A Passage to Iraq

[I]f the reporting out of Iraq is accurate, Mahmudiyah is a tale of sadism and degradation and of the desire of one man and possibly others to display mastery over the weak for reasons having nothing to do with why America is in Iraq.

Wait. Why is America in Iraq, again?

This is a sentence in "Not Just Another Abuse Scandal," by Colbert I. King, a critic of the Administration and the war. If the column didn't exist, we'd have to invent it. It so perfectly encapsulates the essenial contradictions of liberal antiwar thought that I'm tempted to call it an archetype of the form. It abstracts the whole corpus of confused protest on the part of the unradical left.

Don't "lump" the rape and murder in Mahmudiyah together with other war atrocities, King asks. It was not, after all, "a case of soldiers exceeding their orders or authority in the interrogation of prisoners -- or an example of war-weary, stressed-out troops mistakenly assuming a villager was a member of the insurgency. Neither was it a situation in which U.S. service members, grief-stricken over the loss of a comrade, decided to take out their anguish on people who looked like the enemy." It was, instead a pre-meditated, individual, criminal act made worse because it sullied his vastly symbolic uniform, which carries in its very threads the martial rightness of the United States of America and Old Glory, her flag.

In other words, though King couldn't put it so because he clearly has no idea what he's saying, a violent crime executed by a deranged individual is of greater moral import than a long series of war atrocities which are not only endemic to imperial war, but are necessitated by it.

King does yeoman's work to vitiate "the alleged attacks by U.S. troops on unarmed Iraqi civilians in Fallujah, Haditha, Qaim or Salahuddin province." In his telling, they were merely examples of "war-weary, stressed-out troops" making wrong assumptions, or "grief-stricken" troops doing what is only natural, apparently, to grief-stricken men with guns. It's a good effort to make the natural state of things sound like mitigating circumstances. All troops in war are stressed-out and war-weary. All troops are grief-stricken at the loss of comrades. These aren't excuses for the perpetration of atrocities.

But even correcting for Colbert's attempted-exculpatory langauge, his framework is naive. It indulges the favorite liberal über-caveat: against the war, but support the troops. Support the troops how? By wishing they don't get killed?

What it really means is: speak loudly against the policy, but place no agency in the perpetrators of that policy. Although engaged in an action claimed by liberals to be deeply wrong and possibly illegal, the soldiers, merely acting in their daily capacities, are good, as is their work. But their work is to make possible the project that liberals abhor. In no different a manner, ultimately, than the President's habit of cloaking himself in an orgy of uniforms, liberals seek to innoculate themselvs against charges of insufficient nationalism when it comes time to "deal with terrorism" or what have you. If the war is indeed a crime, then the daily lives of those "good" soldiers are lived in service of criminality. That doesn't mean that each and every one should be prosecuted as a war criminal come the end of the war. That goes without saying. The soldiers of nations prosecuting aggressive wars can't be held liable for the policy of state. It does mean that you must, at least, own up to the inescapable conclusion that for the duration of a wrong war the soldiers too are acting in the wrong.

But then some conservative might call liberals "against the troops" or such other schoolyard taunt, and Atrios and the sewing circle of FireDogLake will expend a zillion pixels explaining that it is Republicans who hate the military because they use it to wage war.

Finally, there is the confusion of aberration with essential. Clearly, I'm deeply opposed to the war in Iraq. It's a terrible thing, a violation of almost every principle I hold dear. But look, this is an imperial war. We are a vast world-power reaching across the globe to topple a government, occupy a foreign nation, remake it into an "ally" (read "client" or "province"). We face an indigenous insurgency. We are too few to rule there except through brutality, brutality as absurdity, in daily doses.

"Yes, nothing criminal," Ronny summed up, "but there's the native, and there's one of the reasons why we don't admit him to our clubs [. . .] But I must get on with my work. Krishna!" Krishna was the peon who should have brought the files from his office. He had not turned up, and a terrific row ensued. Ronny stormed, shouted, howled, and only the experienced observer could tell that he was not angry, did not much want the files, and only made a row because it was the custom. Servants, quite understanding, ran slowly in circles, carrying hurricane lamps. Krishna the earth, Krishna the stars replied, until the Englishman was appeased by their echoes, fined the absent peon eight annas, and sat down to his arrears in the next room.

