post elsewhere

LI has contributed another post to Long Sunday. And today is so jam packed with tasks we have to finish that we can't really fiddle in this space.

Check it out, here.

Oh, and even if you don't read my little contribution to that site, there is something you should read -- I'm down on my knees begging you to read it, as you don't get this is the MSM very often: a q and a with the marijuana legalization king, Marc Emery. Reality -- that is, the way people really talk -- is so censored in the press that reading the q and a made me feel dizzy. Sample (and this is in the WAPO!)
ME: "Cannabis is a peaceful and honest lifestyle choice, endorsed in writings by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, that is being suppressed by a Nazified, paramilitary organization (the DEA) acting under illegal authority from a White House that has usurped the Constitution. That is a rogue government in Washington DC and in a manner similar to Falun Gong, it is our duty through peaceful methods to rid the world of the evil that sits at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That is why to defeat the US War on us we use peaceful means, education, and our peaceful spirit to show that there is evil in America and it needs to be addressed. Our enemy uses guns, weapons, helicopters, wire tapping, phone surveillance, snitches, informers, German Shepherd attack dogs, gulags and concentration camps. Is there any doubt what should be eradicated from the face of the earth?"

And this:

"Montreal, Quebec: Marc, why should you and the others Michelle and Greg be charged within Canada on a an Canadian warrant and then not be prosecuted under Canadian law??

All the Best to the BC3

Marc Emery: Because the Canadian political establishment that is in governance in Canada (The Liberal-Conservative parties) both want me out of the way for as long as possible, like the enemies of freedom (White House, DEA, Congress) in the USA do.

In 10 years I achieved huge results in Canada and the world. I sent out over 4 million seeds, had people grow those plants out, over 10 years, probably produced 10 to 20 million marijuana plants around the world, forcing the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars in Nazi police style activities in the USA, Canada and the world. Then with that money, I spent just under $4 million on court cases, lawyers for class action suits, ballot initiatives, politicians, elections, rallies, conferences, political parties, all peaceful, democratic investments, completely transparent, to subvert the US drug war and bring about a legal environment where cannabis can be taxed, regulated in a manner that addresses all social concerns. Ending prohibition, to say it simply.

It was a genius plan. Produce millions of plants to Overgrow the Governments, give the US people what they want (they do want the marijuana, and they'd rather grow it themselves than buy Afghani or foreign pot) and then spend the money they have entrusted to me to achieve what Americans who must hide from their government cannot do, participate in the public process to end prohibition."

What can LI add except -- you will not get a chance to read something this good in the WAPO for a long, long time. Don't miss it!

then-ism

LI sometimes feels bad that our radical sensibilities aren’t really captured by a correspondingly radical politics. It is nice to be more ultra than thou, and to either proclaim the self-evident virtues of anarchy or Marxism or libertarianism, etc.

But no, just as we are about to launch ourself into the heady winds of ideology, we are pulled back by then-ism.

Yes, folks (he said, cartoonishly) then. As in if-then. And you do this and then this happens.

Thenism is unfashionable nowadays in these here States. LI attributes this to the American male's preference for wallowing in the action movie narrative. Don’t even try to give your American male a halfway complicated novel to follow. Middlemarch? Who needs your stinkin' Middlemarch! No, much better to watch cops and super cops and even more super cops catch and kill bad guys, and in the process spindle, mangle and mutilate the poor “then.” In action movies, when a bomb is about to go off in one minute, we know that we will have five minutes of exciting action while the hero goes through all types of obstacles to reach the bomb and defuse it.

The disjunction between the one minute and the five minute perfectly defines political ideology in America. Thus, the favorite campfire tale for your American suburbanite is that we need to shrink guvamint. We need that small guvamint. And why do we need it small? So we can have our wonderful private enterprise system work the magic of the marketplace. And why is the marketplace magic? Because every person works as hard as he can to produce his own advantage. And how then, are we gonna get that small government? Why, by electing people who completely forsake their own advantage. Of course! A perfect “then” moment.

