The New Bloody Assizes

Ominous headlines today, making me wonder how my friend S. is ever going to get rid of all the conditioners and shampoos she no doubt packed this morning before she went to the airport.

More ominous than the threat of attack from an Al Qaeda that was, readers will recall, cynically put on tap five years ago in the comedy cut up campaign in Afghanistan, the one designed to give the political establishment a ready, remote control threat (and which has proven to be beyond their control, and which is happily working from its base in Pakistan, to the almost unanimous disinterest of the Western Press). At the moment, there is a tremendous threat by to our civil liberties posed by the ill named Labour party (Surely the name should be the Blood and Soil party) in Britain and the D.C. party – the LieberCheney party – in the U.S.

This is from the horrendous British home secretary, John Reid, the man who espouses the Blairist policy of minimum freedom and maximum unctuousness – that peculiarly British twist on the authoritarian personality:

“John Reid yesterday accused the government's anti-terror critics of putting national security at risk by their failure to recognise the serious nature of the threat facing Britain. "They just don't get it," he said.

"The home secretary yesterday gave the thinktank Demos his strongest hint yet that a new round of anti-terror legislation is on the way this autumn by warning that traditional civil liberty arguments were not so much wrong as just made for another age.

""Sometimes we may have to modify some of our own freedoms in the short term in order to prevent their misuse and abuse by those who oppose our fundamental values and would destroy all of our freedoms in the modern world," he said.”"

LI can see a certain justice in those words, but applies them to the greatest threat to our fundamental values – that posed by the current British and American governments. A sneaking foreign policy, politicized to expand the brute power of the operatives who benefit from it, coddled by a syncophantic crew of journalists, has indeed been striking at all our freedoms; they have thwarted investigations into their low and negligent acts, they have designed, in a remarkably short time, one of the world’s great machines for peculating public funds, showering favored companies with billions, and they have actively delayed any of the necessary changes to our current system of production to prevent an environmental catastrophe, which we actually know is coming. This, more than anything else, will make the depleted future generations curse us.

Now, traditionally the blog thing to do at this point in my rant is to roll out the Nazis as the epitome of evil. I am truly sick to death of the Nazis as stage devils, stalking into that garden of Eden, universal history. I do think there are more devils than are dreamt of in the blogger philosophy – home grown ones too. Reid doesn’t remind me of Hitler – he reminds me of a very British character, Lord Jeffrys.

Jeffrys, like the Home Secretary, was a carious, career tending, threatening man. He became King James II’s right hand man for mass repression. As his biographer, Woolrych, says, “to secure his own fortunes, let the means or consequences be as they might, was the utmost he had any care for, but the difficulty lay in discerning the best political game for accomplishing those ends.”

Jeffrys is most famous for the “bloody Assizes.” This is the story. James II combined the Stuart idea that he was God on Earth with the idea, unpopular in England, that God on Earth should be worshipped in the Roman Catholic way. His accession led to revolts – or, as Reid might say, “the serious nature of the threat facing Britain” was embodied by various invasions, starting with the Duke of Monmouth, one of those handsome, stupid Protestant nobles with a vague, blood claim to the throne, in 1685. Jeffrys was a judge at the time, and had married upward, and was eager to please James, since he had made many enemies among the Dissenters. In fact, he appears to have been a regular New Labour personality, and would certainly have fit in at any of the Murdochian conferences to which Blair likes to flit and kiss, on bended knee, Rupert’s ring.
Jeffrys was appointed as the cleanup man in Western England after the Monmouth army had been defeated. His first victim, Alice Lisle, was dispatched with alacrity – hung. This is how Macaulay describes his coming into Dorchester:
“Jeffreys reached Dorchester, the principal town of the county in which Monmouth had landed; and the judicial massacre began. The court was hung, by order of the Chief Justice, with scarlet; and this innovation seemed to the multitude to indicate a bloody purpose. It was also rumoured that, when the clergyman who preached the assize sermon enforced the duty of mercy, the ferocious mouth of the Judge was distorted by an ominous grin. These things made men augur ill of what was to follow.”

This is Reid, numbering the things that need to change if England is to be purged of terrorism:

"· The media commentators who "apparently give more prominence to the views of Islamist terrorists rather than democratically elected Muslim politicians like premier Maliki of Iraq or President Karzai of Afghanstan"."

