Bollettino

(fifth in the series)

I don’t know a lot about Iraq. I can’t name one single Iraqi singer or song. I don’t know the name of one Iraqi tv show, actor, or novelist.

I share space in this cloud of unknowing with 99.9% of the American public.

However, I have read a few library books. I have read a few magazine and newspaper articles. I have a fair memory. I have Google. And, mostly, I have a pretty good nose for sophistries, the lacuna in stories, and special pleading.

Now, in the current occupation of Iraq, there is one general and significant difference between the Iraqis and the Americans: the Americans can withdraw. When the Americans go, the Iraqis will have to live with whatever situation (in the creation of which they have mostly acted as junior partners) is left behind. Since the point of this series is to envision withdrawal, I thought it best to knock hard against three myths, as I see them, about Iraq.

1. The ungrateful/abused Iraqi

When Fred Barnes, the editor of the Weekly Standard, made his sahib’s tour of Iraq this spring, he came back with stories to delight the senses. Much as Lincoln Steffens, setting foot on Ukranian soil in 1930, was ravished with the scents and sounds of the future, so, too, Barnes, coming upon newly painted school houses, electric wiring, and entrepreneurial Iraqi exiles, saw that “Iraq worked.” There was, however, a big green fly in the ointment – the Iraqis. Frankly, Barnes revealed, after all we’d done for them, they weren’t grateful.

Sahibs hate a vulgar streak of ingratitude among the bearers.

The liberal hawks have been, well, more liberal. Liberals are a nurture, not nature kind of people. The liberal idea is that the Iraqis are abused. David Aaronovich might not have started this theme, but he went through it pretty early in the game, right after it appeared that there was an insufficiency of flowers greeting the liberators. Why the hesitancy? Surely it is because Saddam, the bad father, beat the Iraqis, the good children, until they hid from the social workers under the looted furniture.

These are the most overt acts of rhetorically infantilizing the Iraqis. More subtle versions were on display throughout the Mission Accomplished months last year. NPR was especially prone to radio shows about U.S. soldiers teaching the poor, clueless Iraqi security people, with their adorable stumbling English (imagine, they didn’t know English!) all about democracy. Never mind that the security people in the Bronx and L.A. might have benefited from similar lessons – the real irony here, of course, is that the classroom should have been reversed. The Iraqis should have been teaching the American GIs how to enter an Iraqi house, how to distinguish one Iraqi holiday from another, etc., etc. As we now all too painfully know. At the time, though, the Iraqis were seen as something like the Noble Indian, to whom we were imparting the benefits of the alphabet. The Noble Indian, however, had the decency to vanish, inexplicably, into the reservation; we can now call them Native Americans and feel proud of our sensitivity in a Kevin Kostner-ish kind of masculine way. The Iraqis, on the other hand, have vulgarly survived.

This is all an echo of what Said wrote about in Orientalism: ‘Formally the Orientalist sees himself as accomplishing the union of Orient with Occident, maily by asserting the technological political supremacy of the West. History in such a union is attenuated if not banished.”

So perhaps it is necessary to say some things about Iraq such as even I, an ignorant American, such have been able to gather over the last couple years.

For instance, Iraq has been a nation longer than either Israel or Saudi Arabia. Its unity has suffered the shock, in the last three decades, of three devastating wars. At the same time, Iraq has gone through periods of quite exceptional prosperity – especially in the seventies, when the price of oil surged. That price of oil benefited the country partly because the Iraqis were the leading contributors towards the constitution of the Middle East’s only successful international organization, OPEC. Even under a brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein, the Iraqis were able to put their infrastructure back together after the first Gulf war faster than the Americans have been able to do it in the past year.

They are not, in short, savages, either noble or ignoble. Nor are they abused children or ungrateful teens. According to people in the oil business, in fact, the Iraqi Ministry of Oil was one of the most competent in the world before the sanctions.

The image of Iraqis as a people who cannot do things for themselves count, since they serve as a sub rosa justification for the complex economic arrangement that the CPA has arrived at with its country. On the one hand, there is the enormous American generosity – a flow of funds unmatched since the Marshall plan. On the other hand is who controls the funds – the CPA. It is the defense department that still, a year on, has final say on all the major contracts. It is as if a man came to your house, tied you up, gave you birthday presents, and played with them before your eyes.

There is one gift, however, above all the others, that the Bush administration got right. That gift is debt relief. In fact, if Iraq could get out from under the crushing burden of the debts contracted under Hussein, as well as the war reparations, the country wouldn’t need American beneficence. Like any country endowed with a vast natural resource that the state contracts out, Iraq could once again borrow the money it needed to rebuild the infrastructure in the way its government wanted. It shouldn’t be necessary to lecture conservatives on the vices of welfare, but apparently, in the case of Iraq, they have made a large exception to all conservative principles.

If we are envisioning an exit, then, the first thing to envision is the transfer of economic power to an Iraqi government.

Next post: The Kurds.