Correspondingly, we love reading Marxist oriented criticisms of, say, the intricate capitalist structure that has led to the environmental horrors of the shrinking ozone layer and global warming. And how are we going to change that? Why, by a revolutionary breakthrough overthrowing capitalism! Brilliant. That’s a darn tootin’ brilliant plan, there, boss. And who is going to lead that, finance it, and how long will it take? Why, we just gotta trust that a party composed of self-less people, financed by George Soros and Jesus Christ, will arise from the Lit Crit departments to mirror, perfectly, the wants of the people in a brand new revolutionary space, a perfect vacuum created by destroying the influence of the capitalist. Capitalism, which in paragraphs 1 through 10 is described as an all powerful evil system, is overthrown in a wink in paragraph 11 by a group of people absolutely uninfluenced by the mechanisms used to overthrow the all powerful evil system, and now ready to lead us to nirvana. And didn’t such a party system lead to the so far greatest crimes against the environment ever committed, re the whole industrial structure of the Soviet union, as this unchecked leadership shifted social costs massively onto the general population. Well,some people are just spoilsports. Another perfect “then” moment.

The whole bloody story of Iraq is, of course, a triumph of the “then” over the action movie idealism of D.C. think tankers. That the invasion being sold in 2003 was obviously fucked, that the versions of how it was going to be paid for, how long the occupation was going to take, and what the point of it was were all in a narrative muddle unquestioned by the (at that time) Democrat dominated Senate, are the symptoms of the serious decay of narrative intelligence in America. And I have noticed, looking around at the celebration of the third year of the fiasco, that the triumph of the “then” has gone almost completely unnoticed, as new schemes, unattached to any 'then', are proposed to "get America out of Iraq.” We particularly like the one where America, much like the baddest cop on your favorite show, just tells the Iraqis, okay, break it up into three different nations. There you go! The painlessness of that solution, the obvious compliance of the Iraqis when they hear the jig is up, and the Johnny come marchin’ home of our boys (who we all support so much! support support support, that’s our middle name around here), points to the genius at work in the American population at large.

bozoism: a swedenborgian perspective

How the delights of every one's life are changed after death into things that correspond can be known from a knowledge of correspondences; but as that knowledge is not as yet generally known I will try to throw some light on the subject by certain examples from experience. All who are in evil and who have established themselves in falsities in opposition to the truths of the church, especially those that have rejected the Word, flee from the light of heaven and take refuge in caves that appear at their openings to be densely dark, also in clefts of rocks, and there they hide themselves; and this because they have loved falsities and hated truths; for such caves and clefts of rocks well as darkness, correspond to falsities, as light corresponds to truths. It is their delight to dwell in such places, and undelightful to dwell in the open country. [2] Those that have taken delight in insidious and secret plots and in treacherous machinations do the same thing. They are also in such caves; and they frequent rooms so dark that they are even unable to see one another; and they whisper together in the ears in corners. – Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell

The sinister farce of American drug policy hit its normal two notes this past week: one clownlike, and the other terroristic. The clownlike note was provided by the DEA’s demand that Canada extradite the Johnny Appleseed of marijuana to stand trial for thirty years – thirty years the monsters want to cut from his body – for selling pot seeds. Now, LI has long been in favor of putting DEA agents themselves in prison, after suitable show trials, for kidnapping, theft, blackmail, and the usual like, but we have doubts this is going to happen. It is one of those peculiarities of national character that the American, a type that tattoos snakes not being tread on on its forearm, has been shredding his rights like so much dead dermis for thirty years in the ‘war against drugs.’ Is this because the average American is a buffoon, an asskisser, a dog in love with a flea or a flea in love with a dog, a pariah among the higher order of Swedenborgian angels that circulate through our celestial body continually? I dunno, I just live here. A nation that passes two million of its population through the prison pipeline, many of them for either selling the means to medicate and enjoy oneself without a permit from the doctor and a profit made by a pharmaceutical company, should be investigated not so much by Amnesty international as by Bozo international. The alarming growth of bozoism in this country, which triumphed in Florida in 2000, is, perhaps, something that can be cured. I recommend high gas prices and another decade of 700 billion dollar debts, myself. Maybe it is a temporary epidemic. Those who think bozoism is simply a tiresome fad disease, a psycho-somatic poltergeist, are urged to read Rumsfeld’s op ed in the WAPO. Obviously, this is a man in the last throes of bozoism. Unfortunately, I have it on good authority that he has not yet been quarantined.

