Fooled Ya Once

My brain and bowels pin Edwards on the Donkle for 2008. Hillary quite clearly can't shake her mythos as some sort of cross between Erzsébet Báthory, Karl Marx, and Alice B. Toklas, and let's be frank, Americans may say they're sick of war, but that doesn't mean they're going to give a Vaginal-American the keys to cluster bombs, such as it were. Barack Obama, admittedly, has an edifying effect on the bloggity entrails of the Donkle, the self-described netroots. It's something to do with his bromidic, ecumenical say-nothingism--lift every boat and change every heart and cross every river; Martin Luther King, Jr. done by Cliffs Notes and stripped of all offending radicalism the way the Oxford dons used to cut the pederasty out of Plato. But despite the metro media chatter about his transnational, transcendent, transubstantial charisma, one fact remains: 2008 is not the year that America is going to elect a black dude named Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency, which will at least benefit the psychological health of those of us who hear "There are no African-Americans and Italian-Americans and this-Americans and that-Americans; there are only Americans!" and run for the toilet bowl faster than a runway model at the sound of Anna Wintour's claws on the linoleum. The rest of them are craven hacks even by the usual standards of a Democratic primary.

So Edwards it is, the Lawerly Lord Orthodontia of the Carolinas, and to firm up his rather wimpy portfolio, he's started hitting up all the right people and telling them that he's totally down with bombing the fuck out of Iran. (As the memorable line went in Bullworth: "My people aren't stupid. They put all the big Jews on my schedule. You are Jewish, right?") His actual phrase is "It would be foolish for any American president to ever take any option off the table." Any option. Ever! Read it and weep. Or, if you're a fan of the Donk, you can read it as backing away mildly from even bloodier nonsense spouted first at a conference in Herzliya, Israel, and then up in New York at some AIPAC conference with La Clinton also rattling her saber in the general direction of the Persian Plateau. The whole sad interview with budding Donkle wordsmith Better-than-Ezra Klein is a fantastical trip through Edwardsian double-and-triple-talk, and it's plain to see who's the wannabe journo and who's the accomplished trial lawyer. Edwards basically stakes out the position that we shouldn't invade Iran unless we invade Iran, but he gives the familiar Donkle huff about "negotiations," which in Demotalk as well as Republitalk means only the presentation of a series of preconditions to a nominally weaker nation with a very bright, very clear "or else" floating over the special envoy's head like the corona of light above a Medieval madonna. Here is the most illuminating bit:

KLEIN: OK, let me talk for a minute then--we spoke last time, about the lessons of Iraq, and the one you told me was that we need to be much more skeptical of intelligence, even when there appears to be unity about what it--

EDWARDS: Correct.

KLEIN: Let’s go a bit farther. What does Iraq say about the feasibility and the bar for invading countries in the Middle East?

EDWARDS: It means that we have to be much more careful. And even, you know, there seems to be some consensus about what Iran is doing, but we ought to be very critical when analyzing the information we’re getting on Iran, too.

Arthur Silber has written many excellent pieces on the fallacy of intelligence in policy, one of the best of which is this essay from last November, called "How the Foreign Policy Consensus Protects Itself." Let's be entirely frank about it: after World War II, the art of figuring out what your enemy is doing in war metastasized with the militarizing security state into the CIA and the zillion other dead-letter acronym agencies now bumping about, unmonitored, all over the country. Their purpose was to hike up the Soviet threat, to provide a psuedo-informational rationale for policies already in place. Their purpose remains the same: to provide material justifications for policies already crafted in service to a consensus ideology of American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny Continued, American Imperialism, et al.

So the unsophisticated Klein, already owning to the false premise that we have any right to invade other countries, asks Edwards what he'd do differently the next time we've got to knock over a gas station, and Edwards looks him straight in the eye and says, Going forward, it's pretty clear that we're gonna have to fool you better so you don't get sick of it so quick. Well, I feel better.

Jew Who?

