Animal Crackers

Matt Yglesias asks "what's the dumbest part" of this David Broder column and comes up with a good reply, which you can find by following the link, but I'm afraid Matt's wrong, and the booby prize most deservedly goes not to the author of the column, but to former Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle for this rather unsurpassable idiocy:

"Our goal is not to find common ground among the four of us on every single issue but to find those areas on which common ground can be found, and then see if we can become the catalyst for bringing that common ground to Congress."

That's their goal, you see. I'm reminded of Mencken's comment on the speechifying of President Harding: "It is so bad that a certain grandeur creeps in." That's a lot of ground to be found, Senator. What, you could ask, would it mean to be "a catalyst for bringing . . . common ground to Congress?" The bringing of ground is an odd enough metaphor without the addition of chemistry.

The four Quixotes here profiled for their Broderian commitment to comity as the signal virtue for the proper conduct of a civilization share a concern, put thusly by Howard Baker:

"[T]here is a growing view, and certainly it's my view, that while partisan debate is essential to our system, it has grown so hostile, it has grown so raucous, that it has now had a corrosive effect on our ability to govern."

When Congressthings start talking about "our ability to govern," it is time to buy guns and run for the hills. This sort of talk is the verbal equivalent of a gypsy child waving a newspaper in your face; you can be sure that another hand is relieving you of your wallet and your wife of her purse. As Yglesias noted, a man can do a lot of cooperating on a budget of $7 million a year, particularly when the cooperative effort is to the ends of finding "evidence-based, collaborative approaches [that] can gain the public and political momentum needed to forge political consensus." There isn't a sunk block of concrete to be found in that sea of abstractions. They aren't seraching for anything in particular. They're searching for "approaches."

CAPT. SPAULDING: [to Mrs. Rittenhouse and Mrs. Whitehead] Let's get married.
MRS. WHITEHEAD: All of us?
CAPT. SPAULDING: All of us.
MRS. WHITEHEAD: Why, that's bigamy.
CAPT. SPAULDING: Yes, and it's big ah me too.

I hate to continually quote Louis Brandeis, but here we go again:

The doctrine of the separation of powers was adopted by the Convention of 1787, not to promote efficiency but to preclude the exercise of arbitrary power. The purpose was, not to avoid friction, but, by means of the inevitable friction incident to the distribution of the governmental powers among three departments, to save the people from autocracy.

"Partisan debate" isn't divided government, but the principle is the same. The substantive differences between parties are vanishingly small, but let's take what we can get. A little "inevitable friction . . . to save the people from autocracy" is a good thing, contra Broder and the Washington Gang, who have a positively cancerous dedication to the uncontrollable, exponential growth of laws.

Good old Hammurabi's great innovation of writing down the rules was a boon to common men because it reduced the capacity for capricious mischief with the law on the part of the goverment. A person could actually learn the rules he was or wasn't breaking. The United States is well on its way back to collective illiteracy, so this is all something of a dead letter anyway--you'll pardon the expression. Still, it's clear that one effective purpose of government as these thick-tongued lunatics envision it is to continue this legislative baby boom from here to infinity, to render it impossible for an ordinary person to know what is or is not against the law through sheer legal logghorea. It's already nearly impossible to tell what is and isn't permissible in this free country of ours. Comity? I wish they'd go back to shooting each other. Maybe then they'd leave the rest of us alone.

The Potent, the Omnipresent Teacher

Local police departments blame several factors: the spread of methamphetamine use in some Midwestern and Western cities, gangs, high poverty and a record number of people being released from prison. But the biggest theme, they say, is easy access to guns and a willingness, even an eagerness, to settle disputes with them, particularly among young people.

“There’s a mentality among some people that they’re living some really violent video game,” said Chris Magnus, the police chief in Richmond, Calif., north of San Francisco, where homicides rose 20 percent and gun assaults 65 percent from 2004 to 2006. “What’s disturbing is that you see that the blood’s real, the death’s real.”

-The New York Times

In the most serious incident, the Afghan Government said 48 civilians - mostly women and children - were killed and 117 injured when a US AC-130 plane opened fire on a wedding party.

A US investigation concluded that the air crew were justified in attacking because they had come under fire.

