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Consider:

"It is better to be drunk with loss and to beat the ground, than to let the deeper things gradually escape."

- I. Compton-Burnett, letter to Francis King (1969)

"Cynical realism – it is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation."

- Aldous Huxley, "Time Must Have a Stop"







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Friday, 23 April 2004

Topic: Election Notes

How we choose our leaders -

Eric Alterman has this to say:
Based on his intellect, experience and knowledge of the issues Kerry -- like Gore -- is obviously more qualified to be president than Bush is. Furthermore he is morally far better qualified to send men to die in battle if need be. And finally, he is also closer to the American people on the panoply of issues that people say matter to them. What Kerry is not is more "likeable," at least as defined by the punditocracy. This may even be true. But so what? Just look where "likeability" has gotten us. We are the only advanced democratic nation in the world even to entertain such nonsense as a serious issue. And yet it will likely decide whether Bush and company are given a chance to finish the work they have begun: destroying the fiscal basis of our children's future; ensuring the violent hatred of our nation for generations to come and inviting Christian fundamentalists the right to determine what rights we enjoy in our public and private lives. I know that sounds overheated and inflammatory. I only wish it were, but there it is. That's all.
And the counterargument is?

Posted by Alan at 18:35 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Topic: Political Theory

Building a nifty nuclear bulldozer -
Don't you get shivers when you see the term `cognoscenti' used in the opinion pages?


Fred Kaplan in SLATE.COM draws attention to a release from the Natural Resources Defense Council by one Christopher Paine. Paine uses official budget documents to lay out how much money we're spending these days on nuclear weapons and defense against incoming intercontinental nuclear missiles. In short, we're spending quite a lot. (Paine's report is here - in PDF format.) Kaplan wonders why. Many of us wonder why. Ah, in my NEWS WRAP in Just Above Sunset on February 1st you find a rant on that - which in turn points to this:

Pentagon seeks big hike for missile defense in $401 billion budget request
Pauline Jelinek, ASSOCIATED PRESS, 4:36 p.m. January 30, 2004

Kaplan's item this week is here:
Our Hidden WMD Program
Why Bush is spending so much on nuclear weapons
Fred Kaplan - SLATE.COM - Posted Friday, April 23, 2004, at 3:41 PM PT

Kaplan points out Bush is requesting $6.8 billion more for next year for nuclear weapons and a total of $30 billion over the following four years. This does not include his the actually-doesn't-work-at-all missile-defense program. He points out that this is simply for the maintenance, modernization, development, and production of nuclear bombs and warheads.

What's up with that?
There is no nuclear arms race going on now. The world no longer offers many suitable nuclear targets. President Bush is trying to persuade other nations --especially "rogue regimes" -- to forgo their nuclear ambitions. Yet he is shoveling money to U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories as if the Soviet Union still existed and the Cold War still raged.

... The report raises anew a question that always springs to mind after a close look at the U.S. military budget: What the hell is going on here? Specifically: Do we really need to be spending this kind of money on nuclear weapons? What role do nuclear weapons play in 21st-century military policy? How many weapons do we need, to deter what sort of attack or to hit what sorts of targets, with what level of confidence, for what strategic and tactical purposes?
Ah yes, good questions.

Well, for one things there's moving large amounts of dirt -
The one aspect of this reorientation that's attracted some attention is the development of a "robust nuclear earth-penetrator" (RNEP) -- a warhead that can burrow deep into the earth before exploding, in order to destroy underground bunkers. The U.S. Air Force currently has some non-nuclear earth-penetrators, but they can't burrow deeply enough or explode powerfully enough to destroy some known bunkers. There's a legitimate debate over whether we would need to destroy such bunkers or whether it would be good enough to disable them--a feat that the conventional bunker-busters could accomplish. There's a broader question still over whether an American president really would, or should, be the first to fire nuclear weapons in wartime, no matter how tempting the tactical advantage.
And that's still whole lot of money to move that dirt.

