a pygmy speaks

Foreign policy is one of those areas in which pygmies are treated as giants. This, LI thinks, is the reason “Frank” Fukuyama has such an outsized reputation. I might be unfair – I am judging him on the basis of the only one of his books I have read: The Great Disruption. Fukuyama's theme is a cockamamie attempt to cast the postwar period, the West’s Magic time (les trentes glorieuses, as the French say) as a time of Hobbesian insecurity. To distort history like this, you have to go to ridiculous extremes – and I remarked on one of them on my review of the book in the Austin Chronicle. It should be remarked that the distortion of history by the right, here, is consistent with their effort to distort the EU economy as it works now -- both are ways of embedding a corporationist conservatism as a sort of utopian template. That in fact the European health systems work so much better than the American that the comparison is laughable (same with workers rights, pensions, etc.), and that the real problem with the EU is that Europeans save too much (the one thing the American right is actually right about is that there is that fear inflation is not a macro-economic policy) has to be obscured by an ideological filter that gives us a no alternative past and future. Ronald Reagan's grinning features are the end of history for this group -- imagine them set in plastic, twenty feet high, the mouth open, and all of world history going for a ride in a boat between those teeth.

(By the way, looking at this article again, my figures for the number of killed in war and by mass murder, 1919-1945 (in Europe only) are way too conservative):

“The argument, briefly, is that, starting in 1950, about, and going all the way until the mid-Nineties (say 1994), the West experienced a prolonged moral disruption. Violent crime rose, marriages eroded, civil life became more precarious, and drugs became widespread. Fukuyama pegs this argument to several graphs, showing rises in bad behavior all over the place, from Sweden to California.

What to say about this argument? Well, the first thing that comes to mind is that it must be wrong.

Consider, for instance, violent crime. Fukuyama considers whether his statistics account for all crimes, or just reported crimes. What he never considers is the status of crime itself. You would never understand the moral climate of Germany, 1933-1945, by looking at the police reports. Why? The police were committing the crimes. To consider violence and violent crimes to be one entity is to strain at a mugging and swallow a massacre. Really, between World War I and the end of World War II, there was a grand disruption, which resulted in the massacre of perhaps 25 million people, the forced emigration of perhaps another 20 million, and the death toll, from wars, of at least 10 million. If we project backward with those figures in mind, we find that the Grand Disruption is characterized by one thing: The West was much, much more peaceful than at any time since the end of the Napoleonic wars. Fukuyama is a suburban Toynbee. His world view has the restricted scope of the confirmed philistine.”


All of which is by way of intro to the article in the NYT Magazine, which is Fukuyama’s farewell to neoconservatism. Or, rather, it is the most visible moment in the extended party of Fukuyama’s farewell to conservatism, which has been rumbling along in Commentary and the National Interest for some time.

The neocon response to Fukuyama, in short form, is given by Roger Simon in a post entitle Fukuyama opts out. Simon has pared the zombie ideology to an economy of words that is impressive, sort of like a hypnotists mantra:

“Fukuyama seems to be a man in a hurry. The Iraq War here he declares to be a failure after only three years. Nostradamus? [Don't say "Well, maybe" again-ed. Okay, I won't.] In my own way, I sympathize with Fukuyama. The opinion game is ruthless. You have no time to wait for history and must make pronouncements based on thin and fleeting evidence. Still, it seems very early to close the book on Iraq. I suspect there are many twists and turns yet to come. Even Germany and Japan took a while to settle down after WWII - and that wasn't the Middle East. Sometimes I think people like Fukuyama (I'm being mean here) write these things to get their New York Times cards back, to be welcomed home into the fold and not to have to spend the rest of their lives writing for the Weekly Standard.”

