hawks shedding feathers

In the early 1840s, a Baptist named William Miller began doing some serious work on the Book of Revelation. Using his mathematical genius, Miller came up with a formula showing precisely that the world would end in March of 1843. Due to an overlooked erasure, that date proved incorrect. The world was really going to end in 1844.

Miller collected thousands of followers. Unfortunately, God didn’t stage the drama he’d outlined in the book of Revelations in 1844, either. Hiram Edson, who later figured out that Jesus was coming in stages to the earth after making a tour of the universe, wrote about gathering with others on 23 October, 1844:

“Our expectations were raised high, and thus we looked for our coming Lord until the clock tolled 12 at midnight. The day had then passed and our disappointment became a certainty. Our fondest hopes and expectations were blasted, and such a spirit of weeping came over us as I never experienced before…”

Civilization rolls onward. Hiram Edson, more savy than Scott Fitzgerald, realized that America is the home of second acts, especially if the first act involved apocalyptic failure, and went on to found the very successful Seventh day Adventists. The war party is going through a similar blasting of expectations. Since the expectations were founded, generally, on mutually contradictory premises, vague allegories, and an almost complete lack of knowledge about… well, Iraq, the sackcloth and ashes phase should, one would think, involve absorbing a certain skepticism, and of course a reconsideration of the entire war culture – at this time, under the guise of the Global war on Terrorism – that has mangled so many bodies without any necessity at all.

There has been a blog hubbub about the post by Jane Galt, aka Megan McArdle, in which she explains why she was slightly wrong about ardently supporting America’s pre-emptive invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. It turns out that McArdle was mislead by her faulty sense of empathy. In the end – as one would expect from a woman who names herself after an Ayn Rand character – the sum of novelistic factors that constituted America’s favorite Punch, Saddam Hussein, was beyond her. On the other hand, she remembers no dove who got anything right in the leadup to the war, except, by some odd quirk of fate, they were right that the war in toto.

Many of the doves seem to be reconstructing their memory of why they objected to the war, crediting themselves with having predicted that the invasion would fail in this way. Many hawks are also reconstructing their memories to make themselves less hawkish. Fortunately, or unfortunately for me, I wrote my predictions down, so I know that I was an unabashed hawk, 100% convinced that Saddam had WMD.

The lesson that I can unequivocally take out of this is: do not be so confident in your ability to read other people and situations. Saddam was behaving exactly as I would have behaved if I had WMD, so I concluded that he had them. I will never again be so confident in the future.

That is so sweet of her! The hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead have contributed to her education, and I bet she is going to be nicer to elderly neighbors, too!

McCardle leans libertarian. The occupation in Iraq has taught her to distrust government. Or so she writes. LI quietly tore out all of our hair, reading that, and flushed it down the toilet. Say what? If it wasn’t an analytic truth in January, 2003 that the invasion involved every feature of governmental overreaching that had been harped upon for two hundred years by liberal thinkers – as Limited Inc pointed out by going exhaustively through the catalogue of classical liberalism, from Burke to Constant – and McCardle couldn't figure that out herself, well, I'd guess there is a large hole in her libertarian ideas. The hole can be labeled - automatic respect for authority figures. I wish libertarians would just call themselves richophiles – a love of the wealthy the desire that all of society be shaped to please them is pretty much the alpha and omega of the McArdle strain of libertarianism.

Another hawk who shed his feathers a couple of months ago, Norman Geras, is an interesting case. He has made a career as a political intellectual – yet, his politics seem as easily distracted by the most juvenile mock arguments as the audience of American Idol, and that worries me about the way people become political intellectuals in the U.K. Geras recently raved about a Martin Amis quip – Amis denounced those who “waddled” out in the streets of London holding we are all hezbollah signs in the demonstrations against Israel’s bombing of Lebanon last year. Now, “waddled” is an interesting verb. I don’t believe that it is the verb that really occurred to Amis, seeing the tv footage of the demonstrators. They were mostly young and sprightly. Waddling wasn’t in it – waddling is confined more to the over the hill cigarchompers Amis might meet at his friend Chris Hitchens’ parties. The difference between insult and satire is the difference between using the verb “waddling” – which lights up the children and the Geras typses - and using a verb that really does break through the human crust, that puts the fishing hook through that bare forked creature and reels him in.

Anyway, Geras coyly links to a defense of the surge published in Foreign policy by a man named Donald Stoker. And what do you know – Stoker comes up with a defense that is another pony ex machina argument, of the same type that the hawks have made, over and over again, during the past three meat mounding years.

To read the Stoker article, it is best to skip the main part – a mélange of cases in which insurgents lost, insurgents won, etc., etc. – and get to Stoker’s case:

“Combating an insurgency typically requires 8 to 11 years. But the administration has done such a poor job of managing U.S. public opinion, to say nothing of the war itself, that it has exhausted many of its reservoirs of support. One tragedy of the Iraq war may be that the administration’s new strategy came too late to avert a rare, decisive insurgent victory.”

8 to 11 years, eh? To what end? I want to try to put a fairer cast on suggestions that are clearly lunatic, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, billion of dollars spent per month, in order to perhaps put down an insurgency and create (ta ta ta da!) a theocratic Shi’a government indistinguishable, in its ideology, from … Hezbollah. Indeed, Amis might have wanted to watch Chris Hitchens neo-con friends waddle at the next party he goes to, since they are doing infinitely more for Hezbollah than the young bucks of London.

ka

Austin is moping under that hideous counterfeit of winter that goes by the name of a winter storm warning – or is it watch? What this means is that there is ice on the branches of the tree outside my window, which obviously took the tree by surprise – and that the streets have icy patches, and the sidewalks do too – and that we can all stay inside and listen to news about traffic accidents on the highways, and those of us who have stocked up on either hot chocolate or cider or marijuana can enjoy the forced hibernation like in a Christmas card. Those of us who, like LI, suffer from vicious ricocheting coughs, the butt end of a chest cold that doesn’t seem to know how to leave the party my body threw for it (get your coats, guys! my, the time!), have to settle for shivering and cabin fever and Kagome purple roots and fruits juice.

This is no condition to ponder the Vedas.

However, as we said in our post before last, or some fucking post, how am I supposed to keep up, we were going to write about Calasso’s Ka. The idea I’ve been kicking around is that the form of giantism in the Indian sacred books is of a different type entirely than that associated simply with wonder. It is a giantism that is both discontinuous and in unlimited, systematic expansion, like certain of the dreams described by De Quincey in the Pains of Opium section of the Memoirs of an Opium Eater. An amazing section that contains, among other things, a description of the close connection between psychosis and racism (it is in this section that De Quincey claims that the very idea of having to live among the Chinese gives him an almost bodily disgust).

But being a sickly critter, I think I’m going to content myself with comparing the creation story in Ka with the creation story in the Samapatha Brahmana, as translated by Mueller.

Here is the story of the first man – Prajapati - via the latter:

Verily, in the beginning this universe was water, nothing but a sea of water. The waters desired, “How can we be reproduced?’ They toiled and performed fervid devotions, when they were becoming heated, a golden egg was produced. The year, indeed, was not then in existence: this golden egg floated about for as long as the space of a year.

In a year’s time a man, this Pragapati, was produced thereform: and hence a woman, a cow or a mare brings forth within the space of a year; for Pragapati was born in a year. He broke open this golden egg. There was then, indeed, no restingplace: only this golden egg, bearing him, floated about for as long as the space of a year.

At the end of a year he tried to speak. He said bhuh: this (word) became this earth. buhuvah: this became this air - svah: this became yonder sky.”

There are many complications here – Pragapati, who turns into Brahma, is also described as the composite of seven men that the gods put together, and the egg here might be Pragapati’s own egg with the waters, that he inseminated – complications that hint at the maddening impossibility, for the mere amateur, to make sense of the Indian myths. The way events are enchained in the Indian sacred books gives one a certain double vision because there are all of these logical hallucinations, these moments of self-contradiction from which the stories branch off. But I could not help but think as Pragapati speaks in that blubber of Handke’s Kasper Hauser – and, indeed, the figure of the stutterer in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. Just as the stutterer breaks through the floor of speech, gets into the basement, Pragapati’s stuttering sounds become words that become things because the words have no speech within which to be words. To be a word means to be a word in a language. To be a syllable in a word means to be a syllable in a word in a language.

In the Upanishads, it says:

LET a man meditate on the syllable Om, called the udgîtha; for the udgîtha (a portion of the Sâma-veda) is sung, beginning with Om.
The full account, however, of Om is this:--
2. The essence of all beings is the earth, the essence of the earth is water, the essence of water the plants, the essence of plants man, the essence of man speech, the essence of speech the Rig-veda, the essence of the Rig-veda the Sâma-veda 1, the essence of the Sâma-veda the udgîtha (which is Om).
3. That udgîtha (Om) is the best of all essences, the highest, deserving the highest place 2, the eighth.
4. What then is the Rik? What is the Sâman? What is the udgîtha? 'This is the question.
5. The Rik indeed is speech, Sâman is breath, the udgîtha is the syllable Om. Now speech and breath, or Rik and Sâman, form one couple.
6. And that couple is joined together in the syllable Om. When two people come together, they fulfil each other's desire.
7. Thus he who knowing this, meditates on the syllable (Om), the udgîtha, becomes indeed a fulfiller of desires.
8. That syllable is a syllable of permission, for whenever we permit anything, we say Om, yes. Now permission is gratification. He who knowing this meditates on the syllable (Om), the udgîtha, becomes indeed a gratifier of desires.
9. By that syllable does the threefold knowledge (the sacrifice, more particularly the Soma-sacrifice, as founded on the three Vedas) proceed. When the Adhvaryu priest gives an order, he says Om. When the Hotri priest recites, he says Om. When the Udgâtri priest sings, he says Om,
--all for the glory of that syllable. The threefold knowledge (the sacrifice) proceeds by the greatness of that syllable (the vital breaths), and by its essence (the oblations) 1.
10. Now therefore it would seem to follow, that both he who knows this (the true meaning of the syllable Om), and he who does not, perform the same sacrifice. But this is not so, for knowledge and ignorance are different. The sacrifice which a man performs with knowledge, faith, and the Upanishad is more powerful. This is the full account of the syllable Om.”

