Bollettino

It's Mornin' in Baghdad

Two papers confirm the claims of Baghdad's new mayor. The NYT reports that the INC in Mosul is receiving American military help, and refers to Baghdad's new mayor as a done deal. The London Times article ledes with an (unconsciously?) ironic statement:

"BAGHDAD was given its first lesson in democracy yesterday when self-appointed leaders emerged from nowhere to fill the power vacuum left by Saddam Hussein�s regime.
Amid the confusion caused by the absence of any authority � other than the US military � Iraqi citizens discovered that they had a governor, a mayor and even a religious leader to look after affairs. Mohammad Mohsen Zubaidi, an exiled political leader, announced that he was now running Bahgdad as the city�s governor, elected by a mysterious council of �religious and community leaders."

What reader in democracy is the London Times using? Machiavelli's The Prince? What seems to be happening is that the Pentagon is boosting the legitimacy of the INC paramilitaries where it can. In Iraq's open moment, the performative is up for grabs. You remember the performative, boys and girls, don't ya? JL Austin, the Oxford philosopher, created the term to designate those speech acts for which the truth condition is their own pronunciation in the appropriate context. For instance, saying I do at a wedding ceremony, or christening a ship, means that it is true that the speaker is married, and it is true that the ship has a certain name.

The contexts in Iraq have been blown to hell or looted, or are floating around the relics market, along with cuneiform tablets and golden figurines from Ur. We'll see if Mohammad Mohnsen Zubaidi has picked up on the one context left standing -- American military might.

Bollettino

Apparently, American troops are better at protecting the furnishings of Saddam's palaces than such trifling landmarks as the Baghdad Museum and library. Lolling about the place, General Franks --entering Baghdad under heavy guard -- is confident, as is his commander in chief, that the War is over.

As is the press. The main question asked by Slate's Chris Suellentrop right now is when are we going to roast those Syrians. That's fairly representative of media opinion.

Well, in the face of such unanimity, and given the nature of the unanimous, we have a hard time buying the pitch.

The occupation of Iraq differs from that of Germany or Japan, and is like that of Afghanistan, in that the other side disappeared. It's evanescence was taken, in Afghanistan, as surrender -- and for all practical purposes, the US definitely achieved its goal in Afghanistan. It denied a haven to Al qaeda. It overturned Alqy's protectors.

In Iraq, the forces of Saddam are through. But the War still rumbles, in Mosul, in Baghdad, in Basra. These are weeks of shifting. We don't think the War part 2 is necessary. We think it is preventable. We think the factional struggles that racked Northern Iraq don't have to be replicated on a national scale with quite that fury. But we also think that the longer the Americans display their insensibility to their situation in Iraq, as long as they sign contracts that seemingly are premised on the assumption of months, if not years, of occupation, we creep ever closer to a pot shot war. One in which Americans casualties will be higher than the pot shot war in Afghanistan, and Iraqi casualties, as seems to be the destiny of wars waged in Iraq, will be much higher still. There's probably some calculable multiple, now, of American to Iraqi deaths.

This story from Mosul is ominous enough not to have received much attention in the American press:

"Whatever the cause, the two shootings have killed 17 Iraqis and wounded 39, according to Dr. Ayad Ramadhani, director of the city's general hospital, who said the toll from Tuesday's shooting rose overnight to 13 from 10.

American officials said they believed that seven people died in the incident on Tuesday, but they had no figures for Wednesday's deaths.

All of the shootings occurred outside the governor's office in downtown Mosul, which was occupied by American troops on Tuesday. Iraqi witnesses said that in Wednesday's incident, Iraqi policemen who had surrounded looters in a nearby bank building had fired shots in the air to disperse a crowd. The Americans, thinking they were under fire, started shooting, they said. Among the wounded were the two police officers who fired the warning shots, a 12-year-old boy and 61-year-old man.

Maj. Steve Katz, a special operations civil affairs officer, said that despite the shooting, most Iraqis were still welcoming American forces here."

The smiley face that is being painted relentlessly across this occupation is treacherous. Welcomes, after all, presage stays. Making oneself at home. Sampling the home cooking. Electing the new "mayor" of Baghdad, and following him with a couple of jeep loads of Chalabi bullyboys, armed and clothed by the Pentagon.

