the real purchasing power of those dollars makes them worth less and less. For further righteous rightwinger anger at Greenspan, see links here and here.

A less biased account of hedonics, including abstruse equations that make LI’s eyes cross, has been put out by Charles Hulton, with the imprimatur of the NY branch of the Fed. One of Hulton’s examples of a qualitative change that the economists at the BEA take as a deflationary offset to a surface inflationary price change is this: the production of aircraft with a larger capacity to carry customers. It is here that economics becomes, as one hedonics critic puts it, poetry. Or more like the literary criticism of poetry. I have never encountered anyone who believes that the lessening of seat space on airplanes is a positive qualitative change. Yet a hedonics calculus could well posit that this is a positive change in quality – it leads to more customers being able to use airplanes – and thus should accrue some variable value that can be embedded in the equations to give us an inflation rate. As the Gold bugs constantly and correctly re-iterate, the bias in the BEA procedure is to posit qualitative changes as inevitably positive. That there is now a much longer wait at the airports then there was pre-9/11 simply doesn’t get into the BEA computer – but if some mechanical way was found to shorten airport wait time, that change would get into the BEA computer. It is a gamed system.

Most interesting part of Hulton’s article deals exactly with problems of the airplane seat kind: the problem of market power, of interpreting quality from the producer’s point of view as mapping non-controversially over the consumer’s point of view, and the problem of substitution. He quotes an interesting neo-Galbraithian guy named Pakes, who wants to include a variable for market power in the hedonic equations; that complexity – that is, non-linear shifts – should not be considered bad data, to be smoothed out to produce equilibriums, but should rather advance us to another level of equations to gain a finer grained matching to real markets. However, Pakes is not advocating getting rid of hedonics. By no means.

Hulton ends the paper with one of those irritating econometricians gestures, saying that the objection to hedonics is simply that it is new. This implies that the revolt against a method that stands in stark contrast to the whole purpose of figuring out a consumer price index is simply the result of superstition and inertia. This simply isn’t so – it is the result of objecting to the hijacking of a perfectly good index by methods that properly generate a whole other index – call it the Consumer Quality Price Index. Hulton's own superstitions, of course, remains consistent with the general bias of his discipline, the apologetic agenda for capitalism and an upper class p.o.v. that econometrics simply encodes.

Bollettino

Two things to read today.

One is Krugman’s editorial in the NYT. Krugman actually understands what a timeline is. Kerry apparently doesn’t – and don’t ask about the Bush hawks. To advocate one or another ‘fix’ in Iraq – for instance, internationalizing the conflict – at one time, and consider that one now has the answer to the ‘problem’ of Iraq, is to commit the central sin of central planning.

A year of mission accomplished has passed in Iraq. It has passed through Iraqi minds and bodies. And those minds and bodies live there. They can feel in their minds and bodies one thing: they aren’t items at the Pottery Barn. They aren’t broken. They aren’t bought. They aren’t ‘fixable.’ This arrogant and stupid rhetoric points to everything that is wrong with the occupation. Being humans, instead of figurines, events, over time, actually have acquired meaning for these people. Gosh. Hard as it is to believe that the Iraqis could be as fully human as Americans, some of them – I’ve heard on good authority – might even look at the carnage in Fallujah as less a lesson in the justice and goodheartedness of their liberators, and more as a reason for their liberators to go. Gosh. Vamoose. Figure out how to depart. They might even – like Americans, mourning the dead of 9/11 – think their dead are worth memorializing. They might even begin to suspect that one hundred fifty thousand people who do not speak their language, know nothing about their culture, and have only contempt for their humanity, don’t have their best interests at heart.

Second article to look at is in the WP.
Here’s an eyebrow raising graf in Josh White’s article:

“The surge in casualties in the past month has not changed the public's key judgments on Iraq, however. While Bush has clearly lost public support for his policies there, much of that erosion occurred before the current wave of violence. Bush's approval rating for dealing with the situation in Iraq stood at 45 percent in a Post-ABC News poll conducted two weeks ago, unchanged from mid-March but down from 55 percent in January. The president also has not suffered politically from the spiraling casualty count and continues to run even or slightly ahead of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry in most polls.”


How’s that for saying, we don’t believe no stinkin’ CBS/NYT polls? Typical of the official newspaper of the hawks, too. Meanwhile, Powell has acknowledged a plunge in American support for the Iraq war. But Powell is as dust in the wind compared to the mighty AEI, a member of which White effusively quotes, as well as the usual retired general. No, no, no, no Iraqis – surely it is a waste of time to quote the Pottery Barn figures. As for antiwar people, are they American? Ditto for Dems from the Byrd side of the party. Quoting such just promotes treason.

Bollettino

According to the media, in the build up to the war on Iraq, D.C. was a regular little hive of the best and the most hawkish, with every little cell planning – wrongly, as it turned out – for “post-conflict” Iraq. Powell’s minions in the press like to point fingers at Rumsfeld for the overwhelming failure to plan the occupation; Rumsfeld’s minions talk of Powell as a softy and – for his work for Dad Bush – pretty much a traitor. However, it wasn’t that the occupation wasn’t planned well – the problem was that it wasn’t imagined well. Or even at all. Its planners had not only never served in uniform – for all of their constant analogizing to Japan and Germany, they apparently never asked a WWII vet what it was really like.

If somebody in the Wolfowitz circle had put down Richard Perle’s latest scorcher in Foreign Policy and taken up Norman Lewis’ diary of serving as an Intelligence Officer in occupied Southern Italy, “Naples, ‘44”, here is what they would have found: looting is so bad that telephone and telegraph wires are constantly cut down for the money that scrap copper brings in, but nobody closes down the flea market where scrap copper is sold; the Germans leave behind mines that periodically destroy buildings, and saboteurs that plant bombs; gangs of traditional criminals – the Camorra and the Mafia – take over vast stretches of territory; vendettas are pursued through massive snitching; the friendliest people will betray you or your information for astonishing reasons; economic aid, which is promised, never comes through, leading to disgust with the occupiers; and everybody fucks constantly.

The latter might not be happening now in Iraq – alas, our journalists are much more hidebound about such things than the journalists of yore. But a little acquaintance with literature should surely have alerted even the most ideologically blinded soul about what lay ahead. Southern Italy was never held out as a showcase analogy by the Rumsfeld crowd – partly because the more pernicious effects of the occupation are still present. Not for Southern Italy the Werkschaftswunder. The mafia, which Mussolini – not one to countenance other centers of power – drove out, were deliberately reintroduced by the Americans. Vito Genovese, if you can believe it, was an “advisor’ to one of the chief American military men – shades of Chalabi!