To my addled mind, a strange path opens up here: it is a path I've been treading for a while. It is Red Riding Hood's path of needles, if you will, or the path of the wiccan Marx - the path that you move forward on will, it turns out, be different from the same path you return on. To go forward is the path of creation, and it seems pretty much what we are used to – in the beginning is the word, and the word becomes earth, and earth is the place for the speaker of the word – etc. But going backward, the word is no word at all, having no language within which to be a word, and the syllable, then, becomes no syllable at all, since it aims at no sense. This is the essence of the gigantism that so frightens De Quincey in the Opium Eater.

As the Upanishad passage says, the syllable is the place of desire and gratification – which gets us back to Prajipati. In Ka, after Prajipati has created the earth and produced the first gods, this happens:

Prajapati sensed that he had a companion, a second being, dvitya, within him. It was a woman, Vac, Word. He let her out. He looked at her. Vac “rose like a continuous stream of water.” She was a column of liquid, without beginning or end. Prajipati united with her. He split her into three parts. Three sounds came out of his throat in his amorous thrust: a, ka, ho. A was the earth, ka the space between, ho the sky. With these three syllables the discontinuous stormed into existence.

peter beinart speaks

Dear sir,

Peter Beinart, nude model, here.

Since I have been making some very high energy adult entertainment on location (let me hint to my fans that, for the first time, I play CHIEF STUD – that’s right, the poolboy roles that graced such films as Operation Free Lickin’ and My Master, My Decider, are now a thing of the past – and let me also say that I have learned from my mistakes in those roles – for instance, the premature problem I had in Operation Free Lickin’ is, I admit, an embarrassment, and I apologize to my faithful viewers) – but anyway, to veer this sentence back to the straight and narrow, due to this schedule I was not aware of the many unfair hits yours truly was taking from various objectively terrorist sympathizing media persons. Apparently my factotum, who I left in D.C., signed a contract for me (aka him) to appear in Time Magazine. On the face of it, writing a column for Time seems just the opposite of what, as you know, I vowed to do last year, viz., leaving punditry for nude modeling. But, as with any vow, there is a time clause – after all, my booboo about Iraq doesn’t excuse me from battling Islamofascism wherever it rears its ugly head. I was, I admit, surprised by the Time announcement. However, after a long conference call with my fac (which was interrupted by my director’s need to have me stiffen my resolve for a scene I was playing with my co-star, Cruella, a charming Southern girl), I decided to see how this Time magazine gig works out.

As this was playing out, I glanced through the LA Times, looking for my friend Jon’s fabulous reflections. And boy, was I rewarded! He is truly sticking it to the doves today! Going through the pitiful records of one of the appeasers who have so damaged the dear, dear Democratic party, Jonathan Schell, he produces one of the great paragraphs of our time, a time crying out for the lucidity of a Harry Truman as the long long long long war continues to threaten all freedom loving people:

“Or go back to the last war we fought with Iraq. Schell insisted that we could force Iraq to leave Kuwait with sanctions alone, rather than by using military force. But the years that followed that war made it clear just how impotent that tool was. Saddam Hussein endured more than a decade of sanctions rather than give up a weapons of mass destruction program that turned out to be nonexistent. If sanctions weren't enough to make him surrender his imaginary weapons, I think we can safely say they wouldn't have been enough to make him surrender a prized, oil-rich conquest.”

Sometimes, the doves – who I give every credit to for their intentions – obscure the important issue. The most important issue of our time was simply this: Hussein would not surrender his imaginary weapons! An America that is threatened by imaginary weapons is an America that can never be as strong, as erect, as lubricated as the America I see in my dreams. In the future, we cannot allow the stockpiling of imaginary weapons – this is something we can all agree on, whether we are Joe Lieberman in the center or Hilary Clinton on the far appeasement left.

However, Jon misses something essential, here: where are OUR imaginary weapons? Without imaginary weapons, the world will think, basically, that Uncle Sam is the Bend Over Kid (fans will recall my scene on the hood of that vintage Mustang in the film of the same name – and no, to answer the query from S.T. in Seattle, augmentation, as dear Condi would put it, was not involved).

We now have a chance to catch up in the imaginary weapons department, and this will be a test – a test of the resolve of the Democratic Party. For if we cannot build the imaginary weapons of tomorrow, that party, sadly, will show itself mired in its McGovernist yesterdays.

I remain, strong in resolve
Peter Beinart
Nude Model

through the ringer with some NYT reviewers

LI is suffering from some damned confederation of leaks and clogs in his pipes – sick to you, damned sick, and I don’t, as our blessed VP put it so teeth grittingly yesterday, have to put my little fucking pinkie in the air and see what a lot of the low use population has to say about that. Sick is sick, you fuckers (the endearing phrase Cheney uses to talk about the cowardly, Islamofascist favoring populace) . Thus, I couldn’t exactly go forward with my plan to explore Ka in relation to De Quincey, the natural next step from my last post.

So instead, a review of a review.

LI is a great fan of the early Martin Amis – the period from Money to London Fields – and is, consequently, very much thumbs down on this ill formed, ill thought out toss off of a new novel, the House of Meetings, a sort of test tube baby that resulted from the unprotected meeting of Anthony Beevor’s Berlin and Anne Applebaum’s Gulag on Amis’ bookshelf. Martin Amis has decided that he, unlike other British comic novelists of the past, is peculiarly gifted with insights into vast swathes of human history – he’s Tommie Mann, if you will, sledding down the Magic Mountain. Unfortunately, the U.K. just doesn’t create the exciting world historical stuff anymore for a novelist of his caliber, so he has to go abroad. (There is a funny dismissal of Robert Graves, of all people, in the House of Meetings - but no, no, no, I must include this in a ps - it is a funny one-off comment that says everything about the safari tour morality of not only Martin Amis, but of the whole liberal warhawery as constituted at present). The premise of House of Meetings is that this Russian expat, magically rich – it is a symptom of how bad this novel is that the striving for money, one of Amis’ great themes, is tossed aside for the scriptwriter’s given of affluence – is moved to write patronizing screeds to his step daughter, an American who apparently went to college in a Tom Wolfe novel (she is a wavering fantasy of PC gestures and, for some reason, blameable money – that she has never had to lie in her own shit in a prison camp has definitely put her lower on the gravitas scale both for her stepfather and for Amis) whilst returning, via a tour boat, to the Gulag camp in which he and his brother were held in the late 40s and early 50s. Oh, and the narrator went marching through Germany raping, vide the Beevor. This sadly loose premise, especially compared to the fine little traps Amis used to make to squeeze his characters, allows for a lot of pontification, as well as for a very weird metaphor for the ass of the woman that both the narrator and his brother are in love/lust with.

Well, this is just the kind of studly, liberal hawk stuff (against the Gulag, check; against the softhearted PC-ers, check) that some reviewers – notably, Michiko Kakutani -are going to find absolutely thrilling. But the cover review of the novel in the Sunday NYT by Liesl Schillinger has to be one of the worst reviews I’ve read there in years. Already, the paper has published the following correction:

“The cover review in the Book Review today, about Martin Amis’s novel “House of Meetings,” misstates the relationship between the unnamed narrator and Venus, the young woman he addresses throughout. She is his stepdaughter, not his daughter.”

Now, since one of the few episodes set in that part of the narrator’s life in which he becomes rich in America is explicitly about Venus choosing to stay with the narrator, it is a measure of Schillinger’s shall we say hit and run way of reading the novel that this passes her by. Not that she doesn’t pretty much broadcast that she is a woman who skips a lot in novels, as for instance in this astonishing paragraph:

“Writers seeking to capture the nature of Russia in one take have often favored grand oppositional schemes: “Crime and Punishment”; “War and Peace”; or, in the case of Woody Allen, “Love and Death.” It goes without saying that there’s more punishment than crime in Dostoyevsky’s novel; and a guilty secret of Russian bookworms is that many of them skim or skip the war parts of Tolstoy’s classic, focusing on the romantic sections devoted to peace. But “House of Meetings” is primarily, obsessively, occupied with the gulag and lacks a counterweight, at the expense of the usual teeter-tottering Amis brio. A woman named Zoya masquerades as a love interest. Luscious, lurching, swivel-hipped and Jewish, she is the wife of the narrator’s brother, Lev.”

Right, skipping those war scenes is just what Russian bookworms are all about – just as readers of Hamlet often skip the tawdry bits about revenge and shit to concentrate on whether Ophelia and the Prince are going to make it, or whether they’ll have to break up, which would be such a bummer for Ophelia.

I have, maliciously, quoted the nadir paragraph of Schillinger’s review, but the rest is equally incoherent. She seems to have decided, having skipped the gross parts in House of Meetings, to free associate about Russian literature in lieu of, like, actually reviewing House of Meetings. If she couldn’t take Prince Andrei loosing consciousness on the battlefield of Austerlitz, it is unlikely she is going to read about lice with any happiness. I have never read a review that made me suspect more that the author reached page 30, went to the middle of the book, and then took a look at the last ten pages. And this is a short book.

I will give Schillinger this – she never commits blurb language. Kakatuni’s first graf about the novel ends like this: “a bullet train of a novel that barrels deep into the heart of darkness that was the Soviet gulag and takes the reader along on an unnerving journey into one of history’s most harrowing chapters.”

This is a bullet train of a sentence – one that crashed as it hit the heart of darkness that was the Soviet Gulag, and out of which passengers leaped as it was going off the track, explosions racking the lead train, balls of fire casting shadows over Nyt readers trying desperately to avoid the harrowing clichés ahead as they tumbled into the outer darkness.

ps - about the Robert Graves comment. Here it is. Remember, our narrator has served in the Soviet army and spent a decade in a slave labor camp:

... I read the famous memoir by the poet Robert von Ranke Graves (English father, German mother). I was very struck, and very comforted, by his admission that it took him ten years to recover, morally, from the first World War. But it took me rather longer than that to recover from the Second. He spent his convalescent decade on some island in the Meditteranean. I spent time above the Arctic Circle, in penal servitude.