From A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

A More Appropriate Headline

"Bush Asserts Security Blanket Would've Blocked Monster under the Bed"

No School District Gets Ahead

Yesterday, NPR featured a piece on the Los Angeles School District, which is in danger of losing funding, or more accurately in danger of being told it's in danger of losing funding, if it doesn't, you know, sprinkle magic seeds on the ground and grow great stalks of pedagogical greenery which each student may climb to Utopic, well-paid, scholarly adulthood.

Read the story yourself. The consider the absurdity of these so-called market-based education reforms. Schools are meant to "compete" now. If they do poorly, students can leave. If they do well, students will flock. There will be choices. The market will work its magic. We shall become consumers of education, even prior to the conspicious consumption of the American higher-education boondoggle.

Except . . . what competition? What market?

You can't graft free-marketism onto a state monopoly. A failing school can't run advertisements, lay off nonessential staff, raise additional revenue by courting investors, offer discounts and specials, or any other tool in the belt of enterprise. Even a failing business has options to convince, cajole, trick, or lure in customers. Certainly failing businesses can get loans or grants or new infusions of capital to actually improve. But a public school is a public school is a public school. Those that are failing have no option but to continue to fail, however valiantly (or not valiantly) their staffs may fight. They can't get rid of their rotten students, or at least not efficiently and effectively. They can't acquire additional revenue.

In short, they face the punitive aspects of markets--loss of "customers," loss of revenue (funding), decline of phsysical infrastructure, decline in reputation, decline in quality of new hires, etc.--with no corrective measures available to them, except, of course, to appeal to the government for more money, which the government will withhold because the school is already failing, and you can't throw bad money after bad, or whatever.

We're the government, and we're here to help.

Question

How can one be "an apologist for global warming"?

Answer: One cannot.

Quote Progressive Close Quote

What the fuck is a progressive?

The pallid young Democrats flocking to the term these days would be no more reconizeable (or acceptable) to the Debsian progressives of American history than would George W. Bush's Republican Party be to Lincoln. These are not radicals, these Democrats and YearklyKossians and FireDogLakers and KillJoeLiebermaniacs. These are the mainstream supporters of a mainstream corporate party who believe that their flinching support for a woman's right to have her fetus extracted, their tepid and unconvincing belief that foreign intervention generally rocks, except when done "incompetently" or based on lies less palatable than those of, say, William Jefferson Clinton, and their conviction that if we would just pay the poor fuckers who sling burgers at Wendy's ten bucks an hour, the rising tide would lift all ships, etc. etc. and so forth and so on.

These are not, in other words, youths (nor adults) radicalized by the war and turning on their own complicit party. In '68 they were calling Democrats war criminals and getting their heads stoved in in the streets. Nary a whiff of tear gas in Hartford, however, as the ahem-Progressives make homophobic hay of the bisous-bisous between G-Dub and J-Leeb. "We will replace this warmongering Orthodox Jewish moralist with this millionaire businessman who, by calling disaster disaster, deserves our vote." My word, it's the new Bastille Day, isn't it?

Here's the most basic problem with such ahem-progressives: their critical faculties don't extend beyond the disaster immediately in front of their faces. They refuse, in other words, to think, preferring only to react. So, while the systematic torture has proven to be a systemic problem (progressives, please note the correct usages of the terms systematic and systemic) in Iraq, the idea that the United States as a global-military enterprise is itself systemically corrupt is, to these progressives, "conspiracy theory," or some other such cutesy-cute dismissal. The atrocities committed as part-and-parcel of the so-called War on Terror were not dreamed up by Don Rumsfeld during a gassy bout of insomnia on 9-12-2001. They were part-and-parcel of our Latin American policy for decades. They were part-and-parcel of our Southeast-Asia policy before that. They were part-and-parcel of our policy in the Phillipines. They are endemic to the war on drugs. They are endemic to our very own penal system, in which guard-on-prisoner and interprisoner rape, humiliation, and violence are tacitly acknowledged parts of official punishment. Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Condi Rice aren't causitive, but rather symptomatic. They, like the brutal methods employed in their particular crusades, are the symptoms of empire.