Kaplan points out (and links to) a recent report by the Congressional Research Service, that points out when Bush started the RNEP program two years ago, it was labeled as strictly a research project. Its budget was a mere $6.1 million in Fiscal Year 2003 and $7.1 million for FY 04. Now the administration has posted a five-year plan for the program amounting, from FY 2005-09, to $485 million. The FY05 budget alone earmarks $27.5 million to begin "development ground tests" on "candidate weapon designs."

Well, fine. We'll get a nifty nuclear bulldozer.

But as they say on the games shows - BUT WAIT! There's more!
Paine's report cites other startlers that have eluded all notice outside the cognoscenti. For instance, the Energy Department is building a massive $4 billion-$6 billion proton accelerator in order to produce more tritium, the heavy hydrogen isotope that boosts the explosive yield of a nuclear weapon. (Tritium is the hydrogen that makes a hydrogen bomb.) Tritium does decay; eventually, it will have to be refurbished to ensure that, say, a 100-kiloton bomb really explodes with 100 kilotons of force. But Paine calculates that the current U.S. stockpile doesn't require any new tritium until at least 2012. If the stockpile is reduced to the level required under the terms of the most recent strategic arms treaty, none is needed until 2022.

Similar questions are raised about the Energy Department's plans to spend billions on new plutonium pits, high-energy fusion lasers, and supercomputer systems.
So what is all this about? (And don't you get shivers when you see the term "cognoscenti" used in the opinion pages?)

In Kaplan's view this whole business seems to be about building new nuclear weapons that are "more usable" in modern warfare while at the same time also making the old nuclear weapons more usable, too.

Why? Does the administration see a different world than most others do, one where lots of nuclear weapons will be needed, and where we'll use them, and others, its seems, will use them against us? The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't the real deal? Trains blowing up in Madrid and airliners slamming into skyscrapers are minor annoyances? If so, shouldn't they be telling us about this "other world" - as this is our money they're spending?

A cynic might say this is just a not very subtle way to throw lots of money at aerospace corporations and contractors who are all Republican friends. Executives work there, move into government, then they move back - it's an "old boys" thing where everyone gets rich (or richer). A paranoid person might wonder if the administration is getting into apocalyptic thinking a little too seriously. An historically minded person might conclude that these are all old guys who got stuck in "cold war thinking" and are simply unable to see this new world of extremely low-budget but massively effective terrorism. They don't get it.

Whatever. We are doing this stuff. And I suppose it doesn't really matter why.

Posted by Alan at 18:23 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Friday, 23 April 2004 18:49 PDT home

Thursday, 22 April 2004

Topic: For policy wonks...

One More Time - Why do they hate us?
Humiliation as One More Useful Diplomatic Tool


Marc Lynch is assistant professor of political science at Williams College and the author of State Interests and Public Spheres: The International Politics of Jordan's Identity - and this week he has an interesting piece on the business with our tilt toward Israel.

That "tilt" was covered here - In-Your-Face Diplomacy - in Just Above Sunset Magazine last weekend.

Lynch has a good summary in Tom Paine under the title Humiliating Our Friends.

Here's the basics -
Two years ago, George Bush stunned and outraged virtually the entire Arab world by warmly describing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as a "man of peace" at the height of the brutal Israeli reoccupation of the West Bank. Last week, Bush did it again, endorsing Sharon's demands to end the right of Palestinian return and legitimizing decades' worth of illegal West Bank settlements. He did so even as Israeli assassinations of Hamas leaders and the bloody American campaign in Iraq had Arab anger at an almost unprecedented pitch. And he did so without any coordination with moderate Arab leaders or any attempt to explain himself to Arab audiences. When the final damage is calculated, the greatest victims of Bush's latest episode of public non-diplomacy may well be a group which Bush himself claims to most want by his side: Arab moderates.

