GET OUT NOW

From Today’s Washington Post:

“Among the four Marines killed and 10 wounded when an explosive device erupted under their Amtrac on Wednesday were the last battle-ready members of a squad that four days earlier had battled foreign fighters holed up in a house in the town of Ubaydi. In that fight, two squad members were killed and five were wounded.

In 96 hours of fighting and ambushes in far western Iraq, the squad had ceased to be.

Every member of the squad -- one of three that make up the 1st Platoon of Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment -- had been killed or wounded, Marines here said. All told, the 1st Platoon -- which Hurley commands -- had sustained 60 percent casualties, demolishing it as a fighting force.”

From yesterday’s New York Times:

“Mr. Rumsfeld is banking on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan remaining stable enough for him to focus his attention elsewhere. Frequent video-teleconferences with senior commanders in Iraq during the peak of combat operations have dwindled to a few phone calls a week.”

I hope the Great Man calls them up sometime next week (or maybe the week after) and says how super appreciative he is of all the scorched flesh. My goodness. 60 percent casualties. But let’s concentrate on all the Good Things that are happening in Iraq, shall we?

Inspissated cockledoodledoo

LI used to ‘do’ Christopher Hitchens more. After a while, though, it got boring. The man’s defense of the indefensible, his substitution of belligerence for logic, his wavering between complete lies and half truths, became a circus sideshow that indicted those who hooted at it as much as those who cheered it – after all, why were us squawkers still watching? My friend, T., kept pointing this out forcefully. After all, why waste one’s time on Hitchen’s inspissated cockledoodledoo when there were more pressing matters to worry about? Existence itself, my next meal, sex and the lack of it around these parts, etc., etc.

But the sideshow still runs, and is still, occasionally, funny in that “watching-Friday-the-thirteenth” way – watching, that is, the killer resurrect in the midst of ever more bogus S/FX. So we read, with vast amusement, the copping of old Cold War themes in his essay on Abu Ghraib (and how the horrible left is using it as a propaganda tool against the good old Americans) in Slate. We particularly liked this one:

“Abu Ghraib was by no means celebrated as an ancestral civic and cultural center before the year 2004. To the Iraqis, it was a name to be mentioned in whispers, if at all, as "the house of the end." It was a Dachau. Numberless people were consigned there and were never heard of again. Its execution shed worked overtime, as did its torturers, and we are still trying to discover how many Iraqis and Kurds died in its precincts. At one point, when it suffered even more than usual from chronic overcrowding, Saddam and his sons decided to execute a proportion of the inmates at random, just to cull the population. The warders then fanned out at night to visit the families of the prisoners, asking how much it would be worth to keep their son or brother or father off the list. The hands of prisoners were cut off, and the proceedings recorded on video for the delight of others. I myself became certain that Saddam had reached his fin de régime, or his Ceauşescu moment, when he celebrated his 100-percent win in the "referendum" of 2003 by releasing all the nonpolitical prisoners (the rapists and thieves and murderers who were his natural constituency) from Abu Ghraib. This sudden flood of ex-cons was a large factor in the horrific looting and mayhem that accompanied the fall of Baghdad.”

Remember how the Russians used to ‘whisper’ about the Lubyanka? Of course, oppressed people were always whispering to reporters back in the day. That the whispers of the Iraqis wouldn’t, really, be understood by Hitchens, who doesn’t speak Arabic, doesn’t matter. Apparently his translators mimicked the whipering. And the hands being cut off – not like today’s prisons in Iraq. Sure, in Samarra, where the Iraqis are whispering again, to a real reporter, Peter Maass, there might be a little electric prodding to the genitals. There might be the tying to the ceiling – the famous airplane – pulling the arms out of the socket. But of course, it is only used on the ‘sudden flood of ex-cons” – Saddam Hussein’s natural constituency. Funny how debasing the enemy into the purely criminal is part of the organization of torture in Iraq. It is also funny that nowhere in Hitchens essay is there any mention of the, uh, heart attacks suffered by various prisoners of the Americans. Maybe the whispering about that was just too low for him to hear.

Anyway, now we get to the new, improved prison complex – prisons as humane as the ones we have in Ameriiiicaaa:

“Efforts were being made to repaint and disinfect the joint, and many of the new inmates were being held in encampments in the yard while this was being done, but I distinctly remember thinking that there was really no salvaging such a place and that it should either be torn down and ploughed over or turned into a museum.

