Bollettino

LI has been trying, and failing, to say something with some reach, some truly novelistic depth, about the symbiotic relationship between the fantasies of Bush’s supporters and the essential falsity of Bush’s vision of Iraq – a falsity that can be summed up as the large, enduring and apparently insurmountable incongruity between means and ends in Iraq.

We thought we were on to something by thinking about alibis. We thought about how alibis, used by defendants in court, have to be contoured not only to assume the shape of truth, but to assume that shape of truth that one presumes the jury would find truthful. Hence, the overlapping of sometimes contradictory or incompatible accounts. So we rummaged through a bunch of Greek texts from Lysias to Antiphon, looking at defense speeches.

Finally, though, we couldn’t make this post cohere.

So we dropped it. And wheeling about on the web, we came face to face with Perry Anderson’s second article about French intellectual culture, in the LRB. So we thought, as Francophiles, that here was a natural sighting for our put upon readers.

Anderson’s casts the usual saturnine Marxist glance, but there is something a bit too kneejerk about that disenchantment and its garage sale metaphors. He does present us with a nice problem. How is it that France, in the aftermath of 68, tended not to the left, but to the vaguely right? How is it that Francois Furet’s drumming for the French tradition of liberalism, of all things, climbed to play a dominant role in French intellectual politics of the Mitterand era and after?

We don’t care much for Anderson’s hurried dismissal of the 19th century’s liberal thinkers as a group of villainous intellectual pygmies, Constant, Guizot and Tocqueville. It would be nice to see Tocqueville treated without the breathless and inane admiration that he receives from American writers, who overestimate him and never place him in the context of his life’s work. But Anderson’s drive-by knock, that Tocqueville is the hangman of the Roman Republic, is too trifling for words. Similarly, his complaint that Constant colluded to elevate Napoleon to the leadership. He did, but he also put up a pretty gutsy howl against the wars of conquest Napoleon proceeded on – with a better sense of the injury that such militarism does to culture than Marx, who coming a generation later, sighed that Napoleon didn’t occupy Germany long enough.

That remark has had untold pernicious consequences.

We did like Anderson pointing to a fact that is routinely ignored by establishment media like the NYT and the Economist. France has, for the last thirty years, found itself saddled with a governing class who, whether socialist or conservative, ends up trying to institute the neo-liberal project. And for thirty years, the population has refused. Every government that has tried it has been voted out of office, or fallen due to some strike.

That’s rather admirable. Surely if the people of France hadn’t taken the power into their own hands, the French medical system would have become the mess it is in other places in the world – like the U.S. and the U.K. Ditto with the great shift towards privatizing retirement.

So – a nice combination of gossip and a little soupcon of mental nourishment. Check out the article.

Bollettino

The Hobby war

When war broke out in Europe in 1914, the German army at
once took the offensive. According to its doctrine, all acts in battle were to be governed by one thought: forward against the enemy at any cost.8 Since Germany’s strategy was tied to the ‘short war’ concept, the German high command under Helmuth von Moltke the younger gave little thought to the state of public opinion, although it was ready to ‘energetically suppress all attempts to undermine the political truce’. In mid-August 1914 the chief of the general staff of the field army was satisfied with the ‘popular unanimity of enthusiasm’ and ‘the united attitude of the parties and the press towards war’.9 The so-called spirit of 1914 thus entered German war mythology.10
– “Ludendorff and Hitler in Perspective: The Battle for the German Soldier’s Mind, 1917–1944” by
Jürgen Förster

One of the mysteries of the war in Iraq is that the war’s most ardent supporters are also the most ardent supporters of Bush. On the face of it, something is wrong here.

Supporting the war would seem to mean that one desires a winning strategy to a goal.

In this way, supporting the war in Iraq shouldn’t be that different from, say, supporting your local football team. If that team is the best in the country and it went through a series of matches in which it started to lose, fans would soon be asking pointed questions about the coach and about the star players. Money would be brought up – money, in America, is tightly coupled (it is our favorite myth) with merit. Radio station talk shows would be deluged with callers pointing out that the quarterback has a multimillion dollar salary, or the coach has a multimillion dollar salary, and that they aren’t delivering, and what are we going to do about it, etc. , etc.