The terroristic face is being shown in America’s great ally in Latin America: Columbia. On the one side of the coin is sending a harmless Canadian to jail, and on the other side of the coin is supporting, with might and main, the familiar conjunction of fascist and drug dealer, all wrapped up in a very pretty package of free trade for all. Somehow, the media critics of Chavez, who go through every election and referendum in Venezuela looking for the stronghanded methods of communism – we just know they are there! – somehow ignored an election in which armed narcotics godfathers, paramilitaries who have already negotiated with the Uribe government to avoid extradition to the U.S., have helped Bush’s man achieve that magical 70 percent of the vote – with more than 60 percent of the voters abstaining.

The place to read about it is the invaluable Colombia Journal online.

“Colombia’s electoral process is undermined by paramilitiaries who use violence and intimidation to determine which candidates can and cannot run in regions under their control and to ensure that their chosen candidates are elected. As the Associated Press noted only two days before the March 12 congressional elections, paramilitary leader Rodrigo Tovar, “who’s accused of several massacres against civilians as well as being a major drug-trafficker, reigned over much of Colombia’s Caribbean coast, deciding who could and could not run for public office.”

An additional factor that aided the paramilitary cause in the congressional elections was the low voter turnout. Preliminary reports show that only 34 percent of eligible voters went to the polls, low even by Colombian standards—42 percent of voters participated four years ago. In one Bogotá precinct, only 80 of the 1,200 registered voters showed up to cast a ballot. The combination of the paramilitarization of the electoral process and the voter apathy evident in many areas not under paramilitary control ensured a victory for pro-Uribe parties.”
Hilariously, the Bush administration is worried about the coca growers in Bolivia, and so is the American news media.

Who will deliver us from the curse of Bozoism, o my fallen cohort of droogs?
I don’t know. I’m going out to smoke a joint, now.

d.c. linguistics

There was a story on the radio the other day about a new movie, "thank you for smoking," that features a cigarette industry lobbyist as its hero. The cigarette lobbyist does funny things, like, for instance, trying to brand anti-tobacco programs aimed at children with cigarette company names – this anti-smoking film is brought to you by R.J. Reynolds, for example.

In actual fact, the cigarette lobbyist in the film is a tame and pallid version of the real life wild wild D.C. variety. Example:

There’s a story in the WAPO today about the D.C. Federal court overturning one of Bush’s responses to Global Warming – making it easier for coal plants to pollute.

“Under the revised policy that was rejected by the court yesterday, power plants and other industrial polluters would not have to install new pollution technology if they modernized less than 20 percent of their operations.”

What this means, in layman’s terms, is that coal plants simply cannot shift those costs of operations to third parties. As the court put it about the Bush administration’s argument:

“EPA's approach would ostensibly require that the definition of 'modification' include a phrase such as 'regardless of size, cost, frequency, effect,' or other distinguishing characteristic," Rogers wrote. "Only in a Humpty Dumpty world would Congress be required to use superfluous words while an agency could ignore an expansive word that Congress did use. We decline to adopt such a world-view."

And now, here is where the vocabulary of the lobbyists comes in.

