Batten Down the Hatches

Via the smarties at SMBIVA, I see the velveteen revolutionary Matt Stoller weighing in on what's become known as "ending the war." To his credit, he says straight out that the Donkle isn't intersted. And even if they were, why, some new Joe McCarthy would arise from the fabled Heartland, doom the Donkle forever with a new slew of red-baiting, and, as "Wes Clark knows" (an odd non sequitur), "our wages," should we repudiate the defense appropriations economy, would "sink to the level of China's." There you have it, mesdames et messieurs, plainly, if innumerately, said: We gotta keep killing Iraqis so that Ma and Pa American in Kalamazoo can cobble together forty-five grand a year, a late-model Ford Taurus, and a yearly vacation to Myrtle Beach with the kids.

The sentences arrive and depart without any particular connection the one to the next. There is an ecstatic throwaway dig at Chomsky, who "has engaged in a brilliant campaign to marginalize himself for thirty years." Capitalist that I am, I wonder how many books Stoller's sold, and what sort of life the royalties have bought him. How many packed houses has he played to? How many heads of state have waved around books by Matt Stoller? To a Donkle, the margins are everyone else. It must get lonely.

The black heart of the matter, though, is that, in Stoller's estimation, 70% of Americans, plus Hillary Clinton, who may or may not count, believe that it is the fault of the "Iraqi government," whatever that is, that things aren't going so well Over There, besides which, the dumb sonsofbitches like the empire; they just don't like it when the home team gets upset in a road game. So keep the conquest going while we, well:

The Democratic Party is becoming an antiwar party that has been pulled out of the bipartisan imperialist consensus. But it is not there yet. And we will have to work hard, first at understanding just how profoundly our system is broken, and then towards fixing it, to move there completely.

Perhaps it's the placement of commas, or perhaps it's just, as Owen Paine at SMBIVA noted, that it all occurs in some indeterminate verb tense and mood so complex it must've been distilled from the pineal gland of the bastard child of High German and late Classical Latin.

Anyway, the point is that the Democrats aren't going to end the war, and neither are the Republicans, and they're not going to nip the next war either, because they really, really believe that but for the bombs, we'd all be begging the UN peacekeepers on the streets of our cities for an extra ration of dusty rice. Better a dead Iraqi than a laid-off union slug.

Yossarian

My continuing to support the Democrats even if they can't get the result I want them isn't prolonging the war.

It's the people who are trashing the Democrats if they can't show results who are, quite seriously, prolonging the war.

-Major Danby, DailyDonkle-

There is no sin but stupidity.

-Oscar W.-

In the extraordinary DailyDonkle diary linked above, something called Major Danby asks us to follow the logic, which bounces like a ball but amuses less. A fair number of Democratic Congressbeings, it seems, can't oppose the war because they hail from what are called "marginal districts"--marginal, presumably, because they exist tenuously on the margins of Donkledom. The Marginally Democratic Congressbeing, should it bark too loudly about the billions spent and hundreds of thousands dead in Iraq, would lose its seat to some Republican. The Republican wouldn't oppose the war because Republicans don't oppose the war. "That's some Catch-22. The best there is." Nowhere in this 1,800-word eruction is their any explanation of the putatitive difference between a Democrat who can't vote against the war and a Republican who won't.

The usual verbal infelicites prevail: "We start with elementary Poli Sci 101: for the most part, members of Congress decide how to vote based on their own self-interest, leavened by party interest." Self-interest is the flour, you see, and the Party is the yeast. It gets nasty at the end:

If you are willing to abandon the Democrats over the war, the blood is on your hands.

The hurt is diminished by the fact that it comes two thirds of the way through an apologia for Democratic inaction, leavened with a demand that no one abandon the Donkle when it "doesn't produce."

Who are these people? It's one thing to argue, as some of the so-called progressive movement does, that the Democrats are basically antiwar, that behind their accomodationist rhetoric--a political necessity, in the telling--they are struggling to find a better path for American foreign policy: to end the bloodshed in Iraq; to avoid confrontation with Iran; to act as a "neutral broker" for Palestinian-Israeli peace; to close down the secret prisons; to rectify the excesses of the war on terror. Ad infinitum. That argument is wrong, and it depends on a lot of willful blindness, but behind it, at least, is a measure of good faith in argument. They may be dumb, but this pwog subspecies at least believes that their boys'll pull the rabbit out of the hat. It's another thing entirely to say that the Democrats aren't doing anything about the war this time around, and probably not next time either, nor the time after that, nor ever, until the last "marginal district" comes out of the shade and into the light, a thousand years hence, and then all the Donkle incumbents in all their safe Donkle districts will finally bring the boys back home. For this, friends and countrymen, we lend them our wallets.

