Deter This

"Anne-Marie Slaughter is dean of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and a co-director of the Princeton Project on National Security. Thomas Wright is senior researcher for the Princeton Project on National Security."

There is, as the saying goes, a certain humor in finding an op-ed on nuclear proliferation authored by a pair surnamed Slaughter Wright. Slaughter, appropriately enough, heads the Woodrow Wilson School, and with such a namesake and ideological progenitor, it's unsurprising to find this sort of neo-Wilsonian hoobajooba: "This initiative would make international law work as a tool of American national security strategy rather than as a constraint on it." Now there's the sort of thinking that's sure to wow 'em in The Hague. For nothing so appeals to your average European technocrat or Chinese Communist Party member or Central Asian strongman as the idea of "international law as a tool of American national security strategy." However will we make ourselves heard above the eructing hosanas?

The Slaughter-Wright Thesis is that we should make "nuclear transfer a crime against humanity" in order to "[capture] the enormity of the crime" and to "dramatically increase the cost of getting caught." How precisely the latter will occur appears to escape our authors' attention, although they do go on to explain that:

Nuclear transfer threatens the lives of millions of people. It merits a place in infamy alongside genocide and other evils. Creating a nuclear transfer taboo would strip away feigned protestations of innocence and illusions of a victimless crime. It would stigmatize black-market financiers and other facilitators of nuclear transfers as the ultimate merchants of death.

The white elephant loudly shitting in the corner of this room is that it is not "nuclear transfer" per se that threatens the lives of millions of people, but nuclear weapons, which, as the authors point out, must be produced by states, which are the only entities currently able (to our knowledge) to marshall the substantial industrial resources necessary for the production of such weapons. Why, I wonder, does that not "merit a place in infamy along genocide and other evils?"

That's a question to which I'll momentarily return. First, note that "black-market financiers and other facilitators of nuclear transfers" are not, as a general rule, terribly concerned with being "stigmatized." They're concerned with money, which, I'm told, has all sorts of salutary effects on the damaged consciences of arms dealers. Nor, let us be clear, are these people "the ultimate merchants of death," at least not yet. At present, the ultimate merchant of death is the United States, the world's largest dealer in regular, boring weapons like grenades and machine guns and land mines and cluster bombs, a $500 billion per year industrty of which over half takes place in the so-called developing world. Which brings us to the fissile heart of the matter: The United States currently possess over 5,700 active nuclear warheads and just under 10,000 total. (As a measure of how crazy we used to be, this number is down from a 1966 peak of over 32,000.) Why?

The bright, filmic aesthetics of nuclear weapons captivate the yakkety-yak class, and it is true that nuclear weapons are uniquely terrible--by scale, at very least. There remains, however, a more mundane horror: a nuclear weapon is on some levels still just a commodity, a physical thing, exchangeable for money. Fortunately they are comparatively rare, and so somewhat easier to account for and monopolize than, say, machetes. But just as no one can forever prevent machetes from falling into the hands of those we euphemize as "non-state actors," just as no one can forestall the transfer of AKs, hand grenades, TOW missiles, helicopters, and on up the scale of increasing expense, and just as it is inevitable that states will collude, cooperate, and actively support the sale of all of these, so too is it with nukes. The idea that states will pursue nuclear weapons, that states will stockpile them, and that somehow "transfer" will nevertheless be prevented is a desperate and stupid fantasy of that odd class of people who rule us, who can read and write while remaining unable to think.

Future History

By chance I was leafing through William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich looking for a half-remembered quote, which I never found. I did, however, notice how often Shirer describes Hitler's private orations--to his friends, his allies, his generals, his enemies, his ministers--as "harangues." That's a word too rarely used anymore. I thought of it when I read our 30.06 Rasputin, Birdshot Dick, the pheasant-slaughtering Falangist, yapping at something called the Conservative Political Action Conference explaining how all y'all muthafuckas best get with the program, son. Compare:

If our coalition withdrew before Iraqis could defend themselves, radical factions would battle for dominance. The violence would likely spread throughout the country and be very difficult to contain. Having tasted victory in Iraq, the (militants) would look for new missions. Many would head for Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban.

And contrast:

Never in history was there a coalition like that of our enemies, composed of such heterogeneous elements with such divergent aims.

Dick lacks the pagan-poetical soul, but he makes up for it with, if anything, an even loonier ideal of the enemy. I am particuarly enamored of this idea that "militants" and "radical factions" "look for new missions," sort of like the Impossible Mission Force, or Charlie's Angels. This fatwa will self-destruct in thirty seconds. And so forth.

