Remora

'Smokin em out' - the definition.

We don't know what the Bush's international coon hunt is going to look like - neither does he. But for a combat ready wet dream, look to this interview with Rear Admiral Stephen Baker, who is creaking in his joints with excitement.

Q & A with Rear Adm. (Ret.) Stephen H. Baker, USN, Senior Fellow, CDI - Terrorism Project - Center for Defense Information

Most frightening exchange is this one:

"Q. Will this "war on terrorism" be just focused only on Afghanistan?
A. No, but the initial focus is to bring to justice the individual terrorists behind the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, and all current leads point to those regions. The Taliban regime and all the leaders and cells of al Qaeda are definitely on the hit list. It will not end there, however. The campaign being planned is global, and it will be a long, many-tiered, world-wide effort. The terrorist training camps that we know of in Lebanon, for example, most likely are being looked at right now. More than 60 countries have known terrorist problems, and it seems clear that there will be multiple ongoing operations at every level of U.S. counter-terrorism capabilities for quite some time."

Not Lebanon again! Not content to repeat the mistakes of his father, Bush 2 is reaching all the way back to repeat the mistakes of the monumental Reagan. If the US is going after Hezbollah again, we really have lost our minds. As for Baker's last sentence, god knows what that means translated out of Pentagon-speak -- I suspect it merely indicates a military wishlist, as the military likes nothing better than to throw money against a newly discovered threat. You can hear them salivating in offices from General Dynamics to The Raytheon Company. It isn't pleasant to hear that much salivating, reader -- it makes me a bit ill.

Remora
Talking about folly and evil -- here's a story from the NYT:
Bush Urges Afghans to Rid Their Country of Taliban

in which Bush 2 has apparently decided to make the same mistakes as Bush 1. You'll remember -- or you won't -- that Bush 1 urged the people of Iraq to "take matters into their own hands -- to force Saddam Hussein the dictator aside..." back in the heady Gulf War days. The Iraqui people, unluckily for them, actually took Bush 1 at his word, and were promptly abandoned by the American military, who calmly watched them being slaughtered by the 'dictator Saddam Hussein's" Republican guard.
Bush 2's people have learned nothing. Once again the president makes an appeal that is promptly denied by his spokesman, Ari Fleischer. Once again a mass of refugees who would like nothing better than to be rid of the Taliban are being given televised assurances by the President of the US that we will support a rebellion, and once again this is, to put it bluntly, a lie. If we do support a rebellion, we've done a piss poor job of aiding it so far. This is the kind of thing that makes one into a pacifist -- vide my earlier post today.
First graf of story:
WASHINGTON, Sept. 25 � President Bush came close to telling the Afghan people today to overthrow the Taliban government, encouraging them to rid Afghanistan of what he called "an incredibly repressive" administration.

Remora

Mike Kelly's column in the WP is, as usual, as stuffed with nonsense as my mama's pecan pie used to be stuffed with nuts (hey, I'm practicing making homegrown comparisons, in an effort to show my Americanism):

. . . Pacifist Claptrap (washingtonpost.com)

The column considers pacifism and, in the concluding graf, concludes it is evil. What Kelly means by evil, I think, is that it is bad. Kelly goes to Orwell's controversy with pacifists in World War II. At that time, Orwell contended, the pacifists were objectively pro-fascist. Kelly wants to transfer this logic to today's pacifists, and say they are objectively pro-terrorist. Here, for what it is worth, is his argument graf. He begins with reasons for engaging with pacifists at all. I'll skip his first reason and go to the second:

"Second, it is worth it because the reactionary left-liberal crowd in America and in Europe has already staked out its ground here: What happened to America is America's fault, the fruits of foolish arrogance and greedy imperialism, racism, colonialism, etc., etc. From this rises an argument that the resulting war is also an exercise in arrogance and imperialism, etc., and not deserving of support. This argument will be made with greater fearlessness as the first memories of the 7,000 murdered recede. Third, it is worth it because the American foreign policy establishment has all the heart for war of a titmouse, and not one of your braver titmice. The first faint, let-us-be-reasonable bleats can even now be heard: Yes, we must do something, but is an escalation of aggression really the right thing? Mightn't it just make matters ever so much worse?"

Here we have a masterful case of muddying your colors, and the invocation of Orwell isn't going to help him out. Pacifism is not the same thing as deciding not to use violence for one or another reason. The idea that America's foreign policy establishment is pacifist is ludicrous in the extreme. If they have hearts like titmice, that has more to do with not wanting to provoke controversy in what is now officially "the homeland." And why not provoke controversy? Because foreign policy is conducted, now, by a very small group, with little attention paid to it by the mass of Americans. Foreign policy people like it like that. If the mass of Americans must stick their noses into foreign policy, the foreign policy establishment would prefer that it happen in the shape of ticker tape parades for returning soldiers and 90% support for whatever inane ass sits in the Oval Office.