The impact of the furious humiliation of Arab moderates has already begun to surface. King Abdullah II of Jordan--probably the most friendly of all Arab leaders--postponed a scheduled meeting at the White House. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak warned that Arab views of the United States had plummeted to unprecedented depths. Even more ominously, independent Arab moderates who had tentatively embraced Bush's calls for democratic reform--often at great personal and political risk--spoke with one voice about their humiliation and outrage. The Arab media now routinely equates the American occupation of Iraq with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and it has become a consensus view that America has lost all credibility in the region.
Well, yes, things seems dismal on the diplomatic front - and we seem to have done this on purpose.

Lynch hits on the essential irony in all this.
While Bush has waxed eloquent over the need for democracy in the Arab world, his policies can only be described as a systematic campaign of alienating and humiliating any Arabs who attempt to speak out on behalf of the United States. It has never been clear how the Bush administration has reconciled its rhetoric about empowering Arab publics with its policies which drive the hostility of those publics to ever greater heights.
Well, that is a puzzle.

And it has caused trouble.
While the furious response from Arab regimes might be dismissed as driven by their own feelings of insecurity, the lack of enthusiasm from Arab civil society reformers suggests the extent to which an association with America has become poisonous.

The problems with Bush's approach to democratic reform in the region run deeper than a lack of seriousness or poor execution. The core problem lies in the administration's clear contempt for Arab public opinion, a contempt which is keenly felt by those Arab moderates who actually share the goals of political, economic and cultural reform. The administration is divided between hawks, who believe that Arabs respect force and can be either browbeaten into submission or else easily repressed by friendly dictators; and neoconservatives, who believe that greater democracy will naturally produce pro-American attitudes.
Yeah, well, Lynch doesn't get it.

There IS a grand plan here.

Matthew Yglesias here edges closer to seeing the grand plan.
A lot of folks in this administration clearly just don't really believe in a democratization agenda. To some extent, though, it's the result of conceptual confusion. A lot of the strongest supporters of the Arab reform project on the right are also the strongest supporters of Israel. On the plane of pure abstraction, there's a logic here: Israel is a democracy, the Palestinian authority is not, and Israel's most intransigent opponents -- Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Syria, Iran, etc. -- are nothing of the sort. So supporting Israel is pro-democracy. And supporting Arab reform efforts is also pro-democracy. Questionable, perhaps, but there's a real logic there.

The trouble is that when the theory hits the desert, it all breaks down. Those leading the charge against Israel may be anti-democratic, but you'd be very hard pressed to find an Arab anywhere -- democrat or otherwise -- filled with warm-and-fuzzy feelings toward the Jewish state in general and the Sharon government in particular. Strong support for Sharon, then, makes it essentially impossible for would-be reformers to embrace the United States, and without American support they have little chance of being able to successfully reform their own societies. So in the end, you have a very self-defeating set of policies.
Self-defeating? The president doesn't see it that way.

In fact, yesterday Bush addressed the press at that Associates Press luncheon and explained. Note in this White House transcript of his speech he expected applause at one point and didn't get any. And then plowed on...
The long-term strategy of this government is to spread freedom around the world. And I believe -- I told you, a free Iraq will be a major change agent for world peace. I also believe a free Palestinian state would be a major change agent for world peace. Ariel Sharon came to America and he stood up with me and he said, we are pulling out of Gaza and parts of the West Bank. In my judgment, the whole world should have said, thank you, Ariel. Now we have a chance to begin the construction of a peaceful Palestinian state.

Yes, [ here is where there was a pause for applause - but there wasn't any applause ] there was kind of silence, wasn't there? Because the responsibility is hard. It's hard to be responsible for promoting freedom and peace when you're used to something else. If you don't have the aspirations of the people firmly embedded in your soul, it's hard to take a gamble for peace by putting the institutions of a free society in place, institutions that are bigger than the people.
What to make of this? Most of the world was stunned when we, as Lynch put it, endorsed Sharon's demands to end the right of Palestinian return and legitimized decades' worth of illegal West Bank settlements. The Arab moderates, our allies, were, as they put it, humiliated and furious. Hey we gave them Gaza? Bush is amazed our Arab allies, such as they are, didn't cheer. He thinks they just don't get it? It would seem so.