Analogy, which once played a weak intellectual role in helping to interpret events in Iraq in the summer of 2003, now plays precisely the same role in interpreting those events as dreams do in helping you decide your lucky number in a lottery. Which is, perhaps, why the zombie followers of our Rebel in Chief, arms outstretched, are still solidly behind the vanity project in Iraq. After all, how many millions, week after week, buy lottery tickets on the off chance that their number will come up? On tv they can see people whose numbers came up – why not me? The only difference is that the U.S. has bought 500 billion dollars + in lottery tickets, disguised in supplementals, and there is no prize at the end of it. The lottery office was blown up long ago, and the only prize left is the prize for closest country to the Khomenei revolution in a supporting role. Eventually, of course, the zombies will notice that a lot of money has drifted out of the savings account, and they will have to blame someone. Who knows who the lucky victim will be? And frankly, who gives a fuck?

In any case, instead of going directly to Fukuyama’s article, I’d rather look at the article by Dmitri Simes, the guy who is the head of the Nixon Center, entitle Jihad, Unintended, published in the National Interest this December. Which I’ll do tomorrow.

Well, here’s a sad confession for you: LI didn’t attend the historians against the war conference. It isn’t because times are tight – an LI reader thoughtfully offered us the ready. It is because the weather is cold, and LI has this thing about biking through 40 degree weather on the off chance that we will be able to see a panel discussion to which we may be barred, for lack of registration. Besides which, the other top ten thing on the list of what we don’t do is we don’t get up early – or at least, we don’t do that well. We did get up and think, okay, time to hit the 8:55 a.m. session, but then our will slumped, and generally we proved that we would never have built the British empire or laid the tracks of the transcontinental railroad by drifting off.

Sorry! I’m more of a big rock candy mountain guy in my heart, a descendent of one of those Brueghel peasants, dreaming of the fruit falling into my mouth. My scythe is rusting in the grass, and I feel the trickle of sand through the hourglass merely as a slight and pleasant tickling sensation as I pursue peasant girls in colorful undress in my dreams…

And so onto other topics…

For instance, Osama bin Laden, our billion dollar man, has decided to really strive for the best MTV video prize this year. He’s out with a new tape, or a director's cut of the old tape, and in this one he promises to live free and die free and compares Bush to … Saddam Hussein.

“Osama bin Laden promised never to be captured and declared that the United States had resorted to the same "repressive" tactics used by Saddam Hussein, according to an audiotape purportedly by Mr. bin Laden posted Monday on a militant Web site.

While there was no immediate way to authenticate the tape, it appeared to be a more complete version of one first broadcast Jan. 19 on Al Jazeera, the pan-Arab satellite channel. In that broadcast, the first from Mr. bin Laden in more than a year, he offered the United States a long-term truce but also said his Al Qaeda network was planning more attacks on the United States.”

All of which makes me want to laugh hollowly and say, in my best Poe-like voice:
"As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport."

JIF GTMO Op Enduring Freedom

We were recently attracted to an article in the Omaha World-Herald about a small businessman, Tom Hogan. Hogan, according to the paper, designed “a sort of wheelchair, … that people can be strapped into to keep them from harming themselves or others.” Hogan, a sheriff, was inspired to do this by an incident involving an intoxicated man at a jail.

He now makes these chairs and sells them for $1,200 apiece. He doesn’t have a large factory. His clients are institutions, usually. But he did ship 25 of the chairs recently to a client in Norfolk, Virginia – “the orders were marked "JIF GTMO Op Enduring Freedom."

Hogan seems like a decent kind of man:

“Under most situations, Hogan said, he doesn't consider it abuse to force-feed someone.

"If my chair is being used to save somebody's life . . . that's fine by me," he said. What concerns him, he said, is whether the feeding is done in an abusive way. "I don't want my chairs to be used to torture people." “

And so it creeps in – our Homeland decency, and our need to fight the long war. That long, beautiful war in which, what with one twist and another, we have to gradually throw off our freedoms – temporarily of course – and ditch our scruples – for a good purpose, of course – and generally become a more depraved and in every way worse country. It looks like Hogan’s chairs were found by some clever person at the Pentagon, and turned out to be just the addition needed to break a hunger strike at America’s Buchenwald in Guantanamo Bay.

