the trifecta fuckup

One of the constants going across the Rebel in Chief’s administration is what you might call the trifecta fuckup. A monstrous fuck up happens – say, the almost insane way we now know that the U.S. “cornered” Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora, without putting troops along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan; then an excuse or a coverup will be made; and then, amazingly, the fuckup becomes a precedent for further fuckups. Since there were too few troops in Afghanistan to do the job right – why not put too few troops in Iraq, too?

The latest fuckup trifecta has roiled the Governor’s Association recently. Here's how it works. A monstrous fuckup happened – the response to Katrina that wasn’t. As we all know, and as the Bush report to itself says (which stoutly refused to point fingers – why worry about the past when we can proudly say that we have not fucked up the future?), the breakdown in that response was due, in large part, to not getting army units and national guardsmen in place in time. So, as in some textbook pool shot, we have, a, the fuckup, b, the subsequent excuse and coverup, and of course, c., the future fuckup building on a. In this case, we have the Bush administration cutting funding for the National Guard – naturally. A War Department that shells out its 200 millions gladly to Halliburton, in spite of its own audit that shows that Cheney’s company put on a squeeze that would have pleased Don Corleone’s heart, doesn’t have time for things as tawdry as keeping a standing National Guard going in a time when we all know that, due to rises in the temperature of the Gulf and the Atlantic, we are going to be going through much rougher hurricane seasons.

This was the topic at the Governor’s conference this year. From the WAPO story:

“Governors were united in their opposition to what they regard as cuts in Guard funding in Bush's fiscal 2007 budget as well as fears that the Pentagon has been slow to replace equipment that has been shipped to Iraq with state Guard units. Early this month, all 50 governors signed a letter opposing the new budget and calling on Defense Department officials to reequip returning units as quickly as possible.

…
Much of the focus was on the gap between the Guard's authorized strength of 350,000 and the budget, which includes money for 333,000 Guard troops. Bush and Rumsfeld said they are committed to funding the Guard at the fully authorized level. They also said the equipment sent to Iraq will be replaced and in many cases upgraded.”

In the what, me worry atmosphere of the White House, though, you can play monopoly with those promises, but don’t take them to the bank – they will bounce. The roulette wheel is spinning, and we do wonder what lucky city will take the hit come August or September. The trifecta fuckup means that, going into the future, the administration ramifies its incompetence on the political as well as the management level. After all, the black dot is most likely to fall on a Florida city – not good for Jeb, not good for the Bushes.

Well, but really, who but crazy Greenpeacers expect that the hurricane season will get worse? After all, it says in the bible that all of nature toiled and moiled in order to produce our Great President. But, hmm, what is this in this week’s Natural Gas Week?

“Even though the 2005 hurricane season was the worst season in 154 years, forecasts for the 2006 hurricane season are already signaling that the energy industry is in for another nail biter. And while natural gas prices might be depressed now over a glut of storage, futures traders say the chance of another hyperactive season in the Gulf is likely to keep prices elevated.

"The market has been so focused on lack of winter and growing storage that no one has been really paying much attention to what lies ahead with the hurricane season," one futures trader said. "The current glut of storage is more of a short-term situation, you have to look at longer-term supply issues as well. If we see anything even remotely similar to last year's activity in terms of damage and loss of production in the Gulf of Mexico, gas prices definitely will reflect it."
As scary as it sounds, Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, said there's no reason to expect any change in hurricane patterns in the near future. The number of hurricanes has been increasing since 1995 and such active seasons are expected to continue for the next 10, perhaps 20 years.

Mayfield has been very vocal in preparing the public and energy industry for what very likely could be an encore season. And a developing La Nina effect, could spell even more hurricanes in 2006, he said.”

With this administration, it is always that little bit extra one admires. The trifecta fuckup is nothing without a little New Orleans style lagniappe. Why are the water temperatures rising? The Natural Gas industry is going to tell you that it is all Ms. Nina. So is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – until it was caught. According to Greenwire, February 16:

“The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration yesterday backed away from a statement it had released after last year's bout of devastating hurricanes that dismissed linking hurricanes to global warming. NOAA posted a corrected statement on its Web site yesterday, stating that some agency researchers disagree with that view.”