One might conclude Bush and his administration are superbly detached from reality. Or conversely, one might conclude that no one else in the whole world save Ariel Sharon has the insight and moral clarity that George Bush has. No one is being responsible. Take your pick.

Back in January in Just Above Sunset you'll find an item called In Defense of Humiliating Others - on our new diplomacy. In it you will find a link to a piece by one of the key conservative scholars, in William Buckley's flagship magazine, which lays out a logical defense of our current policies and diplomatic methods.

See Our Primordial World
Pride and Envy are what make this war go 'round.
Victor Davis Hanson. The National Review, January 16, 2004

Hanson clears up this diplomacy business -
As Mr. Bush has grasped, every time we have humiliated our enemies we have gained respect and won security. By the same token, on each occasion we have shown deference to a Mr. Karzai, the Iraqi interim government, and our Eastern European friends, we have helped to create security and stability. Apart from the model of our forefathers who crushed and then lifted up the Germans and Japanese, we could find no better guide in this war than William Tecumseh Sherman and Abraham Lincoln - in that order. The former would remind us that our enemies traffic in pride and thus first must be disabused of it through defeat and humiliation. The latter (who turned Sherman and Grant lose) would maintain that we are a forgiving sort, who prefer restored rather than beaten people as our friends.
Hey, there IS a plan here. No one is detached from reality.

And thus, as we saw last week, it is sometimes necessary not just to humiliate your enemies - sometimes it is good to humiliate your friends and allies. The argument is that people envy us so the logical thing to do is humiliate them, then offer friendship once they know their place.

Some would say this is madness. But they don't run this country, do they?

Posted by Alan at 12:57 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Topic: Iraq

Where is Baron von Steuben when you need him?
More on our new Hessians and how we manage them...


Two days ago in this item - On delusion, mercenaries, Steubenville, Ohio and DeKalb, Georgia. Two friends from France comment on privatization. - Ric and Joseph in Paris had some comments on our privatization of the war in Iraq using paid troops of companies like Blackwater Security. I commented on how these "private contract troops" do pretty much what our soldiers do and called them our current pseudo-Hessians and chatted about Baron von Steuben and de Kalb and all that.

It seems there is more to be said. "Tom Tomorrow" over at This Modern World commented -
To be fair, I'm sure a lot of these guys are just working Joes, truck drivers and so on, lured there by the prospect of quick money, just like people I knew growing up were lured to Alaska during the fishing season--you go for a few months and make enough money to live for a year.

But Iraq's not Alaska, and when these guys are carrying guns and acting for all practical purposes as soldiers, things get a little ambiguous.
Indeed they do.

You might want to read Nicholas Von Hoffman on this today in The New York Observer

See Privatization in Iraq: `Contractors' With Guns
Thousands of mercenaries have been put to work in Iraq.
Nicholas Von Hoffman, April 22, 2004 - 9:41 AM

Von Hoffman has a gripe with CNN and all the rest on how they report on this:
American news organizations are not doing the truth a favor when they call these hired guns "U.S. military contractors." They are not even being accurate: The men were not contractors to the government, but Hessians or mercenary soldiers in the employ of a corporate warlord, namely Blackwater Security Consulting. Let's call these people what they are, even though Americans have yet to feel completely comfortable with the idea of killing for money.
Well, yes. Call them that. And as for Americans feeling completely comfortable with the idea of killing for money, "The Sopranos" on HBO is vastly popular, so perhaps we are less uncomfortable than Von Hoffman thinks.

Of course the news media portrayed these guys as innocent "contractors" and talked up the mutilation of the four in Fallujah as incredibly sad - implying these were just guys over there to make things better. There wasn't much on one of them having previously admitted to being a hired assassin for the forces trying to keep apartheid going. That might have ruined they narrative? Something like that. And they are dead, and we do want to avenge them, somehow.

Yes, they were bad guys. Then things get all mixed up. How are we to think about what is happening?
Does that justify killing them? No, nothing can justify taking human life - but if you take one-third of a million dollars a year to walk around in somebody else's country with a machine gun, and you get wasted by the locals, I don't think you deserve a very big or elaborate funeral. They were there for the money, and these men - elite ex-soldiers that they were - knew the risks, and they took them. So be it.