Rupert Cornwall in the Independent has a nice column about Guantanamo in the light of the U.N. condemnation:

“The justifications advanced by the US authorities are now absurd. Four years on, whatever intelligence value these individuals once had has surely long since been exhausted. Many of them, it is known, were caught in the American net by accident in Afghanistan and Pakistan, sometimes handed over by rivals, for reasons that had far more to do with bounty collection than the "war on terror". Lawyers say that only 8 per cent of prisoners have been classified as al-Qa'ida fighters, and that less than half, according to Pentagon documents, have committed a "hostile act" against the US.

But we can't release them, intone Donald Rumsfeld and his minions' once freed, they would revert to doing "bad things against America". As if an extra 490 "bad guys" - assuming they are "bad guys" - would make much difference, when in Iraq alone active insurgents number at least 20,000, and when the very existence of Guantanamo Bay is among the terrorists' most potent recruiting agents.

But, in this White House, no one seems to care about that. No one seems concerned by the unanimous feeling of America's allies - let alone America's enemies - that Guantanamo should be shut down. Even by this administration's standards, Mr McClellan's contempt was remarkable. The UN report was a "discredit" to the organisation. Did it not have better things to do?”

Cornwall should look at where Bush hails from – Texas, the state with the fifth or sixth largest prison system in the world. And a prison system that, as has often been noted, self-organizes by way of rape – it being a way of breaking in those unfortunates who’ve been swept up in the often racist policing we see in Edna, or Tulia. Pliability enforced by the stronger inmates brings about a more peaceful prison, and – it being a private enterprise kind of thing – helps to guarantee recidivism – nothing like sending people out into the world with worse criminal attitudes than they had when they came in to ensure that Wackenhut does not take a hit from falling crime rates. This virtuous circle, this convergence of the public and the private, is the governing philosophy at work in D.C. at the moment.

But another day, another UN condemnation, another channel changer speech by our Secretary of War. There are two monuments to the American paralysis that goes by the name, “the war on terror:” one is the uncaptured status of Osama bin Laden; the other is the continuing employment of Donald Rumsfeld. Between the two, we have the story of the American crackup. Here’s Rumsfeld, making Bush seem, by startling contrast, almost connected to reality:

“U.S. public affairs operations tend to be "reactive rather than proactive," Rumsfeld said, operating slowly during standard working hours while "our enemies are operating 24/7 across every time zone. That is an unacceptably dangerous deficiency."
To remedy this, he called for increased communications training for military public affairs officials by drawing on private-sector expertise, noting that public affairs jobs in the military have not been "career enhancing." He also called for creating 24-hour media operations centers and "multifaceted media campaigns" using the Internet, blogs and satellite television that "will result in much less reliance on the traditional print press."

Rumsfeld criticized the U.S. media for hampering such initiatives, however. He said the press "seems to demand perfection from the government but does not apply the same standard to the enemy or even sometimes to themselves," contrasting the coverage of the Abu Ghraib detainee abuse with that of mass graves in Iraq.”

The endless, endless drivel that comes out of Rumsfeld is, as always, a source of wonder to us all.

Rouze up o young men of the new age!

Lovely. The NYT doesn’t even put the condemnation of the U.S. for torture by the U.N. on the front page. It isn’t as big a deal, apparently, as the non-breakup of Times Warner. No, that the United Nations condemns the torture of the young men who, from every study done of them – the latest by the National Journal – are largely innocents sold to the Americans by villagers with a grudge in Afghanistan and kept in appalling Pit and the Pendulum conditions because the leadership of this country has fallen into the hands of a unique combination of moral idiots and feeble intellects – no, that is not news. For heavens sake, let’s not hear about reality in this world until reality drops on our heads.

Well, as Blake put it: “Rouze up O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads
against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, & the University: who would if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War.”

