Bollettino

Our Palestinians

Andrew Sullivan is not often quoted in these pages, because we think it is the height of pointlessness to quote Andrew Sullivan. But he does represent a golden mean of Bush-ism, and for that reason we find one of his posts for
Monday extremely interesting. Here it is:

"THE TACTICS OF FAILURE: The setbacks the allies have suffered these last couple of days are all due to one thing: some Saddam units acting as terrorists. By pretending to surrender and then opening fire, by relocating in civilian neighborhoods, by shooting prisoners of war in the head, the soldiers apparently still loyal to Saddam are not reversing the allied advance. What they're doing is trying to inflict sufficient damage to improve their morale and increase the costs of the invasion. They want us to fire into civilian areas; they want us to panic at a few atrocities (as in Somalia); they are counting on an American unwillingness to persevere through serious casualties. And they intend to use the Arab media and their Western sympathizers, i.e. the BBC, NYT, NPR etc., to get this message out. The lesson to learn is that we have cornered the equivalent of a rabid dog. It will fight nastily, brutally and with no compunction. Those units who will go down with this regime will not go down easily. After an initial hope that this thing could be over swiftly, I think it's obvious by now that we're in for a nasty fight - and the Saddamite remnants will ally with the anti-war media to fight dirty and spin shamelessly."

Beyond the standard vitriol about the media, the logic, here, is beginning to appear in the mainstream press too. The steps go like this.

1. Our liberation of Iraq seems to have been shockingly non-floral. The cakewalk through a grateful population doesn't seem to have materialized.

2. The resistance to liberation can only come from evil units "acting as terrorists."

3. Notice how those evil terrorists endanger civilians, which we, all unwillingly, have to shoot.

4. So any terrorist act that seems to emerge from those endangered civilians is probably some kind of disguised Saddamite terrorists. Thus, no reason not to liquidate them.

Now, we don't want to dispute about whether Saddam's troops and militia are using the civilians as shields or not. That seems pretty likely, given Saddam's history. And our point isn't that there are other causes that might be behind Iraqi resistance. Our point is what happens when this kind of logic becomes the dominant way of explaining the war. What is obviously wrong with Sullivan's analysis is that it emphasizes the evil of the tactic at the expense of the success of it. What is secondarily wrong about Sullivan's analysis is that it defines evil in terms of opposition to America, which is good. This is an ideological fantasy; as it infiltrates the cool thinking necessary to analyze events, it skews them until they assume a moral incorrigibility -- they become simply evil, or simply good. This always leads states to disaster.

We think that probably some Iraqis are feeling the prod of the fedayeen bayonette in their backs -- whereas we also think that some Iraqis are resisting on their own, for reasons that range from nationalism to religion. As Americans, to use Kanan Makiya's words, orchestrate the music of liberation -- or in plain english, bomb the shit out of various Iraqi towns -- there is every chance that the mood will turn against the Americans. The sequence of it is foreseeable, the structure is there, and certainly the propagandists, like Sullivan, have armed themselves with justifications. As it does, Iraqis will increasingly be treated as either friends or terrorists. The Iraqis, in other words, will become Our Palestinians.

Bollettino

Note to readers: we are retiring "remora." The Vatican issues daily bulletins of the doings of the pope, and all his little munchkins in Emerald City, and we've decided to borrow that as our name for our own daily bulletins. Dope will continue to be dope. Thanks.

War and language

Tony Blair -- or a man claiming to be Tony Blair -- readers will recall, I hope, that the real Tony Blair, according to some reports, might be struggling with his bonds in a remote castle in Scotland -- calls the upcoming battle for Baghdad crucial. U.S. commanders, including General Franks, our liberator in chief, a man whose press conferences have quickly devolved into those exercises in denial the military specialized in in Vietnam, claim that the speed Americans are making is success in itself. War, according to this scenario, is a kind of motor-race, and we are simply leaving behind, with superb disdain, those "pockets of resistance" that might exist behind the lines due to fear, according to the inestimable Franks. It is fear that has kept Iraqis from showering us with blossoms, fear that has kept them away from the 24 hour florist shops of Basra, Um Qasr, Najaf, and Mosul, which are guarded round the clock by feared units of S. Hussein's terrorist units, the Weapons of Mass Destruction Legion, Lmt., a non-profit terrorist organization incorporated in Delaware.

