Shame

I can't bear to look at the news today. The Times and the Post and just about everyone else front the grim scene of a primitive execution: civilian dress and cheap ski masks and a natty hemp line. I suppose I should be glad, at least, that we were spared the dehumanizing clinicism of an American-style execution, but still, to see Saddam hanged "for crimes against humanity" in no more polished, clean, or clinical a manner than an American corpse dragged through the streets of Ramadi. Well. It drives home with palpable force the commensurate inhumanity of him and of us. Stripped away at last are all pretenses that we're anything other than an equal gang of manipulators, users, and murderers. "The Defiant Despot Oppressed Iraq for More Than 30 Years," blares the Times obituary, and nowhere in it, not even in its recollection of the Iran-Iraq war, does it mention that Hussein was our ally, that we armed and supported him, especially after losing our man the Shah in Tehran.

He was just another hit man. A Suharto. A Pinochet. He outlived his usefulness, and the "defiance" always appended to his description is now the only verbal measure of the truth: his crime, for which we twice went to war with him and finally executed him, was to step beyond whatever secret limits we laid down for him. His execution and our ahistoric, blinkered remembering of the life preceeding it, is one of the most shameful episodes in a national history full of shameful episodes. The thing about Jacobin justice is that it is not just.

A Libertarian Paradise in which You Could Do Whatever You Want and No One Could Hold You Responsible Because They Wouldn't Rape Their Child

Some time ago on his blog and more recently at Reason, Jim Henley proposed some corollaries to that well-beaten horse, the ticking time bomb. The ticking time bomb is that curious device about which all facts and details are known except its precise location, and its instrumental use is to prove that given such an unlikely scenario, one might be justified in pulling out a fingernail or two to place the last piece of the jigsaw, such as it were. With tongue somewhat in cheek, Jim suggested that the argument is flawed because in addition to the unlikelihood of the given scenario, it also takes as given that the sole remedy is torture. Why, he asked, couldn't you imagine a commensurate situation in which some other unlikely and equally distasteful means of acquiring information obtains? He gave some hyperbolic examples. He suggested that in the absence of arguments for a general allowance of anything, no matter how reprehensible, to prevent the deaths of millions, the ticking time bomb shows itself as little more than a post hoc justification for an otherwise unacceptable practice. Six actors in search of a play? One government in search of a rationale for breaking out the thumbscrews.

Today, Jim linked to a passenger on the good ship Conservitania, who harumphs, "The point is that because we do somethings [sic] and not others doesn't invalidate the things we do." In other words: We don't want to rape children (as Jim's hyperbole had it); we just want to torture people. Which is, of course, the very point Jim made in the first place, that the argument is not about preventing terrorist attacks but about broadly validating torture through the application of one equally unlikely and equally hyperbolic hypothetical. The Conservative suggests that in the absence of torture, all is anarchy. Eatcherheartout, Michel Foucault! Libertarians are not, by and large, anarchists, although anarchists increasingly hold more sympathetic places in our political imagination than conservatives. The libertarian wish is to limit as much as possible the capacity of the state to coerce behaviors from its citizens, and where coercion may be legitimate--preventing violent crime, say--we want to curtail the legitimate purview of acceptable coercive practices because we don't trust the disposition of powerful collective actors like governments toward individuals. That's the old "government of laws and not men." The law must apply equally to its enforcers, or else, by dint of the enforcers' greater power and resources, we arrive inevitably at tyranny.

The Conservative pulls out the familiar complaint about liberty. Why, if you let people do what they want, then they might do what they want! It's a recipe for Weimar decadence. Leben und leben lassen, sang the Emcee in "If You Could See Her."

