In other news from the land of drifty drift – Bush just asked for 46 billion more dollars to throw into the sinkhole of his vanity war. To put that in perspective, that is 10 billion more than the s-chip bill. It is, of course, a characteristic of the authoritarian right to pursue a policy of impudence – to continually shock the temporizors, that vast media machinery which spends its whole existence trying to take plutocratic inputs of the most rancid injustice, the most feeble minded racism, and the most ostentatious theft, and process them out as bipartisan suggestions that are fun for the whole family. The settings in the machinery are moved by impudence, as the Bushies know well by now. So there is a beautiful convergence here between blocking child health care, spending more in various black boxes for puffing up GOP connected mercenaries, and ranting about World War III versus Iran – thus driving up petro profits. Harry Reid, of course, replied with a stentorian voice that they would, they would, well, they would want to know, if the White House would just be so kind as to tell them, really, what the money, uh, that they are voting for, uh, is going to be like used for if you have the time that is and it isn’t too much trouble.
And, on the impudent warmonger publicist front, Chris Hitchens told an audience of atheists in Chicago (sucker enough to give him some award, invite him to speak to them, and forced then to suffer through the exterminationist rant that has become his Coulter routine – he’s all for bombing Iran, now) that he is for Giuliani. This makes so much sense. Giuliani now has a sweep of the lunatic field, from Daniel Pipes to Hitchens. Horowitz is on the horizon.
I think the dems still don’t understand how much Giuliani appeals to the Southern peckerwood faction, and for one reason: they sense he hates blacks as much as they do. The liberals can’t understand, for instance, how somebody who supports gun control could get any support in Dixie. They should look to history. Dixie, during its glorious Jim Crow years, had gun control laws all over the place, specifically aimed at keeping African Americans from owning firearms. And the southern perception, which I think is correct, is that Giuliani was not supporting gun control laws so that cops could look for illegal guns on Staten Island, or the white West Side – no, it was simply a tool to arrest masses of black men in the Bronx, in Harlem, etc. The all American machine at work.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Monday, October 22, 2007
a schmuck visionary, a drifting nation
In a column in 2005 which, rather prematurely, announced the end of the Housing Bubble, Paul Krugman made an analysis of the form of the bubble – a form that puzzled me, at least.
It wasn’t until 2005 that the inner Austin boom got started. This boom consists of building large multistory structures downtown, which are divided into condos, and sold off, theoretically, from 400 up. I have watched this happen with an open mouth, I must admit, since we are in Texas. Texas is flat land’s flat land. To get a house for 185, here, you simply have to go south far enough. This is not a secret, known to a few real estate columbuses – South Austin looks like, well, Dekalb county in Georgia, or Mecklenburg County in North Carolina, or any number of Southern metro areas, where you can see, from a plane’s eye view, similar housing units for human units stretch out for miles and miles. These particular human units, if you keep watching, often, oddly enough, sortie out of their housing units early, early in the morning, get into their little car units, and drive far north, queuing behind each other to get off on exits that will lead them to their office units. You can watch and watch, but you won’t see a lot of car unit to business unit activity downtown. There are a lot of offices downtown, and there are, always, the state employees, but – as is the way with land and living in these here states – the new towers along fifth street are not being built so that state employees can walk to their office units.
But they are being, relentlessly, built. And sold. All of which has made me rub my eyes, for either I am simply so out of the loop I can’t recognize progress when it hits me on my big nose, or… these highly expensive condos are being sold to people who are going to be working either in the North or the South. They are trading the boring housing unit lifestyle for the highly expensive inner city life style, meaning – they have views of the capital, and can go to many a fine club or bar. All of which indicates that these units are being sold to a younger crowd. Which further indicates, to me, that Austin is imitating zone land without being in zone land. And that, if I’m not mistaken, is an illusion, which will surely tug at those unit when the first buyers try to sell them.
However, the city’s bet is that the illusion, having become reality to the extent that the towers do surely exist, will keep generating reality for the next generation of buyers. I don’t see it – I don’t see how an imaginary zone will compete, in the long run, with the South and the more expensive but still less expensive than downtown North. This is why, in real estate terms, I am not a visionary. Instead, I’m a schmuck visionary.
The odd thing is that, from an environmental point of view, it is surely a good idea to pile people one on top of the other even in Austin. The collapse of housing, as one can tell by a glance at a map showing where the subprime properties are being repossessed and housing starts have collapsed, show two of the most environmentally stressed areas in the country, California and Florida, in the red zone. That stress is starting to pop up in odd ways – the suburbs of Atlanta, where my brothers and sister live, are experiencing a Western style drought that astonishes me. Nobody, in the Dekalb county of my youth, would take Atlanta as a place that would ever, ever have serious water problems.
But Georgia’s problems pale before what is happening in the West. If you are a water freak, John Gertner’s The Future is drying up in the NYT Sunday Magazine should make you orgasmatic.
Water freaks are a rare and selective band. Joan Dideon is one. The underappreciated Charles Bowdon is one. The key book, the book water freaks turned to as others turn to the Gospel, Freud, or Zizek is Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert Reisner, after writing it, abjured some of the ‘extremist’ views in it – but I still stick up for all of them. Water and its diversion made the West, of course – that land of Ronnie Reagan individualism was created by the most State concentrated project ever attempted by the Federal Government. It is, in a sense, a perfect example of what Karl Polanyi said about laissez faire economics – the laissez faire economy was planned, increment by increment, by the state. Of course, the beneficiaries then made up a heroic myth, advanced by such mythographers as Hayek and Von Mises and, on a vulgar level, Ayn Rand that substituted various Hercules for the state – building corporation headquarters, in Rand’s version, rather than the Hoover Dam, as in reality.
But creating the West in order to launch an economy based, as Polanyi says, on a fictitious commodity – land – was a more hazardous procedure than any of the original architects knew. Gertner’s understated point is pretty simple: everything points to the fact that the West as we have known it up to the 1970s is a West with water that won’t be there anymore in a pretty brief period of time. So, while the demographers claim that, given current trends, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and California might have as much as one hundred million more inhabitants over the next fifty years, the water that those human units need to function won’t be there.
I like the fact that Gertner begins with a threat that has been oddly put in the let’s not think about this category by the global warming denialists:
What Chu says about the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada goes double for the snowpack in the Himalayas. There, we are talking about a water feed that irrigates a billion or so people, in China, India, Burma, Pakistan, etc. You will notice that China and India are producing enough pollution by themselves to significantly erode that water source. And that the industries that they are promoting are heavy water users. Hmm. Like the towers of 5th street, it seems that a bet is being made on the future that depends on an unlikely combination of lucky circumstances.
Bad bets, bad bets. In the bubble to bubble economy, everything is built on the proposition that even bad bets, for a time, are good ones. Now, when I cast a baleful glare on the towers of 5th street, doing my best to imitate Jonah’s view of Ninevah, I tend to emphasize the foolish and greedy nature of the bad bets in an architectural style that will age badly that I see rising before me. Yet, there is a part of me that is thrilled. The U.S. has taken bad bets and made them go good through sheer force of will before. Gertner’s article is a reportorial tour among water managers of Western cities, and you have to be in awe of these people. The hero of the piece is Peter Binney, the water manager of a town I admit to never having heard of - Aurora, Colorado. Well, Aurora is the 60th biggest city in the U.S., and it is watered through a series of Byzantine series of contracts, as per usual in the West. Binney came up with a rather brilliant idea which consists in getting the good householders of Aurora to drink their own pee. We all drink somebody’s pee, but Aurora is going to capture the wastewater it dumps in the South Platte and recycle it. Exciting, eh? Somehow, this pushes against the second law of thermodynamics, but it is a friendly tickle. Enough will evaporate and escape, and enough new water from precipitation and ground water will join the Aurora water supply so that the good folks won’t literally be locked in a closed system, one that has to be bad for the kidneys.
How odd it is, when you think about it, that the true and mindblowing changes that the U.S. is going to have to face have been systematically not faced, not even thought about, for the last six years. Drift, drift drift.
“When it comes to housing, however, the United States is really two countries, Flatland and the Zoned Zone.
In Flatland, which occupies the middle of the country, it's easy to build houses. When the demand for houses rises, Flatland metropolitan areas, which don't really have traditional downtowns, just sprawl some more. As a result, housing prices are basically determined by the cost of construction. In Flatland, a housing bubble can't even get started.
But in the Zoned Zone, which lies along the coasts, a combination of high population density and land-use restrictions - hence "zoned" - makes it hard to build new houses. So when people become willing to spend more on houses, say because of a fall in mortgage rates, some houses get built, but the prices of existing houses also go up. And if people think that prices will continue to rise, they become willing to spend even more, driving prices still higher, and so on. In other words, the Zoned Zone is prone to housing bubbles.
And Zoned Zone housing prices, which have risen much faster than the national average, clearly point to a bubble.”
It wasn’t until 2005 that the inner Austin boom got started. This boom consists of building large multistory structures downtown, which are divided into condos, and sold off, theoretically, from 400 up. I have watched this happen with an open mouth, I must admit, since we are in Texas. Texas is flat land’s flat land. To get a house for 185, here, you simply have to go south far enough. This is not a secret, known to a few real estate columbuses – South Austin looks like, well, Dekalb county in Georgia, or Mecklenburg County in North Carolina, or any number of Southern metro areas, where you can see, from a plane’s eye view, similar housing units for human units stretch out for miles and miles. These particular human units, if you keep watching, often, oddly enough, sortie out of their housing units early, early in the morning, get into their little car units, and drive far north, queuing behind each other to get off on exits that will lead them to their office units. You can watch and watch, but you won’t see a lot of car unit to business unit activity downtown. There are a lot of offices downtown, and there are, always, the state employees, but – as is the way with land and living in these here states – the new towers along fifth street are not being built so that state employees can walk to their office units.
But they are being, relentlessly, built. And sold. All of which has made me rub my eyes, for either I am simply so out of the loop I can’t recognize progress when it hits me on my big nose, or… these highly expensive condos are being sold to people who are going to be working either in the North or the South. They are trading the boring housing unit lifestyle for the highly expensive inner city life style, meaning – they have views of the capital, and can go to many a fine club or bar. All of which indicates that these units are being sold to a younger crowd. Which further indicates, to me, that Austin is imitating zone land without being in zone land. And that, if I’m not mistaken, is an illusion, which will surely tug at those unit when the first buyers try to sell them.
However, the city’s bet is that the illusion, having become reality to the extent that the towers do surely exist, will keep generating reality for the next generation of buyers. I don’t see it – I don’t see how an imaginary zone will compete, in the long run, with the South and the more expensive but still less expensive than downtown North. This is why, in real estate terms, I am not a visionary. Instead, I’m a schmuck visionary.
The odd thing is that, from an environmental point of view, it is surely a good idea to pile people one on top of the other even in Austin. The collapse of housing, as one can tell by a glance at a map showing where the subprime properties are being repossessed and housing starts have collapsed, show two of the most environmentally stressed areas in the country, California and Florida, in the red zone. That stress is starting to pop up in odd ways – the suburbs of Atlanta, where my brothers and sister live, are experiencing a Western style drought that astonishes me. Nobody, in the Dekalb county of my youth, would take Atlanta as a place that would ever, ever have serious water problems.