But consider an absurd idea: that the Iraqis might have another definition of the war. They might even consider that the invasion of their territory is not, uh, liberation.

I know. You will say, who are these people? I mean, who really cares what the Iraqis think? Some of them have been so ignorant as to compare the U.S.'s showing of unlawful prisoners of sorta-war -- the Taliban and such -- and the way they were masked and manacled -- treated to all the comforts of home, in our prisons in Cuba, if home is a small place, nine by nine, kept perpetually dark, and speaking is forbidden there -- with their own showing and treatment of U.S. Pows, which is a war crime according to the Geneva convention. This is the kind of evil moral equivalency, promoted by relativism and deconstruction, that has spread from our universities overseas. This is what happens when you don't root it out here.

Perhaps it is all one of those big funny cultural things. First we bomb them, then we love bomb them -- with the precious gift of Freedom. When you care enough to send the very best, send Freedom -- it is best served with a big Abrams tank, we understand. Talk about gourmet!

Consider the lowly casualty. It has now become the newscaster norm to consider the combat casualty as a thing defined by the government, and its military branch. So the Edinburg News, today, reports on the first British casualty in combat

"A SOLDIER from the Black Watch has been killed in action in southern Iraq, the second Briton killed in combat in 24 hours.

The unnamed soldier, from the 1st Battalion Black Watch, which recruits in Scotland, died near Al Zubayr, 15 miles west of Basra, Iraq�s second city, where British forces have been engaged in heavy fighting."


Later in the story, however, we are told that "the total number of British deaths in the war so far is now 18." Now, granted, some of those deaths were the result of friendly fire, but some were the result of potshots taken by Iraqi guerrillas. Potshots don't count as combat, however. They are way outside the rules. Combat only occurs when the coalition forces engage in coordinated attack, n'est-ce pas? Eventually some genius will come up with the idea that Iraqis are suffering from mass Stockholm syndrome.

We can't wait.

Remora

This weekend LI talked with a friend who, incautiously, quoted us when talking with another friend about the war. The latter friend said, where does he get his information?! The implication being that we pulled it out of ... the bowels of our imagination. Well, fantasy is something we love to indulge in. But middle age has rather put the kebosh on day dreaming. So we usually look around for info in the usual places.

Information is proving to be a difficulty in this war. The American and British press seem determined to do their patriotic best, whether it is questioning whether Saddam the nefarious is using a body double to do his rousing work (a question that should be directed, we think, at Tony Blair -- surely the real Blair is even now struggling with a duct tape over his mouth and a rope around his wrists in some isolated Scottish castle, much like the kidnapped wife in that Danny DeVito flick, while the Blair substitute, created by Richard Perle out of primitive proteins in some dank basement in Transylvania, is leading the U.K ever closer to 51st state status) or depending on the military to tell us whether the Iraqi tv's broadcast of two downed American helicopter pilots is really two downed American helicopter pilots, or a film cleverly concocted in Baghdad's famous branch of Dreamworks studio. The servility is overwhelming. When General Franks gives his press conferences, the press people now report, with appropriate indignation, that he is greeted with sceptical questions by some of the foreigners present. Shocking.

So the fabulous Iraqi battalion, division, or whatever, consisting of 8,000 men, has surrendered to "coalition" forces at least six times in the press, each time to sort of dwindle away to a bunch of shoemakers and their german shepherd. One of these days a real Iraqi division will surrender to the Americans, and nobody will believe it. So, too, on a day when the stock market loses 300 some points, we have radio newscasters asking journalists sited in Kuwait City, the war seems to be going well from here. What does it look like from there?

What it does look like is a copy of the war that will happen after Saddam H. is history. Treacherous attacks by a subaltern people who don't appreciate the marvels we simply ache to shower them with -- food, democracy, privatized telephone service with 10,000 hours of free long distance calls -- that will eventually wear away the the surface of the military nerve, in the form of the shooting of this or that civilian, and provoke backlash, in the form of the ambush of this or that heroic American, and so on. You know the drill. The huge surprise, so far, is that the American troops haven't had their floral moment -- the Washington Post is getting quite snippy about it. Where are those Iraqi women-'n-children giving our boys the traditional bouquets in Basra and, oh, one of those other desert towns that nobody is going to remember anyway? We can announce, I think, that the problem is that many of those flower arrangements were ordered from busted dot com companies. Seems that Saddam tyrannically prevented the Iraqi masses from accessing the Nets. Hence, behind the times Iraqi women-n-children are ordering their flowers from Grocery.com and Van.com and other now defunct companies. The sorrow and the pity, as they say.


