Bollettino

LI is planning on going out later today and getting champagne. We are also making – from a recipe forwarded to us by our invaluable friend, S. – cigarette borek. And then we are going to a friends house to watch the destruction of the Coup – or so we have high hopes.

Not that the Coup isn’t leaving as much poison behind as possible. Naomi Klein’s column in the Guardian, today, is an excellent piece of reporting about the venture vultures who have looked at Iraq as the kind of pickings worthy of… well, the Carlyle Group. LI first became aware of the Carlyle Group after 9/11, when there was a paranoid story linking the WTC mass murder to the group. This is what we said back then:

"Judicial Watch, the public interest law firm that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and abuse, reacted with disbelief to The Wall Street Journal report of yesterday that George H.W. Bush, the father of President Bush, works for the bin Laden family business in Saudi Arabia through the Carlyle Group, an international consulting firm. The senior Bush had met with the bin Laden family at least twice. (Other top Republicans are also associated with the Carlyle group, such as former Secretary of State James A. Baker.) The terrorist leader Osama bin Laden had supposedly been disowned by his family, which runs a multi-billion dollar business in Saudi Arabia and is a major investor in the senior Bush s firm." If you read further in the article, you'll find that Judicial Watch, the public interest firm that spreads intellectual corruption like an infected rat spreads plague, has no evidence whatsoever that bin Laden's ties with his family's business haven't been cut. But witchhunting groups racial profiling happily through the Wall Street Journal don't care, really.

Actually, it wouldn't surprise me at all if O. bin Laden did have money in the Carlyle group, but it wouldn't surprise me, either, if he had money in Judicial Watch -- the way investment has been freed up from those national agencies that wish to track it is pretty well known among real public interest groups.”

Little did we know that even the left (re Michael Moore’s Farenheit 9/11) would be complicit in anti-Arab racebaiting.

However, the CG deal with Iraq is a different story. We were puzzled, when the Big Eight met this summer, that Bush never pushed Chirac on canceling Iraq’s debts. This, we think, would be fairly popular in France, especially among the socialists. And surely picking on France is about the most popular thing Bush could do for his base. And, officially, the U.S. line has been to forgive the debts that Iraq rang up.

However, that official policy hasn’t reached down to the absurd insistence of the rich state of Kuwait that Iraq pay war reparations in perpetuity.

As Klein revealed in the Nation, the Carlyle Group, which boasts of two disgusting vultures, Dem Margaret Albright and Rep James Baker, has been quietly trying to get guarantees that Iraq will make good on the reparations. Since James Baker is also the official Bush delegate to creditor countries on behalf of Iraq, this is quite a conflict of interest. After the story broke, the CG publicly distanced themselves from that role. And so, supposedly, lost their chance for a billion dollar commission.

But it turns out that there is no paper proof that CG actually is backing off. It is the Jackel’s word we are supposed to be taking. Here are three paragraphs displaying the unedifying spectacle of the wealthiest squeezing the poorest for their medical money, while the U.S. government stands by, in its occupying role, playing the hypocritical role of helpless bystander. I believe there is a slang word for it in Dickens that I haven't been able to find – the word for the pickpocket’s assistant who obstructs the victim once the victim becomes aware of the crime, thus helping the perp to escape.

“The central question remains unanswered by the White House: have Baker's business interests compromised his performance as debt envoy? That question does not go away simply because $1bn will stay in the coffers of a wealthy oil emirate rather than in a Carlyle equity fund. The week after losing the deal, Carlyle handed a record-breaking $6.6bn payout to investors.
In Iraq, the last 18 months have been markedly worse, and the stakes for Baker's job performance there are considerably higher. This was underlined on October 13, when Iraq's health ministry issued a harrowing report on its post-invasion health crisis, including outbreaks of typhoid and TB and soaring child and mother mortality rates. A week after the report, Iraq paid out another $195m for war reparation debts, mostly to Kuwait. Meanwhile, the state department announced that $3.5bn for water, sanitation and electricity projects was being shifted to security in Iraq, claiming that, according to deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, debt relief is on the way.