But here's the thing. A society that doesn't torture isn't anarchy. It's a society that doesn't torture. The Conservative presumes against all evidence of every torturing regime in history that the government will only torture under those circumstances where it is strictly, materially necessary to prevent unimaginable catastrophe. That clearly is not the case. Even with torture nominally illegal, we saw our own government agents using it with increasing frequency under increasingly un-immediate conditions to prevent increasingly vague and obscure harms. The end result of legitimzing torture is hardly that the practice becomes rare. Rather than doing as Jim did and imagining equally heinous acts for the same stringent ticking time bomb scenario, I would ask: What if you knew that there was a bomb in the country somewhere, but didn't know where or when it would go off? Would you still be justified in torturing a man to find out? What if you strongly suspected, but had no actual proof that such a bomb existed? Would you be justified in torturing a man to find out? What if you reasonably suspected, but could in no way confirm, that a man had placed a nuke in the subway? Would you be justified in torturing him? What if you had a hunch? What if you saw it in a dream? The ticking time bomb predicates its moral justification on the prevention of greater harm, but the truth is that preventing harm isn't really related to the prior certainty that danger exists. If you only suspected a bomb, failed to torture the guy, and then the bomb went off . . . ? If we permit torture because we wish to prevent catastrophes, then logically we must conclude by torturing everyone.

I, for one, call dibs on the sling.

So Martin Luther and Leo X Walk into a Bar . . .

There's very little to say about Joe Lieberman's op-ed in today's Post, except that Lieberman, unlike such such intellectual luminaries as Silvestre Reyes (D-His Own Ass), isn't so goddamn ignorant that he can't discern or remember the sectarian and political affiliations of America's constellation of enemies in the Middle East. He knows damn well that al-Qaeda and Iran have as much in common as the Orange and the Green. He's deliberately conflating them. If his goal is to become the lyingest motherfucker in the lyingest motherfucking town in the world, then he's well on his way.

I'd be entirely unconcerned with the opinions and plans of the "Independent Democratic Senator from Connecticut," were it not for the regrettable fact that they represent precisely what's about to happen.

Escalate Again

Yglesias says:

Roughly speaking, the fixed point of the president's thinking is an unwillingness to admit that the venture has failed. For a long time the best way to do that was to simply deny that there was a problem. Political strategy for the midterms, however, dictated that the president had to acknowledge the public's concerns about the war and concede that things weren't going well. At that point, simply staying the course doesn't work anymore. But de-escalating would be an admission of failure, so the only option is to choose escalation. Thus, the idea of an escalation starts getting pushed and we start reading things int he paper like "Top military officials have said that they are open to sending more U.S. troops to Iraq if there is a specific strategic mission for them." Consider the process here. It's not that the president has some policy initiative in mind whose operational requirements dictate a surge in force levels. Rather, locked in the prison of his own denial he came to the conclusion that he should back an escalation, prompting the current search for a mission.

This strikes me as mostly right and a little bit wrong, but the little bit it gets wrong underpins a larger failing to grasp the true nature of the American problem in Iraq.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

World War II exerts a particularly strong magentism on advocates of the Iraq War. The reasons are obvious, beginning with, of course, the fact that we won. Not only did we win and win unequivocally, but we were a force of unequivocal good that triumphed against a force of unparalleled evil. It was, as the saying goes, the last good war. But from Primo Levi to Kurt Vonnegut, those who actually participated in that war (as opposed to those who merely lionize it now that it's passed into myth)--both combattants and victims--recall no such clarity. It wasn't a good war. It was the most terrible thing that has ever happened in all of our history. It was a conflagration of such unutterable horror that it sullied even its most innocent victims. To view it merely instrumentally--Democracy won and the Nazis lost--is to choose a singular moment of triumph and elevate it above all the horror that came before and after. Even while paying lip service to the bravey and sacrifice and horrors and bloodshed that came before, such a view reduces the war to a singular moment of triumph, and everything else falls away in that view as a kind of moral detritus--regrettable, but ultimately irrelevant to the body of victory.

The corollary attraction to contemporary warhawks is that the war, because it was so good and necessary, and because it was fought against such an evil, was fought without reservation. Though they themselves are almost uniformly unwilling to participate in the actual, physical prosecution of any war, they are nonetheless attracted to the idea of total mobilization because that too is a kind of clarity. It's a curious contradiction, because so many warhawks recently enough imagined themselves cold warriors in the battle against communism. Yet their societal ideal is essentially communistic; it is certainly mechanistic. The war society is a machine, each part mobilized toward the end of victory and the good of the whole. The constant labelling of dissent as treason is attendant to the same worldview.

