cosmo-polemos

“Few polls were take to measure the air force’s success in public relations, but by June 1945 a Fortune survey indicated progress. As Fortune put it, “The people are sold on peace through air power.” On more subjective grounds, the air force also had reason for optimism as 1945 appraoched because doubts ere arising within the military establishment about public support for a large peacetime ground army. Arnold believed that Americans would support in its place a powerful air foce making few demands on manpower and responding to public anxieties, nourished by the air force itself, about defending against future Pearl Harbors.” The Rise of American Air Power: the creation of Armageddon by Michael Sherry

He sew his eyes shut
Because he is afraid to see – Nine Inch Nails

The conclusion I draw from my last post is nothing so facile as that all wars are one war. That is an analytic dead end. But I’d suggest that the set of wars that have taken place between 1939 and, say, the beginning of the Heat Death era, around 2040, form a distinct, unified historical epoch. And that war, here, has to include events that are usually segregated from it – the mass transformation of infrastructure that appeared all across the globe (dams, irrigation systems, road systems, the dispersal of urban areas into subways), the great scientific and technological research systems, the psychology-education complex – etc.

We are citizens of the wars. War men and women, war races. Human product among low use populations – this should be the caption for much of our history at the moment. We have devised elaborate plots behind which the parts actually fit together, the hidden patterns come alive, and we love them. We are entertained infinitely by our own destruction. And such has been the creation of cosmo-polemos.

This is why I find articles like Ralph’s fascinating. It begins with those events that have been rather forgotten relative to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“On the night of 9 March 1945, 325 B-29 ‘Superfortresses’, based in the Marianas and under the command of Major General Curtis E. LeMay, dropped 1665 tons of bombs, all of which were incendiaries,on the heart of residential Tokyo. The bombs generated a ferocious, unstoppable firestorm that consumed 15.8 square miles of the city and killed a roughly estimated 100 000 of its citizens. The targeted residential zone bordered a large manufacturing sector of the city: consequently 22 numbered industrial targets were destroyed and struck from the target list the next morning. By official Japanese estimates, 267 171 buildings were levelled (one-quarter of the city), and 1 008 005 Japanese were left homeless.2 Viewed as a massive success by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), the Tokyo raid kicked off a firebombing campaign. that laid waste to more than 60 of Japan’s largest cities and killed hundreds of thousands of its civilians by the end of the Second World War.”

Historians of the war confront a puzzle, here. U.S. air policy, laid out in the 1930s, was very clear about what the Brits called ‘area bombing.’ Roosevelt, in a speech in 1939, said:

“The ruthless bombing from the air of civilians in unfortified centers of population during the course of the hostilities which have raged in various quarters of the earth during the past few years, which has resulted in the maiming and in the death of thousands of defenseless men, women and children has sickened the hearts of every civilized man and woman, and has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity.”

Roosevelt wasn’t just engaging in rhetoric. The U.S. air power policy developed in the thirties specifically aimed at destroying the industrial fabric of enemy power. In the air war over Germany, the U.S. tried, at least, to adhere to this policy. When, in 1945, Dresden was destroyed by an Anglo-American fleet of bombers, a British officer, C.M. Grierson, suggested at a press conference that the purpose was to kill civilians, it disturbed the American command. In fact, the destruction of German cities, Operation Clarion, was discussed and disputed with these issues in mind:

“Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, former commander of the 8th Air Force in Germany, wrote to Lieutenant General Carl Spaatz (who was then co-ordinating Clarion) and asked him not to carry out the attack: ‘We should never allow the history of this war to convict us of throwing the strategic bomber against the man in the street.’12 Spaatz went ahead with Clarion anyway, but remained, according to one general’s diary, ‘determined that the American Air Forces will not end this war with a reputation for indiscriminate bombing’.”

Given this dialogue in the European theater, why was the Pacific theater so different?

