Notes on how things seem to me from out here in Hollywood... As seen from Just Above Sunset
OF INTEREST
Click here to go there... Click here to go there...

Here you will find a few things you might want to investigate.

Support the Just Above Sunset websites...

Sponsor:

Click here to go there...

ARCHIVE
« August 2006 »
S M T W T F S
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31
Photos and text, unless otherwise noted, Copyright © 2003,2004,2005,2006 - Alan M. Pavlik
Contact the Editor

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"







Site Meter
Technorati Profile

Friday, 4 August 2006
The Center Moves - It Doesn't Matter
Topic: Perspective
The Center Moves - It Doesn't Matter
Friday, August 4, 2006, and the twenty-fourth day of the Israeli war with Hezbollah comes to an end - ten thousand troops now in southern Lebanon, small battles beyond, up to the Syrian border, Beirut being bombed, along with the Christian enclaves on the north side of the city now, Hezbollah rockets now hitting fifty miles into Israel with the expected civilian deaths, and Israel taking out bridges so all main roads in and out of Lebanon are impassible - thus no aid will be coming in. The United States still blocking the worldwide call for an immediate ceasefire, and Janes Defense Weekly reporting Iran will send surface-to-air missiles to Hezbollah so they can take out the Israeli jets. In the new Iraq we created one hundred thousand take to the streets of Baghdad in support of Hezbollah shouting Death to Israel and Death to the United States, and we lose two more of our troops in the western provinces, and the bombings go - twenty or more Iraqi police dead when a suicide bomber does his thing at a soccer game where these guys were playing the locals for the fun of it, and the usual death squad assassinations and kidnappings from Mosul to Basra, and the running gun battles with the militias. And the roadside and suicide bombings ramp up in Afghanistan of course. British Prime Minister Blair postpones his August vacation to work with the UN on some sort of cease-fire in Lebanon, followed by a peacekeeping force of yet-to-be-named troops to go in and either calm things, or just "take out" Hezbollah (there's some disagreement), while President Bush starts his Texas vacation, but only ten days this year, not the usual full month of clearing brush and riding his mountain bike. Those who advise him, or control him depending on your point of view, the neoconservatives working out of the vice president's office, are working up plans for war with Syria and Iran now too - so there will be four active fronts in the war on terror, or the war to bring peace and democracy to the Middle East through regime change.

To some it seems like the end of the world, to others like a wonderful opportunity, and then to others it looks like the Rapture is finally at hand, and the return of Jesus - the end of the world, but a good thing.


Setting aside the Rapture crowd, there are two ways to look at this - things are spinning out of control, or if you're a neoconservative theorist, going just they way they should. But the latter is, for now, a minority view. The administration is working overtime to make it the majority view.

The administration's effort to reframe the crises in the world as great opportunity is not going so well. The incredibly stupid chin-up cliché is that when the world hands you lemons, you make lemonade. Most everyone is wondering how we got into this mess and how we're going to lemonade out of these particular lemons (or make Leban-ade as some have cynically said).

Emma Brockes here says what happening is like that scene in Jurassic Park when Jeff Goldblum, finding himself being chased by a T-Rex, struggles momentarily to organize a response. "I'm fairly alarmed here," he says. And she says she herself is fairly alarmed here. It's only funny in the movie.

That item in the Guardian (UK), about how everyone was saying that the election of George Bush in 2004 that gave him another four years to do his insane things will be the end of everything, itself ends with this -
There is an argument to be made that the world is no more in crisis now than it has been at any other point in history, give or take a world war, and that the only reason we are freaking out is that the countries involved are western. No one reported much existential angst during Rwanda. When Israel bombed Beirut airport I was aware that part of the reason I got end-of-the-world shivers was that, unlike the airports in Baghdad or Mogadishu, I have been to Beirut's and it is just like Luton. When two countries with well-decorated departure halls and branches of Starbucks start fighting, you pay more attention than when Ethiopia marches into Somalia, as it did in July without anyone paying much attention. (The Ethiopian troops entered at the invitation of Somalia's secular interim government, to help fight the Islamic militia, who promptly threatened them with another jihad).

These are strange times and the fact that everyone claimed to see them coming in 2004 hasn't made them any easier to deal with. It occasionally feels as if magnetic flip is taking place, the process of polar reversal that happens every 300 millennia or so when north becomes south and south north, and birds fly into buildings and people with pacemakers keel over in the street. What can you do? For the past 10 years I have taken William L Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich on holiday and for the first time, last week, I actually thought about reading it. (I didn't, obviously.) As multiple wars on multiple fronts drag on, you try to initiate a cycle of response that reminds you there are things to be grateful for; the elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo going off without violence, for example, and Mel Gibson self-detonating. You reassure yourself that, as in all cycles of history, this one will come to an end, too. Then you remember that the man in charge of writing the ending is George Bush, and you have to start again.

She is not hopeful.

But then, here, stateside, there seems to be something in the air. Conventional wisdom, whatever that is, seems to be shifting.

As mentioned in the pages in April, David Broder of the Washington Post is sometimes called the dean of Washington journalists (probably because he has a gift for the obvious and has no firm opinion until everyone else has agreed on one), and looking at what the retired generals were saying about the secretary of defense, he said Rumsfeld needed to resign - "Even in Vietnam we saw no such open defiance." That's here if you want the details - four months before Hillary Clinton decided the same thing. He goes with the flow, and she doesn't, until she just has to, and there's an advantage to it.

This week Broder decided it was time for another stroll through the obvious - here he says that "the logic of prolonging the agony" just doesn't add up and its time to withdraw our troops from Iraq. When you've lost Broder you've lost the mainstream, or more accurately, he's the canary in the coal mine. When the canary is dead in the bottom of the cage, it's time to get the hell out of the mine. You could die. The grand experiment to remake the Middle East was, it seems now, just dumb.

The other canary, so to speak, is Thomas Freidman of the New York Times - the moustache of patience, famous for arguing from the pages of "the newspaper of record" that the grand experiment to remake the Middle East was quite smart, and the right thing to do. Sure there were problems, and he explained them in detail drawing on his vast experience in that part of the world, but then said the next six months would be critical. It all might work out. Perhaps he got tired of six-month increment after six-month increment, because Friday, August 4, he gave up, with this, saying that it's "now obvious that we are not mid-wifing democracy in Iraq" but just "babysitting a civil war." He ran out of patience.

Is this important? Do these two guys really matter?

Steve Benen thinks so -

In the world of professional punditry, heavy-hitters like David Broder and Tom Friedman not only help reflect the conventional wisdom, they help shape it. The mainstream political world considers their opinions as the most serious and credible perspectives in the country, and in turn, their points of view become synonymous with sensibility.

And right now, both want out of Iraq. … Welcome to the new sensible, centrist position on Iraq. The political mainstream has finally caught up with the Democratic mainstream. It's about time.
Well, that's from the left, noting the mainstream has shifted, ah… to the middle? Which is slightly to the left? Something like that. The right had been saying that the position of the Bush administration was really what most people knew was the middle position - if you agreed with the president you were smack dab in the middle where you should be, with everyone else, with every sensible and patriotic American. The Democrats are "out of the mainstream" and just loony lefties, and cut-and-run cowards to boot. That doesn't seem to be working anymore. The middle moved on them when they we're looking.

For Freidman it was the August 3 senate hearings that did it -
When our top commander in Iraq, Gen. John Abizaid, tells a Senate Committee, as he did yesterday, that ''the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I've seen it,'' it means that three years of efforts to democratize Iraq are not working. That means ''staying the course'' is pointless, and it's time to start thinking about Plan B - how we might disengage with the least damage possible.

... The administration now has to admit what anyone - including myself - who believed in the importance of getting Iraq right has to admit: Whether for Bush reasons or Arab reasons, it is not happening, and we can't throw more good lives after good lives.

... Yes, the best way to contain Iran would have been to produce a real Shiite-led democracy in Iraq, exposing the phony one in Tehran. But second best is leaving Iraq. Because the worst option - the one Iran loves - is for us to stay in Iraq, bleeding, and in easy range to be hit by Iran if we strike its nukes.
Of course he cannot resist one more the-next-six-months-are-critical hail-Mary speculation - we could have a gigantic "last-ditch" peace conference - and that would be the United State, Russia, Europe, Japan, India, China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Syria and Jordan, all sitting down together to work things out. But he knows that's just not going to happen -
For such a conference to come about, though, US would probably need to declare its intention to leave. Iraqis, other Arabs, Europeans and Chinese will get serious about helping to salvage Iraq only if they believe we are leaving and it will damage their interests.

But the likelihood the Bush-Cheney administration would "declare its intention to leave" is nil, or actually less than zero. He doesn't like it, but he wants out. This is a major change.

Is it a big deal?

Over at the Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum is actually hopeful -

Maybe I'm just a wild optimist about these things, but I think Broder and Friedman are bellwethers. They're both cautious, centrist, establishment liberals who have long hoped for success in Iraq, and they've both given up. Put them together with guys like George Will and Chuck Hagel on the right, and there's just not much support left for staying in Iraq outside of the neocon crazies and the rabid partisans. The wind is definitely shifting.

And as long as I'm being a wild optimist: if we finally develop a consensus that invading random Arab countries doesn't work so well at putting an end to support for radical jihadism, maybe we can start seriously thinking about what would work. Considering how phenomenally difficult the problem is, the sooner we put Iraq behind us and get our brightest minds thinking seriously about nonmilitary solutions, the better off we'll be.
There are nonmilitary solutions? Invading random Arab countries doesn't work so well at putting an end to support for radical jihadism? Now that would require some really new thinking in Washington. We may be too far down the road for that. We have our way of dealing with things, and it's hard to admit that it doesn't work. Maybe it's not possible to admit. And after all, isn't Israel proving you can use massive force to eliminate terrorists, or at least make them seem powerless and humiliate them, so everyone rallies to your side and shuns them, or even laughs at them? No, wait. Bad example.