-The BBC

The United States garrisons troops on 700 bases in more than 100 countries around the world. There are 150,000 regular soldiers and uncounted, uncountable numbers of mercenary contractors, intelligence agents, and other irregulars occupying Iraq. There are tens of thousands of soldiers and another untold number of mercenary whatnots gallivanting around Afghanistan. The US recently bombed Somalia in support of an Ethiopian invasion. American arms and munitions supported the Israeli campaign against Lebanon. American arms supply both sides of the neverending India-Pakistan dispute. Regarding our various arbitrary enemies--Iran chiefly among them--we're endlessly reminded that "all options are on the table" by the current dauphin and the clamoring claimants to the Sun Throne from all quarters of the bipartite war party. That's abroad. You can read Radley Balko daily for an expanding compendium of the ongoing militarization of our police--shocking, heartbreaking stories of the habitual (you could now say, "instinctual") brutalization of guilty and innocent alike at the hands of government agents without respect for person, property, or privacy.

But, yes. Of course. There are "violent video games." There is "the spread of methamphetamine use." "A record number of people [are] being released from prison." (This, largely, in order to make room for a record number of people going in.)

Justin at Americana has a series of posts on our "military-industrial culture" that covers this territory in some detail.

Me, I just read the punch lines--"easy access to guns and a willingness, even an eagerness, to settle disputes with them," and, "a mentality among some people that they’re living some really violent video game"--and wonder if we'll ever understand that joke that precedes them.

A World of Pert

Over at DailyDross, something called Hunter inveighs mightily against congressional do-nothingism on Iraq:

Let me try and make something clear to the Democratic members of the House and Senate. There's a world of hurt coming your way, and time is running out.

You'll pardon me while I remove my soiled culottes.

What "world of hurt" this could be is beyond my ken. Here you have a Democratic partisan on a Democratic party blog dedicated to electing Democrats at all levels of government. Come, children, let us remember together:

This is a Democratic blog, a partisan blog. One that recognizes that Democrats run from left to right on the ideological spectrum, and yet we're all still in this fight together.

[...]

Liberal? Yeah, we're around here and we're proud. But it's not a liberal blog. It's a Democratic blog with one goal in mind: electoral victory.

Not exactly Demonsthenesian in its biting grandeur, but clear enough. The closest our Netrootsian Narcissi ever got to that nec plus ultra of the online Donkle daisy chain was the infamous Ned Lamont victory in the Connecticut Democratic primary, but then Lamont pulled the exceeding miracle of making the Lieb look like Dolf Lungren in the early scenes of Rocky Whateveritwas. Apparently some Navy drone named Joe Sestak got elected here in my Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as well, but the one and only time I caught him speaking on the television, I thought he looked and sounded like George Bailey after an age or two of sexual gimpery to a particularly brutish Clarence-the-Angel. Not entirely stable. Not altogether there.

In other words, Hunter is working for a platform that elects schmoes and know-nothings--that makes it its very raise d'être to do so--and that schemes endlessly to increase the advantage of those schmoes and know-nothings already clutching at the strings of the fat national balloon. And we're to believe, somehow, that in his other pocket lurks some unnamed anathemas to hurl against the institutional Donkle's jiggling flank? I wouldn't believe it if I saw it.

More Donkle Doubletalk

The Times is now running a bit on the Donkle pull-out plan, which is neither precisely a pull-out nor exactly a plan. The lede:

WASHINGTON, March 8 — House Democratic leaders intensified their debate with President Bush over Iraq today as they announced legislation that would pull American combat troops out of Iraq before the fall of 2008.

“Only then can we refocus our military efforts on Afghanistan to the extent that we must,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said. She said the Iraq withdrawal deadline would be attached to legislation providing nearly $100 billion requested by the Bush administration for the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns and money to expand health care for veterans.

Representative David R. Obey of Wisconsin, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said the leadership’s proposal “will essentially redirect more of our resources to the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, fighting the right war in the right place against the people who attacked us and who are giving Al Qaeda sanctuary.”

Bearing in mind that you can't march 150,000 men out of a country in a day, but the September 1, 2008 deadline adds another year-and-a-half of misery to our misadventure. That's 540 days for the "Iraqi government" to go on missing the uncountable "benchmarks" we Americans lay out for them like so many middle managers overseeing the various fictions of our so-called service economy.

