Remind Me Again.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a prisoner during the Vietnam War who led the Senate rebellion against the administration's proposals, said, "The agreement that we've entered into gives the president the tools that he needs to continue to fight the war on terror and bring these evil people to justice." But he added: "There is no doubt that the integrity and letter and spirit of the Geneva Conventions have been preserved."

Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so."

The biggest hurdle, Senate sources said, was convincing administration officials that lawmakers would never accept language that allowed Bush to appear to be reinterpreting the Geneva Conventions. Once that was settled, they said, the White House poured most of its energy into defining "cruel or inhuman treatment" that would constitute a crime under the War Crimes Act. The administration wanted the term to describe techniques resulting in "severe" physical or mental pain, but the senators insisted on the word "serious."

Negotiations then turned to the amount of time that a detainee's suffering must last before the treatment amounts to a war crime. Administration officials preferred designating "prolonged" mental or physical symptoms, while the senators wanted something milder. They settled on "serious and non-transitory mental harm, which need not be prolonged."

These definitions appear in a section of the legislation that specifically lists "grave breaches" of the Geneva Conventions that might bring criminal penalties.

"White House, Senators Near Pact on Interrogation Rules."

If there is a distinction between the broad category of governments that we now call "democracies" and those that we name otherwise (totalitarianisms, dictatorships, tyrannies, or the catch-all "régimes"), then it is that so-called democratic governments limit the scope of their cruelties in order to hide them from their populations, whereas other régimes speak of them in code so as to simultaneously deny and affirm their practice. To name torture, unchallengable imprisonment, secret trials, and any other coercive tool available to States, is to remind your own citizens that such tools may be brought to bear on them. Democracies, socieites "of laws not men" or "of the rule of law," do and always have tortured captives, engaged in unjust wars, conducted secret trials, and imprisoned men without hope of discovery or appeal, but so long as the powers in these societies wish to maintain what Frank Zappa called the profitable illusion of freedom, itself a very effective method of control and a surprisingly effective ensurer of self-induced and self-perpetuating conformity, these tactics are kept as much as possible from public awareness. When hints of them do dribble out--and they inevitably do--then the familiar machinery of patriotic insinuation is cranked up, and the "leftists" or whomever are denounced for naming that-which-we-do-not-do, although we do, in fact, do it.

At some point the illusion of freedom does become too expensive to continue, and a nation like the United States, as it moves away from a model of governance toward a model of outright rule, increasingly acknowledges the various sordid practices it previously concealed from its citizens. First, it acknowledges these practices only as applied to others: foreigners, evildoers, terrorists. Then, with the help of willing patsies like Andrew Sullivan, who often audibly oppose these very practices of torture and detention, it begins naming internal enemies, fifth columns, terrorists sympathizers, leftists, communists, fascists, what have you. None of these names has any inherent meaning. The elasticity of the categories is the point.

The rulers of state will always speak in euphemism because they want to maintain moral authority as a necessary component of their monopoly on coercive force. Our enemies are torturers and killers; we are only interrogators and soldiers. They "force conversions at gunpoint" or "drag the bodies of American contractors through the streets." We "give the President the tools he needs." After a sufficient period in which the meaning of our own euphemisms becomes clear to our own people; after Americans come to understand exactly what tortures we use against our external enemies; then comes the period when internal enemies themselves merit equal treatment: first as agents of foreign enemies, then simply as enemies of the state.

Along the way, there will be two kinds of domestic opposition. Serious opposition will be marginalized as radical or leftist or theoretical. (Your future internal enemies right here.) As I mentioned above, much of this work will be carried out by the nominal mainstream opposition, who will lament "excesses" even as they claim that some extraordinary measures may be necessary against an "unprecedented" enemy. The complicit political opposition will likewise contribute to the sidelining of true opposition by denigrating it as "impractical" or "unelectable." Their citizen supporters, who are intimidated by charges of radicalism and unelectability, will cry that they've been betrayed, but will still urge you:

Of course you must vote and you must vote for Democrats.

Meanwhile, the Democrats:

have put their trust in Senators Graham, McCain and Warner to push back against the White House, and Thursday they signaled that they intended to continue cooperating. "Five years after Sept. 11, it is time to make the tough and smart decisions to give the American people the real security they deserve," said the Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada.

When people read Pastor Niemöller's famous poem, they fail to realize that even by the very first line, it was already too late.