The analogy is not perfect, of course, but it says something about the rationality of “supporting a side.” The counter-argument would be something like, well, the true fan should bear with the team as if loses, since the moral support thus lent leads to better team performance. The latter is a case of “magic thinking” – that is, the idea that an event can be willed into existence without the intermediation of an act. Mass magic thinking goes into such things as reviving Tinkerbell, dieting, and finding Jay Leno funny.

In the case of Iraq, the criteria for success were laid out, very clearly, by the Bush administration at the beginning of the war. They laid out how much it would cost; they laid out how many troops it would take to win it; and they laid out the goal of installing democracy in Iraq. The last entailed privatizing the economy, federalizing the state, creating a division of power between executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and guaranteeing human rights.

In the past fourteen months, they have been wrong to an n-tuple on the amount it would cost, wrong on the amount of troops it would take to win it, and unable or unwilling to hold an election, or even to make stick the constitution that they so widely publicized before the dissolution of the CPA. (one of the many surprising and interesting things in Peter Galbraith’s NYRB article about Iraq was that the constitution, which made headlines in the NYT as it was being contentiously sewn together, turned out to be illegal. Under international law, the moment sovereignty is transferred from the occupier to the host country, the occupiers laws are null and void. In other words, the Allawi government quietly liquidated the constitution. This provoked not one headline). The markers of the failure are clear not only in money spent, but in terms of lives lost and number wounded.

Now, in this case, failure has many fathers, and they have made themselves prominent. We know who decided to invade and occupy Iraq with 150,000 men: Donald Rumsfeld. We know what happened to the General who claimed that that figure understated the reality by half or a third: he was retired. We know who claimed the war would cost in the region of 10 billion dollars: Paul Wolfowitz. We know who went through the intelligence about Iraq: Douglas Feith. Their actions are in the public record.

And we also know this: not one subordinate has suffered for these failures; not one lesson has been learned. Dramatic tactical shifts have occurred on the field as the U.S. military, responding to political pressure, has started to fight a war that is almost a replica of the Vietnam war – take a territory, withdraw from a territory. However, the overriding feature of this war remains the same: the Bush administration wants to fight it while refusing to finance it, or man it. It is a new thing: a superpower hobby war.

If the pro-war side were animated by the same rationality that dictates the behavior of, say, the fan, one would imagine that, for instance, the warbloggers would be spewing the blackest kind of bile at Bush. One would imagine that there would be widespread demands for more troops to be sent to Iraq – a lot more troops, double the amount now on the ground there. The scandal of not having spent the 18 billion dollars in Iraq that was earmarked for the place a year ago would be constantly a theme. Although the goal of installing democracy is a bit hazy, and the support for it in America seems to be a massive act of bad faith more than anything else, surely there should be widespread unhappiness with fourteen months spent appointing the Iraqi power structure out of a pool of exiles who, every man jack, have created militias for themselves, and, to put it kindly, “usurped’ property for their leaders.

That hasn’t happened. Instead, a curious other thing has happened.

On Paul Craddick’s website a few days ago, Paul linked to an article by Victor Davis Hanson , who has been writing about the war for the NRO for two years now. LI doesn’t much care for Hanson as a military theorist or historian. John Keegan, equally conservative, is infinitely wiser. So is Anthony Beevor. However, the quote Paul extracted seems so typical of the moral frivolity, the non-engagement, of the prowar party that we had to quote it ourselves:

"It is always difficult for those involved to determine the pulse of any ongoing war. The last 90 days in the Pacific theater were among the most costly of World War II, as we incurred 50,000 casualties on Okinawa just weeks before the Japanese collapse. December 1944 and January 1945 were the worst months for the American army in Europe, bled white repelling Hitler's last gasp in the Battle of the Bulge. Contemporaries shuddered, after observing those killing fields, that the war would go on for years more. The summer of 1864 convinced many that Grant and Lincoln were losers, and that McClellan alone could end the conflict by what would amount to a negotiated surrender of Northern war aims."

