Allah and the Little Red Book

Another Iran-is-scary story from the official press, in which the various powers in Iran once again pull off the less-impressive-than-it-oughta-be feat of sounding vastly more reasonable, sane, measured, and mature than their American and European counterparts, whose rhetoric had remained cocooned in a merely hysterical lacuna until recently, at which point it emerged from its chrysalis quite insane.

If you wonder why the Europeans, particularly the supposedly antiwar French and Germans, are so willing to bang the drum and sound the horns now, when three years ago the balked at our march toward Iraq, consider that whereas Iraq turned to Russia and also Western Europe for commercial skullduggery, Iran turns to Russia, yes, but also resolutely eastward toward China, thumbing its long Persian nose at the ineffectual Europeans even as it makes vague noise about pricing its oil in euros, principally to piss off Americans even more.

The sane among us note that if Iran were truly on a civilizational jihad against the apostates and infidels of the world, it would hardly pursue close relations with the world’s largest ancestor-worship cum animist cum atheist state, particularly one which viciously suppresses its indigenous Muslim population. It’s a testament to our bizarre combination of cultural myopia and imperial expansionism that we presume all other peoples are as convinced as we are that their society is the apogee of human development and that it must therefore be evangelized throughout the world, at gunpoint if necessary. So far as I can tell, the Iranians seem essentially unconcerned with what the Chinese do within their borders; the Chinese likewise seem unpredisposed to lecture the Iranian government on the necessity of giving up god in order to pursue quasi-semi-demi-post-Maoist-reconstructed-Marxian-pseudo-State-planned capitalism.

It should be curious to we incurious Americans that an atavistic theocracy and a post-communist gerontocracy are so much more faithful to the live-and-let-live credo that once had—I’m told—some fair measure of currency in these United States.

I'm gonna fuck you up for saying you won't let me fuck you up.

"Iran Threatens Retaliation if Attacked."

So reads the headline. I suppose in the anarchic schoolyard sort of world that our nation seems presently intent on creating, such phrasing reads with depressing ease as ordinary bully-bully, chest puffing: "Oh yeah? Touch me again and see what happens!" "Oh yeah? You touch me again and see what happens!" And so on through an embarrasingly impotent series of escalating pseudo-threates until such time as one boy reels off and pops the other in the nose, at which point both start crying, one from the pain and one from the sight of blood.

Of course neither boy has a nuclear bomb tucked inside his jacket, but juvenile psychology is remarkably consistent on all scales, from boys to nations, a veritable fractal geometry of felt inadequacies projected as aggression on the rest of the immediate world.

Still, there's a perversity in that Times article that reflects on our principle problem as a nation, and then again on nationalism itself, which is just tribal exceptionalism by any other name. Despite the preposterous and evasive contention that "the Bush administration has insisted it is pursuing a diplomatic path, even while vaguely holding open the distant option of imposing sanctions or taking military action if diplomacy fails," the fact remains that it is the United States, not Iran, which threatens aggression. To call the Iranian response to our increasingly provacative and unveiled threats "escalating rhetoric" is worse than a lie. It's we, not they, who openly propose to use nuclear weapons against a sovereign nation that hasn't attacked us, nor indicated that it plans to attack us in the near or forseeable future.

Argument by Escher: that which follows precedes. Iranian promises of self-defense (retaliation!) in the case of American aggression are recycled by our official media as casus belli for . . . American aggression, as if any sovereign nation that doesn't go supine at the merest hint of American displeasure has created through the mere possibility of future intransigence the occasion for war.

This is what I and other information critics mean when we talk about polluted discourse. Creating self-fulfilling apocalyptic visions is no way to run a nation. These stories only add to the sense of doomed inevitability about an eminently evitable conflict: we cease to discuss the essential issue, that it's not right nor just nor necessary to invade another nation without the provocation of an attack, and instead we fatuously take up the notion that Iran's impossible promise of disproportionate retaliation in-and-of-itself indicates that Iran poses a immediate danger.

I remain unconvinced that the Crawford Khan and his Horde have the wherewithal to invade Iran, but that hardly diminishes the danger posed by a nation like the United States making it national belief and national policy to forbid any other nation from defending itself--to remake defense as an act of aggression, since, as Max Boot snivels, we are the good guys, regardless . . .

Bref: It is poor form, when accused of being a Zionist Crusader state, to oblige your accusers by becoming one.

I'll Gladly Pay You Tuesday for Some Gasoline Today

Monkey see, monkey do.