Ralph’s structured answer gives weight to the logical development, out of precision bombing, of a terror bombing policy. But in practice, terror bombing was enacted due to the interplay between Curtis LeMay and General ‘Hap’ Hapgood Arnold. It was not planned, but emerged as an improvisation from a context in which it was dialectically prefigured -- by which I simply mean that the boundaries that defined the industrial attrition policy were always subject to change, and were never anchored to any logical constant. Both LeMay and Hapgood knew that they were facing a potential crisis: peace. Hapgood was a strong advocate of strengthening the Air Force and keeping it independent from the army. Independence meant resources.

The Committee assessing the air war over Japan, as Ralph describes it, went from advocating the destruction of industry according to the thirties strategic framework to consideration of the “intriguing idea,” as one General put it, of promoting “complete chaos” in six cities by killing “584,000 people.” But this was put in terms of its economic effects – for killing people as people did make one feel a bit of a heel. Rather, the 584,000 would be workers. Human product. Subtract workers and you effect the economy.

These thoughts, then, were in the Air Force mind. And there were threats closing in:

“The pressure to do ever more for the purpose of air force independence manifested itself in many ways. First to feel it were those within the B-29 programme. As mentioned above, Arnold had risked his career for this US$3 billion endeavour. It was the B-29 that could grant air force independence, because it was the weapon that could deliver fire-power in ways the army and navy could not. But Arnold constantly risked losing his B-29s to the insatiable needs of the army and navy. In early 1944 Arnold specifically designed the 20th Air Force (which would contain the XX and XXI Bomber Commands) to be as far removed from other branches of the military as possible. In a novel fashion, the 20th reported not to the army, but directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Arnold, a member of the JCS, was both commanding general of the 20th as well as executive agent for the JCS in the Pentagon.36 The JCS created the broad strategic framework, but within that framework Arnold
could do essentially whatever he wanted.37

“Command freedom did not guarantee wartime independence, however. Arnold was very candid in his memoirs about his fears that the Air Forces would be subordinated in the Pacific theatre. He recalled that Admiral King, the highly effective commander of the US Fleet, said, ‘Trouble with all this rearrangement and reorganization is your Air Force, Hap. If you would take your Air Force and bring it over to the Navy, then the Navy … would be the largest and most powerful force in the world.’38 Arnold certainly had no desire to follow this plan, and was instead determined to keep his 20th as far from naval operations as possible. But even if Arnold maintained an independent air arm, he still would have to prove he was achieving results with his B-29s in order to keep them.”

Keeping what you got – this is the essence of great drama. Arnold, like the Golem in Lord of the Rings, wanted his precious. And the navy was threatening to take his precious away. And what stood between him and his loss? A buncha Japanese civilians.

These rivalries have become a thing of comedy. However, the 584,000 Japanese, in addition to contributing to the war effort, were notoriously humorless, which meant that, as they were dying, they wouldn’t be dying of laughter. Which is funny, since laughter is the best medicine.

So, 1944 was coming to a close, and the precision bombing campaign, which Arnold had entrusted to the man who developed the precision bombing strategy, Hansell, had been pounding Japan. Precision bombing depended on the relatively primitive guiding technology the air force had, and on weather. The publicity was bad about the bombing of the steel factories that were targeted according to the earlier protocol, since they stubbornly withstood bombardment. In the meantime, over in China, Curtis LeMay was doing wonders. Somehow, his B-29s were getting to their targets in Japan at twice the rate of Hansell’s.

So it all started to click. If precision bombing depended on such complexities, perhaps one could considering widening the cone of destruction. Hansell was asked to make a whole incendiary strike on Nagoya. The purpose was specifically to kill civilians. Hansell answered back:

“I have with great difficulty implanted the principle that our mission is the destruction of selected primary targets by sustained and determined attacks using precision bombing methods … We are just
beginning to get results … I am concerned that a change to area bombing of the cities will undermine the progress we have made.”

Well, this resistance was no good.