As we know, the administration is strictly Lysenkoist when it comes to science. If, perchance, we were suffering from an atmospheric crisis that demanded higher levels of oil burning and more pollution from our coal burning energy plants, you know that we would be hearing about this crisis, in serious tones, daily – and the zombie crowd would wail. But the crisis we are suffering goes against the profit margins of the oil companies – hence, we have Michael Crichton’s environmental policies in place.

What is funny – what is ironic – is that as the temperatures go up, there is actually an economic system in place that is ideally suited to adapt to it. It is called – capitalism. The state could operate as easily to jumpstart a Green economy as it has to jumpstart and maintain a war economy, with the sustaining mechanism coming from the profit motive. In other words, standard 20th century capitalism -- not the libertarian wet dream, and not the Marxist vision of the armed proletariat.

But so it goes. Another sick joke. Another Lord of the Flies day in America.

PS -- re Lord of the Flies. Kerry would have been well advised to read that book in 04. It is often said, now, that the Bush administration is incompetent. Usually, this is taken to mean that the Bush people keep doing the same thing -- as in Iraq --even though that thing has failed in the past. But this is where the true, 12 year old emotional level of the Rebel in Chief becomes an important factor. As anyone knows who has taught twelve year olds, there is a type of twelve year old who will repeat an error exactly to show it wasn't an error. This is where a form of rationality -- the iteration of the correct procedure to do something - breaks down. In the old character-based psychology this kind of thing was called stubborness, or pride, or vanity. A recalcitrant twelve year old boy who knows that he is right in some higher sense will repeat, say, the wrong answer to the problem on a test in order to show he was right all along. The repetition of disastrous policies -- for instance, the repetition of using too few troops to achieve a military objective -- is not about some hope that this time we will get it right, but rather the desire to show that we were ever wrong in the first place. The phrase, "I'll show you" could be the motto of this administration -- that is why so many of its policies seem to exist just so they can be rammed down the American throat. In this way, mistakes are transformed into expected and desired outcomes. It is even better that Osama bin Laden escaped, for instance -- it would make a martyr of him to have taken him. He's powerless anyway. He's on the run. Etc., etc. The Fox news headline that is becoming legendary: "Civil War in Iraq: a good thing" is exactly pitched to the twelve year old mentality. Similarly, with the hurricane season of 06, the cuts in the National Guard are meant to show that the administration was right, right, right to respond as it did to Katrina.

So, throw out your Prince. The best book about the twelve year old mentality in power is Lord of the Flies.

objectively harming the war effort

LI harps like a monomaniac angel in the heavenly choir on the various sins of the zombies, the followers of our Rebel in Chief – and we do not harp enough on the various sins of the left. Or leftiers. Among which the worst, to our mind, has been the failure to protest and try to block this war after the invasion happened. The collapse of the anti-war movement – its incredible weakness, compared to, say, the anti-war movement in the Vietnam years – has really scorched us.

The failure is organizational and attitudinal. Re the latter: there is nothing left bloggers like better than to find some rightwing figure declaring that opposition to the war here has objectively harmed the war effort and to indignantly refute said rightwing figure.

To LI, the idea of objectively harming the U.S. war effort is WHAT WE ARE ALL ABOUT. From anti-recruiting to protest, the point is to cripple the U.S. war effort in Iraq, no more and no less. LI looks with longing at those peasant and worker movements in Latin America that have lately taken to blocking streets and roads and in general making economic activity impossible until their demands are listened to. An anti-war movement that is afraid of looking traitorous has given a hostage to the enemy that will render it null and void.

Take a generally good blogger, this guy Glenn Greenwald. He quotes, as though they were the most scandalous libels, some pro-war guy named Jeff Goldstein, who writes:

“And this is (and has been) a crucial component of the war—one that many on the anti-war side are loathe to admit: that their constant naysaying, though it is well within their right to voice, has objectively hurt the war effort, particularly when the criticism incorporates carefully-crafted falsehoods many of the war’s critics know for a fact to be objectively untrue.”

Toss out the falsehoods claim, which is the usual canned corn gone rotten. The whole point of the constant naysaying has been to objectively hurt the war effort. Damn right. No more and no less. That is the point. An anti-war movement that dare not speak its name is worthless.

