Putin on the Ritz

Vladimir Putin went to Munich and said what everyone was already thinking: that the United States is fucking shit up. Robert Gates, the United States Secretary of Defense, said in response, "As an old Cold Warrior, one of yesterday's speeches almost filled me with nostalgia for a less complex time." He paused, as the saying goes, for effect. "Almost." That he would refer to himself as a "Cold Warrior" and speak of "nostaligia for a less complex time" is telling. The idea of the "Cold Warrior" is a classic of the Reaganite habit of conflating rhetoric with action--to make a speech calling something an "Evil Empire" is to in some sense combat it; to say "tear down this wall" is to tear it down, and so on. The newly acquired habit of referring to the Cold War era as "a less complex time" is a clumsy bit of verbal flippery meant to obfuscate charges that the relative dangers of "terrorism" or "jihadism" or "Islamofascism" are insignificant compared to a half-century of nuclear brinkmanship between two paranoid continental empires sitting atop tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, each ruled fitfully by crazy people with varying penchants for bouts of bellicose grandiosity. It's meant to suggest that the "complexity" of the current "situation," by which the speaker means something like the multiplication of entities called enemies, renders it equally "existential," although how, when, and with what particular means this feat--the wholesale destruction of the United States a national entity; the wholesale destruction of 300 million people--would or could be accomplished always remains notably vague. There is talk of "nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons," or "Weapons of Mass Destruction," or "WMDs," among which only nuclear weapons have the capacity for the total eradication of a populous half-continent, and only in quantities such as those held by the United States and Russia. So the question of our "existence," in the physical sense at least, is not in fact a question, and the issue of "complexity," in the sense that we can no longer claim a single locus of anti-American hostility called "Moscow" or "the Kremlin" or, yes, "the Evil Empire"--however the metonymic and synechdocic winds are blowing on any given day at any particular press conference--is likewise not really a question at all.

But to the question of Russia--Will it once again seek to destroy us--Charles Krauthammer, the Strangelovian avatar of jingo nutjobbery, says yes and no. He gives a series of predictable regrets about a Russia that is no longer a supine Yeltsinian drunkocracy, lamenting those national policies that are called "assertive" by people in politics. Or as Putin, equally circumlocuitous, put it himself, for Russia to "play an increasingly active role in world affairs." There is some pablum about Putin's well-known Soviet background, about his psuedo-Marxian verbal tics, about his plans for an increased ballistic missile armory. But:

Nonetheless, Putin's aggressiveness does not signal a return to the Cold War. He is too clever to be burdened by the absurdity of socialist economics or Marxist politics. He is blissfully free of ideology, political philosophy and economic theory. There is no existential dispute with the United States.

He is a more modest man: a mere mafia don, seizing the economic resources and political power of a country for himself and his (mostly KGB) cronies. And promoting his vision of the Russian national interest--assertive and expansionist--by engaging in diplomacy that challenges the dominant power in order to boost his own.

It's rather rich for an American of any stripe to lecture on "absurd" economics, as if the state-military, corporate-welfare debtor economy of the United States presents some sort of rational, let alone ideal, model for a capitalism of freely functioning and unburdened markets. "He is blissfully free of ideology, political philosophy and economic theory." The same could be said of Josef Stalin or Leon Brezhnev or, for that matter, Ronald Reagan. The "blissfully" seems especially well-suited to the last of that list. Putin is many things, but "mere mafia don" is not one of them. He is much-beloved in his own country, both by his "cronies" and by the general population, which has indisputably benefitted economically from his tenure in office. His "vision of the Russian national interest" seems neither exactly "assertive" nor exactly "expansionist," whatever that means, but just an idiosyncratically Russian understanding of the modern state--autocratic, yes, but also increasing in affluence, relatively free on a day-to-day level for ordinary citizens, more communicative and open to the rest of the world, less an international joke and pariah. These are neither good nor bad developments; it's an American pretension that the growth or diminishment of other states is a particularly American problem.

Land of the Free, Home of the Dumb.

Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori

Justin has written a great piece on one of the favorite topics of Who Is IOZ?, namely, the continuity of those portions of American policy that are now bruited as evidence of George W. Bush's unique and--here is the old political chestnut--"unprecedented" badness, meanness, dangerousness, and so forth. As this blog's saying goes: not abberation but apotheosis. To Justin's excellent summation I have very little to add, and I hope y'alls'll pop over there and read it.