When these hawks think about escalation, this is what they imagine: a more limited version of national mobilization, and a war in Iraq that consists of endless aerial campaigns, divisions rolling across the desert, cities besieged and bombarded, prisoners rounded up, until the enemy eventually capitulates. That's how they see WWII. That even total mobilization served a discrete strategy, or a series of strategies, is a fact that eludes them. To them, we poured in men and materiel until we won. So contra Yglesias, I don't think the problem is that "locked in the prison of his own denial [Bush] came to the conclusion that he should back an escalation, prompting the current search for a mission." The problem, rather, is that escalation is the mission. Military commanders may yap about not wanting to send more troops without some objective, but to the people who actually matter--whose decisions our commanders will not contravene--the presence of more troops is in and of itself an objective.

For this reason, it's important to avoid the trap of discussing what more troops will or won't achieve. It's immaterial to the conversation. I know that it's infuriating to confront an argument that's entirely a tautology: we'll add more troops so that we can win, and we'll know that we've won when we've achieved victory. Infuriating though it may be, that tautology is the basic principle of American foreign policy. If it is not as we imagine it, then it cannot be. To attempt to dissuade the president or his supporters by pointing out that their plan, such as it is, can't succeed on any terms other than its own, and its own terms are mere semantics, is to ignore the heart of our conundrum: these are people who do not accept a reality external to their own perception. Their morality and their politics are childish because they themselves are children. It is not a question of Randian A-is-A versus Derridian all-is-a-construct. It's only a question of the adult capacity to realize that your perceptions are subjective at least insofar as no person can be a perfectly accurate, perfectly dispassionate observer.

They can't be reasoned with.

Escalate

If I have been notably reticent about the state of the American intervention in the non-state of Iraq recently, then it's only because those who can be convinced at least of the necessary failure of the project and at best of its fundamental wrongness are already convinced, and the remaining morons will remain morons. Meanwhile, we must admit that it is now institutionally impossible for Washington to conclude its misadventure. Call it groupthink; call it sunk costs; call it folly. Regardless of the principle illness we attribute to the deciders and opiners, what's become evident and unavoidable is that American forces--30,000 more or 30,000 less--will remain in Iraq for this reason alone: Washington is ontologically incapable of acquiescing to any other eventuality. Thought in our capital occurs on a very narrow bandwith, and while it has some room for considerations of poor planning, poor execution, or even tragic error, it remains innately, inexorably incapable of concluding that the most basic premise underlying the Iraq War is fatally flawed. Washington does not, will not, and cannot admit that the United States has neither the moral right nor the practical wherewithal to influence the development of other societies, for good or ill, through the application of military force.

The question I struggle with is this: What is the proper response of the citizen. I plan, for instance, to attend the January antiwar march in Washington, if only as an observer. But I do not admit to the possibility that such a march can affect outcomes, because the sort of peace it demands is as inconceivable within the narrow spectrum of official thought as the possibility of a man flying by flapping his arms. The governing class can't conceive of an America that does not interfere in other nation's internal affairs. Every time you read an op-ed about American power and prestige, remember that it is at its base defending the premise that not only is America the world's sole "superpower," but that America possesses a unique right to that position--that America is not, in other words, a nation that is by historical accident and good fortune more powerful than other nations, but that it is an totally singular historical phenomenon. "The indispensible nation," as the saying goes.

Most of us can go on living in perfect peace and comfort in these waning years of empire. The United States as a world power will outlive us all. Any other doomsaying is just apocalpyic fantasy. Does that absolve us of responsibility to some degree or other? Or do we begin to consider that something other than marching and electioneering may be necessary and justifiable? Admitting that there is no practical constituency for such a thing, and operating with a healthy suspicion of revolutionary cant, the question remains: Now that all else has failed, what do we do?