And anyway, nothing will change, as the war with Iran is on the way, and the Democrats will buy into that big time, as Bill Montgomery explains here -
I think we've run out of time. Events - from 9/11 on - have moved too fast and pushed us too far towards the clash of civilizations that most sane people dread but the neocons desperately want. The Dems are now just the cadet branch of the War Party. While the party nomenklatura is finally, after three bloody years, making dovish noises about the Iraq fiasco, I think their loyalty to Israel will almost certainly snap them back into line during the coming "debate" over war with Iran.
Or in detail -
It seems increasingly probable that that war will come soon - perhaps as early as November or December, although more likely next year. Israel's failure to knock out Hezbollah with a rapid first strike has left the neocons even deeper in the hole, enormously ratcheting up the pressure to try to recoup all losses by taking the war to Damascus and Tehran.

… What's become clear to me is that the Democratic Party (even it's allegedly anti-war wing) will not try to stop this insanity, and in fact will probably be led as meekly to the slaughter as it was during the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Watching the Dems line up to salute the Israeli war machine, hearing the uncomfortable and awkward silence descend on most of Left Blogistan once the bombs started falling in Lebanon, seeing how easily the same Orwellian propaganda tricks worked their magic on the pseudoliberals - all this doesn't leave too much room for doubt. As long as World War III can be sold as protecting the security and survival of the Jewish state, I suspect the overwhelming majority of Democrats, or at least the overwhelming majority of Democratic politicians, will support it.

And it is being sold, ferociously.

… I think the moment when I realized the Dems once again were going to be - would always be - dutiful spear carriers for the neocons was after Howard Dean and company treated the Iraqi prime minister's recent visit to Washington as an opportunity to do a little pro-Israel pandering of their own. To my eternal shame, I initially defended this ploy as a necessary bit of Machiavellian cynicism - a way for the Dems to protect their right flank from a president who not only thinks Israel is the 51st state but a red state to boot.

Cynical it certainly was. And in another situation I might have been justified in making allowances. It's a stinking, corrupt system, and to expect purity is to expect defeat. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that a party leadership that really cared about bringing the troops home probably wouldn't be so cavalier about trashing a guy who is actually a pretty crucial part of making that possible.

… The lesson learned from the Democratic reaction to Israel's war of choice is that the Dems are only likely to oppose war as long as the war in question can be framed as a fight against Iraqi insurgents and/or Shi'a death squads, rather than a fight for Israel. But the Iraq occupation isn't going to fit neatly into that frame much longer. In fact it's already slipped out of it. The Dems - always a little slow on the uptake - just haven't realized it yet.

… People tell me I shouldn't get hung up on this because, you know, if the Dems get in they'll make sure the seniors get their Social Security checks a little faster - or they'll keep the Supreme Court out of the hands of legal madmen or do something about global climate change or save the whales or whatever else it is that's supposed to make the Democratic Party infinitely preferable to the Republicans.

It's not that I discount these differences entirely - although they're easily oversold. But compared to the fate that awaits the republic, and the world, if the United States deliberately starts a war with Iran, those other considerations start to look pretty insignificant. I mean, we're talking about World War III here, fought by people who want to use tactical nuclear weapons. I'm supposed to put that out of my mind because the Dems might be a little bit more generous about funding the VA budget? I'm sorry, but that's fucking nuts.

The truth is that on the most important issue of our time - the cliff that drops into total darkness - the only real opposition left in this country is in the Pentagon, where, according to Sy Hersh, at least some of the generals are trying to stall the march to war. Plus whatever scattered resistance is left in the intelligence agencies following the purges of the past couple of years.

… I hope like hell I'm wrong about this, but I don't think I am. So I guess I'll just have to accept being labeled a traitor to the cause - or whatever the hardcore partisans are calling it. Sure, why not. They're certainly free to follow their party over the cliff (we're all going over it anyway) but I'd at least prefer to do it with my eyes open.
"I'm fairly alarmed here," he says. The conventional wisdom shifted. It doesn't matter.

Posted by Alan at 22:21 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Friday, 4 August 2006 22:44 PDT home

Thursday, 3 August 2006
Big Doings and Underlying Angry Trends
Topic: Couldn't be so...
Big Doings and Underlying Angry Trends
Thursday, August 3, was the day in the third week of the Israel-Hezbollah war being waged in most of Lebanon, but mainly at the southern border, that it got hotter - after a pause the Israeli Air Force was doing some serious bombing in Beirut again, and the man who runs Hezbollah appeared on television to say do any more of that and we'll use the missiles you know we have and go after Tel-Aviv. Fair is fair. Then he said if you stop bombing Beirut we'll stop sending hundred of rockets a day raining down on northern Israel. The day had been the deadliest so far for Israel - ten or more unlucky civilians dead from the rocket barrages and four soldiers dead, and an impressive big tank taken out by one of those anti-tank missiles. The Israeli prime minister said no dice, being in a defiant mood. It was a sort of "bring it on" moment, and he's not even from Texas. Things will escalate.

Half a world away, in Indonesia at a summit of Muslim nations, the dapper little nasty man who runs Iran said there was a simple solution to all this - get rid of Israel. It's not a legitimate nation, just something made up in 1948 or so. He's said such things before, so that wasn't exactly news. Even the French, who had been saying nice things about Iran, hoping Iran could help stabilize things, said this was beyond the pale. So this was just not helpful.

The news of the day was the two sides slamming each other and then getting into that schoolyard fight thing - "You want more of that, buddy? Huh? Huh? You want more of that?" The government of the United States was silent on the whole matter. We're working on a cease-fire somewhere far down the road, where some nations of the UN, but not us, provide troops to go in, beef up the useless Lebanese army, and march south to rid the world of Hezbollah once and for all. No one wants to sign up. Hezbollah, defending the Lebanese people from the massive Israeli attacks that have killed a whole lot of women and children and ruined the economy and infrastructure of Lebanon, and displaced a half a million folks, are looking like the relatively good guys to many, as this seems a bit much to force the return of two kidnapped Israeli soldiers.

And even in Lebanon itself you now get this -
In an event that would have been unthinkable a few months ago, in this country where politics is locked into religious lines, the Maronite Catholic patriarch - the spiritual leader of the most pro-Western populace - convened a meeting this week of religious leaders of other communities, Shiite and Sunni Muslims and several varieties of Christians … Their joint statement, condemning the Israeli "aggression," hailed "the resistance, mainly led by Hezbollah, which represents one of the sections of society."
As noted by Bill Montgomery here, the whole idea was that bombing the crap out of Lebanon would strengthen Lebanese democracy by uniting the country's various ethnic groups and political factions and turning them against Hezbollah -
I must admit I'm puzzled. I thought it was generally understood that bombing and terrorizing a country was the best way to make its people turn against an internal resistance movement.

I can't figure it out. Where did the Israelis go wrong?

He really is a bit sarcastic. But the neoconservatives who have shaped our new foreign policy do believe such things. That's the reported plan for when we take out Iran's uranium processing facilities with our small nuclear weapons - we'll be heroes to the Iranian people when the smoke clears and things stop glowing. They'll cheer and throw out their government for one that works with America. This trial run isn't going so well.

As for the other trial run, that's not going so well either. Thursday, August 3, was the day the top generals and the Secretary of Defense went before congress, actually a senate committee which wanted to know, since things seem to going badly in the older war, the one in Iraq, what the situation really is, as they see it, and what the plan is for getting things back on track.

That didn't go well, as the Associated Press reported here.

Army General John Abizaid, the head of US Central Command, and one smart guy who speaks the language and has his PhD and all, said "Sectarian violence probably is as bad as I've seen it, in Baghdad in particular. If not stopped, it is possible that Iraq could move toward civil war." Marine Corps General Peter Pace, the most senior US military officer, said there was a "possibility" of civil war in Iraq - after all, about a hundred folks a day are blown up or found dead in the streets or in the river, maimed from torture and such. Two of the Pentagon's most senior generals conceded this looks like a civil war in the making. This got a lot of press. The reason is obvious. That's not the official line.

Rumsfeld doesn't think there's anything like a civil war starting, as earlier, he had said this -

QUESTION: And the question, Mr. Secretary, after your most recent visit and this spike in violence, do you believe that Iraq is closer than ever to the brink of civil war?

RUMSFELD: "Closer than ever." Clearly, there's sectarian violence. People are being killed. Sunnis are killing Shia; Shia are killing Sunnis. Kurds seem not to be involved. It's unfortunate. And they need a reconciliation process. The prime minister is pushing for a reconciliation process. There are a couple of other things that are - oh, how would you characterize it? - things you wish weren't happening. There's some movement of Shi'a out of Sunni areas and Sunnis out of Shi'a areas, to some extent. There undoubtedly are some people who are leaving the country and going to safer places because of the violence. Does that constitute a civil war? I guess you can decide for yourself. And we can all go to the dictionary and decide what you want to call something. But it seems to me that it is not a classic civil war at this stage.

It certainly isn't like our Civil War. It isn't like the civil war in a number of other countries. Is it a high level of sectarian violence? Yes, it is. And are people being killed? Yes. And is it unfortunate? Yes. And is the government doing basically the right things? I think so.

We're now up to 275,000 Iraqi security forces, heading toward 325,000 by the end of the year. The president has announced a reconciliation process. He's working on it. He's a serious person. He's working with some of the neighboring countries to try to encourage the Sunnis to participate. He's worked with Sistani, the leading Shia cleric in the country, and had him support a reconciliation process, as well as support of the disarming of some of the militias.

So there are a number of good things happening. There are four provinces in the country where almost all the violence is occurring, and there are fourteen where there is relatively little violence.

And so, amidst all of this difficulty, the currency is fairly stable, the schools are open, the hospitals are open, the people are functioning.

You'd fly over it - you've been there - and you see people out in the fields doing things and people driving their cars and lining up for gasoline and going about their business.