America is a land fond of its own myths, certainly, and we hold a uniquely childish view of ourselves as constitutionally (and Constitutionally) incapable of the violence and depradations of "statecraft" as practiced everywhere else, by every other people, in ever other era in the whole sordid history of humankind. Because of this, our democratic experiment is a sputtering failure. Without candid self-assessment, there can be no improvement. (In this regard, too, we prove ourselves no better or worse than the international norm.) Of course we do commit the same crimes, suborn the same criminalities, and utilize the same violence as other countries. If we are unique, we are so in that our immense economy and vast military can affect destruction on a significantly larger geographic scale than other countries can plan and/or afford. It remains, nevertheless, a matter of degree. What the US has done/is doing in Iraq, Russia did in Chechnya, and Colombia does to itself. There is a certain fractal quality to our human horrors--in their basic structure, they are the same at every scale.

Otherwise, we're extraordinary only in our capacity for self-deception. As Justin points out in his post, an unusually intelligent adult American like Glenn Greenwald, an educated, well-read, reasonably thoughtful man with a lawyer's capacity to gather and marshall evidence to an argument, a man quite clearly well above the American norm in his capacity to synthesize disparate data into a cogent whole, remains nevertheless able to deny the plain history of action by his own country because it doesn't accord with some a priori convictions about what actions the United States would or would not conditionally engage in.

I would like to say that if there has been one glimmer of hope in the black wreckage of George W. Bush's America, it's that he has, at long last, stripped away the pretensions of America to sanctity and given us a sordid, brutal look at the means we use to maintain our now-crumbling global order. That would have been a tiny twinkle indeed, because it would have come carried on the scent of many corpses. George Bush has not, however, succeeded in disabusing America from America. He has provoked a sniveling pack of cowards who lack the moral capacity to confront their own national past and character to snipe at his heels, to demand that the stagehands get back in black so the passive audience can get on with watching the show without having to know how it works. Their outrage is so impotent because they're children, sometimes stroked and salved so they'll quiet down, mostly cooed at and left to play among themselves.

Glenn Greenwald is fond of formulations beginning with phrases like, "Is America the kind of nation that . . ." Fill in your atrocity. The answer is almost always: Yes. Had Marlow gone up the river, read "Exterminate the brutes" in the margins of Kurtz's book, and simply torn off the edge of the page and tossed it into the river, then we might say that Conrad had written an exegesis on what America was by then well into the process of becoming.

We Only Call them Niggers in Private

A little beastie named Tom Schaller, presumtively a pee-wog given his blog address, has a certain misperception about fags. No, a number. A flock. A murder of misconceptions. The post is rather too vile to quote verbatim, but it distills easily:

I'm, like, totally straight. Me and my buds make fun of fags. Well really we just call each other fags. Cuz who wants to be a fag? That dude from Queer Eye--totally a fag. Here are some gay football players and stuff. That Queer Eye dude, I would, like, totally kick his ass. But those sports guys could kick my ass. And that is why straight dudes are afraid of gay dudes in sports.

Straight men, and I know some of you are reading this, allow me to explain: you are a sorry lot. Your bodies are flabby. You do not excercise enough. You drink too much beer. You are less likely to play sports than to sit on your widening asses and watch them on the teevee. Many--most--gay men fall into that category as well, but fuck all that happy-happy we're-all-really-the-same bullshit. What we're really talking about here--what Schaller is really talking about--is an institutionalized culture of drinking lager, eating nuts (such as it is), and yelling at the teevee, versus ain institutionalized gay culture of youth and body worship, 7-day-a-week gym visits, cardiac stamina and sexual athleticism.

Here's a factoid: Between 1938 and 1963, the Kinsey Institute interviewed over 5000 men for its studies in human sexuality. Among other things, they measured the men's penises using five separate measures to mitigate against the obvious difficulties of measuring something that, you know, changes size. On all five measures, it was fags in first. Yes, Tom Schaller, we have better abs and bigger dicks. In the Junior High marketplace of locker-room bigotry that you seem eager to trawl, I believe that means we win.