When Marty Peretz was discovering masturbation in a Brooklyn basement like some Henry Roth character, George Soros was surviving one of the great urban battles of World War II. Soros, whatever his faults, has actually seen a Nazi in person, has survived both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army, did not marry into but made his money, and I'd vouchsafe that between 3 million bucks a year to Solidarity and Chapter 77 and the work of the Open Society Institute, he's done a measure more good for a number more people than the Thesaurus Rex of the mid-circulation American newsmag set. So you can see how I'd be confused by this:

And, by the way, I've got a short essay about George Soros, only a faux intellectual, self-corrupted as both an American and a Jew. OK, maybe the point is that he isn't a Jew. So to what extent does he think of himself as an American, he who is so vexed by tribalism and so animated by greed?

How one attains to the position of faux intellectual I don't know, but it's rather rich for a guy who bought a magazine with his heiress wife's money and proceeded to give himself column miles to spin anti-Arab yarns like an unironical Ahab chasing a surprisingly olive-hued whale to accuse anyone of fakery. Self-corruption seems more a Catholic than Jewish concept to me, and as for Soros' Judaism, I can't claim to know what imaginary deity, if any, lurks is his billionaire's brain, but I'm as certain as can be that no matter what he sings to himself in the shower, Martin Peretz is neither the sovereign of America nor a Kohen in a rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem, and so his particular judgements of citizenship or membership in Hashem's chosen people count, as do all of Marty's opinions, very much to Marty himself and very little to anyone else.

Termagant

TURGIDSON: Strangelove. What kind of a name is that? That ain't no kraut name, is it, Stainsy?

STAINS: He changed it when he became a citizen. It used to be Merkwurkdigliebe.

TURGIDSON: Hmm. A kraut, by any other name, huh, Stainsy?

-from Dr. Strangelove-

Now that Saddam Hussein has been lynched, and with the possible exception of Islom Karimov, is there any living human being quite so morally odious as Charles Krauthammer? In his own words:

We midwifed their freedom. They chose civil war.

Well that was easy enough.

This conclusion obtains from a long series of preceeding humbugs about Those Goddamn Iraqis. Those Goddamn Iraqis are everywhere these days--seemingly the former nation's newest domiant sect. Here is Democratic Senator Carl Levin discussing Those Goddamn Iraqis. Here is a teaser trailer of "Prospects for Iraq’s Stability: A Challenging Road Ahead," a sure-fire blockbuster produced by "America’s intelligence agencies," the studio that brought you smash hits like Nicaragua: The Ollie North Story, Iran: The Ollie North Story, and Iraq: I'm Sure Ollie North Figures in Here Somewhere, which prominently features Those Goddamn Iraqis.

Krauthammer, though, is the real virtuoso here, the M.C. Escher of the yap-dog class, the Fritz Kreisler of the instruments of blame, who can take your basic Sonata in the Key of Those Goddamn Iraqis and flay it into a skittering, racing, triple-stopping, four-octave cadenza of "It Wasn't Us!":

America comes and liberates them from the tyrant who kept everyone living in fear, and the ancient animosities and more recent resentments begin to play themselves out to deadly effect. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died, the overwhelming majority of them killed by Sunni insurgents, Baathist dead-enders and their al-Qaeda allies who carry on the Saddamist pogroms.

Much of their killing--the murder of innocent Shiites in their mosques and markets--is bereft of politics. It is meant to satisfy instead an atavistic hatred of the Shiite heresy. The late al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was even chided by headquarters in Afghanistan for his relish in killing Shiites for the sport of it.

Iraqis were given their freedom, and yet many have chosen civil war. Among all these religious prejudices, ancient wounds, social resentments and tribal antagonisms, who gets the blame for the rivers of blood? You can always count on some to find the blame in America. "We did not give them a republic," insists Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria. "We gave them a civil war."

Of all the accounts of the current situation, this is by far the most stupid. And the most pernicious. Did Britain "give" India the Hindu-Muslim war of 1947-48 that killed a million souls and ethnically cleansed 12 million more? The Jewish-Arab wars in Palestine? The tribal wars of post-colonial Uganda?

We gave them a civil war? Why? Because we failed to prevent it? Do the police in America have on their hands the blood of the 16,000 murders they failed to prevent last year?