So it's a mixed picture that's difficult but, despite all of the difficulties, there are also some good trend lines that are occurring, and I think the period ahead is an important period.

Does he ask himself the questions he thought he should have been asked and then answer them? Yes, that's how he thinks, working with himself as everyone else is unimportant.

Is it a bit schizophrenic, as if he's hearing voices in his head and talking back to those voices? Yes, there's a touch of that, but he's just trying to work out how this "a hundred dead a day" thing is no big deal.

If what's happening doesn't look like our Civil War with the Blue and Gray armies and battles like Gettysburg, should you not worry about what's happening? Maybe, but that would make you seem silly.

Should we worry that the secretary of defense works out what he thinks by talking to himself in public? Maybe, but there's nothing anyone can do about it, as he's staying.

Would medication help? Probably not.

Rumsfeld had planned to skip the Thursday senate committee hearing - he said he was too busy for such political tomfoolery - and instead hold a closed briefing with the full senate, until the junior senator from New York, Hillary Clinton, publicly called on him to testify in open forum, in front of the cameras and all that. She said that the senators and the American people "should hear directly from the top civilian leader at the Pentagon, the person most responsible for implementing the president's military policy in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Drat. Now what? You don't let any woman make you look like a coward, especially an aggressive (or assertive) one with presidential ambitions. You have to show that you have more balls than she has - two, at least. And he could put her in her place. But that didn't work out.

The junior senator from New York laid into him but good - watch the video (with transcript) here.

She went over, point by point, each "error in judgment" on matters in Iraq and Afghanistan, and quoted him on things he said that just weren't true - his "rosy pictures" of how things would certainly work out, and that stuff about the Taliban being completely eliminated - and it was devastating. She asked him what he had to say about all that, and what the policy was now.

He looked stunned. His first words were "My Goodness!" The generals don't talk to him like this. The voices in his head certainly don't.

There's video of Rumsfeld here then saying he had "never painted a rosy picture" about Iraq - he had been "very measured" and told "you would have a dickens of a time trying to find instances where I have been overly optimistic." He said he had always maintained "this is tough stuff."

That's followed by this list with hyperlinks to the source -

Dec. 18, 2002 [Larry King Live on CNN]: KING: What's the current situation in Afghanistan? RUMSFELD: It is encouraging. They have elected a government through the Loya Jirga process. The Taliban are gone. The al Qaeda are gone.

Feb. 7, 2003: "It is unknowable how long that conflict [the war in Iraq] will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."

Feb. 20 2003: "'Do you expect the invasion, if it comes, to be welcomed by the majority of the civilian population of Iraq?' Jim Lehrer asked the defense secretary on PBS' The News Hour. 'There is no question but that they would be welcomed,' Rumsfeld replied, referring to American forces."

Mar. 30, 2003: "It happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed. We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

The records weren't erased. It sure was easier back in the Nixon days when he work in the White House - no internet, and paper shredders did the job.

Then there's this video and transcript, set up by head of NATO's Afghan security force, one Lieutenant General David Richards, saying Afghanistan was "close to anarchy."

So he was asked about that. How's it going, really? Was Richards full of crap?

Well, he has to admit Taliban fighters were "occupying safe havens" in Pakistan and other places, and admitted that violence has increased recently. But this was not a big deal. It was the weather -

Does the violence tend to be up during the summer, in the spring, summer and fall months? Yes it does. And it tends to decline during the winter period. Does that represent failed policy? I don't know. I would say not.
The voices in his head told him so.

And then there's this, where he seems to get confused about those voices in his head -
Afghanistan - um, I don't know who said what about if the Taliban are gone but, in fact, the Taliban that were running Afghanistan and ruling Afghanistan were replaced. And they were replaced by an election that took place in that country, and in terms of a government or a governing entity, they were gone, and that's a fact.
Are there still Taliban around? You bet. Are they occupying safe havens in Afghanistan and other places - correction, in Pakistan and other places? Certainly they are. Is the violence up? Yes. Does the violence tend to be up during the summer, in the spring, summer and fall months? Yes it does. And it tends to decline during the winter period. Does that represent failed policy? I don't know. I would say not.
After the hearing ended Clinton called on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to resign, accusing him of "presiding over a failed policy in Iraq." She was kind enough to not mention the voices. Other Democrats had called for Rumsfeld's resignation - until now she had stopped short of that. But this was just too surreal.

But we live in a surreal world. Thomas Hargrove is a reporter for Scripps Howard News Service, and Guido H. Stempel III is the director of the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University. And the day of the hearings they offer this -
More than a third of the American public suspects that federal officials assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East, according to a new Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll.

The national survey of 1,010 adults also found that anger against the federal government is at record levels, with 54 percent saying they "personally are more angry" at the government than they used to be.

Widespread resentment and alienation toward the national government appear to be fueling a growing acceptance of conspiracy theories about the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Suspicions that the 9/11 attacks were "an inside job" - the common phrase used by conspiracy theorists on the Internet - quickly have become nearly as popular as decades-old conspiracy theories that the federal government was responsible for President John F. Kennedy's assassination and that it has covered up proof of space aliens.

Seventy percent of people who give credence to these theories also say they've become angrier with the federal government than they used to be.

Thirty-six percent of respondents overall said it is "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that federal officials either participated in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon or took no action to stop them "because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East."
No one is hearing voices. They're just imagining things for which there is no evidence, because they're angry. They've been fed so much bullshit they're trying to figure out what's really going on.

Lee Hamilton, who was vice chairman of that National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (the 9/11 Commission), says the investigation concluded that federal officials bungled their attempts to prevent the attacks, but did not participate in them. But he gets it - "One out of three sounds high, but that may very well be right. Many say the government planned the whole thing. Of course, we don't think the evidence leads that way at all." But he understands.

As for the details of the poll, sixteen percent of Americans hypothesize that secretly planted explosives, not the airplanes and the burning fuel, were the real reason the World Trade Center collapsed. Twelve percent suspect the Pentagon was struck by a military cruise missile rather than by an airliner captured by nasty terrorists.

Why is this coming alive now? The item quotes University of Florida law professor Mark Fenster, the author of the book "Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture" - the findings "reflect public anger at the unpopular Iraq war, realization that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction and growing doubts of the veracity of the Bush administration."

So you get fed stuff you're told is so, then you're told its not so, and you try to work it out yourself. That makes sense. And there's this -
The Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University has tracked the level of resentment people feel toward the federal government since 1995, starting shortly after Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City. Forty-seven percent then said they, personally, feel "more angry at the federal government" than they used to. That percentage dropped to 42 percent in 1997, 34 percent in 1998 and only 12 percent shortly after 9/11 during the groundswell of patriotism and support for the government after the attacks.

But the new survey found that 77 percent say their friends and acquaintances have become angrier with the government recently and 54 percent say they, themselves, have become angrier - both record levels.
And of course Rumsfeld answering the voices in his head, not the voices in the room, isn't going to help any of this at all.

Is driving the American public into deep resentment and anger at you wise politic strategy? No, it doesn't seem to be. When a good chunk of those angry people start believing you set them up and secretly murdered three thousand of your fellow countrymen to get them to support a useless war that's falling to pieces, should you worry? "Does that represent failed policy? I don't know. I would say not."

Yeah, right.

And then things just keep coming up, like this from Sidney Blumenthal -
The National Security Agency is providing signal intelligence to Israel to monitor whether Syria and Iran are supplying new armaments to Hezbollah as it fires hundreds of missiles into northern Israel, according to a national security official with direct knowledge of the operation. President Bush has approved the secret program.

Inside the administration, neoconservatives on Vice President Dick Cheney's national security staff and Elliott Abrams, the neoconservative senior director for the Near East on the National Security Council, are prime movers behind sharing NSA intelligence with Israel, and they have discussed Syrian and Iranian supply activities as a potential pretext for Israeli bombing of both countries, the source privy to conversations about the program says. (Intelligence, including that gathered by the NSA, has been provided to Israel in the past for various purposes.) The neoconservatives are described as enthusiastic about the possibility of using NSA intelligence as a lever to widen the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war.
Four fronts? Are we being had again?

And this is cute -
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is said to have been "briefed" and to be "on board," but she is not a central actor in pushing the covert neoconservative scenario. Her "briefing" appears to be an aspect of an internal struggle to intimidate and marginalize her. Recently she has come under fire from prominent neoconservatives who oppose her support for diplomatic negotiations with Iran to prevent its development of nuclear weaponry.

Rice's diplomacy in the Middle East has erratically veered from initially calling on Israel for "restraint," to categorically opposing a cease-fire, to proposing terms for a cease-fire guaranteed to conflict with the European proposal, and thus to thwarting diplomacy, prolonging the time available for the Israeli offensive to achieve its stated aim of driving Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon. But the neocon scenario extends far beyond that objective to pushing Israel into a "cleansing war" with Syria and Iran, says the national security official, which somehow will redeem Bush's beleaguered policy in the entire region.
It's double or nothing time, and the word is that senior national security professionals have begun circulating among themselves a 1996 document - "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." This was written by, among others, Richard Perle, the first-term chairman of the Defense Policy Board; Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense, and David Wurmser, Cheney's chief Middle East aide. It was written at the request of Likud Party Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to provide "a new set of ideas" for dumping the policies of the assassinated Yitzhak Rabin.

Instead of trading "land for peace," the neocons advocated tossing aside the Oslo agreements that established negotiations and demanding unconditional Palestinian acceptance of Likud's terms, "peace for peace." Rather than negotiations with Syria, they proposed "weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria." They also advanced a wild scenario to "redefine Iraq." Then King Hussein of Jordan would somehow become its ruler; and somehow this Sunni monarch would gain "control" of the Iraqi Shiites, and through them "wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria." Dump the Oslo agreements, and all agreements - just use force. President Clinton put a stop it, but he's long gone.