Jeffrys, obviously looking down upon Reid with approval, knew just what to do with trash that didn’t praise the democratically elected, god damn it.

"“More than three hundred prisoners were to be tried. The work seemed heavy; but Jeffreys had a contrivance for making it light. He let it be understood that the only chance of obtaining pardon or respite was to plead guilty.”

Another group of people who Reid believes needs to be dashed to the ground are those puling human rightsers:

"“· European judges who passed the "Chahal judgment" that prohibited the home secretary from weighing the security of millions of British people if a suspected terrorist remained in the UK against the risk he faced if deported back to his own country.”"

And who, my Lords, isn’t a suspected terrorist in these troubled times? Yes, the only thing to do is to let those in authority, looking out for your best interest, decide on these things. Preferably in secret.

"“At every spot where two roads met, on every marketplace, on the green of every large village which had furnished Monmouth with soldiers, ironed corpses clattering in the wind, or heads and quarters stuck on poles, poisoned the air, and made the traveller sick with horror. In many parishes the peasantry could not assemble in the house of God without seeing the ghastly face of a neighbour grinning at them over the porch. The Chief Justice was all himself. His spirits rose higher and higher as the work went on. He laughed, shouted, joked, and swore in such a way that many thought him drunk from morning to night. But in him it was not easy to distinguish the madness produced by evil passions from the madness produced by brandy. A prisoner affirmed that the witnesses who appeared against him were not entitled to credit. One of them, he said, was a Papist, and another a prostitute. "Thou impudent rebel," exclaimed the Judge, "to reflect on the King's evidence! I see thee, villain, I see thee already with the halter round thy neck." Another produced testimony that he was a good Protestant. "Protestant! " said Jeffreys; "you mean Presbyterian. I'll hold you a wager of it. I can smell a Presbyterian forty miles." One wretched man moved the pity even of bitter Tories. "My Lord," they said, "this poor creature is on the parish." "Do not trouble yourselves," said the Judge, "I will ease the parish of the burden.""

The latter joke would make them roll in the Blairite conclaves. Get off the dole, you fucking twat – that’s the spirit. Reid, following in the example of his spiritual ancestor, has his own numbers:

"“Mr Reid argued that since 2000 almost 1,000 people have been arrested for terror-related offences, with 154 of them charged and 60 suspects now awaiting trial. Four significant terrorist plots had been disrupted. But the opposition from politicians, media commentators and judges had left the government ill-prepared to tackle the threat.

""In spite of these successes we remain unable to adapt our institutions and legal orthodoxy as fast as we need to," he said. "This is the area that puts us at risk in national security terms. There have been several contributory factors to this, including party political point scoring by the Conservative and Liberal opposition during the passage of key anti-terrorism measures, through to repeated challenges under the Human Rights Act and the convention, which I continue to contest."”

Of course, Reid has turned his face to the source of all the discontent with Britain’s gentle democratizing – the Muslims. Fuck those people.

“Such havoc must have excited disgust even if the sufferers had been generally odious. But they were, for the most part, men of blameless life, and of high religious profession. They were regarded by themselves, and by a large proportion of their neighbours, not as wrongdoers, but as martyrs who sealed with blood the truth of the Protestant religion. Very few of the convicts professed any repentance for what they had done. Many, animated by the old Puritan spirit, met death, not merely with fortitude, but with exultation.”

Suicide bombers, those exulting old Puritans.

Macaulay has a vivid description of one of Jeffrys’ spies, a man named Ferguson. I’d apply this mock heroic catalogue to many in the reactionary network that connects England and America. In fact, this sounds like a job application to work for the Sun, or the Weekly Standard.

“At length he turned his attention almost entirely from theology to the worst part of politics. He belonged to the class whose office it is to render in troubled times to exasperated parties those services from which honest men shrink in disgust and prudent men in fear, the class of fanatical knaves. Violent, malignant, regardless of truth, insensible to shame, insatiable of notoriety, delighting in intrigue, in tumult, in mischief for its own sake, he toiled during many years in the darkest mines of faction. He lived among libellers and false witnesses. He was the keeper of a secret purse from which agents too vile to be acknowledged received hire, and the director of a secret press whence pamphlets, bearing no name, were daily issued.”

Welcome to Reid’s world.