“Arnold did not want to hear about any more problems from Hansell; he was impatient, and wanted reports of big results. As he said himself, the ‘best evidence of how you are getting along is the pictures of the destruction that you have accomplished against your primary targets’.53 Hansell was not providing these pictures. Shortly after Hansell’s interview, Arnold made the decision to relieve Hansell and replace him with LeMay. Norstad delivered the news to Hansell in person on 6 January. Again, Hansell was shocked, but now also extremely disappointed. General Arnold wrote to him soon after, explaining his reasoning for the change in command: ‘The job from now on is no longer planning and pioneering. It has become one of operating. LeMay … should be our best qualified operator.’54 This small statement is most revealing. Arnold did not want a planner in charge of his B-29s: he needed someone who would just get things done; again, he wanted results – and fast.”

One often reads about how the Truman White House had its eye on the Soviets during the last phase of the war against Japan. Or that the main point, vide Paul Fussell, was to save American lives. But we should also remember how many eyes were turned to Boeing. And how easily we can go from precision bombing to ‘area bombing.’ In fact, it seems to be the history of the use of American air power after WWII.

war culture in the heraclitean framework

After it became apparent that the Israeli strategy of using air power to make Lebanon Hezbollah-rein had failed, a curious paen to air power appeared in the Washington Post, filed by their military analyst, William Arkin.

“If you've been reading my commentary on the Israel-Hezbollah war here, you know that I am a fan of airpower. To me, modern precision airpower is the epitome of discriminate warfare, which is to say, that it uniquely allows armed forces to discriminate between combatants and civilians. That is, short of two armies consenting to deploy to an unpopulated battlefield -- sort of like what Saddam Hussein did in 1990 after his invasion of Kuwait when he dug his army into the Kuwaiti and Iraqi desert.

I've heard the howls of protest -- Dresden, Tokyo, London -- before, but again, to reiterate, modern airpower, with its new precision weapons, allows an unprecedented degree of discrimination.”

There are many interests that converge in the War Culture, and one of the most difficult tasks for the analyst is to separate them and sort them by their various ‘degrees of discrimination’. And if this task wasn’t difficult in itself, there is a philosophical difficulty that is rarely mentioned, at least by historians, foreign policy think tankers, and political philosophers. The difficulty goes back to the standard assumption that war is derivative from the State. First we have the state, then we have the wars between states, just as first we have teams, then we have baseball. However, that assumption is rarely argued for. In LI’s opinion, you could just as well have war first – ontologically and historically, Hobbes’ war of all against all – and then the state. In this view, states derive from war, rather than the other way around. Just as Mallarme thought that everything strives to be written in a book, every war, striving to be part of the one war, leaves in its path fragments of itself. Those fragments are states. But war is the shaper. The more powerful the state, the more the culture becomes a war culture.

The philosophical warrant for this goes back to Heraclitus. The Heraclitean view is expressed in a cluster of fragments recently re-translated, along with the whole corpus of Heraclitus’ work, by Charles Kahn in The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. Fragment 51 reads: “Homer was wrong when he said “Would that Conflict might vanish from among gods and men!” For there would be no attunement without high and low notes nor any animals without male and female, both of which are opposites.” 52 reads: “One must realize that war is shared, and Conflict is Justice, and that all things come to pass (are are ordained?) in accordance with conflict. And 53, the most famous of the fragments on war, reads: War is the father of all and king of all; and some he has shown as gods, others men; some he has made slaves, others free.”

Kahn’s commentary on these fragments is interesting. According to him, the criticism of Homer is that he, like most men, cannot see how, behind appearance, there is a hidden fitting together of all things. According to Kahn, in these fragments, Heraclitus formulates four responses to the question: ‘What is it that most men do not comprhend.’

1. “One must realize that War is common (xynos, shared)’. “…in the place of the familiar thought that the fortunes of war are shared by both sides and that the victor today may be vanquished tomorrow, Heraclitus takes xynos, ‘common’ in his own sense of ‘universal’, ‘all-pervading’, ‘unifying’, and thus gives the words of the poets a deeper meaning they themselves did not comprehend. The symmetrical confrontation of the two sides in battle now becomes a figura for the shifting but reciprocal balance between opposites in human life in the natural world…”

2. “Conflict is Justice”. “Vlastos is clrearly right to insist that Heraclitus’ conception of cosmic justice goes beyond that of Anaximander [one of whose phrases is echoed in Heraclitus’ phrase], since he construes dike not merely as compensation for crime or excess but as a total pattern that includes both punishment and crime itself as necessary ingredients of the world order.