Lewis is a great capturer of absurd and symbolic action. His account of trying to rescue a peddler caught with copper wire involves him in the Catch 22 of the insane American military bureaucracy. Here’s a bit I cannot resist. Lewis is in court. The judge is trying cases of pilfering. The defendant is a “typical Neapolitan sweat of the kind the pretends to be half-witted to be allowed to get away with his jokes.” The judge earnestly tries to understand what is happening in the court:

Judge: “Didn’t he just say something about the Americans? What did he say?”
Interpreter: ‘just a stupid remark, your honour. Nothing to do with the case.
Judge: Will you please leave it to me to decide what has to do with the case, and what has not. I insist on knowing what he said.
Interpreter: He said: “when the Germans were here, we ate once a day. Now the Americans have come, we eat once a week.”
Judge: Ask him if it means nothing to him that we have freed him and his kind from Fascism. How can he talk about us and the Germans in the same breath?”
The interpreter translated the judge’s remarks and the old man rolled up his eyes, let out a derisive gabble, and then went through the motions of displaying his sexual parts. A gale of laughter went up.
Judge: I’m losing all patience with him. What does he say now?
Interpreter; With respect, your honor, he says, Americans or Germans, it’s all the same to him. We’ve been screwed by both of them.
Judge: He’s off his head. Get him out of my sight. Case dismissed.”

The earnest indignation of that Judge has become the weather that hangs over the CPA – an unholy mixture of self-pity, imaginative blindness, and the absolute inability to imagine that one’s motives could ever be impugned. Americans I know are as funny as the Neapolitan clown – but I have also seen the humorless judge types. It is exactly how the upper level managers talk, exactly – that same unholy buncombe, that same shabby disguise of self-interest as team effort, that same feeling of the utter godliness of all of one’s motives, which God kindly proves by granting one loads of money.

One of the reason those New Deal occupations were more successful than this failed effort was that the men in charge had had enough of the self-righteousness cut out of them by the Depression that they could actually listen. No such luck with our contemporary crew, who have gorged like pigs on their own p.r.

Bollettino

A spate of stories in the media have been proclaiming the end of Chalabi – rather like chasing the Lord of Misrule from the scene at the end of a Tudor play. Shall we all get up and get married? Is there a God in Heaven? Certainly this would falsify parts of LI’s predictions about Iraq in the coming months, which we just prognostically emitted the other day. Were we so out of the loop?

While we believe that Chalabi himself is a stand-in for a policy default position of the hawks – that Iraq should be, in effect, an American colony – character does count. There is nobody around who has been groomed to quite such perfection as Chalabi – the man is from the Agency dream book of the 50s. A crook, an opportunist, a liar, and a blackmailer – you don’t get that Somoza combination at your nearest convenience food store. It is much harder to produce a tinhorn dictator than people think. So many of them think only of stealing the silverware. The real thing, the real defender of the Free World, thinks more ideologically, thinks further ahead, thinks of death squads, of selling off mineral rights, of establishing the family in all branches of industry and the state. With one nephew on the IGC with him, and one prosecuting Saddam Hussein, Chalabi has already shown his mettle. Are we going to throw our leading man away?

The Chalabi is done fad emerged from a Washington Post article last week. According to the article, Chalabi had offended Bush somehow, leading to consequences parallel only to those meted out by Louis XIV to his more rebellious nobles.

Here are the WP grafs that started the whole mini-juggernaut:

“At the top of the list of those likely to be jettisoned is Ahmed Chalabi, a Shiite politician who for years was a favorite of the Pentagon and the office of Vice President Cheney, and who was once expected to assume a powerful role after the ouster of Saddam Hussein, U.S. officials acknowledged.
Chalabi has increasingly alienated the Bush administration, including President Bush, in recent months, U.S. officials said. He generated anger in Washington yesterday when he said a new U.S. plan to allow some former officials of Hussein's ruling Baath Party and military to return to office is the equivalent of returning Nazis to power in Germany after World War II.”

Moreover, our man at the UN with the gluegun in his hand and Iraq in his sights, your friend and mine, a man who needs no introduction even though nobody knows just how the hell he got here, that’s right a round of applause for Mister Lakhdar Brahimi, is not, reportedly, too enthusiastic about Chalabi enthusiast. The NYT had a story this morning that congress might stop stuffing Chalabi’s pocket with the around 400,000 monthly supplement they pay him. Such degradation!
However, in this corner, we still don’t see it. Bush sometimes signals that he has regained his sanity. For instance, he came out foursquare for a Palestinian state. That would seem to be a shot at the Defense department crowd, where they like to say, with a smirk, the “so called occupied West Bank.” But the Cheney-Rumsfeld side is nothing if not persistent, and the recent concession about settlements in the West Bank is surely a stage on the way to an embrace of the Defense Department view. Similarly, that Chalabi has been attacked in the Post will surely be seen as a wound of honor.
But how will Chalabi counter-attack? We will be watching for his three press henchman, Hoagland, Hitchens, and Judy Miller, to do the initial work for him. His big threat is from the U.N. Thus, he has to use his little black bag of Saddam’s papers to reveal the corrupt dealings of the U.N. with the Meat Machine during the sanctions. Our bet is that this story will hit soon, and will spill over into whether we are going to allow a person that Chalabi calls, disdainfully, an “Arab nationalist,” to throw away one of our best and brightest. If, even now, Hitchens isn’t boiling up some screed about the perfidious U.N. and its sanction profiteering, LI will be surprised.
Whatever the weapon will be, however, I would not count a man out who is as adept at the fine arts of fraud and deceit as Chalabi.

Bollettino

We went to see the Omar Faruk Tekbilek ensemble last night at the University of Texas.

Listening to Turkish music is one of those odd habits of our middle age. There is something about it that is very Paul Bowles-ish. Bowles’ typical Westerners, nervous, intellectual, self-absorbed, and (all unknown to themselves) wrapped in such layers of babyfat egotism that they are permanently distanced from experience, usually gain experience in a sudden and fatal shock, all at once. It comes out of nowhere. It leaps at them as they become curious – for these people are always curious. In fact, they have made a virtue out of curiosity. They come from a culture in which curiosity has merged with entertainment. And experience does come to them. It comes from a sandstone landscape for which they are absolutely unprepared. It comes from a kidnapping, it comes from the collapse of all of their presumptions. It comes as a great slap from some archaic strata of being that they are unaware of – think, in fact, to have overcome by succedaneum – since their ancestors, they imagine, overcame it. And are no longer worth thinking about, having completed their task. And then the experience is there. A smelly canvas sack, the cutting off of a tongue, a branding, a selling into slavery. For Bowles’ characters, history is everything that has been put between themselves and such fates – history is the progress that has made such fates unimaginable. Progress has made a world in which all contacts are, on principle, chosen.

This world is in direct opposition to the world of fate. LI has chosen the world of choice. We are liberals, here. But we have the dialectical longing for our opposite that always appears where liberalism appears. Turkish music is the very music of the world of fate. Listening to the Faruk (a man with an amazingly broad face that he shakes so, while singing, that it seems to have become permanently wrinkled in transverse bands, instead of the usual up and down direction of wrinkling ) play the zurna, a raucous pipe that emits a sound that both mocks yearning and evokes it, it is hard not to feel that the Western form of life – that swaddled, babyish life of the mouth and the dick and the screen entranced eye -- is going to disappear. The zurna, which is short, and has a blaring, flanged spout at the end of it, seems to come to life in Faruk’s hands – to be playing him, in fact. Yes, it was as if that slightly mocking sound, that stunted, blaring horn, was possessed of a spirit that in turn possessed the player. The zurna seems to be the master – and a vaguely devilish one.