Evidently, thousands of mercenaries have been put to work in Iraq, and this raises some troublesome questions. Is all this stuff we are fed on TV and in the newspapers about the new and democratic Iraqi Army and constabulary just lies? Why aren't Iraqis guarding "bureaucrats, soldiers and intelligence officers"? Why aren't soldiers guarding themselves?
Well, we do see the Iraqis we have trained to provide their own security are not displaying immense enthusiasm for that task.

The Associated Press reports (Thursday, April 22, 2004 - 3:21:42 AM PST) that about one in every ten members of Iraq's security forces "actually worked against" our troops during the recent militia violence in Iraq, and an additional forty percent walked off the job because of intimidation. Who says? The commander of the 1st Armored Division - Major General Martin Dempsey. And Dempsey says we're at a critical point.

So we don't have enough troops for our guys to protect themselves that well, and the Iraqi guys we trained are flaking out on us, or even turning on us.

Maybe privatization is the only good answer.

But Von Hoffman suggests this may be a bit bothersome -
Not only does privatization not save money waging war, it creates problem after problem, only some of which are visible at this juncture. If captured, are these mercenaries prisoners of war and subject to the Geneva Convention, or can they licitly be shot as spies and saboteurs?

We know that there are thousands of mercenaries now loose in Iraq. Only some of them work for Blackwater. Apparently, there are a number of companies who hire these people, so the question arises about how much control the American authorities have over the irregulars running about the country. Dyncorp mercenaries in the former Yugoslavia were accused of rape and robbery. The point is that they are not subject to military discipline, and even if they commit no acts universally regarded as criminal, they may still do things that offend the Iraqis: They might drink alcohol, use insulting gestures, whistle at women or find a dozen ways to get into trouble doing things which are innocent enough if done in Indiana, but which are incendiary acts if done in Basra.
Oh yeah, I had forgotten about that Dyncorp business in the former Yugoslavia. I shouldn't have - as Dyncorp is now a subsidiary of Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) and I worked for those folks for almost a decade. No, I wasn't a mercenary. I just herded the geeks and dweebs who kept various financial and manufacturing systems from crashing too often.

But in any event, this is an odd coalition bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq, whether they're ready or not, and whether they asked us to do that or not. Hey, it's GOOD for them. And it was, after all, a war of self-defense - at least originally.

An odd coalition? Yes. As I see it the largest coalition component there now is our military at 130,000, followed by Halliburton, its subsidiaries and the reset of "industry" at 26,000 or so - but I'm not sure whether to count GE and Siemens as they suspended operations in Iraq today. Then come these "contract soldiers" at 20,000 or so, and then the Brits at 15,000 more or less. Spain and Honduras and the Dominican Republic have bailed. Poland is making noises that they might bail out. Australia is with us but has dropped to under eight hundred folks - and won't send more. Ah, but Fiji and Tonga are holding firm. That's a couple dozen right there.

Maybe we do need these "contract soldiers." No one else is stepping up, and this does pay well.

Posted by Alan at 11:21 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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Wednesday, 21 April 2004

Topic: The Culture

Is it time to eschew Roland Barthes for the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin?

I have mentioned before - and Ric added visuals too - the fellow who reviews news cars in The Los Angeles Times, Dan Neil, who recently won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, the first automotive writer to ever win that. See What would Roland Barthes drive? from Volume 2, Number 8 of Just Above Sunset Magazine, Monday, February 23, 2004 - where he was introduced.

Well, Dan Neil is at it again.

Today in The Los Angeles Times he eschews Roland Barthes for the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin. Really. He does.

The item, once you get past the extensive registration, is this:

One is unique, two is too many
Concept cars such as the Chevy SSR are defined by individuality, a quality lost on the assembly line.
Dan Neil, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, April 21, 2004

Neil is reviewing the new Chevrolet SSR - which is a imitation hot rod pickup truck, with a folding metal convertible roof and "retro" styling and fat tires, a sort of cartoon car, the kind of thing boys draw in the eighth grade when they're bored. It's quite odd. It started out as a "concept car" and the Chevy people actually decided to build the thing.

