Dope.

One result of the present Crisis is that I've had to read books I never wanted to read. Just thinking about the Middle East gets me depressed. But manfully I assumed the weblogger's burden, and last night read John Cooley's book, Payback, about the US vs Iran vs Israel vs Syria conflicts of the 80s. Today I've been reading Out of the Ashes, Patrick and Andrew Cockburn's book about the ressurection of Saddam Hussein in the aftermath of the Gulf War.

Let's talk about the Cockburn book a bit, since Cooley's book, although a swift bit of reporting, is really history.

The American view of the endurance of Saddam Hussein is a curious case of the public swallowing anything in order to preserve its inertia. The story is, the Gulf war was stopped because of the immemorial respect that the US bears for UN resolutions -- and since the UN resolution said that we were intent on freeing Kuwait, we simply freed Kuwait. If the Republican guard, Hussein's finest troops, escaped, and during the weeks in which our troops were on the ground literally cut the rebellion against Hussein into bloody bits, well, mark it down to America's respect for the law.

Since, however, America was, at the same time, making up the rules as it went along regarding economic sanctions, and since the fine hand of American power has never been noticeably stayed by the palsied body of UN resolutions before, even American apologists shove the law abiding excuse aside after a sheepish wink, and readily come up with the real excuse: that we have to consider the feelings of our allies.

For a condensed, classic version of this theme, see this article by Wallace Thies from three years ago - in the midst of Clinton's sudden attention to S. Hussein' s weapons of mass destruction (attention that curiously coincided with the deliberations of the House on the question of impeaching him). There are two grafs that I spied with my little eye. Let's bore in upon them:


"... the United States labors under two constraints that limit the steps that it can take against Iraq. On one hand, if Saddam is ousted and/or killed, how well would Iraq hold together in the aftermath? The United States' goal is to oust Saddam, but not to cause Iraq to break up. The latter could trigger a new round of warfare as Iraq's neighbors fought over the pieces.

"On the other hand, even if the U.S. intelligence community knew precisely the location of Iraq's weapons stockpile, would it be prudent to target the weapons themselves, at the risk of releasing their contents into the atmosphere? Saddam Hussein may not care much about the lives of his fellow Iraqis, but democracies must adhere to a higher standard. "

Anybody who reads Cockburn's book will discern a high degree of hilarity in the last paragraph. From the poison gas used indiscriminately by Hussein against Kurds (which we never protested) to the use of gas and bio agents against the Iranian armies (which we covertly condoned) to the double whammy of placing economic sanctions around Iraq until Saddam Hussein was deposed, while at the same time refusing to aid any movement to depose him, and even warning allies against aiding said movements, the US has adhered to the same tender standards regarding Iraqui lives as King Leopold once displayed for his Congolese subjects.

But let's disregard history and just try to make those two paragraphs consistent, shall we? For they represent the Officialspeak of American foreign policy re Iraq. The tender concern for Iraq's nationhood, you will notice, trumps concern for, well, democracy. Since if Iraq fell apart without a dictatorship, hmm, perhaps it is being imposed, even shall we say imposed bloodily, on an unwilling population? And so perhaps we can translate the higher US standard as something like this: although we do want to strip you of your basic human rights and keep you in an unresisting position, land's sakes, we don't want you to die of anthrax! How do you think that would look on tv!

As I said before, I didn't want to delve into these topics, since they make me so violently ill.

Remora

Further pogram notes: Victims of Mistaken Identity, Sikhs Pay a Price for Turbans. For some reason, this article is sublined, The Anger. Instead of, say, the Bigotry.

Dope.

I try to run this place like a Punch and Judy show. Usually, I play Punch, and I get some conservative retread to play Judy. And of course I'm enthralled by my own theatrics.

Well... reluctantly, I want to play this game with an idea that is going around the lefty pole of the media spectrum. As Seumus Milne put it in the Guardian:
" Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.