Greenwald summarizes the pro-war viewpoint in this way, sarcasm clearly fronted: “It all would have worked had war critics just kept their mouths shut. The ones who are to blame are the ones who never believed in this war, who control no aspect of the government, who were unable to influence even a single aspect of the war, who were shunned, mocked and ridiculed, and who have been out of power since the war began. They are the ones to blame. They caused this war to fail.”

If only! The anxiety among the lefties – the “knife in the back” scenario that makes them reel back in horror, as if, o woe is me, the left will be blamed for what they should be doing and have shown themselves impotent to effect – is debilitating. LI is not just for a knife in the back but a fork up the butt of the whole effort, and we find the mindset that wants to combine the skills necessary to win the queen of the prom contest and those necessary to bring the troops home from Iraq ennervating, to say the least. Say it loud, little leftward ones – I want to objectively cripple the American war effort in Iraq. From the razing of Falluja to the hundred or so air sorties mounted by the Pentagon per month, I want it all to stop.

It has been, in fact, the last straw for us – we have seen more realism about the war in tepid liberals like Howard Dean than in supposed wild men lefties like Marc Cooper. The Howard Deans have grasped the issue instinctively. As have the Feingolds.

In fact, our one arriere pensee about bringing the troops home is less about crippling a monstrous war than about the availability of those troops for other wars. I have a sinking feeling that if troops had been withdrawn at the end of 2003, we’d be preparing those troops for the truly stupid idea of invading Iran. Instead, the U.S. is pretty unarmed when it comes to Iran, which might actually encourage some rationality.

giving praise to a laissez faire crank

LI’s readers should go to the Online Liberty Library, if they have never been there, just for the pure beauty of the thing. This month they have done something pretty spectacular – they are putting up the 33 volumes of John Stuart Mill’s collected works. Wow. There are a few extraordinary sites on the Net, just in terms of sheer academic bibliophilia. I’m not talking about the general library thing that Gutenberg does. There’s the on-line publication of Simmel’s collected works. There’s the wonderful, polyglot Marxist library. But the OLL is ahead of all of these. I don’t know who is funding it – no doubt some laissez faire crank. But I don’t care.

So… I downloaded the classic essays on Bentham, Coleridge, Whewall, etc. The Coleridge essay is one of Mill’s great works – and tragically neglected. In it, Mill delineates the tension between the progressive and the conservative using Bentham as his emblematic lefty, and Coleridge as his emblematic righty.

“By Bentham, beyond all others, men have been led to ask themselves, in regard to any ancient or received opinion, Is it true? and by Coleridge, What is the meaning of it? The one took his stand ‘outside’ the received opinion, and surveyed it as an entire stranger to it: the other looked at it from within, and endeavoured to see it with the eyes of a believer in it; to discover by what apparent facts it was at first suggested, and by what appearances it has ever since been rendered continually credible – has seemed, to a succession of persons, to be a faithful interpretation of their experience. Bentham judged a proposition true or false as it accorded or not with the result of his own inquiries; and did not search very curiously into what might be meant by the proposition, when it obviously did not mean what he thought true. With Coleridge, on the contrary, the very fact that any doctrine had been believed by thoughtful men, and received by whole nations or generations of mankind, was part of the problem to be solved, was one of the phenomena to be accounted for. And as Bentham's short and easy method of referring all to the selfish interests of aristocracies, or priests, or lawyers, or some other species of impostors, could not satisfy a man who saw so much farther into the complexities of the human intellect and feelings--he considered the long or extensive prevalence of any opinion as a presumption that it was not altogether a fallacy; that, to its first authors at least, it was the result of a struggle to express in words something which had a reality to them, though perhaps not to many of those who have since received the doctrine by mere tradition. The long duration of a belief, he thought, is at least proof a of an adaptation in it to some portion or other of the human mind; and if, on digging down to the root, we do not find, as is generally the case, some truth, we shall find some natural want or requirement of human nature which the doctrine in question is fitted to satisfy: among which wants the instincts of selfishness and of credulity have a place, but by no means an exclusive one. From this difference in the points of view of the two philosophers, and from the too rigid adherence of each of his own, it was to be expected that Bentham should continually miss the truth which is in the traditional opinions, and Coleridge that which is out of them, and at variance with them. But it was also likely that each would find, or show the way to finding, much of what the other missed.”