Crisis by Crisis

In a skillful piece of invective, Michael J. Smith at SMBIVA notes that four months and one professedly successful “hundred hours” since “The Most Important Election In The History Of Whatever,” we now find ourselves confronting, well, the Most Important Election . . . etc. The Dems, newly minted masters of their domain, tinkered with student loan rates, then shrugged their shoulders in the direction of Iraq and said, essentially, “The President will do what the President will do.” The assertion has a double-meaning. Superficially, it’s meant to indicate that whatever fire from the heavens and tremors of the earth go on in the cradle of civilization, the “fault rests with President,” or that George W. Bush “owns” the war—the sort of deformation of the idea of ownership that would send Milton Friedman himself running for the comforting embrace of base and superstructure, with Ayn Rand—but for the practical pumps—nipping at his heels. The secondary meaning and more significant implication is that the American voter, that decreasing demographic and occasional appendage to “the process,” has only made a down payment on the current congress, and will have to come through on a Donkle president in double-aught-eight. Or else. (Here’s the correct application of that favorite Dem diplomatic metaphor: the carrot and stick. The tantalizing reward, forever receding from the puckered lips of the progressives.)

Just last evening on the radio I heard Hillary Clinton intone that it would be a “grave mistake” if the President were to take action—presumably that involves bombs or bullets—against Iran. There was a pause. Be still my heart!—was that a terminal period? Alas, no. It was only an ellipsis. “Without further Congressional authorization,” she concluded. The Fightin’ 110th!

One way or other, it’s true that the action in the national navel is awfully dissipated these days. Perhaps there are hearings, or perhaps there is “the Libby Trial,” a source of endless fascinating for progressive bloggers which significance I honestly cannot discern. If in 2008 it’s considered revelatory to suggest that there is a collusive relationship between Press and Process; if in 2008 it requires a dogged special prosecutor to elucidate the cozy state of insider affairs in Washington; if in 2008, after a half-decade of “Direct Democracy,” “citizen journalism,” and various other forms of bloggity triumphalism, it nonetheless requires a prosecutorial inquisition to show that the narrative of America, as read in the news and amplified (unwittingly in most cases) in the blogs, is a construct; then let’s be clear: none of these wannabe players is paying much attention. Things seem to be happening in Iran; there is a “surge” in Iraq. But Barack Obama has proposed some sort of healthcare something, and John Edwards hired a girl blogger with a rather scatological aversion to doctrinal Catholicism. As they say on Tralfamadore, “So it goes.”

The Enemy of My Enemy of My Enemy Is My What?

In 1953 the CIA engineered a coup in Iran, replacing a moderately socialist and even more moderately Islamic parliamentary republic with a despotic, absolutist monarch who built a police state more or less in the East German vein, which is to say ubiquitous, brutal, terrifying, efficient. Operation Ajax. This did not endear America to the Iranian people. A quarter-century later, the Islamic revolution forced the Shah into exile. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were particularly happy about this development, since the new Iranian government wasn't particularly predisposed to act as a superpower's proxy. So both the Americans and the Soviets turned to their new buddy, Saddam, who had recently consolidated power in Iraq, and who bore both personal and cultural animosity toward the Iranian Shi'ite government. The superpowers gave him money and arms as he launched the Iran-Iraq war, one of the deadliest conflicts of the twentieth century (and that, needless to say, is a tall order), with over a million killed on both sides. This went on for eight years, and somewhere in the early middle of it, the United States began sending money and arms to Iran also--playing the spread, such as it was, but also using an Iranian-Israeli conduit (how 'bout them apples, Marty Peretz!?) to launder money and weapons into South America, where a lot of crackpot Americans operating out of the Washington soundstage-backlot that was the Reagan administration were engaged in what was then called "rollback," which consisted principally of helping vicious rightist paramilitaries overthrow the semi-socialist regimes of impoverished Latin American nations, or if not, at least toss some commie nuns out of helicopters and massacre some villages and such other pleasantries. (As was the case in Iran, we are now witnessing in Latin America the emergence of the Chavez-vanguard Bolivarian counter-counter-revolution.)

