I have a problem with my reblogging comment tool - it doesn't work. I have received some comments, though, so I thought it wouldn't be indiscrete to put these up.
Comments
From my friend Bernat in Barcelona, I received this:
I have been checking your website everyday and I have
found it illuminating (except the first day, when you
were probably still not believing what had happened!).
Bush is reaping the fruits his father sowed in the Middle East.
Every one here is shocked and horrified, pundits talk about the beginning of the XXI century and the new paradigm, bla, bla, bla. It is true that a
lot of things might change, but how is another
question. After the fall of the Berlin wall, everyone
thought we were beyond history, in this new liberal
society... Now even those Europeans who might have
been antiamerican and against USA foreign policy are
shocked because their frame of reference has been
shaken.I imagine the new scenario will be determined
by whether Bush decides to act unilaterally or with
the UE or even with Russia and China.
From Allen, I recieved this:
If Senem thinks you're unAmerican, what would she say about the author of this piece? (Although actually I don't know her nationality). The site this comes from, Common Dreams, is a good source of "lefty" commentary & analysis, most of it far more perceptive than this little exercise in the jerking of the knee. See ya.
Wednesday, September 19, 2001
Tuesday, September 18, 2001
Dope
I was thinking of writing about gout today... because I have surely written enough about the bombing. I was talking with some friends a couple of days ago about gout, and one of them said, well, what is gout? And I thought, what a perfect topic...
Well, who am I fooling? We live in a time when the margins will not hold, and are drawn magnetically to the center, to the images, topics, imbecilities, commonplaces, pans, and cant of the Network news.
So okay. Last week, when the WTC slaughter was 8 hours old, I was watching the shot of the towers fall, in rotation, on the tv, over at Don and Senem's house. Senem is from Istanbul, and she said something I thought perspicacious - she said, the Turk in me says, blood for blood. The Turk in me utters the same cry. But certainly that shouldn't be the last word on the subject. Since last Tuesday, I've seen Senem a few times, and each time, after I've said various things that aren't in the American pep rally spirit, she has implied that I am an anti-American snot, at least compared with the people she works with, who are practically coming out rashes of Stars and Bars, I mean it is almost medical. It is certainly pathological.
I've tried to explain that, far from being anti-American, I'm very consciously in the American tradition of bitching, cussedness, black humor, anti-establishmentarianism, and pissing on public monuments -- all marks of our great inebriated whoremongering pioneer ancestors as they settled ever westward, and gave up the expensive and useless pretences of the Old World for rustling, drinking, and saying "like" in, like, every context.
Well, this is one of those periods when we have to cherish the ragged 10 percent -- the ones who don't give high marks to the Prez in the polls, the ones who ask, plaintively why do they hate us (yes, that's a little irritating -- I'm going to do a post on that inanity) instead of why can't we kill em all now and let God sort em out afterwards; the ones who gather, in small groups, before state capitals and in parks to sing John Lennon songs of peace and chant the people//united//will never be defeated -- or whatever. This is our inner brake, our fabled, fabulous diversity in action, and tough titty if you think these are anti-Americans -- they have a hot cousinship to your blood and bearings, mon frere, so quit with the McCarthyite blather.
At times like this, the liberal thing to do is to go popular front, and talk about how us embattled lefties are part of a grand tradition stretching back to Tom Paine. That's true. But, like Tom Paine, I see no need for that, uh, defensiveness. We have an intellectual model in Randolph Bourne, the little crooked pamphleteer who wrote against the American entry into World War I. His The War and the Intellectuals is a classic statement of dissent and a public pissing on public monuments with style and joie de vivre. Here's a link to that essay. And here's a random, beautiful passage from it:
"The American intellectual, therefore has been rational neither in his hindsight, nor his foresight. To explain him we must look beneath the intellectual reasons to the emotional disposition. It is not so much what they thought as how they felt that explains our intellectual class. Allowing for colonial sympathy, there was still the personal shock in a world-war which outraged all our preconceived notions of the way the world was tending. It reduced to rubbish most of the humanitarian internationalism and democratic nationalism which had been the emotional thread of our intellectuals' life. We had suddenly to make a new orientation. There were mental conflicts. Our latent colonialism strove with our longing for American unity. Our desire for peace strove with our desire for national responsibility in the world. That first lofty and remote and not altogether unsound feeling of our spiritual isolation from the conflict could not last. There was the itch to be in the great experience which the rest of the world was having. Numbers of intelligent people who had never been stirred by the horrors of capitalistic peace at home were shaken out of their slumber by the horrors of war in Belgium. Never having felt responsibility for labor wars and oppressed masses and excluded races at home, they had a large fund of idle emotional capital to invest in the oppressed nationalities and ravaged villages of Europe. Hearts that had felt only the ugly contempt for democratic strivings at home beat in tune with the struggle for freedom abroad. "
I was thinking of writing about gout today... because I have surely written enough about the bombing. I was talking with some friends a couple of days ago about gout, and one of them said, well, what is gout? And I thought, what a perfect topic...