Forward Not Backward

Forward, not backward. Up, not down. Better, not worse. New, not old. Equality, not inequality. Peace (sort of), not war (sort of). Good, not bad. Positive, not negative. George Washington. Abraham Lincoln. Franklin Roosevelt. A New Direction™. A New Direction™. A New Direction™. Money. A New Direction™. My opponent. A New Direction™. Money. A New Direction™. A New Direction™. A New Direction™. Thank you. God bless.

Last night I went to a little private grip-n-grin with Bob Casey, Jr., the pro-fetus, anti-Arab, Democratic senatorial candidate in Pennsylvania. His brief speech is reproduced above.

I didn't get a chance to ask him how he plans to accomplish what his web site calls "peace in the Middle East based upon Israel's security needs." Based on Isreal's security needs? I'm just sayin.

Anyway, it was another extraordinary example of the ineffectuality of liberalism in America: liberals do not field candidates, but they sure do vote for Democrats. I'm not a liberal myself, but you could probably persuade me to support one in an election, given the alternatives. Yet in state after state, you end up with your Bob Caseys and your Ned Lamonts, promising vaguely to ask "the tough questions" about Iraq and to "demand answers" and "accontability" from "this administration."

But what does any of this mean? We've asked the questions. We know the answers. This, more than anything, is a persistent misconception of the left. We don't need Senators who will hold hearings to discover what we already know, which is that the war on terror is a scam to expand the police powers of the state, the war in Iraq likewise, with an added soupçon of misapplied millennial political theorizing as part of the grand, hydra-headed Straussian project to lock the full scope of human endeavor in a Camp X-Ray-style cage and badger it with loud music and freezing showers until it tells us precisely what we've already decided we want to hear. We know these things. We don't need someone to ask the questions or get the answers.

We need someone who will repudiate in absolute and unequivocal terms the practice of waging aggressive wars, who will repudiate in absolute and unequivocal terms the practice of torture, and who, at this late date, will reaffirm that yes, indeed, the Great Writ is the foundation of our much-vaunted, little-practiced Western ideal of justice and the law. Believe me. Bob Casey is not this man.

Bob Casey is a man who must instead concentrate on disconfirming his constiuents' suspicion that his undoctrinaire, but nonetheless unshakeable, fidelity to a medieval concept of uterine ensoulment that damns to hell as murders the practitioners of abortion may possibly kinda sorta affect his public policy making. (Let them die of natural causes, and let god sort 'em out, he seems to be saying of the abortionists.)

¡ Chavez !

I like him. I like a head of state who'll get up and tell Americans to read Chomsky instead of "watching Superman and Batman." The U.N. is like one of those off-campus, college houses that are inhabited by class after class of geeky math kids until one year a couple of stoned, alcoholic lit majors move in with the rest of their rock band.

"We've made no judgment of any kind at this point about any aspect of policy with regard to Iraq."

Oh good god. While IOZ works on something or other to say today, read this.

The Name of the Game . . . booooy.

I wrote a song about dental floss, but did anyone's teeth get any cleaner?

-Frank Zappa to Tipper Gore

Via Crooks and Liars, Michael Smerconish relates that, yes, he was the guy at Madison Square Garden shouting "Go visit Ground Zero!" at the recent Roger Waters solo concert.

Not. Fiction. Real.

One Ring to Rule . . . aw, Hell.

Matthew Yglesias writes about the worst idea ever, a rumored notion that we might drop a couple of tactical nukes (sic) on Iranian nuclear research sites and then claim that in fact we used conventional weapons and the resultant radiation was the result of, well, the nuclear programs related activities programs at the destroyed sites, a plan for which I can claim some credit, as it was obviously cribbed directly, if loosely, from my childhood strategy of grabbing my little brother's hand, forcing him to pound himself on the head with it, and yelling at him, "Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!" Matt writes:

Now I rather doubt that's going to happen. Typically, Bush dials down the crazy factor a notch or two relative to what comes out of the OVP. Nevertheless, it's a sobering reminder that we have genuine lunatics operating in the highest councils of government at the moment. It's an extremely dangerous situation.

