Dumb

In the post below, I linked to and discussed Billmon's The War Party. Now I see Steve Gilliard, a blogger of Democratic persuasion, has penned a clumsy rejoinder. Billmon needs no defense from the humble corners of Who Is IOZ?, but since Gilliard's post is illustrative of just how self-obsessedly irrelevant are Democrats and their so-called netroots, I'm going to take a moment to discuss his claims.

Gilliard begins by listing past examples of evitable nuclear confrontations that were, needless to say, successfully avoided. Leaving aside a current understanding of history that says the world was frightfully closer to nuclear war during the Cuban (American) Missile Crisis than anyone imagined due at least in part to a Kennedy behaving not unlike a contemporary Presidential Bush, Gilliard's conclusion seems curious: that since nuclear conflict has not happened, therefore it will not happen. Bear that in mind the next time Gilliard turns some stock phrase about Bush wasting money on Iraq instead of counterproliferation. Well, Steve, since Terrorists have never acquired the bomb, it's obvious they never will . . .

There are then some incoherent speculations about Iraqis rising up en masse and slaughtering all 130,000 odd American troops in the event of a nuclear attack on Tehran. This, presumably, is a deterrent to American use of "tactical" nuclear weapons, though it seems to presume more than it knows about the psyches of both the collective Iraqi people, whomever that is, and the collective American governing class, ditto. Also, the Saudi people will take over the oil fields. This is Gilliard "predicting to a letter" what will happen. Not, needless to say, the most sophisticated analysis, but written in words and sentences nonetheless.

Following this, a very, very odd utterance:

It's a lot more comforting to worry about a nuclear war with Iran than some 24 year old with his missing legs, but the reality is that the war mongers will be deflected or lead to a massive defeat and that problem with the VA isn't going anywhere.

That anyone should find the prospect of global conflict precipitated by a nuclear exchange comforting, absolutely or relatively, is bizarre to say the least. It can only be "comforting" if, like Gilliard, you believe it to be an abstraction of an impossibility. But Billmon clearly does not, and neither do I, though I think the odds are longer than he does. In any event, the sentence itself makes no sense. It's ungrammatical. "[...][T]he reality is that the war mongers will be deflected or lead to a massive defeat and that problem with the VA isn't going anywhere." What does this mean? There are several different verb tenses at work.

That problem at the VA isn't going anywhere. Well, no shit it isn't! It isn't going anywhere because the Democratic party, supported by Gilliard and his ilk, continues to acquiesce (at best) to the foreign adventurism of their titular opponents across the aisle. As regards the Israeli-Lebanese conflict, they actively cheer while Israel bombards the civilian population of a helpless nation, destroying its meager government and armed forces, driving its people out of their homes by the hundreds of thousands, and occupying territory in a supposedly sovereign nation. So long as Democrats consent to sacrificing Gilliard's much-ballyhooed 24-year-olds to the war machine, the problems at the VA, the soldiers stepping in front of busses, the deployment-prompted divorces, and all the rest of the problems he cites as such grave threats to the health of the nation will not go away. So long as imperial wars are fought, imperial soldiers will suffer.

What Gilliard argues is a standard trope of the recent wartime politics of Democrats: We will do nothing to alter the underlying policies that make the United States the most hated and feared nation in the world, but by god, we will make sure that poverty never descends on any soldier who acted to implement that policy. Alice, your looking glass. In the middle of his ramble, Gilliard suggests that what we really need to alter the situation in Israel is . . . election finance reform! To borrow Billmon's phrasing: What are you, fucking nuts? This idea that if the deep-pocket Jews were just limited to smaller campaign contributions, then the US-fostered mess in the Middle East would get right as rain is insulting, preposterous, and juvenile. Electoralism is the curse of Democrats, and the real pox upon their house. I suspect that Gilliard honestly believes a wise foreign policy will flow from another elected Clinton. While not necessarily crazy, it's certainly fucking dumb.

Cub Scouts

Billmon says it well:

But there's one big problem with all this hyperventilating: It wildly exaggerates the anti-war fevor that Ned Lamont supposedly represents. Oh I know Ned says he's anti-war, but he only means the war in Iraq. The war in Lebanon, on the other hand, is just fine by him. And he's already pledged he'll be just as staunch a friend of Israel and the Israel lobby in this war as Holy Joe ever was or ever could be. So bombs away.