The Troops™, meanwhile, will soldier on to see themselves "refocused," another management-guru buzzword designed to paste daisies and puppy-smiles over the various skullduggeries, failures, and boondoggles of the militarized corporate-welfare state. I can hardly think of a word more indicative of a fast-descending scam, with the possible exception of "paradigm," coupled with "new."

Rep. David R. Obey--was ever a name so telling?--says this is all to help us fight "the right war," in Afghanistan. Ever still the Donkle accepts the faulty premise that what we have is a war, two sides, an eventual victory. What are we doing in Afghanistan? This is a question no one can quite answer, nor could they when we first invaded. Merely: "Something had to be done." This is the disease of our military empire: a vacuum of thinglessness into which done things are ever sucked.

"The people who attacked us," literally speaking, are all dead. The idea that we will defeat and deter their living counterparts by "redirecting" our hapless occupation regime and brutal, futile aerial bombardments from one field to another is vicious fantasy. I read the Donkle's loose-lippery above and what I hear is that they want to use the opportunity of Afghanistan to "do Iraq right," as it were, to prove their brand of intervention superior to that of their domestic political rivals.

Well, one thing I learned as a Jew: it doesn't matter what shape the idol takes; whichever you worship, it's still idolatry.

Opera Show-Off Thursday

Cecilia Bartoli - "Agitata da due venti" - Antonio Vivaldi
Funny faces, and not exactly "period," but that's some fuck-all singing.


Natalie Dessay - "O zittre nicht" from Die Zauberflöte - Mozart
She never could act, but she can hold that F.


Juan Diego Florez - "A mes amis" from La fille du regiment - Donizetti
A cliché, but a good one. What, you wanted Nessun dorma?

One Man's Unlikely Is Another Man's Sure

Some correspondents and at least one linking blogger have expressed skepticism regarding my recent post Spoils of War. The principle objection is entirely derived from the exceptionalist attitudes I tried to address. bEnder, the blogger I mentioned above, provides a neat example:

There’s reality, which is most certainly ugly, and then there’s the fantasy of a “platoon” of men willingly standing guard over rape.

Why is that a fantasy?

In other words, if you accept the incontrovertible evidence that the United States Military in Iraq is imprisoning hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent men and torturing them with only the occasional peep of protest, then what about the idea of complicity in rape is so difficult to believe? Sexual abuse is evidently commonly practiced against prisoners. We all remember the famous "glow-stick" incident, and there are numerous reported instances of forced sodomy, up to and including the rape of adolescent Iraqi boys by Americans. We know from our own domestic experience in American police interrogation rooms and prisons that anal rape is "down-low" policy within our penal system. We know these things to be true. So to the contention that rape is not practiced by the occupying army in Iraq, and to the contention that many soldiers who would not themselves rape would nevertheless stand guard or just stand by while rape occurs, I say: Who is the cynic, and who is the sucker?

Y Tu Mama Tambien

There is another article in the Post today, an op-ed, about the wishes and wants for President Bush's spring break in the land of Tango y Tamales, or wherever, which comes to the predictable conclusion that fuck-all will be accomplished because it's too goddamn late. To late for what? "Chavez containment."

I take a perverse pleasure in watching the dynmaics of all these transglobal rivalries. The United States talks crazy-like, and it props up Chavez. Mahmoud Ahmedinejad talkes crazy-like, and it props up Bush. Chavez and Ahmedinejad get cuddly, and the US government screams bloody murder. Meanwhile, all this Bolivarian Revolution nonsense is a tissue of a farce funded by Venezuala's fortunate possession of a certain natural commodity much in demand of late, but, hey, at least it's something. Latin America is full of dirt-poor people who, in living memory, suffered through horrific US-backed proxy wars and insurrections. A couple of Cuban doctors, a few schools, a paved road, a sewage project--it doesn't take much. Is Chavez an authoritarian? Yes. Has he invaded anyone? No. "Credibility" is a spectrum, and America isn't on the bright end. Bribery affects many ends, but forgetfulness isn't usually one of them.