Gwynne Dyer gets it

LI’s recommend of the day is to Gwynne Dyer’s article, “America has to acknowledge its own vulnerability”, in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record (where I found it – Google has a link to it in the Trinidad paper.)

Journalists write way too much to think, which is why one doesn’t go to them for philosophical analysis – one goes to them to see how ‘it’ thinks – the conventional wisdom. ‘It’ actually does most of our thinking – our telephone conversations, jokes, waterfountain talk, is animated mostly by the various, multi-headed it, which has plenty of words and snap together phrases, a lego kit full – which is fine, as long as the world can be represented by legos. But is not when the world is not. However, Dyer’s article actually articulates a distinct thought – one not wrapped up in the usual columnist’s mummery:

“The three most ill-considered (and probably doomed) political enterprises on the international political scene today are the Israeli assault on Lebanon, the American campaign to force Iran to renounce its alleged nuclear weapons program, and the similar campaign that has been mounted against North Korea. What common theme unites these three enterprises? The quest for invulnerability for one side, at the expense of total vulnerability for the other."

Exactly. As Dyer points out, "between 1945 and about 1970," the U.S. had to cope with going from being by far the world's most powerful country to allowing for the fact that the U.S. could never, by way of open warfare, abolish Russia's ability to launch nuclear missiles at it. "By 1970 it was ready to concede nuclear weapons parity to the Soviet Union, an openly hostile totalitarian state, and was negotiating arms-control agreements that limited missile numbers but guaranteed the Soviets the ability to destroy the United States."

This is philosophical analysis in the Husserlian vein – it brackets other considerations that distort the outlines of what really happened – the phenomenon. This is precisely what did happen. The structure of the Cold War was about the U.S. and the U.S.S.R accepting that vulnerability. The structure of the post-War period, or, rather, the Bush end of it, has been a childish attempt to return to American invulnerability.

Dyer applies that model to Israel. I have been thinking that Israel's aggressiveness is the result of being a free rider -- but Dyer is right to point out one of the unexpected results of Israel's success:

“Israel's period of invulnerability began later, after the 1973 war, and has lasted far longer. No combination of Arab armies can defeat Israel in war, or even inflict major casualties on it. And should Israeli generals ever prove so incompetent that Arab armies did make a little headway, Israel still has its regional nuclear weapons monopoly 40 years after developing the things. (America lost its own nuclear monopoly after only four years in its confrontation with the Soviet Union.)”

This is why Israeli actions have been tinged by such arrogance. Menacheim Begin’s election began a new phase in Israel's history, one that seemed to promise power - and Israel has been going down the path, ever since, of expansion and crushing its opponents.

“Israel faces a bigger 'terrorist threat' than the US, but it is still a pretty marginal concern. Hezbollah's activities on Israel's northern borders were an occasional nuisance, but until Israel's quite deliberate overreaction to its hostage-seizure operation on July 12-- bombing targets all across Lebanon -- it had not fired rockets at Israeli towns in years. Hezbollah had the capability to do that, so Israel was theoretically vulnerable (though not very, since the rockets hardly ever hit anyone), but it wasn't actually doing it.”

At last, the acknowledgement of reality! Of course, reality creeps into the newspaper world via rather obscure Caribbean and Canadian papers, but having arrived on this side of the Atlantic, who knows where it will go?

Check it out, people. You can find the full piece here.

a monster loses in CT

Mr. Scruggs has advised Limited Inc. of the bad effects of shooting up elections. Soon you become addicted. Soon you actually think they are important. He’s counseled the hard cases, the ones eventually found sprawled, bluefaced, dead, under the set blinking and winking the CNN news. All my friends they died/died! as the song says. But LI –in a junkie’s relapse – was pretty happy about the CT. primary. In the end, we even felt sorry for Lieberman – we wanted his ass kicked, but that clueless fellow, out of his D.C. shell, in the pictures in the NYT seemed so … harmless. We couldn’t put him together with the vicious little prick from his identikit presence on so many blogs, getting his aids to write him up another scorcher for the WSJ editorial page, browbeating the head of the SEC to give accounting firms one more chance to defraud investors and workers – instead, here’s this guy with his hand out in the diner I used to breakfast at in New Haven. You want to lead him to a booth.