Leslie Lynch King, Jr. RIP

Today’s WaPo editorial page is rife with paeans to Gerald Ford. George Will fondly recalls his genial obliviousness. David Broder fondly recalls his civility, a word that doesn’t actually mean what Broder thinks it means. Someone named Ron Nessen recalls that “after [Chevy] Chase had performed his ‘clumsy Ford’ routine at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, the president took the podium and topped the professional comic with a brilliant routine of self-deprecating humor,” which may be many things, but true is not among them. Nessen also recalls the Ford avoided recriminations over “who lost Vietnam,” though one might more accurately say of the football-player president that he simply punted and left it to every political season thereafter to re-fight that particular irresolvable battle. Novakula fondly recalls that Jerry wanted to shrink the presidency before remembering that He, Novak, does not approve of shrunken presidents. Bob Dole says Jerry stopped “the national hemorrhaging over Watergate,” which is reflective of the curious Washingtonian habit of discussing Ford’s pardon of Nixon as you or I might discuss our cop brother-in-law fixing a parking ticket.

Atrios says of the pardon, “Our elites repeatedly redefine ‘getting past it’ as ‘sweeping it under the rug’ based on their apparent opinion of themselves as necessary moral and spiritual leaders for the riffraff.” To an extent I agree. In a town like Washington where a man can say with a straight face that he “respects the office of the President,” regardless of its occupant, as if the empty suite carries with it a moral grandeur totally unrelated to and unaffected by its occupiers, there will always be some degree of clerical superiority to the flock. Still, I disagree that the principle impulse here is, as Atrios put it, that “They are our betters and we need them they think, and so their class must be preserved even if the occasional unpleasantness must be swept under the rug.”

I have family in the bar business and I work in entertainment myself. I’ve known plenty of crooks in my life, and what I’ve observed is that every crook knows he is a crook first of all, and if there’s no honor among thieves, then there’s at least a certain omerta where interaction with the straight world is concerned. From the pages of the WaPo op-ed section to the corner office on K-Street to the Capitol and the Executive Mansion, you have a town full of people who understand that they are basically part of the same confidence game—the most successful con in the history of man, excepting only (and only perhaps) the Catholic Church. So when Nixon showed himself to be a crook, an irredeemable and indiscrete crook, it was the natural impulse of Washington to first throw him out before he could give up the game and then throw the blanket over why it was that they threw him out.

In any case, no death is a good death, and I’m happy Ford passed as quietly as a man can pass, but let’s not pretend that a friendly criminal is less a criminal. The blanket pardon of Nixon was in many ways a worse crime than any Nixon committed—recall the old expression: Not the crime, but the cover-up. Insofar as Ford prevented any full reckoning with the scale and scope of executive mendacity, he doomed any effort to truly curtail executive power and return it to its more reasonable Constitutional scope, though it’s obviously questionable whether such an effort would have occurred or held even with a full accounting for Nixon’s sins. And now, insofar as the dead Ford offers Washingtonian nabobs one more opportunity to drag out the old civility card, through which courtly manners are once again reinforced and straight criticism relegated to natty sans-culloterie, he only continues posthumously what he did when he was still alive. He was a crafter of alibis and a giver of indulgences. He was a front man. He too was a con.

Counting these out, what is left is Art

What makes reality TV gripping is that it's all happening live -- the contestants make their choices under pressure, win or lose.

-Davey Ignatius

No. No. A thousand goddamn motherfucking cocksucking times no. A million, billion times no. No to the Nth. All the orders of magnitude in the universe no. No now and forever. No no no no no no no.

I challenge you, dear readers, to present me with a reality television show that airs live. The Real World does not air live. Road Rules does not air live. Fear Factor does not air live. Survivor does not air live. The Bachelor does not air live. The Surreal Life does not air live. The Simple Life does not air live. No reality show airs live. The 22 or 44 reality minutes you see are culled from hundreds of hours of tape, resequeneced for narrative coherence, edited for dramatic and emotional intensity, selected to highlight particular traits of characters and particular arcs of characterological development. Reality shows have screenwriters, though they aren’t yet classified as such—even as we speak, many reality writers are working to gain full screenwriting credit and entry into SAG.

Reality television has been with us for quite a while now, and even the staff here at Who Is IOZ, where no televisions are in evidence, is in on the old joke: reality television isn’t real, let alone live. It is as much a construct as any scripted drama or sound-staged game show. It’s artificial. It’s artifice, for Jesus’ motherfucking sake.