Meanwhile, Jim is not blaming liberals for the Bush administration, leaving that instead to bloggers like IOZ, who'd be happy to point to a dozen different reasons why liberals are responsible for the Bush administration, a contention sure to win me an ABC miniseries writer gig, although they're all pretty much variations on: liberals abandoned liberalism in pursuit of electoralism and found that once denuded of a distinct ideology--or as distinct as an ideology can be in This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land--they could neither consistently win elections nor act in opposition to the nationalistic, expansionistic imperatives of the right, which they themselves now endorsed, if less stentorially. Anyhoo, Jim feels obligated to write in this caveat because of the paragraph which preceeds it:

That only leaves the really depressing theory, which I’m not the first to advance. The White House is picking a fight with Congress over torture because the White House thinks it will help the President (and his party’s) standing with the voters. What makes the theory depressing is, it may be right. And what I want to know is, how do you like your blue-eyed boy, government power, Mr. Managerial Liberalism?

Unfortunately, Mr. Managerial Liberalism still believes that our deliverance will come in the form of sage technocrats--that, conversely his feelings about, say, torture at abu Ghraib, the problem with the American Government is Bad Applistic rather than systemic. The asylum, in other words, only needs to get itself some new lunatics, et tout va bien.

I use Yglesias as proof of this thesis, because although he's much, much wiser than his Democratic elders, he still engages the unpleasant, but comforting notion that the Bush Administration is unique-because-it's-crazy, rather than simply uniquely crazy, and perhaps not even that. The "highest councils of government" have always been populated by genuine lunatics, with the level of lunacy increasing in inverse proportion to distance from The Bomb. I mean, Paul Nitze was crazy. Lewis Strauss was crazy. J. Edgar was crazy. Curtis Lemay was really crazy. The inhabitants of the oval office have been uniformly crazy since Truman, and yes, I include Eisenhower in that assessment. Consider that in the last 40 years alone we've had Nixon, Johnson, Reagan, and our regnant Dauphin. Is anyone really going to propose that Crazy is the outlier of this particular presidential cohort?

To an extent, this is just variation on the old power corrupts theme, but it bears repeating because at the heart of contemporary liberalism, even the smart sort espoused by your various and sundry Yglesii, there remains a belief that at some infinitely-vanishing point there will be a new FDR who will weild the extraordinary powers of government to the near-universal advantage of all Americans and all the rest of the world. But the Dauphin teaches us that the willpower and nastiness necessary to bring the full apparatus of our immense, creaky, dangerous state to full operational status more likely comes in the form of an even more perverse Wilsonianism than Wilsonianism, which is to say crazy, racist, deluded, messianic, and mean. State power is not the sword in the stone, in other words. Any dynastic schmuck with muscles sufficiently developed by brush-clearing can yank that fucker out of its resting place and go chopping randomly around the ranch. State power exists indepently from its operators; it is relentlessly self-accumulating, and its effect on those within its orbit and influence is insidious. I will here resist making a Lord of the Rings allusion, but there it is. The lesson to be learned is not that George Bush is crazy, nor that his predecessors were often crazy, nor that his advisors are crazy, nor their antecedents neither. The lesson is that there is precious little that can check men in power, which obliges our vigilance in combatting and checking the power itself that we grant them.

What's on the Operation Menu?

Crooks and Liars' headline says it all: Retired Colonel Sam Gardiner Says We're in Iran Right Now.

Elsewhere, Jim also pens a pearl of a headline, perfect in itself: If Something's Not Worth Doing, It's Not Worth Doing Right. Jim explains:

Rajiv Chandrasekheran had a devastating article about what we just can’t call the Iraqi Reconstruction in yesterday’s Washington Post. It embarrasses me because the whole endeavor was so inept it over-confirms what’s been my central thesis since starting this blog: that foreign interventionism is the international version of central planning and prey to all the flaws FA Hayek identified in that conceit. Briefly:

Inherently unstable coalitions form to support it - inherently, because the different factions want the intervention for irreconcilable reasons.

Based ultimately on brute force, the intervention destroys the delicate web of local knowledge required to make the society work.

The intervention itself creates problems that become proof of the need for further intervention.

Iraq presents a clear example of precisely this process, in which a society is smashed under some pretext of rendering justice to evildoers and liberating people from the yoke of their oppressors and fomenting democracy and forging liberty and all the rest of the good, uplifting stuff. Then, when the very process of liberation gives rise to new chaos, new violence, new repression, the existence of chaos, violence, and repression necessitate the continuation of the intervetion, in order that the people be liberated from the yoke . . . I needn't repeat what Jim said with admirable clarity.