It is a funny thing, but the Coleridgian presumption of meaning has, gradually, been grafted onto liberalism in the 20th century. Call it the anthropological effect – the realization that there are cultural values, the loss of which is a genuine loss, and the gain in dissolving them – the gain of Westernizing, liberalizing, and otherwise lye and dyeing whole cultures – not always an authentic gain. At the same time, the Benthamite instinct for attributing sordid motives to conservative policies is still fully functional.

I think that the hesitation of the old school conservatives before the warmongering of the current administration – the latest symptom of which is the defection of Buckley to, practically, the side of Michael Moore – comes from the Coleridgian impulse. But the way cultures are met is distinct – for the Coleridgian, what is most respectable about any culture is the elite. Automatic respect should be paid to hierarchy. Whereas for the liberal, the elite is an embarrassment – often, the anthropological effect leads to a ridiculous softening of the picture of a different culture, an erasure of those inequities and cruelties that may be at work in it. Perhaps – if I am be excused a Benthamite moment – that softening makes it easier to bond with the elite, to do business. Thus you get the marginal parody of liberal multi-culturalism. To get a real whiff of it, go to Santa Fe in August and watch perfectly white women and men pretend to be “native Americans” as they buy silver jewelry from the stands at the Governor’s Palace. It’s funny, in that Melville’s Confidence-Man-funny way. Not ha ha funny, but so funny I could throw up blood funny.

a pessoa moment

Life is sad for LI. Yesterday, we were hot to attend a reading of the Khirgiz national epic up at U.T. Apparently it is a very long epic, not to be recited in a mere fit or two, and the U.T. group was going to simply engage in some samplin’ of those primordial Central Asian sayings. Alas, some fool stole our bike a couple of days ago, so we are reduced to footing it or public transportation. So we get out, trek to the nearest busstop, nurse a Marlboro – oh, just to cut a profile. In actuality, we haven’t even reached the piker's demi-semi-carcinogenic pack a month. Still, a Marlboro under the non starling or any bird delighting February heaven, waiting for a bus, going to the Khirgiz epic party – we were feeling classic.

Of course, public transportation dwindles, on the weekends, to an irregular dab of bus or two, none of them going where we wanted to go. So much for our classic evening. So much for contact with a place we only know from the great sections in Gravity’s Rainbow, the mysterious Khirgiz light and one of Slothrop’s alters, Tchetcherine – a name like a plastic – and his Chekhovian love affair with Galina, sent out to the land to help teach an invented alphebet to a people who had none:


“Here she has become a connoisseuse of silences. The great silences of Seven Rivers have not yet been alphabetized, and perhaps never will be. They are apt at any time to come into a room, into a heart, returning to chalk and paper the sensible Soviet alternatives brought out here by the Likbez agents. They are silences NTA cannot fill, cannot liquidate, immense and frightening as the elements in this bear's corner scaled to a larger Earth, a planet wilder and more distant from the sun.... The winds, the city snows and heat waves of Galina's childhood were never so vast, so pitiless. She had to come out here to learn what an earthquake felt like, and how to wait out a sandstorm. What would it be like to go back now, back to a city? Often she will dream some dainty pasteboard model, a city-planner's city, perfectly detailed, so tiny her bootsoles could wipe out neighborhoods at a step at the same time, she is also a dweller, down inside the little city, coming awake in the very late night, blinking up into painful daylight, waiting for the annihilation, the blows from the sky, drawn terribly tense with the waiting, unable to name whatever it is approaching, knowing too awful to say it is herself, her Central Asian giantess self, that is the Nameless Thing she fears....”

I move among the mythologies I have chosen and those that have chosen me. The latter is the sad dented wreck of history I keep trying to pound into useable shape in this blog; the former is literature. I am always looking for the phantom intersection. I went home, after a while, my cig smoked, my mind so dull that if I could have taken it out and preserved it in some fluid and left it and come back after years, I could tell just by looking at it: February.

in the empire of bubbles

From the NYT Week in Review:

“Iraq is less a nation than an artificial entity drawn created by the British. In recent years, only the brutality of Saddam Hussein held its parts together.”