“The EPA's statement did not indicate whether the administration intends to appeal the ruling. Both Walke and Scott Segal, a lobbyist for the utilities industry, said it would be difficult for the administration to forge ahead in light of the appeals court's strong ruling. Walke said the decision is tantamount to the court "burying the rule six feet under, where before it was just in a casket."

Segal said the ruling will make it more costly for plants to operate. "This is a missed opportunity for reform that would have made it easier to improve power plant efficiency and workplace safety, and that's bad news for consumers and the environment," he said. "We believe it is a step backwards for the protection of air quality in the United States."

That last sentence is a joy and a treasure, obviously forged in one of the most advanced laboratories in hell. The WAPO wisely ends the article with these words:

So stretcht out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay
Chain'd on the burning Lake, nor ever thence
Had ris'n or heav'd his head, but that the will
And high permission of all-ruling Heaven
Left him at large to his own dark designs,
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought
Evil to others, and enrag'd might see
How all his malice serv'd but to bring forth
Infinite goodness, grace and mercy shewn
On Man by him seduc't, but on himself
Treble confusion, wrath and vengeance pour'd.

our long national nightmare is over

The only thing more frightening to the Iranians than the U.S. leaving Iraq, would be -- and this is my preference -- the U.S. succeeding in Iraq. – Thomas Friedman

These are the times that try men’s souls, but then along comes a man with a message. A surprising message, a message of hope. Sometimes it is Jesus. Sometimes it is Einstein. But this time it is Tom Friedman. His message is a shocker, but it will certain buck up LI’s readers, mired as some of us may be in doubt. The message is: the U.S. should succeed (!) in Iraq.

I mean, it is almost incredible that he was able to print that in the NYT. That’s a supersecret strategy. Apparently he was rushed to the Pentagon right away, and as we write he is putting, in big, bold chalk letters right there on the blackboard for Rumsfeld to see: S-U-C-E-D. This is next to a chalk cloudy S-C-U-D and frantically half erased S-E-C-U-D – our messiah is no pussy speller, bitches. But he is going to get it right, and then, oh heavens, the lights over D.C. will be celestial, the angels will sing, and the cuckoo clocks will cuckoo.

Our long nightmare is over. In a sentence that will ring the chimes forever, like Blessed are the poor in spirit, or E=mc squared, he drives this message home: “So getting out of Iraq would be a good anti-Iran strategy. Succeeding in Iraq would be even better.”

Glory glory hallelujah. Thanks, Tom!

the bloody third -- part 2

Another post (re my post below) from the travelogue of the beginning of this war. A home movie. I'll entitle this clip, "what do you get when you have a sick and narcissistic left?" You get debate on a level that would make the angels -- the departed souls of the babies on the Gerber jars, those boomer emblems -- weep.

March 13, 2003


Comrades one and all....

There's a rather genteel exchange between Doug Ireland and Christopher Hitchens in this week's LA Weekly. It begins, unpromisingly enough, with Ireland writing: "My old friend Christopher Hitchens will be in Los Angeles on Saturday, March 15, for a debate at the Wiltern Theater." The phrase "old friend" pops up with distressing frequency whenever anti-war media people start writing about Hitchens. It's the friendship that blinds them, perhaps, to the kind of figure he is. This kind of transplant from the left to the right is a familiar figure in times of violent reaction. In France in the thirties, Drieu de la Rochelle moved from a radical branch of the Communist party to Nazi sympathizer, leaving behind a similar trail of "old friends." In Drieu's case, his politics had an echo on the national level in Doriot. The political fault lines aren't as hyper-charged at present, but the phenomenon Hitchens could prefigure some similar authoritarian politician -- somebody like McCain.

Ireland is 'shocked' to read that Hitchens gave an interview in which he remarks, casually, that he would have voted for Bush. No surprise there. Ireland, though, finds this all too upsetting, and sets down at his computer and mails his old friend some woolgathering emails that are pallid even by the low standards of the baby boomer New Left. Here, for example, is Ireland arguing that Bush, being against condoms, is for AIDS, and thus for "millions" of more deaths than can possibly be contrived by evil old Saddam.