But let's take a breath and remember that our victory is assured, as Blair (II) would put it, and little is really said about who will govern our new staging area for democracy. Michael Young, in Reason, profiles two of American's budding proconsuls. One, Barbara Bodine, our woman in Yemen, gets Young's qualified approval. But of Garner, Young has this to say:


"If Bodine's prospective appointment is designed to reassure the Iraqis of the benign nature of a US occupation, her boss, Jay Garner, will prove a harder sell. Garner famously signed onto an October 12, 2000 statement by the archconservative Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, which praised the Israeli army for having "exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of a Palestinian Authority that deliberately pushes civilians and young people to the front lines."

The statement noted: "What makes the US-Israel security relationship one of mutual benefit is the combination of military capabilities and shared political values�freedom, democracy, personal liberty and the rule of law." That Garner himself benefited from the security relationship is well known: As president of California-based defense contractor SY Technology, he oversaw the company's work on the US-Israeli Arrow missile defense system."

Young also reports that on every missile fired into Iraq for its liberation, Garner's company gets a little tooth fairy money. Putting him, it must be said, in the company of the Bush administration's nearest and dearest as far as war profits are concerned.

We did wonder, though, what Young meant by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Was this latent anti-semitism? Turns out that there really is such an organization. Here's a link.

Remora

"...they have a large exposed rear and exposed flanks..."
-- NPR War correspondent.

Ah, those large exposed rears! For a second, I was thinking that NPR had finally gotten around to reviewing one of my favorite movies, Kelly the Coed: part 5 -- in which the exposure of the rear is an essential, uh, plot element. I mean, isn't it about time Fresh Air took on Vivid Videos? But Alas, the war goes on...

LI has redounded a bit too much lately, about Iraq. Let's turn to the toast economy, shall we?



HealthSouth's collapse, last week, was masked by the war -- as, for that matter, were the tax shenanigans of the D.C. Bush-ites, the busy troops bringing us the Great Giveaway. HealthSouth is serious business. These great structures, with their CEO Humpty Dumpties sitting on them, redefining the language of profit and loss, cause a lot of collateral damage when they have their great falls. One of our best friends here, S., is a physical therapist working at a Health South Hospital. She is pregnant, she is a recent homeowner, and she is just the kind of person who is put at risk by the likes of the CEO of Health South, Richard Scrushy.



To rehash the story:



Last year, Health South made one of those surprising earnings announcement that almost invariably indicate the midnight scuttling of rats in the accounting department.  At the beginning of last year, as the death bell for Enron was ringing out  the dead in the energy and telecom sectors, scary news was being heard from the health sector. Forbes, in October, summed up the year's spiral for Health South like this:



"Healthsouth Chairman Richard Scrushy was complaining about Medicare reimbursements when we wrote about him earlier this year. He's still complaining, but he's got bigger problems. A raft of shareholder suits charge that Scrushy and another director sold $100 million worth of shares knowing that a clarification in Medicare billing rules on group therapy would reduce annual operating earnings at the rehab hospital chain by $175 million.



HealthSouth's stock has plunged 75% since the earnings reduction announcement Aug. 27.But maybe it's bondholders who have the real beef. The suits claim that HealthSouth knew about the Medicare billing clarification as early as May 17. Scrushy insists he had no knowledge of it until August. Interesting, that May 17 date. That's when HealthSouth sold $1 billion in debt to investors, extending notes that would have expired in 2003 for an additional ten years. The company got a 7 5/8% rate. Not bad, given that the bonds have since fallen to 69 cents on the dollar, which if negotiated today would mean a 14% coupon for HealthSouth. In short, HealthSouth got a good deal issuing that debt when it did."



Ah, innocence. One ponders another CEO's parental concern with his stock options outweighing his concern for his company. But wait! There was a twist with this announcement. Rather than confessing to a possible fraud, the confession itself was part of a larger fraud.