1. Actually, all parts of the Ottoman empire, after it collapsed, were artificial entities. Followed in the order of history by the artificial entity of Israel. Saudi Arabia is an artifice created by the brute force of the Saud family. Lebanon and Syria were created, jointly, by the French and the British, but the easy overflow of Syria into Lebanon did not prompt any such recollective comments by the NYT. The most ‘natural’ entity in the Middle East is Iran – and in 1991, we saved the most artificial entity in the entire area, Kuwait.

2. The brutality of Saddam Hussein actually tore things asunder instead of holding things together. Under Iraq’s king, and the military that overthrew the king, and the Baathists that succeeded that military, Iraq endured and actually prospered, in spite of the Sunni dominance. It was only when Hussein decided to rule using his tribe and persecuting to the utmost the Shi’ites and the Kurds that Iraq fell apart. This is the kind of reversal of history that we’ve just grown used to in the American press. They can’t get it right even when they try to repair what they couldn’t get right before.

3. It might be that Iraq will come apart, no matter what, after Saddam Hussein seeded grievances over the whole Mesopotamian landscape. But that the U.S. invaders participate in this will only blow up in American faces.

4. U.S. should be discussing timetables for transporting the troops out like next month.

5. Because that won’t happen, and because, by a mysterious spiritual law, the incompetence of this White House doubles every six months – bring the popcorn for 06’s hurricane season - the next couple months will lock the Americans in even more, with both parties complicit in this crime against the national interest, as – of course – the allies of Al Qaeda become even more powerful in Pakistan and Bangladesh, due to the “war against the terrorism and not against actual terrorists” policies of the Rumsfeld era. Of course, what is actually happening is what empires do when they confront problems they don’t understand – the U.S. has basically being paying tribute to Pakistan since 9/11, and that is, indirectly, tribute to Osama bin Laden. Tribute won’t solve this problem forever.
6. Nobody seems to want to talk about opportunity costs. That doesn't mean there aren't opportunity costs.

From Ahmed Rashid's article in the WAPO about Pakistan:
“Bin Laden's new friendship zone stretches nearly 2,000 miles along Pakistan's Pashtun belt -- from Chitral in the Northern Areas near the Chinese border, south through the troubled tribal agencies including Waziristan, down to Zhob on the Balochistan border, then to the provincial capital Quetta and southwest to the Iranian border. …

Al Qaeda's money, inspiration and organizational abilities have helped turn Pakistan's Pashtun belt into the extremist base it is today, but U.S. and Pakistani policies have helped more. Although the Taliban and al Qaeda extremists were routed from Afghanistan by U.S. forces, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld's refusal to put enough U.S. troops on the ground let the extremists escape and regroup in Pakistan's Pashtun belt. …
What followed was a disaster: For 27 months after the fall of the Taliban regime, Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Washington's closest ally in the region, allowed the extremists free rein in the Pashtun tribal areas to re-establish training camps for militants who had escaped Afghanistan. These included Arabs, Central Asians, Chechens, Kashmiris, Africans, Uighurs and a smattering of East Asians. It was a mini-replay of the gathering in Afghanistan after bin Laden arrived there in 1996.

Musharraf did capture some Arab members of al Qaeda, but he avoided the Taliban because he was convinced that the U.S.-led coalition forces would not stay long in Afghanistan. He wanted to maintain the Taliban as a strategic option in case Afghanistan dissolved into civil war and chaos again. The army also protected extremist Kashmiri groups who had trained in Afghanistan before 9/11 and now had to be repositioned.”

And so on and on. I fought the war and the war won.

6. Interestingly, in the four articles about Osama bin Laden in the WAPO, the three by Americans all casually repeat the Bush phrase that Osama bin Laden is on the run. The phrase is a blatant lie. The repetition of the phrase, however, is unconscious -- the context shows that, since all of the pieces recognize that Osama is no more on the run than Bush is, who is HQed in D.C. and lives in Crawford, Texas. Funny, nobody calls the Rebel in Chief "on the run" for living in the White House. American journalism is so out of touch with the reality that they are supposed to be reporting on that they pre-censor it.