"The effects of denying people access to condoms and science-based sex ed, not to mention the continuing efforts by the U.S. to blackmail countries on access to AIDS drugs and sabotage the WTO agreement at Doha that public-health crises take precedence over patents, means that millions and millions more will become infected and die between now and 2050, the earliest possible date by which (the scientists now tell us ) we might reasonably begin to hope for an AIDS cure.These are not just people who’ve had sex, but their many children. That’s more than Saddam Hussein has killed, more than will be killed in the coming war (unless Dubya starts chucking around the nukes he has now authorized). There would be a huge difference on this issue between Bush and the likely (from here) Democratic nominee, Kerry. Just in terms of sheer numbers of dead, Kerry trumps Bush (and Saddam) on that one. Yes, I have been a sharp critic of the Democratic leadership, and will continue to be. But to go from that to supporting Bush in ‘04 and publicly urging others to do likewise seems to me to be a rather dangerous excursion into full-blown Stephen Spenderism, and very shortsighted to boot. So I’d ask you a further question: Since you suggest your commitment to social justice is undiminished, from what I have seen of your public expressions, how do you square that with this undiluted support for Bush’s re-election? Do you no longer believe in creating a democratic social-justice movement to work for change (however hopelessly)?I remain your affectionate friend, Doug (for regime change and revolution abroad and at home)"

The lather, the lather. Plus the revolution remark, in perfectly comic juxtaposition with the support for that old Jacobin, Senator Kerry -- an enemy of capitalism if there ever was one! Eventually, Ireland gets over the rubbers issue and down to the war, and Hitchens fills in the blanks with his usual debased rhetoric, which is all about Bush fighting a war against theocracy. Which prompts this kind of reply on the part of the hapless Ireland, always trying to figure out if Hitchens is just making some super-clever Marxist chessboard move:

"I still have trouble discerning a coherent politics of a progressive hue behind your support for the re-conduction of Bush in ‘04, as you claim."

Well, that's because there IS no progressive hue. There is, however, a huge amount of dishonesty. Hitchens simply substitutes one war for another. This is Hitchens' role. Like a lot of the DC commentariat, his propagandist function consists of putting a consistently moral interpretation on a consistently immoral policy. Because such a policy requires a maximum of secrecy, Hitchens is just as happy to discuss and debate the war as if it were his war. He is not tied to the reality of the war -- to the war that is supposedly going to cost two hundred billion dollars, to the war that is going to use up the blood of American soldiers, to the war that is going to be crowned, according to the administration, with the appointment of Jay Garner as crown prince of Iraq -- and so can defend the war of his fantasies. Slowly those fantasies will converge with reality -- the collapse of an ideological position usually involves some transition period in which you defend a radically different politics by claiming that your only real sin is a rigid consistency. Because Ireland is much too highminded to mention things like the cost of the war, the national interest of the U.S., and other technicalities -- because he wants his wars and his protests against them to be conducted on the purest ethical plane -- he's rather flummoxed by Hitchens. It is pretty easy to convince Ireland that roosters lay eggs. But, after searching high and low for Hitchen's subtle ultra left theory that would make even Vladimir Lenin's head spin (and we know he, too, was forever signing his emails "for regime change and revolution abroad and at home" -- what a fierce change agent that Vladimir turned out to be!), even Ireland is forced to face the fact that his buddy is a reactionary not that different from Charles Krauthammer or Karl Rove.

"Well, Hitch, I shall always love my friend, but I mourn the loss of my comrade. To see such talent as yours put at the service of a truly repugnant crowd like the Bushistas makes me weep. No doubt we�ll have occasion to continue this debate, even if we’ll soon be squabbling about whether all those coming deaths in Iraq have helped shape a better and more secure world."

Let's hope that debate never comes off.