3. ‘All things come to pass in accordance with conflict.’ Kahn points out that this echoes the notion of all things coming to pass in logos. Come to pass can also be understood as birth – which then gives us the strange reversal of the 53rd fragment, since birth here comes from the father, not the mother.

4. “And all things are ordained by conflict.” Kahn thinks that the word for ordained is corrupt. But if it is ordained, he sees the ordination as that proper to an oracle.

If one has the heraclitean framework in mind, the idea that war solely serves the interests of states gives place to the question of what interests are being served by war. And this is a useful thing, insofar as states are not homogenous units. Although we are familiar with trans-national corporations, we still seem to grope when trying to understand transnational interests, which are usually attributed to the hegemonic ambition of a given state. And then, too, there is the definition of wars. We like to count them as distinct things, having beginnings and endings. However, we all know that wars might well have continuities disguised by the ceasefires or intervals of peace that supposedly define them into separate wars, and sometimes we acknowledge this by talking of world wars, or of the sixty or hundred years war.

I hope this isn’t a too utterly philosophical introduction to the topic I am going to discuss in the next post – William W. Ralph’s essay, in the latest issue of War in History, entitled: “Improvised Destruction: Arnold, LeMay, and the Firebombing of Japan,” which argues a thesis that might well explain the motivation for Arkin’s column – or at least one abiding, institutional motivation within the American War Culture.

rwg writing services

Alas, the editing jobs aren't pouring in this summer. We did get a nice note from a client who just graduated from {blank} university, the other day, thanking us for our work on his papers.

So, LI readers, drivebys, friends, Romans and Countrymen - help us out. Tell people about our writing service. The links are on the sidebar (or, for mysterious reasons, on the bottom of the page for those of you looking at this via IE 6).

Remember: a full blogger is a happy blogger.

following this summer's murder story

There are some murders we follow. There are some murders we don’t.

During the infinite newscycle of OJ-iana, the only thing that really impressed us was the slo mo car chase. Oh, and OJ’s houseguest, Kato Kaelin. Actually, Kato impressed us a lot – what a job! My own parents evidently abused me: they never once mentioned the career opportunity of being a houseguest to the stars. If LI had known about this as a tyke, forget the dreams of wealth, or the teenage idea of writing and forging, in the smithy of my soul, the consciousness of my race – fuck that. I would have cultivated better hair, better connections, and practiced saying things in the mirror like, “My Cher,” (or Billy Bob or Telly or Chevy or whoever), this is a big place you got here! Roomy is no word for it. You must get lonely here sometimes, eh?” But no, as aforesaid, my folks abused me by hiding the facts, which I can only excuse them for partly by the fact that we were hicks living in Dekalb County, Georgia, where houseguests were usually your uncle or aunt.

But the murder of Jon Benet was much more interesting, in that sick way that certain murders unzip the underlife. Unfortunately, that is only probed by the tabloids. That is, by reporters and celebrity tv persona who have a fair share of the necessary voyeurism to gawp at the doings behind the drapes but no real curiosity about the meat and beat of people – about their pulsing existences. This is why tabloids are frustrating – they strip the two dimensional of its clothing, but its like the Rape of the Sabine Women being reenacted with mannequins. There is no there there not because there is no there there, but because the there has been condensed, evaporated, and replaced with there-substitute.. Plus, of course, the compass points are all the assumption that the only perspective is that of straight morality, and zero question about why, if the straight morality is such a good thing, we find it so utterly, utterly boring, and why it has created a system that is, in so many ways, detestable. Now, LI is not necessarily against boredom – as so many of our long posts attest! – but we do think that it is motivated, and hence subject to the endless novelist’s project.