Now curiously enough, at the same time, many of these same American characters, having taken certain lessons from the failed American efforts in Iran, began to understand in their Pylian way that radical Islam, while perhaps not the most desirable or amenable of sociocultural phenomena, was in certain regards superior to godless communism. Reagan grinned at the cameras and doodled in the margins of his presidential pad, while operators in the the rather nebulous organization that was "The Reagan Administration" began to openly discuss such plans as smuggling hundreds of thousands of illegal Korans into Soviet boder republics and nearby states. Such grandiouse schema quickly gave way to the more bread-and-butter plan of giving money and arms to the mujahadeen in Afghanistan, then holding off a Soviet invasion--the Russian Vietnam before Chechnya become the Russian Vietnam. The mujahadeen were a rugged, ascetic sort, which appealed to the Reagan-Republican fetish for a kind of gritty, war-movie grandiosity. Also, although they were Muslim, they were a different kind of Muslim than the Iranians, and that was probably good, right? The underlying assumption, surely, was that at some future point, presuming victory over the Soviets in Afghanistan, the internal divisions of Islam would serve our American interests by counterbalancing each other and preveting too much spill-over of any particular sort of radical Islamic sentiment. We are now familiar with these once-allies of the United States as the much-feared and much-hated "Islamofascists," or as the "global jihad," or as the "worldwide Islamic insurgency," and so forth.

The mujahadeen did defeat the Soviets, but Afghanistan was wrecked and descended into warlordism until such time as an especially nasty outgrowth of the Soviet War years, the Taliban, consolidated some central power in the country. In the United States, former CIA man and Reagan Veep George H.W. Bush was elected president. Soon thereafter, our ally Saddam Hussein transgressed on some unspoken stricture on his conduct as an American proxy by invading Kuwait. "This aggression will not stand," said Bush, and so we launched the Gulf War, lead by General Stormin' Norman Schwartzkopf, Jr. Norman, Sr., you may be aware, was one of the principle architects of the aforementioned Project Ajax, whereby the Shah was returned to his throne in 1953. Funny, that. During the Gulf War, the United States established a large military presence in Saudi Arabia, which was regarded by our former Islamic Allies as a towering blasphemy and a clear indication that, having helped them throw off or push back the threat of Soviet domination, we had no intention of leaving them to their own devices and their own self-determination. The rest of the history here is familiar, but let's cover a few more points, for shits and giggles.

The dismal son of George H.W. Bush was elected president, and the senscent remnants of all these Middle Eastern boondoggles hitched their britches and decided to go in for one last kill. They engineered a second conflict with Iraq, whereby we would "finish what we started." We overthrew Saddam Hussein and fostered an Iranian-backed Shi'ite government! In the process, we wrecked the Iraqi state and destroyed the central authority that had maintained a delicate balance of terror between the various ethnoreligious factions of the population. It led to a civil war and a total failure of the American political project. Since America cannot fail, someone else had to be blamed. At first it was "Saddamists" and "Ba'athist dead-enders," but with the lynching of Saddam, the most visible visual metaphor for such claims disappeared, and we currently find ourselves blaming Iran, the country that backs the government we installed in Baghdad. No one seems to be precisely sure what we are blaming them for, but it is surely very, very bad. In all likelihood, this will devolve into an open shooting war of some kind with Iran.

And that, ladies and gentleman, is America's "policy" in the Middle East.

You Say Potato, and I Say Kartoffel . . .

Via the good folks at Making Light, I see that Chris Bowers, a Donklite disciple of DailyKos is itchin to go either 1968 without the blood on the cobblestones of Paris or 1934 with, you know, them Nazis. And with the internet!