Well, who am I fooling? We live in a time when the margins will not hold, and are drawn magnetically to the center, to the images, topics, imbecilities, commonplaces, pans, and cant of the Network news.
So okay. Last week, when the WTC slaughter was 8 hours old, I was watching the shot of the towers fall, in rotation, on the tv, over at Don and Senem's house. Senem is from Istanbul, and she said something I thought perspicacious - she said, the Turk in me says, blood for blood. The Turk in me utters the same cry. But certainly that shouldn't be the last word on the subject. Since last Tuesday, I've seen Senem a few times, and each time, after I've said various things that aren't in the American pep rally spirit, she has implied that I am an anti-American snot, at least compared with the people she works with, who are practically coming out rashes of Stars and Bars, I mean it is almost medical. It is certainly pathological.
I've tried to explain that, far from being anti-American, I'm very consciously in the American tradition of bitching, cussedness, black humor, anti-establishmentarianism, and pissing on public monuments -- all marks of our great inebriated whoremongering pioneer ancestors as they settled ever westward, and gave up the expensive and useless pretences of the Old World for rustling, drinking, and saying "like" in, like, every context.
Well, this is one of those periods when we have to cherish the ragged 10 percent -- the ones who don't give high marks to the Prez in the polls, the ones who ask, plaintively why do they hate us (yes, that's a little irritating -- I'm going to do a post on that inanity) instead of why can't we kill em all now and let God sort em out afterwards; the ones who gather, in small groups, before state capitals and in parks to sing John Lennon songs of peace and chant the people//united//will never be defeated -- or whatever. This is our inner brake, our fabled, fabulous diversity in action, and tough titty if you think these are anti-Americans -- they have a hot cousinship to your blood and bearings, mon frere, so quit with the McCarthyite blather.
At times like this, the liberal thing to do is to go popular front, and talk about how us embattled lefties are part of a grand tradition stretching back to Tom Paine. That's true. But, like Tom Paine, I see no need for that, uh, defensiveness. We have an intellectual model in Randolph Bourne, the little crooked pamphleteer who wrote against the American entry into World War I. His The War and the Intellectuals is a classic statement of dissent and a public pissing on public monuments with style and joie de vivre. Here's a link to that essay. And here's a random, beautiful passage from it:
"The American intellectual, therefore has been rational neither in his hindsight, nor his foresight. To explain him we must look beneath the intellectual reasons to the emotional disposition. It is not so much what they thought as how they felt that explains our intellectual class. Allowing for colonial sympathy, there was still the personal shock in a world-war which outraged all our preconceived notions of the way the world was tending. It reduced to rubbish most of the humanitarian internationalism and democratic nationalism which had been the emotional thread of our intellectuals' life. We had suddenly to make a new orientation. There were mental conflicts. Our latent colonialism strove with our longing for American unity. Our desire for peace strove with our desire for national responsibility in the world. That first lofty and remote and not altogether unsound feeling of our spiritual isolation from the conflict could not last. There was the itch to be in the great experience which the rest of the world was having. Numbers of intelligent people who had never been stirred by the horrors of capitalistic peace at home were shaken out of their slumber by the horrors of war in Belgium. Never having felt responsibility for labor wars and oppressed masses and excluded races at home, they had a large fund of idle emotional capital to invest in the oppressed nationalities and ravaged villages of Europe. Hearts that had felt only the ugly contempt for democratic strivings at home beat in tune with the struggle for freedom abroad. "
Monday, September 17, 2001
Remora
Pogram watch. In Dallas, someone has already tried to torch a mosque. And in today's paper there are stories of three killings, one of which is certainly because the victim was a Sikh - which shows that pograms in America are conducted with maximum stupidity as well as hate, since Sikh's are not, you know, Moslems.