All this is very unfashionable talk among ahem-progressives, who are interested in winning elections for the Democratic party. A very young thing named Ezra Klein, in a post otherwise remarkable for its tone of unearned moral condescension, makes the stupendously ignorant statement:

When I quizzed [George Soros] on the actual amounts he was donating and how committed he was to constructing a progressive infrastructure, he rapidly backed away from the claim, protesting that he possessed no interest in significantly seeding the new left. That's why I find all the hubbub about Soros' money so darkly humorous -- he'll never give enough to truly matter.

Now, I'm no fan of billionaires who bum around the CFR with the rest of the Illuminati, but is one Ezra Klein really claiming that the man who gave all those millions to Solidarity and Chapter 77, the man who created the Open Society Institute . . . that this man "will never give enough to truly matter"? Because he doesn't explicitly endorse the goal of, what, voting for Ned Lamont? Because he didn't go to YearlyKos? Are you fucking kidding me you little twerp? While young Ezra Klein plays political strategist with all the alacrity of a perpetual senior-class vice-president . . . Well, twerp said it all. Says it all.

Ahem-Progressives seek institutional power for their own brand. That is all. There's nothing progressive about it. The progress they dream of is reascension to the bridge of the ship of state. There, they shall make small course corrections and call it a fucking day.

The Crime in Gaza

I was, as they say, raised Jewish. Fractiously, secularly, often indifferently, but nonetheless. At very least I got to learn another alphabet and familiarize myself with some pleasantly poetic mythologizing. And somewhere there is a poorly-monitored Roth IRA with a couple-ah-grand languishing untaxed and untapped, the last memento of a very ordinary Bar Mitzvah made amusing only by the post-service reception at our country club, an institution unused—to say the least!—to finding itself festooned with blue-and-white decorative evidence of Jewry.

My already nonreligious family drifted even further from faith after my younger brother and I completed our requisite transitions into pre-to-mid-pubescent manhood, and we’re now the sort of atheistic clan that could never stand for office in these United States. My father’s side of the family was nominally Catholic, and when my grandfather died, a priest long known to us offered my grandmother the odd condolence that Fritz was surely waiting for her in heaven. “What am I supposed to do about that?” my grandmother deadpanned with a speed and wit I only wish I had, “Hurry up and pack him lunch while I’m at it?”

Yet despite the knowledge among my friends, peers, and colleagues that I am heathen-born, heathen-raised, and heathen-set, there’s an awkward pause each time I speak negatively of Israel; then, inevitably: “But aren’t you Jewish?”

Others have written long and well about the fatuous commingling of the State of Israel and the People Formerly Known as Jews—the notion that because there are Jews, and because they have suffered historic wrongs, and because there is now a nation-state run, if not populated, principally by Jews, ergo to critique Israel, however mildly, is to take up the Death’s-Head mantle and advocate the wholesale destruction of God’s Chosen, which pogrom, by the way, probably never occurred in the first place. In other words, to become a crypto-Nazi holocaust denier, a position that makes about as much sense as calling oneself an inventor and devotee of Thomas Edison, all the while denying that he invented the light bulb or the phonograph. Unless you count the erection of a lot of gaudy architecture or the resume of Leni Reifenstahl, there’s precious little for yer av’rage crypto-Nazi to praise in his forebears. What else did they do but transpose Napoleon’s follies northward by degrees and infuse it with a lot of dollar-store Wagnerian hocus-pocus?