Throughout most of my life, I have been enamored by the idea of movements and revolutions. During the decade I spent studying literature, I was always most excited by experimental, avant-grade work that took place during times of political and social upheaval (you can never read enough early twentieth century artistic manifestoes--fortunately, there is no shortage of them). When I studied critical theory and philosophy, I was always most interested in work that challenged established norms of government, the self, perception and knowledge with radical, but rigorous, new ideas (I was obsessed with Michel Foucault at multiple times during my career in academia). History has always been a favorite hobby of mine, and my favorite topics are invariably revolutions: American, French, Russian, Irish, Indian, Cuban, Eastern European--you name it. Also, no matter how many presidential candidates, members of congress, Democratic Party leaders, or other national figures I meet and talk with, my favorite moments in political campaigns are always large rallies (preferably those organized by volunteers, or those convened to celebrate an electoral victory). I want to be there at the moment when history happens, when the world changes, when consciousness shifts, and when the people rise up and throw off the shackles of the elite, the status quo, and the comfortable. I have wanted that for a long time. Before that happens, I want to be an active member of the small clique, coterie or circle that identified the possibility for massive change and precipitated its manifestation. Whether it is a revolution of the sort Ben Franklin or Tristan Tzara would identify, I want in. As William Wordsworth wrote in The Prelude about witnessing the world change up close during the French Revolution "bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven." Man, do I ever envy young Wordsworth. I want working for a candidate to give me a taste of the revolutionary feeling for which I long, and I want my regular job to do the same thing. For a long time, artistic and intellectual endeavors provided me with that spark, but when they ceased doing so I moved onto a career where that feeling was quickly re-establishing itself: online progressive activism. If I am willing to upend my entire life to search for that feeling, the least I should expect from the candidates I support most fervently is that working for them will allow me to sense it.

So he wants "the people," whatever on earth those are, to throw off their shackles--"shoplifters of the world, unite and take over," such as it is--and cast off the elite and the status quo, but he hopes "to be an active member of the small clique, coterie or circle that identified the possibility for massive change and precipitated its manifestation." At first it smelled like contradiction, but the more I read it, the more it smells like something that exits through an orifice further south. An inner circle is an inner circle is an inner circle. The dork wants power, and he wants to ride a wave of popular whoop-dee-doo into a office with a view, a satellite feed, and two secretaries. Fuck the revolution, kiddo; work on your resume.

Now I don't know what sort of revolutionary lines up Benjamin Franklin and Tristan Tzara and says, "Oh yeah, I like the looks of that," but it's not a revolutionary to be taken seriously--or trusted. There is, regardless, a desperate intellectual poverty and a vicious moral callousness to someone who writes: "Man, do I ever envy young Wordsworth. I want working for a candidate to give me a taste of the revolutionary feeling for which I long, and I want my regular job to do the same thing." Dude, the French Revolution was not a fun time. Projecting masturbatory vocational fantasies back in time to imagine Wordsworth as some sort of protoblogger and La Terreur as Dean 2004 with 20% more rabble is as batty as it is offensive. Electoral politics as practiced by the Netroots, lawd god, is not a revolution. It's not even like a revolution. There is no category of metaphor, no figurative instrument of language elastic enough to encompass such a comparison.

On the perfectly practical side of things, here is what Howard Dean proved: that no clique, coterie, or circle of sober white dudes with little laptops can do a goddamn thing when their man makes an ass of himself on the ol' teevee. But more importantly, what your self-described "progressive activist" hereby admits is that the substantive positions of his politicians are entirely irrelevant provided they flatter his vanity by indulging in his preferred means of textual communication. John Edwards could slaughter kittens by the thousands and Barack Obama could eat the still-beating hearts of underperforming campaign staffers, but so long as there was a comments section and some loopy chick "liveblogging" the fucker, all would be well with Commissar Bowers. The "movement" of which he speaks is a MacLuhanian pretension. It is the status motherfucking quo.

L'Etat, c'est l'état

Someone should probably explain to Anne Applebaum that the French are basically authoritarian. I guess it falls to moi.

There's a saying: "The American Revolution was a revolt; the French Revolution was a revolution." The opposite is true. The French revolutionary habit is really rather Gramscian: one hegemony replicating another. They like to take an old order of élites and replace them with a new order of élites with precisely the same powers. Le roi becomes M. le Président; the court becomes his ministers. In their entertaining, if occasionally thin, book, 60 Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong, Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow note that the French are rather ambivalent about "democracy" as Americans see it. They have, after all, had five republics interrupted by two empires, assorted and sundry kings, and the Vichy regime of Maréchal Pétain. On the other hand, every single one of these governments, even fripperies like the July Monarchy, has shared an essential character as a vast, highly centralized, bureaucratic state that is France. Comme il faut--that's the way the French want it. They find federalism baffling. They find private civic society of the Anglo-Saxon sort (as a Frenchman would call it) troubling and vague. While their government is moderately more open to lesser mortals than in the old-boy days of ENAcracy, it remains meritocratic in an idiosyncratically French way. Populism isn't French. Neither Le Pen nor Bové was a populist, let alone a member of the political mainstream.