If I were to pick an unintentional truth told in this steamy pile of half-digested ressentiment and seasick history, it would be the phrase "kept everyone living." Everyone is a relative term, of course, and Saddam Hussein was as accomplished a murderer as they come, but whatever death and repression he brought to his own nation, it was, let us all join hands and admit, a good measure better than it is since his ignominious deposing and demise.

[...] O, it
offends me to the soul to hear a robustious
periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to
very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who
for the most part are capable of nothing but
inexplicable dumbshows and noise: I would have such
a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it
out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it.

Krauthammer, uncontent to blame Those Goddamn Iraqis alone, goes on to suggest that all the aborigines are responsible for the vicious aftershocks of colonialism. "Did Britain 'give' India the Hindu-Muslim war of 1947-48 that killed a million souls and ethnically cleansed 12 million more? The Jewish-Arab wars in Palestine? The tribal wars of post-colonial Uganda?" Well. Yes. To be entirely fair, one might even argue that the Muslim-Muslim-Muslim-Muslim-etc. War in Iraq was given by our sallow transatlantic cousins, who cobbled the damned thing together in the first place. Krauthammer would prefer to blame the dirty Arab, but the British, at least, are not We, The Americans.

We did not, in any case, "give" the Iraqis a civil war by failing to prevent it, a phrasing that itself implies total native culpability. We necessitated a civil war by foisting a type and manner of government totally at odds with any reasonable prospect of political accommodation. This is a point Jim Henley has made a thousand times before: the fighting is the political process, tout par contre Chuckles Kraut. We demanded proportional representation in a country where such would mean tyranny. We created system of party slates and lists that by its very nature reinforced the primacy of religiosocial identity. Armed conflict is the resolution.

That freedom baby we "midwifed" was stillborn.

A Single Slip-up

Teresa at Making Light has all the good links on the recent Aqua Teen al-Qaeda Force scrum in Boston. By now you're likely familiar with the basic outlines of the story: a marketing gimic featuring cartoon figures with LEDs sparked the sort of all-hands-on-deck interagency response that supposedly could've saved New Orleans, if only Hurricane Katrina had looked a little more like a vast, meteorological Lite Brite kit. Imagine the Pavlovian mania of our Fatherland Shock Troops when some drunken Peorian phones in the flashing-light bomb threat at two AM while confabbing with some fellow Rotarians in Vegas.

Officialdom, meanwhile, congratulates themselves to the tune of: This just proves that we're prepared to respond! It represents the ultimate triumph of the hypothetical over the observed. September 11 happened; Katrina happened; the East Coast blackouts happened. But plenty of phony terrorist plots have been broken up, and the last storm season was a piddler, and thus . . . Almost everything we do to prevent and mitigate these disasters is wrong, but because we do it so well when there's no actual disaster pending, by god, we must be doing something right. To make the basic libertarian point: This is the problem with government: It endlessly aggregates as a corrective to problems of which it itself is the ultimate cause. Homeland Security, such as the Stalinist euphemism goes, and the whole attendant structure of the National Security State is a neverending response by the United States Government to security problems, real and imagined, that are created, grown, and catalyzed by the policies of the United States Government. As goes the famous dialogue in Dr. Strangelove:

TURGIDSON: The duty officer asked General Ripper to confirm the fact the he had issued the go code and he said, "Yes gentlemen, they are on their way in and no one can bring them back. For the sake of our country and our way of life, I suggest you get the rest of SAC in after them, otherwise we will be totally destroyed by red retaliation. My boys will give you the best kind of start, fourteen hundred megatons worth, and you sure as hell won't stop them now. So let's get going. There's no other choice. God willing, we will prevail in peace and freedom from fear and in true health through the purity and essence of our natural fluids. God bless you all." Then he hung up. We're still trying to figure out the meaning of that last phrase, sir.

MUFFLEY: There's nothing to figure out General Turgidson. This man is obviously a psychotic.

TURGIDSON: Well, I'd like to hold off judgment on a thing like that, sir, until all the facts are in.

