R-E-S-P-E-C-T and the war

I’ve been pondering Ezra Klein’s apology for supporting the invasion of Iraq. It contains a sentence that I bump up against with incomprehension, like a goldfish trying to understand an aquarium.

“I thought that if U.S. President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell and former President Bill Clinton and U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair all thought it was necessary, then that was because they had intelligence proving as much.”

What I don’t understand is a personality type that actually respects our political leaders – for this sentence could only come out of such respect. There is a chasm like divide between those people who consider that, generally, anybody who has power is a scoundrel most of the time, and those people who consider that, generally, anybody who has power is a responsible and intelligent figure worthy of trust. I am in the former camp. I believe that our leaders should fear the people, and that they operate best when they fear the people. Mostly, they don’t fear the people, and they operate to maximize the interests of predators and plutocrats, and to incrementally make the lives of the masses worse. This is just SOP, in my opinion.

I take it that Klein is expressing his respect, because I can’t believe he is that dumb. The idea that there is some super secret intelligence shared by the leaders – in the wake of such vivid disproofs as 9.11 and the inability of the Bush’s keystone cops to advance step one on the anthrax caper - should have been knocked out of his head. It is as if he was incapable of grasping the events that were happening around him.  And of course one glance at Iraq’s recent history in 2002 – a history in which Saddam Hussein had essentially ceded control of a vast chunk of his territory in Northern Iraq – should have squashed the idea that, though he was unable to attack the fearsome Kurdish state, he was just about to casually nuke NYC.  There was no excuse for believing the intelligence canard.

Klein’s career afterwards is a case study in R-E-S-P-E-C-T and advancement – you don’t get to be a dealer in D.C. memes if you don’t, in your heart, believe incredible crap about politicos and presidents. You have to be a mook. This is a matter of deep character, perhaps. A real sceptic simply couldn’t believe, is constitutionally unable to believe, a fact because a world leader pronounces it on television. Facts are stupid things – they are only intelligence once they are part of a larger set – which is why even when leaders are not lying, they are lying. Clinton, Bush, Obama, who really cares – this is the sceptic’s assumption. Unmoved by state of the union speeches or Inauguration pageantry, the sceptic is looking for the black spot with which the leader damns whole peoples. The drone on the one side, prison on the other – this is American leadership in a nutshell. The Kleins, on the other hand, are actually moved by the pageantry, oratory, and leadership – by the faux history of it all. My own view of leadership comes from the gospel: he who is first shall be last. Jesus, here, is just compressing into a nifty, Dylan-esque piece of poetry an insight of folk wisdom that Machiavelli laid out more extensively in the Prince: in the moral order, the leaders are shit, and the benefits that accrue to the state from their shittiness are definitely not the result of their better qualities, their ideals. Outcomes that benefit the masses are either side effects of leadership or compromises that spring from the leader’s fear of being overthrown.

Respect your dog, respect your friends, respect your lovers, respect your children – but never respect leaders. They don’t deserve it.    

Nostromo II

“They beat me, a sick sixty six year old man. They laid me face down on the floor and beat the soles of my feet and my back with a rubber truncheon. When I was seated on a chair they used the same truncheon to beat my legs from above with great force, from my knees to the upper parts of my legs. And in the days that followed, whem my legs were bleeding from internal haemorrhaging, they used the rubber truncheon to beat me on the red, blue and yellow bruises…

Lying face down on the floor, I discovered the capacity to cringe, writhe and howl like a dog being whipped by its master.”

This is an extract from the last letter written by Vsevolod Meyerhold, who is certainly one of the most important theater directors of the twentieth century. The letter was among the documents released in 1989 from the files of the KGB. The releases of KGB files have revealed that, contrary to the romantic hopes of Western intellectuals, the writers and artists purged by Stalin all broke. It was no surprise. Meyerhold was not made to endure torture, any more than I am, or any more than any human is.

“The stupidest mind may invent a rankling phrase or brand the innocent with a cruel aspersion. A piece of string and a ramrod; a few muskets in combination with a length of hide rope; or even a simple mallet of heavy, hard wood applied with a swing to human fingers or to the joints of a human body is enough for the infliction of the most exquisite torture. The doctor had been a very stubborn prisoner, and, as a natural consequence of that "bad disposition" (so Father Beron called it), his subjugation had been very crushing and very complete. That is why the limp in his walk, the twist of his shoulders, the scars on his cheeks were so pronounced. His confessions, when they came at last, were very complete, too.” 