Nec Lethea valet Theseus abrumpere caro vincula Pirithoo

Via Lawyers, Guns, and Money comes another bumptious review by this website's favorite nostalgist, Victor Davis Bismark Poros Spartacus Leviticus Galactus Invictus Hanson, who goes to see The 300, a new film based on a Frank Miller book of the same title. Nothing he says is important, although several are pretty damn funny. The best laff-line:

Oliver Stone's mega-production Alexander spent tens of millions in an effort to recapture the actual career of Alexander the Great, with top actors like Collin Farrel, Anthony Hopkins, and Angelina Joilie. But because this was a realist endeavor, we immediately were bothered by the Transylvanian accent of Olympias, Stone's predictable brushing aside of facts, along with the distortions, and the inordinate attention given to Alexander's supposed proclivities.

Alexander's "supposed proclivities"! I'm sure he was just a buddy helping his buddy out. This man is supposed to be a classical scholar. Someone send him the collected works of Housman, and be done with it. He's one catamite away from catatonia.

Kiwanis!

Marisacat links a good presidential yap-job rundown at SFGate. Noted: John Edwards, light of my life, fire of my loins, the flaxen-haired nymphet of Donkle '08, does the old Democratic boogie-woogie on "faith," which is to turn around to the Old Testament yodle and yell of the Oliphant and cry that Jesus wanted nothing more than a New Deal, a Great Society, an eternal earthly protectorate of kittens, babies, and indigent blacks with healthcare subsidies. Yeah, that'll sell in Kansas City. Jesus, to Americans, is an abstraction about personal righteousness. The Donk thinks he's going to win an election by bringing up the fact that the Lord and Savior of America was an adrogyne Jew with a thing for peace who lived, slept, shit, and bathed with a collection of worshipful dudes. My friend, they already chased Terrence McNally out of Texas.

Of greater interest to me is the note on Joe Biden, a man with something called "expertise in foreign policy," waxing whacko on Iranian President Denies-a-lot, Fred Leuchter with a mullah-mandate:

ORANGEBURG, S.C. (AP) — Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden on Monday called Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a "madman" and raised the possibility that he could be assassinated by foes within his country.

"Ahmadinejad, the madman, is in competition with mullahs and ayatollahs who think he's overstepped his bounds," Biden told members of a local Kiwanis Club in this early voting state.

Ahmadinejad may be "assassinated, not by the good guys, but by the bad guys," said the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

At a campaign stop Sunday, Biden called Ahmadinejad "that wacko guy, the crazy president," and said he would only be in office for a little more than a year before being "taken out" because he threatened Shia interests.

Can't you just picture him on the dais abov the Kiwanians. The water glasses sweat onto the table linens. Buttons strain. Another round of chicken parm (with provolone) gets passed around. Biden pounds the podium. Honestly, is their anything nattier than an American presidential campaign?

El Jefe

The dauphin is south of the border, spreading something. Cheer? Hope? Mispronunciation? He's got some babble about creating jobs. The best thing the United States ever did for our southern neighbors was to begin to forget about them. But since the Wilson-Truman doctrine of mucking-fucking about in the rest of the world seems bashed back on its miserable haunches lately, it seems Bush, grasping for any other President to emulate, is going to go back to the old Monroe doctrine. Someone send this guy A Book of Common Prayer, please. Reportedly he's started making speeches harking back to Bolivar. Yeah, that'll wow the boys in the cotton suits waiting for calls in the lobby of the Continental. This man really is the heir of Reagan. What a nightmare. What a farce.

The Spoils of War

Matt Barganier at AntiWar reads an excerpt from the new book, American Deserter, and asks a question about moral obligations. He also touches on one of my own beaten-horse subjects: the sacrosanctity of The Troops™.

Still, he grants more than I would. He grants--with caveats, admittedly--a limited exceptionalism to scenes like abu Ghraib. He quotes a description of a raid from American Deserter in which it's made all but explicit that a group of innocent Iraqi women were gang-raped by American soldiers, but then he says:

Now let’s take the most grunt-sympathetic reading of this passage and allow for the following: People, especially young men, behave terribly under terrible stress. Soldiers don’t get to pick their assignments (not really true of those who volunteer in the middle of a war, but I’ll be generous). In fact, let’s go ahead and throw the alleged mass rape into the exception pile.

Fine.

Though torture, rape, and murder are presumably not routine procedures for occupying forces in Iraq, these blind, tornadic raids on civilian homes are. Two hundred raids in eight months: you do the math. These are literally everyday, humdrum activities for the occupiers.