Bollettino

On December 14 of last year, after the capture of Saddam, LI “played the combinations”. That is, we looked at the effects that could ensue from the capture as combinations of possible worlds, as Leibnitz might have put it.

This is what we said:

“With Saddam rendered irrelevant, the third factor in Iraqi politics can now come into play - and come into play in such a way as to disturb Wolfowitz’s dream of Pax Chile on the Euphrates. That third factor is the Shiite demand for elections. Americans have been blocking this demand, because the American backplan is to somehow thrust a Chalabi or Chalabi like figure on Iraq. This thrusting was to be called democracy, not rape. So far, with Chalabi, it has pretty much failed …

In our opinion, the combinations now at work in Iraq are about to tumble to a new configuration. And this is not going to make the Pentagon happy. Our bet, right now, is that the following will emerge as the combination of forces in Iraq in the next, oh, two or three months:

The resistance will continue. It is a headless resistance. Whether it gets a brain will make a lot of difference, here. Our bet is that it won’t.

The Council is going to have to over-reach or dissolve. They’ve been put in an impossible middle position by the Americans. The question of who and how and for what Saddam H. is tried is going to be a point around which the Council will have to concentrate, for good or ill. We think that the Council, which is as brainless as the resistance, will try to over-reach and submit at the same time, and that it just won’t work any more. Alienating its patron, and alienated from its land, the Council will change radically.

Southern Iraq, assured by Saddam’s capture, will finally show a restiveness that America can ill afford. This, we think, will shape whatever happens next in Iraq. As to what that shape will be --- we have no idea. In truth, the Bushies have been so blinded to what is happening in Iran that they don’t realize that the conservative mullahs are, ideologically, their best friends. We think the clerical Shia elite, which has obtained a considerable amount of capital, is eager to find an excuse to privatize, and to inject its capital into the global monetary flows. Whether that influences the Shia elite in Iraq is something we don’t know enough about to predict.

Montesquieu, in the Considerations, makes a very shrewd remark: Ce qui gate presque toutes les affaires, c’est qu’ordinairement ceux qui les entreprennent, outre la reussite principale, cherchent encore de certains petits succes particuliers, qui flattent leur amour-propre et les rendent contents d�eux.

(What spoils almost all affairs is that ordinarily, those who undertake them seek, outside of the principle goal, certain small particular successes, which flatter their amour-propre and make them satisfied with themselves).

This is the history of the last six months of the occupation of Iraq.”

Time, now, to play the combinations again with the upcoming June 30 handover of power to the Iraqis. First, though, we should recognize that the handover is a complete sham. Iraq will have “limited sovereignty,” as the Bush people put it this morning in the NYT, meaning the new government will neither be able to make laws, nor have any control whatsoever over American forces operating in their own territory. If its legs are made of cloth, there’s a hole in the back for a hand, and its jaws are operated by moving your fingers, it is properly a puppet.

The Bush policy, which has consistently been a mad real life version of what the King's Counselors advice in the Anderson tale of the King and the Invisible Clothes, will be to stridently insist that the puppet is a man. Although it will also draw a wink wink advantage from the puppet being a puppet.

In order to understand the context of the handover, one has to draw the major lesson of this long, terrible two week stretch: – Bush faces practically no domestic opposition. This has truly shocked LI. Kerry’s campaign is justly wounded, perhaps fatally, by the incompetence, wretchedness, and cynicism of the candidate during the last month. Kerry has broadcast, in pretty clear terms, the following message to the voters: under President Kerry, the best we can hope for is the dispatch of even more American troops to be killed in Iraq. To sweeten the thought, he does want to put a UNESCO sticker on every green helmet. Shall we put our hands in the air now, ladies and gents?

If that is an opposition, I say to hell with it. LI, the perpetual naïf, has been stunned that Kerry’s mind meld with Joe Lieberman has not evoked a whimper even from the supposedly independent left side. The Atrioses and the American Prospects don’t care what Kerry says – they simply want him to win. It is a replay of the far fetched scenario of Gore’s campaign – diss your most likely voters, and then try to bully them into not voting for a third party candidate who represents exactly what they believe. So we have the spectacle of Kerry applauding Sharon’s policy of assassinating Palestinian leaders (never mind that the policy will certainly be paid for in American blood in Iraq), a man who has yet to suggest how we could exit from Iraq, a man who so evidently disrespects the people of Iraq that it has not yet occurred to him that the solution, in Iraq, is to return Iraq to the Iraqis – we have this man, and we, Lefties all, are supposed to queue up to vote for him.

Kerry seems to have quickly jettisoned the Democrat persona he was forced to bear against Howard Dean, and arrayed himself as a Daschle moderate. Daschle’s strategy is to stand very firmly against privatizing Social Security, unless it is done under a Democratic administration. That is about it, in terms of principle and policy, the height and breadth of the Democratic commitment to anything like justice. Consequently, the Dems lose and lose elections. And they cling ever more tightly to their strategy. They do like to indulge in a rhetoric of indignation, but their acts breathe the corrupt air of complete submission. How could they not? These people go to the same country clubs as the Bush people, employ the same DC wonks, play the same trivial games of gotcha. It is painful to see how Kerry’s sex change of a campaign is being coddled on the left side. Very painful. Kerry needed Howard Dean, in the same way the Grandmother, in ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find,” needed the Misfit: ‘She would have been a good woman,” said the Misfit, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

So: Here is one given: the lack of any real opposition to Bush (and supposing, as I am beginning to, that he wins the presidential election, his upcoming victory becoming more and more evident over the next couple of months). And here is an event: the June 30th “handover”. What scenarios can we spin out of that?

The strong signal this week is the ‘appointment’ of Chalabi’s nephew, Salam to head the prosecutorial team against Saddam Hussein. Our December combinations were way too hasty about the trial, and very wrong about the modification of the Bush policy of pushing an autocracy on the Latin American model on Iraq. As has been well publicized, the U.S. has supplied Chalabi and his death squad with all of the records of Saddam Hussein’s secret police. Trials are well known instruments for legitimating the usurpation of power. Until recently, LI thought that the Chalabi plan was never going to come off – that the CPA itself, as well as the White House, was too riven by doubts about Chalabi to unite behind him. But things are beginning to take on that familiar, Rumsfeldian cast. Rumsfeld likes nothing better than a fait accompli. The apparent bumbling of the question, who are we turning Iraq over to? – dodged by both Bremer and Bush – might not really be bumbling at all. The full effect of the fait accompli is wrung out of an initial period of uncertainty. This has all the hallmarks of the classic Rumsfeldian M.O. Given the nonexistent state of the opposition to Bush, it is hard to imagine the anointing of Chalabi – as head of some puppet organization – will provoke an outcry among the Dems. His appointment, of course, will be conditioned by just that reference to “limited sovereignty.” Surely, the reasoning will go, Chalabi will not be able to do too much harm, given the limited extent of his power.

If Chalabi is given executive power in Iraq by the Americans, the combinations become very interesting.

