I'm Gonna Burn One Dow-ow-ow-own

The LA Times recently reported that marijuana is the largest cash crop in the US. Tom Riley, "a spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy," said, "Coca is Colombia's largest cash crop and that hasn't worked out for them, and opium poppies are Afghanistan's largest crop, and that has worked out disastrously for them." He added, "I don't know why we would venture down that road."

I wonder if US-backed efforts to eradicate those crops in Colombia and Afghanistan had anything to do with how "that has worked out."

And to All a Good Night

The National Review Online today features what you might charitably call a symposium, though without all that gay shit Plato had to—you’ll pardon the expression—shove in there. It’s called “Christmas at War,” and I imagine a heavy period to lend a little gravity to the pronunciation thereof: “Christmas. At War.” It is not to be confused with the War on Christmas, which is a discrete portion of a wider ideological struggle. If you’d asked me just hours ago if I believed that any table of contents would ever achieve the same gauzy silliness doing drag as necessary commentary as was achieved by this recent edition of TNR, I wouldn’t have believed it. And yet:


It is “Patton’s Prayer,” that reaches the highest aeries of kooky jingo nostalgia, a reminiscence of the Great Showboat personally calling on the assistance of god a-mighty to kill all the Krauts. All of the World-War-II-ia centers on a Patton who’s done even crazier than George C. Scott did him and a General Barry McAuliffe who comes off in Skelly’s piece as a sort of unhinged, merry psychopath, played, one imagines, by Mel Gibson. “Ever spend Christmas in Fallujah?” is actually about spending Christmas on Parris Island. It’s one of those manly-man hunting story things: we all froze our asses off out there and it was cold as hell and we didn’t shoot anything and Phil lost the tip of his pinky to frostbite, but damn it was a good time.” Count me out. I’ve never spent Christmas in Fallujah, but I’ve also never spent a Christmas hanging out in an abbatoir. I know the common human behavior is to make the whole table taste your disgusting appetizer at the restaurant, but I really see no reason to elevate human misery and suffering to an anecdote that will years late begin, “Well, it wasn’t so funny at the time . . .”

George Will in the Age of Man in the Age of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

I'm hardly a triumphalist of The Blog--the format or the form it's inspired. And I don't read Time. And if I'm really the Man of the Year, then I'll join with Jean-Paul to the Nobel committee: Merci, mais non.

Still, when George Will laments again that "Narcissism is news," and tells us hacks that "Franklin's extraordinary persona informed what he wrote but was not the subject of what he wrote," I feel impelled to make an introduction.

George Will, meet Benjamin Franklin.

4th and Long

The dauphin said, “We have an obligation to ensure our military has the capacity to sustain this war over the long haul.” He said that “extremists and radicals . . . can’t run us out of the middle east.” His tone was restrained, but confident. We are not winning, but we will win. The war “will require difficult choices and additional sacrifices.” The president observed that “We’ve got to convert on third down,” and that “Turnovers are really killing us.” He praised the work of the defense, and said that there was “still plenty of time on the clock to turn things around.”

But the President’s hortatory coach-talk on Iraq is hardly the worst of it. According to the same article:

Senator Harry Reid, the incoming majority leader, issued a statement reacting to the president’s comments, saying “It is troubling to see that he still does not understand the need for urgent change in Iraq. The president seems lost within his own rhetoric. He is grasping for a victory his current policies have put out of reach and leaving our troops stuck policing a civil war.”

This is more or less the Democratic party line on Iraq. The objective is to hang the war like a heavy stone around the President’s neck without conceding more vital points about the deep flaws in the imperial American state—without, in the end, conceding that there is an imperial American state.

Now I too would like the backwoods Bourbon to sink under the weight of this war, and I’d like to see him drag his whole passel of courtiers and wannabe maréchals of empire with him. I have no objection to anyone’s efforts to make the Iraq War into the Bush War. Except that insofar as the official Democratic party is willing to make these critiques, it refuses to forcefully advocate for the immediate end to the war. I’ll let those committed to electoral inanities to argue about what it really means to say “get out now” and to stroke their chins over the long-term consequences to the region or “the chances of wider regional conflicts” or any of the thousand-and-one other hypothetical and expedient objections to a post-haste retreat from the scene of our crime. That sort of talk is for people still enamored of the narrative of the tragic mistake.

I reject that narrative. We didn’t make a tragic error. We invaded and occupied a crippled nation on the flimsiest of pretexts and proceeded to usher in millions of internal displacements and hundreds of thousands of death. This isn’t a project to be saved. It isn’t a mistake to be fixed. It’s an ongoing crime to be ended. Ending the war is a moral imperative that supersedes every other political and practical consideration.

The objection is that the Democrats haven’t got the power to do it yet, and I accept that only as an excuse. Neither you nor I nor anyone else has the capacity to bring this war to an end on its own. “Radical changes” for the purpose of “repairing America’s reputation” or forestalling some other conflict or “not abandoning the Iraqis” to civil war share the characteristic of not being radical. These objections constitute complicity in the continuation of a criminal war. How many more hundreds of thousands of people have to die in the name of protecting the viability and moral defensibility of our long-standing, indefensible policies of intervening in the affairs of other nations?