“Instead, it became an improvised center for anyone caught in the dragnet of the "insurgency" and was filled up with suspects as well as armed supporters of Baathism and Bin Ladenism. There's no need to restate what everyone now knows about what happened as a consequence. But I am not an apologist if I point out that there are no more hangings, random or systematic. The outrages committed by Pvt. England and her delightful boyfriend were first uncovered by their superiors.”

Wow. Their superiors uncovered this, eh? Makes one wonder what Stalin would have found out if he’d just ordered a thorough investigation of what the police were up to. The father of all the Russias might have found, to his disgust, that those labor camps weren’t really rehabilitating his dear children. And the Pentagon bigwigs might have found out that instead of the ice cream and veggies that they had strictly ordered the guards to give the low-lives, the guards were, on their own, staging these orgies. One is just pleased as punch that the superiors uncovered the lot of em. As for the hangings – that is certainly right, and progress we should all be proud of. The body in the bag that Grainer was famously making the thumbs up sign over was beaten to death. Or died of a heart attack -- Ba'athist scum are notoriously prone to heart attacks.

Quite wonderful, actually, how civilization marches on.

Hitchens, who has taken to thinking that his father’s position in the Navy makes him an expert on the army, must be pleased that there are no more messy hangings going on, since it is so against the regulations. He might, however, want to watch some of that American funded Iraqi tv. The popular show in which terrorists confess – and sometimes, after confession, their bodies are found by roadsides. The lot of them were Saddam’s natural constituency, and we don’t want to waste a lot of sob sister sympathy on these impediments to democracy as the Hitchenses see it in the Middle East.

ps: ps – We at LI often feel bad about the number of people coming to this site looking for “sex” “girles” “breasts” and the like. We’ve offered pretty slim pickings. But today we can recommend a link to those surfers: take a look at the hot analingus action over at the NYT, when not one but two reporters stick their tongues and noses as far up the rectum of our Secretary of War as is permitted by the Supreme Court. Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker’s article begins in the time honored fashion of the breathless Teen Mag piece about some Britney-ette:

"Ask Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to define his legacy, and he cuts the question short: "Don't. Hold off on it. There will be plenty of time."

Notice how that intimation of intimacy, that dropped “you” in the “ask…” functions. On the one hand, you, too, lucky citizen, could have the earthshaking opportunity to interview the great man! Oh, doesn’t it do something to you that makes you run to the bathroom to change your shorts! But on the other hand – sucker, you don’t have a chance in hell getting within touching distance of Donnie. That’s reserved for NYT reporters, who are specialists in the tongue massage.

Not that they aren’t critical. Why, they went out and found a congressman who put it that some criticize Rumsfeld for not kowtowing in Congress!

As for clichés, we got your clichés right here. For instance, Paul Wolfowitz is a “lightning rod” of controversy. Interesting choice of words, given that this week, the price of going into Iraq has risen to 300 billion dollars, just a tad more than the 10 billion Wolfie projected two years ago. I guess lightning rod means, in Timespeak, dysfunctional liar. But given the adorable Rumsfeld bottom to which our reporters are attached, I suppose these are minor things.

One boner deflator warning, however: the article is about how Rummy is going to finish out his term. Meaning, for those of you outside the NYT orgy – those fans, those “you”’s outside the magic circle – another, what, two thousand, three thousand soldiers dying, adorably, for Rumsfeld’s crackpot ideas. Isn’t that sweet! As for the colored others, well, let’s not even count them.

Another triumph for the free press everywhere!

Nine murdered, runaway bride still running

So, nine American soldiers die in Iraq over the weekend. Not one of those soldiers will get a thousandth of the news attention that a woman who didn’t want to get married in Duluth, Georgia, has already received. Not that the press doesn’t support our troops, but really – these guys are so low income. Suckers. Downers. CNN spending time figuring out how these senseless deaths were caused by the manipulations of a brainless Prez? Please. No doubt, the military got busy right away cutting off benefits to the wives and kids. Money goes to the virtuous – to the stockholders of the weapons companies, the private military contractors, the consultants, and the wonderful, inbred round of retired legislatures and generals who sit on boards and hold down important positions in the Death industry and will devise ways to keep America, in big ways and small, a vicious and uncompanionable country. And the great deferrers who so bravely lead them have, stoically, kept a stiff upper lip. Rumsfeld’s automatic pen was busy. Wolfowitz, of course, is getting ready to sink his fangs into the World Bank. In fact, they are all so brave and true and busy that they haven’t given a thought or a shit about those nine deaths, and never will. Although we can always hope that Rumsfeld experiences a death scene much like the one in Richard III, when the King’s victims visit him:

Ghost of CLARENCE
"Let me sit heavy on thy soul to-morrow!
I, that was wash'd to death with fulsome wine,
Poor Clarence, by thy guile betrayed to death!
To-morrow in the battle think on me,
And fall thy edgeless sword: despair, and die!”