Sikh Owner of Gas Station Is Fatally Shot in Rampage
Important graf:
"The police in Mesa, Ariz., arrested Frank Roque, 42, on two counts of attempted murder, in the shootings. The killing of the gas station owner, Balbir Singh Sodhi, was under investigation.
The East Valley Tribune reported that Mr. Roque shouted, "I stand for America all the way," as he was handcuffed. And while the police have not declared that the shootings were motivated by the victims' ethnicity, they have notified Federal Bureau of Investigation officials who investigate hate crimes."
So, Mr. Roque stands for America all the way -- God help us all.
Pogram watch. In Dallas, someone has already tried to torch a mosque. And in today's paper there are stories of three killings, one of which is certainly because the victim was a Sikh - which shows that pograms in America are conducted with maximum stupidity as well as hate, since Sikh's are not, you know, Moslems.
Sikh Owner of Gas Station Is Fatally Shot in Rampage
Important graf:
"The police in Mesa, Ariz., arrested Frank Roque, 42, on two counts of attempted murder, in the shootings. The killing of the gas station owner, Balbir Singh Sodhi, was under investigation.
The East Valley Tribune reported that Mr. Roque shouted, "I stand for America all the way," as he was handcuffed. And while the police have not declared that the shootings were motivated by the victims' ethnicity, they have notified Federal Bureau of Investigation officials who investigate hate crimes."
So, Mr. Roque stands for America all the way -- God help us all.
Sunday, September 16, 2001
Remora
It is always a pleasure to find one's views shared by some more expert person. This is particularly true with my views, which sometimes feel, even to me, so eccentric as to be irrelevant. I'm a raver.
In any case, for those looking for some clues to the Taliban's history, check out this interview with a Pakistani journalist:
Interview - 2000.08.10
key graf (especially given what I have written in earlier posts):
"I think the U.S. and Iran have a lot of common ground on Afghanistan, and this issue could prove a catalyst to improve their relations. They are both threatened by the Taliban and want to see peace in the country and a diminishing of the Taliban's power. Officials from both countries have told me they are working together quietly on Afghanistan at such forums as the U.N. in New York and in neutral capitals such as Ashkhabad in Turkmenistan."
It is always a pleasure to find one's views shared by some more expert person. This is particularly true with my views, which sometimes feel, even to me, so eccentric as to be irrelevant. I'm a raver.
In any case, for those looking for some clues to the Taliban's history, check out this interview with a Pakistani journalist:
Interview - 2000.08.10
key graf (especially given what I have written in earlier posts):
"I think the U.S. and Iran have a lot of common ground on Afghanistan, and this issue could prove a catalyst to improve their relations. They are both threatened by the Taliban and want to see peace in the country and a diminishing of the Taliban's power. Officials from both countries have told me they are working together quietly on Afghanistan at such forums as the U.N. in New York and in neutral capitals such as Ashkhabad in Turkmenistan."
Remora
Has the New York Times ever been this bad before?
I usually read the Times first. I depend on it, in spite of its weakness for simpleminded neo-liberal mantras, its lack of interest in the juicier stories in the city it is based in, and its arrogance. It is the best paper in America.
But this week, my faith in that last claim has been shaken.
Example:
For the last eight months, the NYT has published some rather snipey articles about Bush. This week, as if in repentence, they have taken to publishing toadying article about our child Commander in Chief. Topping them all is R.W. Apple's analysis of Bushiepoo today, which (under a snippy title - Bush Presidency Seems to Gain Legitimacy) discerns, in the zigzags and radically distributed power of the current regime (the first presidency, in my lifetime, in which the vice president's words are routinely given more consideration than the president's), growth. Of course! -- That magic American quality, which takes a temporary biological characteristic located in our hormones and makes of it a virtue of character.