I don't approve of this political culture--I am, after all, a libertarian. I don't approve of the centralization; I don't approve of the state as the organizing principle of a society; I don't believe that such authority is tolerable. But I understand that cultural differences and political differences exist, and in their own manners work. The French political culture is an outgrowth of French culture; it serves a unique society uniquely. America, so fond of its universalisms, of the unalterable love of unchangeable freedome lurking in every heart on earth, even that of Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao and all the Mullahs and Ayatollahs, here and there, up and down, in and out, forever and ever, amen, can't accept this fact, or if it does, turns it into crass racism: "Some would say, eh-heh-heh-hehe, that the Iraqis aren't ready for democracy. I reject that. Eh-heh-heh-heh." When others fail to affirm our core political beliefs--our core political rhetoric, in any case, since the belief these days is principally in arms industry profits for the National Security regime--we presume immediately that this represents a deficit in their personal and national characters.

Tunisia, Applebaum's case study (all case, no study), is hardly a garden paradise of freedom, but this is absurd:

In the short term, this system has suited lots of people, not merely the president's friends and relations. Most notably, it has suited France, Tunisia's closest business partner and former colonial power. In 2003, French President Jacques Chirac proclaimed that since "the most important human rights are the rights to be fed, to have health, to be educated and to be housed," Tunisia's human rights record is "very advanced." More to the point, the French believe that the authoritarian Tunisian government is the only thing preventing a massive wave of illegal immigration to their country.

Unfortunately, the authoritarian government is also producing the potential émigrés, too: For the most notable product of the Tunisian "economic miracle" is, at the moment, a lot of well-educated but unemployed young people. Once upon a time, the educated and the frustrated might have formed the backbone of a democratic revolution, just as they once did in South America and Eastern Europe. Now, Tunisians look at Iraq and see that "freedom" brings chaos and violence. Which leaves them with two options: emigration -- or radical Islam. Or perhaps both.

The French really believe that those are the most important human rights. It is an aspect of the national consciousness. They believe these are rights and that the government--vested with authority by its nature as the central fact of the state--has an affirmative duty to promote and provide. The "authoritarian Tunisian government," with all its powers, its unabashed elitism, its rule by decree and dictat, its very centrality, looks a hell of a lot like the French goverment. Naturally, they get along. Applebaum, meanwhile, advocates in retrospect that we should have destabilized one of the few stable and relatively prosperous nations on the entire continent of motherfucking Africa in order to bring them some of the old Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy. Thankfully we're fifteen years too late.

I don't know what this shit about the "educated and frustrated" signifies, in the meantime, but in my recollection the revolutions in South America were the march of godless communism and we hooked ourselves up with the current enemy du jour, the land of the mad mullahs, in order to give some decidedly unfrustrated rightwing paramilitaries the means to put that genie back in the Marxian bottle. The educated and frustrated Cubans lost their revolution and came to Miami, where they mostly assassinated each other and grumbled about the rightwing American government--the old Reagan revolution--that they helped build and promote. Why look!--it's one of the most famous pieces of American reportage ever! Why here is another!

This all bespeakes an essential wishfulness among what the newspapers call "America's foreign policy elites." It also bespeaks an unfortunate religiosity. (To be fair: all religiosity is unfortunate.) "Inside every gook is an American trying to get out." The article of faith here is that the peculiar governance of an anglophone continental empire is appropriate for everyone and anyone. One need not be a disciple of The Subaltern Studies Group and their claims of unbridgeable difference to recognize that difference in the most quotidian, everyday usage of the word exists. To each his own. A chacun son goût. Live and let live. Laissez-faire.

Minor Progress

But progress nevertheless.

The Stone Age

Today, Glenn Greenwald asks two related questions, which I'll paraphrase as follows: Why are elected Democrats reluctant to take (or flatly opposed to taking) substantive measures to end the Iraq War, and why is the fabled-in-its-own-little-mind Democratic Netroots™ reluctant or unwilling to raise a serious cry about it? He flits around but never really alights on the answer, which is that elected Democrats are not substantively opposed to the War and progressive bloggers, such as the appellation goes, are obsequious little sycophants who accept as their most basic premise that substance is secondary to Democratic ascendency, for which they've grown a telling euphemism: "Working within the system." The system of reference here is an empire; working "within" it is aiding the Lord Macaulay liberal-Whig wing of the bipartite Caput Mundi Party ruling the Washington roost:

"What is power worth if it is founded on vice, on ignorance, and on misery; if we can hold it only by violating the most sacred duties which as governors we owe to the governed, and which, as a people blessed with far more than an ordinary measure of political liberty and of intellectual light, we owe to a race debased by three thousand years of despotism and priestcraft? We are free, we are civilised, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilisation."