How many victims in the end? Two thousand Americans? one hundred thousand Iraqis?

So what are the headlines on Monday and today? 100 Iraqi insurgents die. Where did this wonderful death count come from? That totally trustworthy institution, the U.S. Military – which is to death counts as WorldComm was to accounting. How do we know that the Iraqis weren’t, say, wedding party guests, kids, and the numerous others that the U.S. military has an unfortunate tendency to eviscerate, scorch to death, disembowel, etc., in the course of its mission – helpin’ freedom loving Iraqis love perpetual subjugation? We can take that on trust. After all, we are getting information from embedded reporters, who pride themselves on not merely spewing out Yankee propaganda. No, they gild the propaganda with their own feeble artfulness.

LI unpatriotically suspects that somehow, the glorious U.S. press, which is always fiercely sniffing out the truth of things, might have lain down a little on the job this weekend. And of course, there is the U.S.’s love affair with imprisonment. Prison, in the age of Bush, is next to godliness and freedom loving. Which is why we are, unsurprisingly, gifting Iraq with our unique obsession:

“BAGHDAD, May 9 -- The number of prisoners held in U.S. military detention centers in Iraq has risen without interruption since autumn, filling the centers to capacity and prompting commanders to embark on an unanticipated prison expansion plan.

As U.S. and Iraqi forces battle an entrenched insurgency, the detainee population surpassed 11,350 last week, a nearly 20 percent jump since Iraq's Jan. 30 elections. U.S. prisons now contain more than twice the number of people they did in early October, when aggressive raids began in a stepped-up effort to crush the insurgency before January's vote.”

Among the things we really ought to list in "America the Beautiful", right next to the purple mountain's majesty, is the the second greatest prison population in the world, much of it made up by that most dangerous of villains, the pot smoker. So isn't it natural we'd want to share with our little buddy, Iraq?

Smoke on the water

LI mentioned punitive liberalism in our last post. In the Reformer, a British journal, the Spring issue is headlines articles about civil liberties and the “therapeutic” state – a state that is no longer big brother, but is simply your best friends intervening to make sure you are no longer a menace to yourself. In the friendliest way possible. With big Tony Blair smiles. The Reformer is obviously oriented towards the classical liberalism of Mill. LI does not subscribe to the classical liberalism of Mill. Or at least we are inspired by that thematic in Mill that made him ever more sympathetic to socialism. But the British journal isn’t into Cato kneejerk libertarianism. There’s a nice recognition, for instance, that environmental harm is a serious issue, rather than a conspiracy made up by junk scientists – the favorite rightwing meme.

Claire Fox’s essay on smoking bans was particularly nice. We liked this graf: “It is through the prism of passive smoking that we have seen the issue of freedom –a key tenent of liberal democracy – redefined and indeed degraded. Instead of fighting for a free society, we now have a demand for a smoke free society. Mike Storey, Lib Dem leader of the Liverpool County Council (the first local authority to vote for a ban) told his party conference – with no hint of irony – that a ban which allows no room for choice, and can result in 1,000 pound fines (with jail for those who refuse to pay) is really “about the liberty of the individual to breathe the air and not have to have their [sic] health put at risk by the illiberal actions of others.” We would have enjoyed the issue even more if it were recognized that the great generator of the discourse that allows the state to exert such moral monopolies over the bio-chemical lives of its citizens is and has been the drug war; that the rhetoric about smoking is the same rhetoric that has been used to ban marijuana, heroin, cocaine, etc., etc.; that the bans were pernicious and unjustified in their very origins; that the last sensible drug policy adopted by a Western government was, in fact, that adopted under classical liberal principles by the British raj in India, which refused, in the 1890s, to ban ganja smoking among Bengalis (as some reformers were calling for them to do) on the sensible ground that it wasn’t those reformers business; and that the radical illogic of drug banning spreads the harm of precedent – the law being the vector, here, bearing harm to all parts of the body politic.

news from austin

A friend wrote to tease me about the protests against Ann Coulter here in Austin. I didn’t even know Ann Coulter was coming to Austin. I feel about Ann Coulter and her movements the way Sherlock Holmes felt about the heliocentric theory, when Watson introduced him to the subject in Study in Scarlet:

“My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found
incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory
and of the composition of the Solar System. That any
civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not
be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to
be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly
realize it.