The balance between the pendantic precision accorded to Graves name - here's a wanking toff, look at that von Ranke, will ya - and the imprecision of what Graves did - he actually went to Majorca in the twenties after spending a very stormy time in Britain that ended with his attempted suicide, so it wasn't exactly that he took a cruise boat tour - and of course he fled Majorca in the end because of a little thing called the Spanish Civil War - is indicative of Amis' odd notion that, deep from within the bright heart of his affluence, he is more of a he-man, really, than this Graves chap, and all of those earlier generations that had no appreciation for the really heroic gestures - except perhaps George Orwell, one should never forget him: we are all Orwells today! A little trench warfare and that sissy Graves has to go to Majorca!

For connoisseurs of the ridiculous, Amis' career since he discovered the Gulag, what was it, in 1998, offers a case study that just keeps on giving. Compared to Graves life of luxury in the trenches, one can only see Amis' agonizing encounter with the Gulag in book after book as a sort of martyrdom, much like Joan of Arc's, except with better lunches in between.

The House of Meetings, by the way, is packed with these invidious comparisons between the decadent West, full of Gulagofascist supporters, and the horrors, absolute horrors, gone through by the narrator. Usually one would say - well, the narrator is not to be identified with Martin Amis, the author - but these off the cuff remarks are so consistent with the remarks Martin Amis, the author, likes to make in newspaper articles and so inconsistent with what we imagine the narrator saying (for instance, about, of all people, Robert Graves) - that we have good reason to conflate the two.

chasse aux geants

The first chapter of the Chuang-Tzu consists of a comparison between the giant and the small, beginning with the famed fish, K’un:

“IN THE NORTHERN DARKNESS there is a fish and his name is K'un.1 The K'un is so huge I don't know how many thousand li he measures. He changes and becomes a bird whose name is P'eng. The back of the P'eng measures I don't know how many thousand li across and, when he rises up and flies off, his wings are like clouds all over the sky. When the sea begins to move,2 this bird sets off for the southern darkness, which is the Lake of Heaven. (Burton Watson translation)

Against the wonder of the P’eng is set the laughter of the dove and the cicada:

The cicada and the little dove laugh at this, saying, "When we make an effort and fly up, we can get as far as the elm or the sapanwood tree, but sometimes we don't make it and just fall down on the ground. Now how is anyone going to go ninety thousand li to the south!

The chapter then proceeds through other giant/small contrasts in the style peculiar to it – each passage being at once unlinked from the proceeding one and yet bearing the distinct resemblance that one hand of cards bears to another. So giant and small face off against each other in wisdom, in status, in miraculous powers. The final contrast is between Hui Tzu and Chuang Tzu. Hui Tzu, given giant gourd seeds, plants and grows them, but the gourds are too big, so he smashes them Chuang Tzu laughs at this, saying that Hui Tzu, seems to be in thrall to the outward show of the gourds only: “Now you had a gourd big enough to hold five piculs. Why didn't you think of making it into a great tub so you could go floating around the rivers and lakes, instead of worrying because it was too big and unwieldy to dip into things! Obviously you still have a lot of underbrush in your head!"

So: what is the Daoist attitude towards the giant – are we looking at things from the perspective of the P’eng or the cicada? Surely Chuang Tzu’s tone of mockery is supposed to release us from the first impression of the giant – the impression of sheer wonder. That moment emerges in the early modern era in Europe as a sly maneuver to allow the writer to attack wonder itself , the glue that officially kept the sacred system together. Rabelais’ mock giants, the windmills that Don Quixote attacks, thinking that they are giants – this is about, in one sense, chasing the giants from the culture. Giordano Bruno uses the same mock heroic means in the Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. In the Ash Wednesday colloquy, Nolan (Bruno himself) is extolled in terms that could plug into the Chuang Tzu:

“Now here is he who has pierced the air, penetrated the sky, toured the realm of stars, traversed the boundaries of the world, dissipated the fictitious walls of the first, eighth, ninth, tenth spheres, and whatever else might have been attached to these by the devices of vain mathematicians and by the blind vision of popular philosophers. Thus aided by the fullness of sense and reason, lie opened with the key of most industrious inquiry those enclosures of truth that can be opened to us at all, by presenting naked the shrouded and veiled nature; he gave eyes to moles, illumined the blind who cannot fix their eyes and admire their own images in so many mirrors which surround them from every side. He untied the tongue of the mute who do not know [how to] and did not dare to express their intricate sentiments. He restored strength to the lame who were unable to make that progress in spirit which the ignoble and dissolvable compound [body] cannot make. He provided them with no less a presence [vantage point] than if they were the very inhabitants of the sun, of the moon, and of other nomadic [wandering] stars [planets]. He showed how similar or dissimilar, greater or worse [smaller] are those bodies [stars, planets) which we see afar, compared with that [earth] which is right here and to which we are united. And he opened their eyes to see this deity, this mother of ours, which on her back feeds them and nourishes them after she has produced them from her bosom into which she always gathers them again -- who is not to be considered a body without soul and life, [33. This animistic world view precedes a slightly veiled affirmation of pantheism.] let alone the trash of all bodily substances.”

The moment of mockery, of the exorcism of the giants, gets its juice, its scoffing power, from the practical, from the peasant’s p.o.v. – it is, after all, through Sancho Panza that we know the giants are windmills in Don Quixote. (Although the voice of the trope starts singing in my head as I write this: aren't peasants notoriously credulous? Aren't these images out of tune? - ah, the malicious trope that tricks my every claim with a counter-claim!) However, it would be a retarded enlightenment indeed that remained frozen in the moment of mockery. The movement, as in the quote from Bruno above, is to another and more abstract view. In the Chuang Tzu, the scale by which the K’un is gigantic and the dove is small is itself neither gigantic nor small. The scale has no size. In Bruno, the attack on the giants is done in the name of a notion of infinity with which Bruno’s name is still associated. When Newton applies the laws of motion on earth to the heavenly bodies, his idea is related to this same notion of a scale of no size – of a force. Newton famously wrote that he saw further because he stood on the shoulders of giants – showing that he had learned something that would make him free from the reproach Chuang Tzu gives to Hui Tzu: "You certainly are dense when it comes to using big things!” In fact, there is a certain slyness to Newton’s phrase – he does not, as is usual with the phrase (tracked through every maze by Robert Merton in his book) call himself a dwarf – his own stature is, as it were, for the observer to determine.

LI is down with these two moments in the chasse aux geants – we can understand – or, more accurately, we feel no resistance to - the Dao, here. But there is a whole other dimension of the gigantic that we don’t understand at all. Lately, we’ve been thinking about this because we’ve been reading Roberto Callosso’s Ka. In Ka, Callasso retells the stories of the Indian sacred books – the Rg Vedas, the Upanishads, the Ramayana, etc. Being incredibly ignorant of these basic texts, we have been trying to catch up – you know, the old struggle for minimum cultural literacy. Reading Ka has been an uncomfortably dreamlike experience – the dream divided between nightmare and wet dream, the powers that rule over the inveterate masturbator’s nocturnal life. We will have more to say about this in our next post.

The Economist supports President Backbone for another Keegan

The Economist is made of stern stuff. Not for them the cotton candy allurement of extraction from that Middle Eastern principality which we were all hopeful, two years ago, would follow General Pinochet’s path to privatization and prosperity. Instead, they are throwing their muscularity behind President Backbone:

America and its allies have failed in Iraq. George Bush is right to hold out against an even bigger failure

GEORGE BUSH has always been a gambler but this is his most audacious bet yet. Most Americans now believe that America has lost the war in Iraq. Only last month the Baker-Hamilton group, a bipartisan group of wise men (and one wise woman) told Congress that the situation in Iraq was “grave and deteriorating”. It recommended a managed withdrawal, dangling the prospect of the bulk of America's combat troops pulling out in early 2008. This week Mr Bush rejected that advice. He intends to defy world opinion, American opinion, congressional opinion, much military opinion and even the advice of many members of his own Republican Party by reinforcing rather than reducing America's effort in Iraq. Some will call this reckless. Some will say the president is in denial. We don't admire Mr Bush, but on this we think he is right.”

And what is he right about? Well, the Economist, right out of the box, starts substituting its own description of what President B. proposed for what President B. proposed. This isn’t unusual – rarely has a war been defended so ardently by systematically misdescribing not only its aims, but its tactics, its motives, and – most importantly – the people most effected by it. This is what the Economist thinks the plan is:

Mr Bush is investing much hope in a plan, known as “the surge”, to secure the mixed Sunni-Shia neighbourhoods of Baghdad by injecting “more than 20,000” additional American troops on top of the 130,000 or so already in the country.

Now, the key word here is “mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods of Baghdad.” That description could mean one of two things – it could designate the subset of neighborhoods that are mixed Sunni-Shia, or it could designate the whole of Baghdad. In the latter case, it would be unnecessary – and yet, the only way that the description fits the proposal is if the latter designation is the correct one.
The lack of economy in the language betrays the anxiety of the writer. In actual fact, what is happening is a neighborhood by neighborhood attempt to clean the Sunni out of Baghdad. The cleansing is exactly what the Shia government – the Dawa government – of Maliki has been doing faithfully. To “secure” those neighborhoods, in conjunction with Maliki, is to ethnically cleanse them. In effect, President Backbone is proposing something parallel to adopting, say, Milosovic’s plan for Sarajevo.

However, because the White House favors being unclear about its own motives – looking in its heart all of the time, instead of watching what its brain does – this isn’t the announced American policy. There’s enough elbow room to pretend, in fact, that the effect is just going to be an accidental consequence of the act.