Is it? In fact, Iraq is being plunged deeper into debt, with $836m in new loans and grants now flowing from the IMF and the World Bank. Meanwhile, Baker has not managed to get a single country to commit to eradicating Iraq's debts. Iraq's creditors know that while Baker was asking them to show forgiveness, his company was offering Kuwait a special side deal to push Iraq to pay up. It's not the kind of news that tends to generate generosity and goodwill. And the timing couldn't be worse: the Paris Club is about to meet to hash out a final deal on Iraq's debt.”

Bollettino


LI feels it ought to put out a little reminder of the stakes tomorrow, in terms of human lives. As if our readers -- hey, we now average 100 per day -- didn't know what this site was about. The LA Times runs a story on the upcoming war crime that Bush and Allawi are plotting against Fallujah. Interesting, the U.S. press line is that Allawi, that oh so independent soul, is pressing the assault. The U.S. press can only accommodate one dark skinned leader at a time in Iraq – so you hear very little about the more popular interim president. But… well, al-Yawer disagrees with sheering the meat off the bones of hundreds of Iraqis via terrorbombing and such. Obviously, he’s a terrorist stooge himself, and not a freedomloving Iraqi:

“Allawi's speech Sunday seemed aimed at preparing the Iraqi public for an onslaught in Fallujah, Allawi warned of civilian casualties, saying that if he orders an assault, it would be with a "heavy heart."

"But I owe, owe it to the Iraqi people to defend them from the violence and the terrorists and insurgents," he said. Commanders have estimated that up to 5,000 Islamic militants, Saddam Hussein loyalists and common criminals are holed up in Fallujah.

He did not give a deadline for how long he would give negotiations with Fallujah's city leaders in which he demands the handover of foreign fighters.

In a position that appeared to contrast with Allawi's, the country's interim president said a military assault was the wrong solution, according to an interview published today.

President Ghazi al-Yawer, a Sunni Muslim, told the Kuwaiti daily Al-Qabas that dialogue must continue and that insurgents "want nothing but a military solution, and the continuation of bleeding among Iraqis."

The Bush planning in Iraq is catastrophic in a characteristic way: it marries means that are at odds with its goals. Thus, the goal of liberating and democratizing Iraq, and paying outselves for the liberation out of Iraq's oil money. Thus securing the country and disbanding an army that was not in U.S. control. Etc., etc. In this case, the goal of making sure the Sunnis get a vote, and that the vote cements the legitimacy of an American friendly Iraq government, is being pursued by killing Sunnis and destroying the major Sunni city. We've seen the oddest self congratulation on the pro-war blogs about how well the U.S. did against Sadr in Najaf, which ignores the polls (U.S. sponsored polls) that showed how Sadr's popularity went up in all segments of Iraqi society after that triumph. This is what is peculiarly "no' reality based about the Bush approach -- it is the invisibility to the world outside a small, self-selected circle of conservative media and political types. In this monad, everybody watches Fox news all the time, and it is paradise.

Crime is one thing. Take the Bush gang's energy policy -- that is a standard Republican big business rip off with which we are all comfortable. But this is the gang that couldn't terrorbomb straight. Stop the Bushies before they kill again, as they try to instantiate their unique program of winning friends.

Bollettino

Good news from Uruguay this morning.


“Tabaré Vázquez, a Socialist doctor running as the candidate of an opposition coalition that includes former guerrillas, narrowly triumphed Sunday in the presidential election, bringing the left to power for the first time in this South American country.

The victory by the coalition, known as the Progressive-Encounter-Broad-FrontNew-Majority, whose largest faction consists of Tupamaro guerrillas turned politicians, strengthens a trend throughout the continent. As in the last presidential votes in Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador and Argentina, the candidate most opposed to American-supported free-market policies has defeated backers of those policies.”

Given that the model in Iraq is the same model the U.S. has pursued in Central and South America, LI’s hope, floating somewhere in the distant future, is that Iraq will go through the furnace of the American occupation with its major industry and structure intact – a state owned petroleum company at the center of it – and resolutely and democratically break with the logic of neo-liberalism. It is a continuing astonishment to LI that Vietnam (or, on the right, WWII) have been the template comparisons for a black bag op that has all the indices of the usual slimy Latin American intervention, right down to Negroponte, the mollusk pulling the strings from the American embassy. In fact, we are pretty confident that the most successful American reconstruction project in Iraq will be the CIA’s cheerful attempt to get the torturers rolling again with its hands on aid to the Mukhabarat.