Whatever you call it, though, it’s nearly universally granted that to Critique Israel is to Hate Jews. That isn’t even casuistry. The entire proposition is absurd on its face. Zionism bumped around Europe even before Daniel Deronda got all googly-eyed at whatshername in Monte Carlo, or wherever, and thence went forth on a vacation later popularized by Madeline Albright: discovering the inner-outer genealogical Jew within himself. Some Jews even went to eke out a living in the Palestinian desert. Then, after the Second World War, the Moral Imperative reared its ugly head, and the British and the Americans and a lot of other hopped-up Western victors carved Israel back out of the map as if the Old Testament were a geography text. I know, I know. That’s reductivist and dismissive. But capering over the history doesn’t make the conclusion less true.

At this point in the conversation, someone usually rears back and does the ol’ j’accuse number: “Are you saying Israel has no right to exist?!” Eyes widen and roll like a bad cut from a Dario Argento film. Screams are heard. God weeps. Madeline Albright says the Kaddish. Elijah farts in his flaming chariot.

There’s no answer to that question. Israel does exist. The United States has no right to exist either, seeing as how Europeans small-poxed the continent, killed the buffalo, and herded the rest of the indigenous inhabitants into reserves on the worst land this side of the Gobi, but it does, and here we are. Time machines have not yet been invented. The notion of nation-states possessing “rights” is transparent bullshit in any event. A smarter man than I wrote, and I concur, that states possess powers; only men (excuse me: persons) possess rights.

So the point to make is that Israel does not have the right to keep killing Palestinians, toppling their government, undermining their society, arresting and emasculating their men, destroying what modicum of normalcy they’ve scraped up for their lives. It does, unfortunately, have the power to do so, and it exercises it indiscriminately. Israel has killed more Palestinians than vice versa, in large part because its US-funded and US-built military far outstrips the capacity of rock-hurling and aging Kalishnikovs and yes, even that horror of horrors, the suicide bomber. You can’t put people in a cage, whip them into a frenzy, and then start shooting at them when they try to bite your hand. That’s called asking for trouble.

Now, there’s plenty of madness on the other side as well. I do not deny that Hamas spouts distasteful rhetoric; it will never recognize Israel, it says. I ask you: has not Israel spouted precisely the same thing, only inverted? Doesn’t the United States itself yak in precisely the same manner about any number of “rogue states” and “defiant regimes” and axes of evil? Western nations make it a point of pride to confer or de-confer legitimacy on elected and unelected governments everywhere on Earth. Even the notorious, traitorous, perfidious French occasionally emerge from their accommodationist cafés, reeking of Gauloises and vin ordinaire and socialism, to bluster about Iran and Kim Jong-Il and Dick Cheney.

And all of this is a very long-winded way of saying that Israel’s long-planned reinvasion of Gaza is a brutal, absurd, unconscionable enterprise that will prolong the misery of both peoples in that tiny little sliver of the world. It is a criminal enterprise. Were it up to me, I’d push them all back into the sea and find some extant genetic Phoenecians, decent traders who established some lovely cities and managed to figure out the basic concept of an alphabet.

Blogroll Update

I've eliminated Michael Bérubé from the blogroll. I've added Dennis Perrin at Red State Son. Bérubé I find increasingly predictable and unfunny, whereas I find Perrin challenging. I suppose that the traditional (such a word, applied to a blog, ye gods!) move would be to leave both, but despite my verbosity, I'm no great fan of meaningless accretion. Selectivity is a mark of discernment. Have at it.

Independence Day

July 4 is as arbitrary a date as any holiday. It bears as little relation to the real and mythical events of 1776 and the decade following as does December 25 on the Julian calendar to the birth and three decades following in the real and mythical life of Jesus. Yes, the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, but not delivered until some months later, owing to the low bandwidths available in those days, or some such. Meanwhile, the good Republic, chipped and mulched through the last century to lay in the flower beds of empire, didn’t get started until 1789, and the preceding thirteen years of independence were mostly spent mucking from one political crisis to another. General Washington was rich, retired, and drunk, although his guests never guessed at that latter detail. Thomas Jefferson mostly drew pictures and lost money. Who knows what our New England founders were doing—lawyering, presumably, but one can never be sure about an Adams.