Now, as is the custom for the belligeranti, arguing for a program that has little chance of success and a much greater chance of failure requires, first, pretending to consider the one the one hands and the on the other hands. The Economist gets through this exercise in propaganda briskly:

It is by no means certain that the surge will succeed. The Americans have tried before to impose order on Baghdad, only for violence to flare again as soon as the troops move on (see pages 22-24). Those who say this is too little, too late, may be proved right. Sectarian hatreds have deepened since that referendum of 2005, as the wildly differing reactions of Shias and Sunnis to the hanging of Saddam Hussein demonstrated. Even with Iraqi helpers, American soldiers may not be welcomed in Baghdad's neighbourhoods now that Iraqis have turned for protection to their local militias. According to one survey last September, 61% of Iraqis approve of attacking coalition forces. It may be that by barging into Baghdad's neighbourhoods, and staying there this time, the Americans will merely stoke resistance and take (and inflict) more casualties.
In short, the surge may fail. But the surge is not the most significant part of Mr Bush's speech of January 10th. If this particular plan fails, a new one will be formulated. Far more significant is the strategic message that in spite of the Baker-Hamilton report, and notwithstanding the growing pressure from public opinion and a Democrat-controlled Congress, this president will not in his remaining two years concede defeat and abandon Iraq to its fate. And this, whether it is motivated by obstinacy, denial or a sober calculation of the strategic stakes in Iraq, is a good thing.”

One could make the argument here made about many things. For instance: “It is by no means certain that a perpetual motion machine will succeed.” Or: “It is by no means certain that a man jumping off a cliff could, by flapping his arms, fly safely over to the cliff facing him.” Or: “It is by no means certain that I could throw a rock that would fly all the way up and hit the moon.” The ass covering here is perfunctory. The Economist can’t really discuss the conditions that would give us a sense of whether the escalation would work or not because they have muddied the description of what the escalation is supposed to do from the very beginning. The continual pretence that Iraq is a tabula rasa, that the government in Iraq has left no record and thus is infinitely malleable, that the people of Iraq have not expressed, in polls and, more importantly, in supporting militias and insurgents, their sense that the occupation should be over, is the necessary precondition to continued failure. To discuss these things would be to strip away the pretence that the Iraq war has anything to do with democracy. It would lay bare the cost of the war both for the occupiers (delaying endlessly the reality that the U.S. has lost its Cold War hegemony in the Middle East and is going to have to negotiate in that system from a lower status) and for the occupied (the cost here has a simple name in the courts: it is called first degree murder).

A week ago, LI was surprised to read some eminent sense from Chalabi frontman, Jim Hoagland, in the Washington Post. Instead of continuing the campaign of crushing whoever, Hoagland proposed that the U.S. policy in Iraq should work, firstly, towards a ceasefire.

“… call a one-month halt to U.S. offensive actions -- a truce, in effect -- and encourage Iraqis to do the same. This would facilitate the holding of a peace conference in Baghdad, in which blood-stained radicals such as Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and Hadith al-Dari, the inflammatory voice of Sunni insurgents, would be asked to participate.”

The second point has to do with Iran – doing exactly the opposite of the slimy President Backbone’s policy of weasely aggression:
“Bush's speech should recognize that Iran has legitimate interests in security in Iraq and the Persian Gulf region, and he should pledge that the United States will not use Iraq as a springboard for action against the Iranian regime.
These implicit security guarantees -- if met by a proper response from Iran -- could be the basis for a broad U.S.-Iranian dialogue and an eventual regional conference to endorse and implement the work of the Baghdad conference.”
Actually, to this point should be added that the U.S. should, over the last month, have been making much of the elections in Iran, which repudiated the President and the various hardliners. Instead, the election has been greeted with zip – because it occurred in the great American blindspot, which pretends that Iran is a tyranny run by mad mullahs. Iran is definitely run by too many mullahs, but then again … so is Iraq. And so is Saudi Arabia.
Now, LI is aware of the fact that Hoagland’s proposal wishes away President Backbone. The point of discussing alternatives like this is simply to start filling in the space of opposition to the continued war criminal policy of the White House krewe. Congress is beginning to assert itself. Of course, one of the things that should be done – just to start the discussion – is calling the Iranian Study group before a committee. This should be done solely to amuse us all with Bush’s oedipal rage that those people – his daddy’s friends – are back in D.C. President Backbone, while a terrible president, is at least amusing when he gets into one of his oedipal rages, and what else is the putz for but to make us laugh at him?
But the other thing calling the ISG would do would be to start loosening the lock of the administration on the policy choices before us in Iraq. At the moment, they have the same binary form as the power on the TV clicker – on and off, stay or go. Our notion is that the policy choices are more like the channels on that clicker –potentially different shows. One channel is off the air – the channel formed around every reason and goal that the U.S. was proclaiming in 2003. Even the Economist knows this, underneath the irrationality of its defense of the escalation. The American soldiers and the Iraqis are to be murdered in defense of the power relations that keep such as the editors of the Economist in bar tabs and speech fees.

Bush's speech: the expected and the unexpected

Everybody is a little let down by the Bush speech. Before the speech, White House aides were saying that Bush was going to speak against a background of Sister Machine Gun singing Hole in the Ground:

“Cut down by the look in your eyes
Never satisfied by your goddamn lies
There's nowhere left for me to go
Living in a river of sin
Never thinking about the shit I'm swimming in
Don't think I'm ever coming home

There's a hole in the ground
There's a hole in the sky
And there's no deeper place where all the pigs can die”

In the event, Bush couldn’t find Jenna’s CD. So the speech zeroed out as the dull cadences of Bush on the serious channel convinced many that he'd gotten into Laura's valium. The last couple minutes caught some off guard, though, when the Rebel in Chief put on his Barbara Bush wig and just sat there, silently, while a voiceover played. According to my notes, it went:

“They're probably watching me. Well,
let them. Let them see what kind of
a person I am.
(A pause, as the fly
lights on George's
hand)
I'm not going to swat that fly. I
hope they are watching. They'll see...
they'll see... and they'll know...
and they'll say... 'why, she wouldn't
even harm a fly...'

George continues to gaze ahead into nothing.




According to a poll taken afterwards among Republican voters, Bush is still so popular that he is the model for the candidate they want in 2008. They want the son of a billionaire who is spectacularly unsuccessful at business, pulled out of several jams by his daddy’s friends, given a sweetheart deal on a sports franchise, and leveraged into a meaningless public office the only power of which is to pardon capital offenses or not. If such a person can’t be found, 70% of GOP voters said they’d be willing to consider one of the members of the Billionaire Boys Club, whose parole could be speeded up just in time for the 2008 election.

ps - in a significant development on the brownnoser front, The Corner has come up with a label for our Churchill that will now officially replace Rebel-in-Chief. This is from the sparkling mind of Larry Kudlow, the man who reported, on the basis of the NYSE runup in October, a stunning sweep by the Republican party:

"President Bush—aka President Backbone—may be fighting an uphill battle in Iraq, but he is sure fighting."

Thus, the heirs of Burke dig the old man up and pee in his skull's gaping mouth! Conservatism today - as hot as a Fox Reality Show!

the expulsion of the triumphant beast

LI’s mind, this morning, keeps drifting to the title of one of Giordano Bruno’s pamphlets: The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. There seems to be something magically coordinate between that title and the scheduled appearance of President Bush this evening. Bush is, of course, going to announce that the final result of the listening tour he conducted among his cabinet, numerous public toilets at D.C. subway stations, and in the attic of his ranch in Crawford has led him to chose to send 20,000 phantom soldiers to Iraq in the hope that this will lead to victory. Victory will come, according to the President, when the stars are covered with blood, the night is as bright as the day, and the last Islamofascist is strangled with the guts of the last polar bear.

Yes, there is some coordination between Bruno’s mock apocalypse and the apocalyptic mockery of this Presidency.

The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast was an expensive pamphlet. It cost Bruno his hide – officially, he was burned at stake by the Church because of the heretical views he expressed in it. Of course, those views had to be found by trained allegorists, since the pamphlet is a dialogue about the ‘reformation’ of the Zodiac. It appears that Jupiter is unsatisfied with the Zodiac’s current figures, old guys from long decayed systems of superstition. Momus, acting as the devil’s helper, suggests many criticisms of these figures to the Lord of Lords – for instance, he says of Orion

„On this, Neptune asked, what, o Gods, do you want to do with my favorite, my dear, Orion is the one I’m talking about, who, as some etymologists believe, causes the heavens out of pure fear to urinate? Then Momus answered: Let me, o Gods, make a suggestion! There’s a Napolitan saying that goes, the macaroni falls into the cheese – which is what we are faced with. This one truly understands performing miracles on every side, and as Neptune well knows, he can wander over the waves of the sea without sinking, yes, without getting his feet wet, and in consequence he can do other beautiful little tricks – now, lets send him down [to exist] among men.“ (my translation of a German translation )

To which Jove said:

“Now do you know, said Jove, what I am deciding to do concerning that one [Orion] in order to avoid any possible future scandal? I want him to go down to earth; and I shall command that he lose all power of performing bagatelles, impostures, acts of cunning kind actions, and other miracles that are of no worth, because I do not want him together with the other to be in a position to destroy whatever excellence and dignity are found and exist in things necessary to the commonwealth of the world.” (translated by Arthur D
Imerti)

Now, if the Zodiac is to be reformed, and superstition is to be swept from the skies like so many old cobwebs carried off by a good huswife’s broom, one would expect that a sort of festival of reason would install, in their place, symbols of our mental dignity. O shades of the French Revolution! But this is to underestimate Bruno’s own peckerwood sense of dialectics – for Bruno, the ludicrous is not opposed to reason, but exists at its secret thumping heart. Thus, Jove suggests sending an ass up to the sky – asinine reason, heehawing its way through infinity! which necessarily encompasses nothingness…

This tickles the line of thought I’ve been pursuing lo these many and weary posts through this blog. But lets return to one of the tricks of our own urinating Orion – with which I began. While not exactly a giant hunter – the Bush administration’s giant hunter is best known for scattershooting an old lawyer – certainly the administration seems to love engaging in sleight of hand games. And LI suspects that reforming the zodiac – taking down the war culture – has to be the end result of opposing the Bush administration. It isn’t a question of just withdrawing from Iraq - it is a question of destroying a whole system of superstitions, the economic and cultural interlocking of a giant, war producing mindset – planetset in the name of … well, that is the question.