MUFFLEY: (anger rising) General Turgidson, when you instituted the human reliability tests, you assured me there was no possibility of such a thing ever occurring.

TURGIDSON: Well I don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip up sir.

To which I have nothing noteworthy to add.

Here Be Spoilers: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Fiction

The dismal science—or is it art?—of extracting evidence of depraved political economies from works of art is nothing new. It’s an Inquisitional hobby that’s probably as old as art itself. It’s certainly true that some art is expressly political. It’s easy to identify because it’s almost universally bad. At present, it’s mostly the tighty-righty Kulturkamp battalions who engage in the neverending task of divining every other artwork’s position in the dim political constellation called America. Roy Edroso does yeoman’s work on the subject over at Alicublog. But Homo liberalus is by no means immune to allure. Here we have Atrios discovering damned, Naderite, above-the-fray, pox-on-both-their-houses, third-party, do-nothing, messianic defeatism in Children of Men:

I tend to react negatively to anything which floats above, or suggests that floating above, the muck is the only productive or honorable course. This is the view of David "pox on both their houses [especially the Democrats] " Broder, the "everybody but us are losers" attitude of the South Park guys, Nader's Gush and Bore, etc... And, ultimately, this is part of the message of Children of Men. The government is right wing and bad. The dissenters are left wing and bad, and so bad they team up with Islamic terrorists and see revolution as an end in itself. Salvation is to be found not within but outside the system. Only those who set up camp outside the existing order offer possible salvation.

I've got nothing against those who see the corruption of the system as an insurmountable problem, it's those who apparently see human nature as an insurmountable problem but then imagine there are Super Humans who can somehow transcend this.

Within that framework the movie had a lot of interesting and perceptive bits, but too often the motives of the political actors were left unexplained. Why was the government obsessed with deporting foreigners? No clear rationale (reasonable or not) was offered. Why were the revolutionaries obsessed with revolution as an end in itself? Why were they united with the Islamic terrorist/revolutionaries?

The political message of "everyone sucks" but "somewhere saviors exist" is a very common one, and it tends to come from people who lack their own coherent ideological foundation.

There are some gaping holes in the narrative of Children of Men, but honest readers and filmgoers know that every narrative is at its heart a construct of unlikely coincidences and foolish decisions. A great work of art integrates these seamlessly, and we believe them. Children of Men isn’t a great work of art, and it creaks. It’s by no means a bad work, though, and the creaks can be charming, particularly since much of the forward momentum of the plot is standard adventure/chase-movie fare. It’s a very artfully, compellingly filmed movie, so we judge it more harshly on its merits than we judge Indiana Jones, but the mechanics of the stories are much the same. Children of Men is worthwhile for its scenes of urban combat alone, which shame well-regarded precursors like Full Metal Jacket with pathos, terror, and palpable immediacy.

Atrios’ real error, in any event, is confusing as plain a deus ex machina as you’ll find in contemporary storytelling with a statement of political principles. Children of Men isn’t about the failures of leftist or rightist ideology, nor is it a brief for salvation by a few ingenious outsiders. Children of Men is about one man, a minor functionary in a fallen, ugly, pitiless world, who has the rare privilege to find a little bit of redemption before he dies. He is an ugly, unhappy, apathetic, uninvolved man who sets out to make a bit of money. He is neither particularly brave nor terribly trustworthy himself. He isn’t likeable. But he has one friend, and he makes another. He acts bravely. He loves a little bit. He protects a person who is more vulnerable than he is. It’s as old a story as there is. A weak man discovers some inner goodness while protecting a woman and child. A woman shows herself to be braver and stronger in many ways than her ostensible protector. They redeem each other. In the end he dies for it, but he dies a better man, and the boat the floats in at the very end of the film to rescue the woman he was protecting might as well have been a choir of angels winging him to heaven or Persephone rising from a trapdoor in the stage floor to bundle him off to the Elysian fields.