But along with necessitating further intervention in the created situation in one community or nation like Iraq, the inevitable fruits of intervention require further intervention beyond the borders of the initial action. Because the logic of intervention is predicated on the belief that the people on whose behalf we've intervened desire it, the intellectual and propagandistic underpinnings of the endeavor of intervention dictate that it cannot be those very same, liberated people who act in contravention of the act of liberation. Instead, we must locate an external enemy who desires to affect his own intervention in the mirror image of that which we have already undertaken. The logic of intervention dictates not only the continuation of the enterprise, but its expansion as well.

We are already in Iran. And I think it's very important to be clear about something, because the next few years are going to be worse than the last. Regardless the outcomes of our off-year Congressional elections, the Congress long ago ceded military determinations, military imperatives, and military control to the executive branch--an executive branch now in the position, you'll pardon the cliché, of a cornered animal, with no options but to lash out. I think a delusion persists on the part of both Democrats, who believe in the power of oversight, and many libertarians, who believe in the power of sweet, beautiful gridlock, that the presence of an oppositional legislature will slow the expansion of hostilities in the Middle East. That, unfortunately, isn't the case. At this point, there is probably no way to prevent the expansion of war into Iran short of either the forcible removal of this executive from office or the total collapse of the American military. That the later will likely occur before the former should sober us.

In the meantime, remind yourself every time you pick up your morning paper and every time you scroll down your favorites-list blogs: We are already in Iran.

How Literature Can Help You Understand America

You know, someone once said to me that the tragedy of The Trial is that Herr K. never discovered the charges against him, that after all his reluctant, heroic, defiant efforts to discover the origins of the process arrayed against him, he got shot without ever finding out what he got shot for.

But that's really the wrong way to read Kafka's novel, for he was constructing an altogether darker fable. There were no charges. Not against Herr K. Not against any of the other strivers broken in the miserable corridors of the court.

He was selected, mocked, and brutalized for worse than trumped-up, secret charges. It was done for no reason at all. There was nothing to discover.

Now clearly Maher Arar did face trumped-up charges, however vague, aribitrary, and incorrect they may have been. The same can be said of any number of other victims of the nigh-psychotic American state.

It is, however, a mistake to see these things through a lens of political utility. The policy is not to brutalize for a purpose--say, to eliminate political enemies. Brutality is the policy; it's its own purpose. An end in itself.

Eat your heart out, Michel Foucault.

A Squeamish Jew

Marty Peretz married a Singer Sewing Machine and bought The New Republic, a magazine which for about a thousand years previous expounded establishmentarian Democratic thinking for the benefit of middlebrow readers wherever they lurked in America, which is to say everywhere in America. That was in 1975. Since then it has principally dedicated itself to the proposition that science will one day prove that the Negro, whatever his facility with balls and fields of play, doesn't much go for the thinking game (though I'd like to see Marty "Fucking" Peretz memorize an NFL playbook), indeed that science has already proven it, and that Arabs, unlike Jews, who do not drink blood, do drink blood, or at least aspire to it in their dervishistic hashish rituals over the bloody corpses of Haifa nightclubbers and commuting grannies in Tel Aviv.

Marty has always imagined himself in the mold of the Herzogian mental pugilist, a fighting man's Jew and not the sissy sort who went Red or worse, ignored Al Sharpton rather than virulently disdaining him. No one seems to have mentioned to him that Herzog was fucking crazy, that behind all those verbal knees and elbows, Bellow put a sorry sack who couldn't live in the world and so conducted an epistolary hate mail campaign against it. (Even Bellow didn't know that's what he was doing.) What's left to us readers is a chicken-or-egg dilemma: was Marty crazy to begin with, or did he merely invent himself as a crazy man in order to acquire the mythic personnage of his misread favorites? Or does the latter imply the former, bringing it all to a neat, cosmic bow?

Either way, it was bad enough when Marty was but an heir-marrying multimillionaire hack editor lashing out at Yassar Arafat or other such slow-moving targets, but now he has discovered the kids' "web" "logs" and reinvented his invented self as the craziest, loudest homeless man in your respective cities, but with a thesaurus. This forum he calls The Spine, and it's represented by the icon of a book on end, which refers quite clearly in Marty's mind and style to that characteristic of manly men, though, as you'll gather by spending a few minutes actually reading what he writes over there, the more appropriate title would be "The Mouth" or better "The Bellowing Pie-Hole."