Bollettino

A wise and a good man may indeed be sometimes induced to comply with a number whose opinion he generally approves, though it be perhaps against his own. But this
liberty should be made use of upon very few occasions, and those of small importance, and then only with a view of bringing over his own side another time to something of greater and more public moment. But to sacrifice the innocency of a friend, the good of our country, or our own conscience to the humour, or passion, or interest of a party, plainly shews that either our heads or our hearts are not as they should be. – Jonathan Swift.

(Read previous three posts. Fourth in a series)

In order to envision the exit from Iraq, as we said, it is important to have a clear view of why we invaded in the first place.

It is also important to have a clear view of why the occupation went so badly awry.

When America invaded Iraq, we think there were two basic principles, enshrined in the Rumsfeld strategy, that guaranteed the disasters of occupation that followed.

1. The unwillingness to commit a sufficient number of troops; and
2. The plan to implement economic “shock therapy” in Iraq at the point of a gun.

1. If one X rays the unwillingness to commit troops, two things strike the impartial observer. The first is that to raise the number of soldiers from the United States alone, given the American troop commitment world wide, would have meant implementing some kind of draft, or major call up of the Reserve, in 2003. This, in turn, would have meant that Bush would have to make the case for sacrifice to the American public. That case was iffy at best. It was in Bush’s interest to wage this war in such a way that the American public’s involvement would be kept at a spectatorial distance.

However, if American troops weren’t available, how about foreign troops? Here, Rumsfeldian politics kicked in. The Defense Department analysis of the first Gulf War was that foreigners – other Coalition members, like the Saudis and the French – had too much influence on the decision making that went on during that war. Rumsfeld was determined to control Iraq from the Pentagon, and he sacrificed a real commitment of international troops for that end. Why was he determined to control Iraq? It was not only because the war was waged as part of the grand strategy we outlined in the previous post. It was also because:

2. The ideology of the decision makers was such that Iraq was considered a test case for the Forbes end of the Republican party.

As the first American proconsul in Iraq, Jay Garner, has testified, the main concern of the Americans around the newly minted CPA was not to hold elections, or to secure the country, but to radically change the economy. Privatization was the name of the game. The grand strategy was all very well, but Iraq, as a specific prize, became irresistible for the same conservative ideologues who have desired, for the past thirty years, to inflict such wonders as the flat tax and privatized Social Security on the American public. After thirty years of frustration, here was an opportunity not to be missed.

What was missed was the lessons of the very recent past. In Poland and Russia, where shock therapy has been tried, one thing became evident – the sudden transformation of a socialist system into a radically privatized system causes an immediate spike in unemployment, and a lessening of the living standard for the majority of the population. I will leave undiscussed, here, whether in the long term the majority gains from these policies. I don’t care, in this instance. What concerns the argument is that Rumsfeld wanted to preside over an occupation with a force half to a third of the size that military men advise, while zapping the economy in such a way that, among a heavily armed population, the unemployment of young men would rise, and the living standards of average families would fall.

To put it briefly: this was insane.(1)

It is interesting to speculate what Nixon would have done, in 2002, given Rumsfeld’s analysis of the Middle East. Nixon was an order of magnitude smarter than Rumsfeld. Nixon would have seen at once the flaw in the Neo-con plan. The kind of regime change they wanted to effect in Iraq was, in Nixon’s time, effected by proxies. Whether it was a Marxist Chilean president or a lefty Guatamalan, one thing about America was that we preserved our distance while exercizing our power. Nixon would immediately have looked for a way not to involve American troops in the overthrow of Saddam.

Thank God Nixon is dead. Rumsfeld’s stupidity – and the man is stupid in that peculiarly bureaucratic way that Gogol’s portraits of bureaucratic chiefs captured – Rumsfeld, one feels sure, would have risen high in the Czar’s service – has accidentally produced a situation that is much happier for the Iraqis, although not, in the short term, for the Americans. We think, given certain modifications of Rumsfeld’s grand strategy, even the American interest can be served if we conduct our exit correctly.

In our next post, we will go through some myths about Iraq.

1. I want to be straightforward in these posts. However, I must put in an aside here. There is a defense of Rumsfeld that has gone the rounds of the conservative commentators that goes like this: compare our situation in Iraq to the situation in Germany in 1945, or the situation that Lincoln faced in 1860, etc. etc. In these situations, there were enormous initial problems. But we admire Lincoln and Truman today because those situations were corrected.

There is a problem with this way of looking at history as composed of self contained individual events, like pearls on a string: it isn’t human. It is recommended by the Tramalfadorians in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. However, I don’t have a tramalfadorian brain, yet.

So, from a simple human point of view: there is a fundamental difference between unprecedented and precedented situations. Lincoln as an improvisor in 1862, going through Generals, is a man we can admire. But if Lincoln was fighting his Civil war ten or twenty years after another Civil War had been fought, we would be much less forgiving of his faults. In fact, we’d think he was an incompetent redneck from Illinois. And we’d be right – in that situation.