One of the more fatuous ripostes offered by prowar factions in this country (and I know how wide and deep a field that is) is the old: "Of course the war isn't about oil! If it were, we'd've just seized the oil fields and gas wouldn't be three bucks a gallon right now."

Transparent foolishness: can you imagine the so-called Bush administration operating the oil industry as some kind of quasi-national enterprise? That's precisely the sort of socialistic whatnot that Paul Bremer, Viceroy to the Stars, put an end to when he ordered the fuck-all privatization of nigh everything in Iraq. You know, because shock therapy worked so well and fomented democratic institutions so quickly in Russia. It was never our purpose to perform a hostile takeover of a national indistry, replacing one ministry with another. It was always our purpose to open Iraq to energy enterprise, principally those firms that are still nominally American, as opposed to French Total and the dirty Russian firms, all currently maligned in the oil-for-food go-around. Oil isn't flowing and prices aren't falling because we totally fucked it up, not because we intended to destroy the native industry. Iraq is perhaps the world's best current example of assumptions making asses of you and me. In Iraq, beliefs about a recoverable and profitable oil industry proceeded from beliefs about post-Saddam political developments.

Feckless Democratic critics and much of the traditional press couch this criticism as: The neocons expected democracy to spring up overnight. But that's not quite the case. What they expected was an American client state to spring up overnight, preferably through the installation of a Shah formerly exiled strongman constitution-derived parliament trans-ethnic National Unity Government. Why should Americans run the wells when Americans can make money from running them with truckloads of cheap wogs? It's clear that the essential neocon assumption was that after a few weeks of war the military could garrison here and there throughout the country, the exiles would take over the new Raj, and we Americans could lounge around the colonial club like a bunch of E.M. Forster characters, occasionally lecturing the wives and Labor on the necessity of a bit of brutishness to keep the Native in line.

As for why gas is so pricey these days, I'm not the sort of "expert" who finds himself at the feet of a congressional inquiry, but I've got a fair idea that it has something to do with the fact that there's a limited supply and we use too fucking much of it?

Madness Everywhere

Via Jeff Wells at Rigorous Intuition, I came across this bit of a Russian newscast (in English). The point of interest is in the very first segment, in which a large group of non-hysterical reporters ask an equally non-hysterical Iranian President at least one or two non-hysterical questions, to which he replies . . . non-hysterically.

Do I trust him? Not in the least. It should go without saying that heads of state practice tactical mendacity the way most of us wish to move our bowels, which is to say regularly and predictably. The heads of protonuclear states . . . all the more so.

Nor do I dismiss him, however. It's very easy to take for granted the notion that when they act crazy, it's because they're crazy, whereas when we act crazy, it's because we merely seek the strategic advantages acquired through the appearance of lunacy. Since WWII, at least, that formulation seems precisely backwards to me, all the more so under the dauphinate of George le jeune and the March Hare Ministerium currently plotting the beheadings in our late, great Wonderland. I trust (not precisely the right word) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad more than I trust George W. Bush and his various interlocuters because his motives are so much easier to divine. Do I believe that Iran wishes, as he says, to move forward in full compliance with the non-Proliferation Treaty, forswearing nuclear weaponization except insofar as US provocations may eventually necessitate a nuclear deterrent? No, not really. But I do believe that Iran is generally far less interested in nuclear weaponry, at least for now, than our resident scaremongers would have us believe. If they seek it, it's for matters of national pride and security in an already nuclear neighborhood. Recall that the US allows and blesses both Israel and India to weild their nukes totally outside any NPT obligations; recall that Pakistan also has nukes. And for all the gaudy talk of Iranian "influence" in Iraq, I suspect that the prospect of failed-state Iraq on one side and failed-state Afghanistan on the other worries Tehran more than it excites the moo-lahs.

In short, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's rhetoric serves a dual purpose: first to raise his image and power in internal Iranian power struggles of which we know very little; and second, to raise Iran's standing among Arab and Muslim states--to claim leadership where the apostate, Amero-centric monarchs of the House of Saud have failed. There is perhaps some irony as well in this moment, in which the historical Persia works to set itself ahead a new Delian League, contra our poor Crawford Xerxes.

On one hand . . .

Kevin Drum, a man in possession of more other hands than cells in the average body, posits that perhaps, just perhaps, Mary O. McCarthy's firing from the CIA isn't precisely what the agency's silence is intended to suggest it is.

Gracious, it's almost as if it were just timed to coincide with a larger witch hunt and set the anolfactory bloodhounds of the press gang chasing geese. Am I the only person left in America who doesn't trust the CIA?