As for our election here in the States – LI has been waking up cautiously optimistic for the last couple of days. While the polls don’t look too good for Kerry, the voter turnout numbers look like they could be very good for him. The Republican strategy of suppressing the voter turnout is, we optimistically think, doomed to fail. Our slim hope rests, partly, on the odd difference between the reported results from early voting in Nevada and Florida, where there seems to be a Dem surge, and the polls, which record a Republican edge. Our desire that this coup be over (deliver us, o Lord) has briefly surmounted the usual intellectual distance we try to gaze into around the LI office. Yes, we folded up the intellectual distance and chucked it in the drawer for the nonce. We actually think Max Boot is about right – the options facing both Kerry and Bush, given the right-defined landscape of American politics, financial reality, and the American penchant for ending its foreign policy failures by retreating from the various bloody theaters into which we should never have stuck our beaks in a hail of bombs and bromides, are too narrow to allow for too much diversity – but a too studied disdain for the symbolic plane misses the way options are formed. There is literature in life as well as decision trees.

We’ve been pleased to see that the Sex industry is coming out for Kerry. While wiling away our surfing hours looking for comforting quotes from our Lord Jesus Christ, somehow, oh somehow, we came upon a situationist site run by a Pagan Moss, Sensual lib, full of pics of cheerful and intently bodacious naked gals interspersed with cutting remarks about jefe Bush. This is probably not a link you want to open around the kids, or at work (pay attention, now, to our prophylactic remarks, since there are penises involved here -- for those of you shocked at the existence of such things). Brian Leiter linked to a phone sex site for Republicans, Lie Girls, where all your Cheney-ite fantasies can come, briefly, true.

Bollettino

Our far flung correspondants

We received the nicest response to our Ayn Rand post yesterday from our friend T. Here it is, almost unaltered -- well, names have been changed to protect the liability of this weblog.

"Nice recollection. I was a little more fortunate in my teenage introduction to La Belle Ayn insofaras what I read was a hell of a lot shorter than your intro.

I was fourteen and spending a lot of time in detention during after regular school hours. This was fine with me as there were always lovely girls in detention and, as we couldn't exactly wildly grope each other, as I would have preferred, I had my first real experiences talking to girls, in conversation about hopes and dreams and hates and fears and all that stuff that teenagers believe to be so vital and forevermore and always; also, the detention room had a bunch of books on those stupid, steel, vertical, rotating towers. It was in that detention room that I read, in order, Brave New World, 1984, and Rand's Anthem. I cannot recall why I read them, but I do have a recollection of what I got from them: that the future will be far far worse than ever this terrible present; these were imaginative futures which see
med all so possible and sensible, and awful. Another lesson learned: the vicious, self-righteous brutality of order. Although I read a bunch of Huxley (esp. when I was fifteen and found hallucinogens and The Doors of Perception) and a bunch of Orwell later, but never touched AR again. There was nothing shrewed or clever in this aversion, its only that once I heard the word "Objectivist", without knowing anything of its definitions, I smelled something bad and walked away.

You are absolutely right about the fact that the likes of Brave New World, Animal Farm, 1984 are taught because the are teachable (writ testable). I add a link to an article about this same status for Catcher in the Rye and Old Man and the Sea. Fortunately, I met the books I mentioned above on my own; it was my own very humble introduction to "comparative" literature - that habit of 'compare and contrast' was one that was hard to break.


Now that I am recalling those years I recall another passage. This one was freshman English, coinciding with my detention time, instructed by a little man named L. Now, while I really didn't have any reason to dislike L., save his all to finely manicured beard and his condescending manner and his pointy shiny shoes and his flowing pants with cuffs much too wide and his small manicured hands, I disliked him; the saving grace of that classroom was this classmate named Tom who could occasionally steal a few joints from his older brother and sell them to me. Sexually totally inexperienced me, I had no sentiment pro or con in the rumors of L. being a "fag" - I didn't have a clue what that meant; I did, obviously, know that it was a bad thing, but I didn't know what it meant (didn't really have fags in the suburbs, I guess). I disliked him, in part, because his overly tidy appearance clearly was a front for a rage; he was not well presented because he enjoyed being so, but because he desired to contain the chaotic rage that he carried in his body. I had no sympathy for him, as I do now, for I had only hatred for the seeming hypocrisy.