Rumsfeld presides over a Department with almost 75 years of institutional memory about various wars and occupations. He ignored it all. We are now paying a price for that piece of arrogance. Conservatives call it tradition – liberals call it progress – Hegelians call it the Spirit – but all agree that events in history are connected. Military men weren’t bs-ing when they said that standard military operating procedure calls for a ratio of a certain number of soldiers to a certain occupied population. Rumsfeld’s over-ruling this is less like Lincoln improvising in 1862, and more like an Intelligent Design scientist challenging the “Darwinian bias” in school biology textbooks in 2003. It is a sign of fundamentalist ignorance. And it shouldn’t be forgiven.

Bollettino

Why are we in Iraq?

(See previous two posts before reading this one, dear reader)

To understand the war in Iraq, we need to understand the reason that we invaded Iraq. The average American can be forgiven for being confused on this point, since, on numerous occasions, Bush himself seems sincerely and visibly confused about why he is occupying this Middle Eastern country.

There are three general reasons mentioned, usually, for justifying the invasion of Iraq:
1. Saddam Hussein’s possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction;
2. The tie between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein;
3. and finally, the human rights abuses of Saddam Hussein.

I think it is easy to show that, even if one concedes that there were WMD, that there were ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and that Hussein’s regime was massively inhumane, these could not be the reason we invaded Iraq. Or rather, these reasons alone would not pick out Iraq as the one unique nation we would invade in 2003.

1. The WMDs. By the year 2000, there was one nation our intelligence agencies knew a., possessed nuclear weapons, in violation of international treaty; b., sold or exchanged nuclear materials to our avowed enemies; and c., had close and supportive ties to Islamic terrorists. That country was Pakistan.
In contrast, by 2000, Iraq had been effectually divided between a northern section and a main section for seven years. During this time, if Saddam Hussein had possessed WMD and the willingness to use them, as he had during the Iraq war, he would have. He didn’t. Why? Well, it turns out that he didn’t even have WMD, but even at the time, those who thought he did thought, also, that he didn’t want to face the consequences of using WMD.

Our point is that the bias towards punishing countries for illegally possessing WMD

2. The Al Qaeda tie argument is much simpler.
Grant, for a moment, that Cheney is right, and that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda.
Now, we can reason by subtraction here. Given the above supposition, we know that three countries, at least, had ties to Al Qaeda: Iraq, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.
The idea of going to war with one of those countries would then seem to depend on the strength of the tie. So do a simple thought experiment: subtract a country, and ask if Usama bin Laden would have been prevented from launching the attack on 9/11 without the aid of that country.
Pakistan is easy. Pakistan’s secret service essentially set up the Taliban. The ISI also supported a network of Islamic warriors throughout Central Asia. Without Pakistan, there would have been no 9/11.
Saudi Arabia is trickier, since less is known. But it is known that the Saudis negotiated to find Osama a place, after the U.S. demanded his expulsion from Sudan. And we also know that large amounts of Saudi money flowed to Al Qaeda. The material symbol of Saudi help is the fact that the majority of the hijackers were Saudi. So there is a case that without S.A., there would have been no 9/11.
Iraq is much simpler. There simply is no record of largescale financial support. There were no training camps in Iraq for Al Qaeda. The ties that Cheney’s crew has publicized, even if true, played a minimal support role in 9/11.
Again, even given the truth, then, of this justification for the war, the bias against Iraq is presupposed by the justification.

3. Human rights. In the build-up to the war, LI said that there were two wars being debated in the press. One was Bush’s war, and the other was Hitchen’s – named for the most ardent advocate of the third justification.

Hitchens war always discretely skipped over a large problem. The war he – and liberal advocates – advocated was to be led by the same people who, in the eighties, allied the U.S. with Saddam Hussein.

Rumsfeld was the most prominent member of this group, but Wolfowitz, too, was a member of the Reagan foreign policy team that came into office with the explicit promise to overturn Jimmy Carter’s human rights foreign policy agenda.

The puzzle, here, is that if the case for the war was really a human rights one, then these people had wonderful conversion stories to tell. Nothing persuades like conversion. Yet, unless I missed it, I have not heard Rumsfeld tell of how he realized that helping a man who was ordering gas attacks on the same day Rumsfeld shook hands with him was a bad and immoral thing. I have never heard Wolfowitz describe his ambassadorship to Indonesia, where he rubbed shoulders with one of the world’s great mass murderers, Suharto, lead to a Damascus experience.
Again, what we have to ask is: why Iraq, then?

I think the clue lies in the people who lead us into this war – Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc. LI thinks that the reason we are in Iraq is that far from changing their mind about the tilt towards Iraq in the 80s (which has gone down memory hole – still, it is startling to read that, in the days after the Washington Post reported the gassing of the Kurds, the Reagan White House response was to ask for a tighter arms embargo on Iran – in other words, to award Saddam Hussein even more), Rumsfeld, et al. wanted to pursue it through other means. In other words, they wanted Iraq to play the role Saddam Hussein gave the country in the 80s – a hostile state poised against Iran and Syria – but with someone American friendly in place of Saddam.