But the real silliness is this idea that but for our presence, these "radical factions" would ascend and "battle for dominance." Who, one wonders, does Birdshot Dick imagine is in the Iraqi government right now, battling for dominance. These are not the Rotarians. They do not open sessions with patriotic songs, nor do they picnic or potluck together. This is a paramilitary polity. Each party has its armed wing, and let's be clear: they make the Orange and the Green look like the Sharks and the Jets.

Compare:

Contrast:

Dick says, "I sincerely hope the discussion this time will be about winning in Iraq, not about posturing on Capitol Hill." The people intent on winning in Iraq are not big on discussing, and the men with the militias are many things, but posturing they are not.

See You on Tatooine, Stud

Wasn't Provate Boths a character in one of those trade paper Star Wars novels?

Craigslist personals: Making conference calls more bearable since whenever.

Papieren Bitte, Part Who the Fuck Knows Anymore

"The Real ID Act," it seems, is a delayed if not dead letter, not because anyone has any particular problem with national identification, but because the program is, in Washingtonspeak, an "unfunded mandate." But fine, fine. A two-year delay is better than nothing. This act is predicated on some vague notions that it is now too easy to get fake IDs and use them for "federal purposes such as boarding airplanes or entering courthouses." (These are "federal purposes?") We all recall that the 9/11 hijackers entered and remained in America legally, lived and died under their own names. The Real ID Act, such as it is, will more effectively interdict 18-year-olds from Jägermeister than terrorists from airplanes, but, of course, national IDs, though invariably proposed as means of preventing outsiders from infiltrating, are just as invariably instituted for the real purpose of domestic control.

The rest of the article deals with the tangentially related issue of workers' rights and protections for Transporation Security Agency employees, collectively the most ridiculous front-line measure against terrorism the world has ever known. If you wish to prove to yourself that the War on Terror, Homeland Security, and all the rest of their attendant neologisms are a grotesque boondoggle, whittled to a point by the Drawling Dauphin and his cowpoke congress, aimed at the colesterolic heart of liberty in these United States, then drive out to your nearest airport. There, observe a security process that resembles nothing so much as the back-of-house procedures at a second-rate fast food restaurant but with no tangible product resulting. It's like an Arby's at one AM. Miles of shoeless travellers shuffle past. Broken and compliant. When some Bluetoothed businessman makes a stink about taking off his Maglis, eyes raise, momentarily hopeful, before a fat guy in a yellowing uniform hauls him off and starts pawing through his overnight bag.

Oscar Zeta Acosta

Howie Kurtz is quoting Michelle Malkin quoting some various and sundry Huffington Post commenters cracking semi-wise about the attempted killification of Birdshot Dick. Says Howie, "Don't people realize that openly rooting for the death of an American official says way more about them than their intended target?"

For my part, I take the more moderate approach of Dr. Gonzo: "Aw, man, I wasn't going to kill you. I just wanted to carve a little Z in your forehead."

"I'm talking about drawing a line in the sand, Dude. Across this line you do not-- Also, dude, Chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature."

Quoth Clifford May at the National Review:

How curious that at the Academy Awards ceremony last weekend not a word was said about the terrorist movements dedicated to the destruction of the West.

I'm sure someone meant to, but they kept getting cut off by the orchestra.

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

Victor Davis Jefferson Starship Xerxes Montezuma Charlemagne Genghis Valerius Hanson today avers in a column titled after a Tom Jones song that the history of the United states is positively rife with fucked-up wars of choice. He chronicles fuck-ups in the Pacific Theater in WWII and the Truman/McArthur squabbling over "the stalemate in Korea." He notes:

Optional conflicts like the Mexican War, the Philippines Insurrection, Korea and Vietnam all cost more lives than Iraq. Even our most successful wars witnessed far more lethal stupidity than anything seen in Baghdad. Thousands of American dead resulted from lapses like the Confederate surprise at Shiloh, Japanese surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, and the German surprise attacks in the Ardennes.

There have also been plenty of major policy failures in our history — a failed invasion of Canada during the War of 1812, a failed 12-year reconstruction of the south, a failed effort to help Chiang Kai-shek stop Chinese Communists under Mao, a failed effort at the Bay of Pigs to remove Fidel Castro, and a failed effort to stop communism in Southeast Asia, to name a few.

He goes off on a goofy tangent about how "our intelligence agencies failed to foresee" such items as the overthrow of the Shah, which is odd, since "our intelligence agencies," you know, overthrew the Shah. But he brings it all back home, reasonably enough, with the observation that war has exhausted presidents, killed presidents, or destroyed presidencies--both the "successful" and "unsuccessful" alike.