On the one hand – Chalabi has been wooing Sistani intensely. On the other hand, Sistani knows that his own legitimacy could be endangered by embracing a man so disliked by Iraqis that in the admittedly imperfect ORI poll conducted in February, Chalabi was the most distrusted politician in Iraq – ranking well over Saddam Hussein himself.

Our guess is that if the Rumsfeldians put their little Mussolini in play, there will be: minimal opposition in this country; and fear and loathing in an Iraq squeezed between the bullying ur-Saddamist remnant and the Americans. Chalabi is no doubt combing the secret police files for things he can hold over Sistani or his associates. No doubt, he will find something. But we wonder if it will really count. So far, Chalabi has demonstrated a masterly understanding of Americans. But he seems genuinely puzzled by Iraqis.

The last time we played the combinations, we were more optimistic. We believed that the CPA’s battle with the Resistance would make the June 30th handover more important than the CPA knew. Imagine the CPA as Wiley the Coyote, and the June 30th date as a big black circle he’d painted on a rock, in the likeness of a railroad tunnel. Image Wiley hearing a whistle sound, and looking at his work in puzzlement, and then being run over by a train that comes through it. This, we thought, loomed as a real possibility, There is a budding civil society in Iraq. We know vaguely of its outline through the imperfect polls and the dumb sociology of newspaper and magazine articles, with their insistence on interviews with the man in the street. This is the movement that the Bush people will have to oppress if they are going to complete their dream of Iraq. Chalabi is the perfect instrument to do the Bush’s dirty work here. To avert that, LI’s hope is that those who were prepared to do organizational work for Kerry desert the sorry man, and organize for a long term anti-war campaign. Because this is going to be a very long and ugly war.

PS -- for a more optimistic view of the 'new' policy in Iraq, read David Ignatius' column in today's WP. LI once interviewed Ignatius, and came away with a very favorable impression. The man worked as a correspondent in Lebanon through the eighties, and has a pretty clear grasp of Middle Eastern reality, unlike his WP op ed colleagues.

Bollettino

Two sites to go to today.

One is Juan Cole’s excellent analysis of the current state of play in the Pentagon operation to make Chalabi our Somoza in Iraq. Cole encountered point man for Chalabi -- Perle -- at a Senate hearing, yesterday. As Cole points out, that Perle was testifying there at all is bizarre, since Perle's ignorance of Iraqi culture -- and Middle Eastern culture in general -- should surely bar him from testifying in a forum meant for expert testimony.

Yesterday, on NPR, they interviewed the man’s nephew, Salam, who is to be, in a bizarre and self-discrediting move, the official prosecutor of Saddam, and not one question was asked about his background. Also, LI was heartened to read Cole’s note because Cole takes the same position LI took since last year about Sisteni’s insistence on elections, and why they should have been held by now.

Second, the IWPR site publishes an excellent battlefield report on Falluja from an Iraqi perspective.


We particularly liked the visit to the sniper -- or the kidnapping to visit the sniper. The whole scene is like something from one hundred fifty years ago, in the Caucasus:

“In front of him, Aqil [one of the journalists] sees a man dressed in loose pyjama pants and a button-down shirt. Only his eyes are visible through his yishmagh.
Beside him is propped a Dragunov, a Russian-made sniper rifle issued only to the elite of the Iraqi military. Everything about the man, the room, and his weapon is spotlessly clean.
In a slow, deep voice, Abu Walid told Aqil that he had been brought here to "let American forces know about our power".
The American casualty figures – 70 soldiers killed throughout Iraq since April – are a lie, he says, "I myself killed maybe 100 soldiers. Every day we destroy at least three vehicles, just in the gateway to Fallujah, in Gurma. Americans are liars."

There is no ideological ax ground in the reportage, by the way. It is simply a narrative from a perspective that has been ridiculously neglected in the past couple of weeks.

Bollettino

Charming little site, crammed with old, rare texts and illustrations. I got this little anecdote from Taine’s The Life and Philosophical opinions of a cat. I thought, somehow, it applied to Iraq. Since we are all applying analogies to that happy country nowadays, I thought I’d apply one of my own. Although I’m still not sure what it means.
.


“My paws having become solid, I ventured out into the world and soon became fast friends with a goose, an estimable beast, for she had a warm belly. I loved to crush myself under it , and while I was doing so, its philosophic discourses educated me. She said that the fore-court was a republic of allies, and that the most industrious, man, had been chosen for the leader, while even the dogs, although turbulent, were our faithful guards. I cried with tenderness under the belly of my good friend.

One morning the cook approached us with a benevolent air, stuck out her hand, and exhibited a whole handful of grain. The goose stuck out its neck, which the cook proceeded to grab, grabbing hold at the same time of a big knife. My uncle, an alert philosopher, hurried to the scene and commenced to exhort the goose, who was carrying on most indecorously: ‘dear sister,’ he said, the farmer, after having eaten your flesh, will be that much smarter and will watch that much better over our well being; and the dogs, being nourished on your bones, will be that much more capable of defending us. Under this torrent of words, the goose fell silent, for its head was totally cut off, and a sort of red pipe stuck out of the neck, which bled. My unclue hurried to the head and carried it away quickly; for me, a little taken aback, I approached the puddle of blood. Without reflecting, I dipped my tongue in it It was good blood, and I hurried to the kitchen to see if I could find any more.

“Mes pattes étant devenues solides, je sortis et fis bientôt amitié avec une oie, bête estimable, car elle avait le ventre tiède ; je me blotissais dessous, et pendant ce temps ses discours philosophiques me formaient. Elle disait que la basse-cour était une république d’alliés ; que le plus industrieux, l’homme, avait été choisi pour chef, et que les chiens, quoique turbulents, étaient nos gardiens. Je pleurais d’attendrissement sous le ventre de ma bonne amie

Un matin la cuisinière approcha d’un air bonasse, montrant dans la main une poignée d’orge. L’oie tendit le cou, que la cuisinière empoigna, tirant un grand couteau. Mon oncle, philosophe alerte, accourut et commença à exhorter l’oie, qui poussait des cris inconvenants : "Chère soeur, disait-il, le fermier, ayant mangé votre chair, aura l’intelligence plus nette et veillera mieux notre bien-être ; et les chiens, s’étant nourris de vos os, seront plus capables de vous défendre." Là-dessus l’oie se tut, car sa tête était coupée, et une sorte de tuyau rouge s’avança hors du cou qui saignait. Mon oncle courut à la tête et l’emporta prestement ; pour moi, un peu effarouché, j’approchai de la mare de sang, et sans réfléchir, j’y trempai ma langue ; ce sang était bien bon, et j’allai à la cuisine pour voir si je n’en aurais pas davantage.’