That’s it. It is that simple.
Or, rather, it is that simple in this instance. But the reason for wanting a state that would function like Saddam’s did in the 80s takes us to the larger, Rumsfeldian perspective on the Middle East. Their theory goes something like this.

From 53 to 79, American policy in the Middle East could balance our alliance with Israel with our dependence on Saudi Arabia because there was a stable third term between the two: Iran.

After the Shah fell, our Middle Eastern policy was increasingly skewed by, on the one hand, the pull of Israel’s interests (which the Rumsfeldians interpret as, eventually, the full occupation of Palestine – Eretz Israel as the manifest destiny of that nation) and, on the other hand, our need to pacify the Saudis. The end of communism merely hastened the decay, here, by removing our strongest ideological bond to Saudi Arabia. In order to make the Middle East work, what was needed was a spectrum of states, going from Israel, our closest ally, to Saudi Arabia, which was always going to be a troublesome ally. Iraq, in this scheme, works perfectly. It could serve as a pressure point against Iran, and against Syria. It could, in other words, play the role of reversing the destruction of the old American policy from 53 to 79. Eventually, it could help lead to the re-Pahlavization of Iran. All of which would put such pressure on Saudi Arabia as to neutralize its hostility towards Israel. At last, we would reach equilibrium in the Middle East.

This, we think, states the subtending reason that we went to war with Iraq. If we are right, we have a reason for considering Iran, and our relationship with that country, among those conditions that have to be considered in getting out of Iraq. We will not, in other words, get out of Iraq successfully unless we end the remnant of our dual containment policy with Iran.

Bollettino

The Glass Student – or The Man of Glass, in Samuel Putnam’s translation – has a plot that goes like this:

One day two students, traveling to the University at Salamanca, come upon a peasant boy sleeping under a bush by the side of the road. The boy refuses to give his real name, but does express a desire to learn. So the students employ him as a servant. He reads much in Salamanca, then parts from his masters and falls in with a recruiting agent, goes with him as an independent soldier to Italy, tours a sort of grand tour of Europe (which was the equivalent, at the time, of making a grand tour of Hapsburg battlefields0, then returns to Salamanca. There, a woman of easy virtue falls in love with him. Tomas does not return her affection, so she makes him a drink into which she has mixed a love potion. Far from arousing his desire, the potion poisons him to the point where he almost loses his life. After a prolonged illness, he recovers, physically. However, he is now under the firm delusion that he is made of glass. He becomes famous because of this delusion, which is accompanied not only by odd, protective behaviors, but by a sudden access of sharp speaking in public. In short, he becomes a sort of Diogenes, making pithy pronouncements about people and events. Eventually he is cured of the illness, becomes a soldier again, and dies in Flanders.

The interest of this story lies in Rodaja’s madness. Here is Cervantes’ describing the onset of the illness:

“For six months Tomas was in bed, and in the course of that time he withered aways and became, as the saying goes, nothing by skin and bones, while all his senses gave evidence of being deranged. His friends applied every remedy in their power and succeeded in curing the illness of his body but not that of his mind, with the result that he was left a healthy man but afflicted with the strangest kind of madness that had ever been heard of up to that time. The poor fellow imagined that he was wholly made of glass, and consequently, when anyone came near him, he would give a terrible scream, begging and imploring them with the most rartional-sounding arguments to keep their distance lest they shatter him, since really and truly he was not like other men but fashioned of glass from head to foot.”



As a man of glass, Tomas makes his way through Salamanca, loudly telling coaches and little boys with pebbles to stay out of his way. These remarks, which are at first self-protective, gradually turn critical. The comedy of the story is in the fact that it is only after turning into glass that Tomas also becomes ‘sharp’ – that is, he begins to make remarks in the fashion of one of the Cynical philosophers. Remarks that “hold up a glass” or mirror to society. Cervantes’ technique, in the first part of the story is similar to that he employs in Don Quixote – a juxtaposition of madness and high rationality. So Tomas has this reaction, for instance, to storms: “When it thundered he trembled like quicksilver and would run out into the fields and not come back to town until the storm had passed.” Yet he is more than willing to tell off a student who wants to be a point, expose the legal profession to a lawyer, and talk down painters. Remember, given the touchy Spanish sense of honor of the time, the painters, poets and lawyers would certainly find these kinds of things worthy of challenge.



The truth is, the idea of the story is better than the story. Why are we talking about the Glass Student? Because we have been looking for an emblem with which to illustrate what we are doing, here. And what, by extension, the public intellectual does in the age of the declining liberal democracy. On this weblog. LI is at once so imminently fragile – fragile so that any stray event can shatter us – and at the same time impelled by some demon, in this condition, to make sharper and sharper comments. It is as if there is a double and opposite process going on, in which the level of our frangibility serves as the very condition of our speaking at all. This, at least, is the first allegorical level of the glass student that we’ve been pondering.