My dislike for him came to a head when we were assigned another eminently testable book: Jack London's White Fang - what a horror! So, I sez to myself, L. want me to write a little paper on this stupid book; well, I sez to myself, you just read this crazy little book called The Metamorphosis and thinks if kinda cool - why not write a paper about our man Gregor. And, sezing to myself again, why not fuck with L. and write about feeling like a cockroach....so I did.

Well, L. got red-in-the-face mad and flunked me and made sure that I did some time in detention and, with the powersthatbe of the high school, convinced my parents that therapy is necessary in my case, and blah blah blah its tough being fourteen blah blah blah......anyway, I also learned of The Clash in that detention room, and I got to all so inexpertly grope a lovely girl in a bathroom adjacent to that detention room, so its all good. Thank you L., wherever you are.

Bollettino

Rand, Rand, Rand

When I was sixteen, my humanities teacher assigned me some huge, indigestible novel by Ayn Rand to do a ‘report’ on. I’m pretty sure it was Atlas Shrugged. Now, it didn’t take long for me to realize that I was holding in my hands an aesthetic nullity. By then, I had read enough – Dickens, Dostoevsky, Flaubert – to know what it meant for a novel to be an aesthetic success, and this stuff wasn’t even in the horserace. I was a snobbish teen – I now know that the novel is a capacious form, containing multitudes – art, tracts, comic books, etc. However, my dim memory of the novel was that it went from bad to worse quickly, and that reading it was comparable to staring at water going down the drain for hours at a stretch.

Thousands of high school teachers once took it as their task to obliterate the taste for literature from the souls of their charges by assigning either tract novels – Walden Two and Rand’s Fountainhead – or allegories – Brave New World, Animal Farm. There is a simple institutional reason for this – it is supremely easy to devise tests for these novels. What does Emma Bovary represent? Who knows? But there isn’t a single character in a Rand novel who doesn’t represent something Capitalizable.

She was, I recall, that kind of writer.

This season’s Salmagundi publishes a large essay on the writer who Gore Vidal describes as the only writer whom everyone in Congress has actually read: ” Who Was Ayn Rand? by Gene Bell-Villada. It is an unfortunate growth. He flatfoots himself right away, I think, by comparing La Rand to Nabokov, on the thin ground that both were Russian emigrants. Both had two nostrils, too, but the similarities are uninstructive. Surely as a phenomenon of the fifties and sixties, Rand should be seen in the perspective of other pop authors, and in particular those who tend towards the didactic. These writers cluster on the sci fi shelves. Rands capitalist utopia was another form of science fiction. Certainly it was like no economic system in actual existence anywhere on planet earth. While capitalism saved itself in the postwar world by embracing consumerism and creating unprecedented credit markets, Rand was fantasizing a capitalism consisting entirely of captains of industry a la Jay Gould or the union busters of the 1890s. Adam Smith, wisely, knew that self-interest needed the guidance of the invisible hand – the ameliorating society of the market – in order to create a connected system that would actually ‘go of itself.” For Smith, sympathy was the glue in the order of the free market. Rand, who began as a screen-writer and never, as far as I know, ran even a lemonade stand, thought of capitalism as a both a metaphysics and a blood n sand film, starring, inevitably, Gary Cooper.

Bell-Villada is obviously repulsed by Rand’s fantasies, even as he thinks that they do represent some core truth about capitalism:

“But Randianism also exists as a consistent and rather simple set of beliefs, a theology one readily grasps and absorbs after spending some time with its scriptures. "Objectivism" is how the founder dubbed her system. At its core is the idea that selfishness is good, greed is admirable, and altruism is evil. (The Virtue of Selfishness is the pointed title of one of her essay collections.) Unfettered capitalism is the only true moral system in history. The successful businessman is the ideal hero of our time. The sign of the dollar is an icon to be worshiped and flaunted. On the other hand, generosity and compassion have no place in the world according to Rand. In a letter from the 1940s she singles out competence as "the only thing I love or admire in people. I don't give a damn about kindness, charity, or any of the other so-called virtues." Or, as Dominique Francon, the gorgeous and cold-hearted heroine-cum-bitch of Rand's Fountainhead reflects at one point with lofty sarcasm, "Compassion is a wonderful thing. It's what one feels when one looks at a squashed caterpillar."