Since we are neck deep, at the moment, in Mailer’s Executioner’s Song, we are just in the right spirit for the news about Jon Benet’s supposed killer. I should emphasize supposed, since a confession does not equal case solved. The confession is, to say the least, confused, and the pre-made articles pouring out from straight news outlets about how the tabloids injured the poor parents and distorted the facts – amazing how the press, resistant to any criticism about its three year obeisance to Bush and the rush to war, is always willing to criticize the tabloids for the rush to judgment on any given topic - aren’t convincing to me, yet. We will see.

the story of the little lie that wants to be a big one

For the past month the United States has worked urgently to end the violence that Hezbollah and its sponsors have imposed on the people of Lebanon and Israel. –Condolezza Rice,

LI does have to wonder how long this joke can last. This is not, contrary to those who immediately go for the Nazi reference, a big lie. This is a little lie. It is little minded. There is little evidence that anybody believes it, except in D.C. circles and the White House. It is not the slogan of a triumphant imperialist movement, but the delusive cry of a ruined, debt ridden, arthritic giant, in slo mo fall as all the Jacks cut down all the beanstalks. So pathetic that it really is appropriate for the WAPO op ed page, that funhouse of thinktanker testosterone, the bipartisan CW that goes all the way from the Heritage Foundation to the New Republic, and produces the undead language of Krauthammer, Fred Hiatt and crewe, a stange speak that is more like a drug than a language, a bit of the old ultraviol swallowed by meritocratic peabrains, enlivened of course with that favorite magic word ‘terrorism.” But something is wrong here. Condi’s little lie lacks, somehow, the robust cynicism of the White House’s past real big lies – the wonderful, silky ones of 2002, when the White House was riding high on its failure to respond to the small threat posed by Al Qaeda in August 2001, its failure to defeat Al Qaeda in December- February, 2001-2002 (the start of the famous meme, Al Qaeda’s on the run, which has become the official way to describe the growth of Al Qaeda – related political parties as they extend their power in the nuclear armed state of Pakistan – always on the run, that OBL, and makin’ videos on the way. Why, he’s a cybernetic Bonnie Parker!) and its failure to sufficiently resource a brief war in Afghanistan, thus extending the stay of troops there ad infinitum – or until, as seems more and more likely, they are handed their asses.

O les beaux jours! So much for democratic intervention, eh? That sweetsounding name for mass murder in the name of superpower aggression – it passed like a fad. Like hula hoops, except with collateral casualties.

Rice’s delusions about what the UN resolution actually says are par for the course. But how about the U.S. making an effort to buy back a little love? Surely Cheney, et al., have enough experience with buying sex that they know – you get what you pay for. But no – cheap Johns to the very end, this is what the U.S is proposing:

“For our part, the United States is helping to lead relief efforts for the people of Lebanon, and we will fully support them as they rebuild their country. As a first step, we have increased our immediate humanitarian assistance to $50 million.”

That and a nickel will buy you ten yards of road repair from Brown and Root. Which may be the problem, in all honesty. There might not be enough profit in humanitarian assistance to Lebanon – no non-competitive contracts for Bush’s own al qaeda of war industry honchos – to make it worth gouging the U.S. treasury.

And so much for episode one, in which Uncle Sam tries to start a war with Iran using its little buddy Israel to light the fire, and its little buddy gets its fingers burnt. Stay tuned for episode two, in which we shift back to the war in Iraq, or, as the AEI site helpfully reminds us, THE WAR THAT WE HAVE ALREADY WON! for the ever stupider ways this administration spirals out of control. We'll be here -- mocking.

liberalism and fear

Lately LI has been reading Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. So we were pleased to see an article in the Journal of Social Philosophy by Frank Cunningham, a professor at the University of Toronto, that dealt with a central Polanyi-ish theme: does a market economy necessarily generate a market culture? To clarify the problem, Cunningham quotes a pertinent passage in one of Polanyi’s essays:

“This institutional gadget, which became the dominant force in the economy—now justly described as a market economy—then gave rise to yet another, even more extreme development, namely as a whole society embedded in the mechanism of its own economy—a market society.”