Like the right-wing morons who read science fiction series as anti-Bush propaganda and other such, Atrios resolutely refuses to take the fiction on its own terms—to allow it its own context, to believe in the world it proposes, to accept its rules and conditions. Like every work of narrative fiction, the imagined world of Children of Men owes much to our own, and like any near-future speculative fiction, it uses present politics as a template for its own political reality. Atrios complains that Children of Men proposes that left and right, government and opposition, are equally bad, equally selfish, equally short-sighted, equally vicious, and equally self-interested. It’s all just backward projection. He assumes that the film makes that argument not about its universe, but about ours. You may or may not believe that such an argument is applicable to the real, contemporary world, but whatever your position on that matter is, it’s irrelevant to Children of Men, whose world exists in service of its narrative, which in turn is in service to the development of a small collection of characters.

In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio actually says, “A plague o’ both your houses.” He says it three times. Curiously enough, the Montagues and the Capulets deserve it.

Holy Roman Empire, Take 2

We can now see in motion a classic pattern of aggression playing out in the Middle East. It begins with claims of victimization by the party planning the aggression -- that would be the Bush Administration. Evil designs and extraordinary powers to do evil are ascribed to the assigned victim. Today it's Iran and its non-existent nuclear weapons. The target is personalized for purposes of a vilification campaign that stupid people can rally around. In this case, it's the batty Iranian president, though in truth equally nutty statements come from the mouths of U.S. evangelical leaders routinely feted by our rulers. It's only a matter of time before his mug shot is blown up and put on the cover of TIME Magazine.

-Sawicky

Read, as they say, the whole thing. Max Sawicky also kindly amplifies a point I made in comments to yesterday's post:

This is not a new war. It is the same war. It has waxed hot and cold for decades. The consistent policy implemented by the U.S. government, sometimes through its proxy Israel, is to prevent national economic, social, and democratic development anywhere in the region that is not on U.S. terms. The object, a pillar of U.S. strategic interests, is control--not literal possession--of petroleum resources.

Max perhaps overstates the singular importance of oil (which is not to say that I quibble with the keystone importance of the resource to our policy in the region) and underestimantes the concurrent influence of a truly evangelical commitment to Jacobin revolutionarism. Such matters of emphasis aside, though, what he notes here is the very point that I have tried to make (and tried and tried again): that what we face is not a "War in Iraq" alone, nor the possibility of a distinct "War in Iran," but a continuous, unified, global policy of aggression and dominance toward minor and developing states. The purpose is to preseve American predominance. The costs--in lives, ruined infrastructures, poisoned environments, smashed internal equilibriums, political rifts, ad inf.--to the many nations affected by this policy are incidental. The idea of "nation-building" is a euphemism for half-hearted attempts to Vichy-ize subordinated nations. When you hear Condoleeza Rice talking about overthrowing the old Westphalian notion of sovereign states; when you hear her talking about abandoning extant international institutions--flawed though they may be--for variously described coalitions of "democracies"; what you're hearing is the description of an essentially medieval-feudal worldview, with the United States as monarch and the rest of the "democratic" world as a collection of fiefdoms paying tithes and raising armies when called upon to do so. Those in the not-so-democratic world, of course, are fair game.

"The party of the first part shall be known in this contract as the party of the first part."

Who's responsible for the new anti-Semitism? Why the Jews, of course!


Via Ackerman.

Notes and Premises

There are two errors at the root of so-called progressive support--tentative or full-throated, it makes no difference--for the Democratic Party. The first error is believing that the Democratic Party is a peace party, or at very least, that the Democratic Party is now institutionally committed to ending the Iraq War. They're committed insofar as Hillary Clinton, who like most of her cosectarians supported the war until its failures became entirely undeniable, says that it would be "the height of irresponsibility" for "this president" to leave the catastrophe to his successor. Or they are committed, in the now-popular euphemism, to "phased redeployment," through which American soldiers will remove themselves (mostly) from territorial Iraq, but will remain "in the region" and "as an over-the-horizon force." The Iraq War was part of a project of regional dominance articulated in its present form by none other than Democratic President Jiminy Carter, who proclaimed the Middle East, and the Persian Gulf in particular, "a vital national interest," of the United States. That, too, is a euphemism we all understand. The Democratic Party's committment to ending the War in Iraq is a committment to mitigating American losses, diminishing any perception of their own culpability, and therefore maximizing their own future political fortunes. It isn't a committment to peace in any meaningful sense, and it's even less a committment to disengagement from a failed regional policy in which the bloody stumbling of the American military and its Israeli proxies has served only to stoke the flames of religious conflict, religious extremism, and religious nationalism. The non-binding 110th has shown no inclination toward any meaningful diminishment of America's disastrous involvement in the Middle East. (But, I can already hear the plaintive progressive cries, there's nothing they can do! If true--which it ain't--that's only one more reason to stop giving them your money, your time, and your vote.) That they now wish impotently for fewer American targets in the shooting gallery they complied to create is hardly an argument for their status as peacemakers.