As for Kelly's thoughts re the liberal-lefties -- well, again, we aren't dealing with pacifism here. Among some, certainly, that might be the case. Kneejerk anti-war sentiment isn't a bad vice; but it is true, I think, that it is a vice. Meaning that the argument that there is no virtue in using violence for political ends ignores the structure of political injustice. Nor is Kelly very perceptive about American foreign policy in the Middle East, which has been, to say the least, unwise, driven by hasty impulses, political panics, and the overriding need for a stable supply of oil uncoupled from any concentrated national policy to promote, with all our wealth, alternatives to oil energy. I know, sounds way rationalistic, right?

I've already had my say about this in earlier posts, but to reiterate: the era since the Cold and the Gulf War ended has not been a glorious one for American foreign policy. The dual containment of Iran and Iraq ignored the reality of change in Iran, and enforced a horrendously immoral -- let's even use Kelly's word, evil -- policy in Iraq, to wit, the refusal to aid or countenance a democratically oriented overthrow of Saddam Hussein for fear that such an overthrow would destroy the country and expand the sphere of Iranian influence, and the consequent turn to the compromise of sanctions, which was premised on the insane proposition that an unarmed populace could be prodded into overthrowing a heavily armed, violent dictator by being systematically starved. With, of course, the codicil that even if the population, by some miracle, was able to successfully bring some tyrannicide to fruition, that it would allow the political fruit of its courage to be wrenched away from it, leaving the structure of the regime alone. Exchanging, in other words, one tyranny for another, in a nightmarish succession of Ba'athist strongmen.
Yeah, let's see, what were the terms Kelly used? "Foolish arrogance and greedy imperialism, racism, colonialism"? I think I could throw a few more insults on that pile, but that will do for starters.

Dope.

In 1725, Voltaire was thirty one years old. He'd established himself at the great houses by this time, where the Names could enjoy the dangerous turn of his epigrams. His wildly successful plays were thought to be the successor of Racine's (although now they are considered the last clunk of classic theater, heading for the garbage chute). He had, it was true, spent time in the Bastille in 1717 for writing verses that satirized the Regent. It was also true that he was the prematurely wizened child of a conseiller de roi, a bourgeois, and that his father did not count his poet son among his worldly successes - in the Arouet family the ornament was the older son, Armand, a lawyer like papa.

Voltaire, however, considered himself the peer of his titled friends -- ennobled, so to speak, by his brain.

It is a sign of the times that Voltaire could so easily allow himself this presumption. In the seventeenth century, a Moliere could see a king, but couldn't sup with a prince. Voltaire, however, felt himself fully entitled to break bread with princes -- or, more usually, princesses. The habits of Louis XIV's regime, in which a conscious effort was made to codify, and so stabilize, the hierarchy in order to control the nobility, so inclined in the first half of the seventeenth century to frightening Frondes, had been swept away during the Regency. In particular, the Mississippi bubble, John Law's attempt to take a seventeenth century society into the age of floating currencies and stock options, had turned life upside down, bankrupting old houses and enriching outsiders, until it all came down with a crash. Law's paper currency was a real, if unintended, assault on the feudalist order, and succeeded in weakening that order even if it did not succeed in floating France's debt.

In December, 1725, Voltaire had an altercation with the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot (the link has another version of this story) in the dressing room of an actress. Rohan-Chabot made a cutting remark, Voltaire replied in kind, the Chevalier raised his can, Voltaire raised his sword, friends intervened, and the broil was brought to a close.

A few days later Voltaire was at the table in the Duc de Sully's hotel, with the family, when a servant came in and told him he was wanted outside. In the street stood two closed carriages, to one of which Voltaire advanced. He was grabbed, thrust inside, and assaulted with sticks and fists. From the second carriage, the Chevalier de Rohan's voice was heard: "don't hurt his head, something good may come out of it." After being beaten, Voltaire was thrown back out into the street.

He made his way upstairs to the Duc de Sully's table, disheveled and presumably bleeding Let me quote from Jean Orieux's biography: "He called on them [the dinner guests] to help him -- first of all the Duc de Sully, whose guest he was, and on whose doorstep he had been assaulted. He begged Sully to go with him to lodge a complaint; his assailants had tried to murder him. But the duc calmly refused. The faces of all present were impassive; everyone was silent. Voltaire realized then that no one was going to aid him..."

I love this story. I, too, have seen those faces -- the face the established order shows the outsider. I saw it when I was a young man in Shreveport, Louisiana. In a way, it was a rare privilege. This story could have happened yesterday in any number of places: Russia, the Philippines, Indonesia... and Louisiana. It could happen anywhere, in other words, where the roots of civil society are weak; where clans are strong; where the monopoly of violence is not entirely conceded to the state, and where the state recognizes, in its daily working, the de facto right of groups to enforce extra-legal punishments. What Votaire saw, sealed in the impassivity of the circle of faces that confronted him, was the naked substructure of the very society he moved in. Rohan's henchmen woke him up. Voltaire made a leap in place that moment. He became the Voltaire we know, realizing, beyond his vanity, what the point was: the great target, really, of the whole Enlightenment project in the first half of the 18th century. The traditional order, the rule of authority rather than reason, was based on just this moment when the face closes. He realized that he could expect no quarter from these people. He'd have to forge his arms himself.