But Georgia’s problems pale before what is happening in the West. If you are a water freak, John Gertner’s The Future is drying up in the NYT Sunday Magazine should make you orgasmatic.
Water freaks are a rare and selective band. Joan Dideon is one. The underappreciated Charles Bowdon is one. The key book, the book water freaks turned to as others turn to the Gospel, Freud, or Zizek is Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert Reisner, after writing it, abjured some of the ‘extremist’ views in it – but I still stick up for all of them. Water and its diversion made the West, of course – that land of Ronnie Reagan individualism was created by the most State concentrated project ever attempted by the Federal Government. It is, in a sense, a perfect example of what Karl Polanyi said about laissez faire economics – the laissez faire economy was planned, increment by increment, by the state. Of course, the beneficiaries then made up a heroic myth, advanced by such mythographers as Hayek and Von Mises and, on a vulgar level, Ayn Rand that substituted various Hercules for the state – building corporation headquarters, in Rand’s version, rather than the Hoover Dam, as in reality.
But creating the West in order to launch an economy based, as Polanyi says, on a fictitious commodity – land – was a more hazardous procedure than any of the original architects knew. Gertner’s understated point is pretty simple: everything points to the fact that the West as we have known it up to the 1970s is a West with water that won’t be there anymore in a pretty brief period of time. So, while the demographers claim that, given current trends, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada and California might have as much as one hundred million more inhabitants over the next fifty years, the water that those human units need to function won’t be there.
I like the fact that Gertner begins with a threat that has been oddly put in the let’s not think about this category by the global warming denialists:
“Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.”
What Chu says about the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada goes double for the snowpack in the Himalayas. There, we are talking about a water feed that irrigates a billion or so people, in China, India, Burma, Pakistan, etc. You will notice that China and India are producing enough pollution by themselves to significantly erode that water source. And that the industries that they are promoting are heavy water users. Hmm. Like the towers of 5th street, it seems that a bet is being made on the future that depends on an unlikely combination of lucky circumstances.
“One day last June, an environmental engineer named Bradley Udall appeared before a Senate subcommittee that was seeking to understand how severe the country’s fresh-water problems might become in an era of global warming…
The importance of the water there was essentially what Udall came to talk about. A report by the National Academies on the Colorado River basin had recently concluded that the combination of limited Colorado River water supplies, increasing demands, warmer temperatures and the prospect of recurrent droughts “point to a future in which the potential for conflict” among those who use the river will be ever-present. Over the past few decades, the driest states in the United States have become some of our fastest-growing; meanwhile, an ongoing drought has brought the flow of the Colorado to its lowest levels since measurements at Lee’s Ferry began 85 years ago. At the Senate hearing, Udall stated that the Colorado River basin is already two degrees warmer than it was in 1976 and that it is foolhardy to imagine that the next 50 years will resemble the last 50. Lake Mead, the enormous reservoir in Arizona and Nevada that supplies nearly all the water for Las Vegas, is half-empty, and statistical models indicate that it will never be full again. “As we move forward,” Udall told his audience, “all water-management actions based on ‘normal’ as defined by the 20th century will increasingly turn out to be bad bets.”
Bad bets, bad bets. In the bubble to bubble economy, everything is built on the proposition that even bad bets, for a time, are good ones. Now, when I cast a baleful glare on the towers of 5th street, doing my best to imitate Jonah’s view of Ninevah, I tend to emphasize the foolish and greedy nature of the bad bets in an architectural style that will age badly that I see rising before me. Yet, there is a part of me that is thrilled. The U.S. has taken bad bets and made them go good through sheer force of will before. Gertner’s article is a reportorial tour among water managers of Western cities, and you have to be in awe of these people. The hero of the piece is Peter Binney, the water manager of a town I admit to never having heard of - Aurora, Colorado. Well, Aurora is the 60th biggest city in the U.S., and it is watered through a series of Byzantine series of contracts, as per usual in the West. Binney came up with a rather brilliant idea which consists in getting the good householders of Aurora to drink their own pee. We all drink somebody’s pee, but Aurora is going to capture the wastewater it dumps in the South Platte and recycle it. Exciting, eh? Somehow, this pushes against the second law of thermodynamics, but it is a friendly tickle. Enough will evaporate and escape, and enough new water from precipitation and ground water will join the Aurora water supply so that the good folks won’t literally be locked in a closed system, one that has to be bad for the kidneys.
How odd it is, when you think about it, that the true and mindblowing changes that the U.S. is going to have to face have been systematically not faced, not even thought about, for the last six years. Drift, drift drift.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
terrorism on tap - is this the grimy end, or just another rerun?
The best writer on power was not Machiavelli or Clausewitz, but that little old state insurance employee, Franz Kafka. Among the things he got magically right was the odd relationship to time in authoritarian regimes. In the Great Wall of China, the narrator notes: “Our land is so huge, that no fairy tale can adequately deal with its size.” And then he tells a story that transforms that physical hugeness into time, a sort of Zeno’s paradox of power:
“There is a legend which expresses this relationship well. The Emperor—so they say—has sent a message, directly from his death bed, to you alone, his pathetic subject, a tiny shadow which has taken refuge at the furthest distance from the imperial sun. He ordered the herald to kneel down beside his bed and whispered the message into his ear. He thought it was so important that he had the herald repeat it back to him. He confirmed the accuracy of the verbal message by nodding his head. And in front of the entire crowd of those who’ve come to witness his death—all the obstructing walls have been broken down and all the great ones of his empire are standing in a circle on the broad and high soaring flights of stairs—in front of all of them he dispatched his herald. The messenger started off at once, a powerful, tireless man. Sticking one arm out and then another, he makes his way through the crowd. If he runs into resistance, he points to his breast where there is a sign of the sun. So he moves forward easily, unlike anyone else. But the crowd is so huge; its dwelling places are infinite. If there were an open field, how he would fly along, and soon you would hear the marvelous pounding of his fist on your door. But instead of that, how futile are all his efforts. He is still forcing his way through the private rooms of the innermost palace. He will never he win his way through. And if he did manage that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to fight his way down the steps, and, if he managed to do that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to stride through the courtyards, and after the courtyards the second palace encircling the first, and, then again, stairs and courtyards, and then, once again, a palace, and so on for thousands of years. And if he finally did burst through the outermost door—but that can never, never happen—the royal capital city, the centre of the world, is still there in front of him, piled high and full of sediment. No one pushes his way through here, certainly not with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window and dream of that message when evening comes.
That’s exactly how our people look at the emperor, hopelessly and full of hope. They don’t know which emperor is on the throne, and there are even doubts about the name of the dynasty. In the schools they learn a great deal about things like the succession, but the common uncertainty in this respect is so great that even the best pupils are drawn into it. In our villages emperors long since dead are set on the throne, and one of them who still lives on only in songs had one of his announcements issued a little while ago, which the priest read out from the altar. Battles from our most ancient history are now fought for the first time, and with a glowing face your neighbour charges into your house with the report. The imperial wives, over indulged on silk cushions, alienated from noble customs by shrewd courtiers, swollen with thirst for power, driven by greed, excessive in their lust, are always committing their evil acts over again. The further back they are in time, the more terrible all their colours glow, and with a loud cry of grief our village eventually gets to learn how an empress thousands of years ago drank her husband’s blood in lengthy gulps.”
In the same way that the messenger has to battle through infinite heaps of bodies, and the message is delayed for centuries, and the battles of the past are received as news of the present in the distant villages – in that same way, the news is reported in the U.S. by a stooge press, subservient to the least whims of the dim and dangerous cartel that runs D.C., a mesh of petro-chemical and defense industry interests.
So it comes as no surprise to LI that the NYT has an article reporting on Pakistan full of details that should have been reported on, investigated, and headlined in 2003.
Here’s the first four grafs:
Which should give you a deep, refreshing draft of the idiocy that is the Bush foreign policy.
We have written about this often. So here’s a post, and a comment thread with LI’s friend, Paul Craddick, about Pakistan. This is from July 8,2005:
more froth for your buck
To sum it up: Tony Blair took a non-threat to the U.K., Saddam Hussein, implanted a continuing British presence in the Middle East, and for the return on the British investment got 50 some deaths, 700 some casualties, and the disruption of all of London.
Steven Coll, whose Ghost Wars is the best book I’ve read about the Reagan era financed adventure in creating the jihadi movement in Afghanistan, has a good article in the WP. Here are two grafs:
Terrorism on tap – it is evolving nicely in the direction of a constant structure. The war on terrorism, enacted with the incompetence at which the governing class is especially good, to create a continually mobilizable base of support; the occasional real explosions, to instantiate a strong psychological restraint on dissent; and the filtering of all discussion through an endlessly growing network of anti-terrorism experts, whose ideas, a junk shop of reactionary ideological clichés that would have bored a John Bircher meeting in the 60s, will be presented with suitable worshipfulness every time an incident happens. It is rather like interviewing the head of the Nuclear Energy lobby every time there is a Chernobyl.
The end of the Coll story is a nice example of this blindsided mindset:
A number of themes come out in this graf.
a. The self exculpation of the experts. Since the main fact, here, is that the U.S. spectacularly blew it both by encouraging Al Qaeda at the outset and renting out to a former Al Qaeda collaborator the job of handling Bin Laden, the main goal is to disguise this fact. Soul searching indeed. The job is just so complicated, it is just so intricate, it just requires so many brain cells, that we might need whole offices and bureaucracies to do it, and certainly many, many terrorism experts. It isn’t as simple as: removing the structure and removing the cause – taking down bin Laden and ceasing to occupy significant parts of the Middle East and blowing up Moslems every day on the tv in the name of … well, something. The job couldn’t have to do with exploiting the torture facilities of our ally states in the Middle East while loudly proclaiming our commitment to compassion. No, that is way too simple. The discontent of those young Moslems are because they hate us. They have hate in their hearts. We have compassion.
b. Then, of course, there is the absence, in that soul searching, of a pretty simple solution for the U.K. – withdraw from Iraq. Hey, it worked for Spain. And perhaps, oh just perhaps, a war that is opposed by the majority of the population shouldn’t be pursued by an isolated, arrogant elite – perhaps that was one of the reasons, in the eighteenth century, that the aristocratic/monarchic form of governance was either overthrown or reformed away.
c. Which is why we need a cover story. The “self-generation” one is nice. We know, to a t the kind of landscape that ‘self-generates’ terrorism, since we gleefully exploited that landscape in Afghanistan against the Soviets. And we’ve faithfully copied that landscape in Iraq, with the U.S. this time starring as the U.S.S.R., and with co-stars the Badr Brigade and Sciri imposing shari’a law in those areas ‘democratized’ by the British occupation, such as Basra, while our opponents, yesteryear’s freedom fighters, are showing what good pupils the CIA had back in the golden days.