Of course, this is the whole problem of democracy, one not often talked about – the elected by a mysterious process become monsters. Their egos become huge and grotesque, Mr. Hydes, stamping around with a cane, pillaging, hobnobing with the worst, vicariously enjoying death. The monster problem is the central problem in democracy – and Carl Schmitt is not the guy you want to go to to have it all explained to you. Try Richard III, instead.

But there are better monsters and worse ones. We know what Lieberman was. Lamont sounds harmless, and he might do some good, who the fuck knows.

In any case: Hurray!

Although I dread the morphine treatment Mistah Scruggs will make me go through in the next coupla weeks.

advertisements for myself

I hate August, as it is a terrible month for getting editing jobs. No money, no happiness, autumn in my heart and spectacles on my nose, as I. Babel once put it in a different context. The landlady at the door with an axe in her hand… Etc.

So I am going to U.T. and put up my advertisement for editing work here and there. I’ve sent out my flyer to sororities and fraternities, honor societies and all kinds of student organizations, which are all pretty much in suspended animation in the summer. This is a reminder to my readers who may know someone who needs an editor for a paper, an article, or a translator, or a ghostwriter – please refer them to my writing services site. It is here:

http://www.geocities.com/rogergathman/writing.html

Jonathan Chait's heart breaks -- but don't worry, he doesn't use it anyway

Jonathan Chait’s column in the Guardian begins like this:

“Let's face it, Israel's counter offensive in Lebanon doesn't seem to be going very well. Liberals are saying it. Conservatives are saying it. Plenty of Israelis are saying it. But here is the odd thing: nobody is paying very careful attention to the alternative. The criticism of Israel's ground campaign - however sound much of it may be - takes place against an assumption that peace could be at hand if only Israel stopped fighting.”

Of course, we know that Chait, being a clever American, will tell us that peace isn’t the absence of fighting. In this way, a garden variety word, peace, suddenly starts doing summersaults.

“Let's examine that idea. The United Nations types argue that Israel should withdraw from Lebanon and cease its airstrikes and that an international force should patrol southern Lebanon. But every country that could contribute to such a force has insisted they don't want to fight Hizbullah. Kofi Annan has said that a "cardinal principle" of any peacekeeping force would be obtaining Lebanon's consent. And neither Hizbullah nor the Lebanese government has evinced any willingness to remove Hizbullah's forces from southern Lebanon.”

Hmm. So, peace, it turns out, and Israel’s victory are one and the same thing. If Lebanon itself doesn’t have any willingness to remove Hizbullah’s force from Southern Lebanon – an unwillingness reinforced, in the last two weeks, by the evidence that other than having that force there, Israel will invade and batter the country any time it feels like it –well, according to the impeccable logic of Chait, Israel just has to keep fighting. They are fighting, you see, for peace. Such peaceful bombing of children was never seen before. A regular miracle.

In Chait’s view though, the problem is that Israel is threatened. Lebanon, which Israel has invaded now three times in the last twenty years, is, by contrast, unthreatened. Funny, that. To be really unthreatened, you have to have an air force making hundreds of bombing sortees over your cities every day. It makes things more and more peaceful. It is almost like they are dropping apple pie, except the bombs are not sugared, and they rip your guts out and your arms off. But otherwise, it is just like a picnic.

“But the death toll doesn't quite capture the damage wrought by Hizbullah. The purpose of the missile attacks is to force Israelis to live under a constant threat - missile attacks or cross-border raids that, while sporadic, can occur at any time. No nation would consider that condition acceptable. And even if Israel learns to take periodic attacks from Hizbullah with good cheer, there's no guarantee that the attacks won't get worse. After all, Hizbullah is acquiring newer, more powerful rockets from Iran.”
So, we are to consider Israel as doing what any nation would do. There are things that are acceptable for all nations, according to Chait. An interesting concession. Similarly, no nation would allow its neighbor to occupy its land. No nation would allow its neighbor to repeatedly violate its air space. No nation should remain uncompensated for damage wrought over eighteen years of occupation. No nation would tolerate its neighbor calmly planning and carrying out assassinations of its political leaders.
In actuality, just as Chait’s idea of peace is simply war, Chait’s appeal to the universal acceptable behavior of nations is not meant to be taken seriously. One nation, Lebanon, according to Chait, should happily swallow anything that Israel wants to do to it. In return, Israel has the right to reply in any way it feels fit to aggression. But of course, if another nation, say Syria, occupied Lebanon, why that would be a serious crime against humanity.