Note this -
At his first National Security Council meeting, President George W. Bush stunned his first secretary of state, Colin Powell, by rejecting any effort to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. When Powell warned that "the consequences of that could be dire, especially for the Palestinians," Bush snapped, "Sometimes a show for force by one side can really clarify things." He was making a "clean break" not only with his immediate predecessor but also with the policies of his father.

In the current Middle East crisis, once again, the elder Bush's wise men have stepped forward to offer unsolicited and unheeded advice. (In private they are scathing.)
That's all documented. The man has problems with his father. Yipes.

The bottom line -
Having failed in the Middle East, the administration is attempting to salvage its credibility by equating Israel's predicament with the U.S. quagmire in Iraq. Neoconservatives, for their part, see the latest risk to Israel's national security as a chance to scuttle U.S. negotiations with Iran, perhaps the last opportunity to realize the fantasies of "A Clean Break."

By using NSA intelligence to set an invisible tripwire, the Bush administration is laying the condition for regional conflagration with untold consequences - from Pakistan to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Israel. Secretly devising a scheme that might thrust Israel into a ring of fire cannot be construed as a blunder. It is a deliberate, calculated and methodical plot.
Are Sidney Blumenthal's sources feeding him disinformation, setting him up to look like a foolish conspiracy nut? That could be, but recent history argues against that. And there is the document.

Was the plan all along a four-front war, with our forces deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Iran, working to replace the government in each (two down, two to go)? Maybe so, but no one has said this is the plan.

If this is the plan, should the citizens who must pay for it, and send their sons and daughters off to do this all, have been told this is the plan. Maybe so, but they might object.

Should you feel left out as the last two of the four wars start and you weren't told? That would depend on whether you think the government has the obligation to explain anything to its citizens.

Is there a plan for a fifth and sixth front - regime change in Venezuela and Cuba - and a seventh front, regime change in North Korea? Don't be silly. But don't be surprised.

Who in their right mind talks like this? The answer is obvious.

Posted by Alan at 23:03 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Friday, 4 August 2006 07:07 PDT home

Wednesday, 2 August 2006
Diversionary Moves
Topic: Perspective
Diversionary Moves
Looking back in time, not too far, to Wednesday, August 2, the day was, like the others before it, a bit dismal. The media was concentrating on the top war - "Hezbollah fired its biggest and deepest volley of rockets into Israel on Wednesday as Israel pursued the guerrillas with 8,000 soldiers on the ground and heavy bombing. With fighting in its fourth week and diplomatic efforts stalled, the region braced for a bitter and long war." Everyone wants an immediate cease-fire, except for Israel and the United States - who want a cease-fire only when Hezbollah is disarmed and being nice. You just don't stop the ever-escalating war, and have both sides stop fighting for a talk about what the problem is here, when the bad guys refuse to dissolve and become good citizens. So it goes on, and Israel resumes bombing Beirut, and so on. The prospects of sending in a "peacekeeping force" are not good - those who would send troops would like a peace to keep, so won't go in if there's not a cease-fire. We've set it up so that won't happen. Lebanon will be effectively gone soon. So it goes.

And the now "second string" war, the one in Iraq, continued - seventy dead in the streets Monday, twenty or so Tuesday, and fifty-three Wednesday, in the ongoing Sunni-Shiite war of the death squads. We lose one or two of our own a day. We are sending more troops - and more troops to Baghdad - so we'll be up to 135,000 or more any time now. The idea that there'd be a drawdown and a big boost for the administration, and thus the Republicans running in the November elections, seemed now as quaint as the provisions of the Geneva Conventions on how you have to treat those bad guys you've captured. This is not going well, and congress had some questions for Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. They wanted to know what the heck is going on. They called a hearing, and he said he just wasn't going to show up - he was too busy to answer dumb questions from assholes trying to score political points - not his exact words, but that's the gist of this. He just thinks he owes no one an explanation of anything. And within two hours of that hitting the wires there was this -
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld late Wednesday reversed a decision to skip a public hearing on Capitol Hill and said he will testify at a session on the Iraq war.

The move came after hours of criticism and pressure from Senate Democrats who urged him to come before the Senate Armed Services Committee to answer questions about the administration's Iraq policies. Earlier Wednesday, Rumsfeld had said that his crowded calendar did not allow him to be present for the meeting Thursday morning, but he agreed to attend a private, classified briefing in the afternoon with the entire Senate.
That's odd. You want everyone to concentrate on how we're working with Israel to end Hezbollah and Hamas and maybe go after Syria and Iran, and, as they say in Vegas, double-down and run the table in this war on terror, and they want to return to the Iraq business. So they want to know in this Iraq war, now longer than World War Two, why it looks like we're trying to tamp down a civil war and supporting a pro-Iranian Shiite government we created, and one that doesn't think much of what Israel is doing nor of our alone-in-the world support of that, and are pouring in more troops. They want to know what the plan is here, and the policy objectives are. Rumsfeld's attempt to blow this off as old news no one cares about anymore didn't work. One senses he's very angry with these small minds, unable to move on to the new war. But then no one is talking about the "third string" war, the one in Afghanistan, nor is anyone any longer asking why the CIA disbanded its group dedicated to finding Osama bin Laden. Rumsfeld catches a break on that. Osama bin Laden caught his break long ago.

And then there's new stuff coming up that will take their minds off Baghdad disintegrating and Iraq failing. That would be this - "The White House and Congress, caught unaware by Fidel Castro's illness, prepared Wednesday for a possible showdown in Cuba as lawmakers drafted legislation that would give millions of dollars to dissidents who fight for democratic change."

Americans love a good showdown - it's that cowboy heritage. We'll send money and guns to anyone there who makes trouble for the new government. And perhaps we're going to fund anyone in Miami-Dade who, when Castro dies, as he will, wants to mount a force and go in and battle whatever successor socialist or communist second-stringers move up to run the joint. Everyone concedes that the successor government won't be much different, but as rookies they may have trouble if we send in the South Beach Irregulars, well-funded and of course well-armed. Hugo Chavez will no doubt send in the same from Venezuela. It'll be great fun. Baghdad will seem so last year.

And it will be a diversion from the coup under way, where the executive branch neuters the congress and the courts and what the president says at any given time becomes the law of the land - that cannot be questioned. Yeah, yeah - that's over the top. But he has claimed he has the right to declare anyone he chooses to be an "enemy combatant" - even US citizens - and that he doesn't have to explain to anyone why they are, and that he can then hold them, without charges, indefinitely, and not allow them representation, or even communication with anyone at all, and not tell them why they're being held, or offer them access to whatever evidence he has or does have that they are what he says they are. On another matter he says he knows that there are rules - explicit laws - that spell out the conditions under which his people can wiretap US citizens, but as he sees his job, for our own good he has the implicit authority to ignore those laws. So he broke them and will continue to do so. They don't apply. Yep, there's the new law saying torturing people is illegal - and he signed that, but added his signing statement that it was clear, to do his job, as his attorneys explained it to him, he can order torture when he wishes, and will. He's signed more than seven hundred fifty bills into law, adding his statements that he thinks it is clear that with each there always will be times when it is correct for him to ignore the law and just not do what it requires. The American Bar Association has called this a constitutional crisis, but not a coup. Perhaps, as many have suggested, it's more like a slow-motion coup. The wars keep it out of the headlines. It's a "filler" item in the news.

The latest twists came on Wednesday, August 2, amid all the war news. Since the Supreme Court ruled in the Hamdan case that the military tribunals planned at Guantánamo were illegal - and the two main arguments offered that the president could ignore the law were just bullshit (not their word, but close enough) - and the White House, knowing it would look bad to say the court's opinion was irrelevant (you need these nine on abortion and other issues), agreed to "revise" its legal procedures for holding detainees. So the president's lawyers have been "crafting a proposal" for congress that would become the administration's new policy. The idea is to get congress to pass a law to make things kosher, so the courts cannot make trouble.

The Associated Press lead was this - "The Bush administration wants a new system for trying terror suspects to let prosecutors withhold classified evidence from the accused, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Wednesday, holding to a hard line on detainee policy despite concerns by senators and military lawyers."

The Washington Post offers this -
A draft Bush administration plan for special military courts seeks to expand the reach and authority of such "commissions" to include trials, for the first time, of people who are not members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban and are not directly involved in acts of international terrorism, according to officials familiar with the proposal.

The plan, which would replace a military trial system ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June, would also allow the secretary of defense to add crimes at will to those under the military court's jurisdiction. The two provisions would be likely to put more individuals than previously expected before military juries, officials and independent experts said.
Steve Benen explains -
Got that? The new-and-improved military commissions could consider charges against just about anyone, not for being a suspected terrorist, but for a list of offenses Donald Rumsfeld could write at his own discretion. The accused would not have the right to confront their accusers, or to exclude hearsay accusations, or to bar evidence obtained through torture. The right to a public trial, a speedy trial, and to choose your own military counsel would not apply. Indeed, the commission could try the accused without him or her even being there.

The Navy's top uniformed lawyer from 1997 to 2000 said the rules would evidently allow the government to tell a prisoner: "We know you're guilty. We can't tell you why, but there's a guy, we can't tell you who, who told us something. We can't tell you what, but you're guilty."
In list form, the new rules would, 1). "include trials, for the first time, of people who are not members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban and are not directly involved in acts of international terrorism," 2.) "also allow the secretary of defense to add crimes at will to those under the military court's jurisdiction," 3.) "defendants would lack rights to confront accusers, exclude hearsay accusations, or bar evidence obtained through rough or coercive interrogations," and 4.) "they would not be guaranteed a public or speedy trial and would lack the right to choose their military counsel, who in turn would not be guaranteed equal access to evidence held by prosecutors."

Cute. One thinks of the Star Chamber and such. Congress is being asked to pass legislation that the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions do not apply, nore do what most see as the basis of western law - all that innocent until proven guilty stuff, the right to be present at you own trial, to know the charges against you - all that stuff. The federal government can now convict a defendant based on secret evidence. That's new.