Bollettino

LI’s friend, R., recently got a job telemarketing a medical software designed to accelerate patientflow to various medical facilities in the Southwest. You can imagine how fun this is. The pay was great too – seven bucks per. Since R. had recently totaled his car, while experiencing an extensive stint of unemployment, he had to peddle to reach his well appointed office – which was a computer on the same table as the community fax machine, and a phone with a cord that didn’t quite reach all the way to his desk (meaning he had to leave the phone on the floor and wheel back in his chair and bend over and press the buttons on the phone to make the calls from the numbers listed on the Excel spread sheets with those same numbers listed before him). Since the bike ride was seven miles – downhill getting there, uphill getting back, R. would get tired going home, so he was always looking for shortcuts. Last Friday, he decided he would peddle to the nearest bus stop and go on the bus to the center of Austin, and from thence he’d peddle home, stopping on the way for a tall one. He took several buses that all ended up not going to the center of Austin, but that gave him much bus experience. So, he told me, “I’m sitting there and a guy comes in and he has a reddish, rather squashed face under a filthy gimme cap, and the bus is crowded. The squashed face guy sits down and looks across at this kid, a boy wearing a soft convenience store robbery type cap slouched in his seat in the inimitably insolent slouch of a teenage boy, and in a loud voice he says, how are you today kid? The kid doesn’t respond, so he says, that bad, eh? Then he looks around for people who might want to converse with him. Seeing nobody up to the task, he decided to utter loud aphorisms that we could all learn from, like: what goes around comes around; and (more obscurely) the terminator terminated.

“After a while, he got off the bus – although one had the impression that he got off at some randomly selected stop. He didn’t look like a man who had business to attend to. The man I was sitting next to kept watching him in fascination, and when he got off the bus he leaned forward and said to the large black man with the gold chain around his thick neck who was sitting there in front of us, did you hear that? The black man said, I heard it. The man said, he said, the terminator terminated. The black man said, I don’t believe that man was packing.”

R. told me this to impress me that the juice of life and the glory of literature was on the bus. He said, “I wouldn’t have been surprised if Van Gogh’s ear had raced down the aisle of that bus at that very moment, like a scared mouse. If you are looking for the very epicenter of American abjection, you will find it on the bus.”
I said, ‘am I looking for the very epicenter of American abjection? I thought I was writing a crime novel.”

These things have reminded LI of two recent reading experiences. Which we will get into in the next post.

Bollettino

Part II

LI should have posted a few more links to Danielle Allen in our last post. The London Review of her book on punishment in Athens is particularly rich. Reviewers must tread a path between overreach and mere description. This reviewer maxes out on over-reach, barely getting to Allen’s book at all. Still, it is full of interesting explanations of the Athenian system of punishment -- suggesting, bizarrely, that Athens was less like Jefferson's Virginia than like Mao's China.


Allen's book – The World Of Prometheus – was published by Princeton University Press, which has an excellent policy of publishing chapters from their books on the web. Go here to the first chapter of Allen’s book. We love this intro paragraph:


“One of the most important but least acknowledged features of the modern world is that individuals no longer punish for themselves. By this I do not suggest, as so many have, that over time a dark Dionysiac and ancient age of mad blood vengeance has ceded to an era of rational, legally based state punishment and Apolline brightness. I refer rather to the quite specific fact that the modern age has produced the public prosecutor to replace the lay prosecutor as the person responsible for seeing that wrongdoing is dealt with. In the ancient world the victims of wrongs had to enter into judicial processes in order to prosecute their own cases. The modern age has produced the state representative who acts on behalf of wronged individuals and who is supposed to prosecute impartially, disinterestedly, and dispassionately. The invention of the public prosecutor is a small historical detail--small enough to slip out of most history books--but its consequences have been great and systematic.”

Now, to get back to Allen’s essay.

According to Allen, there is a structural problem in any democracy. While democratic government claims to represent all of the people, governance necessarily involves actions which are to the advantage of some, and to the disadvantage of other, people. The task of governance is to assure the latter group that its specific disadvantages will be so assimilated into greater long term advantages that its sacrifices will not have been in vain. This sets the problem of sacrifice before the disadvantaged group.

For the last hundred and fifty years, sacrifice has been a central anthropological theme, since it seems to indicate that the political economy existed even among peoples with no institutionalized market or state. In one of the most cited and moving passages in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment, sacrifice is linked both to the Freudian notion of sublimation and the Marxist problem of how the exploited can be complicit in their own exploitation. For A and H., the image of sacrifice – and the implacable logic that makes every particular sacrifice insufficient – can be glossed from that passage in the Odyssey in which Odysseus is lashed to the mast in order to hear the song of the sirens. The song of the sirens, “who know all things that have happened on earth,” embodies the longing for the irretrievable – for what has been surrended in the very constitution of time, which divides itself, for the subject, into the past, present and future. The economy of sacrifice, according to this scenario, pervades our sense of the continuity of the self in time. This is why mourning is that most peculiar of pains – the pain of remembered pleasure. Mourning is the mode through which the sacrificial element in time (conceived as the total connection of the self with itself) is, to use the old Hegelian term, sublated – that is, this is how loss is preserved. A. and H. wrote their book in 1947, as mourners at Europe's funeral. These keeners at the grave have sharp eyes. Here is how they describe the crucial scene in which the ship passes the Sirens:

Its [Civilization’s] way was that of obedience and work, over which shines sensual fulfillment as a semblence, as disenfranchised beauty. Odysseus’ thought, hostile alike to his own death and his own happiness, knows this. He knows only two possibilities of escape. One he prescribes to the sailors. He has them stop their ears with wax; they must row forward using their bodily strength. He who wishes to survive must not be susceptible to the temptation of the irrevocable; he can endure it only by not being able to hear it. Society takes care of that. The workers, fresh and concentrated, must look only forward and leave what lies by the side. The compulsion that leads to diversion from the task must be grimly sublimated in the progressive order of striving. It is in this way they become practical. Odysseus, as the Master who has others work for him, chooses the other possibility. He does listen, but bound, impotently, to the mast. The greater the seductive power of the song, the stronger he is bound – in the same way, since, the bourgeois man also stubbornly avoids his happiness.”

(LI’s translation,)



We think Adorno and Horkheimer’s text is (perhaps indirectly) one of those in the background of Allen’s reading. It helps tremendously that, as a classical scholar, Allen is very aware of the civic construction of sacrifice. Ellison’s awareness was less scholarly, and more dramatic.

Remember, from our last post, that the issue of sacrifice rises to the surface of the text in the Invisible Man’s confrontation with Hambro, the spokesman for the brotherhood. Hambro has instructed the I.M. that the party is sacrificing action in Harlem for other actions. The I.M. questions both the interest of the decisionmakers who have ordered this sacrifice, and the very nature of sacrifice itself:

“I.M. articulates one last criterion for determining the legitimacy of particular sacrifices: sacrifice becomes illegitimate when one person or group regularly sacrifices for the rest. Instead, sacrifices must be reciprocated. The weak have been incorporated into the democratic polity only when they are in an equal position to request sacrifice from others…”

This, of course, begs the question of how one defines the weak. Isn’t the demand for equality of sacrifice really the demand for transcending weakness itself? And is that possible? If democratic governance really and necessarily proceeds through acts which always comport some sacrifice by some group, then some group must, in that instance, be the weak. But it seems to us that governance, if it is rational and not arbitrary – if it is, in other words, the concrete project of the governors – is never going to wholly make up to the weak specified by the previous sacrifice with the next one. Moreover, real weakness is not re-defined in every instance of sacrifice, but by the skew evidenced over a series of sacrifices. Where does this skew emerge from? It emerges from the perceptions and biases of the Grundherr, as Adorno and H. call Odysseus.