But who cares? The fun is in the ironic cultural warps Neil goes through - like this:
The most lucid thing the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin ever wrote is the essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," written in 1936, during an apparent dry spell in Berlin's hashish supply.

Benjamin's famous essay, a staple of film-lit classes, puts a dope-scented finger on a central issue in aesthetics: If the art object is special -- if it has an authenticity, an "aura," Benjamin calls it -- what is the status of the duplicate, the mechanically reproduced copy?

"That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art," says Benjamin. Reproduction "substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence."

In other words: The first David by Michelangelo is art, the second is a lawn ornament.

Which brings us to the Chevrolet SSR. The SSR -- Super Sport Roadster, if you must know -- began life as one of those impossibly cool concept cars at the 2000 Detroit Auto Show, a pickup truck gene-spliced with a hot-rod roadster and incubated in gorgeous '50s heritage, with brand cues skimmed from the noses of Chevy trucks circa 1947-'53.

Roadster? Pickup? Retro? PoMo? No one knew quite what to call it -- and resorted to calling it everything at once -- and GM didn't have a very good idea how to build it....
Well, no point in discussing the car (truck) here. It's heavy and sluggish and crude, and quite expensive. Neil covers all that.

In doing so he does get off some good lines. In discussing the folly of mass producing cars folks loved as "concepts" at the auto shows, Neil points out one might do better not to, and the manufacturers sometimes know it:
Just about every carmaker I can think of has been burned by this phenomenon at one time or another. They display a show-stopping prototype -- for example, the Plymouth Prowler -- and the car-loving public begs the automaker to bring the car to market; but by the time the finished product rolls off the assembly line, the vehicle isn't so cool anymore. Art has become commodity. Elvis has left the building.

Nobody understands the risks better than the carmakers themselves. GM's Cadillac Sixteen was the darling of last year's autoramas -- a huge, rakish and evocative 16-cylinder saloon car, as sumptuous a slice of autocratic hauteur as ever ran over a peasant. Build it and they will come, chorused the automotive press. Yeah, sure, right, said GM.
And they didn't build it. Perhaps they anticipated the lawsuits from the families of recently flattened peasants.

But they built this SSR thing. And it's just silly. And as Neil says -
It's also too expensive. Our test model, in crime-scene-tape yellow, was priced at $44,260, a price point that limits its appeal to -- if I may be so indelicate -- rich old guys who want yet another weekend toy.

And a toy is just what it looks like, something the Revell model company might require you to glue together over a weekend. It's the sort of vehicle that will stop preschoolers in their tracks, but the older the observer -- if one can judge from the looks on their faces -- the more mixed the reactions. There is a lack of seriousness with the SSR -- a lack, Benjamin would say, of authenticity. And I felt kind of ridiculous behind the wheel.
Yes, corporations can't build hot rods.

And that circles back to the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin -
By definition, hot rods are one of a kind. And when we see them on the street we light up because we are in the presence of something special, art qua art. Also, hot rods are built from the inside out. They are old cars with their guts ripped out so they can get as much performance as possible under the hood. Pouring a racy enamel over a truck chassis just isn't the same.

The concept-car SSR was as close to the real thing as it will ever get. When I look at an SSR on the street now I see only a copy of an original. It's as if it were forever and futilely swimming upstream toward its spawning grounds, the auto show floor, to the time and place where it was unique.

The SSR's greatest failing is not that it's a novelty but that it's not novel enough.
Yep, it's not the real thing. It will not do, as it is not the thing in and of itself. It may have been designed out here at the GM design center in Pomona, just east of Los Angeles, but it's not the real deal, just a corporate marketing object, a brick on wheels.

Here's a real California hot rod, on Sunset Boulevard, at the appropriate business.


Posted by Alan at 17:56 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
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