Of course, LI’s criticism of U.S. policy in the Middle East shouldn’t overlook the good things we’ve done. For instance, we are cleverly bedeviling the ghost of Khomenei with irony. The man, from all accounts, did not take to irony. But what is his ghost to make of the fact that the U.S. has succeeded, where he failed, in spreading his revolution? This graf from the NYT is a juicy one, buried at the bottom of an Iraq story:
10:12 AM
Comments:
" ... renting out to a former Al Qaeda collaborator the job of handling Bin Laden"
Roger,
Do you mean Musharraf? I hope not, 'cause to not "delegate," to him, the task of managing affairs within Pakistan's own quasi-borders would have meant - what?! - going to war with Pakistan too.
"But there's no evidence whatsoever that Pakistan had a direct hand in 9.11," retorts the sideline sage.
Ahh, to be king for a day!
# posted by Paul craddick : 11:46 AM
There's evidence of an indirect assist, however, as well as the power sharing arrangement Musharraf has worked out with Islamic militants and militants in the ISI. I'm glad no one has seriously proposed doing something about that. The last time we tried to meddle in that region, we gave a big boost to what has become al Qaeda. I doubt even Donald Rumsfeld is silly enough to attempt something in a country with a semi-stable government and nukes.
# posted by Deleted : 1:27 PM
Hey y'all.
Well, to fully answer your comments about Pakistan would take another post, because it would be necessary to go into the pervasively corrupt relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan over the last thirty years, the convergence of a rigid anti-communist ideology and the interests of the junta and rent seeking Pakistan military in wiping out the communist-socialist space in Pakistan (as all over the middle east, squeezing the political choice into one between corporationist military rulers and bigots, which the U.S. blessed wholeheartedly), and the inability of the U.S. to clean out its channel of contacts with Pakistan in such a way that it avoided falling into the old client-capture routine: bet everything on a military despot, select our contacts solely from the intelligence and military sectors in the U.S. (who are most inclined to have erotic dreams about juntas according to an article by Strangelove and Strangelove entitled “Military emissions in the Nighttime” in Mercenary Psychotherapist Magazine) and watch as that capture leads to blindsiding by the coming coup, revolution, or what have you.
Obviously, to get back to a previous comment to you, Harry, the justification for a war isn’t the same as the necessity to wage one. That the deep Pakistani complicity in setting up and maintaining Al qaeda has not lead conservatives to call for a war (on the contrary, the call is to be aware that Pakistan has a large population and nuclear weapons – which has such a pacifying influence on hawks that I do wonder whether Iran’s getting them wouldn’t lead to peace in the Middle East) shows that it is possible to dicker with a country that has helped kill a lot of Americans.
# posted by roger : 5:58 PM
However, about the escape of Osama bin Laden, a., Pakistan did, according to newsweek back in May 13, 2002, allow U.S. forces across the border covertly. Here’s a graf about the operation from Scott Johnson and Rod Nordland:
“Pakistani officials hated to let the U.S. military operate on their soil. They ran out of excuses in late March, though, when American communications intercepts led to the capture of Abu Zubaydah, one of bin Laden's top lieutenants, at a safe house in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad, hundreds of miles from the Afghan border. Armed FBI and CIA agents accompanied elite Pakistani police on that raid and others that netted a total of 50 Qaeda fugitives. The arrests blindsided bin Laden's former backers at Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency--and mortified President Pervez Musharraf. After that, knowledgeable Pakistanis say, Musharraf decided he had no choice but to let the Americans in.”
But b., at that date, we already had other priorities. The Rumsfeld who exclaimed, like a Monty Python general, that he didn’t have enough places to bomb in Afghanistan, was getting his big birthday wish for a place with enough places to bomb. By December, 2002, when Bin Laden’s voice was heard again, Time magazine, which like most MSM is a lacky of the D.C. hawk crowd, wrote this:
“Bin Laden broke cover at a particularly awkward time for President Bush, raising doubts about the success of phase one of Bush's antiterrorism war just when he's pushing to launch phase two against Saddam Hussein. The news was rushed to him not long after experts at the CIA's bin Laden unit at Langley reviewed the audiocast on al-Jazeera, the network regularly used by al-Qaeda to deliver its messages. At around 8 p.m. that day, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice called Bush with the bad news while he was in the shower. Experts were almost certain they were hearing the voice of bin Laden for the first time since U.S. agents thought they picked up a radio message from him in Tora Bora almost a year ago. When the President walked into his staff meeting the next morning, a staff member says, "he was very intense." After all, this is a President who keeps a copy of the faces of key al-Qaeda leaders in his desk and crosses them out as they are killed or captured. “
That last image, by the way, is sorta precious. One thinks of the cretinous children in Far Side Cartoons.
In order to go after Iraq, Bush rented out the hunt for Bin Laden to Pakistan, plain and simple. There was no urgency in the hunt – glimpses to salivating newsmen, like the Newsweek story in May, 2002, were only planted to assure us that our leaders were action movie heroes, working for our interests. Instead of slackers, conspiring against our interest and for their own parochial obsessions.
# posted by roger : 5:58 PM
Roger,
Despite an awful lot of bluster, I don't believe you addressed the question squarely.
If, ex hypothesi, Bin Laden had fled to Pakistan - and surely you're not insinuating that a burgeoning "obsession" with Iraq somehow allowed him to give American troops the slip - then how would it have been possible for the US to track their quarry relentlessly without undertaking actions which would entail de facto belligerence towards Pakistan? For, angrily tolerating troops crossing the border on occasion is most emphatically not the same as acceding to the freedom of motion required for responsive and effective military campaigning.
# posted by Paul craddick : 7:56 PM
Angry toleration? Where do you get that from, Paul? I really think that it isn't bluster. I really think, without reference to the actual history of what happens, one simply treads water.
What we have is clear negligence on the part of the American governing class, subspecies Bush. There is no barrier between Pakistan and Afghanistan here that we have to tremble at -- as is the convenient myth about how we just couldn't go into Pakistan because it was too dangerous. What there is is lack of will. If Pakistan is angry, all the better, then, to operate with efficiency and on point, n'est-ce pas? Unless, really, you don't think it is important. Unless you think Bin Laden is a mere scarecrow, and the really important thing is establishing a footprint in the middle east by occupying Iraq. In which case, Tony Blair and George Bush would have been more truthful in saying, we are going to sacrifice a few American and English and Spanish civilians here and there to bombing attacks to pursue what we think is the really important goal.
Which, in practice, is what they have done.
Further honesty would have compelled them to drop the phrase war on terror and insert the phrase -- war for preserving and expanding our spheres of influence. Or, war to preserve the Carter policy in the Gulf.
I've pretty clearly presented an opportunity cost, I think. And I don't see that your argument addresses it. The argument that could address it would say, hey, the risk of continuing that operation was so very great that we had to abort it. Which isn't true. Although it may be true now, after two more years of malign neglect.
# posted by roger : 9:07 PM
PS. Paul. One question. When you say, "If, ex hypothesi, Bin Laden had fled to Pakistan..." So you don't think Bin Laden is in Pakistan?
# posted by roger : 9:21 PM
Roger,
Working from back to front ... I wouldn't claim to know where Bin Laden is. I assume that Pakistan is the most likely place, out of a host of possibilities. I say "ex hypothesi" to indicate that I will concede the point, for purposes of dialectic, in order to see what does or doesn't follow.
Agreed: I have not directly addressed the question of "opportunity cost" (if by that locution we mean the extent to which focus on Iraq detracted from the overall effort to nab Bin Laden et al) - that hasn't been the point on which I'm pressing you, and about which I'm seeking an answer. However, I alluded to it indirectly, in ridiculing the notion that a 'burgeoning "obsession" with Iraq somehow allowed him to give American troops the slip'. This ridicule is justified by looking at the timeline (which, perhaps, I'll examine in a future rejoinder).
As to the infelicitousness of the locution "war on terror," I would agree - although to an observer not out to score points, it's clear enough that it's a trope intended to convey a host of aims and exigencies; some of which it would be impolitic to state explicitly.
As to "sacrificing" citizens ... I do recall it being stated over and over again that, in confronting the exigencies entailed by 9.11, we are in for a long fight which will in all likelihood see further attacks in Western Capitals; in attempting to vanquish our enemies, they will fight back, hard - and their cachet is a gleeful disregard of the combatant/noncombatant distinction. Your point loses its punch if its rhetorical integument is peeled away.
Now, when you ask "Angry toleration? Where do you get that from, Paul?" I "get" it from paraphrasing Johnson/Nordland, whom you quote as stating, "Pakistani officials hated to let the U.S. military operate on their soil. They ran out of excuses in late March, though." The Pakistani officials allowed this to happen - hence they "tolerated" it; those same officials "hated" the incursions, hence they were "angry." There's nothing at all controversial about my restating, that I can see.
I take it that this is your answer to my question about belligerence vis-a-vis Pakistan: "If Pakistan is angry, all the better, then, to operate with efficiency and on point, n'est-ce pas?" Here is my paraphrase, and correct me if I'm wrong: if killing/capturing Bin Laden entails running roughshod over Pakistan's borders, disregarding their at least nominal claim to "sovereignty," then the Pakistanis be damned.
I'm actually sympathetic to that line, if that's really what you're prepared to say - would you extend it to other states in the region where Bin Laden might find a safe haven? (I'll be glad to be corrected, but my hunch is that you would look askance at any incursion into, say, Iran, if we had reason to think that Bin Laden had set up shop there).
However appealing the notion might be, I'm not convinced that putting it in to practice would be prudent, by any stretch - especially with respect to Pakistan. Clearly we've made another deal with a Devil, on the timeworn pretext that ambivalent cooperation from Musharraf - pushing things at times, holding back at others, getting cooperation at times, followed by duplicity - is better than undertaking actions/provocations which would probably issue in his overthrow, with him replaced by nuclear-armed ISI Islamists.
Hence, you're mistaken that not relentlessly pursuing Bin Laden, wherever he might be suspected of being, necessarily bespeaks a "lack of will." It might reflect a prudent (but undeniably tragic) statecraft - i.e., the least bad course of action. To me this is no surprise - it's part/parcel of operating on the internationl stage, where 3 steps forward are often followed by 2 backwards; especially in the Middle East, where it's difficult to find a palatable and reliable ally.
Do I consider Bin Laden a "scarecrow"? Good metaphor; in part, yes, though in my view it is needful for him to be killed, both because of his role as an enemy strategist and figurehead. Do our efforts to-date count for naught if he's still at-large? Not at all, but they're certainly vitiated. Here's the crucial point, though - do I countenance any action, however reckless, to bring him down: most emphatically not.
# posted by Paul craddick : 10:43 AM
It seems to me, Paul, that the point here that should be emphasized is:
"what we can do now in Pakistan has changed from what we could do in 2002."
Execution is obviously about time frames. Why is the time frame important? Because U.S. power is only partly dependent on the fungibility of its military technology (which, in itself, is not magical. You can prepare to invade Iraq or you can seriously occupy Afghanistan. You can’t do both). It is also dependent, vitally dependent, on world opinion, as well as domestic opinion. The ability to leverage cooperation between the European states, the Middle Eastern states, and U.S.'s own priorities was great in Spring, 2002, and had dissipated by Winter, 2002, due to the deliberately belligerant policies of the U.S. vis a vis Iraq.