This first error is the inevitable outgrowth from the second, which is a serious fallacy of premise. The second error is the error of that favorite political adjective "unprecedented." You can be sure that any time that word appears in political discourse, the exact opposite is true. The War in Iraq is not an unprecedented foreign policy disaster. It's a disaster with a distinct, observable lineage. The Bush administration is not unprecedented. Its precedents are every other presidency in the years since World War II, and several, at least, before. At the very root of the error is unthinking acceptance of the P.T. Barnum-esque premise of America as "The Greatest and Most Prosperous Nation in the World," a chestunt roasted equally by both parties. That phrase, and those like it, is shorthand for a religious--I mean that as a pejorative--belief that the United States of America, being something of a civilizational (minimum: civic, political) apotheosis has an affirmative commission to interfere in the internal developments of other nations for whatever reason we see fit. The most disastrous consequence of that belief from a purely practical standpoint is that it has decoupled our plain imperialism from plain acknowledgement that imperialism is our project. Because our moral self-illusion precludes us from really identifying what it is we seek when we send off the ships and airplanes and infantry, we make colonial policy by circumlocution and euphemism, even at the very highest levels. "The forward agenda of freedom" isn't only a phrase for public consumption. Meaningless bromides are clearly just as much the lingua franca of the governing class. The far more disastrous consequence from a human perspective is that because we believe our bromides, believe in our goodness, and believe in the legitimacy of our moral pretensions, we feel as justified as any other zealot in raining blood and fire on non-belieivers, since we believe that a failure to convert is spiritual doom anyway.

That sort of exceptionalism lead us into a militarized national security state, a garrison economy, a many-trillion-dollar military complex, a series of fruitless border skirmishes with the Soviet Union that, in their worst instance, killed millions of Vietnamese. It led to the creation of a vast nuclear arsenal which we alone reserve the right to use, should it become "necessary." It led to a quarter-century of America-funded, America-supported massacres in Latin America. (These things occured under Democrats as much as under Republicans.) It lead to the modern surveillance state, the gradual slide toward national identification, the imprisonment of two million Americans, the creation of a vast intelligence apparatus with no meaningful Congressional oversight and secret budgts. It lead to our monstrous interventionist policies in the Middle East. It lead to Bill Clinton's "Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act," which lead to the Patriot Act. It lead to the articulated Clinton/Gore policy of "regime change"--a Democratic euphemism. The current contention that "A Gore presidency wouldn't have taken us to war in Iraq" is not only fanciful, ahistorical projection, it's also patently false in that we were already at war with Iraq. We were bombing the country almost daily through the final years of the Clinton administration, and Al Gore was one of the staunchest Iraq hawks in the government. It was a low-intensity conflict that we simply chose to ignore domestically under the euphemistic guise of "no-fly zones" and "economic sanctions." In Susan Sontag's famously provocative post-9/11 essay, she asked, "How many Americans are aware of our ongoing bombardment of Iraq?" You know the answer.