That about sums up the syncophantic press in the age of the great Rebel-in-Chief.

Speaking of depressing mental war, we are also witness to the spectacle of Britain’s P.M., a man who should quietly have taken the message (adios! leave! go!) from the last election but has instead decided to put the stamp of his claustrophic self righteousness on the decline and fall of the Labour party ramming through a law, rejected in an access of mental clarity last year by the House of Lords, against “glorifying terrorism.” Louise Christian’s article in the Guardian makes the case against it:

“In the original draft of the terrorism bill, glorification of terrorism was a new stand-alone criminal offence. After widespread condemnation and ridicule that it would be unworkable the government did not abandon it, but tacked it on as part of another new offence of indirect encouragement of terrorism. It is part and parcel of the over-the-top government approach to legislation in this area that vague new transgressions which are not viable on their own are being stuck on to other offences to shore them up.”

And further
“We already have offences of incitement to murder, and the Terrorism Act 2000 specifically created a new offence of incitement to terrorism. Abu Hamza was prosecuted under the existing law, and it is to be hoped that the jury trying the case were rigorous about whether there was incitement, as opposed to only encouragement. If indirect encouragement is to be prosecuted as well, it is not going to be used just for those who incite but for the relatively powerless who are not inciting but making remarks which are simply foolish.
The very wide definition of terrorism espoused in legislation since the Terrorism Act 2000 means that an offence of indirect encouragement - with its glorification add on - can attach to support for all kinds of foreign resistance movements and causes, from Hamas, the democratically elected main party in Palestine, to the Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe. Many of these movements are part peaceful and part engaged in violence of which one may not approve while still approving the cause.”

All of which reminds me of the quite un-Blakeian conservative, Henry Maine.
Maine is not a well known figure outside of the esoteric precincts of legal anthropology. He was a wizened Tory who, in the 1870s, contributed, along with Fitzjames Stephen, to create the intellectual structure of modern conservatism as a mixture of laissez faire and imperialism. Maine had an almost French reactionary’s distaste for democracy. The many – by which he meant the unwashed, such as moi – struck Maine as a sort of flood, washing away the monuments of civilization. But given that perspective, he was able to see truly on many points. One thing he was quite clear about: much of politics is entertainment. That isn’t a bad thing, or a good thing – it is simply characteristic of politics, and a thing that must be calculated upon when discussing political orders. So – when discussing the democratic order, one must look towards the aspect of popular entertainment in politics. One of the populace’s perennial delights is to give itself a good scare. In political terms, the political entrepreneur should always remember that the horror show, the pumped up moral panic, is one of the easiest ways to gain power, even though the power thereby gained is as precarious as the terror is ephemeral.
Maine made a point about legislation with which LI is in complete agreement: there really isn’t a need for a lot of it. This is one conservative principle that should be evoked any time congress is in session. But it never is.

“It is not often recognised how excessively rare in the world was sustained legislative activity till rather more than fifty years ago [Maine was writing in 1880], and thus sufficient attention has not been given to some characteristics of this particular mode of exercising sovereign
power, which we call Legislation. It has obviously many advantages over Revolution as an instrument of change ; while it has quite as trenchant an edge, it is milder, juster, more equable, and sometimes better considered. But. in one respect, as at present understood, it may prove to be more dangerous than revolution. Political insanity takes many forms,
and there may be some persons in some countries who look forward to " The Revolution " as implying a series of revolutions. But, on the whole, a Revolution is regarded as doing all its work at once. Legislation, however, is contemplated as never-ending. One stage of it is doubtless more or less distinctly conceived. It will not be arrested till the legislative power itself, and all kinds of authority at any time exercised by States, have been vested in the People, the Many, the great majority of the human beings making up each community. The prospect beyond that is dim, and perhaps will prove to be as fertile in disappointment
as is always the morrow of a Revolution. But doubtless the popular expectation is that, after the establishment of a Democracy, there will be as much reforming legislation as ever.”