Currently, Marty is pissed that Muslims are pissed that the Pope is pissed at Muslims. At least I think that's what he's pissed about. He wanders over and pats Pope Benedict on the head for quoting a 14th-Century Byzantine Emperor on the subject of why Mohammed is a wicked S.O.B. and cavils bizarrely at the Anglican and Greek Orthodox church for having "habitually dissembled--no, lied--for the Arab cause," whatever that may mean to Marty, since two paragraphs later he's crowing about how Sunni-Shia animosities suggest--no, prove--that Islam is doomed forever to internecine violence, hardly the stuff of which a world-spanning Ummah is made. He also complains that one of the ten zillion religious militias unleashed by the Peretz-championed invasion of Iraq has called the, uh, Vicar of Christ "you dog of Rome," no worse, I note, than anything Hutton Gibson has to say about the false prophets of St. Peter's.

He is also angry that the Council on Foreign Relations has invited the Iranian President to some blab-a-thon dinner or other. In the process, he hauls out Elie Wiesel, who "was also invited. I heard about the event through a third person whom Elie had called to discuss it." That's only a prelude to what comes next, in which CFR president Richard Haass is called "a squeamish Jew," which means either that he once fainted at a bris or else that he's insufficiently bloodthirsty when it comes to Arab males. Then he says Haass was simply a patsy in some sort of elaborate Nixonian plot to invite Ahmadinejad "himself," which in turn has something to do with Larry Summers no longer holding the title, you'll pardon the expression, of Head Nigger In Charge of Harvard. Needless to say, what Marty is really talking about is the Holocaust. Even though the two nation with the most Jews on Earth, Israel and the United States, are linked as international BFFs, and even though they represent the most powerful and one of the most powerful militaries on earth, the camps and pogroms must be a heartbeat away. Of course, appeasement is exhumed, and thus does Marty write one of those killer sentences that make you glad you waded through the dreck prior:

If I had been Chamberlain, I would not have spoken with Hitler when he did.

No, he probably would've delivered "a staggering roundhouse to the Fuhrer's jaw," like the comic character of Chabon's Kavalier and Clay.

Well, if Marty Peretz had been Chamberlain, he certainly would've spoken with Hitler when he did, because he would've been Chamberlain. A less sloppy writer would've said, "If I had been in Chamberlain's place," but that was probably too modest for Marty, who really does imagine himself as a world-historical figure. Lord knows, if he had been Dreyfuss, he wouldn't have taken it laying down; if he had been Christ, he'd have turned the other cheek only in order to sucker punch the fucker who hit him first; if he'd have been Moses, he'd have struck the rock contrary the word of god, and when that big pussy told him to stay the fuck out of the promised land, he'd flip him the bird and cross the Jordan, if only to wail on some proto-Arabs and teach 'em a few millennia early why no goddamn sand nigger ever, ever! throws a rock at a Jew.

Crazy

I finally got around to watching the most recent Presidential Presser, and it finally dawned on me that the President conducts himself like the pettiest Jr. High School vice principle ever to grace the institutional hallways of the Washingon-Jefferson-Harding-Whathaveyou Jr. sixth-through-eighth grades at an interminable student assembly, alternately pissed off, condescending, and confused, vaguely aware that most of the kids are smarter than he is and onto his game, but also aware that he holds the cards in the end, and that even the misbehavers can be dealt with, and that no matter how many impertinent questions and spitballs fly around the auditorium, he gets to begin and end the thing on his time, and he holds in his power to tell anyone to shut up.

Anyway, David Gregory, one of the smart kids, asked the President in rather more polite terms:

Mr. President, aren't you afraid that if we go down the road of saying the Geneva Conventions, and hell, any other treaty obligation, are open to arbitrary interpretation by our national executive and legislature, then a bunch of other countries who you've more or less named as belligerents in a global war will snatch a bunch of American troops and then say right back to us, "Yo, America, it is the interpretation of Dear Leader Kim or whomever that ripping a man's guts out through his asshole and making him eat them off a dinner plate while they're still attached to the insides of him is, like, totally consistent with all that human dignity jazz. At least we provide a fucking privacy curtain, you big-eyed white motherfuckers."

To which the President replied:

I am saying that I would hope that they would adopt the same standards we adopt; and that by clarifying Article III, we make it stronger, we make it clearer, we make it definite.

I'm just saying that it seems a stretch to posit your supposed mortal enemies will abide your own idiosyncratic interpretations of an international standard, thus making it stronger. I'm just saying.