…

LI has noted the vast fluffing of General Petraeus in the press. David Ignatius publishes another paen in his WAPO column today. The subject is Petraeus’ apparently brilliant insight that successful counter-insurgency strategies don’t involve the massive projection of force guided by the precept of optimally guarding each individual soldier from risk. Wow! If this is what it takes to be a military genius, I suppose LI should apply to West Point – we made this point what, two years ago? Three years ago? Here’s Ignatius on Petraeus’ field manual:

The field manual summarizes some of the lessons that commanders have learned in Iraq: Long-term success "depends on the people taking charge of their own affairs and consenting to the government's rule." Killing insurgents "by itself cannot defeat an insurgency." Local commanders "have the best grasp of their situations" and should have the freedom to adapt and react to local conditions. As many officers ruefully admit, the Army is learning these lessons three years late -- but perhaps that's still in time to make a difference.

My favorite part of the manual, which I suspect Petraeus had a big hand in drafting, is a section titled "Paradoxes of Counterinsurgency Operations." The headings give the flavor of these unconventional ideas: "Sometimes, the More You Protect Your Force, the Less Secure You May Be." (Green Zone residents, please note: "If military forces remain in their compounds, they lose touch with the people, appear to be running scared, and cede the initiative to the insurgents.") "Sometimes Doing Nothing Is the Best Reaction." "Some of the Best Weapons for Counterinsurgents Do Not Shoot." And this military version of the Zen riddle: "The More Successful the Counterinsurgency Is, the Less Force Can Be Used and the More Risk Must Be Accepted." (As the host nation takes control, "Soldiers and Marines may also have to accept more risk to maintain involvement with the people.")

The abiding lesson of this manual comes in one of Petraeus's paradoxes, and it ought to be engraved as the cornerstone of U.S. policy going forward, regardless of whether there is a troop surge: "The Host Nation Doing Something Tolerably Is Normally Better than Us Doing It Well." In making this point, Petraeus cites the godfather of counterinsurgency warriors, Gen. Creighton Abrams, who said when he was U.S. commander in Vietnam in 1971: " We can't run this thing. . . . They've got to run it."

The last paragraph is, of course, itself fluff. What we are doing Well is – protecting American troops. The same thing that General McClellan did well in 1862. Compare this to, say, our post from June 26th, 2006, with which I will end this here long long long post:

... This misses the bloody crux, the structure, the very moral economy of the American way of warfare. If forces are kept to a minimum and if force is proportioned to some threshold point beyond which you antagonize the population, you will, inevitably, suffer much higher casualties. If American soldiers winnow through a village, looking only for insurgents, they are much likely to be injured or killed than if they plow through the village in the balls out, mega-American way. And the soldiers know that. The American soldier has been trained to think that the preservation of his life is the prime objective. He has been raised in the spirit of McLellan, and advances with the firepower of Grant, which is why America always wins the wars that it loses. This is why the American soldier is good in a battlefield situation such as presented itself in WWII, or in the First Gulf War, and entirely sucks at counterinsurgency. And will always suck. Because the higher risk brings with it the question: what am I doing here? Since American interests have nothing to do with the Iraq war – it was commenced and continued solely to serve the vanity of a small D.C. clique – the only way to keep waging it as what it is in reality – the usurpation of American forces for mercenary purposes on the part of a power mad executive – is to wage it with as few American deaths as possible. The Bush doctrine converges with the Powell doctrine – overwhelming force = lucrative contracts to war contractors + lack of visible sacrifice to the Bush base.

The logic here is inexorable. Either a greater number of Americans die, or a greater number of Iraqis die. Americans have decided to pretend that the greater the number of Iraqi deaths, the more the Americans are winning. That, of course, is bullshit. Which is why the argument that the U.S. troops should stay in for humanitarian reasons is bullshit – the logic of American strategy will continue to maximize the number of Iraqi deaths, or it will have to face the repulsion of American public opinion as American deaths go racheting up. It won’t do the latter. The rulers actually fear the American population in their nasty, prolonged wars. Fear that the population doesn't want to fight. This is their worry. This is what they work at. Both parties, it goes without saying. This is what all the bogus talk about "will" is about.

They are afraid of us. Doesn't that imply that they have something to be afraid about?

Stab this war in the back.

The Basho of economics

No doubt, this is of no interest to anybody but me. So, excuses in advance. But ... guess what? The book I translated - the Basho of Economics, by Silja Graupe - has been accepted by the Ontos Press. Publication, boys and girls!

So allow me to be totally gross for a second and quote from the acceptance letter. This is so gross I advise you to shield your eyes and come back to Limited Inc when I have something better to lay before you.

Here it is. The quote. Our acceptance letter. Ha ha ha!

I just had a look at the translation. As I expected, Roger did a truly outstanding job--the result is faithful to the 'intellectual feel' of the original yet reads as smoothly and lively as an original text (and the technical terminology is recaptured expertly, with great precision and sensitivity--congratulations to both of you, Roger and Silja, to the splendid result of your intense and dedicated collaboration on this project!)

Life is good. The champagne's on me. How much is it a bottle again, bartender? ...

The Nietzsche Peace Tribunal initiative

LI checked around to see how Peace was doing this weekend. You remember peace – as in, ain’t gonna study war no more and other songs popular in kindergarten. During the hoopla that preceded putting Jerry Ford in the ground, there was surprisingly little talk about peace – which would have surprised people in the seventies. Nixon couldn’t make a foreign policy move without invoking Peace. Even Reagan would genuflect to Peace.

Interestingly, I don’t have an aural memory of Bush using the word. Surely he has at some point – but not as though Peace were, ultimately, a Goddess that we must assuage. Talking about this with my brother the other day, I told him that there is a phrase, hypocrisy is the tithe vice pays to virtue. He repeated the phrase a little doubtfully – my bro immediately gets suspicious when I get all epigrammatic and shit. He didn’t think it lessened Nixon’s crimes that he used the word Peace. Myself, I was just trying to look on the bright side!

The first thing I noticed is that the newspapers are floating another trivial project – a mere 100 billion dollars to “replace” our aging nuclear missiles with brand new ones, which might require underground testing. Now, if somebody was talking about spending 100 billion dollars to extend health coverage for people in my income bracket (the botched lowest 10 percent), there would, of course, be an outcry. We can’t do things like that. But for the peculiar geometric shape we all know and love, the Pentagon, 100 billion dollars is really a computer blip. After all, that 100 billion will flow to the people who need and deserve it most – the network of war industries out there, just aching to employ our finest engineers, who in turn are always just aching to see Free Enterprise unleashed upon the lazy masses. There’s nothing like an exception in an ideology to make it go down like sugared urine.

We did like the comments by one of the Pentagon Generals who, obviously, was interrupted in the middle of some sweet, erotic daydream about launching his pretties on the fuckin’ Russkie Islamofascists:

“Administration officials and military officers like General James Cartwright, head of the Strategic Command, which controls the nation's nuclear arsenal, argue that because the United States provides a nuclear umbrella for so many allies, it is critical that its stockpile be as reliable as possible.

"We will not 'un-invent' nuclear weapons, and we will not walk away from the world," Cartwright said in an interview. "Right now, it is not the nation's position that zero is the answer to the size of our inventory."

He added: "So, if you are going to have these weapons, they should be safe, they should be able to be secured, and they should be reliable if used."

Safety and reliability! That’s the ticket. If we must kill 2 million people, we want them to be the right 2 million people, after all. What kind of barbarians do you think we are? The NYT newspaper reporter did not record if he zipped up before or after this statement of the case, but surely those strong words must have left some telltale stain upon his uniform trousers.

Looking around for more hopeful Peace stuff, we went to the blog of the Perdana Peace Initiative, supposedly launched to criminalize war. Unfortunately, the signatories of the blog, all members of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal, have an inverted idea of peace. For them, peace seems to involve the total increase of conflict.

It was not Saddam Hussein’s death warrant that Nouri Al-Maliki signed so publicly but his own political and moral downfall along with that of the militias and gangs he is leading. The haste and the glee with which Maliki rushed through the execution exposes clearly the sole division that exists in Iraq, between the occupation and its local lackeys and the Iraqi population and its resistance to America's murderous agenda. This execution finds its place within an American strategy that at the least seeks to humiliate Iraq and at worst aims to foment mass civil strife if not a wider regional conflict.

The criminal Maliki government cannot now be recognised by any
government, institution, association or citizen as either a protector of Iraq and its people, or of legality and Iraqi custom.
Only the Iraqi national popular resistance is the guarantor and
protector of Iraqi sovereignty and the continuity of the Iraqi state.

The national popular resistance is the only legal authority that can
represent the Iraqi people and determine a path towards peace and
stability in Iraq.”

Notice the very sound of this - it is the language of the secret policeman as he breaks your glasses. It goes on and on, pretty much an anti-Shiite screed. While of the opinion that Hussein was lynched and his lynching used as a sign that the government and its allies desire the crushing of the Sunni population, we would think that a peace organization would do some general deploring and then advise negotiation – for negotiation between all parties in Iraq is, really, the only way out. There are models for this – for instance, the negotiation that ended the war in Northern Iraq between Kurdish factions in the 90s. Negotiation involves, first, less intransigence about legitimacy. It involves, second, a minimum of self policing. But such is not the route taken by this supposed peace organization, which apparently thinks that there is one thing called the national popular resistance. If only there were! And the use of the usual branding words – Hussein as the legitimate head of the government, Maliki as a criminal, etc., etc. – are so much useless confetti. Hussein, it should perhaps be recalled to these representatives of the Peace goddess, launched a devastating war against Iran in 1980, thus making legitimacy a mask for the far greater crime of warmongering.

There are legislators in the Kuwaiti parliament who are calling for retaliation against those governments that have expressed shock at Saddam’s death. What do you expect from Kuwaiti parliamentarians? But this antique, militant and futile language from supposed peace activists is as depressing as the tortures, explosions, and casualties it countenances. Poor Bertrand Russell, whose name is now being used as a shell to disguise calls to further mass murder! LI is very tempted to form a real Peace tribunal, and name it after Nietzsche.