Many, many are the laws that merely repeat laws already made – and often, in that repetition, glide over prudent restraints in the former laws, extending the power of the state insensibly – and with that spider like creep, the state comes more and more into our private lives.

The moral panic about terrorism has long been about anything but terrorism. While, of course, the terrorist group that we all know about practically has an email address in Pakistan where you can complain about your Osama bin Laden tape if it doesn’t come with the special features, terrorism as the bugbear that can prolong the horrid rule of Tony Blair, and our own Rebel in Chief has become one of the abidingly depressing features of the current political landscape. They are addicts of fright, but my sense is that the population they have successfully frightened is beginning to come out of it – and may even ask, one day, why the real, small core that is frightening is allowed to exist and flourish, while these paragons of national security attack windmills and imprison the innocent.

the historians against the war

I’m definitely planning to attend the Empire, Resistance and War in Iraq symposium sponsored by the Historians against War at U.T. – Austin this weekend. Here’s the schedule. I’m not sure I necessarily want to see the Friday opening talk with Howard Zinn – a fine fellow, but my eye is more on the Saturday panels, especially the one on the U.S. in the Middle East. According to the site,

“As of Wednesday afternoon, February 15, on-line registration is no longer possible. To register for the conference, please come to the registration table in Sid Richardson Hall before the Friday evening event, preferably by 6:30 or earlier. If you aren’t coming to the Friday evening event but want to register for the conference, a registration table will be up in the Thompson Conference Center starting around 7:30 am Saturday. (The first Saturday panel starts at 8:30, and there will be coffee and bagels.) On-site registration is is $45 (or $30 for students or low-income/unemployed), and includes admission to the entire conference, including the Friday and Saturday night plenaries, and all the panels. It also includes a coffee break, lunch, and afternoon cookies on Saturday. (IF you only plan to come to one or both of the evening plenaries, and not attend the rest of the conference, the fee is $5 each evening, payable at the door; there is no need to register in advance.) “

I’m hoping that I can finagle admission to one or two of the panels without spending 45 dollars – a little much for this month’s budget.
Check it out if you are in Austin.

the nyt ... behind LI by merely a year

The NYT reluctantly recognizes reality.

Since the pre-election reporting from Iraq was almost wholly misleading, telling its readers that basically Allawi, Chalabi and Mahdi were the three big contenders for the prime ministerial post, the paper has slowly assumed a more realistic position. In fact, today it is catching up with LI – from January of last year. Before the election in January, 2005, this is what we said:

“The post election situation is going to show how good a games player Muqtada al- Sadr is. Sadr has staked out a position that is both anti-exile (meaning Iranian exiles, as well as American ones) and anti-occupation. If, as seems likely, the crew that comes into power after the election is distinguished by the amount of real estate they own in Southern France or the United States, and if those politicians continue to follow a compliant line with the Americans, we expect that Sadr will have a great window of opportunity. What he does with it is the question. The appeal to poor Shi’ites would seem to be the right appeal in a country with a forty to sixty percent unemployment rate.”

Interestingly, a month after the election in 2005, the NYT published perhaps its most sci fi like article about Iraq ever, even throwing in Judy Miller’s classroom lovenotes to Ahmad, with a piece by James Glanz in which, after talking to numerous upper class Iraqis, he worked himself into a lather about Basra becoming a Singapore like city state, all business and free enterprise and working with American oil companies the way Mickey Mouse worked with Walt Disney. At that time we said:

“What isn’t mentioned in Glanz’s article? Hmm, let’s start with the fact that the South is the stronghold not of a Singapore-ist faction, but of a theocratic faction. There were local elections in the South which somehow didn’t get into Glanz’s article. Pity, that. He has a nice dreamy sentence about an American friendly, free enterprising Southern Iraqi state: “Several different versions of a southern Iraqi republic have been proposed. One would include only the three or four southernmost provinces - Basra, Muthanna, Dhi Gar and Maysan” Funny, not mentioning that Sadr’s political party won the local election in Maysan, and came in second in Muthanna. Well, Sadr of course is one of those problematic characters outside the Narrative, and it is best to ignore him. Especially as he seems to have the weird idea that Americans have come to exploit Iraq instead of liberate it. How much nicer to find people who understand our way of life – so civilized! such dealmakers! Surely these are the kind of people an empire that runs on oil can rely on.