There’s something so bathetic about these heroic instances, a separation from the reality principle so deep, that it cries out for the proper novelistic treatment. In the Civil War, Lincoln issued the largest call up of volunteers ever effected in the U.S. By 1864, the North had experienced two years of the draft. Grant relied on the manpower that Lincoln was willing to provide him, and in the Virginia campaign lost the equivalent of the number of American soldiers in Iraq. This, to hold a territory that is one tenth the size of Iraq. By WWII, of course, totale Mobilmachung, as Ernst Juenger put it – total mobilization – put all the hostile states on a war footing. Even the Vietnam War was resourced, although Johnson feared to mobilize the country on the scale the war called for.

The case of the Iraq war shows that a superpower can be wealthy enough to start and engage in a losing war for a number of years. Support for the war and Bush is conjoined by one shared mental trait: willing the end and refusing to will the means. Instead of a draft, the pro-war people demand – a comforting analogy. It is as if the doctor prescribed warm milk for gangrene. Instead of holding the people who botched the occupation responsible, instead of drawing the obvious conclusion from their pack of analogies – that the number of soldiers is critical to winning a war -- the prowar side holds that the analogies themselves will win the war. Meanwhile, the military, who insisted for months last year that there were only about 2,000 insurgents – or “terrorists” – in Iraq, can calmly announce that they killed 2,000 insurgents in Najaf in August without anybody raising an eyebrow. Even Hitler’s propaganda machine, at the time of Stalingrad, would have hesitated to put these kind of lies over. But partly that is because the people of Germany were experiencing the war. The chief thing about the war in Iraq so far is that the experience of it is segregated, for the most part, to expendable populations: the Iraqis themselves, and a volunteer army composed mostly of working class kids. Hence, the hobby of killing them off is, at the moment, politically cheap.

And so the prowar people collude in shifting the one criteria that counts in a war – who is wining and who is losing – to the criteria of whether the U.S. is good or not – to the question of how many schools have been built, rather than the question of how many school children have been killed. That school children will be killed is an inevitable corollary to waging a modern war – LI doesn’t doubt that. That is the burden of supporting a war. But that those school children are being killed in a war that is being waged as an expensive hobby, an airplane model war, transforms those deaths into an indictment of post 9/11 America, where obliviousness has been fatally merged with power lust. This war retains its precarious popularity only to the extent that it is conducted frivolously, which is why Bush is the perfect person to wage it.

Our quote, from Jürgen Förster’s article about morale in Germany during two world wars, will be the occasion of our next post.

Bollettino

LI was part of a research project the other day. A graduate student invited us and about four other bloggers to talk with her in a chat room about what we did. It was a pretty enjoyable scene, and we learned some new, fine acronyms – like MSM for main stream media. At one point LI suggested that bloggers don’t report the facts – we aren’t journalists – but frame them. We were surprised that this was generally disputed.

Well, perhaps LI is deluded on this one, but we still think most blog reporting consists of playing Google roulette. In the spirit of which…

The Washington Post published a White House pr release about Iraq in the implausible shape of a news article yesterday, suggesting that, as John Negroponte says in it, "When it comes to calling the plays on the field, especially on sensitive military operations, there's only one quarterback, and his name is Allawi." Negroponte’s metaphor, referring to a game that isn’t played in Iraq, is more truthful than he perhaps realizes. Metaphors, like symptoms, don't lie. The article was a fluff piece in general, in line with a whole history of fluff pieces about various American puppets and proxies that have been installed – with just such heavy breathing by American ambassadors – over the years. We imagine you could substitute Duarte’s name for Allawi, or Thieu’s, or whoever. The imperialist pretence is strictly for American consumption – or rather, American press consumption.