As Billmon goes on to note, this is true of the majority of the so-called antiwar community, who are opposed only to the "incompetent" war in Iraq, unable to label their own nation the aggressor that it's become, unwilling to condemn imperial war in general, and essentially compromised to the positon that it was "bad" or "cooked" or "misrepresented" intelligence that led to the misattribution of "WMDs", or at least programs to that extent, to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Thus from "bad intelligence" do all errors flow in their minds. But it is and has been the general international disposition of the United States to wage aggressive wars against non-client states (or, in the case of Iraq, former client states) for many decades now. Bipartisanly.

Jim keeps telling me to hope for Democratic victory in one of the houses of congress, or both, in order to achieve Gridlock, Sweet, Sweet Gridlock. On the various, lamentable aspects of domestic non-policy, I'm tempted to agree that the gears would grind and go nowhere--surely preferable to even the marginal "successes" of the current GOP crop. But . . . once again, Billmon puts it best:

It's not that I discount these differences [between parties] 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.

In other words, what differences exist along the budgetary margins, and what benefits might be gained from halting the march of medievalism in government-subsidized medical research or what have you, pales before the bloody imperatives of the Security State, which pursues its inexorable wars regardless.

Recall that in the early days of the ginned-up Iraq crisis, even those Democrats who objected did so on the flimsy grounds that George W. Bush was an abrasive jackass who couldn't get together a "grand coalition" in the manner of his paterfamilias, whose own coalition was itself a PR cover for an Anglo-American adventure, a fact much ignored by the ever-backwards-looking "progressive" community. They objected to Bush's ignorance of and disdain for the diplomatic niceties requisite for good citizens of UNistan. Despite a lot of carping about "letting weapons inspectors do their work," and a lot of post-game quarterbacking of the intelligence issue, when the huddle broke and the play was called, most elected Democrats, finding that the fait was already bien accompli, tried to get right with history and voted Yes to War. Later this tragicomic act of political hari-kari was twisted in the mouth of Cicero-but-for-brevity, John Kerry, into the precursor of the "incompetence" dodge: I gave the President permission to wage an aggressive war of territorial conquest, but I didn't think he'd fuck it up so badly.

Recall also that in those days, post-Axis-of-Evil-Speech, Democrats engaged in endless chatter about the relatively greater danger of North Korea and Iran, accusing the president of ignoring these "threats" in order to wage his PNAC pet project or whatever. A bit of schadenfreude is certainly in order, as Democrats now find themselves in a position where such war with Iran is not merely a rhetorical gambit but practically a foregone conclusion, and there's really no way to wiggle out. If Democrats do take the house and/or senate, and if notre petit prince ascends the rostrum to announce an extension of hostilities into Syria or Iran, does anyone imagine that Sweet, Sweet Gridlock will result? I, for one, do not.

Rather, I expect that Hillary Clinton will lead the charge to don the symbolic yarmulke and hurl our now-fragile armies against the villainous Shi'ites now arrayed against Israel. Ned Lamont will line up behind her, as will every other Democratic politician but Dennis Kucinich, and much of the left-looking blogworld, from Brad DeLong to Markos "You Must Be This Tall to Ride the Thunderbolt" Moulitas to comfortable Kevin Drum to the young things at TAPPED, they'll be stuck staring at their feet and wishing their way out of the double-bind: fight a war they've been all-but-advocating for nigh-unto four years, or abandon it with fancy talk, à la John Kerry, 2004. Neither, needless to say, a recipe for success.

Like Billmon, I think we've now gone too far. Our ambitions have caught up with us. The neat proxy war we wanted to wage through Israel is not neat, and to the population of the Middle East is not proxy. Voting the Democrats into office would be even worse, insofar as they seem collectively to believe that it will be necessary to kill, kill in order to prove to Joe McAmerican in Witchita that no Arabs will blow up the Statue of Liberty when he's in the gift shop on his trip with the wife to catch some Broadway in New York. I don't for a moment, a second, a breath, an instant believe that Democrats, even in the majority, will mount any meaningful opposition to war once the intent to make war is clear. At heart they still believe Abu Ghraib was an abberation and Qana a mistake--the fault of a morally lax, messianic President. That both were inevitable and intentional--and infintely repeatable--is a truth to which no Democrat will admit, even as he necessitates the repetition of these and other horrors.