"...any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent."

There's a number of things to say about that.
1. The assumption that the hijackers were representative is nonsense. They were merely successful.

The Seumus Milne line starts out with an assumption that I certainly agree with - the real opinions of the masses in the poor countries, from Pakistan to Rwanda, are simply ignored in the West. Unfortunately, the gesture of ignorance is then repeated. Who says that the hijackers of the airplanes are in any way representative of Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Lebanon - their nationalities, as reported at least in the American press? To pretend that hating the US is a progressive act in Egypt is to ignore what I thought we all learned in Iran - there are many ideological variants of hate. The people associated with the hijacking belong to a rather rebarbative, and certainly fascist, variant. The inference that hate has a cause must be true -- but that it is a cause we should sympathize with isn't. The Jews were well hated in Nazi Germany - does Milne really think that was the fault of the Jews?

2. The US has blood on its hand. This is certainly more than true. The US has pursued a barbaric policy in Iraq, and it has provided Israel with support even when Israel has used its American sponsorship to create an apartheid state that systematically discriminates against Palestinians and favors Jews. But to see this as the only US policy in the Middle East is incredibly shortsighted. The US also has close ties, via its oil empire, with the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and other Arabic states and factions. The US routinely creates ties with the ruling class in many poor countries, has sponsored death squads all over South America, tilted towards Pakistan when Pakistan was committing genocide in Bangla Desh... hey, I could go on.
But there is a rule of relevance, here. When the US attacked Nicauragua in the 80s, it was often pointed out that the Sandinistas were persecuting the Misquito Indians - in fact, Daniel Ortega himself admitted this. Did this justify US intervention? No. For a number of reasons, I felt, back then, that nothing in International Law, or my own conscience (which countenances a certain amount of violence for progressive ends - which is why I felt the Viet Minh and their successors were legitimate) could justify what Reagan was doing in Central America. In the same way, the groups that have been associated with the WTC atrocity have no justification for spilling American blood. So far, we don't even know what they stand for - which is condemnation enough. To kill five thousand people without bothering to even write a note about it shows a contempt for human life not even equalled by your average suicide. So Milne engages in a little psychological projection, which, to my mind, is as patronizing as anything I have read on the right.

3. The word hate. Hmm. Milne uses that as the keynote - the US is hated bitterly -- without considering it as a more complex emotion. US pop culture, the US as a destination, the US as both overbearing, politically stupid tyrant and as the 'petit chose x' -- Lacan's obscure object of desire - are the intertwining forces in the Third World. This isn't to defend the New World Order - the preponderance of wealth, which is in Europe, Japan and the US, has a direct and terrible relationship with the preponderance of poverty, which is in the Global South -- but to ask a question about the psychological coordinates of that situation. Much as the shorthand of hate seems relevant to the WTC assault, I don't think the hijackers would have done it if they were doing it for hate. Hate was balanced by affection -- affection for another order. This order is one Milne doesn't really want to look at. It is certainly not the order of socialism -- the Afghans were kicking Russian butt precisely because they didnt want that socialist feeling. It is the order of sharia. If Milne thinks that this is going to be satisfied with a more just distribution of the world's goods, I think he is wrong. This is about theocracy, about what the worship of God requires, about the relationship between the sexes, about corruption. It is about a mix of changes in the Middle East, and I even have some sympathy with the corruption issue. In the end, though, it is about mandating a lifestyle I find abhorrant - and more, that I don't have to live in. Seeing someone oozing with the luxury of sympathy for these Holy Warriors while never having to face the consequence of living in the order they dream of brings out the militant Orwell in me. Milne, who thinks that Americans 'simply don't get it," doesn't seem to get it himself. Instead he immediately broadens this incident, as if we were still in the Nassar era, where we were all going to adjust to secular norms and dam the Nile and we could talk about the solidarity of the Third World masses.
That epoch is long gone.

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.

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. "

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.

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."