From this record of failure, this two-hundred-year history of abymal performance, poor choices, aggressive policies, chosen conflicts, errors of judgement, and thousands upon thousands of American dead, can we derive a lesson for today? Yes:

The high-stakes war to stabilize the fragile democracy in Iraq is a serious, costly and controversial business. But so have been most conflicts in American history. We need a little more humility and knowledge of our past — and a lot less hysteria, name-calling and obsession with our present selves.

Carry on, soldier.

Lies My President Told Me

Why it appears that the "Bush administration is backing away from its long-held assertions that North Korea has an active clandestine program to enrich uranium, leading some experts to believe that the original U.S. intelligence that started the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions may have been flawed." I'm sure they're spot-on when it comes to Iraq, though.

It appears that the dauphin's international hatchet men scuttled any and all talks with North Korea for years, pending the America-demanded precondition that North Korea admit to its Uranium enrichment programs activities. Which, as it turns out, they didn't have! Take it away, Josh Marshall:

The relevant point is that from 1994 to 2002 the North Korean nuclear weapons program was frozen in place. The strong consensus judgment was that they had not yet made any nuclear weapons. And they could not access the plutonium they had already produced.

It was on the basis of this alleged uranium enrichment program -- which may well not even have existed -- that the US pulled out of that agreement. This allowed the North Koreans to get back into the plutonium business with a gusto. And they have since produced -- by most estimates -- at least a hand full of nuclear weapons, one of which, albeit a rather feeble one, they detonated last October

[...]

Because of a weapons program that may not even have existed (and no one ever thought was far advanced) the White House the White House got the North Koreans to restart their plutonium program and then sat by while they produced a half dozen or a dozen real nuclear weapons -- not the Doug Feith/John Bolton kind, but the real thing.

Let us leave aside the cant about which nations should and should not produce nukes, about why Israel or France or the US or, Dog help us, Pakistan may, but Iran may not. That raises interesting questions, but they're not really germane to the central issue at hand.

We should instead recall that period early in the Bush administration, during the "march to war" in Iraq, when Democrats waved their hands and shouted that North Korea and Iran were the real danger. Why wasn't Bush doing something about them? It was an odd war-mongering without mentioning actual war. Not this war, that war. Not ground war, air war. Or neither--it was, in the end, the Democratic habit of engaging in vague, purely rhetorical bellicosity in order to appear "tough on defense."

To their credit, thought, Democrats did say we ought to "talk to North Korea," even as they Chicken Littled it. And that, however, meagre, was something.

Meanwhile, the essential mendacity of American governments since Wilson is well established, but honestly, is there anything these Bushy motherfuckers don't lie about?

Bad Moods are Good for the Comments Section.

Hypotheses?

Harvard Yawned

Barack Obama. Within the alien cadences of that name lies some strange voodun, and to it, the Democrats do swoon. He is young, so he reminds them of JFK, and he is black, so he reminds them of Martin Luther King, and he is, as Joe Biden said, articulate, so while they damn Hairpiece Joe for mentioning it, they too secretly thank their oddly tolerant god for serving up a man who will not insult Jews or remind urbanites of the people who make Mom say, "Lock the doors, honey," when they drive through certain neighborhoods. They like him because he speaks in ecumenical vacuities. His speeches are "electrifying"; he is "a great orator." But these people say the same thing about JFK. JFK: who blew hard but swam shallow, and whose priapic myopia gave us the real-deal arms race, the Bay of Pigs, and Vietnam, which, pace Ollie Stone, he was most assuredly not about to end. Democrats also enjoyed Bill Clinton's drawly empathy, though I always found it like the biggest lobster in the tank: tasteless, knobbly, strangely textured, and appealing only to the déclassés who don't know any better. Obama speaks, and I cannot ever ascertain what he's talking about, except that it glows, it shines, it lifts and hovers, it flares and flames, it pops and sizzles. He is always looking vaguely upward, and the camera loves to shoot him from below, which, unfortunately, is also how the camera took to old Adolph, or General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, the latter more appropriate since Obama, too, is reputedly a smoker. I know he's supposed to be brilliant as the sun and stars, but why? Because he edited the Harvard Law Review? An acquaintance of mine, also a Harvard-educated attorney, once told me over a drink--over many drinks--that Harvard Law was "the goddamn easiest thing I've ever done. And the most lucrative!" He slapped the table. He swirled a lemon around the rim of his third Franziskaner. He grinned.