The Dauphin

I ask you, in what sort of Republic does an article such as this appear. In what sort of "democracy" does the quarreling between the courts of the former and current ruler appear in speculative journalism? I'm well past the point of being shocked, needless to say, but are our pressmen now so compromised and dehistoricized that the specter of "loyalist" advisers to a father-son ruling pair of Georges elicits not the slightest mirth?

The Passion

The cosmic secretariat, in Mencken's inimitable phrase, must be giggling around the boardroom table this week. In absurdly complementary instances on opposite sides of the globe, made more absurd by their vast differences in scale and significance, Israel pursues war against the civilian population of Lebanon while Mel Gibson does his loony pa one better by first demanding the phrenological provenance of a Malibu police officer and thence snarling at the confused goy that the Jews are the cause of all the wars in the world. These are the mad times we live in.

Of course, Gibson is wildly off the mark. Unless the Dauphin and Cardinal Cheney have dipped into the Mikvah while none looked on, it is principally the followers and not the once-and-future accused killers of Christ who are responsible for the real carnage in this world, but it is certainly true that Israel, much ballyhooed as the Jewish--in both essence and actuality--state contributes its fair share to the mix. The problem with Israel is not inherently that its people are Jews, but that the Jews who live there, and unfortunately many of their coreligionists in the United States, buy happily into the sort of pseudomythological blood-rite lebensraum chatter of their own attempted eradicators. That the Hebrews slaughtered the inhabitants of Canaan based on the orders of some tribal deity millennia ago hardly justifies the Greater Israel fantasies of today, and though it raise hue and cry among the Barack Obaman liberals for whom the unseen evidence of the unseen evidence of the unseen . . . well, for whom invisible deities are something that must be electorally reclaimed in order to reclaim the heartland for know-nothing progressivism, I feel obliged to point out that in any event the goatherders' fairytales are no more historical justification for a modern nation and its imagined destiny than the quasi-Norse Wagnerian mumbojumbo that gave uncle Adolph the tingles. Failure to craft a national identity beyond belief in a blood-past is poor policy, in other words, and leads to bloody excess.

No, the Jews are not cause of all the wars in the world, nor even of most of them, but the nation which calls itself the Jewish State is certainly the cause of a great deal of collective suffering, aided and abetted by our American nation, in which real anti-semitism of the Gibsonian sort has been so elided with phony anti-semitism of the "You're against Israel--gasp!" sort that no man may utter the truth about Israel's gangsterism without getting tossed in the same bin as Gibson, David Irving, and Bill Bennet. In my last post I wrote that I was ashamed to be a Jew, and here is why: because so many Jews, Israeli and otherwise, today buy into the absurdity that past catastrophe excuses present criminality, that to oppose Israeli actions, right or wrong, is to oppose Judaism. It is not the opponents of Israel who are most guilty of conflating the State with its Religion, but the supporters. Their motives are perfectly obvious to everyone but Congressional Democrats, currently falling over each other to bolseter Israel as it commits the same criminal stupidities in Lebanon that they supposedly oppose in Iraq, blundering around like idiot bullies, killing anything, claiming some nonexistent democratic highground, subverting every supposed belief of their so-called civilizations in order to bring light to the savages in the form of explosions.

Olmert's Willing Executioners

What happened at Qana was an unspeakable crime made possible by the United States of America.

Meanwhile it appears that the chief legacy of the failed extermination of European Jewry was to render the descendents of survivors entirely insensate to the suffering of others, so convinced of the unapproachable of the calamity suffered by their own people that they take licesne to do or say anything, anything in order to guarantee their "survival"--which, of course, is not in question to begin with. Since no one wants to say it, I will: the tactics of Israel are the tactics of the Third Reich; the Jews of Israel have become their own nemesis. In the service of a created national mythos about blood and homeland (not to mention some eerily familiar carping about demographic doom, what with those Arab birthrates), they've gone about the indiscriminate killing of civilians, and affected the collective punishment of a whole nation for crimes it had at best a highly questionable ability to control or quell.

Billmon wrote recently that before now he'd never felt contempt for Israel. I regretfully raise the ante. I have bever before now regretted or been ashamed to have been born a Jew. I think this year I will attend services on Yom Kippur. I don't believe in God, and one man's atonement doesn't count for much in this world, if anything, but I'm going to say the Kol Nidre anyway, and hope the fucker works:

And it shall be forgiven all the congregation of the children of Israel, and the stranger that sojourneth among them; seeing all the people were in ignorance.