So he did. He operated under the aegis of satire, the downstairs weapon. Scapin's revenge. (actually, the denouement of this story does have a Scapin-esque feel - Voltaire made it known that he was consorting with underworld thugs, learning fencing, and Rohan, a notorious coward, prevailed on the king to issue a lettre de cachet, putting Voltaire in the Bastille again. A sign of the regime's essential weakness is that Voltaire was soon released -- there was a certain shame about what Rohan had done. Follow the shame - it is always a clue). To implant a sense of the judicial equality of persons in a society that doesn't, in its social tissues, feel that equality, requires more toxic methods than the arguments of rationality. It required all the tactics of ridicule, imprudence and pointed analogy that the philosophes inherited from the ancients, and from the kindred spirits of the century before: Montaigne and the libertine circle around St. - Evremond. Even in this early stage of modernity, shock was the weapon of choice, because the other weapons -- the closed carriages and the cudgels -- were all held by the other side. As we will see in my third tableaux -- you see, I am thinking of my posts about this subject as pictures in a triptych -- this ingrained habit of satire stood between Voltaire and Rousseau, making it impossible for either party to understand the other one. Satire, in other word, has its great historic moment in the 18th century. It is the dark star twinned with optimism in the Enlightenment program. That relationship contains in itself the seed of its own dialectical destruction.

Remora
Blogger wasn't working for me this morning. So I posted the same entry twice. Look to the entry below this one, please

Remora
I recommend reading the Far Eastern Economic Review this week -- a lot of the articles are on line, and the magazine, which is owned by Dow Jones, is pretty on spot about Asian issues. And the war or non-war or shadow war or whatever thing looming and lurching towards us like the as yet unseen serial killer in a teen slasher flick is definitely a classic, Kipling style East of the Suez deal.

There's a piece by Enzio von Pfeil which inadvertantly shows how tightly superstition and art are intertwined in economics:
THE 5TH COLUMN -- September 27, 2001

Economics, for the past two weeks, has publicly put on its consolatory face, while underneath the investors, the electronic herd once lauded by Tom Friedman, have been running off various cliffs. Like almost all post-Keynsian econ-masters, von Pfeil actually seems to believe in the hoary chestnuts of monetary theory, and retails such bogus analogies as the following:

"Policy mixes involve monetary and fiscal measures. On the monetary front, the world's leading central banks have been injecting more liquidity into the system, intensifying an existing excess supply of money. In the United States, the Federal Reserve pre-emptively slashed rates ahead of the stockmarket reopening. This was expected, and already had resulted earlier in even firmer bond prices, driving down yields. Lower yields mean even lower mortgage rates--and so, eventually, up go housing starts and with them, consumption. True, in the near term, people won't be spending. But once the dust settles, lower rates will fuel consumption. Looking back at the U.S. on its entry into World War II, we see that though consumption fell 2% in the first full year following, it accelerated each year after until 1945, by 2.6%, 3.6% and 7%, respectively. Slowing consumption will be a temporary setback. Like in World War II, people will adjust."
Anybody who believes the logic here is chemical -- just add element X to Element Y and get compund Z - should take a glance at Von Pfeil's proof. The WWII analogy is, to say the least, bizarre. In the US, the necessary gross expansion of military industrial output to meet the needs of the war in the 40-45 period was extraordinary. To think that the pattern of consumption had to do with the hypodermic of Fed policy -- the trickle trickle into the bloodstream of easy money -- is close to insane. And to think that the shadow war is going to cause the Government to rev up its old warplane factories in Washington State is so off the mark that one wonders if von Pfeil wrote this passage in his sleep. There is a kind of analogical desperation behind this -- one selects one's historical comparisons after one has one's theory down, rather like the alchemists used to do to prove that at some point in the past, some esoteric master did, after all, transform base metals into gold.

For a more reasonable analogy, look at what Japan's central bank did in the nineties -- an unprecedented amount of pump priming. That did no good -- and the reason? The Japanese consumer wasn't prepared to take on the kind of debts the American consumer doesn't even give a second thought to. The recession, if we have one, is not going to be managed by a Central Bank.

Remora:
Since the market Humpty-Dumptied last week, I thought readers might like a cheerful article from 1998 about the Asian collapse by Murray Sayle, a veteran journalist now settling into his bungalow years in Japan. It is from a Japanese English mag.
OutsideR Online -Nonember 1998
Sample grafs:

"Can it possibly be 1929 again, out East? Where are the suiciding stockbrokers, the criminal scandals uncovered by the falling markets? Well, six officials connected with the Finance Ministry and the Bank of Japan have hanged themselves (traditional swords having become scarce and expensive, like most Japanese objets de vertu) and so has a Japanese MP of Korean origin, not a good thing to be in Japan when trouble strikes. Two small-fry finance officials are out on bail for allowing themselves to be entertained by overlent bankers at something called a No Pants shabu-shabu, a raunchy restaurant whose waitresses serve at table
minus underwear (in the Shoguns days, silk-robed officials met with favour-beseeching merchants in brothels, hence the Japanese euphemism for a bribe, sodenoshita, a little something in the sleeve. So what else is new?) But it all does rather fit, no?"