Well, it is hard to find the most ridiculous paragraph in Apple's piece -- every graf sparkles with its own special bad faith. But here's my fave passage:
"At Camp David this morning, the president reached for a down-home metaphor reminiscent of Lyndon B. Johnson's promise of "coonskins on the wall" during the Vietnam war. Declaring bluntly that "we're at war, there's been a war declared," he added, "We will find those who did it. We'll smoke them out of their holes, we'll get them running and we'll bring them to justice."
Perhaps most important, he was visible: in a Washington hospital ward, in a couple of brief exchanges with reporters, amid the awful devastation in New York's financial district, clad in a beige windbreaker, with his arm draped around a retired firefighter. Shyer than most politicians, he sometimes seems to shun the limelight. This weekend, he stepped smartly into it."
Invoking the wildly successful rhetoric of LBJ to move us into war might not be, well, tactful. Didn't we, uh, lose that one? And the photo op catch-up game hasn't, I think, erased the original bad impression of a prez who let his secret servicemen and vice president determine his first responses to a national crisis. Bad news for the rest of us, no matter that polls show people giving Bush their approval. At the moment, you would expect such an outpouring of support for anything that smells remotely American. Hell, right now, my fave song is This Land is Your Land (God Bless America just doesn't have the poetry). It will, no doubt, fade from my top ten list in the next couple months, and Lithium will re-assume its rightful place in my affections.
But the NYT hasn't just been ideologically weak kneed - as a newsgathering organization, they've been behind the curve. The Post has been much quicker in getting pieces of this story and putting them together. The human details of the attack have been gathered everywhere - I have a piece about that in the Austin Statesman, today - but the larger details have been amazingly neglected. For instance, I haven't seen a major piece yet that concentrates not on the terrorists ethnicity, but on their nationalities. Why Lebanese, Saudis and Egyptians? Since we are getting reports that mysteriously speak of a long war - on whom? -- one would think that the subgroups which exist in these places would call for some focus, and especially focus on what it means, if anything, that we are going to war with bits and pieces of populations with whose governments we aren't going to war. This sounds sickeningly like the war on drugs - not a good precedent, campers. So lets have some news stories about what has been happening in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, our allies. And a big lacuna out there is why the US allowed the Cole investigation to be, basically, rolled up by the Saudis without protest, which is a key incident, in the series of events that led up to the wtc mass murder. But try arousing the torpid interest of the major newsgathering organizations in a question which lies at the heart of the entangled interests of the US and the Saudis: namely, how the American interest came to be so incorporated into maintaining a highly volatile and corrupt regime in the Arabian peninsula. Don't look for this story any time soon, since the big news organizations mainly (mis) represent the Mideast as a stomping ground for Israelis and Palestinians.
Has the New York Times ever been this bad before?
I usually read the Times first. I depend on it, in spite of its weakness for simpleminded neo-liberal mantras, its lack of interest in the juicier stories in the city it is based in, and its arrogance. It is the best paper in America.
But this week, my faith in that last claim has been shaken.
Example:
For the last eight months, the NYT has published some rather snipey articles about Bush. This week, as if in repentence, they have taken to publishing toadying article about our child Commander in Chief. Topping them all is R.W. Apple's analysis of Bushiepoo today, which (under a snippy title - Bush Presidency Seems to Gain Legitimacy) discerns, in the zigzags and radically distributed power of the current regime (the first presidency, in my lifetime, in which the vice president's words are routinely given more consideration than the president's), growth. Of course! -- That magic American quality, which takes a temporary biological characteristic located in our hormones and makes of it a virtue of character.
Well, it is hard to find the most ridiculous paragraph in Apple's piece -- every graf sparkles with its own special bad faith. But here's my fave passage:
"At Camp David this morning, the president reached for a down-home metaphor reminiscent of Lyndon B. Johnson's promise of "coonskins on the wall" during the Vietnam war. Declaring bluntly that "we're at war, there's been a war declared," he added, "We will find those who did it. We'll smoke them out of their holes, we'll get them running and we'll bring them to justice."