It is in those terms that we love the fact that all the American contributions are anxious to assure us that Osama is harmless, basically, a defanged man, his poll results going down. None dwells on that rather humiliating fact that under the current administration he not only got away, he has flourished -- and is no more injured than he was in Sudan, or than he was when he first arrived in Afghanistan from Sudan. The on the run talk, of course, conceals that he was "on the run" when 9/11 happened. I mean, why risk getting out of the narrative?

None of them, too, inquire too closely about the nexus between Al Qaeda and Pakistan's Islamist parties.

Our bodies, God's hand, or the doctor's

Some people think of oil when they think of Houston. Some think of millionaires, some think Bush, some think Enron. But those plugged into the deeper level of American psychopathology think: breast augmentation.

Yes, more symbolic than the Menil, than Enron Tower, than Houston rap or dayglo lowrider graffiti, down in the dreamzone where symbol converts into matter and matter into symbol, is the discovery, in 1963, of a silicon gel breast “protheses” to replace the old sponges, the old transfer of fats. It was invented by Houston surgeons Thomas Cronin and Frank Gerow. By this time silicon had already emerged as the techno-edge element, but while those Bell lab boys were playing with the response of silicon to light and electricity, Houstonites knew there was a better world a-comin’. A world of hi tech infantilization that would eventually sweep the country. Or as the account of the correspondence between Dow chemical and our Houston surgeons observes, soberly: “Although implants were first targeted at mastectomy patients, even Cronin and Gerow would have been able to surmise the general population's desire to use the mammary prostheses for enhancement as well.” The general population. The general population.

LI’s been reading Sander Gilman’s history of aesthetic surgery, Making the Body Beautiful, which has turned out to be full of interesting factoids, little lights on the grid where history intersects appetite. Race, sex, manifest destiny, all of those categories which are processed into abstractions in academia, find local habitation here: the Jewish nose, the Oriental eye, the African skin color. Irish pug noses and bat ears (for the English). Breasts – breasts reduced among the Brazillian upper class, breasts enhanced, to use Dow speak, among Argentinians (the people who have the greatest proportion of silicon implants in the world – 1 in 30 Argentinians. LI wonders if there is some correlation with Argentina’s claim to have the greatest proportion of psychoanalysts, too.)

Initially, LI picked up Gilman’s book because we were interested in the noses in the Danish cartoons. Noses are one of LI’s favorite subjects. Gogol’s short story is gospel around here – we believe it, we’ve seen it, the nose that tricks itself out in a uniform, that rises through the ranks, that takes on its own life. Gilman traces modern nose talk back to a Dutch anatomist, Petrus Camper, an enlightenment savant who introduced the nose to the Newtonian world of measurement. Quantifying over the nose angle finding its golden relation to the spine – a golden relations confirmed, of course, by Greek sculpture. (“The face is beautiful when the nose is parallel to the spine,’ explained one of his readers). And he who says angle soon says identifying index. As we all know, Modernity is all about indexes – you are your index. Fingerprints, skin color, nose angle, eye color, birth date, DNA profile. Try to escape that grid. Lichtenberg, at this time, could already feel the forces gathering in the very air – hence, the rather apocalyptic comedy of his anti-physiognomic satires. We’ve been lead by the nose to this point. And by the tits and ass too (oh, let us not forget buttock lifts, that Brazillian contribution to permanent youth!)

This is the world of the anti-tattoo – the surgery that leaves no scar, the liposuction that absorbs its trace, that unexpected dialectical resolution to the crisis of deconstruction.

Anyway, LI is now on the lookout for Hermann Heinrich Ploss’ ethnographic study of woman, Der Weib in der Natur- und Völkerkunde. I’ve apparently missed a veritable atlas of 19th century attitudes that would help guide me through Zola’s crowds, and even Henry James’ country house parties. Ploss, of course, knew that God traced his theogony through the body, blessing the conquering white race, of course. It was there in the superiority of the white woman’s “compact breast” with the “goat udder” of the black. About Ploss' work, this German bio of the man says: "Es wurde zum Standardwerk und - man muß wohl befürchten auch wegen seiner zahlreichen Abbildungen nackter Frauen - zum Publikumserfolg." (It became a standard work and a success with the public -- which one may well fear was also due to its numerous pictures of naked women." That fear of the public's appetite for naked women -- hmm, what to make of it? It all comes down to: Houston.