What this captures is not how capitalism works – it would immediately collapse if it really embraced such premises – but how the average CEO pumps himself up, in his head, into a captain of industry. This requires such howlingly absurd scenarios as surely as, in the past, knobby kneed Sultans required Spanish fly in the harem. One can imagine that the upper management at Enron inhaled this stuff. Or one of the many execs who’ve been hauled into the dock after that most Randian run-up in the stock market in the late nineties. Of course, all of these “captains of industry” are disasters for the owners of their companies, which consist, contra Randian fiction, of anonymous and dispersed investors. The era of absentee ownership long ago drove out the Jay Gould types, and not creepy crawly liberalism.

Bell-Villada is on firmer ground in tracing Rand’s route to greatness. It is rather funny thinking of her as a history student at Leningrad University, but so she became. She got out of the Soviet Union in 1926. One wonders what she would have made of the cult of Stalin. Aesthetically, it would no doubt have exerted a strong appeal. But she didn’t have to wrestle with Stalin. Instead, she met Cecil B. Demille in Hollywood.

Bell-Villada has an unfortunate tendency to get all snipey going over the events in Rand’s life. This is a typical graf:

“ Weeks into her L.A. phase, Rand got involved with a handsome young movie extra, of Ohio working-class origins, named Frank O'Connor. Meanwhile she kept renewing her visa, and just as the extensions were about to run out, she married Frank the same month of her scheduled return to Russia. Without exception friends of the groom--by all accounts a passive, easy-going, nice-guy type--saw Frank as doing his sweetheart the favor of resolving her immigrant status. For the next fifty years Frank put up with Rand's many manias and caprices--with disquieting results. In the 1950s and '60s, when the couple were living in Manhattan, Ayn--now a famous author and cult figure--conducted a lengthy amour with her right-hand man, Nathaniel Branden. The other respective spouses grimly accepted the twice-weekly trysts at Ayn and Frank's apartment as a rational choice between two superior beings. Nathaniel's wife Barbara did live to include this bizarre tale in her authoritative life of the priestess, but the affair contributed to Frank's slow destruction, driving him to drink. He died a broken man in 1979, still married to a Rand he no longer much liked.”

This kind of thing makes even LI, whose views of Rand are much like those of Dominque Francon in re squished caterpillars, leap to Rand’s defense. The lazy victimizing of Frank O’Connor, who apparently had no friend to tell him about this wonderful invention called divorce, and who was living with a woman who was raking in the bucks, is distasteful. One of the healthier effects of acquaintance with Rand is to mitigate the lazy sentimentalism of liberal culture. We do like the notion that Rand’s copulatory energies were so violent that we are to imagine that Barbara Branden, who ‘did live” to record them, suffered some narrow escape from the rank mouth of a tiger. Perhaps it is impossible to write about so melodramatic a writer without falling into the tropes oneself.

Bell-Villada usefully reminds us that Atlas Shrugged revolves around a general strike – albeit of the captains of industry. Still, a general strike is a general strike. Alas, in the fifties, a decade that saw the mamby pamby New Deal ideology replace the hardcore CIO thirties ideology of war to the death against capital (where the Randian hero functioned as the useful villain, Mr. Moneybags, as translators of Marx’s Capital would have it), the general strike idea couldn’t take root. But who knows – perhaps it contributed, in some small way, to the New Left’s tactics in the sixties, particularly the burning of draft cards and the Moratorium of 1967. All good tactics to remember for today’s anti-war movement. In order to stop the war in Iraq, remember John Galt!

Unfortunately, Bell-Villada has no sense of dialectical irony, so he does not bark up this tree, instead pursuing that old canard, Rand’s Nietzsche-ism. Has Max Stirner actually become that dead? Anybody who reads Marx – as, presumably, poor Ayn was forced to in the Leningrad years – eventually comes upon Marx’s most tedious work, the German Ideology. The good thing about this work is that it preserved in the amber of intellectual history those curious species, Feuerbach and Maxie Stirner. Stirner is the man who pretty much invented the philosophy of egoism Rand later made her own.