Perhaps most important, he was visible: in a Washington hospital ward, in a couple of brief exchanges with reporters, amid the awful devastation in New York's financial district, clad in a beige windbreaker, with his arm draped around a retired firefighter. Shyer than most politicians, he sometimes seems to shun the limelight. This weekend, he stepped smartly into it."
Invoking the wildly successful rhetoric of LBJ to move us into war might not be, well, tactful. Didn't we, uh, lose that one? And the photo op catch-up game hasn't, I think, erased the original bad impression of a prez who let his secret servicemen and vice president determine his first responses to a national crisis. Bad news for the rest of us, no matter that polls show people giving Bush their approval. At the moment, you would expect such an outpouring of support for anything that smells remotely American. Hell, right now, my fave song is This Land is Your Land (God Bless America just doesn't have the poetry). It will, no doubt, fade from my top ten list in the next couple months, and Lithium will re-assume its rightful place in my affections.
But the NYT hasn't just been ideologically weak kneed - as a newsgathering organization, they've been behind the curve. The Post has been much quicker in getting pieces of this story and putting them together. The human details of the attack have been gathered everywhere - I have a piece about that in the Austin Statesman, today - but the larger details have been amazingly neglected. For instance, I haven't seen a major piece yet that concentrates not on the terrorists ethnicity, but on their nationalities. Why Lebanese, Saudis and Egyptians? Since we are getting reports that mysteriously speak of a long war - on whom? -- one would think that the subgroups which exist in these places would call for some focus, and especially focus on what it means, if anything, that we are going to war with bits and pieces of populations with whose governments we aren't going to war. This sounds sickeningly like the war on drugs - not a good precedent, campers. So lets have some news stories about what has been happening in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, our allies. And a big lacuna out there is why the US allowed the Cole investigation to be, basically, rolled up by the Saudis without protest, which is a key incident, in the series of events that led up to the wtc mass murder. But try arousing the torpid interest of the major newsgathering organizations in a question which lies at the heart of the entangled interests of the US and the Saudis: namely, how the American interest came to be so incorporated into maintaining a highly volatile and corrupt regime in the Arabian peninsula. Don't look for this story any time soon, since the big news organizations mainly (mis) represent the Mideast as a stomping ground for Israelis and Palestinians.
Saturday, September 15, 2001
Remora
When I first started logging, I made a private resolution to try to do something every day.
What I would like to do, today, is write a long commentary on Voltaire's response to the Lisbon Earthquake, with invidious references to yesterday's day of prayer.
But I have to work my ass off this weekend, in order to catch up with my committments: three reviews, and then a piece I am supposedly doing, due wednesday, on terrorism.
So I am going to have to suspend the Voltaire thing.
Also, I have received a few comments on my posts about the WTC bombing (or holocaust, or mass murder - one thing it wasn't was a tragedy. Unless building a skyscraper is considered an act of hubris. But even then, the hijacking and jet fuel explosion doesn't compute as a tragedy. Sorry.). The comments surprised me - my friend David said that my posts were cold. He said he didn't mean this as an insult, just that is what they were.
I guess I have responded, so far, in these posts, on a highly intellectual plane. The reason is, my emotional response, my grief, my obsessive replaying of the planes hitting the towers within my mind - all of these things aren't, yet, things I can write about in a direct way. Maybe I won't ever be able to do that. I wasn't there - my experience is of being by, being a bystander. Karl Kraus once remarked that the ontological effect of newspapers was to shift our Dasein into Dabeisein - a sort of untranslateable German pun, but you get my point. Or do you? Lately I wonder if my points are similar to private jokes, which I think are funny and everybody else thinks are incomprehensible. Spelling it out - the movement from being there to being by there is the dialectical moment of inauthenticity, its historically specific structure.
But don't get me started, me with my big Heideggerian mouth!
In any case - I am not at all cold about this thing. I am frozen, I am at dead zero, I am an emotional evacuee. That's what I am.
As for todays link - this is the best I could do. I'm not, repeat, not trying to be cold, but we need information about what is going on, and what the puzzle American forces, apparently, are going to enter is all about.
When I first started logging, I made a private resolution to try to do something every day.
What I would like to do, today, is write a long commentary on Voltaire's response to the Lisbon Earthquake, with invidious references to yesterday's day of prayer.