America's new plan in Iraq: theocracy and mass murder

The NYT pokes through the ashes of Saddam Hussein’s execution in a long article that tells us what this occupation has wrought. In one of history’s practical jokes, the phrase that American warmongers can’t get enough of when talking about Iran – those mad mullahs, that mullah ridden country, the word mullah repeated like a charm against the evil of the evil axis – has become the term that designates the government that has been installed, step by step, in Iraq, with the Americans playing the role of sublimely unconscious instruments. This fact, somehow, never crops up when the Americans are discussing why they are in Iraq – the official version, which has been erected like the Berlin wall in the MSM, is that Americans stand for “democracy.” Here is a salient paragraph from the NYT article about Iraq’s “democracy”:

“Mr. Khalilzad had suggested that the Iraqis get a written ruling approving the execution from Midhat al-Mahmoud, the chief judge of Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council; Mr. Mahmoud refused. Then, the Iraqis played their trump card: a call to high-ranking Shiite clerics in the holy city of Najaf, asking for approval from the marjaiya, the supreme authority in Iraqi Shiism. When his officials reported that they had it, Mr. Maliki signed a letter authorizing the hanging. It was 11:45 p.m.”

Let’s be clear, as your average Pentagon voxbox likes to say: the government in Iraq is another Shiite mullah led state. Victory – the precious relic that Bush has carried over from his cheerleader days – means simply that the Shiite mullahs crush the Sunnis. That’s it. Victory is the triumph of a paler form of Khomenei-ism, and this has been acknowledged, in practice, by this administration. The Sunni insurgents have every reason, at the moment, to fight, and fight as hard as they can, since their extermination is on the table. The upcoming murders of American soldiers, the blood of whom is on Bush’s head, will only serve either to cement the mass murder and the installation of a theocracy or to fail at that mission. That’s it.

The good news from Iraq yesterday was that corpses were found on Haifi street hung from streetlamps – a more merciful form of murder, surely, than getting the dentist drill through your eyeball, favored by the Badr brigade and the Mahdi militia.

Cursing our rebel in chief

LI read the NYT article about the planned surge, and we have mixed feelings. On the one hand, we want the troops out now. On the other hand, deepening the military failure in Iraq and crippling American power for the next decade, which is what the Bush plan will result in, does have some advantages over the long term. To use a phrase right wing commentators apply to Arabic governments, D.C. only really understands humiliation. On the one hand, the increase in American troops is really an increase in targets and shooters, and will lead to pointless violence in the service of an impossible end. There is no pro-American force left in Iraq – save quasi-independent North Iraq. That North Iraq is pro-American and hosts no American troops is not a coincidence – if American troops are deployed there, soon enough the cracks in the Kurdish system, papered over after the 96 civil war, will reappear.

The Bush plan calls, ultimately, for 20,000 more troops. News reports indicate that there are only 9,000 more troops to send at the moment. Having inflicted a generational wound on the officer caste, the administration does seem determined to recycle volunteers until they are stressed beyond use.

It is an interesting strategy. At the moment, the U.S. has pretty much left Afghanistan to the mercies of the ad hoc NATO forces. Our ally, Pakistan, has given al Qaeda the kind of territory within which to train whatever paramilitary troops it needs – and al Qaeda is good at taking advantage of these respites. It took advantage of the Sudan sojourn to design the embassy hits, of the shelter provided by the Taliban to target the WTC, and now, under the benign Musharref and with the blind eye given by this administration, who knows what wonders will emerge from the deeps? Neglecting the terrorists so that they can make attacks is pretty much priority number one in the long long long long war – otherwise, its absolute ridiculousness is pretty quickly exposed. It would be a short short short war, and where is the power and profit in that?

So, just as the Sunnis realize that they are targeted for annihilation by the Iraqi government – the clear message sent by the manner in which Saddam H. was murdered – Bush is proposing an escalation that, inevitably, will rush from one place to another, shredding people along the way, and operating as a reserve force of executioners manipulated by the peculiarly airless circle of Shiite Islamicists who are in charge in Iraq. As the last act of their sanglante orgy, this might cover Bush’s ass until he is squeezed out of office. One can only hope that the perpetual revulsion of all the nations, including the U.S., who have been victimized by his Neronian vanity dogs him in his retirement to his dying day.

occupations - the Sorrow and the Pity

A few years ago, there was a deal of noise around the reissue of the Battle of Algiers – Pentagon honchos had a special showing, policy wonks and pundits got to review the film (showing why they shouldn’t review the film) and, in fact, there were things in the Battle of Algiers that have happened in Iraq – although there is nothing quite like the Battle of Baghdad that we are seeing now, with ethnic cleansing going on inside the city while outside, the Sunni insurgency is turning the screws inch by inch to turn off the city’s services. The more valid comparison might be to the Paris Commune.

However, a film that is just as relevant to the occupation in Iraq is the Sorrow and the Pity. I know that now, because I watched the Sorrow and the Pity for the first time two days ago.

The German occupation of France was spread out over 3 years – much like the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The first occupation was covered by a collaborationist government – much like the second. The first occupation involved resistance to the occupiers, which was labeled terrorism by the occupiers – much like the second (there is a fascinating interview with a former German soldier who tells the story of a German troop, passing by a group of peasants, who – as soon as the troop goes by – unsheathes weapons and kills fourteen of the Germans. And he says, these peasants wore no uniforms. They had no stripes on their sleeves. They were terrorists, and how do you deal with people like that – shades of Americanspeak in Iraq! Shades, actually, of the discourse put about by Israeli officials last summer about Hezbollah. Invading forces are always aggrieved that they have to institute a policy of slaughtering civilians – so much simpler to once and for all devastate a uniformed army. If the occupied aren’t going to cooperate, what are you going to do?). The first occupation also involved a boom in the capital city – while the Germans were stealing as much of the French economy as possible, there was sufficient spending in Paris that the upper middle class had a blast. The race track opened, theater tickets were selling at a premium, there were fashionable dresses on the backs of fashionable gals. Similarly, the second occupation involved a two fold economic fact – mass and stark unemployment, on the one hand, and a boom in consumer goods in Baghdad, on the other hand. Fleeing into Jordan, a middle class Baghdadi family can now take with them quite a few electronic gadgets they could never have purchased under Saddam, or at least under the sanction regime.

It was also interesting to see how the curve of resistance inevitably goes upward. The odd American notion that the occupiers will be resisted less each year comes out of some woozy notion of occupying Germany in 1945. Actually, most occupations have a pretty predictable schedule – the occupation becomes more and more unpopular the longer it goes on. To quench that unpopularity, the occupiers have to become harsher and harsher – they have to engage, at the very least, in discrete ethnic cleansing. A one hundred or two hundred year occupation – say, the occupation of India by the British – requires periodic repressions, plus – in the Indian case – the fragmentation of the former powers, and terror famines.

The two most fascinating characters in The Sorrow and the Pity are the former French nazi, Christian de La Mazière, who is one of those plausible French fascists, and the two peasant resisters, Louis Grave and his brother, Alexis. Both were socialists, of course. The movie was shot within a memory frame close enough to the actual events so that the nonsense about the Communists really not being the backbone of the resistance hadn’t been spread about by the inheritors of the bourgeois indifference or collaboration in France. The notion that the Communists were fighting for the Soviet Union is as laughable as the idea that the British were fighting to make America a hyper-power – but, of course, the reactionary crap spewed out first by the ‘New Philosophers’ and then by a generation of ‘moderates’ has engulfed the period in a very fake revisionism.

France, we are often told, horribly betrayed the Jews who had fled to the country. This is very true. What is elided, here, is that they fled to France partly because the Communist dominated Popular Front initiated the most wide open refugee policy in Europe in the thirties – vastly more wide open than the U.S., which virtuously made it as hard as possible for fleeing Jews to gain entrance, and of course gave no refuge to fleeing Spanish Republicans, etc., etc. So there were, numerically, vastly more Jewish refugees caught in France when the country fell to Hitler. Britain, which could easily have accommodated them in the thirties, of course refused them entrance as much as they could. Varian Fry, the American who, as France fell, saved as many Jews as he could, sending them to the U.S., was reproached by his American superiors at the time and persecuted by the McCarthyites in the early fifties. The U.S. simply grudges refuge to the persecuted – at the present time, for instance, doing all it can to keep out Iraqis who have been stupid enough to trust Americans, and who are fleeing the dental drills of Bush’s friend Hakim’s Badr Brigade. Other countries – Jordan, Thailand, Kenya – scattered throughout the third world have, in the past fifty years, had to set up huger refugee camps and, out of their few resources, support them – but the vastly wealthier Americans never do things like that.

the actor and the hangman

We have been wrestling with a fact we stumbled over a few days ago. We were researching Tom Paine’s years in revolutionary Paris, and his friendships with the group known as the Gironde. And we came across the famous day, in the National Assembly, when the motion was made to grant Jews full civil rights. This moment has been treated as an important symbol, and it is an important symbol. It marked the end of Christendom, for instance – the rotten structure finally collapsing completely. It marked the beginning of modernity – with an appropriate ironic chaser, since the legislation came on the heels of a pogram in Alsace. But we had not realized that the legislation came as a sort of afterthought that day. The topic of extending civil status was brought up by Clermont Tonnerre, but the original objects of that extension were: the hangman and the actor.

Gaston Maugras’ Les comediens hors la lois has the full story:

“

At the opening of the session, Clermont-Tonnerre climbed to the podium to defend his project: “Professions,” he said, “are obnoxious (nuisibles) or not. If they are, it is a habitual crime that justice must reprimand. If they aren’t, the law must be adapted to justice, which is the source of the law. It must reach out to correct the abuse, and not to chop down the tree it is necessary to prop up or correct.”

Then, speaking of the two professions (of hangman [executioner - bourreau] and actor) “that the law puts on the same level, but that are not uninjured by their rapprochment, “he asks for the simultaneous rehabilitation of the hangman and the actor: “for the hangman,” he says, “ it is simply a matter of combating prejudice… All that the law ordains is god: it ordains the death of a crimina, the executioner does nothing more than obey the law. It is absurd that the law says to a man: “do this, and if you do it, you will be guilty of a crime.”