The second level is that the fragility is false, a delusion, and the words are pointless. This is where allegory becomes comedy. This is the comic dilemma of a public intellectual when the grand scheme of liberatory oppositions collapses. When, that is, the univocal has become the universal. LI has been posting in this spot for three years, and watched a whole culture of commentary grow up on the web, blog by blog. And our impression is that blog culture is evidence of the serious and incurable narcissism and egotism that are seemingly the defining characteristics of the comfortable of our time. It is as if, in Hegelian terms, the culture has stepped back – increasingly, self reflection is blocked as the ability to imagine the other has become either so distorted by patronizing academic jargon, with the terrible euphemisms that wipe out the Other as a historical entity, or has vanished as a determinant, at all, from our current consciousness. The disproportion between the anger at the pictures taken at Abu Ghraib and the acts the pictures show is evidence of this on a concrete level. But take, on a much humbler level, what we are doing here. We predict, we analyze, we go on and on, ransacking our reading, our mental activity, etc. etc. – to our own immense satisfaction. Yet we have glimpsed, out of the corner of our eye, so to speak, the ridiculousness of our bellowing, the complete vacuum that swallows our protests, the sheer pointlessness of thinking that, by piling words up, we are ‘doing something’.



We aren’t. This isn’t just a waste of time – the sheer emptiness of our opinions is a sort of dissipation of our life itself, a sort of slow motion, slapstick death.



Well, there you are, then.



So it is under the sign of the Glass student that we want to dedicate the next three or four posts to imaging getting out of Iraq. It is, according to established American opinion, unthinkable to get out of Iraq right now. That’s a performative unthinkability – the more it is unthought, the more power is given to those who are ‘authorized’ to do the thinking. So the first step in getting out of Iraq is to imagine getting out of Iraq.



First, then, we want to understand why we are in Iraq in the first place. Then we want to talk about the opposition to the war, in this country, and in particular explore how the the Democratic party has played the role of co-conspirator in the war, and evidently will continue to play that role. Third, we will explore what we think (again, bellowing like the Glass Student) could make withdrawing from Iraq a (as the marriage counselors say) “positive experience” – starting from the angle that any withdrawal from Iraq should be coupled with détente with Iran,



This is what we will do, if we have time.

"Larvatus prodeo." – Descartes' motto.
“I advance, masked.”





In 1641, Descartes published his Meditations. The book contains a reference to a man who “imagines” he is made of glass. The reference is embedded in the first of the meditations, the one dedicated to doubt: And how could I deny that these hands and this body belong to me? If only, perhaps, by comparing myself to those insane people whose brains are so troubled and obscured by the black vapors of bile that they are constantly assuring people that they are kings, when they are actually poor; or that they are arrayed in gold and purple, when they are nude; or who imagine themselves to be pitchers, or to have bodies of glass?”
(“Et comment est-ce que je pourrais nier que ces mains et ce corps-ci soient à moi? si ce n'est peut-être que je me compare à ces insensés de qui le cerveau est tellement troublé et offusqué par les noires vapeurs de la bile qu'ils assurent constamment qu'ils sont des rois lorsqu'ils sont très pauvres; qu'ils sont vêtus d'or et de pourpre lorsqu'ils sont tout nus; ou s'imaginent être des cruches ou avoir un corps de verre?”)

Some have imagined that the man made of glass might be a reference, or a memory, of Cervantes’ novella, the Glass Student. It is, at least, nice to think so. In fact, given that Cervantes story had been out for three years in 1619, Descartes great year and the one that shaped his Discours, one hopes that he read it in one of the tents he lived in when he served in the troops of Maximilien of Bavaria. It was in that year that, as we know from the Discourse, Descartes was “lying on a stove” … but here is how a very comprehensive biography describes him:

“So in 1619, Descartes engaged himself with the troops of Maximilian of Bavaria. But he didn’t participate in the terrible Thirty Years War. The Catholic Army to which he belonged took its winter quarters on the banks of the Danube. We can easily imagine Descartes quartered on some civilian “in an oven,” meaning in a room well heated by one of those porcelain ovens which were beginning to become common, served by a domestic in livery, and entirely delivered over to pure reflexion. On the 10 of November, 1619, marvelous dreams alerted him to the fact that he was destined to unify all the disciplines by an admirable science, of which he would be the inventor. Descartes therefore abandoned the military life and returned to France, going through Germany and Holland. In the course of his journey he had occasion to defend himself victoriously with a sword on board a crossing boat, against some sailors who aimed at stripping him and murdering him.”

The French have always remembered that Descartes was a soldier first. It is, in fact, possible to see the method of doubt as a sort of metaphysical tactical assault, with the tactics threatening to entirely overthrow the grand strategy of the mind in search of certitude. What we like to think, however, is that Descartes – who was using his soldiering as a way of escaping the books of his early schooling – might still have picked up a book that tells the story of another soldier – one Tomas Rodaja, the “glass student.”