But I have to work my ass off this weekend, in order to catch up with my committments: three reviews, and then a piece I am supposedly doing, due wednesday, on terrorism.
So I am going to have to suspend the Voltaire thing.
Also, I have received a few comments on my posts about the WTC bombing (or holocaust, or mass murder - one thing it wasn't was a tragedy. Unless building a skyscraper is considered an act of hubris. But even then, the hijacking and jet fuel explosion doesn't compute as a tragedy. Sorry.). The comments surprised me - my friend David said that my posts were cold. He said he didn't mean this as an insult, just that is what they were.
I guess I have responded, so far, in these posts, on a highly intellectual plane. The reason is, my emotional response, my grief, my obsessive replaying of the planes hitting the towers within my mind - all of these things aren't, yet, things I can write about in a direct way. Maybe I won't ever be able to do that. I wasn't there - my experience is of being by, being a bystander. Karl Kraus once remarked that the ontological effect of newspapers was to shift our Dasein into Dabeisein - a sort of untranslateable German pun, but you get my point. Or do you? Lately I wonder if my points are similar to private jokes, which I think are funny and everybody else thinks are incomprehensible. Spelling it out - the movement from being there to being by there is the dialectical moment of inauthenticity, its historically specific structure.
But don't get me started, me with my big Heideggerian mouth!
In any case - I am not at all cold about this thing. I am frozen, I am at dead zero, I am an emotional evacuee. That's what I am.
As for todays link - this is the best I could do. I'm not, repeat, not trying to be cold, but we need information about what is going on, and what the puzzle American forces, apparently, are going to enter is all about.
Friday, September 14, 2001
Remora
Invading Afghanistan. I talked to my brother a couple of days ago, and he told me he thought we should try to invade and hold Afghanistan, like we did Germany in 1945.
I think that is a crazy idea, although it seems to be floating around in the American psyche right now. There's a nice site on the Soviet Afghanistan war as a possible "harbinger of future war."by a General Mohammed Nawroz. Facts to know and tell:
a. "Yet, their [the Soviet] force commitment, initially assessed as requiring several months, lasted ten years and required increasing numbers of Soviet forces. It proved a bloody experience in which the Soviet Union reportedly killed 1.3 million people and forced five and a half million Afghans (a third of the prewar population) to leave the country as refugees. Another two million Afghans were forced to migrate within the country. Today, the countryside is ravaged and littered with mines. On a percentage basis, the Soviet Union inflicted more suffering on Afghanistan than Germany inflicted on the Soviet Union during World War.
b. "One needs only review the recently released casualty figures to underscore the pervasiveness of the problem [of the military situation in Afghanistan]. Soviet dead and missing in Afghanistan amounted to almost 15,000 troops, a modest percent of the 642,000 Soviets who served during the ten-year war. Far more telling were the 469,685 other casualties, fully 73 percent of the overall force, who were wounded or incapacitated by serious illness. Some 415,932 troops fell victim to disease, of which 115,308 suffered from infectious hepatitis and 31,080 from typhoid fever. Beyond the sheer magnitude of these numbers is what these figures say about Soviet military hygiene and the conditions surrounding troop life. These numbers are unheard of in modern armies and modern medicine and their social impact among the returnees and the Soviet population was staggering. The Armed Forces of the Soviet Union were structured, equipped and trained for nuclear and high-intensity war on the great northern European plain. However, their political leadership thrust them into the middle of the Afghanistan civil war to reconstitute and to support a nominally Marxist-Leninist government. The terrain, the climate and the enemy were entirely different from what they had prepared for." Of course, it wouldn't be a Marxist-Leninist government that the US would try, hypothetically, to install. What type, then? Big problem is that the governments before the Taliban fell apart, as warlords ruled over various areas, with very very unappetizing results for the people. We begin, then, with a situation politically similar to South Vietnam's.
c. "General Nawroz once watched the return of a Soviet motorized column from a day's combat. It's mission was to open a highway for traffic and destroy the enemy blocking it. The Soviets acted like conquerors as they passed by General Nawroz's hiding place. Officers stood inside the turrets of the tanks, firing machineguns in the air and to the sides. One would have thought they had vanquished their enemies for ever. Disabled tanks and trucks were towed, carefully camouflaged, inside the column. When General Nawroz reached the site of the highway battle, he saw swarms of very young, cheerful freedom fighters running to the highway from all directions, armed only with rifles, a few AK47s and a couple of rocket launchers. They were collecting the meager spoils of the combat that had just taken place. The vain-glorious return of the Soviet column was in fact a rout."