Anyway, what Bell-Villada’s essay proves is that literary culture still doesn’t get Ayn Rand, partly because literary culture is often populated by people whose sense of capitalism is as screwy as Rand’s. If someday someone wants to understand the Rand effect, the books to read would start with Galbraith’s New Industrial State, which delineated the technostructure that dominated the postwar corporation, and Organizational Man, Whyte’s account of the conformist culture of big business. And do get out of poor Nietzsche. Here’s a link to Max Stirner.

PS -- Funniest fact in Bell-Villada's essay: Michael Millikan supposedly took sixteen copies of Atlas Shrugged with him to prison. I guess, if you divided by four, that would make a nice support for a low table, perfect for learning how to give those Japanese tea ceremonies that can enrich the life of the lonely prisoner, along with other useful and reconstructive activities, in the weary hours in the hoosgow.

Bollettino

Most confused story of the week goes to this WP article, which says:
1. The explosives probably were looted from Al Qaqaa;
2. That huge amounts of explosives and ammunition have been looted from unguarded sites throughout Iraq in amounts;
3. so, the explosives looted from Al Caca are unimportant.

Say what? the media simply neglects to report on how the insurgents acquire the explosives that they use to kill 1,100 American soldiers for a year, and so – when they finally get around to reporting on one looted site – the story is already old hat.

The parallel between the way the American press reports things and the way the Bush administration does things is pretty striking. Both are sloppy, ideologically skewed, and buttressed by self-consuming excuses and intermittent aggression.

Beginning graf:

“The 377 tons of Iraqi explosives whose reported disappearance has dominated the past few days of presidential campaigning represent only a tiny fraction of the vast quantities of other munitions unaccounted for since the fall of Saddam Hussein's government 18 months ago.”

Which leads to: “The Bush administration cited official figures this week showing about 400,000 tons destroyed or in the process of being eliminated. That leaves the whereabouts of more than 250,000 tons unknown.”

Which, by the logical path only known to that special group known as spinners, leads to this:

“Against that background, this week's assertions by Sen. John F. Kerry's campaign about the few hundred tons said to have vanished from Iraq's Qaqaa facility have struck some defense experts as exaggerated.”

In other words, Kerry is exaggerating – what he should be doing is expanding his charges to include the 250,000 tons. He is exaggerating by minimizing, being that type. A flip flopper. Unlike the brave and true WP, which ra ra-ed the entry into war, reported on it with a lack of standards and the proper embedded spirit of servility that would have done the old journalists at Pravda proud, and reports, now, 14 months into the occupation, with the election coming in a week, that, oh, by the way, the occupation forces haven’t guarded a quarter of the arms and explosives left in the country by Saddam, so let’s not sweat the little stuff. Which of course we haven’t bothered to investigate at all. Because it is all in a no-go area.

There are good reporters at the WP. They have done a better job of reporting the campaign than the Times – although it is hard to see how they could have done worse than the Times. But this kind of reporting is disgusting on every level. It is hypocritical, illogical, and aims consciously to deceive – that is, to muddle the information that it conveys. There’s no excuse for it at all. Kerry has taken up a story that originated in a report by the Iraqi government that exposed a small part of the vast system of malfeasance. Far from exaggerating, he has hit closer to the truth than the WP has for – well, the last time they reported on where the insurgents get their weapons. When was that?

Speaking of silly media, the NYT has mounted an odd crusade to preserve the sensitivities of their political reporter, Adam Nagourney. First it was Daniel Oken's odd outing of some email bitch to Nagourney. Nagourney attracts criticism because he is, of the group of bad political reporters at the Times, primum inter imbicillis. At best, Timesmen wear their arrogance like a club tie. I've met a few attending SXSW conferences, and I've always been impressed with their inflated ideas of their own self worth. Lately, they've gotten much worse. In particular, the political reporters (Bushmiller, Wilgoran, Seelye) are vain, shallow, and never losing an opportunity to lean over backwards to include the latest GOP hitline. Nagourney, however, stands out. His stories have a very depressing content to gas ratio. You could read all of Nagourney’s stories about this campaign and still know zip about what Bush proposes to do in the next four years, and what Kerry proposes to do in the next four years. The purpose of the presidency is bracketed, as if beneath the dignity of the writer. The purpose, after all, is wonkish. It is boring. It is so unlike a tv show. For Nagourney, the presidential race is like Survivor, a reality show that exists either to amuse him or to be flipped away from. Unfortunately, us victims of D.C. misrule can’t, it turns out, change the channel so easily. If, by some quirk of Time travel, you could go back and erase all of N.'s stories, beginning in January, you would not block out a single bit of news.