Cervantes ““El licenciado Vidriera” has, according to an essay by George Shipley, been both one of the most commented on and one of the most disparaged of Cervantes novellas. Shipley tends towards disparagement himself. After re-reading the story, we understand why. But we also understand why we have been thinking about the “glass student” all week.

To be continued...

Bollettino

LI recently wrote a review of Niall Ferguson’s latest book, Colossus, for the National Post. In the review, I gingerly tiptoed around one of the obvious flaws in the book – Ferguson knows little and cares less about American history. This is fine with me. Let each do the work he loves.

Ferguson has never made any bones about the fact that he wants to be the AJP Taylor of the Right. Unfortunately, he seems headed for being the Toynbee of the Right -- hot, donnish air spread over big and vacuous ideas. He is exploiting his serious status as a historian (a man who knows things) to build a shaky and unworthy career for himself as a pundit (a man who quotes men who know things). He should really try to refrain from drawing conclusions from American history until he has an undergraduate level familiarity with it. But there he is, again, in Slate, blithely going on about, of all things he doesn’t know about, John Quincy Adams.

Here, astonishingly, is what he says about JQA:

“The lineal antecedent of the Bush administration's current policy is revealed here to be John Quincy Adams, "the most influential American grand strategist of the nineteenth century." (Although Americans are generally wary of the hereditary principle, they do like it to apply in the realm of foreign policy.)
According to Gaddis, Adams' strategy—partly inspired by one of the first nasty "surprises" in American history, the torching of the White House by the British in 1814—had three distinctive components. It allowed for pre-emption, on which basis South Florida and Texas were annexed; unilateralism, hence the Monroe Doctrine instead of an Anglo-American condominium in Latin America; and American hegemony, which came a lot later, but which Adams and his contemporaries fondly imagined.”

This is, well, whacky, and only a man who draws his American history through the very narrow straw provided by books by foreign policy scholars would have written something that is both so weird (South Florida? Does Ferguson know where Florida is? He had the same problem in his book) and that so misstates Adams contribution to American’s expansionist policy. The misstatemeht is symptomatic of Ferguson's real disinterest with American history. Ferguson has never had much time for race as a historical category. Sure, he mentions it in Empire, but he much prefers to talk about markets. That, plus Ferguson's tendency to make lawyer like arguments -- he loves to weed through his facts -- show through in the way he does American history.

Historians get a feel for facts. For instance, even if an American historian knew little about Adams and Texas, he'd suspect the annexation story and the South Florida story for the same reason: Adams was prominently and famously anti-slavery. Annexation, in the pre-civil war days, was driven largely by the South - in search of new territories, and seeking to enlarge the sphere of slave economies. These things came together in Adams famous opposition to annexing Texas. Adams knew very well that the Texas revolt was caused in part by the fact that the Americans in Texas were bringing their slaves into a state in a nation that had abolished slavery. All of which adds up to what Adams really did – which was to prevent a pre-emptive annexation of Texas by Andrew Jackson. Actually, the last is a bit speculative, but the latest historian of the Texas revolution, H.W. Brands, in his book Lone Star Nation, makes a pretty good case for it. The speculative part is that Jackson was moving towards annexation. The part that isn’t speculation is that Adams clearly blocked the annexation of Texas to the U.S., and he did it because of slavery. An excerpt from Adam’s speech on the subject:

“Annexation, had been put off with a sort of Return Jonathan refusal. He had been told with Solemnity of face that there was a doubt of the Constitutional power of Congress and the President to accept the proposal and moreover that they could not think of it now because it would risk a war with Mexico, and violate the sacred Faith of Treaties. But Mr. Jefferson had shewn how a Constitutional Camel could be Swallowed for the sake of Louisiana by palates accustomed to strain at a gnat, and the Chairman of the late Committee of Foreign Affairs professed his readiness to swallow another for the sake of Texas. And as to the war with Mexico, one President had told Congress seven months before that it would be justifiable, and his successor, even while alleging this pretence of War and the Sacred Faith of Treaties, was about to tell Congress not only that he himself agreed with his Predecessor that War would have been justifiable the Winter before, but that...both Houses of Congress had been of the same opinion, and that it was now not only more justifiable but indispensable because the last magnanimous Appeal to the Justice and the fears of Mexico, heralded by a Courier from that Department of State, with the indulgence of one week for an answer, had totally failed.”

Notice, however, that Kagan, Ferguson's interlocutor, doesn't correct him. As AJP Taylor once said, foreign policy mandarins know little about their own country, and a little more about other countries -- which is a distinct limitation on their policy formulations.

That's surely the case here.

Now, one might say, in Ferguson's defense, that Adams did, after all, construct what is known as the Monroe doctrine. But this simply reinforces the point about how complicated the American expansionist idea was, and how even in practice it was even attended with sometimes crippling tensions. While Adams, like many Americans, probably did assume that the U.S. would, at some point, take over the whole of North America, in fact his career is about the gradual dissolution of this idea, rather than its triumph. Ignorant of the way dialectical tug in American history, Ferguson justs sees an analogy with the British Empire. If that analogy wasn't there, frankly, Ferguson wouldn't be interested.