So a forgettable article in the vein of agit-prop, another lie in the mill that keeps running on American and Iraqi blood. But our eye was caught by one sentence in the piece: “Allawi's credibility is also still on the line, despite an early August poll indicating varying degrees of support from more than 60 percent of Iraqis.”

Wow. This 60 percent figure was surely some of that good news that was being suppressed by the ever liberal press. The odd thing about the sentence was the vagueness of its allusion to the poll.

So we looked around via google and finally found the source, something called the IRI, or International Republican Institute..

The IRI institute, from its webpage, looks like it could have been set up by John Negroponte. The place has just appointed a former Bush official president; has just given Condoleeza Rice, of all people, some freedom award; and is right on track with the good news bein’ suppressed by the bad press meme the Bushies have pushed for the last year and a half.

The result is an organization whose polling results are as trustworthy as, well, Saddam Hussein’s vote totals in 2002.

Here’s the killer results for our quarterback in Baghdad:

“Over 51% of Iraqis polled felt that their country is headed in "the right direction," up slightly from IRI's May/June poll. More telling, the number who feel that things are heading in "the wrong direction" has dropped from 39% to 31% over the same time period.

Some of this confidence may be a result of wide public support for the Iraqi Interim Government. Prime Minister Allawi holds an enviable approval rating, with 66% rating him as either "very effective" or "somewhat effective." Likewise, President al-Yawer enjoys the support of 60.6% of Iraqis polled who say that they "completely trust" or "somewhat trust" him.”

Now, usually in a country where there is an exponential increase in the amount of violence – where there are battles raging in Najaf, Karbala, Baghdad and Mosul, bombing strikes against Falluja and the like – the words “right direction” don’t exactly pop out. But not with the hip-happy Iraqis the IRI has polled! They are crazy in love with us – in fact, a full half of them, according to the poll, supported the invasion!

One wonders – did the WP byliners, Robin Wright and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, purposely leave out the name of the source of the poll, or did they even bother to research the White House pr sheet? Reporting or dictation -- you decide.

Comically, after duly announcing that Allawi was running around with the football we bought him, Americans standing about like nature's humble waterboys, the same byliners reported in another story that the Iraqi government announced it would release two women prisoners in response to the demands of the kidnappers – only to be overruled by the waterboys.

“The Iraqi Ministry of Justice announced the impending release of Taha Wednesday morning, insisting it had nothing to do with the demands of the kidnappers of Americans Armstrong and Hensley and their British housemate, Kenneth Bigley.

Later in the day, however, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad said that that the women "are in our legal and physical custody. They will not be released imminently. Their legal status, like the other detainees, is under constant review."

That one story totally contradicts another is seemingly no problem for the WP journalists. To keep the war effort going, Americans need to be lied to in small ways and large. After all, this is the war the WP helped whip up last year.

What’s the line in the Dylan song, Highway 61, about promoting the next world war?

“… he found a promoter who nearly fell on the floor
“I’ve never engaged in this kind of thing before, but – yes
I think it can be very easily done…”

Bollettino

Since LI has been slamming Kerry, fair play (as well as Pavlovian psychology) suggests that we praise him for good moves. So let's get it up for the speech on Iraq yesterday. Sure, he should have made it two months ago. Sure, the delay was inexplicably self-subverting… But the speech was firm, just, and outlined what Bush did badly and what Kerry will do to fix those mistakes. We now actually have two candidates with two positions. It is like having ... a democracy.

Our only complaint is that he should connect, as clearly as possible, what William Saletan, in a rather smarmy summary of Kerry's speech in Slate, calls "opportunity cost." We call it the failure to confront reality. We are talking about the subordination of the war on terrorism part of the war on terrorism to a sideshow. Kerry should learn to say Osama bin Laden's name. And then he should say it a lot. He should take a hint from this column by Joe Conason in the NY OBS commemorating bin Laden's survival and flourishing three years after 9/11. Three years ago we were promised that bin Laden would be taken dead or alive; as Conason reminds us, the dead, here, don't include Osama, but do include 1,000 U.S. GIs, and 10-13,000 Iraqis. It's a joke served very coldly to us this 9/11.