 The citation above is from one of the most startling passages in Nostromo – especially surprising in the context of the English novel, circa 1904, which did not discuss, with such coolness, the political uses of pain. Even though by 1904 the term “concentration camp” had been added to the English language. In the just ended Boer war, the English had used them extensively. For instance, there was Camp Irene, which housed Boer women and children, witnessing the death, it was estimated at the end of the war, of 4000 of the former and 23,000 of the latter by the time it was closed in 1902. The Africans who died there were not counted.

These things, however, were matter for Irish journalists, not novelists. Conrad’s friend, Henry James, for instance, allowed a great deal of pain into his novels, but never in the crude and childish form that results from whacking a sixty six year old man, tied down to a chair, on his open soars. This does not happen in Daisy Miller, or the Turn of the Screw, or the Ambassadors, or any of his novels: in fact, the whole force of James’ work, the faith that underlies it, is that such things are incompatible with late nineteenth century and early twentieth century civilization. Such things are over.

The reason Conrad’s novel seems so contemporary is, in part, the far reaching knowledge that such things are far from over. The brief description of the breaking of Dr. Monygham comes out of the book and bites the reader for exactly that reason. This could be the dirty war in Argentina, circa 1979. This could be the dirty war in El Salvador, circa 1983. This could be the dirty war in Iraq, circa 2004. And in Dr. Monygham, whose intelligence is, in these circumstances, his great vulnerability, Conrad briefly sweeps through the entire century. It is not simply the stupidity of the torture, but what is transmitted by torture: the deadness of the torturer. Dr. Monygham is tortured under the supervision of a priest, Father Beron, who is working for the dictator of Costaguana, Guzman Bento. After confessing to everything, Monygham is put in solitary and has great hopes of starving to death, but to his dismay, he is liberated at Bento’s death, and hobbles out of the prison using a walking stick that is a little thinner than he is. He hobbles into an afterlife in which he bears his own certainties:

“And he could not forget Father Beron with his monotonous phrase, "Will you confess now?" reaching him in an awful iteration and lucidity of meaning through the delirious incoherence of unbearable pain. He could not forget. But that was not the worst. Had he met Father Beron in the street after all these years Dr. Monygham was sure he would have quailed before him. This contingency was not to be feared now. Father Beron was dead; but the sickening certitude prevented Dr. Monygham from looking anybody in the face.”

Conrad is too wise, in the novel, to allow Dr. Monygham’s disillusionment to anchor the novel in at least some fundamental level of moral certainty. Monygham’s cynicism is as fallible an attitude as any other to predict and understand the events that unfold in the civil war/revolution that engulfs Costaguana. Torture, which gives a certain self-knowledge, does not stamp its victim with any greater perception of the order of things. It doesn’t even do that. Conrad’s restraint, here, his refusal to surrender to the romanticism of victimhood, made the novel difficult for readers as acute as Forster or Pritchett. The absence of sentimentality was too explicit, and was promptly labeled obscurity.     

Monygham is paired with another “disbeliever”: the French journalist Martin Decoud. Both are on the same side – the side of the “Gould concession”, or, in other words, the side of the liberal European and American exploiters of the silver mines. Monygham is simply concerned that Mrs. Gould not fall into the hands of the ‘democratic’ revolutionaries. Decoud, however, sees the revolution in large enough terms to disbelieve that the exploiters represent some higher stage, some kind of progress, for Costaguanans. The liberal ideals are wrapped around a core of money; without the money, the liberal idealists wouldn’t even be in Costaguana. Decoud, in other words, grasps cause and effect, which is something that is always being deflected and differed by the colonizers, even as they celebrate their ‘science’, the larger discoveries of cause and effect that have given them their technological edge.

Which is as far as I want to go today.

Nostromo I

I have attempted and failed to penetrate past the first chapters of Nostromo at least four times. The scene painting was too suffocating, and Nostromo himself seemed to be an operatic puppet way too empty to thrust a crowded, long narrative upon. Recently, however, as I am writing fiction again, I resolved to  past the coastline of the novel, knowing that it is one of the rare English English novels of the twentieth century that has actually effected writers in other literatures (Gadda, Garcia Marquez, etc.). The English English novel – as compared to the Irish and American English novel – lacks the cosmopolitan air, the epic sloppiness, as it busied itself tucking in corners and marking the chasms opened up by the minute violation of the decorum based on class distinctions. This, at least, is the reputation – which isn’t quite fair, but does represent a distinct trend. Going back to Henry Green or Elizabeth Bowen, one sees how those chasms, explored with a high intelligence, intersect with the underground territory of the great Continental novels. Still, there was an obscure, amputating moment in the English novel – for instance, in the rejection of Joyce – that did real damage to a writer like Rebecca West, perhaps the most cosmopolitan of British 20^th century writers who could not quite shake off provincialism in her fiction. Instead, she turned to another form, the travel narrative, in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon to write the only English prose equivalent to Magic Mountain –  just to be George Steinerish for a second here. And a parallel move occurred in British philosophy, which became obsessed with how we know – or rather, how we say we know. The conjunction of a language philosophy that was born in the breakdown of the liberal Austrian-Hungarian empire and the traditional English concern with understanding resulted in something rather amazing: a diminished philosophy, a philosophy of endless contraction, and endless, inbred justification of that contraction against all foreigners.