There’s a kind of rule of thumb, here. When the NYT announces something definite about Iraq – say, for instance, the announcements last year that the army had completely destroyed the insurgents in Samarra – one should expect a completely contradictory next announcement - as in, Battles in Samarra, ten dead in Samarra, etc., etc. Glanz’s article is an ill omen for poor Basra.””

Wow. I’m impressed with myself in that last line. A little intuitive leap there.
So, in a way, the NYT seeing that Sadr has played his part so that he has become, in their words, a “kingmaker” does, at least, get the NYT to the point LI was a year ago. Nice work, boys!


“Even on the issue of Iranian influence, Mr. Sadr's position is no worse from an American point of view — and may even be better — than that of his Shiite rivals who have been running the government for the last year. Although Mr. Sadr recently traveled to Tehran and cast himself as a defender of Iran, part of his popular appeal comes from his stance as a homegrown nationalist.
"Sadrists often define themselves as anti-Iranian and accuse Sciri of being Iranian stooges," said Rory Stewart, a former Coalition Provisional Authority official in Amara, a poor southern city where the Mahdi Army holds immense sway. "It's the main reason why people like them."”
Bingo! Something that could have been discovered, oh, two years ago, when the U.S. was chasing the Mahdi army around and its stooges in the U.S. were saying, bizarrely, that Sadr was an Iranian ally.
“Mr. Sadr had decided to back Mr. Jaafari after his followers met with the prime minister and presented him with a 14-point political program, said Bahaa al-Aaraji, a member of Parliament and spokesman for Mr. Sadr's movement.
"We saw that Jaafari was closer to implementing this program," Mr. Aaraji said, than Mr. Mahdi was.

The 14 demands, he said, include a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq; a postponement of any decision about creating autonomous federal regions; more action on releasing innocent detainees from Iraqi and American prisons; and a tough stand against Kurdish demands to repatriate Kurds to Kirkuk, an oil-producing city in the north.”

The question in the Iraqi war really is this: when will the Americans realize just how irrelevant they have become in Iraq, and what will they do about it?

be... all that you can be... in the army!

Surely there should be a word for this. We have kleptocrat. We have mafia. But we need a word honed to the multiple splendors exhibited by a new species of capitalist that has flourished under our Lord the Rebel in chief. These are MBA style go getters who have everything – the networking ability, the ambition, the sense of opportunity. The only thing they don’t have is the ability to contribute a single useful idea or good to the stock of humankind. Even con artists, rightly considered, have an aesthetic status: they are sort of like walking divine judgments, prophetic sarcasms, tropes in Caddies.

But no. The Lincoln Group is something different, is generated by another station in the history of consciousness.

And so this is how the NYT article begins:

“Two years ago, Christian Bailey and Paige Craig were living in a half-renovated Washington group house, with a string of failed startup companies behind them.
Mr. Bailey, a boyish-looking Briton, and Mr. Craig, a chain-smoking former Marine sergeant, then began winning multimillion-dollar contracts with the United States military to produce propaganda in Iraq.

Now their company, Lincoln Group, works out of elegant offices along Pennsylvania Avenue and sponsors polo matches in Virginia horse country. Mr. Bailey recently bought a million-dollar Georgetown row house. Mr. Craig drives a Jaguar and shows up for interviews accompanied by his "director of security," a beefy bodyguard.”

It was inevitable, perhaps, that the fog of MBA rhetoric would eventually produce a creature made entirely of fog. The Lincoln Group is it:

“In collecting government money, Lincoln has followed a blueprint taught to Mr. Bailey by Daniel S. Peña Sr., a retired American businessman who described Mr. Bailey as a protégé.