For the Bush administration, the Afghanistan war was never considered in any way but as a prelude the war in Iraq.
It is often asked, by pro-war people, what alternative was there to war in 2003? Well, the question of alternatives cuts both ways. What were the alternatives in Afghanistan after Tora Bora revealed the style of the War Department to which we have now become accustomed (rhetorical overkill concealing tactical failure)? An exploration of those alternatives -- and successes in failures in pursuing them -- has to be tied to those ephemeral factors that made it possible for the U.S. to trespass on Pakistan with little cost during this time. As you know, I was pro-war in 2001 and 2002, the war in question being the one against the Taliban and against Al qaeda. Being pro-war doesn’t mean that you are pro any war, however. It means you are pro a war that is taken seriously by the supposed leaders of it, for one thing. For another thing, there is the conduct of the war, which should involve a minimum of terror bombing and torture; and finally, the aim of the war shouldn’t be auctioned off cheaply like some white elephant prize at a house party.
When the anti-war person says, well, there was no imminent reason to invade in 2003, the time frame issue suddenly becomes all important to the pro-war advocate. But in Afghanistan, on the other hand, time frames are suddenly slack. So we can press the advantage we had with the attention and urgency that the 'hunt' for Osama b. had in 2002, or we can just let it go, and satisfy ourselves with the pics of the prez, tongue out to the side of this mouth, magic marker uncapped, putting x-es over the pictures of terrorists. While you seem to object to saying we outsourced the hunt for Osama to a kleptocratic ally, in fact, you seem to think the same thing. You just seem to think it is a good thing. Alas, this is what comes of having a rubber stamp Congress in 2002, because these issues should certainly have been articulated then. But the D.C. eggheads in both parties certainly didn’t want that to happen.
Any recklessness in going after Osama bin is in direct proportion to the time frame I've presented -- it becomes more reckless the more time ticks away. And thus, a leadership that neglects the necessities that arise out of that time frame is either: a., incompetent, or b., disinterested. Or, to be fair, a mix of the two.
So, what was the cost of not completing the mission in Afghanistan and beginning another one in Iraq? Tracking the costs is like one of those negative space pictures, where you fill in the space around an object. The object so revealed is the structural inability of the Bush administration to comprehend terrorism. It has not changed its mindset from before 9/11 in the post 9/11 world. It still believes terrorism is a sub-branch of some x state’s policy. It still can't conceive of a shifting, entrepreneurial, state changing terrorist group. Even though, actually, these groups aren’t uncommon. The cellular, global, franchising illegal group on a black money dole is essentially of the same structure as the Mafia, but with a different incentive set. The mafia, too, started out as a political, not a commercial group. By the time it had evolved a global network, it had become a commercial group – but the omerta at the heart of it was a political legacy. Of course, the person who pointed this out in the nineties was John Kerry. Too bad he didn’t read his own book – whoever ghostwrote it did a decent job. Kerry, on the other hand, throughout his campaign showed only a pale grasp of the gross defects in Bush’s approach to counter-terrorism.
So what happened is: Iraq's state was cracked, its army disbanded (all in the lunatic hope that Chalabi, of all people, was the people's choice for Iraq -- or Allawi, after that hope had proven clearly misjudged), and an insufficient force, unable to guard an occupied population, was 'surprised' when jihadists came through the borders. Of course, those who go through one way can go through the other way, so it sets up a nice school for a franchising terrorist network. I guess the neo-cons, who have read their Marx, are trying to prove that the first time around is tragedy, the second time is farce. The first time around, in the 80s in Afghanistan, the Soviet's created an uncontrollable guerilla situation, with the U.S. operating as the insurgents logistics masters. Having learned nothing from the experience, the U.S. does the Soviet thing in Iraq. With the addition that, having left their flanks unprotected, the U.S. suffers the first defection from an alliance it has forged in its history after the Madrid explosion. Chalk another one up to the Bush counter-terror strategy. As well as to the long term political cost of taking to war countries that don't want to go to war.
Essentially, the Bush group’s thinking about terrorism is as obsolete as its latent dreams of imperialist glory in Mesopotamia. And the price we are paying for an unnecessary war is an amplified terrorist threat.
# posted by roger : 1:08 PM
“There is a legend which expresses this relationship well. The Emperor—so they say—has sent a message, directly from his death bed, to you alone, his pathetic subject, a tiny shadow which has taken refuge at the furthest distance from the imperial sun. He ordered the herald to kneel down beside his bed and whispered the message into his ear. He thought it was so important that he had the herald repeat it back to him. He confirmed the accuracy of the verbal message by nodding his head. And in front of the entire crowd of those who’ve come to witness his death—all the obstructing walls have been broken down and all the great ones of his empire are standing in a circle on the broad and high soaring flights of stairs—in front of all of them he dispatched his herald. The messenger started off at once, a powerful, tireless man. Sticking one arm out and then another, he makes his way through the crowd. If he runs into resistance, he points to his breast where there is a sign of the sun. So he moves forward easily, unlike anyone else. But the crowd is so huge; its dwelling places are infinite. If there were an open field, how he would fly along, and soon you would hear the marvelous pounding of his fist on your door. But instead of that, how futile are all his efforts. He is still forcing his way through the private rooms of the innermost palace. He will never he win his way through. And if he did manage that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to fight his way down the steps, and, if he managed to do that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to stride through the courtyards, and after the courtyards the second palace encircling the first, and, then again, stairs and courtyards, and then, once again, a palace, and so on for thousands of years. And if he finally did burst through the outermost door—but that can never, never happen—the royal capital city, the centre of the world, is still there in front of him, piled high and full of sediment. No one pushes his way through here, certainly not with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window and dream of that message when evening comes.
That’s exactly how our people look at the emperor, hopelessly and full of hope. They don’t know which emperor is on the throne, and there are even doubts about the name of the dynasty. In the schools they learn a great deal about things like the succession, but the common uncertainty in this respect is so great that even the best pupils are drawn into it. In our villages emperors long since dead are set on the throne, and one of them who still lives on only in songs had one of his announcements issued a little while ago, which the priest read out from the altar. Battles from our most ancient history are now fought for the first time, and with a glowing face your neighbour charges into your house with the report. The imperial wives, over indulged on silk cushions, alienated from noble customs by shrewd courtiers, swollen with thirst for power, driven by greed, excessive in their lust, are always committing their evil acts over again. The further back they are in time, the more terrible all their colours glow, and with a loud cry of grief our village eventually gets to learn how an empress thousands of years ago drank her husband’s blood in lengthy gulps.”
In the same way that the messenger has to battle through infinite heaps of bodies, and the message is delayed for centuries, and the battles of the past are received as news of the present in the distant villages – in that same way, the news is reported in the U.S. by a stooge press, subservient to the least whims of the dim and dangerous cartel that runs D.C., a mesh of petro-chemical and defense industry interests.
So it comes as no surprise to LI that the NYT has an article reporting on Pakistan full of details that should have been reported on, investigated, and headlined in 2003.
Here’s the first four grafs:
“The scenes of carnage in Pakistan this week conjured what one senior administration official on Friday called “the nightmare scenario” for President Bush’s last 15 months in office: Political meltdown in the one country where Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and nuclear weapons are all in play.
White House officials insisted in interviews that they had confidence that their longtime ally, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, would maintain enough influence to keep the country stable as he edged toward a power-sharing agreement with his main rival, Benazir Bhutto.
But other current and former officials cautioned that six years after the United States forced General Musharraf to choose sides in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, American leverage over Pakistan is now limited. And General Musharraf is weakened.
His effort at conciliation in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where Al Qaeda and the Taliban plot and train, proved a failure. His efforts to take them on militarily have so far proved ineffective and politically costly. Almost every major terror attack since 9/11 has been traced back to Pakistani territory, leading many who work in intelligence to believe that Pakistan, not Iraq, is the place Mr. Bush should consider the “central front” in the battle against terrorism. It was also the source of the greatest leakage of nuclear arms technology in modern times.”
Which should give you a deep, refreshing draft of the idiocy that is the Bush foreign policy.
We have written about this often. So here’s a post, and a comment thread with LI’s friend, Paul Craddick, about Pakistan. This is from July 8,2005:
more froth for your buck
To sum it up: Tony Blair took a non-threat to the U.K., Saddam Hussein, implanted a continuing British presence in the Middle East, and for the return on the British investment got 50 some deaths, 700 some casualties, and the disruption of all of London.
Steven Coll, whose Ghost Wars is the best book I’ve read about the Reagan era financed adventure in creating the jihadi movement in Afghanistan, has a good article in the WP. Here are two grafs:
“Yet al Qaeda's chief ideologues -- bin Laden, his lieutenant Ayman Zawahiri and, more recently, the Internet-fluent Abu Musab Zarqawi -- have been able to communicate freely to their followers, even while in hiding. In the past 18 months, they have persuaded dozens of like-minded young men, operating independently of the core al Qaeda leadership, to assemble and deliver suicide or conventional bombs in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Spain, Egypt and now apparently London.
As in the Madrid bombings, these looser adherents sometimes copy al Qaeda's signature method of simultaneous explosions against symbolic or economic targets, an approach repeatedly advocated by bin Laden in his recent recorded speeches.
"No more 9/11, but lots of 3/11, especially in Europe," declared the final slide in a PowerPoint presentation about al Qaeda's evolution presented at numerous U.S. government forums this year by terrorism specialist and former CIA case officer Marc Sageman, a clinical psychologist who has recently studied al Qaeda's European cells.”
Terrorism on tap – it is evolving nicely in the direction of a constant structure. The war on terrorism, enacted with the incompetence at which the governing class is especially good, to create a continually mobilizable base of support; the occasional real explosions, to instantiate a strong psychological restraint on dissent; and the filtering of all discussion through an endlessly growing network of anti-terrorism experts, whose ideas, a junk shop of reactionary ideological clichés that would have bored a John Bircher meeting in the 60s, will be presented with suitable worshipfulness every time an incident happens. It is rather like interviewing the head of the Nuclear Energy lobby every time there is a Chernobyl.
The end of the Coll story is a nice example of this blindsided mindset:
“Even the relatively unsophisticated nature of the attacks in London has generated soul-searching about whether effective countermeasures exist against an Islamic extremist movement that appears able to "self-generate" new terrorists, as a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official put it. "The impact of it is significant. It shows they have been able to overcome a well-developed security architecture in London," the former official said. "It shows that al Qaeda and associated groups and fellow travelers still have the ability to conduct an effective operation."