Ferguson should get safely back to his field in pronto time. The next time he writes for Slate, they might match him with someone who knows something about American history.

Bollettino

Josh Marshall, of Talking Points Memo, pointed us to this very illuminating Salon article on Ahmed Chalabi by an enterprising journalist named John Dizard. It is worth seeing the ad (for the one day’s free membership!) to read the article, which provides an x ray of the motives of Bush’s Pentagon pump house gang. Our idea about the obsession with Iraq on the part of the Wolfowitzies was that, in part, Wolfowitz wanted to impose a coherent policy on the Middle East that would make it easier to accommodate our policy towards both Israel and Saudi Arabia. If Dizard is to be believed, however, the motives were much shabbier and stupider – basically, the idea was to find a way around forcing Israel to cede the West Bank to the Palestinians.

Dizard gets some great quotes. Here’s one from Douglas Feith’s former law partner, who happens to have been Chalabi’s nephew’s partner, too, L. Marc Zell:

“Zell outlines what Chalabi was promising the neocons before the Iraq war: "He said he would end Iraq's boycott of trade with Israel, and would allow Israeli companies to do business there. He said [the new Iraqi government] would agree to rebuild the pipeline from Mosul [in the northern Iraqi oil fields] to Haifa [the Israeli port, and the location of a major refinery]." But Chalabi, Zell says, has delivered on none of them. The bitter ex-Chalabi backer believes his former friend's moves were a deliberate bait and switch designed to win support for his designs to return to Iraq and run the country.”

And here is Dizard’s analysis of the neo-con set of motives:

“Why did the neocons put such enormous faith in Ahmed Chalabi, an exile with a shady past and no standing with Iraqis? One word: Israel. They saw the invasion of Iraq as the precondition for a reorganization of the Middle East that would solve Israel's strategic problems, without the need for an accommodation with either the Palestinians or the existing Arab states. Chalabi assured them that the Iraqi democracy he would build would develop diplomatic and trade ties with Israel, and eschew Arab nationalism.”

If that really sums up the grand Wolfowitzian strategy – they truly are nuts.

This is hard for even someone as cynical as LI to swallow, but Dizard makes a good case. If this was, indeed, the motive, than it would explain the otherwise puzzling loyalty to a man whose greatest accomplishment was escaping Jordan in the trunk of a car to enjoy the fruits of his numerous swindles in other, less threatening, climes. But Dizard does provide a reason for one of the most puzzling aspects of the war: why it was waged when it was waged in the first place. LI had imagined, when Bush was elected on a non-interventionist platform, that he was a traditional Republican in the semi-isolationist mode. It never crossed our mind that he imagined he was Woodrow Wilson’s retarded brother. How he went from the Taft wing to the Daffy wing of the party is a big puzzle, and Dizzard provides some of the key background information.

Dizard’s article doesn’t just nail the neo-cons. It gave LI a small dialectical shock, too. The policy of rapprochement with Iran that Chalabi and his minions are pursuing in Iraq is, obviously, a good thing for Iraq. It is hard to imagine an Iraq that wouldn’t try to seal some type of alliance with Iran. It is a natural fit, and we have always maintained that an autonomous Iraq can be expected to take that direction. A democratic Iraq is not going to spontaneously embrace Israel.

According to Dizard:

“The crux of the conflict is Iran, and whether the U.S. should try to make a deal with the Islamic Republic to enlist its support for peace in Iraq. Before and immediately after the war, the neoconservative position was that U.S. empowerment of the long-disenfranchised Shia community would make possible an Iraqi government that would make a "warm peace" with Israel. This in turn would pressure the rest of the Arab world to make a similar peace, without the need to concede land to the Palestinians.
This was, of course, a pipe dream: The Shia community in Iraq, like the Sunni community, is overwhelmingly anti-Israel, and the entire range of its leadership has close ties with Iran. Belatedly realizing that Chalabi's promise to build a secular, pro-Israel Shiite government is not going to come true, in the past couple of months the neocons in the Defense Department have tried to come up with a new plan. Feith, Wolfowitz and others are backing away from the Shia, due to their ties to Iran as well as Chalabi's deceptions. They are trying to cobble together a coalition of rehabilitated Sunni Muslim Iraqi Army officers and Kurdish leaders backed by their militias that would have Shia participation, but in a reduced role. For proponents of this strategy, the front-runner to be prime minister of the next version of the transitional government is Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, the founder and leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.”

One should read the Dizzard article, and then read this mish-mash of lukewarm Democratic centrism by Lawrence J. Korb in the LA Times, today. If you want to know why Kerry is well on his way to losing the election, the Korb article provides the mindset. We particularly like this graf:

“The Bush administration has still not explained why it was mistaken about the primary reasons for going to war. Even in the face of recent setbacks, it has yet to acknowledge that creating a stable Iraq will be a long, difficult and costly endeavor and cannot be accomplished by an artificial deadline like June 30. The president has not recognized that we may have to live with an Iraq that is not a Jeffersonian democracy.”