The Life of the Mind

American officials insisted that the importance of the attack, by a single suicide bomber who blew himself up a mile away from where the vice president was staying, was primarily symbolic.

[...]

About 20 Afghans died, including a 12-year-old boy. An additional two dozen or so were wounded.

-The New York Times

Primarily symbolic, was it?

In a recent Daily Show bit on The Eyes of Laura Mars Bush, John Stewart, responding to the now-familiar line about this-or-that carnage appearing on "television screens," joked that Laura, a mumbling mind-control zombie of the Brice Taylor model if I ever saw one, may not entirely understand that the carnage isn't located inside the boob box.

So the real catch-line of thre above-cited article immediately followed the assertion of symbolism:

It was more successful at grabbing headlines and filling television screens with a scene of carnage than at getting anywhere near Mr. Cheney.

Now the "carnage" here actually occured, and it was not, in a literal sense, the bombing itself, nor the bomber, who affected its transmission to the glassy front of the electric-blue hearth.

It seems we're entering a curious territory where the epiphenomenal takes precedence over the primary occurence. I read that sentence over and over again, and what I think of is John Goodman as Karl "Madman" Mundt in Barton Fink, barrelling down the hotel hallway crying, "Look upon me, I'll show you the life of the mind!"

A Book Review

Unfortunately for the reader, Mr. Perret’s discussion of broader issues, like presidential wartime powers, is scattered and unpersuasive. Worse, the more illuminating aspects of the book tend to be overshadowed by incessant editorializing and an eagerness on the author’s part to focus on only those aspects of these three presidencies that support his thesis. He overstresses the Truman administration’s belief in intervention and unilateralism, playing down the importance it also attached to alliances. He wildly oversimplifies the Bush administration’s decision to go to war against Iraq by focusing on President Bush’s characterization of Saddam Hussein as “the guy who tried to kill my dad” and his apparent fixation on that Iraqi dictator.

And, finally, he resorts to cheap ad hominem attacks on members of the Bush administration who promoted the war against Iraq: for instance, he describes Paul D. Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary, as “a graying vulgarian who licked both sides of his comb before applying it to his wayward mop.”

Such snarky descriptions make this book seem a lot less like a reasoned argument than like a partisan screed. And they’re completely unnecessary to underscore the author’s point that a multitude of misjudgments and misrepresentations were made in the decision to go to war against Iraq and in the subsequent prosecution of that war. In this case, the plain, unadorned facts are damning enough.

-Michiko Kakutani in The Times

The book under review is Commander in Chief by Geoffrey Perret. But that doesn't matter.

My question, and it's a serious one, is in what universe, under what parameters of truth, in what manner of interpretation, through what lens is that last sentence (which emphasis is mine) true?

Because it seems to me that if "the plain, unadorned facts are damning enough," our present situation wouldn't be our present situation.

Through the Rotting Attic a Shaft of Light Doth Come

Can I get a "praise Jesus?" Digby says:

But I have to say that I'm just a teensy bit disappointed in the Democrats. This is a war we're talking about not some tax cut legislation. They don't have to do anything that unctuous creep tells them to do. He is holding nothing over their heads and yet everyone is pretending that they are worried about appeasing Old Joe and so they can't actually get anything done on Iraq.

You can't help but wonder if Lieberman and the Senate Dems aren't working the same side after all.

You can't help but wonder.

Why, it's almost as if the United States is an intercontinental empire in which the symbolic offices accoutrements of an old Republic are maintained! It's almost as if conquest became the principle economic engine of the empire!

If Mitt Romney becomes the emperor and declares once-persecuted Mormonism the new state religion and moves the capital to Salt Lake City . . . Oh, lordy . . .

Soothsaying

There is no such thing as "people-powered politics" in a nation that spends a trillion dollars every year on a state military, police, and surveillance apparatus. There are no "movements." There is no "preventing wars of aggression."

It should be needless to say that I'm not unsympathetic to the plight of the victims of America's policies abroad, but I don't believe that I, you, or anyone can arrest the prosecution of those policies. It's important to name the crimes because the act of naming has its own power. Otherwise, what will end our aggression is this: getting our asses handed to us on a platter; getting our chips called in.

We are in all likelihood doomed to go to war in Iran. The forces impelling us to further war are most probably irrevocable. They are self-sustaining and self-fulfilling. The edifice of America--the daily functioning of our society and economy as we know it--is predicated on war. It is what we do.

And here is the good news: we are also probably doomed to lose.