In a stroke of minor ‘internets’ genius, someone put up a parody site, Adam Nagourney’s Diary, which captures the high school cliquishness of the national reporting pool – the empty pompadour set – by importing into it a stylistic correlative: the high school weblog. The entries read exactly like LiveJournal dramas: the sobs, the heartthrobs, the I rule! the “everybody is so mean to me. This is exactly the right: Adam Nagourney is a high school phenomena, writing on an eighth grade level.

Here’s the first entry, under I am the hero:
“Man, I have been getting major props for my reporting lately. First I am praised for choosing to avoid the spin room and now Mark Halperin is hailing me as the hero of journalism. I danced around calling Bush a liar in my latest article but resisted so I wouldn’t see a decrease in Christmas cards. Plus, “pushes limit on the facts” makes it sound like he’s working hard.

I expect to see a spike in party invites as a result of my ever-increasing credibility. Speaking of party invitations, I reorganized my collection from being indexed by political affiliation to favorite hobby.
Watched Caddyshack I and II tonight. Why doesn’t Chevy Chase make movies anymore?”

The Times dispatched Jim Rutenberg to defend the media’s honor, and Nagourney’s, in one of the more bizarre self defending articles the Times has ever published. Rutenberg pitches in with an intro that sounds like something from the blond valedictorian in Election – preening, superior, sneering and self-pitying, all at once:

“Practicing cheap and dirty politics, playing fast and loose with the facts and even lying: Accusations like these, and worse, have been slung nonstop this year.
The accused in this case are not the candidates, but the mainstream news media. And the accusers are an ever-growing army of Internet writers, many of them partisans, who reach hundreds of thousands of people a day.

Journalists covering the campaign believe the intent is often to bully them into caving to a particular point of view. They insist the efforts have not swayed them in any significant way, though others worry the criticism could eventually have a chilling effect.”

Bully them? It turns out bullying is the key theme. Journalists, in Rutenberg’s view, are heroic professionals. And those who criticize them are bullies. Makes for a simple chemistry, and fits right in with the high school theme.

“But the most personal critiques originate among the political blogs - especially from the left - run by individuals who use news media reports for their often-heated discussions.”

Rutenberg is particularly incensed that some of those political blogs make comments about the personal appearance and sex lives of media personalities. Something, of course, that the media never does about politicians. You’ll remember how Gore’s choice of brown suits was a minor detail in the NYT’s relentless focusing on his Social Security and Medicare proposals back in 2000. And, of course, the meme of George Bush’s ‘likeability” and Kerry’s ‘lack of charisma” has never been transmitted, like a sexual disease, through the organs of the press.

It is when he gets to the criticism of (gasp!) the Times that Rutenberg turns up the pilot light and really starts sniffing the gas.

“On a Web site named after Adam Nagourney, The Times's chief political correspondent, contributors mix crude personal insults with accusations that Mr. Nagourney and other Washington-based reporters are too easy on Mr. Bush.

Bob Somerby, a comedian who runs a Web site called The Daily Howler that often accuses the news media of being shallow, lazy, bullied by Republicans and unfairly critical of Democrats, said a more genteel approach would not be effective. (He has referred to this reporter on his Web site as "dumb" and in "over his head" for being blind or turning a blind eye to Republican spin.)”

Bullying and being bullied worry Rutenberg. After all, the Timesmen have a 92.3 grad point average and their extracurricular activities in Debate, Archery, and Volleyball aren’t to be disparaged, either!

Bollettino

Shortly after 9/11, LI interviewed Peter Galbraith for the Austin Statesman (which has recently endorsed Bush, in payback for a piece of legislation the Cox family dearly appreciated – the rollback of the inheritance tax).

Galbraith’s brother, James, the economist, lives in Austin. We later interviewed him in connection with another article. James, as an economist, gets tons of respect in this corner, but as an interviewee he sucks – surly, unclear, etc. In contrast, Peter was a joy to talk to.