So what would Ploss make of better tits through chemistry? Would he be shocked that the compact breast was not enough, never enough? Or perhaps it is a compromise formation, the threat of George Clinton’s Black Planet attached to Barbie’s body?

weasels fighting in a hole

None of these exit strategies will work for the simple reason that they are based on an unrealisable ambition: to have the Iraqi cake and eat it. All the Bush and Blair strategies are based on maintaining a pro-US regime in Baghdad. -- Sami Ramadani, Guardian.

All of the U.S. papers have been touting the civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites in Iraq, and some of them have even stopped and listened, with headshaking American grins, to certain indications that the natives blame the Americans. Well, that takes the cake. Really. We are only there to help the little people. This is so evidently outside the realm of reality that reality itself must be censored. So, as Ramadi points out, while the Americans view themselves as standing between Iraq and civil war, there is the little business of what the Iraqis are doing themselves.

From the Guardian:

“It has not been Sunni religious symbols that hundreds of thousands of angry marchers protesting at the bombing of the shrine have targeted, but US flags. The slogan that united them on Wednesday was: " Kalla, kalla Amrica, kalla kalla lill-irhab " - no to America, no to terrorism. The Shia clerics most listened to by young militants swiftly blamed the occupation for the bombing. They included Moqtada al-Sadr; Nasrallah, leader of Hizbullah in Lebanon; Ayatollah Khalisi, leader of the Iraqi National Foundation Congress; and Grand Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran's spiritual leader. Along with Grand Ayatollah Sistani, they also declared it a grave "sin" to attack Sunnis - as did all the Sunni clerics about attacks on Shias. Sadr was reported by the BBC as calling for revenge on Sunnis - in fact, he said "no Sunni would do this" and called for revenge on the occupation.”

Why Americans think they can spend three years in a foreign country killing the country’s people at times and places of their choosing and still be voted king and queen of the prom is a question for psychoanalysis. Look under “narcissism, terminal.” There was a very amusing bit in Crooked Timber the other day, where they listed the Instapundit’s pronunciations about Sadr. From 2003 until the end of 2004, it was all downhill for Sadr as the good news just poured in from Iraq. A sad spectacle, actually. To make a zombie, all you have to do is cut away the ability to make any scenarios except those that reproduce the glorious occupation of Germany, circa 1945. And that, of course, is where the zombies have come to rest – the computer game generation playing the greatest generation.

The disasters of the Bush foreign policy do seem to be piling up at a more rapid rate, lately. There has always been an air of the juggling act about that policy – the throwing up of as many knives and plates in the air as possible. Since these are grossly uneducated jugglers, jugglers who have only read the first chapter of the juggling textbook – the one that says first you throw things up in the air – watching them stand around while the plates and knives head downward is painful. Adding to the suspense, of course, are those audience members who keep saying that since the plates and knives haven’t yet hit the heads of the juggler, it just may be that the laws of gravity are suspended – in fact, we haven’t heard the good news about that law yet. After a while, one’s astonishment turns into a sort of cognitive fury, a neural heart attack.

ps -forget the neural heart attack and cue exhausted laughter. From the NYT today:

"Rather than see a collapse or a setback, I think in some ways, you can see an affirmation that the approach we've been taking has worked," said Adam Ereli, a State Department spokesman. "You've got political leadership acting together on behalf of the common good, and you've got security forces demonstrating that capability and a responsibility as a national entity that we've been working to develop and that has now been put to the test and, I think, is proving successful."

Ereli was, I believe, the same person who praised the american airline attack plan (aaap), devised by the Rebel in Chief himself in the summer of 2001, for being tremendously successful on 9/11/01, as the WTC towers successfully intercepted those hijacked planes. "The adminstrations plan to effectively use our skyscraper as the first line of defense proved its worth today, as we march immer forward from success to success under our Leader."