Will there be further conflict in Iraq after we leave? Terrible violence? Torture and death? Refugees? Disease? Destruction of infrastructure? Devolution of society? Yes. And there is absolutely nothing we can now do to prevent it. We should leave Iraq now, and the only thing we get to take with us is guilt.

"Tribal sovereignty, it means . . . that they're sovereign."

Strange item in this recent WaPo story on the ongoing whathaveyou in the Febrile Cresent:

Asked in light of that whether they supported a surge of thousands of U.S. troops into Baghdad, one of several options under consideration by a White House review of Iraq strategy, Sattler and Rodman declined to offer an opinion. The report said the U.S. military plans to steadily pull out of cities and consolidate its bases. Meanwhile, the remaining 16 of Iraq's 18 provinces are expected to be placed under Iraqi government control in 2007.

Is that just a poorly worded rehash of "they'll stand up as we stand down," or is that an unintentional admission by Pentagon spokesmotrons that 16 of 18 provinces have never been under control of the "sovereign" Iraqi government and are still being policed and governed by American forces?

To the latter possibility, I say: Whoa.

All the King's Horses and All the King's Men

Anne Applebaum:

There is no question that America's credibility has been undermined by the Iraq war, in "Old Europe" as everywhere else. There is no question that America's reputation for competence has been destroyed. But that doesn't mean there are dozens of eager candidates, or even one eager candidate, clamoring to replace us.

It's an odd complaint in an odd article. Not only, says Applebaum in many more words, are the European nations generally opposed to America's Wilsonian crusading, but they're also totally unwilling to take up the mantle of our failed Wilsonian crusades!

Europeans are rightfully and understandably rueful of the America-loosed disaster in Iraq. The Middle East, as Applebaum notes, is a lot closer to Europe than to the US, and European nations have so far dealt poorly with the problem of generational Muslim disenfranchisement stemming from post-colonial guest worker programs and decades of failed immigration policy. And if their economies are marginally less petropowered than our own, the operative word remains marginally. An expanding catastrophe au proche-orient is hardly in Brussels' best interest, or in the best interests of Euronext or Deutsche Börse. Nonetheless, the Europeans, as Applebaum dismissively notes, and particularly the Germans, are generally unwilling or unable to support the American mission militarily. Europe is rightfully skeptical of military solutions, and despite long talk of a unified European security force, there's no European constituency pushing for an American-style interventionist military to bestride the globe enforcing some sort of social-democratic-values hegemony. This, of course, is what Applebaum means when she says no one "here" believes that Europe "is going to replace the United States anytime soon." In their failure to take over our failures are they damned.

Then the familiar whine of the not-victors in a guerilla war. Why won't someone help? Or:

Ultimately the only way for the West to deal with the new threats posed by a disintegrating Iraq, a resurgent Iran and a shattered Middle East is through a unified policy--an alliance whose members are not easily played off against one another--and a joint strategy.

The West, in this formulation, is as fanciful a political entity as the rightwinger's fearful caliphate (from Borneo to Bilbao and back again!). What possible "unified policy . . . and joint strategy" can emerge? What possible good would a war fought under the NATO banner--that seems to be what Applebaum is really advocating--do that a war fought under the American banner is not doing? What, precisely, is a "resurgent Iran." The last time Iran surged, so to speak, the Safavids were running a pseudo-Sufi empire and the powers of Europe were busy giving smallpox to the native population of North America.

The Europeans are no happier about the state of the Middle East than anyone, and their told-you-sos are really quite restrained. They, after all, gain nothing but a lot of useless credibility, and they still suffer from proximity to the catastrophe that they were powerless to avert. But unlike Applebaum and her Washington clique, they seem basically opposed to throwing good money and still-living lives after bad and already-dead. They'll do their best to weather the storm, but they will not join their American friends in shooting at the rainclouds.

Update:Whoa! Escahtonians and LGMers and UOettes everywhere!

Yalie!

As I recall, N., who was smart and conversational and attractive, came home feeling horrible about herself, because she didn't have as much money as others there, or she wasn't this, or she wasn't that. The poor woman was in such despair.

-Ron Dreher, the Cap'n in my crunchy con-

It's worth reading just for that incredibly, unintentionally infelicitous use of "poor," but you really have to read it all.

The Crunchster recalls that his Yalie friend, N., "painted a portrait of a society so status-obsessed that almost nobody dated." (Yeah, they were all too busy fucking.) These poor students were "afraid to take a chance on dating, for fear they'd choose the wrong person." Ah. There's the rub. The Crunch sees college as the moment for pair bonding; dating is the find-a-hubby/find-a-wife game. That's not to say that Yale isn't status-obsessed. Of course it is! This is America, you dweeb. Rather, it's to say that while elite undergraduate programs are surely full of plenty of yutes wishin' and hopin' for true love, they're hardly a hotbed of matrimonialism. The kids have more important things to worry about. Grades. Grad schools. Internships. Finding blow for weekend parties. The good stuff.