March 21, 2003

So where are those weapons of mass destruction, anyway?

Well, like a rich man ordering up the fine wine, Saddam Hussein apparently serves only his special guests his rich, toxic brews. He's saving them for when he's really in trouble, you see.

Iraq is collapsing like a puff pastry in the path of a bull dozer. The cheerleading from the press is also on schedule, including yesterday's ridiculous craze for asking various and sundry people whether that was really Saddam Hussein on tv, including an archivist at the Richard Nixon library -- as if all these people were Saddam's friends. NPR had a great time with that one. At one point they annouced that Saddam Hussein's mistress, apparently given shelter within the friendly walls of the Pentagon, had put her thumbs down on the video: no, that was not her sweetie.

No question is ever asked, no heresy is ever contemplated, that would disturb this seemless flow of misinformation from their mouths to your ears. When a government feels no pain for its lies, it will spin ever more elaborate ones. We have reached that Pavlovian strata towards which, all winter, we have been traveling, as though in a ship driven by a drunken Captain Nemo: we have a naked government, a junta, that responds solely to pain or pleasure, to galvanic shock or tax cuts. All human things -- in the lines of Yeats' poem,

"Beautiful lofty things; O'Leary's noble head;
My father upon the Abbey stage, before him a raging crowd.
"This Land of Saints", and then as the applause died out,
"Of plaster Saints"; his beautiful mischievous head thrown back."

are dissolved into mere current at this level. The voltaic replaces hard, tensile thought and, as Yeats said in another poem, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world; in the shape, this time, of a creature slouching first towards Basra, then towards Baghdad.

So yesterday yours truly went downtown to the demonstration, to get my fair share of depression. The demonstration built over an hour, but it attracted, in the end, a crowd that looked like what would happen if you took a college area coffee shop at rush hour and tipped it on its side. There were few solid suburban types, and the people speaking made no attempt to appeal to them, anyway. There were some old hippies playing old hippie anti-war songs, the well spoken UT professor, Bob Jensen, and another UT professor who thought that it was now high time to denounce capitalism. In other words, one felt like the choice was between playing in a sandbox or joining the ever more compliant booboisie at their tv sets, complaining that the war had interrupted their favorite reality tv show. One felt, in other words, once again that the real weapon of the powerful is their ability to define what is and what is not serious. We, the demonstrators, bore the curse of non-seriousness on our very foreheads.

Nevertheless, I moved with the masses, such as they were, down Congress. I lay in the intersection of Congress and 6th street, a die-in moment, then got up, dusted myself off, moved with the masses again (a damned helicopter on the horizon, spotting us -- which affirmed the insanity of the moment, since we were being taken seriously, apparently, by somebody, some uniformed somebody. I should also take a moment to point out that, on my way downtown, three busses for the police stood ready on 5th street), and made it to the bridge. There a bunch of 19 year old college students, ardent with antiwar feelings -- and with the breath of high school still on them -- formed a circle and sat down and chanted. It is one of the ironies of demonstrations that they attract the kind of people who have never learned to chant at pep rallies or football games. The anti-cheerleader type. And yet, what do we all do? We chant.

Someone, after a while, suggested that we take the bridge.
So I pondered whether I could afford to go to jail. I haven't yet paid all my rent for the month. I am on the brink, every day, of having that awful, foodless moment, when zero settles on your bank account and you have to live on that food substitute, coffee. And of course various of my jobs -- my scribblings for the press -- have not been paid for, one of them now going on three months. So no, I decided, I could not afford to go to jail. Because I didn't know if I could get out.

I'm not sure if I pussied out, thinking back on it. But there's a bleakness in my heart this morning.

the bloody third

The bloody third anniversary. There is a demonstration in Austin tomorrow, starting at eleven. Myself, I'd advise --as a protest -- reading MacBeth, today. Take this passage as your guide to Iraq:

MALCOLM

Let us seek out some desolate shade, and there
Weep our sad bosoms empty.