Chait’s logic is about an equivalence that is simply bogus. That equivalence is between Israel and the more powerful nations. He is simply appealing to the behavior sanctioned by the special group of nations of which he wants to make Israel part – the great powers, the former and present empires, who have given themselves the right to bomb and invade at will.

This overlooks the fact that Israel simply isn’t part of that group, and never will be.

Chait is correct to sum up the pluses and minuses of the Israeli military operation against Hezbollah, but somehow he misses the alternative that would emerge if Israel’s ruling class hadn’t made military supremacy and the settlement of the West Bank Israel’s supreme goals for the last forty years. The inability to triumph militarily in Lebanon is a sign that this ruling clique has lead Israel into a trap. The trap is disguised by Israel’s current idea that it will take unilateral action – which really means endless violence, resting on endless efforts to achieve military supremacy, financed by the United States. That, it seems to me, is the path that Israel is taking in Southern Lebanon. As with many an American proxy, though, Israel is going to find out the limits of existing as a free rider on American benevolence. Squandering its moral stature and its wealth against a militia party that is unlikely to be dislodged at all in Southern Lebanon is not a good deal at all – although no doubt the red meat boys at the New Republic, where Chait writes, think that it is neat. The same thinkers thought invading Iraq was neat.

Unilateralism is dead. Military action has obviously reached its limit. Oh oh, that means the dreaded and wimpy negotiation thing – even, perhaps, giving up the Golan heights, and giving up the settler’s welfare state on the West Bank. If Israel heeds the call of its “friends” such as Chait, however, it will be giving up much more, in the not too distant future.

“The doves are right that any solution that involves attacking innocent civilians is a terrible one. It's heartbreaking to see houses flattened and children killed. But when you have a nation populated in part by murderous religious fanatics who delight in killing enemy civilians and see the deaths of their own civilians as a strategic boon, any option is going to be terrible.
Israel is hoping to change the equation, to force Lebanon to take control of its border or accept an outside force that would do so. The tactic of striking Hizbullah has some chance of bringing that about. Stopping the attack and hoping for the best has no chance at all.”

Heartbreaking, is it? I think those are the mass manufactiured, Hallmark kind of hearts he is alluding to. Any breaks they may suffer are easily healed. It isn't the likes of Chait who will refer, again, to the Children's Massacre in Quana.

However, the more Israel heeds the words of hawks like Chait, the more it is going to confront no choice at all. As Iraq showed, an insurgent force can stop an occupier. And certainly as Israel huffs and puffs about bombing Teheran if Tel Aviv is bombed, they are moving blindly in a direction that has been mapped out by group that has never yet been right in the middle east – the neo cons.

robert kaplan - stooge

The phrase ‘war profiteer’ causes noses to wrinkle among the conventional wisdom set. It is so… angry. And fringe. Not at all the kind of bloodless bloody talk preferred at Georgetown lunches, or Raytheon sponsored golfing trips for congressmen.

However, LI is so damn fringe that we spontaneously generate tie dyed shirts (it is a horrible FX, not suitable for children under 16 not accompanied by parent). And so we think that there are indeed war profiteers, and that wars are fought more often for stuff than for principles (which, actually, has turned out to be a good thing – stuff is limiting) and that the combination of fighting for stuff and claiming to be fighting for principles is the worst of both worlds. We think that there is a subculture, dominant in the U.S., that fattens on spilling human blood. We also think that the flaks of war are immensely important to keep the whole corrupt system going. It is these people that make mass murder exciting. Hip. And oh so serious – strategy rather than butchery. Which reminds us a bit of a parable John Selden, the English antiquarian and friend of Ben Johnson, jotted down in his strange little book, Table Talk:

“Boccaline has this passage of Souldiers, They came to Apollo to have their profession made the Eighth Liberal Science, which he granted. As soon as it was nois’d up and down, it come to the Butchers, and they desir’d their Profession might be made the Ninth: For say they, the Souldiers have this Honour for the killing of Men; now we kill as well as they; but we kill Beasts for the preserving of Men, and why should not we have Honour likewise done to us? Apollo could not Answer their Reasons, so he revers’d his Sentence, and made the Souldiers Trade a Mystery, as the Butchers is.”