Passing to actors, he demonstrated that, in their regard, the prejudice is established on what they are under the dependence of public opinion. “This dependence makes our glory and it flays them,” he cries. “Honest citizens can represent on the stage the chef-d’oeuvres of the human spirit, works filled with the healthy philosophy that, thus put in a position where every human can appreciate it, has prepared, successfully, the revolution that is now in operation, and you tell them: you are Comediens du Roi, you occupy the national theater, and you are criminal (infame)! The law must not let this crime subsist.”

This sounds like an old and done story, but the issues, here, continue to provoke us – drug dealers and prostitutes, for instance, bear the burden of the crime law even though it isn’t clear that these professions are anything more than wretchednesses made wretched by the law itself. Using the law as a means of showing moral disabrobation is, again, something that was never resolved in the Revolution, and is stilltje unresolved now. However, the historic question for me is how it happened that the hangman, the actor, and the Jew ended up as figures of a certain boundary – the figures that, given civil status, liquidated the Christian state. The Jew as other is now a bit of a philosophical cliché, but the actor and the executioner…

Interestingly, arguing passionately against the removal of the taint against the actor that day was a priest. And the issue moved into Rousseau’s Letter to D’alambert, and the notion that actors bring corruption. About which, more later.

As faithful readers of LI know, we are stout conspiracy theorists. No, we don’t think the CIA took down the World Trade Center by implanting JFK’s assassin shattered brain in a comatose Mohammed Atta. Our theory, much simpler, has been that in December, 2006, somewhere in the U.S. government, the decision was made to allow Osama bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora. We referenced Army Times reporter Sean Naylor’s account of the battle in this post. Recycling ourself (oh, the egotism!):

Anyway, the American force that approached Tora Bora at the end of November, 2001 was extremely small, and depended on Afghan allies that were busy feuding with each other. According to Naylor, as the siege proceeded, the Air Force flew over the twenty mile passage between Tora Bora and Pakistan and recorded “hot spots” on their heat sensing equipment. Now, CENTCOM, unbelievably, had never considered the possibility that Al Qaeda’s forces could escape from Tora Bora – thus, there were no guards on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. But the hot spot data did provoke some consultation:

“The Generals in Kuwait recommend[ed] bombing the positions as soon as possible. But Franks [who, you will recall, bravely lead our heroic troops from a boat in Florida] and his staff did not see it like that. “They might be shepherds,” was Control Command’s attitude, according to two officers who sat in on the video-teleconferences in which the matter was discussed. At CFLCC that theory didn’t wash. The idea that scores of shepherds were tending to their flocks at 10,000 feet in the middle of winter was implausible.’

We bring this up because, thanks to the Tiny Revolution site , we went to an article in the Christmas Time Magazine and had one of those moments, you know, like when a Warner Bros. cartoon Tom Cat sees a shapely femme cat – all eyes bugging out, wowowowoweeee! For amidst the confab of the heavy hitting journalists Time had gathered to ruminate over what went wrong in Iraq, we read this, from Lawrence Wright, the (Austin) author of The Looming Tower:

“TIME: Did the failure to capture Osama bin Laden play a role in the decision to go to war?
GORDON: I was at Tora Bora at that point, in December '01. The desire to have a war plan for Iraq has already been telegraphed to [General] Tommy Franks at Centcom. Franks is actually struggling with Tora Bora, with his unhappiness with the results in Afghanistan, just as he is on the eve of returning for a very important meeting at Crawford with the President. I think they made a very quick decision that in principle Iraq was next on the agenda.
WRIGHT: Al-Qaeda essentially was dead after December 2001. The war on terror, you know, had succeeded. [If we had] captured the leaders, I think people would've felt a sense of finality and might not have had that impulse to roll into Iraq. I'm not sure [the Administration] would have had the public support.”

Of course, like paranoiacs, conspiracy theorists are aces at reading silence. Silence is a multiply intentioned text, and you can lose yourself in it and wind up on a drip in the State nuthouse quicker than you might think. Myself, I saw the Q and A shift from Wright’s comment with amazing quickness.

As I’ve said before, the Tora Bora conspiracy is almost perfect. The left pretends that Al Qaeda wasn’t even dangerous – it was merely a version of high spiritied Boy Scout Jamboree, with a harsher handbook. The right, of course, is hell bent on excuses to break into Iraq and shed some real blood – the little Keegan under the pants gets hard at the very thought of all that wondrous raghead blood being spilled by our F/X. Osama was always an excuse for them. As for the moderate to moderate liberal, why, conspiracy is out of the picture. No, society is one big SAT test, and though some of the players might cheat – those are the ones that have to go to jail again and again, and my, isn’t it just a coincidence that they are mostly black males, who have, by coincidence, been the subject to rancid and consistent bigotry in this country for four hundred years – the test is sound, the teacher is honest, and as for the guys who run the SAT – you couldn’t meet a sweeter bunch of guys. Honestly, listening to President Bush, a man who can really make you laugh (he owns a marvelous ranch, too, and the nicknames he thinks up! reminds me of my roommate back at UMass – some of those frat parties were really a lot of fun!) and not some broad who might be getting into a “catfight” (1) – well, you just don’t suspect people like that of letting slip the leader of the first attack on the continental U.S. since Pancho Villa took Columbus, N.M.

So it was a perfect crime. Nobody wanted to believe it was happening. And it was victimless - or the equivalent, since the victims were only the volunteers that have been sent to Iraq over the last three years, plus the Iraqis - dead that are, to be frank, culled from the Low Use population.

(1) As per the Washington Post today:

Sewickley, Pa.: Hello, and thank you for taking questions. Is it really appropriate to refer to a disagreement between two powerful women in Congress [Pelosi and Harman] as a "catfight"? I came of age in the business world during the 1970s when women were routinely told during interviews for career track jobs that "we don't hire girls for those positions" the reason being that girls are temperamentally unsuited to positions of authority. Do you see a time--perhaps in my lifetime-- when a disagreement between powerful women will be characterized as something other than a "catfight"? Welcome to The Post political chats.

Lois Romano: Thank you for writing. We were just having a little fun."

Only dour, sour feminists would consider the 'catfighting' term to be unfun. And we can't have them in the club! Only fun girls in the club. God, the peasants out there!

how I know I am a poet

Sometimes, LI is sure he is a poet.

Today, for instance. Today, we were walking down a street in downtown Austin, looking for the office of a friend. We went in and out of buildings on Brazos street, and finally found the office. Soit. So, we are walking down sixth street and we pass by two men who are talking to each other, each having the same height, each sporting a white Ho Chi Minh beard. White guys. And just ahead of us, crossing the street, is another white guy, same height, also sporting a white Ho Chi Minh beard.

Now, things like this happen a lot. We are a strange attractor, or rather, an attractor of the strange. Our predecessors in this field are Baudelaire and Rilke. In fact, if we were going to name these moments – moments of the configuration of some eerie and pointless coincidence – we’d call it the seven old men effect, from Baudelaire’s poem about seeing an bent, rather disgusting old man stumbling along like he was crunching the bones of corpses, and then seeing emerge from the fog another old man just like him, and another, until he saw seven:

A quel complot infâme étais-je donc en butte,
Ou quel méchant hasard ainsi m'humiliait ?
Car je comptai sept fois, de minute en minute,
Ce sinistre vieillard qui se multipliait !

This is plain fact for a strange attractor. I am always running into six shaven headed very fat men wearing UT t shirts, or crossing paths with a bent old black woman who wears a strange sort of old fashioned headdress, Salvation army clothes, clutches a basket to her side, and gives me the same glance I give her – you again? – while she hurries to do something every day, even though I have never seen her arrive anywhere - whose territory, on Sixth street, overlaps mine. Or the man with the nervous tick of going into coffee shops and rearranging the newspapers, left by customers and tossed into a bin, neatly back into their original form: A section, B section, C section. He has his rounds.

“Die wissen, daß ich eigentlich zu ihnen gehöre, daß ich nur ein bißchen Komödie spiele.”

Rilke, of course, was haunted by similar people. The eerie part is –who is really the poet? Me, or the woman with the headdress, or the newspaper organizer? I’m aware that I haunt them as much as they haunt me. We are supremely aware of our territory – we make it out of our routines. And that the civilians around us are not. They are just renters, here. Normals. No obsessions bind them to these paths. They could move tomorrow, and they'd forget it all the day after. Myself, I still remember San Francisco Street in Santa Fe in Spring of 1993, sitting on the passenger side, watching Dave park the van so we could make a brownie delivery, I remember Mansfield Street in New Haven on a peculiarly bruised, Seasonal Disorder Day in the winter of 1995. At the autopsy, if they extract the brain from my head, they will find inside it a ball of very fine lines all tangled up – all those streets that I’ve been on – rather like the strychnine hairs on a peyote button.

LI is either a pisspants poet or a ghost.

in other news: John Keegan goes bonkers

It isn’t just a surge – it is a lebensraum policy! John Keegan gets very excited and almost jumps out of his moustache thinking of the Einsatzgruppe, er, American military, clearing the Judische scum from Warsaw, er, I mean the Sadr militia from Baghdad, in this very very exciting version of shooting wogs in a barrel:

The object of the surge deployment should be to overwhelm the insurgents with a sudden concentration, both of numbers, armoured vehicles and firepower with the intention to inflict severe losses and heavy shock. The Mahdi Army in Sadr City should prove vulnerable to such tactics, which would of course be supported by helicopters and fixed-wing aviation.

Hitherto most military activity by coalition forces has been reactive rather than unilateral. Typically, units have become involved in fire fights while on patrol or on convoy protection duties. During the surge, the additional troops would take the fight to the enemy with the intention of doing him harm, destabilising him and his leaders and damaging or destroying the bases from which he operates.

The cost of such tactics is likely to be high but not unbearable if enough armoured vehicles are used to protect the attacking troops. The advantage of committing recently arrived troops to such operations is that they will come to operations fresh and enthusiastic. Though there is the disadvantage that they may not be familiar with local conditions or topography, this need not be a disqualification since the purpose of a surge strike would be to create a shock effect, not to alter local conditions by informal action.