Bollettino

One of our favorite stories about predictions concerns a bet made in the seventies between Paul Ehrlich, a famous biologist and environmentalist, and Jules Simon, a libertarian economist. Ehrlich, who believed that population would push the use of natural resources to the breaking point, took a bet on a basket of metals in 1980. The bet was about the price of the metals in 1990. If Ehrlich’s thesis was right, the price of the metals would obviously go up. Simon bet they wouldn’t. Simon won.

This is often interpreted, by libertarians, as proof that environmentalism is all hooey. LI thinks that interpretation is all hooey. Actually, the alarmism of Ehrlich, on one end, and the regulatory momentum that was set in place during the Nixon years, worked to make industry greener – both in the U.S. and abroad. In other words, prediction doesn’t happen in a neutral environment: that a prediction is made in a certain context can have an effect on the outcome. Environmental alarmists have been wrong partly because they have been effective – their alarmism had induced changes in the industrial system such that the supply of copper necessary to sustain the system per person in the global system, for instance, in 1980, was much less in 1990. This is called, by management people, loose coupling.

Keeping this in mind, LI has been thinking about the Bush second term.

The most obvious question is: what will that term mean for Iraq, and the Middle East in general?. We don’t have any predictions per se, but we do think we can spot the components of the possible scenarios.

We think that Bush’s re-election has to be viewed in the larger context of the other Republican victories. As this Post story makes clear, Kerry’s campaign doldrums aren’t just affecting his prospects, but the prospects of the Dems in the house. Essentially, if Bush wins big, the Senate’s minority of Democrats will shrink. This will remove what little restraint the opposition party provided in D.C. The House, of course, is going to become Republican to an almost insurmountable degree. Texas, for instance, is on the verge of putting in place about ten new Republican reps.

Given the vast and almost incomprehensible incompetence of the Bush people in managing the ‘war on terrorism’ so far, in other circumstances this would surely signal an expansion of the war in the Middle East to Syria and Iran. The post Powell State Department would certainly be on-line for that adventure. And it will be vigorously pushed by the Pentagon pump house gang. One of the real winners in the upcoming election will be Cheney, whose side – the President’s base – will be massively owed.

One thing this will certainly mean, given the characteristic bloodthirstiness of this group, is a lot more Iraqi deaths. The Vietnam comparisons are always to the number of Americans killed – not to the number of Iraqis killed. But with the re-installation of an ultra-hawkish wing in D.C. (who will justly take the election as a legitimation of their methods) surely we will see an acceleration of Rumsfeld’s kind of warfare – the terror bombing of Fallujah, the pillage of Najaf, that kind of thing. The Bush people have been pushing a re-definition of the aim in Iraq as ‘working democracy” – which means that they will skew what election process they allow, in January, to put in an American puppet. Allawi is the candidate right now, and he does have one essential quality – he will rubber stamp any terror tactics the U.S. forces take against the Iraqi population. But it is hard to see how an election, no matter how corrupt, could be won by Allawi. Without opposition in Washington, however, there might be no pressure to hold elections at all. Postponing the elections next year would surely be on the Pump house wish list.

What are the constraining factors here? We think the major constraint is the Bush fear of having to resource its war. It has been obvious for some time, in Iraq, that the distance between what Bush says is the goal in Iraq and Iraqi reality could have only been bridged if Iraq were treated as a serious occupation. That would require about two to three times the manpower that is there right now. Instead, this war is being fought like a child playing with the puddles from its bottle of milk on the high chair – American soldiers go into an area, ”pacify” it, then withdraw. Then the insurgents return. Going to war with Iran and/or Syria is going to require a lot more military manpower. We think the fear of that will drive the Bush administration to make threats, and to maybe use its airpower, but not to invade. The worst case scenario would be: seeing that we need a proxy in the Middle East, Wolfowitz et al encourage an Israeli attack on Syria.