In order to restore some necessary element of the accidental to the logic of sacrifice, then, what must be done? The answer is written in the whole fabric of the left: resistance.

We’ve gone a long way from Iraq, but we can now apply some of our musings about sacrifice to the paradox of occupation in Iraq: the CPA, in order to really “install” democracy in Iraq, must create its own resistance. Or, more specifically, the logic for its own resistance. Only a real resistance will supplant the armed resistance that crystallized around a Ba’athist remnant, and is now spreading to other parts of Iraqi society. The CPA has, however, no notion of this whatsoever. They operate in high denial mode, claiming that the only sacrifices that are being made burden the Americans. The claim to sacrifice is the claim to weakness – insofar as one has made the sacrifice. But if the pattern of sacrifice shows that those who claim this weakness are actually the powerful – if it shows that their sacrifices are more in the nature of investments, from which they seek a return, while the sacrifices of others are in the nature of permanent losses – we have a situation ripe for the kind of bad faith that characterizes all authoritarian societies, in which the strong engross the claims of weakness, using them to justify more and more intense acts of oppression against the weak. It is a bad faith that arises, first, in the discourse, and then creeps into power. The newspapers cry for the policemen, and the policemen eventually answer the cry – by shutting down newspapers.

Is there a way out of this impasse?

Bollettino

Part I

Danielle Allen is one of those U. of Chicago prof who has swept the MacArthur genius circuit. She is a scholar of classics and of African American literature, a pretty rare and cool combo. LI read her essay on Ralph Ellison in this season’s Raritan with an eye on what is happening in Iraq. The essay, “Ralph Ellison on the Tragicomedy of Citizenship”, speaks to – or is it for? an occupied population – and one occupied by people who claim, by some perpetually unfolding mystery, to speak for the occupied, even as they evacuate the place in the discourse where the occupied could, possibly, have a voice.

But to Allen’s fascinating essay. She begins by pointing out, as all scholars of Ellison have done before her, the key political disagreement between one important critic of the book, Irving Howe, and Ellison himself. Howe objected to the de-politicization of race in the novel -- and what he took to be Ellison's acceding to a liberal and conformist ethos that avoided the politics of race. Allen shrewdly understands that a great book’s critics say things that are already forecast in the book itself – in fact, great novels are prophetic to the extent that they contain characters, asides and symbols that already stage the argument with their future critics. In this case, Allan claims that Ellison’s often stated interest in ritual, especially rituals of humiliation, should serve us as a guide to just that political subtext of the novel that its critics claimed it lacked. Its critics weren’t reading hard enough.

Allen concentrates on three encounters that mark the Invisible Man’s career. The first of them is the famous Battle Royal, which remains in the memory of even the most casual reader of the book. Here’s a brief synopsis.

The narrator’s school speech about humility has won such praise in the community that a white group proposes to give him a scholarship, requiring only that he read the speech to them. He arrives to find the whites surly and drunk. A stripper comes in, and barely makes it through a few moves before she has to escape this crowd. Then a battle is staged between ten black boys who are blindfolded. The Invisible Man is, of course, thrown into the battle too.

This is what Allen says:

“Bloodied and debased, I.M. [Allen’s initials for the narrator] is finally allowed to speak and begins, among yells and laughter, in this context of humiliation, his paen to, of all things, humility. As the context for his speech has been shifted, however, so too his memory has been jolted out of place, for instead of pledging, in accord with his written text, that he will devote himself to ‘social responsibility,’I M resoundingly commits himself to social equality. Ellison writes: ‘the laughter hung in sudden stillness. I opened my eyes, puzzled. Sounds of displeasure filled the room…’Say that slowly, son!” Realizing his mistake, I.M. feels a flutter of fear before retracting his desire for ‘equality’, affirming his commitment to social responsibility, and finding himself rewarded.”

This is the Governing Council’s own situation. The social responsibility we want from the Iraqis shouldn’t encroach on our hierarchical edge over them – shouldn’t, in other words, presume on an equality so radical as to equate an Iraqi death – an invisible thing, something that Iraqis can, of course, mourn in private, but that can’t be allowed to intrude in any gross manner on the American public space – with an American death – a tremendous thing, something that must be revenged to the second and third generation. And the GC, after going through the Battle Royal of affirming every one of Bremer’s wishes, of rubberstamping even their own mock elevation to a power that is only an attenuated form of powerlessness, the power of Roman senators in the era of Caligula, are required, now, to rubberstamp Bremer’s closure of Sadr’s newspaper, and Bremer’s use of a corrupt court’s murder warrant, and the U.S. high command’s destruction of Falluja. This is a long crawl on the belly, and it has obviously hurt some of the Council. Most, mere lechers and bagmen, have proven themselves classically indifferent to everything but their own skins – or, in the case of Chalabi, have used the occasion to float various power-grabbing ideas through a bunch of D.C. proxies (see Jim Hoagland’s op ed piece in the Post yesterday for an especially greasy hint that now would be a good time for the U.S. to officially recognize Chalabi’s militia – a sort of 'bring on the death squads and freedom fighters, boys" to round out Bush's Reagan parody). Others, however, have steered a course between responsibility and abjection.

Well, do you trade a certain number of deaths for being cycled through the upward mobility promised by the system? Certainly that has to be on Iraqi minds. On the one hand, they are watching the U.S reward Israel’s conquests in the West bank, and on the other hand, they are having to endure an occupation that grows out of the U.S. claim that conquest – Saddam’s conquest of Kuwait – is such an ultimate evil that it justifies a decade of war and sanctions, crowned by an invasion. They have to stitch together the consistency here, which is wholly racial – the justice or injustice of a land grab depending on the ethnicity of the land grabber -- just as it is with the Invisible Man.

As Allen points out – with regard to the Invisible Man – humiliation, sacrifice, and acceptance have political aspects:

‘By presenting the I.M’s in terms of such categories as sacrifice, agreement and responsibility, Ellison lays bare how politics structures ordinary life and psychic experience. He names the rituals that give human life its meaning and that undergird our common actions. His writing is an X ray machine that reveals the skeleton of democratic life. The skeleton is made of what Ellison called rituals.”

One doesn’t have to read far, in analyses of the Iraq situation, to find people talking about how the Iraqis feel humiliated by the war, and of the psychological aftereffects of this. But there is an odd silence about the other side of that humiliation: is it such an accident that the Iraqis feel humiliated? Wasn’t humiliation written into the script, one of the great unconscious motives in this war? Didn't we want to humiliate them? Where there is an effect, as any Freudian can tell you, there is unconscious desire. The denial of the U.S. desire to humiliate is part of the greater discursive pattern, in which the Americans present themselves not as representatives of a state with appetites and interests, but rather as radiant spacemen of virtue, riding in on attack helicopters. As long as Americans treat their country as a moral force, rather than as a nation, they will have a debased and juvenilized foreign policy.

More on Allan's essay tomorrow.