Familiar, t'ain't it?

The most "antiwar" of the major Democratic presidential candidates, pace Dennis K., is Blessèd Obama, who claims distinction as having "opposed the war from the start." But here's our national peacenik pastor bawling that he doesn't really mean it:

"We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged--and to which we now have spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted."

He backtracked in an interview with the Des Moines Register, saying: "I was actually upset with myself. Their sacrifices are never wasted; that was sort of a slip of the tongue as I was speaking.

"The sacrifices they have made are unbelievable. What I meant to say was those sacrifices have not been honored by the same attention to strategy, diplomacy and honesty on the part of civilian leadership," he added.

All the standard tropes of Democratic doubletalk: the "waste" walked back to a noble sacrifice, the "should haven never been authorized and should have never been waged" walked back to "attention to strategy, diplomacy, and honesty on the part of civilian leadership."

My friends at SMBIVA slice even closer to the bone, and here is the real knife to the tendon:

Apropos the Iraq-upation: "We need to be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in."

It's a perfect humanist empire phrase, isn't it? The obvious response from the anti-empire side: But Obie -- it's really not our call, is it? It's the Iraqi people's call; and if -- as I'm sure is the case -- they want us to scram, then we just oughta scram. Anything else -- in particular, staying solely for "their own good" and solely at our own expense, 'cause we owe it to them to... do the right thing. Even if it's thankless! Even if the world will revile us!

The Donkle, meanwhile, screams "We! We! We!" until it sounds like a Frenchman making universal affirmations. "We must do this." "We cannot allow that." The burden of civilization weighs heavily on the Donk's Atlean shoulders, and he will not shirk it just because George W. Bush let the globe begin to slide.

Meanwhile, as we speak, a third carrier group appears to be steaming (or whatever nuclear-powered equivalent thereof) toward the Persian Gulf, and America, the occupier of Iraq, is warning Iran not to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries. Colitis Powell is no longer available to show cartoon trailers as the Iraqi Los Alamos, but plenty of "Senior US Military Officials" are happy to show mortar shells and pipe bombs, with such scare-grandma-and-off-to-war claims as:

U.S. military officials in Iraq had previously described the use of "explosively shaped charges" to target vehicles, but Sunday's briefing was the first time they displayed pieces of what they called an "explosively formed penetrator" or EFP.

The one such device shown at the briefing was a cylinder of PVC pipe about eight inches long and about six inches in diameter. The officials said the devices are deadly because the explosion sends a slug of malleable metal, often copper, at velocities high enough to penetrate the armor of tanks and Humvees. Their components require precision machining that Iraq has shown no evidence of being able to perform, the officials said.

To which I reply: Are you out of your motherfucking mind? "Precision machining that Iraq has shown no evidence of being able to perform?" I thought they were reconstituting their motherfucking nuclear weapons programs, you fools, you morons! Am I to believe that in a nation where any random seven-year-old can take a junked Volkswagen, two lengths of garden hose, an old refrigerator, some bubble-gum, a couple of postage stamps, and a ball of twine and construct from them a diesel generator, an air conditioner, and a water purifier there is no one, nowhere capable of building a pipe bomb that blows out one end?

Where, I ask, is the Democratic skepticism about Iran? Why is this newly public conflict playing out to precisely the same tune as the old, with a series of dubious disclosures about our nefarious enemy greeted with timorous silence or, at best, proceduralist quibbling from the party nominally in opposition to needless warfare? "The job wasn't finished" in Afghanistan, but they still said "Sure!" to Iraq; now the same warmed-over colonialist argument hovers around the Iraqi morass, and the cheer is, "On to Iran!" It's madness, and in a few more years, we shall all be treated to the privilege of the perennial political youth, the Donkle, telling us that he never expected little Georgey to do that with the loaded gun.