The HealthSouth saga was, as is so often the case, all about the CEO, Richard Scrushy. Scrushy swung a  member of elephantine proportions in his home town of Birmingham, Alabama. He'd gotten his name on various University of Alabama buildings. He was celebrated in the newspaper as an entrepeneurial sage. Like Stephen Hilbert, the CEO of CONSECO of Indianapolis, another grounded high flier with a taste for younger, prettier wives, located in an out of the way burg that was perfect for camoflaging on-going revenue stripping, Scrushy was famed for a variety of tasteless moments. There's one of those NYT portraits of the guy, by Simon Romero that drypoints with just that hint of acid the true bizarreness that can be overlooked in a Southern town if you are willing to throw around one hundred million dollars:





"For a city that had grown accustomed to Mr. Scrushy's public persona in recent years, the disclosure of the problems at HealthSouth came as a jolt. Mr. Scrushy (pronounced SCROO-shee) was known as much in Birmingham for his extravagant tastes, which included a Hummer oversize S.U.V., a luxurious Florida estate and a lead singing role in his own country music band, as he was for his philanthropy."





Romero's article -- and by the way, that it is Romero's and not Kurt Eichenwald makes us wonder if something is up there on the NYT business page --today frontloads a few pretty shocking grafs, bad news for Scrushy:





"At least one official is said to be planning to submit documents, including copies of invoices and receipts, that would show how Richard M. Scrushy, HealthSouth's former chairman, oversaw the creation of a sophisticated electronic surveillance system that may have intimidated senior officials into keeping quiet.Last week, the Justice Department filed a criminal complaint against Weston Smith, HealthSouth's former chief financial officer. Mr. Smith is cooperating with investigators in their effort to show how Mr. Scrushy pushed senior executives to inflate earnings to prevent a decline in HealthSouth's share price. The Securities and Exchange Commission is also investigating."



But worse is in the meat of the article, the twist in Scrushy's summer confession:



"The S.E.C., in the case it filed last week, said that the controversy over the Medicare rule was simply a ruse and that Mr. Scrushy, along with several other HealthSouth executives, had been inflating and distorting the company's financial results almost since its inception. The company is accused of inflating earnings by $1.4 billion and assets by $800 million from 1999 through mid-2002, although the fraud is said to have taken place for a much longer time. Like other health care companies, HealthSouth routinely adjusted its revenues to estimate how much it would be paid by insurers.



But Healthsouth used those adjustments to manipulate its earnings, according to the S.E.C. complaint, and falsified records to deceive the company's auditors.After years of falsifying earnings, Mr. Scrushy had been looking for a way to reduce Wall Street expectations so he would not have to inflate profits as much in the future, the regulators said."




Wow. You have to wonder about the brass, or the desperation, of a guy like this. Meanwhile, Alabama has to face up to the costs of erasing Srushy's name on various and sundry public buildings. Surely there's a market in this -- selling governments erasable tags, good for stadiums and college facilities. If your donator CEO goes belly up, just flick a switch and presto-chango! The name changes to Smith or something. Until you program in the next CEO's name.

Remora

The US government, and the British government, in their wisdom, have decided that it is all right for US photographers to show Iraqi troops surrendering, and it is all right for US journalists to interview Iraqi POWs, but that it is a war crime for Iraqis to do the same thing. The broadcast of Iraqis interviewing -- or rather mistreating -- obviously scared prisoners has been shown through out the Arab world by Al Jazeera,and you can see it here, from the Netherlands RTL4. It is not pleasant watching. However, censorship, in this case, is merely feeding the Beast -- a point deliberately misunderstoon by our patriot censors who are bravely manning the media, feeding us figures that don't match the images. When the NYT asked ABC news about the Al Jazeera broadcast, here was the reply -- supply your own satire:

David Westin, the ABC News president, said he decided ABC News should not show those pictures. "I don't think there's any news value in it," he said.

Among other censorship news: the widely reported figure of 8,000 Iraqi troops surrendering in the first days of the conflict has dwindled to 2,000 troops in further re-telling. Here's the NYT take:

"The first few days were intense, but perhaps the easiest part of a complex war. Many of the Iraqi soldiers the allies confronted were ill motivated and ill trained. Some surrendered, and many simply vanished. Even so, some of the celebrated capitulations have turned out to be less than advertised. American officials were quick to announce the surrender of the commander of the 51st Iraqi Division. Today, they discovered that the "commander" was actually a junior officer masquerading as a higher-up in an attempt to win better treatment."