And he's back -
John Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer who helped draft the earlier plan, said Bush administration officials essentially "took DOD regulations" for the trials "and turned them into a statute for Congress to pass." He said the drafters were obviously "trying to return the law to where it was before Hamdan" by writing language into the draft that challenges key aspects of the court's decision.
Yoo has come up before, and here the idea is to overrule the Hamdan case. It's a matter of who has the final authority.

But you have to love the details -
The plan calls for commissions of five military officers appointed by the defense secretary to try defendants for any of 25 listed crimes. It gives the secretary the unilateral right to "specify other violations of the laws of war that may be tried by military commission." The secretary would be empowered to prescribe detailed procedures for carrying out the trials, including "modes of proof" and the use of hearsay evidence.

… Unlike the international war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, the commissions could rely on hearsay as the basis for a conviction. Unlike routine military courts-martial, in which prosecutors must overcome several hurdles to use such evidence, the draft legislation would put the burden on the defense team to block its use

… Under the proposed procedures, defendants would lack rights to confront accusers, exclude hearsay accusations, or bar evidence obtained through rough or coercive interrogations. They would not be guaranteed a public or speedy trial and would lack the right to choose their military counsel, who in turn would not be guaranteed equal access to evidence held by prosecutors. … Detainees would also not be guaranteed the right to be present at their own trials, if their absence is deemed necessary to protect national security or individuals.

… To secure a death penalty under the draft legislation, at least five jurors must agree, two fewer than under the administration's earlier plan. Courts-martial and federal civilian trials require that 12 jurors agree.
That's about it. But there are improvements - Rumsfeld alone makes the rules of evidence, the class of detainees is expanded, and the number of crimes to be considered is increased.

How will congress deal with this? The House will love it - they're the president's men - and the Senate may go along. It's the midterm elections - the guess is that most who may find the time to vote, and more than half of registered voters never bother, want a strong authoritarian government - a brutal daddy (not articulate, not very smart, and you have to keep him away from the Jack Daniels, but mean) - to keep them safe. And that may be a good guess.

As for the vote on the new rules for the detainees, and where this is all going, The Onion offers this -
In a decisive 1–0 decision Monday, President Bush voted to grant the president the constitutional power to grant himself additional powers.

"As president, I strongly believe that my first duty as president is to support and serve the president," Bush said during a televised address from the East Room of the White House shortly after signing his executive order. "I promise the American people that I will not abuse this new power, unless it becomes necessary to grant myself the power to do so at a later time."

The Presidential Empowerment Act, which the president hand-drafted on his own Oval Office stationery and promptly signed into law, provides Bush with full authority to permit himself to authorize increased jurisdiction over the three branches of the federal government, provided that the president considers it in his best interest to do so.

"In a time of war, the president must have the power he needs to make the tough decisions, including, if need be, the decision to grant himself even more power," Bush said. "To do otherwise would be playing into the hands of our enemies."

Added Bush: "And it's all under due process of the law as I see it."

In addition, the president reserves the right to overturn any decision to allow himself to increase his power by using a line-item veto, which in turn may only be overruled by the president.

Senior administration officials lauded Bush's decision, saying that current presidential powers over presidential power were "far too limited."

"Previously, the president only had the power to petition Congress to allow him to grant himself the power to grant more power to himself," Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said shortly after the ceremony. "Now, the president can grant himself the power to interpret new laws however he sees fit, then use that power to interpret a law in such a manner that in turn grants him increased power."

In addition, a proviso in the 12th provision of the new law permits Bush the authority to waive the need for any presidential authorization of power in a case concerning national security, although legal experts suggest it would be little exercised.

Despite the president's new powers, the role of Congress and the Supreme Court has not been overlooked. Under the new law, both enjoy the newly broadened ability to grant the president the authority to increase his presidential powers.

"This gives the president the tools he needs to ensure that the president has all the necessary tools to expedite what needs to be done, unfettered by presidential restrictions on himself," said Rep. John Cornyn (R-TX). "It's long overdue."

Though public response to the new law has been limited, there has been an unfavorable reaction among Democrats, who are calling for restrictions on Bush's power to allow himself to grant the president more powers that would restrict the powers of Congress.

"This is a clear case of President Bush having carte blanche to grant himself complete discretion to enact laws to increase his power," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said. "The only thing we can do now is withhold our ability to grant him more authority to grant himself more power."

"Unless he authorizes himself to strip us of that power," Reid added.

Despite criticism, Bush took his first official action under the new law Tuesday, signing an executive order ordering that the chief executive be able to order more executive orders.

In addition, Republicans fearful that the president's new power undermines their ability to grant him power have proposed a new law that would allow senators to permit him to grant himself power, with or without presidential approval.
That's about it. We're in trouble. But keep your eyes on the wars. It'll keep you busy.

Posted by Alan at 22:22 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Thursday, 3 August 2006 06:55 PDT home

Tuesday, 1 August 2006
The Heart of Darkness
Topic: Couldn't be so...
The Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was quite a novelist, born in Poland as Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, in Berdyczów (which is now Berdychiv and in Ukraine). Conrad's father was a writer and translator from French and English, and he was arrested by the Russian authorities in Warsaw for his activities in support of the 1863 insurrection against Tsarist Russia - and was exiled to Siberia. Conrad was an orphan by the time he was eleven, and ending up not much liking Russians. He then lived with an uncle who reluctantly allowed him to travel to Marseille and begin a career as a seaman, at seventeen - it seems he couldn't get Austro-Hungarian citizenship and that made him liable for a twenty-five year involuntary stint in the Russian army. No thanks. Off to Marseille and off to sea - and then a bit of gunrunning and political conspiracy, and the women that drove him crazy. In 1878, after a botched suicide attempt, he took a slot on his first British ship. With time on his hands learned English before he was twenty-one, and then in 1886 got his Master Mariner's certificate and British citizenship at the same time. In 1894, all of thirty-six years old, he left that sea stuff. He ended up living in London and then near Canterbury, down in Kent.

And he wrote - Nostromo, about a revolution in South America, and The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes - and those two deal with espionage and what we now call terrorism. There was Lord Jim and the others. But the novel everyone remembers these days is the short Heart of Darkness - a really scathing indictment of colonialism, and the nasty human exploitation and all too harrowing but predictable suffering that goes with it, and the despair on all sides in the end. The narrator sees lots of things while in command of a Congo steamer. Marlow meets Kurtz.

We're not a nation of readers so the only way most know of this book is through a film inspired by it, Apocalypse Now, where the quietly and profoundly evil Kurtz at the heart of all the darkness in that case turns out to be Marlon Brando, of all people. Caught in traffic up on Mulholland Drive a few years ago when Brando died and the local news vans had clogged the street by his place hoping to interview someone or other, anyone who looked sad, it was easy to think of Brando as the heart of darkness still. But the film was just a shadow of the book, and really about more than a few other matters.

Conrad himself is long gone - in 1923 he declined the offer of a British knighthood, saying he already had a hereditary Polish one (implying he rather not have one from this British Empire that had subdued the lesser races and all that). He died the next year. But he had nailed the darkness, spot on, in that one book.

It was easy to think of him when, on Tuesday, August 1, there's this - Michael Steele, the real-life hero of the 1993 events in Somalia that were turned into the film Black Hawk Down, is now under investigation - he may have either directly ordered the men he commanded, or implicitly encouraged the men he commanded, to go on a bit of a killing spree, as in just go kill all military-age males you find. This happening, of course, just as the Army has started to make its case against his four soldiers charged with murdering three Iraqi civilians. They say he gave the order, and they don't think it's fair to wholly blame them - they acted in self-defense, and were, anyway, under orders to kill all military-age Iraqi men, whether or not they were armed. So they did. But they just were not acting "in cold blood."

As for Steele, you are responsible for those you command. Responsibility flows upward, save for the Pentagon and White House. So Steele is in trouble. The scoop in the item from ABC News the day before the soldiers' hearing gets going is that Steele has already been reprimanded for the incident.

And the item adds this detail -
During the current conflict, Steele has been heard boasting about his unit's record of killing insurgents. Last November he said, "We are absolutely giving the enemy the maximum opportunity to die for his country."

A source familiar with the investigation said Steele kept a "kill board" tallying the number of Iraqis killed by units under his command, and in some cases he gave out commemorative knives to soldiers who killed Iraqis believed to be insurgents.
Charming. But Steele is not the heart of darkness, just unclear of the concept that the Army is now trying to drive home - in this kind of asymmetrical, fourth-generation, guerilla war of insurgency, or whatever you wish to call it, the native population is the prize you're trying to win, not those who just get in the way and can be eliminated when you really don't know who is the real bad guy, who might be, and who's a normal or goofy nobody in the area and you don't have the time or resources to find that out.

Steele may have really hurt our efforts, buy one could go higher, as in this - Major General Geoffrey Miller, the former commander of Guantanamo, has resigned -
Miller chose to retire without seeking promotion and a third star, in large part because his legacy has been tarnished by allegations of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, according to military officials and congressional sources. Miller had hoped to retire in February, but his departure was delayed because members of the Senate Armed Services Committee wanted to question him while he was still in uniform about his role in implementing harsh interrogation techniques at the two prisons.

Miller was allowed to retire only after he assured members of the Senate panel in writing that he would make himself available to testify if called. Congressional sources from both political parties said yesterday that they were not satisfied with several investigations into Miller's actions while he was commander at Guantanamo Bay and are still skeptical of his truthfulness in Senate testimony after the Abu Ghraib abuse surfaced in spring 2004.

… While the top officer at Guantanamo Bay in 2002 and 2003, Miller implemented and oversaw a number of harsh interrogation tactics that included the use of dogs to frighten Arab detainees, and stripping captives naked and shackling them in stress positions to force them to talk. Such tactics later were used in Iraq, shortly after Miller and a team of experts visited in 2003 to help obtain more information during interrogations.