Federal contracts in Washington can supply easy seed capital for a struggling entrepreneur, Mr. Peña says he advised a youthful Mr. Bailey in the mid-1990's when the two men started a short-lived technology company. "I told him, 'When in trouble, go to D.C.,' and the kid listened," Mr. Peña said.

Mr. Bailey defends his company's record, saying, "Lincoln Group successfully executes challenging assignments." He added that "teams are created from the best available resources."”

Yes, this is a best practices group, a sigma six group that is on time and on line with the best best practices executable in this rapidly globalizing world, using its competitive advantages to compete as its challenging assignments challenge. This is a power point ready, young and hungry company hungry to be even hungrier, helping the wind of freedom lift all boats as we tell our side of the story that is an inspiration to millions.

And then there is this. Oh for a Thackeray. Oh for a Zola. Oh for a Dreiser. Oh, even, for the young Tom Wolfe, before he was covered with fungus.

“Little in Mr. Bailey's background indicated he would end up doing propaganda work in Iraq. Born in Britain as Christian Jozefowicz, he changed his name when he graduated from Oxford University and moved to San Francisco during the late-1990's dot-com boom.

There he founded or advised several companies and plunged into the Silicon Valley social scene, according to Mr. Bailey and several friends and former business associates.

Among the companies were Express Action, a company that planned to develop an Internet service to calculate duties on overseas purchases, and Motion Power, which intended to invent a shoe that would generate its own electrical power to run portable consumer devices.

"You would have been proud had you seen this 23-year-old kid pitching, with no product, no customers, no business plan," Mr. Bailey wrote in a letter to Mr. Peña, describing how he raised $15 million from investors for Express Action.”

America! My newfound land! Yes, it is a continent of low rent Prosperos, Calibans who changed their name and attitude after the year abroad and realized that with a dynamically planned, revolutionary shoe breakthrough and growth potential potentiating in every market, with Dow 35,000 in the headlights, impossible is a word we don’t recognize. It is a go for it country, with a real estate deal on line 2 that will break your heart. And if you have to drop your electric powered shoe when you country calls to you – well, we know the mindset of sacrifice and service of the Bush culture. We respect it deeply at LI, as our readers know.

Lincoln started out helping the winds of freedom blow by devising a scheme to export Iraq’s “scrap metal.” That scheme didn’t get off the ground. Then there was the scheme to build a brickbuilding factory in Mosul. Ditto. And then, oh, the magic of the marketplace! Caliban finds the Prospero’s books:

“Eventually, Lincoln began working with the American military, which was spending millions on contractors for a broad range of services.

The firm rented a one-story house inside the Green Zone, the heavily fortified government compound in central Baghdad. Furnished with two sofas and a sheet of plywood that served as a desk, the house had a single telephone and an overloaded electrical outlet.

Lincoln formed a partnership with The Rendon Group, a Washington company with close ties to the Bush administration, and won a $5 million Pentagon contract to help inform Iraqis about the American-led effort to defeat the insurgency and form a new government.

One contract requirement was to get Iraqi publications to run articles written by the military, according to several ex-Lincoln employees.”

It is a pity that Iraqis so seem to resent this war. The 30- 100,000 dead, the air sorties that have increased now to what, 160 per week? Bitch bitch bitch. Because there is so much good news that they should be looking at. The inspiring rise of Christian Bailey and Paige Craig brings tears to my eyes, at least, and I think many Iraqis, burying their dead, in lockdown in Baghdad, Falluja, Ramadi, in the ruins of bombed out cities in Western Iraq, in Basra dodging the new religious police, they should ask themselves: haven’t we helped a new generation of Americans be all they can be? Ask not what you can do for your country, as the man said, but ask how much ($$$!) your country can do for you. Talk about idealism to inspire the generations.