Yet Lucian, a rhetorician also, in a treatise entitled, How a history ought to be written, saith thus: 'that a writer of history ought, in his writings, to be a foreigner, without country, living under his own law only, subject to no king, nor caring what any man will like or dislike, but laying out the matter as it is.' – Hobbes in the introduction to his translation of Thucydides


LI recommends the Sy Hersch story on Afghanistan in the current Nyorker. It should be read in conjunction with the stories that are coming out concerning both the Bush administration’s pre-9/11 readiness to counter terrorist activity and its post 9/11 actions in so doing, or not. It has been our contention, all along, that the heart of the case against Bush is summed up by what happened not before 9/11, but in response to it -- that is, a massive and willful blindness to the reality of an attack by a nomadic, well entrenched jihadist group, with roots in the mujahdeen movement the U.S. not so covertly supported in the 80s in Afghanistan. The willfulness of this blindness was in thinking that any terrorist group is ultimately anchored in some state’s policy. Thus, the U.S. fought Osama bin Laden with one hand tied behind its back in the winter of 2001-2002, and ultimately satisfied itself with the collapsing of the precarious shell of Taliban governance in Afghanistan, as if the Taliban had been anything more than a bribed provider of a hideaway for Al Q. The Bush administration then took up its pre 9/11 obsession with Saddam Hussein, with the consequences we all know. LI thinks that it is completely odd that some of those consequences have received absolutely zero attention from the American press or public, since they include the flourishing of the Al Qaeda organization – in spite of the less than convincing statements of Bush concerning the killing or taking hostage of 2/3rds of the Al Qaeda leadership. Surely this radically misunderstands Osama bin Laden’s role as a symbol of recruitment, the network between the jihadist fighters in Central Asia (as in Chechnya) and Al Qaeda, and its ability to plug into local jihadist groups.

LI has written about this with the obsessiveness of Richard Dreyfuss piling the mashed potatoes on his plate in Close Enconters. Were we nuts? Well, it is nice to have the confirmation of a study by the Pentagon, which is being reported in the Nyorker article. Here’s a money shot graf. Hersch discusses Clarke’s larger and more interesting criticism of the Bush administration (that the diversion into Iraq subverted the war against terrorism), and then writes:

“Clarke's view of what went wrong was buttressed by an internal military analysis of the Afghanistan war that was completed last winter. In late 2002, the Defense Department's office of Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict (solic) asked retired Army Colonel Hy Rothstein, a leading military expert in unconventional warfare, to examine the planning and execution of the war in Afghanistan, with an understanding that he would focus on Special Forces. As part of his research, Rothstein travelled to Afghanistan and interviewed many senior military officers, in both Special Forces and regular units. He also talked to dozens of junior Special Forces officers and enlisted men who fought there. His report was a devastating critique of the Administration's strategy. He wrote that the bombing campaign was not the best way to hunt down Osama bin Laden and the rest of the Al Qaeda leadership, and that there was a failure to translate early tactical successes into strategic victory. In fact, he wrote, the victory in Afghanistan was not, in the long run, a victory at all.”

Don’t expect the papers to touch this gingerly topic anytime soon, since they have gone along with the script.

…

LI has been conducting an interesting knock about with a certain Rajeev over at Crooked Timber, in the comments section. Rajeev, flatteringly enough, has actually read this endless series of graphomanic posts, or some of them, and has even spotted LI’s big themes about Iraq. He’s nailed us, in short. Rajeev disagrees with our viewpoint, but his main criticism is with our framing distance. He asks, reasonably, how LI can talk about the ‘Americans” in Iraq, as if LI himself weren’t a born and bred Yankee.

It is true – I like to maintain a pretence of distance between myself and what ‘we’ - the ‘americans’- are doing in Iraq. As my little quote from Hobbes indicates, I think that the intellectual gain from that distance, the ability to see in terms of sharp outlines, is worth the emotional loss – the loss of being cut off from a ‘we’. However, I am not totally happy with the accounting, here. The mask of allegiance is woven out of passions that are incomprehensible – at least in their force and connection – to the outside observer. This makes the supposedly clear vision that I bring to what is happening in Iraq inadequate – beyond the inadequacy of pure ignorance. It isn’t just that I have no personal acquaintance with how Iraqis think, I have cut myself off from the personal acquaintance with how Americans think.

The gain, here, is to see the encounter of different projects and their adaptation to each other and circumstances without thinking that I am watching a morality play between the forces of good and the forces of evil. The loss is that the CPA., in particular, is incomprehensible to me in its more extreme moments. In moving against both Sunni paramilitary groups and the Sadr Shiites, the CPA shows that it is more, well, conceited than even I gave it credit for. Only behind the mask would one be able to understand the thousand and one impulses that feed into that conceit.

However, I am not so cut off from the “we Americans’ that I don’t recognize who is running the CPA. And I think this is part of the difficulty. People like Bremer and the people around him have shaped their careers in the least democratic organizations in America – big business and the lobbying bureaucracies. It is all either command and control or spin. Furthermore, they are heirs to the forces that have always seen democracy as something to be brought before a judge and fined. If the CPA really wants to promote democracy in Iraq, why not translate Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals into Arabic? Why not import organizers of demonstrations, anti-globalization activists – all those who like to activate peaceful transformative change. If anything, Iraq needs a King or a Gandhi, not a Sadr or a Chalabi.

Bollettino

The man who wasn't there


John Kerry has decided to run a unique campaign. So far, he is running as either “None of the Above” or “Me too, and double it!”

Here we have a perfect Kodak moment: Bush, receiving a warning that any sane executive would take seriously, retiring to his ranch to rest on his tax cutting laurels in August, 2001. Did the man even alert his own secretary of treasury that the FBI suspected hijackers were present in the U.S.? No, he didn’t. There is a comfortable myth that is starting to fall apart, which says that nineteen hijackers succeeding in three different venues is one of those ‘can’t stop it’ kind of things. That it is an unusual, indeed, unique act of terrorism is swept under the rug. The most startling thing about the hijacking is less the first plane that slammed into the WTC. It is that the second plane did. The second plane screamed – system-wide collapse.

Kerry’s response to this has been: no comment.

Kerry’s response to Iraq is even worse. It is to “internationalize’ the situation and send in more U.S. troops. And he wants me to vote for this? Kerry hasn’t commented about the vital element in the whole Iraq fiasco – the Iraqis. As in, he has never criticized the reliance on Chalabi, he has never said that we should work more with al Sistani, he’s made no comment about our surprising, or sinister, hesitation in really putting in place representative institutions, he’s said nothing about the rather criminal use of the criminal courts to blackmail Sadr that we know was undertaken by the CPA (which, incidentally, discredits the one thing that is truly necessary for democracy in Iraq – an independent judiciary. One that is wholly subservient to executive power is one that is wholly corrupt. Martial law operates not only to exert direct pressure on the percieved enemies of the state, but to preserve the integrity of the court. A court that issues murder warrants selectively for an occupying power is doomed to Iraqi contempt). His view of Iraq, if he is serious, will get us ever deeper into an impossible situation. Kerry battle cry is that of a man who has served on way too many committees – process, and more process. Meanwhile, the world ends.

John Kennedy once wrote a book, Why England Slept, about the period before WWII. We are experiencing something unique – a whole nation is sleeping during the war. Call it: Why America can’t wake up. And if Kerry keeps sleepwalking through this election, he will surely lose people like me.