"You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my
expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my
best to forget it."

But if I was young and full of cum and a liberal undergrad at U.T., I’m sure that I would have thought protesting A.C. was just the thing to do. One has to teethe, no? And a little tussle with the cops, some shouting, and apparently one arrest – excitement was had by all.

No, the real news from Austin is that the smoking ban passed. I voted against it, of course. But I expected it to pass. The anti-smoking people did a really good job canvassing for that. And the pro-smokers did a piss poor job campaigning against it. Basically, there is already a ban on smoking in most work places. This ban would extend it to places where you drink and try to pick up your sexual preference (and if that doesn’t work, you listen to music). The pro-smokers should have emphasized the fun aspect of this. Instead, they mounted a dreary, geeky campaign about choice. Well, liberty will move the libertarians among us, all four of them – but to really block this ban, one needed to move the people who actually go to the clubs. And they would be moved only if it was obvious that this was a case of making good and sure that somebody else wasn’t having fun – a perennial preoccupation of punitive liberalism. This campaign, in other words, required mockery and song, but it didn’t get it.

The other issue that was much discussed and thrown about was the possibility that the state will rent some public roads to tolling companies. Or that tolling companies will build the roads. It is hard to know which it is to be. If the latter, it is a terrible idea. If the former, I don’t know. Extracting a charge from cars on the highway does have its good points – especially if, like me, you ride a bike. Seriously, although the highway system in the U.S. proves, once again, that sector specific socialism works, I’ve always held that there are no absolutes in the political economy. The social cost of allowing the state to spread the cost of infrastructure around is, evidently, to be measured in environmental damage here. And, as time goes by, in an unbreakable bond to an exhaustible resource accessed most easily under other skies. How to make that that social cost visible? LI is not against privatizing, with strict regulation, certain resources in order to make the cost of them real in every case. There are certain aberrant phenomena in this country – for instance, the million person lollapolooza in the desert known as Las Vegas – which are, in the long run, unsustainable. That the fastest growing city in these states is located in the area with the most rapidly dwindling supply of water implies something has gone wrong in our vaunted system of allocating resources.

I put down these stray thoughts as markers for a later post.

I’ve been waiting for two years for Tony Blair to get his comeuppance. So this morning, I should be filled with glee.

I’m not. I’m filled with pity.

The repudiation of Blair was all about the war. A concentrated effort will be made to reverse the obvious among the American pundocrats in the next couple of days, but the fact is that, even if we put the anti-war shift away from Blair’s Labour at around 4 percent, that missing percentile torpedoes Blair’s ability to govern – as he is used to governing.

The polls don’t get to the multiplier effect. A list of voter priorities is not a map of voter mood. Every other issue was infected by the feeling that Blair practiced blatant deceit and high-handedness in maneuvering to bring Britain into the War.

What was the point? The U.S. was going to invade with or without Britain. In the event, Britain got nothing. No say in the running of “coalition” Iraq – the English had to sit back and watch flunkouts from the Heritage Foundation destroy Iraq as a unified whole from their place in Saddam’s Palace without having the power to intervene with a firm nanny’s smack. They enabled Bush-ites to design the war as a no-sacrifice political show. Even though that didn’t completely succeed (true, nobody cares about the number of Iraqi dead sacrificed to the neocon dream, but even a country of Sleeping Beauties – the out of it America of the Bush age – has a rumbling that things haven’t been working out right, there), Britain, by providing enough troops to subdue the South, actually gave the Bush administration the leeway to do what it likes to do best – put sacrifice off until tomorrow, while posturing today. If the U.S. had had to throw in another fifty to one hundred thousand troops in Iraq, Sleeping Beauty would be halfway out of her coma. So Blair’s policy didn’t even have the minimum effect he ostensibly wanted, keeping America integrated into the circle of international interests shared by the Great Power democracies. On the contrary, Bush’s nosethumbing at civilization became a great amusement for his more yahoo followers, while the NYT set had to be content with assuring us that Colin Powell was gravely concerned.

There is a part of me that will forever be an oatmeal bread Fabian. That part of me, the part that reads Polly Toynbee and nods its head, was not wholly out of love with Blair. True, the horrible civil rights record is not good – the sucking up to the worst kind of capitalist is even worse – but Labour made those incremental improvements in the lot of the working class that Toynbee is always writing about. It seems like all commas and subclauses, this program here and that program there, but that is the way Fabian progress looks.