This is, of course, obsolete in the age of Robert Kaplan, where all Mysteries have been bureaucratized into security clearances. Kaplan is an important flak who has “promoted/ the third world war” – like the guy in the Highway 61 song, Kaplan believes it can be “easily done.” He is writing in belligeranti mode in his article, Hunting the Taliban in Las Vegas, in this month’s Atlantic. Kaplan does Tom Wolfe like paens to military hardware, but it is like Wolfe with half a brain (unfortunately, that is what Wolfe, too, sounds like as a novelist).

It begins by framing the issue nicely. First we get the decadent civilians, whacking off:

“To embed on some of the niftiest air missions over Iraq and Afghanistan, I had to fly to Las Vegas. 1 drove out of town past the MGM Grand, the Bellagio, and Caesar's Palace and checked in at a low-end hotel-casino complex in Las Vegas for $59 a night. It was crowded with obese people in sweat suits and seniors driving motorized wheelchairs, yanking one-armed bandits in a masturbatory frenzy, and smelling of whiskey, cigarettes, and popcorn. Ten minutes away, at Nellis Air Force Base, I found a cluster of camouflaged trailers.”


Such nice distinctions between worlds. Oh, the nasties in their masturbatory frenzy. Oh, how they just don’t understand the price of Freedom! And oh, on the other side, the hardbody military, the world’s greatest fuckers – so beyond the primitives in 120 Days of Sodom. Sade’s fuckers, with their elaborate sodomies choreographed in cathedrals and vaults, their pitiful excesses of sperm and candle wax, can’t compete with the fucking of cyborg war, where the torture and death can be vicariously enjoyed by fuckers at home – such as Kaplan – dressed, no doubt, in camo. Although the logic remains the same – get to the to the Sadean vanishing point – that moment when pleasure and pain are indistinguishable. So, put on your helmets and enjoy the seared human sweetmeats with the drones!

“The Predator is the most famous of several dozen UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) that the military operates. It was first deployed in the 1990s in the Balkans, but made its bones in November 2002 in Yemen, when a Predator fired ACM-114P armor-piercing Hellfire missile incinerated a car in which an al-Qaeda leader, Abu Ali al-Harithi, was traveling with five others through the desert. And a Predator tracked Iraqi insurgency leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi during the last days of his life.”

al-Zarqawi is a perfect example of the antiquated Sadean fucker – orgasming over chopping off the heads of civilians. No wonder such as Kaplan despise him – oh, how much better to chuckle and grunt over incineration via OUR UAVS – such a great toy, much better than those masturbatory one armed bandits:

“I've been traveling to Iraq and Afghanistan for a quarter century, and yet some of the most illuminating moments I've experienced in those countries occurred here in Las Vegas. Each day began with a pilots' briefing, no different from those I've attended with Air Force pilots elsewhere,with a similar nervous edge to it. To wit, the brief began with "Motherhood"—that is, the idiot-proof basics. Then came an intelligence backgrounder, followed by a detailed weather report (for Iraq and Afghanistan, not Nevada), and concluding with the "Brevity," or code words for the day. The wall clocks focused on three time zones: Iraq's, Afghanistan's, and Zulu. (Zulu Time, or Z Time, is Greenwich Mean Time not adjusted to daylight saving time; the U.S. military uses
Z Time worldwide to prevent confusion.)

"Those who '"fly" Predators are indeed pilots, not operators, even though they don't have to leave the ground. They wear flight suits. Each is a veteran of an A-10, an F-15, a B-1 bomber, a B-52, or any of a host of other aerial platforms. The scrappy, lumbering, low-tech A-10 Warthog may give pilots the best preparation for flying the high-tech Pred. Both Warthogs and Predators are about hitting small targets and gunning down individuals in confined spaces. "If you want to pull the trigger and take out bad guys, you fly a Predator," one Pred pilot told me.”