After mission is accomplished, we can move white, Christian people into Baghdad, find some beautiful day for a Memorial celebration, and distribute some of the surviving Untermenschen around for work on plantations and such. It could be one of those great public-private kinds of deals. Tony Blair could dedicate the whole thing – how about calling it George Bush Freedom Now Acres.

It is liberation plus! And they say that the Right has run out of ideas in Iraq…

PS Sadly, in other news: it was reported that Keegan, overexcited from the exertion of composing his Telegraph article, donned his explorer outfit (with the jodhpurs), took up his elephant gun, and started chasing his maid around the bungalow, shouting: "General Dyer, sir! Reporting for duty, sir! I'm going to plug this cheeky monkey, sir! How dare she show disrespect to a redblooded, white skinned Englishman, damn her dusky hide!" The police were called, and restrained the well respected military historian. Doctors have prescribed a strict non-Kipling diet.

take away George Bush's joystick? Never!

By May 2006, uneasy officials at the State Department and the National Security Council argued for a review of Iraq strategy. A meeting was convened at Camp David to consider those approaches, according to participants in the session, but Mr. Bush left early for a secret visit to Baghdad, where he reviewed the war plans with General Casey and Mr. Maliki, and met with the American pilot whose plane’s missiles killed Iraq’s Al Qaeda leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He returned to Washington in a buoyant mood.

The visit meant that the reconsideration of strategy was not as thorough as some officials hoped.

“… and met with the American pilot whose plane’s missiles killed Iraq’s Al Qaeda leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.” By this point, our cup overflows with the evidence that President Bush is an incurable juvenile, a composite portrait of the video war game generation, a man who has mistaken the joy stick for his dick, and his dick for the golden key to “victory”. John Burns story in the NYT is, obviously, a special plea for the surge strategy – Burns being an incurable hawk. It builds the case for the increase in troops by using that odd Bush era strategy of referring to the gross and criminal mistakes of the krewe running the country to justify … a new twist in the way the krewe wants to run the country. Thus, the article, obviously written with info channeled from a lot of White House insiders, concedes that frankly, 2006 was a bad year. We all fucked up. Rumsfeld was a fuckup. General Casey was a fuckup. Nobody actually understood Iraq. And… so, let’s increase our commitment to the place!

Apparently, the Rebel in Chief is concerned not that American soldiers are dying needlessly, nor that the ungrateful Iraqis are dying by the tens of thousands, but that General Casey didn’t use the word “victory” enough when explaining what he was doing. We gotta get us some of that “victory”:

“Mr. Bush came to worry that it was not just his critics and Democrats in Congress who were looking for what he dismissed last month as a strategy of “graceful exit.” Visiting the Pentagon a few weeks ago for a classified briefing on Iraq with his generals, Mr. Bush made it clear that he was not interested in any ideas that would simply allow American forces to stabilize the violence. Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine commandant, later told marines about the president’s message.
“What I want to hear from you is how we’re going to win,” he quoted the president as warning his commanders, “not how we’re going to leave.””

And:

“Mr. Bush still insists on talking about victory, even if his own advisers differ about how to define it. “It’s a word the American people understand,” he told members of the Iraq Study Group who came to see him at the White House in November, according to two commission members who attended. “And if I start to change it, it will look like I’m beginning to change my policy.””

To which, let me add LI’s own outraged voice. My fucking God! We don’t want it to look like he’s beginning to change his policy! Why, he racked up a score of 700 and got a win sign just the other day on his favorite machine! They want to take away his joystick, his specially ordered “I am the champ” “George Bush” “President” nameplate, and his Decider stationary. Has this great nation ever been so threatened? No wonder so many of our best minds have already concluded that, from the perspective of the long long long long war, the Islamofascists are much more dangerous than the communists ever were.

I am tempted to make this into some trendy feature article. I need some hook to make some desperately needed bread lately. Something along the lines of The Culture of Shallow: How Shallow became Hip! Just right for Slate - pure pablum and babyshit, allowing for some pic of a cleavage happy blonde, one of the indistinguishable many that slide across the glossy covers, with just that right touch of ... snark and contrarianism ... to float the thing. Oh, I can see it now, a completely useless braindrain - just what the editor ordered.

demo letdown

Oh, bitterness. I get to the bridge where the demonstration is scheduled at around 6. It is a relatively frosty evening for Austin. I’d supplied myself with two candles and a box of matches. Somehow, I had the delusion that – though it was a day off – though the evening was nippy – though the demonstration itself was the result of a floating announcement – that somehow others would be as shocked by the symbolism of three thousand soldiers dead as I was. As spurred on. Of course, nothing of the sort happened. Rather, crammed up on the ramp leading to the pedestrian bridge over lake Austin was a handful of people – at most, 150. And coming up to them, I received, once again, that familiar progressive demonstration feeling. Small demonstrations for good causes generate an air much like an after church service get together. Except not after, say, a Southern Baptist Church service. Baptist get togethers are full of meaty, red faced men in florescent blue suits bouncing around with the juice of life and the holy ghost running in their veins, and their wives, all sweetness and life and chuckles and the flesh around the chin catching the kids and absentmindedly stroking their hair, and the sons with the high school football player shoulders, and holy connecting, business connecting, sexual connecting being all wound up with each other in the great suburban ball of yarn. Demonstrations, on the other hand, resemble the get together after a Quaker service. Nobody is meaty, the goodness of life is a set of good causes, and nobody wears a florescent blue suit. Let’s put it this way: if the call had gone out in Austin, Texas, for everyone who despises barbecue to meet on a cold bridge in January, much the same group would have assembled. Good people all, God bless them. But not the army to stop the war.

Oh well. The news people interviewed a few people. I hoped the cameras didn’t take any long shots – the contrast between the claim, made by all the interviewees, that the people are rising up against this war and the paucity of people gathered to rise up against the war would be too killing. There were crosses to hold, and it turned out I didn’t need my own candle, and eventually the crowd gathered around a guitar player and sang this little light of mine and This land is your land – believe me, this was an after services get together. We were all pretty old, and lovely as it is that the guitarist was there – and he is always there, he always puts in his time – I felt that the sing along format jarred with the occasion. If he had sung, say, I want to fuck you like an animal, no doubt this would have disturbed the semi-sanctuary air of the demo, but it would have been more about what this war is all about.

This little light of mine seemed singularly inappropriate.

The demo spoke of political paralysis. It foretold another 3,000 dead. And no doubt there will be – 3,000 more, that is, in American uniforms. I held a candle, said this land was made for you and me, thought like hell, blew it out and walked back down to the path around the lake and looked back. You couldn’t really see candlelight up there on the bridge.

I know these people are the core. They are my side. But I wish we could get us some fucking Baptists.

While Chalabi lounges in London, the 3,000th American soldier is killed

First things first: to find the location of a vigil near you for the 3000th American soldier killed in Iraq, go to the American Friends site.

Now, to get out the knives.

Anne Applebaum’s typically braindead obit for Hussein – a little like Hitler, a little like Stalin, throw on olive oil and bake in the pundit oven for three minutes, blah blah blah – was enlivened by the inevitable nod to Kanan Makiya, Republic of Fear. The mention of Makiya started another train of thought, however, in LI’s mind. While Hussein was the bloody dictator Applebaum describes, one thing he didn’t do – he didn’t flee Iraq. He had the means to. He could have surely gone, as his family did, to Jordan. He could have found a way to get to Libya. But he stayed in Iraq, and was captured, and was hung.

Kanan Makiya, on the other hand, helped to generate the American invasion. He was one of those who suggested the disastrous extreme de-Baathification program, the dissolution of the army, etc. He was at all the conferences. He was a regular hero of moral integrity for the neo-cons. But, inexplicably, after helping liberate Iraq, he didn’t move there. In fact, apparently he lives in the States, and he pulls down lucrative fees from his association with Benador Associates, a whack job agency dedicated to promoting blood in their mouths Middle East hawks – need someone to recommend bombing Iran for your next chamber of commerce meeting? Call Benador.

Similarly, Ahmed Chalabi is now residing in London.

And, of course, we recently witnessed the escape from prison of an Iraqi official charged with peculation, who simply used mercenaries to break him out of the Green Zone. He will no doubt be flying back to Chicago.

Now, LI has just the tiniest peckerwood rage that the devisors of a war in which 3,000 American soldiers have been killed so far – this hardy band of Iraqi patriots – aren’t patriotic to go back to Iraq. So here’s a proposal: why not prod this band back to the country they so love and cherish? If Iraqis in the U.S. could vote in the last Iraqi election, surely they can be punished under the system of Iraqi law. If the Iraqi exiles that allied with the scummiest members of the permanent War Party in D.C. can play a role in sending kids from Nebraska to Iraq to operate as decoys in Anbar province, perhaps those same Iraqi exiles could test the waters in the new, ultra-liberated Baghdad?

Iraq – if Saddam Hussein could stay there after the fall of Baghdad, perhaps Kanan Makiya should try it. Or shut the fuck up.

PS – while it is simply cruel and unusual punishment to inflict comments about Christopher Hitchens on my poor readers, I had to smile about his latest war tourist piece in Slate:

“I flew to Baghdad from the northern city of Erbil, by the ordinary means of buying a local Iraqi Airlines ticket, boarding a plane that made a stop in Sulaymaniyah, and landing at the former Saddam Hussein International Airport. The whole exercise was almost weirdly normal. The plane was full of ordinary citizens carrying plastic hold-alls, with cheerful, unveiled hostesses handing out snacks and drinks. The terminal was quiet, and the airport road (which used to be known as "Route Irish" and was the scene of incessant mayhem) is these days considered fairly safe and has been stabilized by the Iraqi army. I stopped to be photographed with a unit of this force, a group of cheerful and professional young men.”

The photo op at the end of this Scoop-like passage is the gorgeous bit that just topples the creaky bogus tone into that something extra - it is that sweet moment of ridiculousness that transcends the mere booming egotism of the Hitchens persona, and becomes true self-parody. Isn’t this just like Bertie Wooster after the testosterone patch? Hitchens punishment for having taken on the role of a warmongering zombie is that he now writes like one, 24/7. The punishment fits the crime.