The supposed sarcasm of the last sentence discloses, in actuality, a deep gullibility. When Howard Dean had his moment of genius about the war, it was in enacting what Husserl called an “epoche” – a bracketing of suppositions in order to understand a phenomenon. Dean bracketed the rhetoric about democracy and freedom, and looked at the “thing itself” – and he found, not democracy and freedom, but the usual shabby American colonial venture, circa 1953, in Iran, and 1956, in Guatamala. The same rushing in of corporate interests, the same lack of interest in setting up representative bodies, the same exercise in re-naming (in order to secure freedom of press, for instance, we have to close newspapers or “direct” the ones our corporations are contracted to “manage” ; in order to save Falluja, we have to destroy Falluja, etc.)

Democrats aren’t necessarily averse to these projects – in fact, they have often benefited handsomely from them. As David Brooks points out, admiringly, in his column in the NYT today, Kerry is campaigning on a Joe Lieberman like platform about Iraq. Korb’s little essay in the LAT ends, predictably, with a Kerry-esque flourish:
“Not learning from our mistakes in Vietnam would be the real disservice to our troops and the country. In fact, learning from those mistakes might be the best, if not the only, way to understand how we got into the current mess in Iraq and how we might get out of it.”
Of course, we have to learn. We have to learn and learn. We have to process. We have to process and process. We can’t promise anything, or plan anything, that would come down to: Getting Out of Iraq. Rather, the Kerry plan entails staying there and learning and processing and internationalizing and just having the most marvelous learning and processing time. Of course, regrettably, collateral casualties (you know, butchered Iraqis, butchered American soldiers) will be incurred in the learning process, but education comes at a steep price.

ps -- for confirmation of the appalling state of the Dem establishment, read Harold Meyerson's op ed piece in the Washington Post today. We loved the verbs in this sentence: "
Kerry's views on Iraq reflect those of the Democratic foreign policy elites, who largely maintain an embattled Wilsonian optimism about the prospects -- or at least, the necessity -- of shaping Iraq into a unified, pluralistic democracy." Shaping, eh? Perhaps those Democratic foreign elites ought to analyze the grammar of the word -- on the one side, the active, muscular, thinking force -- on the other side, the inert mass. Sound like colonialism yet?

Meyerson -- whose thesis is, basically, that Kerry is no flip flopper -- as if this was what mattered -- then present the dissident foreign policy view. Surprisingly, this dissident view doesn't entail having any confidence in a people to self organize -- doesn't entail applying the lessons of the Civil Rights movement in this country to Iraq -- doesn't entail any of the traditional methods used by the left in the past, including unionization, consciousness raising, and the like. I mean, doing things like that implies that the inert mass might not be so inert.

No, the new thing is to just segregate the inert mass into separate little cultural piles. Here's Meyerson, showing that the D.C. Dems are as brain-dead as the Pentagon pump house gang:

"A relative handful of the party's foreign policy mavens -- most prominently, Les Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Peter Galbraith, former U.S. ambassador to Croatia -- have a more chastened perspective. Heirs of such Vietnam-era realists as Sen. J. William Fulbright and political scientist Hans Morgenthau, they argue that Iraq is more nearly three countries than one -- a Shiite south inclined toward some form of Islamic rule, though not necessarily a theocratic republic; a democratic Kurdish north; and a Sunni-dominated middle with large non-Sunni minorities. No region will accept the domination of another, and striking a politically acceptable balance between majority rule and minority rights under these circumstances is all but impossible. You can't do nation-building, they conclude, when the nation doesn't want to be built.

Gelb has argued for letting Iraq devolve into three separate states. Galbraith, fearing that an independent Kurdistan would soon be invaded by a Kurdophobic Turkey, calls for establishing one state with a common foreign policy but consisting of three largely autonomous regions in all other matters. The realists acknowledge that there would be dreadful consequences from either kind of devolution -- certainly, women in the Shiite south would have their freedoms and lives ratcheted backward by several centuries -- but that this is going to be the eventual outcome in any case."

Those dirty, wife beating Shia, and democratic Kurds -- surely that is the verdict of contemporary history?
Or ... perhaps it is the verdict of forgetting contemporary history. Galbraith's article, for instance, mentions the first democratic elections held in Iraq, in 1992, in Kurdistan -- but forgets to mention that the two dominant Kurd war lords, dissatisfied with the results, soon went to war, and have since established their separate territories in Northern Iraq. Democracy at its finest! But why remember the facts?

Meanwhile, in Southern Iraq, elections -- which have been held on a local level -- show no strength for a theocratic party ratcheting women's rights back to the stone age, but a lot of strength for lefty parties with a strong stake in civil society.

Meyerson's article is more evidence, if we need it, that the Kerry flip flop which we should be angry about was his devious stance on Iraq. During the primaries, he allowed himself to be presented as a critic of the war. Little did we know his position was about the same as Bush's.