But returning to Conrad: V.S. Pritchett, in the fifties, commented that it could easily have been written last year. It still has that air. In fact, Nostromo is an eerily appropriate book to read on the 10^th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, since it involves the same elements: the diabolical greed which haunts economies that are premised on the extraction of primary products (in Nostromo, silver, in Iraq, oil) (which contrasts with the prudent self-advancement that is the more negotiable spirit of manufacturing and the service economy); the weird amalgam of liberal idealism and the cruelest power plays of colonialism; and the alliances of convenience that traverse societies in which political structures are merely the translation of clashing charismatic claims – that is, political structures that are not structures at all.       

George Packer discovers, again, how nice he is and all...

George Packer, who was, alas, the New Yorker’s point man on Iraq during the occupation, wrote a piece in 2004 that is worth revisiting in order to plumb the depth of delusion and narcissism that characterizes our pundit class.  In it, he had this to say: 

“The Iraq war, from its inception in Washington think tanks to its botched execution on the ground, has always been a war of ideas—some of them very bad ones. There’s the idea of preëmptive war, America’s divine right of intervention; the idea of tyrannies falling like dominoes in a strategically realigned Middle East; the idea that American power is worse than the worst dictatorship. Facts have reduced most of these to rubble—notably, the argument that this was a war of urgent national security (although facts can be less stubborn than officials in the grip of ideological truth). Only two serious, and competing, versions of the Iraq war’s meaning are left standing: one, that this is a war against tyranny and for democracy; the other, that this is a war of American domination.”

This gets the entire war about as wrong as you can get a war. It was no war of ideas at all, and on the ground in 2004 in Iraq, even a slightly retarded child could have analyzed the war more accurately than Packer. The war of ideas existed solely in D.C., and it was a war of cocktail parties.  Packer, evidently, never understood the critique of American power – which was that it actually created the dictatorships for its own reasons historically, just as it created the jihadi network used so efficiently by Al Qaeda after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, just as it created the idea that hitting a superpower within its borders – hitting the Soviet Union through sabotage in Central Asia, for instance – was an “idea” that was conceived and distrusted by the CIA handlers of the Afghani “resistance” – etc., etc.  In other words, American power was not about ideas, but about American interests, which in turn reflected different factions within the American compact – corporations, for instance. And in turn, these interests were not consistent one with another – they compete.  So much, then, in two sentences, for the critique of American power. But such a critique went right over his narcissistic liberal head – since Packer evidently understood the entire war as nice people like him vs. not nice people. Who wanted “tyranny”. You will notice that this précis of what the “war” is about doesn’t even mention Shi’a or Sunni – such is the cluelessness of thinking that he could press the cookie  cutter of the stimulating ideas he had garnered from attending a party chez Hitchens on the reality of Iraq. 

I looked this up after reading Packer’s envoi to the Iraq war (tenth anniversary edition!), which was revealing – but not in the way that Packer meant it to be, I think. Apparently, Packer lost contact with his Iraqi friends – i.e., the English speaking Iraqis through which he seems to have funneled his entire understanding of Iraqi history and politics – and so got a little bored with the whole war thing. The war of ideas moves on, don’tcha know. 

“Over time my interestin the place came down to the people I met, and as Iraqis whom I knew became engulfed in horror, I wanted it to be mitigated and the worst averted. That meant wanting America to succeed, or at least not completely fail—whatever that might be. Though I knew that the whole effort was very likely doomed, it was emotionally impossible to write it off. Even foreigners who had nothing but contempt for American officials and officers couldn’t bring themselves to that point. The only alternatives were Al Qaeda and Iranian-backed Shiite extremists. The stupidities of American policy, the mistakes and—in some cases—crimes of American forces, made it harder and harder to sustain this attitude, but if you turned completely against the U.S., you were consigning a lot of people you knew to a terrible fate. It became their fate anyway—that was the real tragedy for Iraqis.

By the fall of 2007, my last remaining Iraqi friend in Baghdad had left. Once he was gone, my connection to the country and the war began to thin, even as the terror diminished.”