MACDUFF

Let us rather
Hold fast the mortal sword, and like good men
Bestride our down-fall'n birthdom: each new morn
New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows
Strike heaven on the face, that it resounds
As if it felt with Scotland and yell'd out
Like syllable of dolour.

MALCOLM

What I believe I'll wail,
What know believe, and what I can redress,
As I shall find the time to friend, I will.

In honor of this anniversary, we are going to publish a little travelogue of posts. A travelogue from a man who never budged, a pocket Cassandra.

This is from March 09, 03:


March 09 03

The Exile's Temptation

"C'est une chose infiniment plus dangereuse de révolutionner pour la vertu que de révolutionner pour le crime. Lorsque des scélérats violent les formes contre les hommes honnêtes, on sait que c'est un délit de plus. On s'attache aux formes, par leur violation même ; on apprend en silence, et par le malheur, à les regarder comme des choses sacrées, protectrices et conservatrices de l'ordre social. Mais lorsque des hommes honnêtes violent les formes contre des scélérats, le peuple ne sait plus où il en est ; les formes et les lois se présentent à lui comme des obstacles à la justice" " -- Benjamin Constant, quoted in Lucien Jaume, Droit, Etat et obligation selon Benjamin Constant

It is infinitely more dangerous to revolutionize for virtue than to revolutionize for crim. When the scoundrels violate the forms against the honest people, we know that it is just one more of their crimes. We are attached to the forms, even by their violation: we learn in silence, and by the weight of mischance, to regard them as sacred things, the protectors and conservators of the social order. But when honest men violate the forms against the scoundrels, the people no longer know where they are; the forms and the laws present themselves then as obstacles to justice.”

How would I see the War if I were an Iraqi exile?

LI has been reading Benjamin Constant's essay on the "Spirit of Conquest" thinking of that question this weekend. Constant wrote the essay in 1813, in Germany. He'd been in exile from Napoleon's France for five years, following in the wake of his lover, Mme. de Stael. He'd had to flee Napoleon's troops in Germany more than once. From this viewpoint, he could see just what was wrong with revolutionary expansionist wars. Which, oddly enough, is how our War is being advertised.

With less mandarin reference, the NYT Magazine article about, mostly, Kanan Makiya, the intellectual architect of the Defense department favored blueprint for Post-Saddam Iraq, thrusts the question under our noses. George Packer, who wrote the article, has been on the edge about these issues. If, like me, you feel the War will be a disaster, you still have to stop and consider the position of the politically active Iraqi exile. LI's politics, before it fits into an ideology, requires "fantasia" -- a term O'brien uses to describe Burke's politics. It means the ability to imaginative project oneself. For Burke, and I think, although O'Brien would disagree, for Marx, fantasia is the horizon that conditions politics -- not justice.

So, what would I think?

Here, after all, is a bloody tyrant. Here are millions of people demonstrating against the War, against, secondarily, Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, and leaving absolutely unmentioned the Kurds, the Shiites, the massacres of the last twenty years. And the thing is -- he isn't just bloody -- he's incompetent on a scale unparalleled by even the region's notably incompetent rulers. He has, in his quest for military supremacy in the region, spent untold amounts of the country's wealth on futile projects that are now coming down on his head.

And then here's the strongest country in the world, offering its full military might. What would you do?

Packer's article begs that question, but it should definitely be read in conjunction with this article in Business Week that surveyed the Iraqi shambles, since no questions were asked about how Makiya's 'democratic government" was going to, well, support itself. Here are some central grafs from the BW article:

"Two decades of war plus 12 years of U.N. sanctions have slashed gross domestic product per capita by over 70%. The U.N. Development Programme calculates that on a purchasing-power-parity basis, Iraq's per-capita income is only $700, making it one of the poorest nations on earth outside Africa.