Miller has said he did not authorize interrogation techniques in Iraq. But according to slides he presented to Pentagon officials upon his return, he used his Guantanamo Bay experience as a baseline for suggestions such as having military police who guarded the detainees set the conditions for more fruitful interrogations. Weeks later, military police soldiers at Abu Ghraib took pictures of themselves using harsh and demeaning tactics similar to those at Guantanamo Bay.
Is he Kurtz? Maybe, but he knows he's not going to rise, and he may be the fall guy, eventually, for all this. It's time to get out.

And there's this -
Miller's retirement was postponed until after the court-martial of US Army Sergeant Santos Cardona, who was convicted of abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib when he used unmuzzled dogs during interrogations. In testimony during Cardona's court-martial, Miller denied recommending the use of dogs during interrogations. Although Miller will not face disciplinary action for the allegations against him, he could be called back to active duty to face a court-martial, though military officials say the move will not likely happen. Pentagon officials last year refused to reprimand Miller as recommended by two generals investigating abuse at Guantanamo Bay.

There may not always be two generals who flat-out refuse to say you did anything at all wrong. Why chance that?

But then again there's this - the president has nominated General Bantz J. Craddock, to be the top military man at NATO.

Craddock currently commands the Southern Command, responsible for the Guantanamo prison, and is the guy, when the three prisoners there recently committed suicide, called the suicides an act of war on America. Whatever.

The Europeans get to nominate the top civilian at NATO, and we get to name the top military leaders - that's the deal. And this may be a Bush in-your-face thing at all the euro-weenies who bitch about Guantanamo and want us to shut it down, and don't like our secret prisons and don't like us grabbing people of the streets of Rome and sending them off for "enhanced interrogation" to places that don't exist, never to be heard from again. Maybe Miller should have stayed around. The senate, who must approve this nomination (the Europeans have no say), are a bit uncomfortable with this move, but the president's party still has the majority there. There are still enough angry no-one-can-criticize-us types that this will sail through, even if sailing through roughly. But it best be done before November. Things could change.

Given these items, one senses that there's a bit of an under the surface struggle going on here as Iraq disintegrates, the Hezbollah-Israel war widens and deepens, the Taliban retake parts of Afghanistan, and all the rest spins out of control. There are the "get tough" neoconservatives, echoing the words of Conrad's Kurtz - "Exterminate the brutes."

It's the Heart if Darkness, once again. Steele and Miller, and maybe Craddock and others - and Vice President Cheney in the shadows doing his Marlon Brando thing (think about it) - leading to things like this from the influential John Podhoretz -

What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn't the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?
Had will just killed every one of them there'd be no problem. Well, yes, genocide can be efficient, and bring a long period of no troubles. The Turks pretty much got rid of the Armenians way back when (many of those who escaped seemed to have ended up out here in California). Hitler almost got rid of all the Jews (and Schoenberg and Thomas Mann and so many others got out quick and ended up here in Hollywood). Those who aren't dead have left for California. But you hope you get them all. So the neoconservatives float a new theory.

And Podhoretz adds this - "If you can't imagine George W. Bush issuing such an order, is there any American leader you could imagine doing so?"

Podhoretz is saying Bush is the man, and he should have done it, and he's disappointed in Bush for not giving the order. But you could apply the lesson elsewhere.

An anonymous writer who uses the name Tristero, a character in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 - he's actually a composer whose works are performed by orchestras worldwide - says Podhoretz has concluded Conrad's Kurtz had the right idea - "Exterminate the brutes." That's here, with a collection of matching quotes from the Third Reich and other sources. It's not amusing.

As for exterminating the brutes, it may be too late now to kill all the Sunni males of a certain age, but now be the time to for mass slaughter of the Hezbollah crowd - men, women and children - but they're doing for us, or something, or so says Rush Limbaugh -here (emphases added) -
We've got the Hezbos, who have in interesting fashion, and I think the same thing is being attempted in Iraq, and it poses the same kind of trouble, or the same kind of challenge. The Hezbos have pretty much made - and we've heard the puff piece stories. Oh, they're wonderful humanitarians, the Hezbos, why, the social services they provide the general population, why, they're doing such wonderful things, they care about people, they passed out health care and whatever the hell it is. Well, what they're doing is making the general population of these countries dependent on them, and as such, that is how they secure - it's either through blackmail or genuine support, but it's how they get the support of the general population centers. You also have the Israeli factor in that. These are Arabs absolutely, so there are a number of factors in it.

But the one thing that has really changed in warfare, from World War II forward - and I know that tactics change, but strategy doesn't. The Art of War by Sun Tzu is still something that's regarded as timely, even though it's thousands of years old. The one thing that you just don't do these days is kill civilians. It used to be the name of the game in war. And it was done on purpose. Now, it was done to end wars, and it was done to achieve decisive victory, and it was done to save the lives of your own troops in the field. All of those things were factors.

So we had this episode at Qana. You know who really killed those people are the Hezbos. Hezbollah killed those people. Hezbollah put those people in that building and brought the rocket launchers in close by, knowing full well that the launcher would be targeted. That building didn't fall for eight hours after it was hit. What do you bet that the Hezbos finished the job that the Israeli bomb did not actually complete? What do you bet they killed their own people for the PR aspect? These people cannot compete militarily with any industrialized nation, so they have to fight the PR and the spin war. And it is amazing to me to see how easily the duped US and world media is.

… Every bit of it is staged and the still photographers know it. Yet they send these pictures out without saying all of this is being staged for us. They send these pictures out as though they are in a timeline of an exact sequence, which they are not, which you will see when you read it. So the point is, Israel is probably not even killing all these civilians. I asked the other day, when you have the Hezbos who don't wear uniforms, how do you know what civilian deaths are versus Hezbo deaths, how do you know who's who there? You don't.

… Until civilians - frankly, I'm not sure how many of them are actually just innocent little civilians running around versus active Hezbo types, particularly the men, but until those civilians start paying a price for propping up these kinds of regimes, it's not going to end, folks. What do you mean, civilians start paying a price? I just ask you to consult history for the answer to that. It's not their fault, Rush, it's not their fault! No. Not saying that it is.

But as long as you're going to allow these people to hide behind baby carriages and women and children and mosques and so-called apartment buildings, and if you're going to launch military strikes at military targets, which Hezbollah is not doing - 120 rockets into Israel yesterday. Nobody has a care in the world, nobody has one word of condemnation for that. We don't know what targets were hit, we don't know how many people died. The Israelis are not parading their victims around on TV for propaganda purposes. As long as we are going to pussyfoot and patty-cake around, we're not going to get anywhere, we're not going to make any real progress.

We may delay the inevitable, we may get ceasefire after ceasefire after ceasefire, but we're not going to deal with the root cause of the problem. And as such, your kids and grandkids are going to be saddled with that at some point when they assume responsibility for the fate and future of the country.
So they all need to be exterminated. Or so says Kurtz.

Digby sees the underlying idea here -
So, the pictures of the dead are all phony, staged propaganda but the civilians need to be killed anyway in order to get to the root causes of the problem - which I understand to be too many living Arabs. If we don't kill them now, our kids and grandkids will have to kill their kids and grandkids later.

This blatant genocidal bloodlust has become de rigeur on the right now. It's on talk radio, TV and in the columns of respectable newspapers. They don't even pretend to be civilized anymore. Maybe it's just the SOS, but I've got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I don't ever remember this kind of stuff being openly bandied about like it's normal. And those who did, like Curtis LeMay, didn't have audiences of 25 million listeners to spew their bilge to.

But hey, what do we expect? Once you explode the taboo against torture, can genocide be far behind?
Yep, there's something going around, in the top circles of those who advise or support the White House now. It's that "kill them all and let God sort them out" thing. The ball is rolling.

Of course there are ironies. We just don't do genocide - going after whole races of people - men, women and children. We're the good guys - and just don't say anything about the Long Trail of the Cherokee as they were forced to walk from North Carolina to Oklahoma, and then we took most of that away. That was a long time ago. So were the internment camps for the Japanese in the forties. It's not the same. We don't do such things.

But there is a rising tide here - Ann Coulter saying we should force their leaders to convert to Christianity, or kill them, the calls for getting tough and "taking the gloves off," Steele, Miller, the rules going away so people die in "enhanced interrogation" and others just disappear, the administration's documented plan to use nuclear weapons on Iran if they keep experimenting with that nuclear stuff, and so on, with Limbaugh saying "but until those civilians start paying a price for propping up these kinds of regimes, it's not going to end, folks."

Bill Montgomery here compares that to Osama bin Laden in March of 1997 is his Fatwa Against America -
We declared jihad against the US government, because the US government is unjust, criminal and tyrannical. It has committed acts that are extremely unjust, hideous and criminal.

… As for what you asked regarding the American people, they are not exonerated from responsibility, because they chose this government and voted for it despite their knowledge of its crimes in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and in other places.
Same thing. The gloves are off. (And see this the two quotes side by side on national television, and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC ruefully laughing at Limbaugh.

But that's where we are.

_

Waking Up

One pro-administration fellow (Bill Ardolino) takes his own side to task here -
There's a common idea, almost exclusively promoted among right-wing pundits, that more force is necessarily more effective force.

... But the global war on terror is a wildly asymmetrical conflict that's only going to grow more frustrating and complex. ... As a result, much of the bluster about ditching Queensbury rules and going "Dubya Dubya Too" on our "enemies" as an evident solution to the conflict is simply that: bluster. … "Nuking Mecca" won't do a whit of good, and in fact [will] accomplish the opposite of any cowing intent.

... I think that it's time for some right-wing pundits to either move beyond the lazy general concept of "more force" is necessarily "better force," or at least present a practical, detailed plan for an aggressive subjugation of "the enemy" that goes beyond "we need to get serious! If only those ******s in Washington would take the gloves off!"
That's a start.

And then out here on Tuesday, August 1, Prime Minister Blair gave an odd speech. The night before it had been a pleasant night at the Getty Center with the mayor and the big guns. Tuesday was World Affairs Council in Los Angeles, at the Westin Bonaventure hotel (the glass cylinders one in all the movies and in the most recent Buck Rodgers series).