The thing about the Holy Roman Empire, as old François was wont to say, is that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

Update: Shamefully failed to mention that I found this via the always entertaining marisacat.

Lyin' for Zion

Arthur Silber observes that in addition to using "more utterly empty, meaningless, vacuous phrases per speech than any politician in recent memory," Barack Obama is also a dirty little fag-baiter. Quel suprise, non ?

But, as Arthur also notes, the real problem with Obama is that he, like every other national Democrat of consequence, intends to do his damnedest to destroy the world, or at least a healthy portion of it. The linked speech is the one he gave to AIPAC, and it opens with a sentimental account of the IDF choppering him up to Kiryat Shmona, where children play in the streets jus' like 'Merica. "Then, I saw a house that had been hit with one of Hezbollah's Katyusha rockets." The Donkle loves to complain that Gee-dub and crew speak to their fetus fetishist supporters in code and symbol. Well, here it is from the grinning avatar of modern Donkleism himself: Kiryat Shmona, "The City of Eight," is named for the eight Jews who died in 1920 in a conflict between Jewish settlers at Tal Hai and Arabs. One of them, Joseph Trumpeldor, is now a great national symbol. His apocryphal last words were: "Ein davar, tov lamut be'ad artzeinu." You may be more familiar with it in the language from which it was cribbed and converted to legend: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

Obama gives the real red meat when he yaks about Iran giving weapons to Hezbollah. Oh, it is all there. "Security through defense." Confronting Iran. Then:

My plan also allows for a limited number of U.S. troops to remain and prevent Iraq from becoming a haven for international terrorism and reduce the risk of all-out chaos. In addition, we will redeploy our troops to other locations in the region, reassuring our allies that we will stay engaged in the Middle East.

"Oh, he's just telling the crazy Jews what they want to hear," is the un-self-censored version of the prevalent defense of this speech from the libblogosphere. As we've said in the East End of Pittsburgh since time immemoroial: Yeah, keep tellin' yourself that.

Muad'dib

I will confess that I like that Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. According to National Public Radio, he said yesterday that the West won't stop Iran's nuclear program "even if all of you gather and also invite your ancestors from hell." It's funny because it's precisely the sort of action-movie man-talk that Col. Kurtz Party wishes would be more prevalent among our own leaders. Put the man in a speedo, give him a sword, and Victor Davis Hercules Gilgamesh Stalingrad Battlestar Gallactica Hanson would find himself creaming his loincloth: Far from the usual moral relativism of the Hollywood left, he would write, here is a hero willing to identify his enemies in the plainest terms and stand against them. The trumpets would blow, the CGI armies would clash, a shadow would block the sun, and atop a pile of carcasses, Mahmoud would thrust forward his sword. "My name is a killing word!" No, no. That was Kyle McLachlan. In a galaxy far, far away.

In fact, the NPR story relates to the efforts of large state pension firms to divest themselves of terror-related investments activites, and how that may serve as a model for divestment from companies that do business in Iran. This, incidentally, is a great idea for a tax protest, but let's not digress. It appears that several years ago, one Frank Gaffney, maitre d'hôtel over at the Center for Security Policy, where a Hun is still a Hun, spearheaded a similar program to get large institutional investors to divest from "state sponsors of terror," one of the goofiest of our loony bag of Eternal-War neologisms, with the boosterish, PTA-connoting "sponsor" undermining the holocaustian hysteria that the phrase is meant to evoke, or invoke, as the case may be. Then the comedy begins in earnest, as Wilde might've said were he with us today:

The first activists to pick up on this were those interested in punishing Sudan, not because of its links to terrorism, but because of the violence in Darfur. That divestment push has been fairly successful, with several states and universities dumping shares of companies doing business in Sudan.

Missouri Treasurer Sarah Steelman told a news conference in Washington this week that she hopes states will now follow her lead — and start what she calls terror-free employee pension funds.

"It seems strange to me that we send men and women to defend freedom--some of whom pay the ultimate sacrifice--however, we have not yet used our most powerful weapon, America's financial markets," Steelman said.

Here you have a less-unlikely-than-you'd-think combination of campus-left wooly-headedness and rightwing chestpuffery. If the purpose of divestment is to fill your own heart with sunshine and gladness, to be able to look at Darfur the way a vegan looks at an industrial abattoir and think, "Hey: Not. My. Fault," then "fairly successful" is indeed the right descriptive. But if, on the other hand, the goal is to use "our most powerful weapon, America's financial markets," for the purpose of punishing a globeful of transgressors, then the more accurate assessment is something like onanistic, pretentious, useless, and absurd. There is not one less machete nor one more health clinic in Darfur because of such a campaign, and there are no fewer terrorists or "state sponsors" in the world either. Has six decades of unending war footing sent America drifting toward a command economy? Yes. Can we wield our "financial markets" like a weapon, slashing and burning, conquering and overthrowing? Not on your life, bubba. It isn't by accident that we say of money, like water: It flows.