This may seem like an esoteric theme, but, in actuality, it is the central problem of our time. If the one always leads to the other, not only is liberalism sunk, but the ability to meet the enormous environmental challenges that are even now building in the oceans and the heavens is doomed to failure. That will then doom to failure whole swathes of the planet. For instance, the melting of the glacial system in the Himalayas will essential drain the source of water for around 400 to 500 million Indians and Chinese. Although the libertarians, Randians, Bushians and other fine purveyors of superstition probably don’t know this, without water, people die. The Randians, et al., would probably answer that at least they would die in freedom, able to freely exchange their whole life savings for a couple of cups of water before expiring. And think of the enormous flexibility this would put into the labor market!

But these people are crazy. Unfortunately, at the moment they govern the planet, write the newspapers, and release the bombs. To use the word in the proper sense, they are the terrorist class.

Terror, or fear, is, according to Cunningham, one of the great connectors between a market economy and a market society. Cunningham makes the case that what is commonly viewed as greed – that insatiable avarice for more money driving the ideal type capitalist (he quotes John D. Rockefeller’s response to the question, how much do you need, by saying – “just a little more”) is actually driven by the fear that is promoted by one of the mechanisms of the market – its efficiency. That efficiency depends, in good old capitalist fashion, on removing ‘unnatural’ restraints to the pricing of commodities.

“Still, market economies are characterized by expansion of the market into all domains. Part of the explanation for this is greed for profits, but I suggest that at a more primordial level expansion derives from insecurity or, more precisely, fear.
Competition among producers and retailers promotes efficiency by prompting them to make and distribute things that people want and by keeping the costs of those things down—this is the key premise of free market economic theory. But at the same time, competitors must fear each other. Employment of wage labor with the omnipresent threat of dismissal keeps wages down, thus reducing this cost of production or distribution. Privatization of publicly needed goods provides captive markets. From the side of working people and consumers, market economies are also fearful places. Wage laborers must fear dismissal. Market transactions may signal consumer preferences, but they do not guarantee that goods produced in response to those preferences will be affordable.”


Cunningham’s point is that fear is what turns the relation of the economic and social around – in Polanyi’s terms, what makes it the case that, in capitalism, the economy is no longer embedded in social relationships, but social relationships are embedded in the economy.

Cunningham gracefully moves from his analysis of the key role played by fear to the kind of social philosophy I recognize as liberal:

"The upshot of the foregoing is that a market economy can be prevented from engendering a market society by voiding it of fear. There is no mystery about the sorts of measures to accomplish this. They include a guaranteed annual income,full employment through job creation and training, adequate health and old age care programs, and the like. At the end of the paper I shall return to some questions about what structural arrangements (welfare capitalist or a more socialist alternative) are necessary to inhibit the nurturing of a possessive individualist culture, while maintaining room for an economic market. Here I pursue the hypothesis’ cultural implications.

Removing fear from the market would inhibit selfishness at least to the extent that people could afford to be moral." [my italics]

The last sentence is excellent, since this is the heart of liberalism – allowing people to afford morality. And the attack on fear connects up to the founding political father of liberalism in the U.S. – Roosevelt – who explicitly connected liberal programs with fear.

Yet this interpretation also hints at the reason that liberal society decays. Once one removes fear, after all, it is like past pain – the memory of it is not equivalent to the thing itself. Liberal society can lead to two things – the kind of free riding that re-introduces a conservative politics; and a search for invulnerability that feeds into a perpetual war culture.

About which LI will have more to say later.

professor challenger, the stupidity seismograph, and the WAPO editorial board

In the world of Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger, there is always another fantastic machine being tinkered with in one of the world’s laboratories. Unfortunately, Professor Challenger was undone by one of those machines, Nemor’s diabolical disintegration machine, that makes objects vanish. Before Challenger vanished himself, however, he said something prophetic: 'You cannot explain one incredible thing by quoting another incredible thing,' said Challenger.