So yes. The present incarnation of the Bush administration is like a reality show, in that what you see is not what actually is. The grimness is craft. The pain is craft. The characterological development of Generalissimo Jr. is fake:

Bush is not a man for introspection. That's part of his flinty personality -- the tight, clipped answers and the forced jocularity of the nicknames he gives to reporters and White House aides. That's why this version of reality TV is so poignant: This very private man has begun to talk out loud about the emotional turmoil inside. He is letting it bleed.

These aren’t changes that occur in real, non-televised life. The epiphanic quality is all wrong. The speed of change is all wrong. The causal relationship between exterior events and interior state is too neat. The slutty girl who drinks and fucks too much does not reform and become a good member of the MTV house in the real-time space of one episode; what changes occur do so over the entire duration of her Real World stint; they occur at the direction of the producers and wirters; they occur with the cooperation of the cast member who is playing a character. In post-production, the 22-minute episode focusing on the drinking problems and redemption of the slutty girl is of this matter made.

David Ignatius, the newly-minted Stupidest Motherfucking Man in the Whole Motherfucking World, concludes:

[Bush] is still playing to win. The audience is shouting out advice, but the man under the spotlight knows he will have to make this decision alone.

Davey even confuses reality TV with a game show in his own damn column! And that, I think, is a perfect encapsulation of our ruling class: it thinks in terms of mixed and mismatched metaphors that it doesn’t know are mixed and mismatched. It doesn’t even know they’re metaphors.

One where you got thirty million killed, and one where you got a hundred and twenty million killed!

Kevin Drum, one of the many bland accommodationist Donkles who girded his loins and hitched his britches and raised the flag and piled the barricades to "Save Social Security!" now writes:

Still, honesty compels me to say that I'm glad this [escalation] is going to happen. I know this makes me a bad person with no concern for human life etc. etc. (feel free to expand on this sentiment in comments), but at some point we have to come to a conclusion on this stuff. Conservatives long ago convinced themselves against all evidence that we could have won in Vietnam if we'd only added more troops or used more napalm or nuked Hanoi or whatever, and they're going to do the same thing in Iraq unless we allow them to play this out the way they want. If they don't get to play the game their way, they'll spend the next couple of decades trying to persuade the American public that there was nothing wrong with the idea of invading Iraq at all. We just never put the necessary resources into it.

Well, screw that. There's nothing we can do to stop them anyway, so give 'em the resources they want. Let 'em fight the war the way they want. If it works -- and after all, stranger things have happened -- then I'll eat some crow. But if it doesn't, there's a chance that the country will actually learn something from this.

Usually it's your ahem-progressives loudly castigating the Naderite Bolshevik Left-Libertarian pseudo-caucus for bitching on the Donkle and trying to "heighten the contradictions" while Iraq bleeds, the poor suffer, the baby Jesus cries, and so on.

Now we have this veritable avatar of faux-rationalist Donkle centrism advocating that we heighten the contradictions a bit by throwing a few more eggs on the griddle. What can it hurt, after all, other than the eggs? "There's nothing we can do to stop them anyway . . . Let 'em fight the war the way they want." By which, to paraphrase Drum himself, he means: Give 'em permission to add more troops, nuke Baghdad, clear restive Anbar with a heapin' helpin' of napalm or white phosphorous. Drum says that if only it were so, when the eventual, inevitable loss comes, there'll be no room for today's young combat-dodgers to grow up nursing the nightmare that we were stabbed in the back by our own perfidious internal dissenters. As if that particular narrative requires that the stab-in-the-back actually, you know, happen.

From the early sixties onward, we only escalated and got more brutal in Vietnam, until there were half a million men in-country and non-stop sorties firebombing the country all to hell and everything else short of actually nuking the place, and it still didn't work, because it was their country, and whatever faction was going to control it, it wasn't going to be Uncle Sam's boys.

That is Drum's recipe for success. Exterminate the brutes until the exterminators realize that roaches outbreed their traps. Morally monstrous and hopelessly naive. Yes, Virginia, we have no Santa Claus.