This is the war as a videogame fantasy. I especially like the alternatives – since of course the alternatives were not Al Qaeda and Iranian backed Shiite extremists. To think so was to embed yourself so deep in the asshole of the American military mindset as to have no light at all to throw on the subject. Any Shiite party or faction, as an observer such as myself, thousands of miles from the conflict, knew well simply by reading the paper and the BBC Middle East dispatches every day, would have to be Iran backed. Extremists meant, uh, nothing in this context. Nor was there a chance in hell that Al qaeda, being used as a catspaw by Sunni political groups in Iraq, were going to take over. They were the yeast, however, in a resistance movement that is going to be here for a long time.

In a strong sense, Packer’s reporting from Iraq gave New Yorker readers a completely distorted picture of Iraq. Unlike New Yorker’s reporters in Vietnam – like say Robert Shaplen, who I naively thought Packer was going to reincarnate when I started reading him in 2003 – Packer cretinized his readership, making them less able to understand or predict what was going on and would be going on in Iraq.

I'm sourly amused by how many liberal hawks, like George Packer, have taken the tenth anniversary as an opportunity to attribute being wrong about Iraq to their being too nice and noble – and then end up adding, well, we got rid of Saddam, and to that all must bow. Now, if cancer had gotten rid of Saddam, it would not make cancer a beneficial organic condition. So I am unsure what is being argued for here. But, just as one should resist arguments about alternatives to Bush’s action based on the idea that the 9.11 attack was an immutable historic fact which no president could have avoided – which I think is total nonsense – one should also avoid the trap of thinking that the only policy option before the U.S. post 9.11 was either to get rid of Saddam through invasion or not. Actually, the U.S. could have – and should have – trashed its Persian gulf policy and leaned heavily towards Iran if it really wanted to get rid of Saddam without war. A combination of recognizing Iran and strengthening economic relations with that country, and pouring money into Northern Iraq to bring Kurdistan into a new level of development would have had large and devastating consequences for Saddam even within the Baathist structure, which was supported partly by the fact that the U.S. kept both Iran and Iraq on the shitlist.
But of course nobody in D.C., that nest of conventional wisdom, corruption, and subgenius, even mentioned other options, even though such options had been enacted before – a notably precedent was Nixon’s detente with China. This, it turned out, actually benefited Taiwan in the long run, destroying the Nationalist illusion that cemented that party’s tyrannical grip on the island.

The reaction to the 10 year anniversary by the liberal hawks, who are much more powerful in O.’s administration than the liberal doves, shows, depressingly, that they have learned nothing. SOP in D.C. circles is to attribute one’s mistakes to one’s exemplary character and inability to recognize that other people just aren’t as good, smart, and nice as oneself. This is the liberal vice that has pretty much destroyed liberal policy. Liberals have taken to excusing their defeats and missteps by reference to their superior intelligence and excellent ethical sensibilities, which tea party yahoos just don’t’ have, bigots all. This is of course entirely bogus. Liberal missteps come from the contradictions in the liberal position – on the one hand, the instinct to preserve the elite, gated community where a certain type of social liberal flourishes, and on the other hand, a certain guilty conscience arising from the fact that liberalism used to be about securing a good deal for the wage class, which has now been abandoned to the market and grand bargainish cuts in “entitlement”.

I mock. Meanwhile, the Packers of the pundit class still drive the Democratic party Bush lite foreign policy.

10 years after our excellent adventure in Iraq!

Ah, the tenth anniversary of our brave, brave, brave liberation of Iraq! There's a private monument to that in my own little monkey heart - I think it marked the beginning of my awareness of just how lost I was in an American culture I no longer recognized at all. Of course, it also marked a symbolic change under which the U.S. still blunders. The age of Bush continues, unabated in the minor epoch of the supposedly 'liberal' O., he of the grand bargain, the dispenser of unparelleld welfare to Wall Street and unparalleled non-prosecution by his justice department of any and all bank enacted frauds, the dronemaster whose Defense department, by all accounts, worked as hard as it could to retain troops in Iraq - just like we all used to accuse Bush of planning. This recent story in the NYT about sums up the age of the souring of the American promise:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/15/business/younger-generations-lag-parents-in-wealth-building.html?_r=0

The NYT title is bland on bland, but the import is clear: the gross and pernicious inequality of wealth combined with patching the lack of wage increases for a generation with greater access to credit is producing a much poorer generation. And this massive social fact bores all parties in D.C. to tears.

My raven's croak, here, will not budge the night. Which makes me increasingly weary of croaking.