A number of themes come out in this graf.
a. The self exculpation of the experts. Since the main fact, here, is that the U.S. spectacularly blew it both by encouraging Al Qaeda at the outset and renting out to a former Al Qaeda collaborator the job of handling Bin Laden, the main goal is to disguise this fact. Soul searching indeed. The job is just so complicated, it is just so intricate, it just requires so many brain cells, that we might need whole offices and bureaucracies to do it, and certainly many, many terrorism experts. It isn’t as simple as: removing the structure and removing the cause – taking down bin Laden and ceasing to occupy significant parts of the Middle East and blowing up Moslems every day on the tv in the name of … well, something. The job couldn’t have to do with exploiting the torture facilities of our ally states in the Middle East while loudly proclaiming our commitment to compassion. No, that is way too simple. The discontent of those young Moslems are because they hate us. They have hate in their hearts. We have compassion.
b. Then, of course, there is the absence, in that soul searching, of a pretty simple solution for the U.K. – withdraw from Iraq. Hey, it worked for Spain. And perhaps, oh just perhaps, a war that is opposed by the majority of the population shouldn’t be pursued by an isolated, arrogant elite – perhaps that was one of the reasons, in the eighteenth century, that the aristocratic/monarchic form of governance was either overthrown or reformed away.
c. Which is why we need a cover story. The “self-generation” one is nice. We know, to a t the kind of landscape that ‘self-generates’ terrorism, since we gleefully exploited that landscape in Afghanistan against the Soviets. And we’ve faithfully copied that landscape in Iraq, with the U.S. this time starring as the U.S.S.R., and with co-stars the Badr Brigade and Sciri imposing shari’a law in those areas ‘democratized’ by the British occupation, such as Basra, while our opponents, yesteryear’s freedom fighters, are showing what good pupils the CIA had back in the golden days.
Of course, LI’s criticism of U.S. policy in the Middle East shouldn’t overlook the good things we’ve done. For instance, we are cleverly bedeviling the ghost of Khomenei with irony. The man, from all accounts, did not take to irony. But what is his ghost to make of the fact that the U.S. has succeeded, where he failed, in spreading his revolution? This graf from the NYT is a juicy one, buried at the bottom of an Iraq story:
“While the United States has pressed hard for friendly Arab nations to upgrade their ties here, it has been wary of the new government's ties with another neighbor, Iran, and American diplomats and military commanders said on Thursday that they were still weighing an announcement that Iraq and Iran had reached agreement in Tehran on a military cooperation pact that will include Iranian training for Iraqi military units.
Iraq's defense minister, Sadoun al-Dulaimi, was quoted by Agence France-Presse as having told reporters after the signing ceremony, "Nobody can dictate to Iraq its relations with other countries."”
10:12 AM
Comments:
" ... renting out to a former Al Qaeda collaborator the job of handling Bin Laden"
Roger,
Do you mean Musharraf? I hope not, 'cause to not "delegate," to him, the task of managing affairs within Pakistan's own quasi-borders would have meant - what?! - going to war with Pakistan too.
"But there's no evidence whatsoever that Pakistan had a direct hand in 9.11," retorts the sideline sage.
Ahh, to be king for a day!
# posted by Paul craddick : 11:46 AM
There's evidence of an indirect assist, however, as well as the power sharing arrangement Musharraf has worked out with Islamic militants and militants in the ISI. I'm glad no one has seriously proposed doing something about that. The last time we tried to meddle in that region, we gave a big boost to what has become al Qaeda. I doubt even Donald Rumsfeld is silly enough to attempt something in a country with a semi-stable government and nukes.
# posted by Deleted : 1:27 PM
Hey y'all.
Well, to fully answer your comments about Pakistan would take another post, because it would be necessary to go into the pervasively corrupt relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan over the last thirty years, the convergence of a rigid anti-communist ideology and the interests of the junta and rent seeking Pakistan military in wiping out the communist-socialist space in Pakistan (as all over the middle east, squeezing the political choice into one between corporationist military rulers and bigots, which the U.S. blessed wholeheartedly), and the inability of the U.S. to clean out its channel of contacts with Pakistan in such a way that it avoided falling into the old client-capture routine: bet everything on a military despot, select our contacts solely from the intelligence and military sectors in the U.S. (who are most inclined to have erotic dreams about juntas according to an article by Strangelove and Strangelove entitled “Military emissions in the Nighttime” in Mercenary Psychotherapist Magazine) and watch as that capture leads to blindsiding by the coming coup, revolution, or what have you.
Obviously, to get back to a previous comment to you, Harry, the justification for a war isn’t the same as the necessity to wage one. That the deep Pakistani complicity in setting up and maintaining Al qaeda has not lead conservatives to call for a war (on the contrary, the call is to be aware that Pakistan has a large population and nuclear weapons – which has such a pacifying influence on hawks that I do wonder whether Iran’s getting them wouldn’t lead to peace in the Middle East) shows that it is possible to dicker with a country that has helped kill a lot of Americans.
# posted by roger : 5:58 PM
However, about the escape of Osama bin Laden, a., Pakistan did, according to newsweek back in May 13, 2002, allow U.S. forces across the border covertly. Here’s a graf about the operation from Scott Johnson and Rod Nordland:
“Pakistani officials hated to let the U.S. military operate on their soil. They ran out of excuses in late March, though, when American communications intercepts led to the capture of Abu Zubaydah, one of bin Laden's top lieutenants, at a safe house in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad, hundreds of miles from the Afghan border. Armed FBI and CIA agents accompanied elite Pakistani police on that raid and others that netted a total of 50 Qaeda fugitives. The arrests blindsided bin Laden's former backers at Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency--and mortified President Pervez Musharraf. After that, knowledgeable Pakistanis say, Musharraf decided he had no choice but to let the Americans in.”
But b., at that date, we already had other priorities. The Rumsfeld who exclaimed, like a Monty Python general, that he didn’t have enough places to bomb in Afghanistan, was getting his big birthday wish for a place with enough places to bomb. By December, 2002, when Bin Laden’s voice was heard again, Time magazine, which like most MSM is a lacky of the D.C. hawk crowd, wrote this:
“Bin Laden broke cover at a particularly awkward time for President Bush, raising doubts about the success of phase one of Bush's antiterrorism war just when he's pushing to launch phase two against Saddam Hussein. The news was rushed to him not long after experts at the CIA's bin Laden unit at Langley reviewed the audiocast on al-Jazeera, the network regularly used by al-Qaeda to deliver its messages. At around 8 p.m. that day, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice called Bush with the bad news while he was in the shower. Experts were almost certain they were hearing the voice of bin Laden for the first time since U.S. agents thought they picked up a radio message from him in Tora Bora almost a year ago. When the President walked into his staff meeting the next morning, a staff member says, "he was very intense." After all, this is a President who keeps a copy of the faces of key al-Qaeda leaders in his desk and crosses them out as they are killed or captured. “
That last image, by the way, is sorta precious. One thinks of the cretinous children in Far Side Cartoons.
In order to go after Iraq, Bush rented out the hunt for Bin Laden to Pakistan, plain and simple. There was no urgency in the hunt – glimpses to salivating newsmen, like the Newsweek story in May, 2002, were only planted to assure us that our leaders were action movie heroes, working for our interests. Instead of slackers, conspiring against our interest and for their own parochial obsessions.
# posted by roger : 5:58 PM
Roger,
Despite an awful lot of bluster, I don't believe you addressed the question squarely.
If, ex hypothesi, Bin Laden had fled to Pakistan - and surely you're not insinuating that a burgeoning "obsession" with Iraq somehow allowed him to give American troops the slip - then how would it have been possible for the US to track their quarry relentlessly without undertaking actions which would entail de facto belligerence towards Pakistan? For, angrily tolerating troops crossing the border on occasion is most emphatically not the same as acceding to the freedom of motion required for responsive and effective military campaigning.
# posted by Paul craddick : 7:56 PM
Angry toleration? Where do you get that from, Paul? I really think that it isn't bluster. I really think, without reference to the actual history of what happens, one simply treads water.
What we have is clear negligence on the part of the American governing class, subspecies Bush. There is no barrier between Pakistan and Afghanistan here that we have to tremble at -- as is the convenient myth about how we just couldn't go into Pakistan because it was too dangerous. What there is is lack of will. If Pakistan is angry, all the better, then, to operate with efficiency and on point, n'est-ce pas? Unless, really, you don't think it is important. Unless you think Bin Laden is a mere scarecrow, and the really important thing is establishing a footprint in the middle east by occupying Iraq. In which case, Tony Blair and George Bush would have been more truthful in saying, we are going to sacrifice a few American and English and Spanish civilians here and there to bombing attacks to pursue what we think is the really important goal.
Which, in practice, is what they have done.
Further honesty would have compelled them to drop the phrase war on terror and insert the phrase -- war for preserving and expanding our spheres of influence. Or, war to preserve the Carter policy in the Gulf.
I've pretty clearly presented an opportunity cost, I think. And I don't see that your argument addresses it. The argument that could address it would say, hey, the risk of continuing that operation was so very great that we had to abort it. Which isn't true. Although it may be true now, after two more years of malign neglect.
# posted by roger : 9:07 PM
PS. Paul. One question. When you say, "If, ex hypothesi, Bin Laden had fled to Pakistan..." So you don't think Bin Laden is in Pakistan?
# posted by roger : 9:21 PM
Roger,
Working from back to front ... I wouldn't claim to know where Bin Laden is. I assume that Pakistan is the most likely place, out of a host of possibilities. I say "ex hypothesi" to indicate that I will concede the point, for purposes of dialectic, in order to see what does or doesn't follow.
Agreed: I have not directly addressed the question of "opportunity cost" (if by that locution we mean the extent to which focus on Iraq detracted from the overall effort to nab Bin Laden et al) - that hasn't been the point on which I'm pressing you, and about which I'm seeking an answer. However, I alluded to it indirectly, in ridiculing the notion that a 'burgeoning "obsession" with Iraq somehow allowed him to give American troops the slip'. This ridicule is justified by looking at the timeline (which, perhaps, I'll examine in a future rejoinder).
As to the infelicitousness of the locution "war on terror," I would agree - although to an observer not out to score points, it's clear enough that it's a trope intended to convey a host of aims and exigencies; some of which it would be impolitic to state explicitly.
As to "sacrificing" citizens ... I do recall it being stated over and over again that, in confronting the exigencies entailed by 9.11, we are in for a long fight which will in all likelihood see further attacks in Western Capitals; in attempting to vanquish our enemies, they will fight back, hard - and their cachet is a gleeful disregard of the combatant/noncombatant distinction. Your point loses its punch if its rhetorical integument is peeled away.
Now, when you ask "Angry toleration? Where do you get that from, Paul?" I "get" it from paraphrasing Johnson/Nordland, whom you quote as stating, "Pakistani officials hated to let the U.S. military operate on their soil. They ran out of excuses in late March, though." The Pakistani officials allowed this to happen - hence they "tolerated" it; those same officials "hated" the incursions, hence they were "angry." There's nothing at all controversial about my restating, that I can see.
I take it that this is your answer to my question about belligerence vis-a-vis Pakistan: "If Pakistan is angry, all the better, then, to operate with efficiency and on point, n'est-ce pas?" Here is my paraphrase, and correct me if I'm wrong: if killing/capturing Bin Laden entails running roughshod over Pakistan's borders, disregarding their at least nominal claim to "sovereignty," then the Pakistanis be damned.
I'm actually sympathetic to that line, if that's really what you're prepared to say - would you extend it to other states in the region where Bin Laden might find a safe haven? (I'll be glad to be corrected, but my hunch is that you would look askance at any incursion into, say, Iran, if we had reason to think that Bin Laden had set up shop there).