Saddam's economic policies have made matters worse. Since 1991, the regime has been churning out local currency, which it uses to soak up whatever dollars are available in the local market. This practice has created hyperinflation and destroyed the value of the dinar. On the black market, the currency has plunged from about 8 per dollar in 1990 to 2,000 per dollar now. Members of the once thriving middle class can feed themselves only by selling their jewelry and household goods and by receiving transfers, typically $100 per month, from relatives abroad. Crime is soaring, and girls and women from respectable families are increasingly turning to prostitution--a deeply humiliating trend in a conservative Arab society.

Even Iraq's oil reserves are unlikely to be a panacea. The fields are in a decrepit condition, with equipment broken and missing. Oil production--currently about 2.5 million barrels per day--may have to be cut in the short term while contractors replace antiquated hardware and stabilize pressure in the reservoirs. That could cost $3 billion to $4 billion--assuming Saddam doesn't sabotage the fields.

Unless oil prices stay at current high levels, Iraq's oil income of around $15 to $20 billion per year isn't likely to be enough to pay for food and other needed imports as well as rebuilding and development costs. That tab is estimated at $20 billion a year over several years."

As we've pointed out, with ever greater tediousness, the war as envisioned by the War Intellectuals -- Hitchen's war -- and the war as planned by the U.S. and British governments are two different things. Packer's article gives a sort of synthesis of the Makiya scheme for a democratic Iraq and the Wolfowitz scheme for an expansionist Israel -- an Israel that gets to keep the occupied territories, or "so called occupied territories," as Donald Rumsfeld calls them:

"The story being told goes like this:
The Arab world is hopelessly sunk in corruption and popular discontent. Misrule and a culture of victimhood have left Arabs economically stagnant and prone to seeing their problems in delusional terms. The United States has contributed to the pathology by cynically shoring up dictatorships; Sept. 11 was one result. Both the Arab world and official American attitudes toward it need to be jolted out of their rut. An invasion of Iraq would provide the necessary shock, and a democratic Iraq would become an example of change for the rest of the region. Political Islam would lose its hold on the imagination of young Arabs as they watched a more successful model rise up in their midst. The Middle East's center of political, economic and cultural gravity would shift from the region's theocracies and autocracies to its new, oil-rich democracy. And finally, the deadlock in which Israel and Palestine are trapped would end as Palestinians, realizing that their Arab backers were now tending their own democratic gardens, would accept compromise. By this way of thinking, the road to Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh and Jerusalem goes through Baghdad. "

Parts of this scheme seem reasonable to LI. The part about Palestine is simply nonsense. But the central idea, that a democratic Iraq would act as an attractor to other countries, is in a sense our idea too. We believe in the power of creating a democratic, or more democratic attractor. We simply disagree on the facts on the ground and the means to achieve this goal. This is happening in Northern Iraq. We think that for Iraq to become a democracy this attractor has to be allowed to work -- that is, the exile's temptation to strike, in one blow, against the dictator using, as a sort of forgettable instrument, a foreign power's might, should be avoided. The reason is simple -- the means resonate in the result. Constant's words make terrible sense: "when honest men violate the forms against the criminals, the people no longer know where they are: the forms and the laws are presented to them as obstacles to justice." Constant said this in 1798, before Napoleon destroyed the remnant of the Revolutionary Republic. The destruction of the future Iraqi Republic is written in its very genes if it is parented by Pentagon hawks on a coalition of Iraqi exiles. After distorting international law, bribing or threatening allies, and endorsing the fuhrer prinzip in regard to popular discontent with the War (see the utterances of Bush's poodle, or the American press about the latest vote in Turkey), to think that the hawks' ends are democratic is a delusion -- they have simply re-defined democracy. It now means "friendly to the administration of George Bush.". The new governors of Babylon will be American puppets, and they won't last long without Americans. The mentality of the coup can dress itself up as a splendid dream, but enacting an armed dream upon the waking life of a distant population is my definition of a nightmare.