In the meantime, where is Smilin' Jay's prefector in Northern Iraq? Isn't General "Loose" Bruce Moore supposed to be in charge up there? Although Loose Bruce is a hard man to keep tabs on. In a recent Glaswegian spreadsheet about the Military-Industrial complex about to run Iraq from the banks of the Potomac , Loose rated merely a mention. No company ties, no nothing. But if they keep mowing down Iraqis for unprofessional displays of impolitic fervor, eventually Loose Bruce will have to say something.

Bollettino

Forged in Ireland

Brigadier Gordon Kerr operated a special unit for the British in Northern Ireland, the Force Research Unit. Research means different things to different people. For some research means a library; for others, research means going through files in some archive. For others, research is a sedate and secluded career among test tubes. For the Brigadier, apparently, research meant hiring killers among the Protestant paramilitaries to track down and kill dissident Catholics.

At least, that is the rumor about a suppressed report, today.

Among the victims of Kerr's research was one Pat Finucanne. The BBC admirably compressed report about researching Finucane starts like this:

"Loyalist paramilitaries shot Mr Finucane 14 times as he sat eating a Sunday meal at home, wounding his wife in the process. The couple's three children witnessed the 1989 attack. In its statement claiming the killing, the UFF said they had killed "Pat Finucane, the IRA officer".

While Mr Finucane had represented IRA members, the family vehemently denied the allegation - and have been supported in this by the police. But, what has made the investigation into his murder so important to many in Northern Ireland is that it lies at the heart of allegations that some members of the security forces collaborated with loyalist paramilitaries to the extent that they could have stopped the killing if they had so wished."

The last extenuating clause --"they could have stopped the killing if they had so wished" -- is apparently a sop thrown to elements of the "security forces" who consider that they did a wonderful job in Ulster. It is the language used by Stevens in the non-release of his report, today. The Guardian story begins like this:

"The murders of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane in February 1989 and Protestant student Brian Lambert in November 1987 by paramilitaries "could have been prevented" if the security forces had not been involved in the plots, Sir John said.

"Sir John carried out a four-year inquiry into allegations of widespread collusion between Special Branch, army officers and Protestant terrorists. He concluded there was damning proof of the use of agents in assassinations and withholding evidence."

Another Guardian story fingers one of Kerr's researchers -- a Brian Nelson


"An FRU agent, Brian Nelson, infiltrated and effectively ran the Ulster Defence Association, a loyalist terror group. Sir John's team believes that Nelson, who died last week, was responsible for at least 30 murders, and that many of the victims he helped to identify were not involved in terrorism."

As Steven's investigation was going on, Kerr spoke up for Nelson:

"Sir John believes that he has debunked the claim by Brigadier Gordon Kerr, who ran the FRU at the time of Finucane's murder, that Nelson saved more than 200 lives while he was operating in Northern Ireland. His team has found evidence he saved two: one of them was Gerry Adams. Finucane was killed by loyalist terrorists guided to him by Nelson.

Sir John's detectives uncovered evidence that some police officers wanted Finucane killed and that the force had been warned he was a target: at least two of the loyalists involved were police informers. But nothing was done to stop the murder."


Paul Foot's column is a little more cut to the chase about the Nelson-Kerr connection. Nelson wasn't just your average researcher/killer -- he organized arms shipments to the Protestant paramilitaries, under the benign protection of his fellow Researchers, and no doubt kept his group up to snuff with recruitment drives and plans for strategic attacks. All the gentlemen involved seem to have learned a lot from the Argentine military of the 1970s. In order to uphold their honor they were forced, alas, to frame an Army officer who was appalled at the collusion in assassination and gang warfare and threatened to grass. They framed the man for murdering his best friend, and had him sent away to prison for ten years. When Nelson was finally brought in on the charge of four murders, his researching buddy, Kerr, spoke up for him in court.

This case indicates some of the features that are no doubt in crystallization as Richard Perle's friend Ahmed Chelabi forms his own paramilitary group in Iraq. Apparently, Chelabi has sent a representative to Baghdad to claim dibs on the governance of that new American territory.