However appealing the notion might be, I'm not convinced that putting it in to practice would be prudent, by any stretch - especially with respect to Pakistan. Clearly we've made another deal with a Devil, on the timeworn pretext that ambivalent cooperation from Musharraf - pushing things at times, holding back at others, getting cooperation at times, followed by duplicity - is better than undertaking actions/provocations which would probably issue in his overthrow, with him replaced by nuclear-armed ISI Islamists.
Hence, you're mistaken that not relentlessly pursuing Bin Laden, wherever he might be suspected of being, necessarily bespeaks a "lack of will." It might reflect a prudent (but undeniably tragic) statecraft - i.e., the least bad course of action. To me this is no surprise - it's part/parcel of operating on the internationl stage, where 3 steps forward are often followed by 2 backwards; especially in the Middle East, where it's difficult to find a palatable and reliable ally.
Do I consider Bin Laden a "scarecrow"? Good metaphor; in part, yes, though in my view it is needful for him to be killed, both because of his role as an enemy strategist and figurehead. Do our efforts to-date count for naught if he's still at-large? Not at all, but they're certainly vitiated. Here's the crucial point, though - do I countenance any action, however reckless, to bring him down: most emphatically not.
# posted by Paul craddick : 10:43 AM
It seems to me, Paul, that the point here that should be emphasized is:
"what we can do now in Pakistan has changed from what we could do in 2002."
Execution is obviously about time frames. Why is the time frame important? Because U.S. power is only partly dependent on the fungibility of its military technology (which, in itself, is not magical. You can prepare to invade Iraq or you can seriously occupy Afghanistan. You can’t do both). It is also dependent, vitally dependent, on world opinion, as well as domestic opinion. The ability to leverage cooperation between the European states, the Middle Eastern states, and U.S.'s own priorities was great in Spring, 2002, and had dissipated by Winter, 2002, due to the deliberately belligerant policies of the U.S. vis a vis Iraq.
For the Bush administration, the Afghanistan war was never considered in any way but as a prelude the war in Iraq.
It is often asked, by pro-war people, what alternative was there to war in 2003? Well, the question of alternatives cuts both ways. What were the alternatives in Afghanistan after Tora Bora revealed the style of the War Department to which we have now become accustomed (rhetorical overkill concealing tactical failure)? An exploration of those alternatives -- and successes in failures in pursuing them -- has to be tied to those ephemeral factors that made it possible for the U.S. to trespass on Pakistan with little cost during this time. As you know, I was pro-war in 2001 and 2002, the war in question being the one against the Taliban and against Al qaeda. Being pro-war doesn’t mean that you are pro any war, however. It means you are pro a war that is taken seriously by the supposed leaders of it, for one thing. For another thing, there is the conduct of the war, which should involve a minimum of terror bombing and torture; and finally, the aim of the war shouldn’t be auctioned off cheaply like some white elephant prize at a house party.
When the anti-war person says, well, there was no imminent reason to invade in 2003, the time frame issue suddenly becomes all important to the pro-war advocate. But in Afghanistan, on the other hand, time frames are suddenly slack. So we can press the advantage we had with the attention and urgency that the 'hunt' for Osama b. had in 2002, or we can just let it go, and satisfy ourselves with the pics of the prez, tongue out to the side of this mouth, magic marker uncapped, putting x-es over the pictures of terrorists. While you seem to object to saying we outsourced the hunt for Osama to a kleptocratic ally, in fact, you seem to think the same thing. You just seem to think it is a good thing. Alas, this is what comes of having a rubber stamp Congress in 2002, because these issues should certainly have been articulated then. But the D.C. eggheads in both parties certainly didn’t want that to happen.
Any recklessness in going after Osama bin is in direct proportion to the time frame I've presented -- it becomes more reckless the more time ticks away. And thus, a leadership that neglects the necessities that arise out of that time frame is either: a., incompetent, or b., disinterested. Or, to be fair, a mix of the two.
So, what was the cost of not completing the mission in Afghanistan and beginning another one in Iraq? Tracking the costs is like one of those negative space pictures, where you fill in the space around an object. The object so revealed is the structural inability of the Bush administration to comprehend terrorism. It has not changed its mindset from before 9/11 in the post 9/11 world. It still believes terrorism is a sub-branch of some x state’s policy. It still can't conceive of a shifting, entrepreneurial, state changing terrorist group. Even though, actually, these groups aren’t uncommon. The cellular, global, franchising illegal group on a black money dole is essentially of the same structure as the Mafia, but with a different incentive set. The mafia, too, started out as a political, not a commercial group. By the time it had evolved a global network, it had become a commercial group – but the omerta at the heart of it was a political legacy. Of course, the person who pointed this out in the nineties was John Kerry. Too bad he didn’t read his own book – whoever ghostwrote it did a decent job. Kerry, on the other hand, throughout his campaign showed only a pale grasp of the gross defects in Bush’s approach to counter-terrorism.
So what happened is: Iraq's state was cracked, its army disbanded (all in the lunatic hope that Chalabi, of all people, was the people's choice for Iraq -- or Allawi, after that hope had proven clearly misjudged), and an insufficient force, unable to guard an occupied population, was 'surprised' when jihadists came through the borders. Of course, those who go through one way can go through the other way, so it sets up a nice school for a franchising terrorist network. I guess the neo-cons, who have read their Marx, are trying to prove that the first time around is tragedy, the second time is farce. The first time around, in the 80s in Afghanistan, the Soviet's created an uncontrollable guerilla situation, with the U.S. operating as the insurgents logistics masters. Having learned nothing from the experience, the U.S. does the Soviet thing in Iraq. With the addition that, having left their flanks unprotected, the U.S. suffers the first defection from an alliance it has forged in its history after the Madrid explosion. Chalk another one up to the Bush counter-terror strategy. As well as to the long term political cost of taking to war countries that don't want to go to war.
Essentially, the Bush group’s thinking about terrorism is as obsolete as its latent dreams of imperialist glory in Mesopotamia. And the price we are paying for an unnecessary war is an amplified terrorist threat.
# posted by roger : 1:08 PM
Friday, October 19, 2007
the psychoanalysis of electricity
I'm the High Voltage Messiah.
… The Electric Christ…
I saw my son Jamie die.
He had a cancer at the base of his spine...
and one in his head.
They put the black spider treatment on him.
They crawled all over,
cracking the body vermin with its nippers!
I can cure your bursting.
Fire a laser beam into you to clear away the sick pus...
the sack of pus, the white pus,
the dead fetus!
- The Ruling Class
Gustave Jäger is best known today as one of the coiners of the word, homosexual. In his day, though – the 1890s – he was a well known naturalist. In the book in which he dropped his coin to fame, the Discovery of the Soul, he also wrote a sort of materialist prose poem to that thing, the brain. If we have decided that the Geist – the mind/spirit – is material, Jäger reasonably asks, what form of matter does it take? Is it a gas, a liquid (tropfbar fluessig – dissolvable into liquid drops), or a solid?
“The answer easily reveals itself. The first two forms of aggregation are completely expluded, since the midne obviously doesn’t follow the laws of diffusion which governs all fluids – otherwise it couldn’t be localized in the brain surface; and as a gas it must rarify and be at least quantitatively injured by the process of filtering, which, according to what we have described previously, is not the case. As a fluid dissolvable into drops it must, in case it is supposed to move, mix with blood and lymph, and then it would be everywhere – but if it didn’t move, then movements as those that have been shown by the faculty of attention wouldn’t be possible.”
So, the mind doesn’t drip and it doesn’t rarify. And, since it has to move, it isn’t, Jaeger insists, a solid. He concludes, then, that it is another form of matter, and this takes him to “the often made comparison between the mind and electricity.” Jaeger likes the analogy in some ways – for instance, both seem to exist on the surface of their carriers; both are unities even in motion; and both do move. However, two things are dissimilar. Electricity can be discharged in contact with a metal conductor – and that seems to have no analogy with the mind; and the mind is plastic, and electricity isn’t.
“One million volts.
Two million volts.
Three million volts.
Four million volts!
Five million volts!
Six million volts!
Seven million volts!
Eight million volts!
Nine million! Ten million!”
This naïve inventory of the mind’s characteristics interests me not so much for the physiology behind it as for the mythology it reveals. For the connection between electricity and mind is of the utmost importance in the creation and spread of the polarity affects model. Reading Hartley, whose mental metaphysics are taken from Newton’s corpuscular theory of vibraticules, I’ve been struck with how the substitution of electricity for ‘animal spirits’ plugs into a mystique, a mythology of electricity, that most scientific of substances for the 18th century, on the one hand, but a substance deeply steeped in folk myth, on the other. Electricity has a natural affinity with the more elaborate cosmologies of the insane, from James Matthews’s Air Loom to Schreber electrified body. Lenin plugged into the way the peasants’ world and the scientific world view crossed when he said that “Communism is Power of the Soviets plus Electrification.” Nobody has yet done a Bachelardian psychoanalysis of electricity, but I am longing for one as I venture into the lumberyard of notions about the passions, the sentiments, the affects in the 18th and 19th century.
No god of love made this world.
I have seen a girl of four whose nails had been torn out by her father!
I have seen the mountains of gold teeth and hair...
and the millions boiled down for soap!
S- S-Sometimes God...
turns his back on His people...
And breaks wind...
and the stench clouds the globe!
I am the High Voltage Man...
closer to God than you,
you sentimental clishmac-laverer!
like articles abandoned in a hotel drawer
'I tell you when I leave the Wise Man I don't even feel like a human. He converting my live orgones into dead bullshit.' "So I got an exclusive why don't I make with the live word? The word cannot be expressed direct.... It can perhaps be indicated by mosaic of juxtaposition like articles abandoned in a hotel drawer, defined by negatives and absence.... “ – William Burroughs
LI needs to plunge into a boring topic but fun fun fun I’m going to attempt this with the maniac eye of one of Burrough’s doctors, hop heading it through the normal to the ectoplasmic. Although this will just be a lecture in 18th century psychiatric fun, so… so bear with me… I’ll chain the fire doors just in case. And go back to …
To my lovely little post regarding ‘sensualism” (I like that term much, much better than sensationalism. Don’t you know, the Victorian historians would want to bowdlerize away the sex part of the philosophy, or even its distant echoes. But I’m not like them. I’m a much friendlier autofellator, don’t you know). Anyway, in that post, I made a point that I ought to modify, i.e. the detachment of the physiological from the philosophical, re history of philosophy, and Locke as the codifier of the subjective view, no doctors allowed. I should point out that empiricism, neatly pursued from Locke to Berkeley to Hume in various anthologies, has its edges rounded out in this separation. But this is to rely too much upon anthologies, an intellectual history that selects certain star intellectuals to light our path to good grades and empty heads. In reality, the Lockian dispensation was a disputed heritage even back in the day. There’s a line going through the minor figures who, nevertheless, each contributed their mite to the enlightenment episteme. Figures like David Hartley.