Maybe I'm a Defeatist

Joseph Lieberman, a bronchial mush-mouth of a man, the sort of power-mad mediocrity who can make an old bar Mitzvah like myself pull down the moldy copy of The Protocols and think, "Hey, maybe there's something to this," has once again self-plagiarized in the pages of The Wall Street Tattler, penning another self-same article asking for more patience, more national reticence, and a few more liters of Iraqi blood to bake into the national matzoh. But seriously. No, that was seriously.

Glenn Greenwald, almost as predictable in his dry outrage as Joeseph Free-Man in his mild-mannered death cultism, is on the case. Comme d'habitude, his analysis is meticulous, well-structured, cogent, responsible, researched, and wrong. At some length:

Many Americans believed before that we did have an effective strategy designed to preserve security in Iraq and that this strategy was working because people like Joe Lieberman assured them that this was true. Yet now he is claiming that everything has changed in Iraq because, for the first time, we have a strategy for preserving security. The logical conclusion from assembling his own statements is that the assurances he gave in the past were simple lies.

It's one thing for people like Joe Lieberman to have spent almost a full year prior to the invasion spewing one falsehood after the next about the state of Iraq's military capabilities, its relationship to Al-Qaeda, and the likely effects of our invasion. But the absolute deceit of the American people by the Joe Liebermans in this country extends -- in both duration and substance -- far beyond merely those pre-war claims.

George Bush was re-elected, and Americans tolerated the occupation of Iraq long after it was clear that things had gone terribly awry, because the Joe Liebermans in our country continuously lied about what was taking place there, falsely assuring Americans that things were going well, that we were on the precipice of success, that the press accounts of the violence and chaos there were fiction and were merely the by-product of a politically biased media seeking to embarrass the President by concealing the great progress we were making -- progress which Lieberman insisted he witnessed himself during his visit.

To bump into these paragraphs after the dull exposition devoted to Liebraman's recycled prose is to experience in some slight way the feeling of waking up from anesthesia with the surgeon still jiggling your heart in his hand. Here is my question:

What is the source of this bottomless confidence in the essential goodness of "Americans" or "many Americans," or "the American people"; on what basis do we arrive at this claim that but for the lies told to them by their less-than-noble, less-than-honest patriarchs, these American people would rise up in recognition of their current transgressions and past sins, retreat, and resolve not to repeat the shameful crimes of empire, forever and ever, on earth as it is in heaven, hallelujah, amen?

Because it is not at all obvious to me that Americans, such as they are, give one good goddamn or one high-flying fuck about a "strategy designed to preserve security in Iraq." "Security in Iraq" is not their concern. "Security in America" is their concern--that's why they acquiesce with nary a whimper to every security-vs.-liberty argument put forward by their governors (to Greenwald's eternal chagrin and confusion), and that is why they support wars to kill the wogs who killed the World Trade Center. That there are many varieites of wogs, and that none of the wogs currently involved in our conflict participated in "the events of 9/11," and that within worldwide woggery there is currently a vast, vicious religious war--none of these things occur to "many Americans." Many Americans reelected George W. Bush and "tolerated the occupation of Iraq" because it accorded with their narrow, slack-jawed, country-music ideology of "let's roll." For good measure, George W. Bush indulged them in their fears of faggots, niggers, and spics. That is why he was elected. For the same reason every crass, pseudo-bumpkin autocrat gets himself elected: by recognizing that nativism, resentment, fear, and racism are the roots of politics; by governing with a program designed to deepen the rot and cause such resentments to fester.

If tomorrow or the next day, George W. Bush decides to begin a campaign against Iran, and it seems icreasingly near and certainly inevitable, then the cable news networks will go back to Crisis:Iran subtitles, the generals will come back on to babble about strategy, the yellow-ribbon magnets will reassert themselves, the nominal opposition will fall back in line, the "failure" in Iraq will fade from the front of our collective consciousness, and however much the libbloggers cry that the dauphin's poll ratings remain mired below 40%, not one person who matters will pay them no nevermind. If Israel, Dog help us, gets involved, then the libbloggers will simply remain conspicuously (or inconspicuously) silent.

I have been asked a number of times why it is that I don't use what meager skills I have to propose a positive program to rectify our national shames and shortcomings. Why don't I offer some way "to change it?" Why don't I "do something?" Why aren't I "productive?" I've given plenty of answers, some truer than others. But here is a more honest answer, the most honest I can give: I'm not especially convinced that Americans, many Americans, the American people, or America deserve anything other than what they're about to get. To put it another way: I'm not an evangelist about anything, and I'm not of the opinion than everyone can or should be saved.