Bollettino

The NYT business section, which is always worth reading on Sunday, has a long story about a bank in D.C. – Riggs bank. It is a private, homey kind of D.C. bank – for the champagne and chauffeur set, as one of their interviewees puts it. They do a roaring trade in blood money for the Saudis and Equatorial Guinea. Also, incidentally, they’ve done the Bush family one of the characteristic favors banks and businesses like to do the Bush family: as the story blandly puts it, “deepening its links to the Bushes, Riggs also bought a money management firm owned by Jonathan Bush, the former president's brother, in 1997.”

It’s the Equatorial Guinea money that is bringing them down at the moment. The NYT is behind the ball on this story – the Nation had a story six months ago about Equatorial Guinea’s suRprising redemption in the eyes of the U.S. It used to be a backwater African dictatorship run with the usual large splashes of blood by Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo:

“Mr. Obiang assumed power in 1979 after his uncle was killed in a military coup. The United States ended diplomatic relations with his government in the mid-1990's but rekindled relations last year as the Bush administration moved to support efforts to tap new oil supplies outside the Middle East. Equatorial Guinean officials opened government and personal accounts at Riggs in 1995.

EXXON MOBIL entered into a profit-sharing arrangement with Mr. Obiang's government in order to secure drilling rights there.”

Profit sharing with the government, here, is a soothing way of saying that they massively and regularly bribe Mr. Obiang to splash the blood of anybody who will get in Exxon Mobil’s way as they pump out oil for the world market. Mr. Obiang, knowing that money must go to money, returns that money to the states in the form of running it through the Riggs bank. As the Times reports, the Riggs bank has already had a bit of trouble accounting for the mysterious flows of Saudi money through the bank – some of which has no doubt gone jihadist. In the case of the EG money, the bank put an ace named Mr. Kareri in charge of seeing that the blood drenched bucks were treated within the limits of the law. Mr. Kareri had a flexible view of those limits:
“Riggs investigators discovered that Mr. Kareri approached Mr. Obiang's son in Washington last year and solicited money to buy a car, according to three people with direct knowledge of the event. Mr. Obiang's son gave Mr. Kareri an undated, signed $40,000 check with no payee designated, these people said. Mr. Kareri, they said, then altered the check to change its value to $140,000, wrote a friend's name on the payee line, and then maneuvered to have the funds redirected to his wife.”
Read the Times story, and then read the Nation story here by Ken Silverstein – who is, incidentally, the author of a currently much discussed book about private military companies, ie mercenaries.

done

Bollettino

So I met a man yesterday, had lunch with him. He was a friendly, bald, gray moustached man, eating carrots out of a Tupperware case. We fell into conversation, and at one point he said that he was in Vietnam. We’d been talking about war. I’d mentioned that I’d read that soldiers in Vietnam were issued Dexedrine and various speed pills to get them through the next encounter. And he’d said that that was countenanced, but it wasn’t officially approved, then told me the tale of his war – and ended up by adding, as a little sidenote, that people do funny things in war. A friend of his, for instance. He blasted an eight year old girl. Came upon her in some go through the village maneuver. Little darling kept approaching him. He got out the rifle, warned her to go back, and she kept approaching like Viet bad seed, and he let her have it. And, he said, she exploded, meaning that she’d been wired.

Then the guy said, two war crimes there, really. One is killing the eight year old, one is the Cong wiring her up.

I said yes.

This was not supposed to be happening again. That girl, that bomb, that GI, those dreams, that crippled life, that ended life, that desolation wrought on a citizenry by its own government, intoxicated by power and lies – no, this was not supposed to happen again. I remember hearing stories like that man’s – who was placidly chewing his carrots – when I was eighteen, nineteen. In the seventies, you were always running into vets who were never coming home, you could tell it from their eyes and their raddled faces, and especially their laughs, and their stories. And you knew much of it was bullshit. But you also knew that so much external damage implied something had happened the way a crater implies a shell.

Here are pictures from Falluja. I don’t find images of viscera and blood particularly sickening. It happens. Nor am I against violence per se – it is no joke that liberty is purchased with blood. But this isn’t liberty. This is senseless retaliation, for purposes that have been so wound in a labyrinth of Bush’s photo op politics as to be long lost; as these pictures go out to Baghdad and Basra, they pretty much put an end to the ‘good feeling’ that Americans are always polling the Iraqis to pull out of them, our colonialism with a smiley face.

I admit it -- I was fooled. I thought there was something like a learning curve operating in the bowels of the CPA. That Bremer had recognized his mistakes. I was wrong. They have learned nothing. Nothing, amazingly enough. These are people on whom all experience is lost.

Bollettino

What to say about the 280 Iraqi deaths in Fallujah?

What to say? What to say? The sickness unto death has stolen LI's words today.

Bollettino

The neo-cons never cease to generate ideas – bad ideas. Incredibly bad ideas.

There has been a lot of speculation about why in the world the CPA would provoke Sadr at this point in time by closing down his newspaper. The result, as we see, is twenty American deaths and mounting, not to mention – because nobody mentions them – the Iraqi deaths, which must be over fifty to eighty.

This article in the Asian Times quotes one Larry Diamond, from the dreaded Hoover institute, that explains part of the mystery:

"We are on the edge of a generalized civil war in Iraq," said Larry Diamond, a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), who told Inter Press Service that occupation authorities must follow through on any crackdown against Muqtada's forces by disarming and dismantling all of Iraq's militias if the transition process and future elections are to have any hope of success.

Diamond, a democracy specialist at the Hoover Institution in California, also called on the administration to sharply increase the number of US troops in Iraq in order to disarm and dismantle the militias, and accused Iran of financing and arming Muqtada and other Shi'ite militias, which he says are building up arms in advance of elections or possible civil war.

"Iran is embarked on a concerned, clever and lavishly resourced campaign to defeat any effort to create a genuine pluralist democracy in Iraq, and we've been sitting back," he said in what has become a growing refrain among neo-conservatives and administration officials who blame Tehran for the coalition's growing problems among the Shi'ites."

In other words, it wasn’t Sadr the loony toons CPA was after – they were striking at Iran. It has been one of the causes of the diehard War fans that we went into Iraq as a preliminary thing, and we are going to follow up by going into Syria and Iran too – a general war-o-rama, followed by privatized Social Security, patriotic mercury in the water, and tax cuts for victims of the SEC’s Gestapo like war on the best and the brightest, that’s the deal. The nightmare world of Bush-ist wish fulfillment is unlikely to be in the offing any time soon, but these players have a puzzling and disproportionate influence. Puzzling, because they have proven to be wrong so often that they have become political liabilities. If there is one thing the Bush administration notices, it is political liability.

So what we are seeing in Iraq is the result of the idea that we had to strike at Iran by striking at those of Iraq’s shi’ites who are close to Iran. As Diamond puts it at the end of this revealing article, better to clean up the militias now, rather than later.

And this man is being paid by the CPA? Surely we need to pack him up and ship him gently back to the Stanford Campus, where he can extensively analyze communist influence in the Civil Rights movement, circa 1965.