David Hartley M.D. The man made contributions in his day, especially to the curing of kidney stones, which could be done, according to David Hartley, M.D., with a little elixir he had tried his own self, during a painful and near fatal time of trial with said stones, an elixer devised by one Joanna Stephens. His campaign to get the government to reward Joanna Stephens five thousand pounds for her genius concoction found its way through the gears of the patronage machine and succeeded, in the end. But no one would remember him for this. No, it was his vibrationism, combined with sensualism by way of associationism, that seared his name into the common memory. Lightly seared, a little raw in the center.
Hartley was not the first to take up Newton’s suggestion, in the Opticks, that interior human body, like any physical body, was fundamentally vibratory. He conjoined that notion to Locke’s associationism. Of course, since he is following Newton’s footsteps and we are just a couple of decades away from the most modern of modern things, electricity, he is considered a forerunner of a more scientific way of looking at things. But it is a fair question to ask whether this was really a progress or a regress in neurology. After all, the humoral school at least had a firm grasp on the fact that human biology was chemical, whereas one could accuse Hartley of premature reductionism. Yup. I’ll do the honors. By taking us down to a lower, atomic level, Hartley was definitely responding to a reductionist bent that always evokes pious pledges of allegiance from scientists. However, until this day, nobody knows how that level of the human body really effects neurology, besides giving us pretty CAT scans of our Christmas Tree innards when plugged into some shock or told to look at pictures of mice or something. However, the chemical level is certainly where the action and the understanding is. Philosophers have a casual way of simply assuming the work of reduction is done, and talking about the brain as some kind of wired unit – and in fact, since Putnam’s essay that downplayed the matter of the brain in favor of the computational structure, it has been the cog psy credo that meat or silicon doesn’t matter, any more than it matters if you scribble out your mathematical formulas with chalk or ink. However, it is a credo that requires faith – for instance, the faith that because we can make computers to do thought like things and using algorithms to instruct themselves, we must be projecting what the human brain does. But when we look at the human brain, we definitely see organic chemical processes at work, often in ways that defy our localizations and that require us simply not to look at the unusual way the brain can refunctionalize, or the way the brain lights up in parts that shouldn’t light up when we turn on our Magnetic resonance scanning equipment.
However, I am not writing this post to discuss Hartley’s pioneering role in neuroscience. I’m more interested in his role in moral science. This is about happiness, goddamn it.
Nicholas Capaldi has this to say – ever so briefly – about Hartley in The Enlightenment Project in Analytic Conversation:
“… associationism did not become an all-encompassing doctrine until articulated by David Hartley in his Observations on Man (1749). What gives special significance to associationism is the additional thesis of intellectual hedonims, namely, that the sole origin of human response to environmental stimuli is the desire to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.”
I think this is a pretty standard reading. It makes sense. Hartley influences the Edinburgh school, including Smith, who influences Bentham. Badda badda boom. Dat’s intellectual history, folks, as we all make like Jimmy Durante and say, in chorus.
But the interesting thing about Hartley is that his vibrationary philosophy – which made it hard for him to separate intellectual thoughts from passions – also made it hard for him to accept a straightforward hedonistic psychology, one in which we automatically seek the pleasant and shun the painful (about which I truly need to do a couple of posts – why this idea that emotions are all, at the center, about pleasure and pain?).
In the chapter of the affections, which I am now going to roll up my sleeves and dissect before your disbelieving eyes, Hartley begins with a semi-standard definition of the passions:
‘…That our passions of affections can be no more than aggregates of simple ideas united by association. For they are excited by objects, and by the incidents of life. But tthese, if we except the impressed sensations, can have no poer of affecting us, but what they derive from association…
Secondly, Since therefore the passions are states of considerable pleasure or pain, they must be aggregates of the ideas, or traces of the sensible pleasures and pains, which ideas make up by their number, and mutual influence upon one another, for the faintness and transitory nature of each singly taken. This may be called a proof a priori. The proof a posteriori will be given when I come to analyse the six classes of intellectual affections, viz. imagination, ambition, self interest, sympathy, theopathy, and the moral sense.”
As you can tell from this small sample, Hartley is a pretty eccentric writer. There are passages where he seems to prefigure Gertrude Stein with an almost painful relentlessness, forcing us to extract the sense from his monstrous sentences with the huge efforts of a man… well, of a man pissing out a kidney stone.
To be continued.
LI needs to plunge into a boring topic but fun fun fun I’m going to attempt this with the maniac eye of one of Burrough’s doctors, hop heading it through the normal to the ectoplasmic. Although this will just be a lecture in 18th century psychiatric fun, so… so bear with me… I’ll chain the fire doors just in case. And go back to …
To my lovely little post regarding ‘sensualism” (I like that term much, much better than sensationalism. Don’t you know, the Victorian historians would want to bowdlerize away the sex part of the philosophy, or even its distant echoes. But I’m not like them. I’m a much friendlier autofellator, don’t you know). Anyway, in that post, I made a point that I ought to modify, i.e. the detachment of the physiological from the philosophical, re history of philosophy, and Locke as the codifier of the subjective view, no doctors allowed. I should point out that empiricism, neatly pursued from Locke to Berkeley to Hume in various anthologies, has its edges rounded out in this separation. But this is to rely too much upon anthologies, an intellectual history that selects certain star intellectuals to light our path to good grades and empty heads. In reality, the Lockian dispensation was a disputed heritage even back in the day. There’s a line going through the minor figures who, nevertheless, each contributed their mite to the enlightenment episteme. Figures like David Hartley.
David Hartley M.D. The man made contributions in his day, especially to the curing of kidney stones, which could be done, according to David Hartley, M.D., with a little elixir he had tried his own self, during a painful and near fatal time of trial with said stones, an elixer devised by one Joanna Stephens. His campaign to get the government to reward Joanna Stephens five thousand pounds for her genius concoction found its way through the gears of the patronage machine and succeeded, in the end. But no one would remember him for this. No, it was his vibrationism, combined with sensualism by way of associationism, that seared his name into the common memory. Lightly seared, a little raw in the center.
Hartley was not the first to take up Newton’s suggestion, in the Opticks, that interior human body, like any physical body, was fundamentally vibratory. He conjoined that notion to Locke’s associationism. Of course, since he is following Newton’s footsteps and we are just a couple of decades away from the most modern of modern things, electricity, he is considered a forerunner of a more scientific way of looking at things. But it is a fair question to ask whether this was really a progress or a regress in neurology. After all, the humoral school at least had a firm grasp on the fact that human biology was chemical, whereas one could accuse Hartley of premature reductionism. Yup. I’ll do the honors. By taking us down to a lower, atomic level, Hartley was definitely responding to a reductionist bent that always evokes pious pledges of allegiance from scientists. However, until this day, nobody knows how that level of the human body really effects neurology, besides giving us pretty CAT scans of our Christmas Tree innards when plugged into some shock or told to look at pictures of mice or something. However, the chemical level is certainly where the action and the understanding is. Philosophers have a casual way of simply assuming the work of reduction is done, and talking about the brain as some kind of wired unit – and in fact, since Putnam’s essay that downplayed the matter of the brain in favor of the computational structure, it has been the cog psy credo that meat or silicon doesn’t matter, any more than it matters if you scribble out your mathematical formulas with chalk or ink. However, it is a credo that requires faith – for instance, the faith that because we can make computers to do thought like things and using algorithms to instruct themselves, we must be projecting what the human brain does. But when we look at the human brain, we definitely see organic chemical processes at work, often in ways that defy our localizations and that require us simply not to look at the unusual way the brain can refunctionalize, or the way the brain lights up in parts that shouldn’t light up when we turn on our Magnetic resonance scanning equipment.
However, I am not writing this post to discuss Hartley’s pioneering role in neuroscience. I’m more interested in his role in moral science. This is about happiness, goddamn it.
Nicholas Capaldi has this to say – ever so briefly – about Hartley in The Enlightenment Project in Analytic Conversation:
“… associationism did not become an all-encompassing doctrine until articulated by David Hartley in his Observations on Man (1749). What gives special significance to associationism is the additional thesis of intellectual hedonims, namely, that the sole origin of human response to environmental stimuli is the desire to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.”
I think this is a pretty standard reading. It makes sense. Hartley influences the Edinburgh school, including Smith, who influences Bentham. Badda badda boom. Dat’s intellectual history, folks, as we all make like Jimmy Durante and say, in chorus.
But the interesting thing about Hartley is that his vibrationary philosophy – which made it hard for him to separate intellectual thoughts from passions – also made it hard for him to accept a straightforward hedonistic psychology, one in which we automatically seek the pleasant and shun the painful (about which I truly need to do a couple of posts – why this idea that emotions are all, at the center, about pleasure and pain?).
In the chapter of the affections, which I am now going to roll up my sleeves and dissect before your disbelieving eyes, Hartley begins with a semi-standard definition of the passions:
‘…That our passions of affections can be no more than aggregates of simple ideas united by association. For they are excited by objects, and by the incidents of life. But tthese, if we except the impressed sensations, can have no poer of affecting us, but what they derive from association…
Secondly, Since therefore the passions are states of considerable pleasure or pain, they must be aggregates of the ideas, or traces of the sensible pleasures and pains, which ideas make up by their number, and mutual influence upon one another, for the faintness and transitory nature of each singly taken. This may be called a proof a priori. The proof a posteriori will be given when I come to analyse the six classes of intellectual affections, viz. imagination, ambition, self interest, sympathy, theopathy, and the moral sense.”
As you can tell from this small sample, Hartley is a pretty eccentric writer. There are passages where he seems to prefigure Gertrude Stein with an almost painful relentlessness, forcing us to extract the sense from his monstrous sentences with the huge efforts of a man… well, of a man pissing out a kidney stone.
To be continued.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
ITT - Once a criminal, always a criminal
Any reader of the classic nineteenth century novels has just gotta be interested in corporate crime. LI is. But man, we are behind the ball on this one – we just discovered Footnoted org, your one stop shop for reading disclosure statements from our friendly corporate giants. It is full of the letter that killeth – in this case, the explanations of expenditures, profits, strategies hidden in quarterly reports that gives the knowing reader an x ray vision - or perhaps I should say Piranesian vision - of various fouls, small illegalities, and the legalized fraud that goes into making our economy tick like a clock.
In corpo world, nothing is as good as dropping straight into the bowels of the state and operating like a big old tape worm, sucking up tax money. For, while nobody wants to pay for the State, everybody wants the State to pay them – this, by the way, is called conservative economics.
Anyway, race on over there and read the tres funny post about ITT, a merchant of death that at one time got all kind of publicity when it coordinated with the Nixon gang to take down this podunk country – Chile – which had got this wild idea in its head that it was sovereign. Fuck that! as we cheerfully say in Gringo city. Anyway, since those wild and woolly days, ITT has calmed down. Nowadays, it only quietly violates U.S. law when it feels like it, and is punished by being awarded more tax money, since you just can't get made at their loveable pranks. As I said, this is Gringo City, where we practice a special brand of Christianity in which the sins of the rich are pre-forgiven. Hey, its been checked out by the theologians of the Southern Baptist church themselves!