The deep collusion between army units and paramilitaries, the assassination of selected targets as the army officially presents itself as a neutral party, the importation of arms, and especially the nature of the targets -- lawyers, students, any educated person who is willing to speak out -- no doubt this is what is up next for the INC. Interesting. As Angus Calder showed long ago, Ireland was the site where the prototype of British imperialism was perfected in the seventeenth century -- the ethnic cleansing of the North American indians, for instance, followed on plans made by Raleigh, originally, for the ethnic cleansing of Catholic Irish -- and this was true down to the nomenclature. Raleigh's idea was to set up protestant plantations, as he called them, in Ireland. The Elizabethan effort floundered, but many of the elements of it became standard issue imperialist tools. Even down to the nineteenth century -- the British response to famine in Ireland being repeated in India, almost laissez faire impulse for laissez faire impulse.

Bollettino

Reviews, reviews. We went gleefully after Remnick on the Lenin issue a couple of days ago. Now it is Paul Berman's turn. Except... surely Scialabba's review in the Nation is misinterpreting the guy. Does Berman really believe that he can decode, in Lincoln's decision to persevere in waging war against the South, the choice to "repair the Founders' mistake and render "the whole concept [of liberal society] a little sturdier." In so doing, it took on a "universal mission": "the defense of democratic self-rule...for the entire planet"? Tell me I am not reading that.


Scialabba, with the crashing understatement of Stanley meeting Livingston in the jungles of Central Africa, writes, "This is a dubious interpretation of the Civil War..." Hmm, that's for sure. When Hegel decided that the miserable king of Prussia was the end of history, or when Goethe decided Napoleon was the spirit of history on horseback, surely the one had the excuse of syncophancy, and the other the excuse of Sturm und Drang. But Berman should have lived long enough not to let such heady nonsense escape onto a published page.

Scialabba coolly disses Berman's anti-Chomsky-ism (sure to make the book a rave for the New Republic crowd):

Perhaps because Berman dislikes being reminded forcefully of the enormous factual record that demonstrates the absurdity of this claim [the record of American subversion of liberties and defense of oligarchies during the last one hundred years], Terror and Liberalism includes a lengthy attack on Noam Chomsky. Ten pages of this slender book are devoted to painting Chomsky as a prime specimen of the left-wing "simple-minded rationalist," whose inability to comprehend the "mystery, self-contradiction, murk, or madness" of totalitarian movements leads him to attribute all the evil in the world to the "greed" of "giant corporations and their intellectual and governmental servants."

"After the Indochina war, Berman writes, Chomsky had no way to explain the atrocities in Cambodia. He therefore set out, basing himself on his "customary blizzard of... obscure sources" (an ungracious remark, this, coming from the author of so lightly documented and empirically thin a book as Terror and Liberalism), to demonstrate that "in Indochina, despite everything published in the newspapers...that genocide never occurred," or if it did, was all America's fault."

However, to return to our little hobbyhorse about Lenin, Scialabba seems more than willing to play Berman's game of pulling Lenin out of historical context. While S. disputes Berman's typology of totalitarianism as a popular pathology depending on the charisma of an obviously mad leader, he gives us this explanation of Bolshevism:

"The fit with Bolshevism is far from perfect. For one thing, the proletariat was not exactly the people of God. It never dwelt in peace and simplicity; it was born with the modern world, from the chaos and upheaval of industrialization. For another thing, Lenin was not exactly the Leader Berman says he was: "a superman," "a god," "a nihilist," "a genius beyond all geniuses...the man on horseback who, in his statements and demeanor, was visibly mad, and who, in his madness, incarnated the deepest of all the anti-liberal impulses, which was the revolt against rationality." Lenin was certainly an arrogant, cold-hearted son of a bitch, and it would have been much better for the world if he had fallen off (or under) that train before it reached the Finland Station. But he was not "mad" or a "nihilist," he did not regard himself as a god, and he was annoyed when other people did (or pretended to). Most important, Bolshevism was not exactly a "pathological mass movement," which, according to Berman, is the fundamental characteristic of all totalitarianisms and precisely what liberal intellectuals consistently fail to understand about them. Bolshevism was pathological all right, but it was not a mass movement. It was an elite, skillfully and ruthlessly controlling demoralized and apathetic masses. It was, as Nicolas Werth wrote in The Black Book of Communism, "a state against its people."