Remora

Peter Dixon, 34, photographer, lives in London: "Just because war has started doesn't mean that my opinion has changed. The war is still illegal. Marching today is even more important than before. What else can we do?"
--Guardian, Anti-war protesters take to the streets.

LI has been revolving Peter Dixon's question in our little pointy head since participating in the last Austin Anti-war rally Thursday. And we have been sharpening our big idea, which is that the antiwar campaign must either doom itself to irrelevance by playing the game of the politics of expression (hey, we are trying to get into punditspeak, where pronunciations are always from on high, and use the modals of necessity -- must and should, as if we were all Nemesis, Jrs. down here) or turn into a movement against the upcoming occupation.

We went to the Stop the War coalition website, which is the Net hq for the people that organized the huge demonstrations on February 15. Unfortunately, our feeling is that the SW people have only one campaign strategy, which is to repeat February 15. That might work in the UK, but it certainly won't work in the U.S.

Why shouldn't the focus be on stopping the war, you ask? Because this war is moving with extraordinary rapidity, and will stop itself -- at least the first phase -- pretty soon. If you simply want the war stopped, it will soon be stopped.

No, what we don't want is what is forecast in Nicholas Hoffman's column in the New York Observer, which turns the jaded eye of some Joseph Conrad character upon the probable effects of the war. Oddly enough, the horror and nightmare Hoffman evokes is synonymous with Robert Kaplan's idea of sweetness and light, as adumbrated in this month's Atlantic. Robert Kaplan is one of the intellectual architects of the war, and he cuts through the facade of propaganda about the war thrown up by figures of fun like the ineffable Hitchens. We are going to do a post on that Kaplan article -- it is so deliciously open about Bush's foreign policy, which is a sort of Sadism as dreamt up by a backwoods evangelical.

...

To stop the occupation, the antiwar movement, at least that bit of it that shows itself in Austin, Texas (which we assume is a sample of the larger, national movement) is going to have to stop concentrating exclusively on the same demographic Fox comedy shows are aired at: the young and the restless. The speakers at the rally we went to referred repeatedly to their students. They are recruited from academia; they are wholly honorable in their sentiments; but just because they occupy a niche in this country where radicalism can be comfortable, they are limited by their vocabulary and attitudes to what they are used to. So, for instance, the broadcast to the wrong niche. The youth of America might be important consumers of CDs and blue jeans, but they are no longer the chosen vehicle of the kind of efficient political movement that can actually stop the occupation. Polls show that, just as in the Vietnam war and the Korean war, the demographic with the strongest aversion to this war is the Retirement set --- that's right, people above 55. Some of them made it to the rally Thursday, but they were not at all enlisted by the speakers.

This is from a WP poll published on March 4th:


"The poll also found that some of the strongest doubts about a war with Iraq are coming from a seemingly unexpected source: older Americans, who were far less likely to support taking military action than young adults -- a dramatic illustration of how President Bush's policies have reopened divisions in the electorate that were largely absent immediately before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan 17 months ago. At the same time, large majorities of Democrats and minorities expressed opposition to taking military action against Iraq."

From those constituencies, the older group and the minorities were dramatically under-represented in the march, while the young constituted easily 65 percent of the marchers. I suppose that the older segment was well represented on the platform -- there were gray haired musicians playing Dylan songs from 1962. And that is good. But there was no Spanish-language music, there was no rap, there was nothing to appeal to the East side of Austin. And there were no Rotarians up there. There should be.

This is a delicate moment, and it requires coalitions between libertarians and leftists, conservatives and liberals. And the art of making those coalitions is, alas, untaught among grassroots organizers, who more and more come from a narrow segment of this society: academia.

However, we have to appeal to the Business Week reader. Especially as we move into the occupation phase, the cost of the enterprise will start to wake up the businessman type. But they will be thrown back by their instincts into the prowar camp if they believe being anti-occupation is not serious. If, that is, they believe that it is the equivalent of being cool in a coffee house, or being indignant as a form of emotional refreshment. No, the indignation we need is to the death, in the bone -- one willing to give up being right and righteous, always a nice hierarchizing move, for being efficient.