Doing his hopped up clancyite routine is why Kaplan is just the cutest little reporter the neo-cons ever saw. Of course, the replacement of the face to face encounter by the kindergarten role play encounter of men wearing flight suits as costumes ‘taking out’ bad guys is exactly the reason the U.S. was gunning for military disaster from the moment they set foot in Iraq. Reporters who want to play the people who play the soldiers who kill the bad guys are the reason that, for so long, this obvious fact never emerged in any of the reporting on Iraq. Embedded reporters? Nope. The word is stooge. And Kaplan is the very model of a stooge. Really, he should get into the interactive war game market and compete with the Clance himself.

realism about iran

At a seminar in Toronto around the start of the war, historian Bernard Lewis, who was instrumental in advising Vice President Dick Cheney and other top U.S. officials on the Iraq invasion, said: "The Iranian regime won't last very long after an overthrow of the regime in Iraq, and many other regimes in the region will feel threatened." – WSJ, Ancient Rift: Rising Academic Sees Sectarian Split Inflaming Mideast --- Vali Nasr Says 'Shiite Revival' Is Met by Sunni Backlash; Resurgent Iran Leads Way --- Can Mullahs be Moderated? By Peter Waldman

LI advises our readers to check out the Wall Street Journal story on Vali Nasr, a Teheran born academic who advocates pretty much what LI has been advocating – getting real about Iran. That is, recognizing Iran, establishing relations with the nation, “managing” its entrance into Middle Eastern affairs rather than wishing it would go away, or targeting it.

“Mr. Nasr, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., calls this a historic "Shiite revival" and has gone further than most in identifying it as a central force in Mideast politics. He also frames a possible U.S. response: Engage Iran, especially over the issue of reducing violence in Iraq, and try to manage Tehran's rise as a regional power rather than isolating it.

"The issues are more than academic for the 46-year-old professor. He was raised in Tehran and hails from a prominent intellectual and literary family in Iran that traces its lineage to the prophet Muhammad. His father was once president of Iran's top science university and chief of staff for the shah's wife.

"In 1979, after the Iranian revolution, the Nasrs "started from zero" in the U.S., says Mr. Nasr. He received a doctorate in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writing his thesis on the political dimensions of radical Islam, while his father, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, became a renowned professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University.”

The WSJ editorial board is in the death grip of the neo-con pod people – but the newspaper survives by exploiting a much bigger niche in the general business community, which could care less about the cancerous Weltanschauung of Cheney. When the business community turned against the Vietnam war, the political establishment began its long, bloody disengagement from Vietnam.

I’ve been wondering when Iraq would tip. As the Bush policy seems to call for endless and ever more pointless wars, creating a New Middle East of universal hatred for America, the business community, sated by the tax cuts that poured money into the upper wealth brackets, is beginning to come out of its stupor and object.

“For the U.S., the Sunni-Shiite divide is fraught with challenges --and opportunities. By creating in Iraq the first Shiite-led state in the Arab world since the rise of Islam (Iran is mostly ethnic Persian), the U.S. ignited aspirations among some 150 million Shiites in the region, Mr. Nasr says. Many live under Sunni rule, such as in Saudi Arabia, where they have long been persecuted. Yet U.S. foreign policy still operates under the "old paradigm" of Sunni dominance, he contends.

"Take the current crisis in Lebanon. The U.S. has long relied on its traditional Sunni Arab allies -- Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia -- to keep the Arab-Israeli conflict in check. But now the Sunni axis is failing, says Mr. Nasr, because these nations are incapable of containing a resurgent Iran and its radical clients on the front lines against Israel -- Hezbollah and the Palestinian group Hamas.

"To adapt, the U.S. must "recalibrate" its diplomacy and re-establish contacts with Iran, he says. That would require disavowing any interest in "regime change" in Tehran -- an unrealistic aim anyway, Mr. Nasr argues -- but would offer the best hope of moderating Iran's growing influence.

"The Iranian genie isn't going back in the bottle," he says. "If we deny these changes have happened -- that Cairo, Amman and Riyadh have lost control of the region -- and we continue to exclude Iran, we'd better be prepared to spend a lot of money on troops in the region for a long time," Mr. Nasr says.”

You can tell that Nasr’s argument is being taken seriously when it is dressed in ‘opportunity’ talk, which is that nexus where bad taste metamorphizes into a war crime. However, given the slim pickings in D.C., where the moronic inferno has been whirling for five years without stint, I am going to overlook the gastliness of the vocabulary and find Nasr’s prominence a good sign. He's actually running a line that Hoagland, one of the WAPO superhawks and Chalabi's spokesperson in America, ran in 2003. It is a sign of how bad things are that this is now a progressive view.