The down side of the constraint on Bush’s aggression is that the administration will increasingly use Rumsfeld tactics. That is why we expect a big upsurge in Iraqi deaths – that will be the major characteristic of at least the first year of the Bush administration. At a certain number of deaths, as Saddam Hussein has shown, a country can be pacified. Will the Bush people reach this threshold?

Another component enters the picture, here. That’s the unknown variable of the network that has radiated out from Al Qaeda. Again, the vast, almost incomprehensible incompetence shown by the Bush people in the past, vis a vis Al Qaeda, will no doubt continue. So far, the Bush’s have benefited enormously from their errors – from the attack on the towers itself, from the comedy of the WMD, and from actually colluding in the preservation of a continuing Al Qaeda threat in Peshawar. Each of these were failures that should have brought down the administration. Instead, they renewed the allegiance of the American public to this administration. Will the thinking in the administration change about these things? We’d guess that the answer, for Pavlovian reasons, is no. When the button rings and the animal responds badly, and is rewarded multiply for the bad response, it will keep responding in the same way when the bell rings again. Other terrorist attacks, in Europe, Latin America, or the U.S., will be mishandled in the same way, and surrounded by the same aura of propaganda that will disallow criticism of the performance as a subtle aiding of the perpetrators.

To sum up: four more years of Bush, if these components are near correct, will lead to a multiple of Iraqi deaths, more successful terrorist attacks, and a belligerence towards Iran and Syria that will either encourage a war between Israel and Syria, or will, at the least, lead to some American military action, short of war, targeting one of those countries. Wild cards here are the effectiveness of the Al Qaeda like organizations – will they, for instance, opt for what, to an outside observer, seems like the obvious ploy? Namely, disrupting the flow of oil. Especially Saudi oil. Will the Saudi royals, through its usual combination of mass murder and bribery, be able to tamp down its rebels? And finally, if Israel under Likud has already managed to seize a goodly portion of the West Bank. Will it be satisfied with that amount, or will it try for more?

There is a loose coupling between the economy and foreign policy. We are going to compartmentalize the economy, keeping in mind that the boundary, here, is abstract, and that economic factors – an oil crisis, for instance, or some radical shift in the value of the dollar – can have incalculable effects on the components we’ve outlined above.

PS An excellent preview of coming attractions in the second Bush term is given in today's thuggish Washington Post editorial on Iran. It is extremely useful reading, the real "blood in our mouths" thing: mass murder as foreign policy, from the same people who gave us the invasion last year. No doubt the editorialist will keep his kids well away from any dying -- there's nothing like sending the working class off to kill the working class to make a newspaper feel good about itself.

Bollettino

The second term

LI would like to think that the defeat of George Bush is still a good bet. But we can’t trick our gut feeling. That our worst president – vacuous, dishonest, corrupt – is going to really win, instead of fake win, this election fills us with political despair. It is as though we’d been condemned to eke out the rest of our life on a diet of nothing but potato chips. Endless non-nutrition.

However, the polls record the obvious. Kerry’s strategy for defeating Bush has been a series of unbelievable miscalculations. It has not only eroded Kerry’s own image as a “leader” – those questions about leading the country can go up or down – but it has locked in an image of him as a loser. The worst numbers for Kerry are not in the for or against categories – they are in the question about who is going to win. This is a measurement of the sense of the race. The only way to dislodge an incumbent is to make the incumbent seem vulnerable. Here are the latest NYT numbers:

“The poll found that 61 percent of respondents expected Mr. Bush to win the election this fall; in March, shortly after Mr. Kerry clinched the Democratic nomination, just 44 percent thought Mr. Bush would win.”

The last election left a widespread taste of coup in the mouth. Coups work not so much because the coup’s leadership is popular as because the coup projects an image of inevitability. The image of force, of there being no alternative, has the effect of keeping people who oppose established power below the threshold where that dissatisfaction magically transforms itself from an intellectual mood into social action.