The Challenger principle is, of course, denied every day by the current administration of cons and imbeciles and their minions in the press. But Challenger himself might be inclined to give LI some slack on our latest invention. It is called the stupidity seismograph. The principle is quite simple. Just feed the editorials of the Washington Post to the machine, and you can actually map waves of stupidity as they travel from one pole of conventional wisdom to the other. I’m not sure how to patent it, however.

Today’s editorial threatened to shake the machine to bits, so powerful were these particular waves of stupidity. The headline – hold onto your hats – is: “A Month of War:
And now, at least a chance for peace.”

This is, perhaps, not as self evident as a 7 on the stupid scale to the laymen, but to those of us who have been using the WAPO editorial page (not only for our scientific studies, but as a highly satisfying way to wipe our asses), the blood in their mouth whoops of the editorial board, which dines on roasted cadaver of Lebanese child, with a little cream sauce on the side (a perfect meal for you and your date at Signature, the restaurant to go to in D.C.!) have of course been all about delaying peace until the land of Lebanon, and its people, were all in pieces. Imagine the moral imagination of a serial killer, wrapped up in the dulcet tones of Charles Krauthammer.

Nemor baited Challenger in that last, dramatic episode of the Professor’s life. He pointed to his machine and said, with a villainous voice: 'This is the model which is destined to be famous, as altering the balance of power among the nations.’ The balance of power among nations does have a way of generating villainy, especially when it is all about preserving an essential imbalance among nations, in which some are heros, bombing calmly and humanely in the most expensive machinery, while some are evildoers that out evil do Fu Manchu, lurking around in their villages and not even painting targets on their roofs or clothes. Disgusting subhuman… er, subhumans! Or to put it in the stupid tones of the WAPO crowd (this is a 7.5 – watch out!):

“Now the United Nations has called for the Lebanese armed forces to deploy to southern Lebanon and -- because they are woefully weak -- for an international force of 15,000 troops to join them. The resolution doesn't explicitly authorize the force to disarm Hezbollah but it does authorize it "to take all necessary action" to ensure that southern Lebanon can no longer be used as a base for attacks against Israel. Importantly, U.S. diplomats resisted demands that Israel withdraw immediately, which would have created a vacuum that Hezbollah would quickly have filled. Instead, Israel will withdraw as the Lebanese and international forces arrive, which could take several weeks.”

Ah, the security, the peace, as of the grave, and the moral benefit all the way around, of a force that “fills in” those untidy vacuums. That exist, alas, outside of one’s own boundary lines – although, as we know from the unenforced and apparently unnoticed 40 years of U.N. resolutions, those boundary lines on the west bank are a tricky thing! It appears that Israelis grow, actually, on the West Bank much like mushrooms – who knew? Which is why Israel has a justified claim there, and - vide the delicious WAPO op ed page - to Damascas, and actually to Baghdad, and beyond. Israel should, as we know, be exactly the same size as the Middle East. It would be, well, an opportunity, n’est-ce pas? Birth pangs of the new Middle East, where opportunity runs through the streets like white phosphorus.

Now the stupidity seismograph had to be turned off at the next paragraph. It started throwing itself around the lab, and issuing a most unseismograph like horse laugh. It did a jig, thumbed its nose, and finally made a long and disgusting fart sound. When we finally de-activated the gizmo, we were curious to see what part of the WAPO editorial caused that behavior. These were the words (warning: may cause heartburn, madness, and diarrhea – or an uncontrollable urge to pie pundits):

“Secretary General Kofi Annan deplored how long it took for the Security Council to act, but it may be that the damage inflicted on Hezbollah during a month of fighting is what led it to accept the terms of the resolution.”

You can’t get stupider than that, surely. However, we have not yet fed the seismograph the editorials praising the progress we are making in the Iraq war. We are waiting for funding to get a new, special alloy, a combination of iron, bullshit, and flipundium. Anyone who wants to fund or work on this project is urged to contact LI’s lab.