This could easily happen again. If the US is smart, it won't - it will limit its operation, it will ally with those resistance forces on the ground and (unlike during the Gulf war) not betray them, and it will not attempt to impose its own political solution on this country.
Invading Afghanistan. I talked to my brother a couple of days ago, and he told me he thought we should try to invade and hold Afghanistan, like we did Germany in 1945.
I think that is a crazy idea, although it seems to be floating around in the American psyche right now. There's a nice site on the Soviet Afghanistan war as a possible "harbinger of future war."by a General Mohammed Nawroz. Facts to know and tell:
a. "Yet, their [the Soviet] force commitment, initially assessed as requiring several months, lasted ten years and required increasing numbers of Soviet forces. It proved a bloody experience in which the Soviet Union reportedly killed 1.3 million people and forced five and a half million Afghans (a third of the prewar population) to leave the country as refugees. Another two million Afghans were forced to migrate within the country. Today, the countryside is ravaged and littered with mines. On a percentage basis, the Soviet Union inflicted more suffering on Afghanistan than Germany inflicted on the Soviet Union during World War.
b. "One needs only review the recently released casualty figures to underscore the pervasiveness of the problem [of the military situation in Afghanistan]. Soviet dead and missing in Afghanistan amounted to almost 15,000 troops, a modest percent of the 642,000 Soviets who served during the ten-year war. Far more telling were the 469,685 other casualties, fully 73 percent of the overall force, who were wounded or incapacitated by serious illness. Some 415,932 troops fell victim to disease, of which 115,308 suffered from infectious hepatitis and 31,080 from typhoid fever. Beyond the sheer magnitude of these numbers is what these figures say about Soviet military hygiene and the conditions surrounding troop life. These numbers are unheard of in modern armies and modern medicine and their social impact among the returnees and the Soviet population was staggering. The Armed Forces of the Soviet Union were structured, equipped and trained for nuclear and high-intensity war on the great northern European plain. However, their political leadership thrust them into the middle of the Afghanistan civil war to reconstitute and to support a nominally Marxist-Leninist government. The terrain, the climate and the enemy were entirely different from what they had prepared for." Of course, it wouldn't be a Marxist-Leninist government that the US would try, hypothetically, to install. What type, then? Big problem is that the governments before the Taliban fell apart, as warlords ruled over various areas, with very very unappetizing results for the people. We begin, then, with a situation politically similar to South Vietnam's.
c. "General Nawroz once watched the return of a Soviet motorized column from a day's combat. It's mission was to open a highway for traffic and destroy the enemy blocking it. The Soviets acted like conquerors as they passed by General Nawroz's hiding place. Officers stood inside the turrets of the tanks, firing machineguns in the air and to the sides. One would have thought they had vanquished their enemies for ever. Disabled tanks and trucks were towed, carefully camouflaged, inside the column. When General Nawroz reached the site of the highway battle, he saw swarms of very young, cheerful freedom fighters running to the highway from all directions, armed only with rifles, a few AK47s and a couple of rocket launchers. They were collecting the meager spoils of the combat that had just taken place. The vain-glorious return of the Soviet column was in fact a rout."
This could easily happen again. If the US is smart, it won't - it will limit its operation, it will ally with those resistance forces on the ground and (unlike during the Gulf war) not betray them, and it will not attempt to impose its own political solution on this country.
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You can skip this boring part ... LI has not been able to keep up with Chabert in her multi-entry assault on Derrida. As in a proper duel, t... -
Ladies and Gentlemen... the moment you have all been waiting for! An adventure beyond your wildest dreams! An adrenaline rush from start to... -
LI feels like a little note on politics is called for. The comments thread following the dialectics of diddling post made me realize that, ...