This was an odd speech. Billed as a major foreign policy address he called for a "complete renaissance" of the global approach to tackling extremism, with as much emphasis on "soft" power as military might -
We will not win the battle against this global extremism unless we win it at the level of value as much as force, unless we show we are even-handed, fair and just in our application of those values to the world.

In reality we are at present far away from persuading those we need to persuade that this [is] true.

Unless we reappraise our strategy, unless we revitalize the broader global agenda on poverty, climate change, trade and in respect of the Middle East, bend every sinew of our will to making peace between Israel and Palestine, we will not win, and this is a battle we must win

You cannot win by bombing everything in sight, then rounding up everyone you can and torturing them to find out from the random sample who knows what?

No kidding, Tony. Dick Cheney may never let you talk to George again.

But this too is a start. On the other hand he's in trouble back in the UK and had to show he's really not George's prison bitch, and this would do. And he couldn't say this in Washington, only way out here where everyone is crazy anyway.


Posted by Alan at 23:40 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Thursday, 3 August 2006 06:18 PDT home

Monday, 31 July 2006
There May Be No One at the Wheel
Topic: Couldn't be so...
There May Be No One at the Wheel
The state of things late Monday, July 31, indicated to some that there may be no one at the wheel. Of course, maybe there never was anyone at the wheel, and no one at all has much influence on what happens in the world.

In the Cold War half the world seemed to turn to Moscow for leadership, and the other half to Washington. Now, although we say, as the only remaining superpower in the world, that we are remaking the world the way God intended it to be - free and democratic and free-market capitalist - the project seems more than stalled. It seems to be falling apart, and no one much is turning to us for leadership. They know they won't get it. They'll get "let things play out" and "through war and death and chaos things will be remade into something better," as stability and calm have, really, been the problem. You could look it up.

Of course those we have named as the bad guys - the terrorists of all sorts all over the world, except for that odd fellow with the bad hair in North Korea who isn't a terrorist at all but shouldn't have the bomb - have the exact same project, remaking the world the way they say God intended it to be, and that is devout and severely narrowed to a whole different set of rules. The guy with the bad hair in North Korea doesn't talk of what God wants - he's a godless communist. He's just dangerous. But it's all evil, and we are here to rid the world of that. There shouldn't be evil in the world, anywhere. We'll put and end to it.

As these words read, this should be a Monty Python skit - that crew was, in their day, forever sending up the logic people used in this world by taking it to its "logical" conclusion. Who can forget Every Sperm is Sacred from The Meaning of Life? You just go with the argument, running it out, and it turns silly. But this isn't a Monty Python skit. It just seems like one. There's a lot in the press about whether our tactics and strategies were right or wrong - from asking whether we sent enough troops to do the job, to what we have had them do, to, way back when, whether the Iraq War was necessary or there were other alternatives. The commentary on what we should have done, are doing and should do to achieve our aim is endless. But maybe it was the basic concept. All the rest is just detail.

The news of the preceding weekend had been of the death of all those women and children in the small village of Qana in south Lebanon. The world was outraged that an American-made precision bomb dropped by the Israeli Air Force killed thirty-seven small children, the rest of the fifty-four dead being women and the elderly. There were riots in Beirut and Gaza, the Lebanese government told our Secretary of State to just go home as there was nothing to talk about, and every nation called for a cease-fire. The government of Israel said it was regrettable, and the Untied States alone said there should be no cease-fire. Condoleezza Rice had been saying that in the Israeli-Hezbollah war we were seeing the "birth pangs" of a new Middle East - and sure it would be painful, but it was worth it - and the president used his Saturday morning radio address to say what was happening was really a great opportunity, if you looked at it the right way. But neither of them had been in the line of fire.

Sunday we announced that Israel had agreed to forty-eight hour halt to all the bombing. They didn't announce it - we did, for them. We cannot appear too heartless. That lasted six hours or so. It was just one of those things you throw out there and hope people remember later, no matter what really happens next. Call it positioning.

What happened next was this -
Israel's prime minister declared Monday that there would be no cease-fire with Hezbollah guerrillas, apologizing for the deaths of Lebanese civilians but saying "we will not give up on our goal to live a life free of terror." His Security Cabinet approved widening the ground offensive.
They had just called up thirty thousand reservists. They called up another fifteen thousand. So the president of Syria told his army to raise readiness, as something seemed to be up. Well, the Jerusalem Post had reported that the White House had been pressing Israel attack Syria. Forget birth pangs. We're talking induced labor. And in Iraq the vice president of our new government there, Shiite by default, was saying Israel was carrying out massacres, and former moderate clerics were on our case. But Israel bombed on, and we stood with them, alone.

And there was the inevitable - the Israel Defense Forces indicated that it might not have been responsible for the deaths at all (here) - the building they bombed didn't fall in until seven hours later and they have no explanation for that, but think something is up. And your can see here that the Israeli Insider is claiming the whole thing was staged - these people killed their own folks to make Israel, and by extension the Americans, the bad guys. You can find a lot of that on the web, and on Fox News Oliver North floated the idea - it may have been a set-up to make "us" look bad. Cognitive dissonance is a wonderful thing.

But things - as we talk about childbirth and opportunity and say dead children are just something you have to accept - are looking bad, as Daniel Froomkin notes here -
In the best of circumstances, Bush would be running the risk of being considered callous. But in the current circumstances, he runs the risk of being considered both callous and delusional.

… You don't get much more Washington Establishment than Richard N. Haass, who was Bush's first-term State Department policy planning director and now leads the Council on Foreign Relations. And he apparently finds Bush's position laughable. Literally.

Peter Baker writes in the Washington Post that Haass "laughed at the president's public optimism. 'An opportunity?' Haass said with an incredulous tone. 'Lord, spare me. I don't laugh a lot. That's the funniest thing I've heard in a long time. If this is an opportunity, what's Iraq? A once-in-a-lifetime chance?'"
People are catching on. Well, actually, the rest of the world had caught on a long time ago, years ago. They've been trying to tell us, but they're foreigners so they don't count, of course. But then polling shows the American public is slowly catching on, late to the game but sensing there's something delusional going on at the top. Some things you have to figure out yourself. The third of the country that says the president is doing just fine and his ideas are sound may find themselves getting more and more defensive - when people laugh at you when everyone is sitting around shooting the breeze you may get upset, not that you'd change your mind. (For a curious discussion of "the apparently literal impossibility of explaining the fundamentally counterproductive nature of the United State's invasion of Iraq, or of what's currently going on in Lebanon, to those who disagree" see William Gibson here - it all goes back to Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" and the blindness that "changing paradigms" induces, really - and it is quite convincing.)

And even the most carefully calculating group of people, who know their very careers and just about everything they are depends on not offending anyone about anything on any topic, the Democratic congressional leadership, sent the president a letter on that Monday, about the Iraq part of the delusion. And it included this -
The open-ended commitment in Iraq that you have embraced cannot and should not be sustained. Rather, we continue to believe that it is time for Iraqis to step forward and take the lead for securing and governing their own country... We believe that a phased redeployment of U.S. forces from Iraq should begin before the end of 2006. U.S. forces in Iraq should transition to a more limited mission focused on counterterrorism, training and logistical support of Iraqi security forces, and force protection of U.S. personnel... Mr. President, simply staying the course in Iraq is not working. We need to take a new direction.
They even stopped squabbling among themselves. Everyone signed on - Murtha, Biden, and the whole gang. This is very odd. But then, when the whole world was there years ago, and two-thirds of the nation is slapping their foreheads and feeling had, maybe it's safe to send a letter now.

On another issue, the same day out here down in Long Beach, Tony Blair was meeting with Arnold Schwarzenegger, our odd governor, and the two of them announced an agreement to bypass the Bush administration and work together to explore ways to fight global warming (details here). Just bypass the White House - everyone knows they're a rather useless bunch. Heck, the administration still claims there is a lively debate on whether global warming is caused by man or just stuff that happens now and then, although they find it hard to come up with folks on the latter side of the argument, save for one guy at Yale and the fellow who wrote Jurassic Park. Why even bother trying to get them to do anything? So California and the UK will work something out together. George cannot be happy with Tony. And states really shouldn't be entering into what looks like treaty agreements with foreign countries - that's against the rules. But you've got to do what you've got to do. We're funding embryonic stem cell research out here too. Why even bother to argue with the administration?

And why even deal with people, who, as Scott Rosenberg notes here, here are pretty much saying we have to destroy Lebanon in order to save it. Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt. But as Rosenberg says -
Chalk up another Vietnam parallel: Just as, in that conflict, military officers explained that in order to save a village we had to destroy it, so, today, President Bush explains that the destruction of Lebanon - one of the Middle East's very few functioning democracies -- is all in the service of spreading democracy.

Addressing the Coast Guard in Miami, Bush declared, "When democracy spreads in the Middle East, the people of that troubled region will have a better future, the terrorists will lose their safe havens and their recruits, and the United States of America will be more secure."

Never mind that Hezbollah, the Shiite group that provoked Israel's attack and continues to fire missiles across the border, was actually a part of the coalition that ruled democratic Lebanon. I suppose that if, say, elections in Saudi Arabia replaced its authoritarian monarchy with an Islamist democracy, we would hear something similar from our government: Democracy, yes - but it has to be a democracy that elects just the right people! In taking on the grand mission of bringing democracy to the Middle East, it seems, the U.S. is also committing itself to intervention (or support of others' intervention) any time that democracy produces governments we don't like.