I once did a Yalie. At least, he said he was a Yalie. He studied art or biology or math or something. I'm pretty sure he had a name, but one can never assume. Ron Dreher may think he's discovered evidence of "Yale's dysfunction," but I can assure him that that evening Yale was functioning just fine.

They've Got to Put Some Points on the Board if They Want to Win the Game

I once heard the color guy announce shortly into the third quarter of a football game: "You know, they've got to start running the ball if they want to get the running game going."

Pat Lang links Fred Kagan's "Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq Interim Report." It's full of such sportscaster-inspired tautological nonsense. It's PowerPoint ("what else?" asks Lang, and you can feel his eyes rolling), and the best page is page 41, which ends with an all-caps admonition:

WE CAN WIN IN IRAQ, AND WE MUST

Well, when you put it like that . . . !

Phantasms

We tell ourselves stories in order to live [...] We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson on the murder of five We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

-Joan Didion, "The White Album"-

"One night in mid-April, the steel door clanked shut on detainee No. 200343 at Camp Cropper, the United States military’s maximum-security detention site in Baghdad." Detainee No. 200343 was a 29-year-old American citizen named Donald Vance. He "went to Iraq as a security contractor." That isn't a phrase to be taken at face value. That's the sort of euphemism that hides depth like muddy water. Mr. Vance became a whistle-blower (another euphemism, that; a goofy metonym) because he noticed that

the company had a growing cache of weapons it was selling to suspicious customers, including a steady flow of officials from the Iraqi Interior Ministry. The ministry had ties to violent militias and death squads. He said he had also witnessed another employee giving American soldiers liquor in exchange for bullets and weapon repairs.

The Times, as you'd expect of official media, lets the clear connection glide by. The Times says:

Nathan Ertel, the American held with Mr. Vance, brought away military records that shed further light on the detention camp and its secretive tribunals. [...]

The story told through those records and interviews illuminates the haphazard system of detention and prosecution that has evolved in Iraq, where detainees are often held for long periods without charges or legal representation, and where the authorities struggle to sort through the endless stream of detainees to identify those who pose real threats.

Well what if it wasn't haphazard? The ministry works for the Americans. The militias and death squads work for the ministry. Vance reported to the Americans. The Americans locked him up, tried to figure out what he knew and from whom he'd learned it.

The Times wants you to believe that this was a case of mistaken identity, a "haphazard system" where authorities "struggle" to manage things properly in an unmanageable environment. Mistakes, of course, will be made. Maybe there's been "incompetence." Maybe Vance was "in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Or maybe the United States is sponsoring death squads in Iraq through the Interior Ministry and running guns through private firms. We've heard the song before. Maybe Vance got a little too close. Maybe he hadn't put together all the disparate images. He just saw that something wasn't quite right. There was something wrong with the guns, or there was something wrong with the money, or there were too many guns, or there was too much money. There were too many members of the ministry. There were too many American soldiers. So Vance went to the good guys. He went to our guys. He whistled to the FBI. And for that he was secreted away and interrogated for 97 days. Kept in an always-lit cell. Incommunicado. His fiancé at home thought he might have died.

Mr. Vance’s situation was more complicated. On June 17, Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry, a spokesman for the American military’s detention unit, Task Force 134, wrote to tell Ms. Schwarz that Mr. Vance was still being held. "The detainee board reviewed his case and recommended he remain interned," he wrote. "Multi-National Force-Iraq approved the board’s recommendation to continue internment. Therefore, Mr. Vance continues to be a security detainee. We are not processing him for release. His case remains under investigation and there is no set timetable for completion."

Sometimes things seem not to work because they really don't work. Sometimes things seem not to work because that's the best way to keep them from seeming like they're really working.

The Americans figured out that Vance didn't know much. He never fixed the ideas. He never made the connections. He was just a guy who saw too many guns and too much money. He blamed corruption. He blamed incompetence. He blamed the Iraqis. He figured they were putting something over on the Americans. He figured they were up to no good. He saw some shady deals. He thought it was all private contractors and just bad business.

I don't believe it. I don't believe the story. I don't believe the narrative line. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't add up. There's something going on in Iraq that we're not hearing about. It's something other than "the drumbeat of sectarian violence" or "a nation teetering on the brink of civil war" or "no good options." Talk of getting out of Iraq is bogus. We're not going anywhere. I think things in that country are just starting to get bad. I think the same old crew of American accomplices to murder are still running things in Washington, the old Vietnam hands, the old Latin America hands. I think that failure to win the thing outright has bred some nasty, nasty practices on the underside. I think the very worst we've heard is probably only the half of it.

Seymour Hersh was recently quoted saying that the US was doing things in Iraq that would bring a blush to the cheeks of your coldest Lt. Calley. I believe him.

I'm beginning to think that I've been too much of an optimist about Iraq.

I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.

-Joan Didion, "The White Album"-