Simulation

A man is secretly detained for many months and years, incommunicado. What the people know of him is that he engaged in plots against the government, against the country. Eventually he is brought before a tribunal. Of course, he confesses to "a vast series of plots." Yes, I did it. And what's more, here's what I wanted to do!

I couldn't tell you if Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is really a "terrorist mastermind" or if he's a total fiction, invented by the government, represented by a goofy snapshot of a disheveled Arab man, who could be a Riyadh cabbie waking up with a hangover for all we know. Nor could anyone else really tell you. If not a product of our government, he is, at least, its singular possession. His existance lacks externality. He has no being, only meaning. Bless you, Jean Baudrillard: The Simulacrum is true.

The New York Times, meanwhile, pulls its usualy Pravda for this shameful farce.

"Mr. Mohammed, long said to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, he confessed to them and acknowledged full or partial responsibility for more than 30 other terror attacks or plots.

”I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” he said.

It reads like a dispatch from the USSR. It reads like an East German party paper. Here is the thing about show trials: some of the tried are guilty of crimes. Some of them are terrorists, or violent revolutionaries, or foreign agents, or spies, or traitors. But the nature of the process is worse than any of their real or imagined crimes because it obviates guilt. It makes the judgement moot. It makes the finding and the confession irrelevant. Here is what we can say about the show trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed: Even if he were truly guilty of every item on the confession, he was not nor ever will be brought to justice.

NYRB Classifieds

Culled from the New York Review of Books classifieds, solely for the purpose of quoting The Big Lebowski:

EROTIC EXPLOSION. Let me blow your mind, your ultimate erogenous zone. Provocative talk with educated beauty. No limits. (866) 540-7588.

And thence to les frères Coen:

JACKIE TREEHORN: People forget the brain is the biggest erogenous zone.

THE DUDE: On you, maybe

Flying Too High / With Some Guy / In the Sky / Is My Idea of Nothing to Do

Le con qui croque, Rob Dreher, believes that the "chasm that runs right down the middle of just about every church in America" (watch your step, pewsters) is the advent of popular gnosticism, by which he means, of course, fags. No. Really. Somehow he's gotten the idea that certain Anglicans believe butt-fucking to be a sacrament. I'm pretty sure that Philippe le bel already used that one against the Templars, but you know the saying: One man's trash is another man's Cathar.

More presently, he has a post up under the title, "The Antichrist is an ecumenist and ecologist." No. Really. "How interesting that this is what's on the pope's mind these days," he muses. I've been to the Vatican, and it's a nice place, but crazy must go with the real estate, because if anywhere else on Earth you encounter an old man in a dress with a goofy hat yelling about "a philanthropist, a pacifist, a vegetarian and a determined defender of animal rights" as the antichrist, you toss the bum some change and hope he buys a hamburger instead of a bottle of Slivovitz.

The War on the War on Beauty

Beauty Is Back! declares Christopher Benfey in Slate, although where it went is anyone's guess. He says with an oddly grandiose fatuity that:

There are signs that the hundred-years war on beauty is drawing to a close. We can date the first hostilities to Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907, the jagged painting of five prostitutes that he called his "first exorcism painting." With its African masks and crude frontal nudity, the painting seems bent on exorcizing something—probably syphilis in Picasso's case, but beauty itself for later painters and critics inspired by it.

Then he quotes Barnett Newman saying that "The impulse of modern art was to destroy beauty," without pausing to wonder if it's at all possible that Newman wasn't being entirely serious, nor to consider that artists are notoriously full of bullshit when asked to discuss their work and their movements anyway.

There's been plenty of ugly art. Ugly for ugly's sake, and ugly for the sake of other things. But look. Here is Les Demoiselles d'Avignon:

Here is a street scene by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner:

Here is one of René Magritte's Empire of Lights paintings:

Here is a poster by Jean Coctea:

Here is Milton Avery's Autumn:

Here is Rothko's Blue and Gray:

Here is an 8-pointed star drawing by Sol LeWitt:

Here is a Calder painting:

Here is a photo of Walter De Maria's earthenwork, The Lightning Field:

Here is Ernesto Neto's piece from a recent Venice Biennale:

Each of these produced by a major artist since 1907. Each of these shockingly, strikingly, uniquely beautiful.

The Party of the First Part Shall Be Known in This Contract as the Party of the First Part Shall Be Known in This Contract as . . .