Of the people who supported the war in Iraq, Peter was both the one we respected most and the one who has consistently operated to criticize the occupation from the standpoint of the original reasons he chose to support the invasion. In our opinion, due to his work with the Kurds in the late 80s and his witnessing of the afteraffects of Saddam’s mass murders, he has made a fatal unconscious jump from sympathy for the victim to apologist for Kurdistan. That has prevented him from confronting the reality of the history of Northern Iraq, which is not a tale of increasing freedom, but a tale of sporadic fighting between two warlord groups, interspersed with a subplot of increasing freedom.

If one can imagine an intelligent pro-war intellectual – a sort of Hitchens with brains – then it is Galbraith.

His recent survey, in the NYRB, of the landscape of occupation mistakes was, we think, the most devastating indictment of the occupation to be found outside the pages of … well, this site. For that reason, we strongly recommend his op ed piece in the Boston Globe, which concludes that the war has made Iraq better off, but then lets this last graf drop:

“It is my own country that is worse off -- 1,100 dead soldiers, billions added to the deficit, and the enmity of much of the world. Someone out there has nuclear bomb-making equipment, and they may not be well disposed toward the United States. Much of this could have been avoided with a competent postwar strategy.”


The article intros thusly:

“IN 2003 I went to tell Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz what I had seen in Baghdad in the days following Saddam Hussein's overthrow. For nearly an hour, I described the catastrophic aftermath of the invasion -- the unchecked looting of every public institution in Baghdad, the devastation of Iraq's cultural heritage, the anger of ordinary Iraqis who couldn't understand why the world's only superpower was letting this happen.”

Alas for Galbraith – he still doesn’t understand the chain of command in Iraq. He should have been talking to the head of Raytheon, which the Bush administration tapped to take care of minor things like looting. Ray Bonner’s article back on October 14, 03 about the Al Musaiyib dump and the wonderful pickings there obviously passed quickly into the unconsciousness that absorbs all news out-of-the-narrative from Iraq. In that article it was revealed that the Pentagon pump house gang, on top of the situation as usual, had sportingly decided not to deprive guerrillas of hand held missile launchers or such stuff for a certain period – a sort of hunting season. But they had signed a contract with Raytheon to start actually guarding the dumps in December. So from May to December, it was the Pentagon position that Iraqis, overwhelmed with joy at their liberation, were simply rifling the munitions dumps to decorate their living rooms.


“BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 13 - The two most recent suicide
bombings here and virtually every other attack on American
soldiers and Iraqis were carried out with explosives and
matériel taken from Saddam Hussein's former weapons dumps,
which are much larger than previously estimated and remain,
for the most part, unguarded by American troops, allied
officials said Monday.

The problem of uncounted and unguarded weapons sites is
considerably greater than has previously been stated, a
senior allied official said.

The American military now says that Iraq's army had nearly
one million tons of weapons and ammunition, which is half
again as much as the 650,000 tons that Gen. John P.
Abizaid, the senior American commander in the Persian Gulf
region, estimated only two weeks ago.

In separate interviews, the officials, civilian and
military and from different countries, expressed concern
about the potential of attackers with access to the weapons
dumps to nurture violence and insecurity.

…
There are not enough American soldiers here to do the job
of finding the weapons and securing them until they can be
destroyed, the officials said. A private American company,
Raytheon, has been awarded a contract to destroy the
weapons, but it will not begin work until December, one
official said.”

In the let it bleed war, however, such things are insignificant. String out your soldiers, let them occupy a territory for an undetermined number of years, use the war to your political advantage but never wage it in any but a frivolous way, and there you have a foolproof (and foolmade) policy. At least, though, it doesn’t have to pass a Global Test.

Interestingly, the U.S., before it decided that looting at Al Musayyib was just good sport, had featured the plant as the big bad reason we had to go right into Iraq. It was a prominent part of Colin Powell’s slideshow for the UN. Many people have commented on the reasons for the increase in violence in Iraq from about last fall until now. LI has adduced a sort of social psychology of resentment of the occupiers to explain it. But who knows -- the more mundane reason might simply be that the guerrillas were stocking up on their weaponry, while the CPA watched and waited for Raytheon. This would be a very Tolstoyian reason -- the immediate contingencies of the material nexus of war, as Tolstoy observes in War and Peace, being of a much greater influence than the strategies of the generals.