'Demoralized and apathetic masses"? Somehow, in the history of the Russian Revolution, the small, hardly worth mentioning fact of the war against Germany and Austria goes out of focus fast. The masses were demoralized, but not by the Bolsheviks - they were demoralized by the war. The 'party elite' would never have been able to take over a streetcorner if they hadn't relied on a strong military contingent. The demoralized and apathetic masses belonged to the Mensheviks. The aspirations of the Russian bourgoisie were crystalized in literature rathen than politics -- which is why we are rather fond of the Russian bourgoisie. Nabokov jr is much more representative of their abilities than Nabokov sr., try as the latter did to implant a form of parliamentarianism on Russian soil.

Sweeping historical views, such as Berman's seems to be, whiCh attempt to synchronize morality and history -- modifications of the Whig version of history, in other words -- always seem to leave out wars, famines, and the rest of it. If Berman really thinks France was disarmed pre-WWII because French leftists were pacifists, he has reached the acme of silliness. Alain's pacifism was much less debilitating to the French than the unwillingness of the British to combine with France to enforce the provisions of the Versailles treaty that France, after all, had insisted on. The reason for that is that Britain didn't want to spend the money necessary to have the military might to confront Hitler. If Berman thinks Blum didn't want to support the Popular side in Spain, he definitely has lost his connection to the long, lone song of leftist libertarianism. We follow that songline faithfully. Pity that he's lost it.

Bollettino

Paul Foot's column in the Guardian ejects some salvoes at the League of Leftist Warmongers -- presumably Nick Cohen. Foot's thesis is that Democracy only grows from below. This is pretty much our thesis, too. But our second thesis -- that time and circumstance dictate events, not iron laws abstracted from the flow of history - modifies our first one. We don't think that Northern Iraq, in which, after faction and civil discord, a civil society was beginning to peep out, is anamolous.

Foot's claim arises from two questions put to an imaginary LLW opponent:

"As I understand the LLW position, they would, in general, prefer tyrants to be overthrown by the people they oppress. At times, however, they complain the tyranny is so savage, so universally terrifying that it has to be overthrown by superior military force from elsewhere. So the only way to topple Saddam was by US military might. Two points arise. First, in Iran in 1979 the people themselves toppled the tyranny of the Shah - a tyranny every bit as terrifying as that of Saddam Hussein (and imposed and sustained, incidentally, by the US). Second, what guarantee is there that any sustainable democracy will now succeed in Iraq?"

Foot answers his questions by claiming that, 1, it was possible for Saddam to be overthrown the old fashioned way, and that 2., Iraq's hell will be giving way to further hells:

"In the event, all that has been created on the pile of corpses in this war (and most people die in such a war not by being shot or bombed directly, but from loss of limb, blood, disease or plague) is a political vacuum into which plunge a host of contractors, bounty hunters, looters and minorities terrified of another round of persecution. In this chaos, the only beneficiaries are the millionaires and their toadying politicians who caused it in the first place. Our political leaders promise elections, as though poor dismembered Iraq can be compared to East Germany or Czechoslovakia or Indonesia or Serbia after their tyrants were deposed in the 1980s and 1990s. In all those countries, elections followed close on the end of the dictatorships. But in all those countries the tyrants were toppled by movements from below. In Iraq, as in Afghanistan, the tyrants were toppled from above, by stronger military power in other countries. In Afghanistan, they are still waiting for elections and will wait a long time yet, but not as long, I expect, as in Iraq."

Where Foot finds a political vacuum, we find an open moment. We are more comfortable with the term civil society than democracy because democracy has come to mean elections. Elections are fine, but they aren't sufficient to create real liberty. In fact, they can impede real liberty, especially when they are used as excuses to strip a political system of the various subsystems that countervail established power.

Among those subsystems is a sense of humor. One of the things we have liked about the last week is that, even through the fog of war reporting, there seems to be a lot of Iraqi humor directed at the momentous events that dim the lights in every household every night. It seems grotesque to speak of humor when, as Foot puts it, the corpses are heaped everywhere. But how else to explain this article by NYT reporter Ian Fisher:


"The Americans are the ones who have been looting and taking things out of the stores and giving them to families," said Amer Karim, 30, who was himself selling two industrial ceiling fans and a new telephone in a street market in the Kadhimiya section of Baghdad. "So anyone who is selling these things didn't really loot it."

Or the rumor that Saddam Hussein has taken refuge in the USA?

Surely Iraqis who are getting used to being accosted by arrogant newsmen looking for pathos and gratitude have got Fisher's number. And surely that is a sign of the times.