Still, Independence Day is as good a day as any to take stock of the current state of things. Currently, the United States is involved in two failed wars in Asia. Americans, by and large, seem to recognize failure once it bludgeons their thick heads for enough concurrent cable-news nights in a row. Sixty-or-so percent of them are now solidly against the war in Iraq, and they would be equally against the war in Afghanistan if they could remember that it exists. The other forty percent express support in polls, but that statistic is misleading. The only people I know who support the war do so in the same spirit as when they fork over five bucks to their colleagues' Heart Walks or 5K Runs Against Breast Cancer: reluctant and slightly embarrassed.

That leaves only conservative writers and bloggers, cable news bimbos (a unisex term here to be sure), and the entire seasonal population of Washington, D.C. to yabber on about Victory, Withdrawal, Re-deployment, and so many other buzzwords and martial neologisms popular in our heavily fortified capital. A large number of Pax-Americana Liberals writing for dumber magazines like The New Republic now propose that the war(s) was lost through incompetence, and that all will turn around with another six months of perseverance and a Changing of the Course. Republicans, meanwhile, figure that as long as they can keep American deaths to a thousand or so a year, they can skate through to 2008 owing to the incoherency of the opposition, which is probably true. We did not lose a good war because it was badly prosecuted, of course. We lost bad wars because they were bad, unnecessary, ill-conceieved, unjustified, objective-less, DOA catastrophes dreamt up by callow, thin-chested, untanned Washingtonians who imagined that last summer’s confab at AEI or some roundtable at the Kennedy School had bearing on the capacity of America to inject Democracy into the ruins of an Arab dictatorship.

Of all the people in American life to feel pity for, then, George W. Bush is the most deserving. Here is a man raised his entire life to serve precisely one purpose in business or politics—for the Bush clan, there’s hardly any difference. His rôle was to read words others had written. Badly. This allowed everyone else in the room to feel like they were pulling one over on the stupid sonofabitch, and it made him popular with such illiterates as baseball fans and the American voter. People make far too much of Bush’s early drinking, his cavorting, his imbecility in college, his nastiness. What else was he to do while waiting to kneel and accept the mantle? Drink, brawl, and fail at business. Eventually his business associates got sick of bailing him out and bought him a governorship. He grinned and strode around. Then they purchased his presidency, which first campaign cost about as much as a midsized Hollywood movie but with poorer special effects.

Since then we’ve rolled merrily to ruin. The business interests that put George Bush in the White House, counting on the vague support of an amiable dunce who’d stay out of the regulatory game and act as a sort of national WalMart greeter, grinning and shoving the American people toward the line of shopping carts, hadn’t the smarts or the wherewithal to keep the all crazies and millenarians from the last fifty years of American politics from defrosting and crawling back into their sinecures throughout the offices of the empire. Business was no match for a convincingly hollow escahtology, and since someone once told George W. Bush that he was a Christian, he felt duty-bound to ride back into the Middle East with dreams of Megiddo.

Needless to say, it didn’t work out so well. For a few months, George strode around and uttered militant nonsense that sounded like the books of the Prophets rewritten by a feverish and war-mad Teddy Roosevelt. But soon after the unfortunate flyboy incident on the deck of that aircraft carrier, the ratings went south. Showdown: Iraq proved to have less box office draw than anyone predicted. It was overlong. Something should’ve been left on the cutting room floor. George’s speechwriters gave up, which explains why he’s spent the last three years giving precisely the same speech over and over again. The country-hick preacher-warrior of the early presidency now sounds like a sad mainline pastor recycling sermons. The rats are fleeing the sinking ship. Even the diehard hangers-on now concede failure, but they lay the blame on sundry bogeymen like The Media, Which Is Liberal, a kind of pre-post-facto re-reckoning of the entire disaster as a noble victory scuttled by the scheming pamphleteers of the Eastern cosmopolis at the moment of greatest glory.

Happy Birthday, America.