The progressive will say that all this is a recipe for hopelessness. Only a major party can make changes, goes the argument, and if you can't get behind one then you're just a useless complainer. It's a profoundly ignorant argument. Every vote for either major party is approbation for immense crimes. It's only because their historical perspective is so myopic that these self-proclaimed progressives view political action as necessarily constrained to election cycles, votes, discrete military endeavors, etc. The project of altering the fundamental perceptions and premises underlying the American popular consciousness is a long one. Possibly it is futile. But the idea that the American electorate--the American mind, if such a thing exists--is currently capable of supporting or sustaining meaningful, essential, fundamental change is a fantasy and nothing more. The nature of our problems and the scope of our wrongdoing is entirely beyond the farthest boundaries of ordinary discussion in America today. The first step toward change is to expand the capacity of Americans to imagine something different. Slow, quixotic, and likely hopeless. But that is the task at hand.

"Why's that nigger talkin' 'bout Vietnam?"

Over at DailyKos, the Deux Magots of Donkle self-amplification, something called Hesiod, who I do believe I've seen slinking around the comments chez Henley, quotes America's Most Hysterical Homosexual™ before doing the usual Donkle disdainery over the appearance of some additional anti-Occupation sentiment at an "anti-War" rally.

As usual, "Free Mumia" serves as a neat synechdoche for leftie perfidy, when all the pwoggies really wanted was for some nice, middle-class, reg-uh-lurr Americans already in the opinion-poll majority to show up and pose for the cameras while listening to stump speeches by Democratic politicos. As usual, there is an unconcealed animosity for those who understand that the America-funded Israeli occupation regime and the American occupation in Iraq are predicated on the same cultural assumptions and military policies. They aren't just incidentally or regionally related.

The weird-looking lefties who always ruin the Donkle's pleasant afternoon on the National Mall, for their many immaturities and manifold faults in the field of PR, at least possess a sufficiently sophiticated understanding of the history of their nation to understand the Iraq war as an extension and realization of many decades of American policy toward the rest of the world. At very least, they know that the narrative renders the Iraq war as a deeply regrettable aberation in a century of generally positive American international involvement is simplistic, stupid, and desperately, childishly naïve. The war in Iraq is not discrete, but your basic Donkle is too dumb and blinkered to realize this, and sees it only as momentarily choppy waters impeding the glorious forward moment of the Good Ship Take Back America.

Lesson: neither elected Dems nor the nabobs of Netrootsia have any interest in actually confronting the American imperium head-on. It hurts their little noggins. They love them some manly military men like Fightin' Jim Webb. They love his "greatest nation in the country" remix. They share his affection for Andrew Jackson, who "relocated" 40,000 Indians. JFK was good, the Great Society was great, Vietnam was a "mistake," Nixon was bad, Carter, eh, Reagan terrifies them even now, George père has acquired a new veneer of respectability for "not going to Baghdad," the height of foreign policy perspicacity, Bill Clinton was a saint of a man ruined by vendetta, and Gee Dub disappoints them by directing the restrictive powers of the Eternal Maternal State at those things they approve rather than the opposite. Their normative historical mode is mythological. Their habitual rhetorical position is self-righteous. Their only outward expression of moral sense is disdain. Their only interest is to acquire status in the status quo.

Was. Is. Shall Be.

Like Jim Henley, I smell a big fish story in the changing story of the Battle amongst The Palm Orchard. Juan Cole provides some needed perspective by pointing out that there really is no perspective. It's all evidently part of the ongoing York Harding School of American military policy. There are good guys and bad guys, and there's some sort of third force (or in the case of Iraq, a fifth, ninth, one zillionth force), but damned if we can tell who's whom; they all look the same to us. As Cole points out, the greatest likelihood here is that we witnessed American forces duped into aiding one party or other in some internecine Shiite violence. That should be sobering, since it shows more clearly than ever that our facile, tripartite impression of an Iraq composed of a Shiite bloc, a Sunni bloc, and a Kurdish bloc is a dangerously simplistic colonial fantasy, but as is always and inevitably the case for America, what ought to sober us up only makes us drunker.

And speaking of drunker, there's this Times interview with Iran's ambassador to Iraq, also linked by Cole, who calls the Time's treatment of the whole thing "a little breathless" (quel supris!), and who says with uncharacteristic (perhaps intentional?) naïveté:

As for American officials, when asked about such plans [to establish greater economic and diplomatic links with Iraq] in the past, they said that they hoped Iraq would have good relations with all its neighbors and understood that there would be economic relations with Iran. I can't see what the big crisis is.