However, my pity is more personal than political. Blair was battered for the war very personally, his nose was held to the blood spilt – once again playing the surrogate for Bush. And Blair seems like a person who can be very hurt by being disliked. The eagerness and chipperness in trying to make himself likeable is what makes him so damned annoying, and made the lap dog comparison woundingly apt – but, insofar as his surface insincerity is truly sincere, it also makes his wounding a sad spectacle.

ps – readers have complained that LI has neglected the week’s hot story – you know the one, Paul Abdul claiming to have been kidnapped by OJ Simpson so she could avoid marrying her secret American Idol sweetheart in Duluth Georgia, while the investigation among the Duluth Georgia police department reportedly finds that nine out of ten of the finest slept with Michael Jackson while he abstained from abusing them. Some talk of “playing with the badges” has surfaced. Well, we are taking the high road on this story. We are ardent fans of the alter-American Idol show – the one in which demi-virgins from Bachlorette are sacrificed on a Gilded dollar sign altar by Pat Robertson wearing the leathermask from Texas Chain Saw massacre – which is shown on the alter-Fox station in Austin, Texas. The singing American Idol show has a little too little bloodshed and corrupt evangelists for our taste. Also, no mudwrestling. We can’t abide no mudwrestling. Kudos kudos kudos to ABC for pulling its investigative team off the totally boring 8.7 trillion dollar Medicare deficit story – directly attributable to our lovable Mr. Mission Accomplished in the White House -- to jump on this much more interesting story. Red State America deserves no less – and no more.

Greater evils, election time

Pity the Brits today. An election between a man who is marginally more evil than Bush (the margin consists of his much greater intelligence—Blair is Iago to Bush’s Ubu Roi) and a conservative leader who is campaigning to bring the paramilitary right back to the fold. Howard is simply another sign of the disaster Margaret Thatcher wreaked, like some medieval comet shedding plagues, on a party that at one time boasted Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan. The socialist side of the British political economy, one should always remember, owes a lot to Conservatives – from the willingness to break with the liberal/free trade orthodoxy in Lord Salisbury’s era to Macmillan’s normalization of the welfare state.

A Macmillan would recognize the opportunity that Blair has given the Conservatives to repair the social compact by opposing, wholeheartedly, the ill conceived alliance with the U.S. to invade and subjugate Iraq. A Macmillan would also recognize that a conservative defends those instruments of social cohesion that have passed the test of time – and thus would be for strengthening National Health, for instance, not looking for illusory savings. A Macmillan would recognize that, given the country’s enormous wealth, the cost of a higher education should be going down, with solid state support for taking the financial burden from the student and his or her family – for surely there is a direct relationship between conservatism and the expanded property-holding possibility given by higher education. A Macmillan wouldn’t be captured by the silly tinker toy called ‘conservatism’ in the United States, which consists of enormous handouts to corporations, a permanent state of war justifying a permanent inflation of the Department of War, and a taxphobia that is less a reasoned position than a cause for psychotherapeutic intervention.

Unfortunately, as long as the Thatcherites have their withered, dying talons on the throat of the Conservative party, they will keep squeezing the life out of the thing. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, in the Guardian the other day rather beautifully:

“What's more, Howard's enthusiasm for the war puts him quite out of step with his own followers, as opposed to the quasi-neocons and quisling right who dominate the Tory press, as well as the Tory leadership. Anyone who lives in middle England, otherwise known as provincial England, will be aware of what the polls have regularly confirmed: the Iraq war was markedly more unpopular among ordinary Conservatives than among Labour voters.

One of the most electrifying moments in the past month wasn't directly related to the election. George MacDonald Fraser was talking on the Today programme about the latest of his marvellous Flashman novels. Now an octogenarian, a Tory of Tories, this splendid writer is for ever groaning about the dismal modern age and every woe from political correctness to the metric system. More relevantly, a lifetime earlier he was an infantryman, who saw his best friend killed beside him.
Suddenly there was an explosion on air. He had never in his life felt more ashamed of his country than he had over Iraq, the old soldier said. He could not get out of his head two pictures, one of a small Iraqi boy with his arms blown off by American bombs, and another of our prime minister smirking sycophantically at President Bush's side.

It was riveting, but not surprising. I would have a large bet that if the 60th anniversary of VE-day on Sunday were marked by a poll of MacDonald Fraser's surviving contemporaries - the men and women who served this country in 1939-45 - an easy majority of them would be opposed to the Iraq war.”

And so the spectacle will continue – a country moving right under a nominally left leadership, opposed by a rightwing party that stands for the worst kind of servility to a foreign power, etc., etc. Sad days.