Painfully, I think we must reject the premise here. Consider warfare from the beginning of recorded history, and rewrite one of Matt's sentences with some editing:

Torture, rape, and murder are routine procedures for occupying forces.

I would ask Matt to search his mind and his conscience and to ask himself: Is there any reason other than the fact that they are American, that they're us, to believe that these are "presumably not routine" in Iraq?

What other purpose is there in sending the soldiers of an occupying army home-to-home in a conquered nation but to terrorize and brutalize the population? None. "These blind, tornadic raids" are by design and intent terroristic.

It seems to me that even among the most vocal, purposeful, and persistent critics of American imperialism, there remains an unkillable seed of exceptionalism. It's a salve to what remnants of our collective goodness--if such ever existed--persist. It allows us to say that, yes, the conquest of Iraq was wrong, criminal, negligent, brutal, unpardonable . . . but still, it was different, somehow, than any other conquest by any other people at any other time in the damned history of one people violating another. It's a last, desperate attempt to cling to some bit of rightness, to the myth of the noble intention. It's understandable, but it's wrong.

Here is a truth: American forces in Iraq beat, rape, steal, maim, and murder in Iraq. They practice collective punishment. They destroy and expropriate private property. They seek to break the local population. They seek domination through the same old, crude methods that occupiers have alwas sought it. These acts are endemic and essential to the principal acts of invasion and occupation.

America is an empire, ladies and gentlemen. Let's not pretend it means something other than what it means.

What the System Says

Arthur Silber examines the story of the Walter Reed scandal and says that the story no one is getting is that the process through which the story came to light is, in a sense, more important than the story itself. The story, he says, is that politicians are cowards and are motivated to action, such as it is, only though concerted effort and repetitious outrage. He says, and he’s right about this too, that it’s inconceivable the military leadership was unaware of what was going on. He says, and he’s right about this, that it’s inconceivable the Congress, or at least the important members on the appropriate committees and subcommittees, didn’t know what was going on. He says the real story here is that they would all happily have let it continue and paid it no mind, but for the slow trickle of reports, the gradual appearance of certain news stories, and finally the reportage of a major newspaper. He says that what we should understand is that none of the major players in this story—not the Congress, not the military brass, not the Secretary of Defense—is trying to right a wrong; they are trying to fix an embarrassment.

I agree with Arthur that this is a story no one is getting, but I don’t think that it’s the story. The word I’ve been hearing over the last few days is “systemic.” As in: “the problems at Walter Reed maybe systemic throughout military hospitals.” As in: “Poor treatment of wounded prisoners may turn out to be a systemic problem.” The word seems to me to connote a certain quality that I might call a lack of intent. It seems to suggest something sui generis. It seems to indicate a certain random aggregation of acts, practices, intentions, and circumstances, some good and some bad, whose final combination catalyzed a ghastly mistreatment of desperately hurt individuals that no one wanted to address in its totality.

I think we underestimate the frequency with which systemic becomes an exculpatory euphemism for intentional. Systemic can also be a synonym for policy. It seems to me that the story here is less about the mistreatment of soldiers, the poor standard of care, the poor living conditions, than it is about the huge impediments to their return to the world. It seems to me that the story here is about keeping a certain kind of soldier tied up. Many war opponents point to the policy of the Administration to prevent airing photographs of the coffins of soldiers killed in Iraq. But a flag-draped coffin, even if it indicates a casualty of war, is also a visual symbol of nationalism. A crippled soldier, meanwhile, or a disfigured soldier, or a mentally ill soldier, is a very different kind of symbol. He suggests something else entirely about war. We all know war kills, and the coffins themselves are an abstraction, cloaked again in the abstraction of the flag. An amputee resists abstraction. A man suffering from sever mental illness resists abstraction. There are by reports about 20,000 of these men. It seems to me that what we had was a system designed explicitly to keep them bottled up for months and years, to render them less fit for eventual return to civilian life, not more. I think many of us have had the acquaintance of a “crazy” Vietnam veteran—a friend, or the father of a friend, perhaps. I think we all understand that there’s a certain stigma about these men. I think we all understand that although we admit they may have “seen some things,” we also largely accept that they are unreliable narrators.

Let me suggest that there is a purpose to the mistreatment of a certain kind of returning soldier. Let me suggest that our military and our government have a compelling interest in impeaching a certain kind of witness.