The big crisis is that the United States is already engaged in a hot conflict with Iran and plans to escalate that conflict. We've sent an additional carrier group to the region. We've sent batteries of Patriot missiles. We've amplified our belligerent dialogue. We've made it open policy to interdict "Iranian agents" in Iraq. There have been reports--even by men of reputation like Pat Lang--that American special operations forces have already conducted cross-border activities in Iran. The big crisis must be constructed.

Iran and Iraq are neighbors. Iran and Iraq fought a brutal war waged at the behest of a minority government in Iraq. Now that the minority government is gone, it's in Iran's natural self-interest to encourage and support a sympathetic, coreligionist majority in Iraq. These are the things that states do to guarantee their own security. Iran's "meddling" in the internal affairs of its neighbor is strikingly similar to America's meddling there: it seeks to establish as thoroughly and firmly as possible a friendly regime. (One notes that whatever violence Iran may be encouraging, and I do not doubt for a moment that some parts of the Iranian government are providing at least some support for violence in Iraq, the Iranian military is not currently occupying its neighbor.) Now I am no more a fan of Iranian intervention in Iraq than I am of American intervention in Iraq, and this business of jerking other nations around for your own benefit is just as unseemly, immoral, and doomed-to-fail for Iran as it is for America. Regardless, it's important for all of us to understand that when our government makes warlike noises about Iranian provocations which are commensurate with American actions, it isn't because our governors are naïve, short-sighted, or blind to history. It's because they're lying, entirely deliberately, and with the intention of starting another war.

Update: As Jim notes in comments, this post lacked a certain clarity in sentence numero uno. To Mrs. Offering, the kids, the pets, and libertarians everwhere, I do hereby disavow any knowledge of Jim's sanitary affinities and animosities, and presume him a model of hygiene.

White Rabbit

Radley Balko and a lot of other admirable cats have already gone to the mat with John Hawkins high-larious paean to the Forever War on Mari-hu-wana. The best bit is near the end:

[W]ay back when William Bennett was the drug czar, he responded like so to a caller on the Larry King show who told him that he should "behead the damn drug dealers."

"I mean what the caller suggests is morally plausible," he said. "Legally, it's difficult. But somebody selling drugs to a kid? Morally, I don't have any problem with that at all."

Bennett was right then, he's right now, and my guess is that most parents, upon finding out that someone was peddling drugs to their kid, would agree with him.

Now this reminded me of one of my favorite scenes in the collected works of the greatest almost-sheriff of Pitkin Co., CO. I couldn't find my copy of the book, but I did dig up the screenplay for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

DA
(whacks his fist
on the bar)
Hell, I really hate to hear this.
Because everything that happens in
California seems to get down our
way, sooner or later. Mostly
Atlanta. But that was back when
the goddamn bastards were peaceful.
All we had to do was to keep 'em
under surveillance. They didn't
roam around much... But now Jesus,
it seems nobody's safe.

GONZO
(with a conspiratorial
nod)
You're going to need to take the
bull by the horns -- go to the mat
with this scum.

DA
What do you mean by that?

GONZO
You know what I mean. We've done
it before and we can damn well do
it again!

DUKE
Cut their goddamn heads off. Every
one of them. That's what we're
doing in California.

DA
(stupefied)
WHAT?

GONZO
Sure. It's all on the Q.T., but
everybody who matters is with us
all the way down the line.

DUKE
We keep it quiet. It's not the
kind of thing you'd want to talk
about upstairs. Not with the press
around.

DA
(recovering slightly)
Hell, no. We'd never hear the
goddamn end of it.

DUKE
Dobermans don't talk.

DA
What?

GONZO
Sometimes it's easier to just rip
out the backstraps.

DUKE
They'll fight like hell if you try
to take the head without the dogs.

DA
God almighty!
(muttering in a daze)
I don't think I should tell my wife
about this. She'd never understand.
You know how women are.