One wonders: what was the thinking behind making Kerry a Vietnam hero? The man’s credentials spring not from what he did to gain his medals, but from his coming home and articulating the reasons the Vietnam war was evil. And, in fact, his Senate career was not a mindless jog. Kerry’s book about terrorism, which he put out in the nineties, should have been the center of portraying the man as a leader against terrorism, and should have been contrasted with Bush's own record at every turn. He could well have pointed to it, and pointed to the inability of the present administration to constrain Al Qaeda and its affiliated terrorist network, and hammered Bush at every appearance with the demand that Al Qaeda be taken care of. Apparently, the Dems are so paralyzed by the idea of an October surprise that they have colluded, out of fear, in keeping Osama bin Laden's name out of this race.

The coulda beens pile up. He could have made the 9/11 commission’s report into what it actually was – a searing indictment of Bush. He could have turned around the rightwing meme about law enforcement as a mamby pamby way of “warring” against terrorism by showing that the real criteria in judging the war against terrorism is whether it works or not – not whether it is tough enough or not. As Kerry should know – I get this from his own book – terrorist organizations of the Al Qaeda variety rely on the same cell structure that the Mafia relied on. The victories over the Mafia in the nineties were achieved by international cooperation between law enforcement groups in Italy, Brazil, the UK, the USA, and other countries. They pooled information, for one thing, coordinated trials, coordinated investigations, and eventually rooted out the patrons of the Mafia. His book could have put real flesh on the hollowness of Kerry's line about internationalizing Iraq. By not foregrounding the criticism of Iraq in the larger criticism of the war on terror, Kerry essentially handed the issue to Bush.


Instead of playing to his strength, Kerry played to his weakness – his desire to pander. Pandering to the testosterone charged veteran constituency of Bush’s was never going to pick them off – it was simply going to get them talk radio riled against the anti-war protestor.

All of which means – it is time for lefties to start thinking about the landscape of Bush’s second administration. We’ll consider this in some posts next week.

PS -- there's a nice discussion of this over at Pierrot's Folly.

Bollettino

As many of LI’s readers know, the House refused to renew the ban on automatic weapons. We can now – or soon – buy as many Uzis as we want to.

The ban, we know, was largely symbolic, and contained enough hedges and exceptions that any gun dealer worth his bullets could find his way around them. It is doubtful that gun bans led to the decrease in the murder rate in the 90s. LI’s skepticism about gun control is such that we don’t care, one way or another, about the end of this provision of the Brady law.

The ancient equivalent of the automatic weapon was the polybolos. There’s an interesting rundown on military weaponry, and Archimedes inventions of clever weapons to outwit the Romans, in David Frye’s contribution to the October issue of Military history. He gives a nice survey of the situation in the Mediterranean in 200 BC, when the Romans encountered the resistance of Carthage to their empire building.

“Archimedes was a product of an age like none other in the history of the ancient world. He was born into the Hellenistic era, when Hellenistic culture was spreading rapidly across the Western world. It was an extraordinary period, an age of boundless ambition and audacity, when politicians, artists, writers, philosophers and even mathematicians refused to be held back by the conventions of the past. It was an era, too, of astonishing growth in military technology.

Hellenistic engineers inherited from earlier times a form of the catapult that resembled a large crossbow. They would not remain satisfied with that design for long. Like Hellenistic-era thinkers in every other field, they felt that they should not merely copy but improve the traditional form of things. Recognizing the limitations of the old design, they replaced the bow with two arms that were propelled by springs of twisted rope. Over time, their experimentation with new materials enabled them to fire heavier bolts, and eventually stone balls, over longer distances. Animal sinews and even human hair were pressed into service.

Hellenistic ingenuity was not limited to the search for better torsion springs, however. The Alexandrian inventor Ktesibios developed radically new catapults, one of which was powered by bronze springs, the other by pneumatic pistons. But even his efforts seem primitive compared to the designs of Dionysius of Rhodes. In an effort to improve the rate of artillery fire, Dionysius actually automated several steps (including the locking of the bowstring, the placing of the missile in the groove and the pulling of the trigger) in catapult operation. Those tasks that he did not fully automate he at least speeded up by adding a chain drive. Dionysius' new design was called the polybolos, or multishooter. It was arguably history's first automatic weapon.”