Bollettino

Our friend D. says he hates it when we get all maudlin over our own poverty and misery, so we have avoided talking about all that tasteless stuff. But recently our poverty and misery are getting out of hand. In the past month, we have received a total of 225 dollars from those who we have contracted to write for -- out of a total of 1000 dollars owed. On this amount, a man with our daily calory intake ... not to mention our need for alcohol ... cannot exist.

So anybody who has a tip about jobs in the Austin area -- preferably ones that don't involve a tremendous loss of vital fluids -- should write us at rgathman@aol.com.
Thanks.

Bollettino

The BBC news, doing its best to subvert the brightest and best that has been thought or spun -- at least if we confine this kind of thing, which can get out of hand, to the set of responsible Pentagon apparatchiks that operate in the circle around Wolfowitz -- featured a story on the Shi'ite protest of the Founding Convention at An Nasiriyah, under Smilin' Jay Garner, as always Iraq's number one choice for el jefe supremo. Jay, in an exclusive with the Scotsman, confided that he was reminded of the Philadelphia convention of 1787 himself:

"But General Jay Garner insisted that United States-style democracy could sprout on the shards of Saddam Hussein�s government.

"I don�t think they had a love-in when they had Philadelphia in 1787," he said before he left. "Anytime you start the process it�s fraught with dialogue, tensions, coercion, and should be."

Iraq, he suggested, could be the richest country in the Middle East within a few years."

That Jay, always with the history of Iraq at his fingertips -- and, of course, due to some thousands-weight of smart bombs and the cluster kind, Philadelphia in 1787 is, practically, Iraq's history now.

The Christian Science Monitor features this quote on the Philadelphia like meeting:


"Tuesday's meeting of Iraqis and Iraqi exiles in the shadow of the ancient ziggurat of Ur was simply the beginning of what is likely to be a lengthy process. Its ultimate aim, according to US officials: build a government in which all Iraqis, be they Sunni, Shiite, or Kurd, feel they have a representative voice."There are some very dangerous cleavages there," says Rashid Khalidi, a historian of the Middle East at the University of Chicago. "If exploited by outside forces they could cause problems."

Outside forces! Yikes! Like, say, a large superpower about 8,000 miles away, pulling all the strings?

Sorry about that. We've canned the pipsqueak that stole in and wrote that line. A cheap shot at our brave attempts to forge an Iraq fit for the vision of Iraq's corps of eager beaver proconsuls in D.C. An Iraq in which every corporation could participate in the sweet, sweet air of freedom sweeping that great Middle Eastern piece of real estate; in which, privatized, the natural resources of that great country can flow as the invisible hand intended them to; in which, angry at the wickedness of their neighbors, the government might even support staging surgical improvements, via the latest weaponry, in Damascus and Teheran, if this is so suggested by a close ally.

In other events celebrating the dawn of democracy, the NYT reported that "similar demonstrations [to those staged by the Shi'ites] were under way in Baghdad. In Mosul, an angry crowd stoned an Iraqi opposition leader praising the arrival of United States marines. A gun battle ensued in which 10 Iraqis were reported killed and 16 were wounded.

"The senior Shiite cleric in the holy city of Najaf, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sestani, sent a message through his son today saying he was in hiding until the religious strife that has included murders and demonstrations there subsided."

A gun battle? No doubt instigated by Rashid Kalidi's "outside forces." Although according to the WP, the NYT story reports that US Marines were the gunners. Here's another story, from Australia, about these confusing, although unimportant, events:

"US forces accused of shooting on an angry crowd in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul overnight said they had come under fire from at least two gunmen and fired back, but did not aim at the crowd.

The shots came as the newly-appointed governor of the city was making a speech from the building housing his offices which was deemed too pro-US by his listeners, witnesses said."There were protesters outside, 100 to 150, there was fire, we returned fire," a US military spokesman said."

Although the returned fire was trained on a roof, apparently ten to twelve people in the crowd died. But the reporting on this incident reminds us -- do we hear an echo here -- of the way Palestinian deaths somehow involve rockthrowing crowds, totally innocent gunplay by soldiers, and the miraculous, and unimportant, deaths of ten here, three there.

So it goes as Philadelphia like feelings permeate the junketeers of freedom over there, and all of us over here. God bless and good night.