Oh, Bush also took the opportunity to explain how the war between Israel and Hezbollah is actually all a part of the Manichean struggle that commenced on 9/11: "'For decades, the status quo in the Middle East permitted tyranny and terror to thrive,' the president said. 'And as we saw on Sept. 11, the status quo in the Middle East led to death and destruction in the United States, and it had to change.'"
Yep, it's the same thing. And Republican Senator Hegel, was blunt on the floor of the senate - this is "an absolute replay of Vietnam." He says we need to call for an immediate cease-fire - no more civilians in Lebanon get killed and no more rockets drop into northern Israel. Then everyone can talk. Of course he's ex-military. He fought in Vietnam. The administration scoffs at such folk - think Max Cleland, and of course that coward who knows nothing of these matters, John Kerry with all his medals. Amateurs. Monty Python couldn't top all that.

Rosenberg also offers this -
First we have the Bush administration's basic position, which, it's fair to say, has all along been: It's time to clean house in Lebanon. Let Israel do whatever it wants. Cease-fires are for wimps (unless they're real, manly cease-fires that are agreed to only after you have pulverized your enemy and achieved your goals). Then we have a succession of escalating awful events on the ground culminating in the Qana carnage - events that not only feature civilian bloodshed but that also immediately and directly harm the administration's "war on terror" by discrediting the U.S. among the Muslim populations whose hearts and minds we are supposed to be winning over. Finally, we have the U.S. engineering a slight slowdown in the Israeli onslaught - trumpeted on front pages as a "concession." This "concession" is so limited it has to be announced by American spokespeople rather than Israel itself, and before long it turns out to be so limited as to be nearly meaningless.
And he wonders what the administration is up to, offering these four possibilities -
1) They really mean it when they say that they only want a cease-fire if it can be a lasting cease-fire. Probably they do "mean it" in the sense that this accurately represents the wishful thinking of the president and vice president. As that wishful thinking collides with reality, however, the stance becomes increasingly irrelevant.

2) They think victory for Israel is just over the next ridge - the way it is for the U.S. in Iraq. Therefore holding Israel back from delivering a coup de grâce against the Hezbollah terrorists would hurt the "global war on terror" - civilian casualties are regrettable but it's more important to let Israel get the job done. The assumption here is that, given enough time, the Israeli military machine will get the job done. Unfortunately for Bush (and the Israelis), at the moment the Lebanon campaign looks no more effective at establishing the invader's invincibility than the Iraq invasion was at demonstrating American power.

3) It's a throw-the-gameboard over move. Things in the Middle East are so bad for the U.S. right now that Bush's team wants to go for broke. We have hints that Washington is egging Israel on to take on Syria. With Iraq spiraling the drain and Iran ascendant, Bush sees Israel's Lebanon campaign as the only way to create a new "opportunity" (to use Rice's term) in the Middle East. This scenario would be easier to credit if the neocon gang (Wolfowitz, Feith, et al.) that took us into Iraq were still manning the fort. Today we can only hope and pray that the reality quotient in policymaking circles is a little higher.

4) There is no one at the wheel. "Let it play out" might be a calculated stance, but it could also be the pure deer-in-the-headlights paralysis of a White House that is so far out of its depth it cannot muster any sort of coherent response to a crisis. In other words, there might not be method to this madness; in the immortal words of Martin Sheen's Willard in "Apocalypse Now," "I don't see any method at all."
He has the sinking feeling it's number four. And maybe it is.

There may be no one at the wheel. Is there a better explanation?

Well, maybe there is. It's the "human nature" explanation. Everyone tells you what you believe is wrong, and it's unanimous, and basic logic tells you you're wrong, and everyone is pointing to the logic. So you get defensive. You insist you're right, and everyone else just doesn't get it, all of them, every one of them. And you offer an alternative logic. When they laugh you act all noble - you play the misunderstood visionary. No one understands you, and it's so sad. Watch Humphrey Bogart in The Cain Mutiny - he got that thing down cold, maybe his best performance. Of course he was playing a madman, but he nailed the character. It's just in this case we don't get the ball bearings and this isn't about strawberry ice cream. And there will never be a court martial of anyone.

He doesn't like taking crap from anyone. Think of this from Ron Suskind's new book, The One Percent Doctrine -
He's a graduate student at one of America's most prestigious business schools.

He is the leader of his class basketball team.

Without provocation, he hits the leader of the opposing team in the jaw to stop him from making a shot. A few minutes later, he blocks another shot by the same man by smashing his legs on a jump shot.

Years later after both had become successful businessmen, the fellow who'd been struck twice was still wondering what the hell all that had been about. One day he happened to run into the man's brother, now the governor of a state. Could he explain it?

Well, yes. You see, in Texas there are people who get satisfaction from being hard. This was an example of Texas hardness.
That too might explain things. The whole crew is like that - the "shock and awe" crowd. We get two an half more years of this.

___

Thinking Differently

Here's a little thought experiment from the novelist Jane Smiley. She won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992 for A Thousand Acres and her Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (Knopf) is pretty good literary criticism. She writes articles for all the major magazines and she's a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has a way with words, and ideas, and on current matters she offers this -
One of the things that is astonishing about conservatives is that they seem not to understand the simplest facts of logistics, such as how expensive and fragile extended supply lines are. I imagine it this way: France sends 150,000 troops to subdue California. California has 36 million people, most of them armed with something - if not guns, then kitchen knives. France divides up its forces between LA, San Francisco, Sacramento, San Jose, and Bakersfield, leaving, say a thousand troops to pacify the Monterey Peninsula, from south of Big Sur to north of Santa Cruz and east to the 101, about 4800 square miles of mountainous and inhospitable terrain. How exactly are they going to do it if we Californians refuse to cooperate? They will certainly make examples of some of us, destroy lots of our houses, wreck as much of our infrastructure as possible, and imprison some of us who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it's a long way from France to Monterey, it's hard to ship lots of supplies all that way, and so unless the French Army takes what we have, thereby alienating us, they are going to be hard put to subdue us, and the longer it takes them, the less likely it is that they will accomplish what they set out to do. Anyway, as soon as the French army leaves my neighborhood, I'm going to do what I want. Just about the only way that the French army is going to succeed here in Monterey is genocide - same in LA, same in San Fran, same in Sacramento.

The French Army is in big trouble because they have mistaken their fantasies for reality, but as they begin to win over the Hispanic population of California, they find themselves looking the other way when some ethnic cleansing takes place. The French Minister of Defense goes on the record saying that "Democracy is messy" a few days after some of my neighbors are ethnically cleansed by their gardeners. All around the world, after this incident, there is muttering about how maybe my neighbors deserved what happened to them (although isn't it too bad about the children?), but I can't help think that before the French army came along we seemed to be getting along well enough here in California. It's just that now, with the infrastructure largely destroyed by the French bombing and survival more difficult, it is inevitable that everything will be messy. Unfortunately, Jacques Chirac, when he planned this war on California, didn't bother to factor in the inevitable social breakdown that has been a documented part of every war since time began. I mean, unfortunately for us. Chirac doesn't care how California has been destroyed because he's distracted by his poll numbers, which are low, and in order to revive them, he is talking about attacking Mexico. This time, though, since the French Army is pinned down in California, he is just going to bomb the Mexican populace into submission. It's going to be a genocide. That seems to be his only strategic alternative, and the defense of France requires it.

Modern air war is always genocide. It has to be, because that's what bombs are for - they are for burning and blasting out civilians. That is the use they were put to the Second World War, and that is the use they have been put to since, and no one has ever proven that genocide-through-bombing was effective in persuading civilian populations to switch loyalties from one side to another. In fact, Jorg Friedrich, historian of the Allied bombing of Germany maintains that thousands and thousands of bombs toward the end of the war only stiffened German civilian resistance. Conservatives live by the principle that force always works in the end - and it does, if genocide is the goal (I mean real genocide, where a majority of a given population are killed), but what have you got when the killing is over? A devastated landscape, the reputation for war crimes, and a big humanitarian mess. The psychology on the face of it is just wrong. They're trying to kill me so I will start honoring and obeying them? Only a conservative would expect something like that, and only from the other side. He himself would never expect to be bombed into submission. So let's quit playing word games.

But let's give the conservatives the benefit of the doubt and say that they know enough to know, even though they don't say so, that bombing and genocide are not actually any more persuasive to an indigenous population somewhere else in the world than they would be to folks at home. But if that is true, why are they so enamored of bombing, attacking, sending in the troops?
Good question, that. But there's more -
Why did they come here, so far from France, in the first place? Oh, right. It was "French interests abroad" that they were trying to defend. You know, I was suspicious when they bought up the water rights in my neighborhood. I thought at the time "Why would the Loire Valley Water Authority buy the rights to the Carmel River?" And then when they put in the sausage facility and started sending groups of hunters out to harvest the wild pigs that infest our area, I was actually happy. But now I understand that for them the cost of doing business in California was just too high. We wanted them to pay pretty steep taxes and we began charging much stiffer permit fees for hunting licenses when we heard that those sausages were selling for about the same price as Kobe beef, while we were getting nothing at our end, the "buy low" end. The water owners and the sausage-makers back in France got incensed at how uppity we Californians were. They decided it was easier and far more cost effective (for them), to send in the French army to permanently secure the supply of water and sausage than it was to actually make a deal with us. But now the river is polluted and the sausage facility has been blown up by insurgents from Santa Cruz, so the French capitalists are thinking of investing in China (and I say French, but really, the money behind them is not only French - it's Saudi, American, British, Chinese, Brazilian. Capitalists are always proud of globalization. Money, as they say, doesn't care who owns it). What Capitalism requires, as I understand it, is the ruthless externalization of costs so that shareholders will keep investing. The job of the executives is always to reduce costs and maximize profits, so getting others to pay and keeping the profits for oneself is always the point and the goal. I am going to repeat that again, because so many average persons think that the corporation is their friend and capitalism is the lifeblood of democracy. The goal of capitalists is to make me, the average citizen, pay as much of the cost of doing business as possible, and to keep for themselves as many of the profits as possible.
And on it goes. It's just a different way of looking at things. Enjoy it while you are still allowed to look at things differently.

Posted by Alan at 23:26 PDT | Post Comment | Permalink
Updated: Tuesday, 1 August 2006 07:13 PDT home

Newer | Latest | Older