“ITT, a major defense contractor, pled guilty back in March to violating U.S. arms trafficking regulations. On “numerous occasions” dating back to the 1980s, it was said to have sent data, services and equipment related to “classified military night vision systems” to parties in foreign countries (including China), and lied to the State Department about it. The firm paid some fines and agreed to an additional $50M penalty which, under this agreement, it can work off by putting the money into new night vision technology for the Army over the next 5 years. (Kind of like some deadbeats allowed to pay their restaurant check by washing dishes, except for the national security part.)
…
Meanwhile, in September the firm got a new $37M contract to supply night vision equipment to the Navy and Coast Guard and another big order from the Army. No senior heads at the company have rolled. Indeed, it’s been busy acquiring another defense technology firm, and the stock has been pretty much chugging along.
Ironically, on Friday the Justice Department announced an initiative “to combat the growing national security threat posed by illegal exports of restricted U.S. military and dual-use technology.”
In corpo world, nothing is as good as dropping straight into the bowels of the state and operating like a big old tape worm, sucking up tax money. For, while nobody wants to pay for the State, everybody wants the State to pay them – this, by the way, is called conservative economics.
Anyway, race on over there and read the tres funny post about ITT, a merchant of death that at one time got all kind of publicity when it coordinated with the Nixon gang to take down this podunk country – Chile – which had got this wild idea in its head that it was sovereign. Fuck that! as we cheerfully say in Gringo city. Anyway, since those wild and woolly days, ITT has calmed down. Nowadays, it only quietly violates U.S. law when it feels like it, and is punished by being awarded more tax money, since you just can't get made at their loveable pranks. As I said, this is Gringo City, where we practice a special brand of Christianity in which the sins of the rich are pre-forgiven. Hey, its been checked out by the theologians of the Southern Baptist church themselves!
“ITT, a major defense contractor, pled guilty back in March to violating U.S. arms trafficking regulations. On “numerous occasions” dating back to the 1980s, it was said to have sent data, services and equipment related to “classified military night vision systems” to parties in foreign countries (including China), and lied to the State Department about it. The firm paid some fines and agreed to an additional $50M penalty which, under this agreement, it can work off by putting the money into new night vision technology for the Army over the next 5 years. (Kind of like some deadbeats allowed to pay their restaurant check by washing dishes, except for the national security part.)
…
Meanwhile, in September the firm got a new $37M contract to supply night vision equipment to the Navy and Coast Guard and another big order from the Army. No senior heads at the company have rolled. Indeed, it’s been busy acquiring another defense technology firm, and the stock has been pretty much chugging along.
Ironically, on Friday the Justice Department announced an initiative “to combat the growing national security threat posed by illegal exports of restricted U.S. military and dual-use technology.”
Monday, October 15, 2007
margot and the cosmopolite
Julia Kristeva, in Strangers to Ourselves, explores an interesting notion – that of the “lumpen intelligentsia”. Rameau’s Nephew, a favorite reference here at LI, serves as Kristeva’s reference to talk about this hitherto unnamed tribe. Kristeva focuses on a man who has sometimes been seen as one of Diderot’s models for RN – Fougeret de Monbron.
Now, by coincidence, I’ve been reading Fougeret’s ‘bad’ novel, Margot La Ravadeuse – or Margot the stockingmender. This is a novel of the Fanny Hill type – in fact, Fougeret may have translated Fanny Hill – but it is much less lubricious than realistic – a forerunner of Zola’s researches, a century later, into the depth psychology of the ‘laboring and dangerous classes”. Fanny Hill does seek to arouse, which makes it, inevitably, sentimental. Fougeret, however, seems to have been on a lifelong crusade to offend as many people as possible, starting with his family in Peronne, the place he was born. He once charmingly qualified the inhabitants of Peronne as ‘the excrement of the human race” and as an “assembly of imbeciles”. He of course shook the dust of his natal village from his shoes as soon as he could – in 1726 – and started wandering about Europe and the Meditteranean. One account of his travels – The Cosmopolitan, or the citizen of the world – was apparently read by Byron before he set off for Greece, which is how a sentence from that book became the epigraph of Childe Harolde.
The Cosmopolitan starts off with a passage worthy of Paul Nizan’s Aden, Arabie:
‘The universe is a kind of book of which one has only read the first page when one has only seen one’s native land. I’ve leafed through a number of them, and have found them all equally bad. This examination has not proved fruitless. I hated my country. All the impertinences of the diverse peoples among which I have lived has reconciled me to it.”
As Kristeva says:
“Fougeret’s cosmopolite is shrill, bitter, full of hatred. A character trait or a rhetorical figure – or undoubtedly both at the same time – such malevolence is truly dynamite that destroys borders and shatters the hallowed legitimacy of nations.”
For Kristeva, Fougeret becomes the figure of one kind of intellectual development – what LI has called, in earlier posts, the odd coupling of the buffoon and sage. But he is interesting more than as the person who could have been the model for Rameau’s Nephew. He is actually rather a good writer. For instance, Margot begins with a ‘seduction’ scene. Margot is fourteen years old. She’s seen her parents go at it, and is hot to have sex herself, so much so that she can’t sleep. So, after introducing her beau – a stable boy named Pierrot –this is how Fougeret, through Margot, describes the scene:
‘It should satisfy the reader to know that Pierrot and I were soon in agreement, and that a few days afterwards we sealed our liaison with the great seal of Venus, in a little shabby tavern near Rapee. The place of the sacrifice was garnished with a table laid across two decaying supports, and a half a dozen broken down charis. The walls were covered with a quantity of licentious hieroglyphics, that some amiable gangbangers in a good mood had usually chalked in with coal. Our little celebrations responded to the simplicity of the sanctuary. A pint of eight cent wine, two cents’ worth of cheese, and an equal amount of bread; all of it, added up, mounted to the sum of twelve cents. We officiated nevertheless with as light a heart as if we were doing the louis a plate dinner at Duparc. One shouldn’t be surprised. The most humble meals, seasoned with love, are always delicious.
At last, we came to the conclusion. At first, we had a hard time arranging ourselves. For it wasn’t prudent to trust to the table or the chairs. We thus decided to remain standing. Pierrot glued me against the wall. Oh! all powerful god of the gardens! I was frightedn at the faces that he showed me. What shaking! What assaults! the wall itself shook under his prodigious efforts. However, on my side, I was killing myself, laboring away, not wanting to be reproached by the poor boy for leaving all the fatigue and painful work to him. Whatever, in spite of our patience and mutual courage, we still made very mediocre progress, and I was beginning to despair that we would never crown the work, when Pierrot remembered to moisten with his saliva his thunderous machine. O nature! Nature, whose works are so admirable! The redoubt of pleasure opened; he penetrated; and what more can I say? I was well and totally deflowered. Since that time I slept better.”
It would be hard to read this and get aroused. It is easier to read this and get seduced into thinking this is Margot’s voice, not the voice of a fourteen year old Parisian girl imagined by a forty year old man. The reason for that, the only true seduction here, is that Fougeret seems to have talked to more than a few prostitutes in his time. In that little greasy courtyard, with all that humping and bumping, something really does happen. Margot really has solved her sleep problem. Although she soon gets into others.
Now, by coincidence, I’ve been reading Fougeret’s ‘bad’ novel, Margot La Ravadeuse – or Margot the stockingmender. This is a novel of the Fanny Hill type – in fact, Fougeret may have translated Fanny Hill – but it is much less lubricious than realistic – a forerunner of Zola’s researches, a century later, into the depth psychology of the ‘laboring and dangerous classes”. Fanny Hill does seek to arouse, which makes it, inevitably, sentimental. Fougeret, however, seems to have been on a lifelong crusade to offend as many people as possible, starting with his family in Peronne, the place he was born. He once charmingly qualified the inhabitants of Peronne as ‘the excrement of the human race” and as an “assembly of imbeciles”. He of course shook the dust of his natal village from his shoes as soon as he could – in 1726 – and started wandering about Europe and the Meditteranean. One account of his travels – The Cosmopolitan, or the citizen of the world – was apparently read by Byron before he set off for Greece, which is how a sentence from that book became the epigraph of Childe Harolde.
The Cosmopolitan starts off with a passage worthy of Paul Nizan’s Aden, Arabie:
‘The universe is a kind of book of which one has only read the first page when one has only seen one’s native land. I’ve leafed through a number of them, and have found them all equally bad. This examination has not proved fruitless. I hated my country. All the impertinences of the diverse peoples among which I have lived has reconciled me to it.”
As Kristeva says:
“Fougeret’s cosmopolite is shrill, bitter, full of hatred. A character trait or a rhetorical figure – or undoubtedly both at the same time – such malevolence is truly dynamite that destroys borders and shatters the hallowed legitimacy of nations.”
For Kristeva, Fougeret becomes the figure of one kind of intellectual development – what LI has called, in earlier posts, the odd coupling of the buffoon and sage. But he is interesting more than as the person who could have been the model for Rameau’s Nephew. He is actually rather a good writer. For instance, Margot begins with a ‘seduction’ scene. Margot is fourteen years old. She’s seen her parents go at it, and is hot to have sex herself, so much so that she can’t sleep. So, after introducing her beau – a stable boy named Pierrot –this is how Fougeret, through Margot, describes the scene:
‘It should satisfy the reader to know that Pierrot and I were soon in agreement, and that a few days afterwards we sealed our liaison with the great seal of Venus, in a little shabby tavern near Rapee. The place of the sacrifice was garnished with a table laid across two decaying supports, and a half a dozen broken down charis. The walls were covered with a quantity of licentious hieroglyphics, that some amiable gangbangers in a good mood had usually chalked in with coal. Our little celebrations responded to the simplicity of the sanctuary. A pint of eight cent wine, two cents’ worth of cheese, and an equal amount of bread; all of it, added up, mounted to the sum of twelve cents. We officiated nevertheless with as light a heart as if we were doing the louis a plate dinner at Duparc. One shouldn’t be surprised. The most humble meals, seasoned with love, are always delicious.
At last, we came to the conclusion. At first, we had a hard time arranging ourselves. For it wasn’t prudent to trust to the table or the chairs. We thus decided to remain standing. Pierrot glued me against the wall. Oh! all powerful god of the gardens! I was frightedn at the faces that he showed me. What shaking! What assaults! the wall itself shook under his prodigious efforts. However, on my side, I was killing myself, laboring away, not wanting to be reproached by the poor boy for leaving all the fatigue and painful work to him. Whatever, in spite of our patience and mutual courage, we still made very mediocre progress, and I was beginning to despair that we would never crown the work, when Pierrot remembered to moisten with his saliva his thunderous machine. O nature! Nature, whose works are so admirable! The redoubt of pleasure opened; he penetrated; and what more can I say? I was well and totally deflowered. Since that time I slept better.”
It would be hard to read this and get aroused. It is easier to read this and get seduced into thinking this is Margot’s voice, not the voice of a fourteen year old Parisian girl imagined by a forty year old man. The reason for that, the only true seduction here, is that Fougeret seems to have talked to more than a few prostitutes in his time. In that little greasy courtyard, with all that humping and bumping, something really does happen. Margot really has solved her sleep problem. Although she soon gets into others.
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