We’ve always found Archimedes a fascinating figure, and the conjunction of Roman expansion and Late Hellenistic culture one of the more unfortunate of history’s coincidences. Rome, with its genius for practicality, rather stifled the flowering of Greek thinking that was built upon a tradition that the West, since the Renaissance, has been trying to restore -- the two centuries after Aristotle. Stoic logic was a victim of the Roman hegemony. And Archimedes, himself, comes down to us as a piecemeal figure, half magus, half the familiar absent minded professor.

Plutarch (who must, bien sur, be read in Sir Thomas North’s translation) gives this account of Archimedes peculiarities:
“For all that he hath written, are geometricall proposicions, which are without comparison of any other writings whatsoever: bicause the subject whereof they treate, doeth appeare by demonstracion, the matter giving them the grace and the greatnes, and the demonstracion proving it so exquisitely, with wonderfull reason and facilitie, as it is not repugnable. For in all Geometry are not to be founde more profounde and difficulte matters wrytten, in more plaine and simple tearmes, and by more easie principles, then those which he hath invented. Now some do impute this to the sharpnes of his wit and understanding, which was a naturall gift in him: other do referre it to the extreame paines he tooke, which made these things come so easily from him, that they seemed as if they had bene no trouble to him at all. For no man livinge of him selfe can devise the demonstracion of his propositions, what paine soever he take to seeke it: and yet straight so soone as he commeth to declare and open it, every man then imagineth with him selfe he could have found it out well enough, he can then so plainly make demonstracion of the thing he meaneth to shew. And therfore that me thinks is like enough to be true, which they write of him: that he was so ravished and dronke with the swete intysements of this Sirene, which as it were lay continually with him, as he forgate his meate and drinke and was careles otherwise of him selfe, that oftentimes his servants got him against his will to the bathes, to washe and annoynt him: and yet being there, he would ever be drawing out of the Geometricall figures, even in the very imbers of the chimney.”

The sweet enticements of the Siren has been many a man's downfall.

Archimedes death is as symbolically significant as Socrates. War, theory and instruments -- the dark matrix out of which capitalism would arise -- are prefigured in this small butchery.

Here’s how Plutarch reports it:

“Syracusa beinge taken, nothinge greved Marcellus more than the losse of Archimedes. Who beinge in his studie when the citie was taken, busily seekinge out by him selfe the demonstracion of some Geometricall proposition which he hadde drawen in figure, and so earnestly occupied therein, as he neither sawe nor hearde any noyse of enemies that ranne uppe and downe the citie, and much lesse knewe it was taken: He wondered when he sawe a souldier by him, that had him go with him to Marcellus. Notwithstandinge, he spake to the souldier, and bad him tary untill he had done his conclusion, and brought it to demonstracion: but the souldier being angry with his aunswer, drew out his sword, and killed him.

Others say, that the Romaine souldier when he came, offered the swords poynt to him, to kill him: and that Archimedes when he saw him, prayed him to hold his hand a litle, that he might not leave the matter he looked for unperfect, without demonstracion. But the souldier makinge no reckening of his speculation, killed him presently. It is reported a third way also, sayinge, that certeine souldiers met him in the streetes going to Marcellus, carying certeine Mathematicall instrumentes in a litle pretie coffer, as dialles for the sunne, Sphaeres and Angles, wherewith they measure the greatnesse of the body of the sunne by viewe: and they supposing he hadde caried some golde or silver or other pretious Juells in that litle coffer, slue him for it. But it is most true, that Marcellus was marvelous sorie for his death, and ever after hated the villen that slue him, as a cursed and execrable persone: and howe he made also marvelous much afterwards of Archimedes kinsemen for his sake.”