Here is a paragraph by Martin Peretz with more switchbacks than a coastal highway:

I know that the internationalization of our universities is high on everybody's wish list, at least with everybody who makes a living in our academic institutions. Probably, however, much of this is just a scam. "The higher learning" is not everywhere the higher learning. So, many mediocre intellects come from foreign countries to less than mediocre colleges and graduate schools, and the most one can say about these enrollments is that they are a favorable cash transaction for the U.S. You may recall those eight male students from some place in the Middle East who came to study I forget where and never showed up at the registrar's office to enroll. Of course, some very brilliant intellects come here--maybe even many--and they end up making significant contributions to the life of the mind, the spirit and the economies of America and their places of origin.

So this "internationalization" is "high on everybody's wish list," but everybody turns out to be a narrowly-circumscribed professional sector. "'Higher learning'" is not "higher learning"--(echoes of "love is not love")--because these foreigners are "mediocre" while their institutions of advancement are "less than mediocre." This basically describes the state of the majority of students--mediocre--at the majority of American land-grant universities--less than mediocre--but neveryoumindnowthat'snotthepoint. Marty can't recall any details of the aspersion he nevertheless casts; the only reason he casts it in any event is to make sure you know he ain't talkin' 'bout no Hindus or Chinamen: he's talking about dirty Arabs. Well, when is he not? This generalizing is a little too gaudy even for Marty, so he hauls it on back: some, no, many foreigners are "brilliant intellects" and make "significant contributions" to theirn and ourn.

What's the point, Marty? With that question in mind, I waded into his second paragraph, and found out that what he's really talking about: back in the glorious days of the Shah, a bunch of Iranians came over and studied physics. Then the Shah got booted out and, while a few scientists fled, plenty stayed put, and now?

But many of them remained behind, and some of them are responsible for the weapons with which Ahmadinejad is now imperiling the world.

What weapons? Martin doesn't know and doesn't care. He needs something to carelessly impugn the way a dog in heat needs a crotch to sniff. He capers of and thus alights on a apocalyptic vision of some Egyptian grad student cackling to himself in his Cambridge sudio apartment: "Today, the coin-op laundry in the basement; tomorrow, the world!"

QOTD, as Jim H. would say.

Over on the Times' blog, The Lede, Robert Mackey posts an item: "Top General Opposes Openly Gay Troops."

Wayne, at Comment 23, ripostes:

Top general? He doesn’t look like a top to me.

Israel Threatened by the Moon; Congressional Democrats Speak Out

Via Señor Matthew Yglesias, I spy that "Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members of the [Democratic congressional] leadership [have] decided to strip from a major military spending bill a requirement for Bush to gain approval from Congress before moving against Iran." (One wonders: Donkey, or mule?) It all has to do with Isreal, whose security has benefitted greatly from current events in the Middle East.

You may recall that during the most recent Congressional elections, the most important elections of your and my lifetimes, the great battle of our time, in which many things would pass away, where we would all stand or fall, under the Shadow, great song and noise arose around the theme: Democrats, our only hope. The ThanksRalph coalition of Democratic dead-enders rose as convincingly as it could onto its hind legs and, having convinced itself of its own sapience, came whinnying at we few hold-outs that whatever we might think of the Donkle in ordinary times, such times had fled, and in our extraordinary era extraordinary measures were necessary, the least of which (went the argument) would be to cast a vote in favor of a national Democrat or two, for they had seen the light and were now Against the War. All sorts of hoary anhistoricisms popped up like crocuses in March, part of an ever-expanding gambit to justify the ways of God in Man . . . no, to justify the elevation of a new gang of grifters to the chambers and backrooms of the Republic. The worst of these was: "Do you really believe that if Al Gore had been elected president we'd be at war with Iraq now?" Al Gore, after all, had grown a beard, and had converted, like many fellow Party members, to anti-Iraqism at a moment when the catastrophic magnitude of our failure there had already become evident to every other person and fetus and now-departed spirit on the Earth and in the nine circles of heaven, all the way out to the black lodestone of souls where Mitt Romney and the rest of the latter day saints will find themselves ere they depart this vale.

Did I believe that we would be at war with Iraq? Under Gore? Yes, and double-yes. Here was a man who carved out his place in the senate as perhaps the most war-mongering senator, a man who never saw a military appropriation or a jingoistic strophe that he couldn't massage into a bland testimonial to the Albrightian indispensibility of the American State. He was chosen by Clinton for this particular quality, to lend some cruise-missile gravitas to the grits-and-hollers domestic campaign. He was a principle proponent of the now-infamous Iraq Liberation Act. If he and the Lieb had gone over the hump, you bet your underoos we'd have gone to war with Iraq. If he and the Lieb had ascended, we'd have never seen the Afghani sideshow; we'd have gone straight for Baghdad, and the Afghanis would've had to continue their civil war on their own. Qu'aurait eu aurait eu: Whatever would've been, would've been.

Yglesias accepts too readily that "Conservative Democrats as well as lawmakers concerned about the possible impact on Israel had argued for the change in strategy." Invoking Israeli security is like calling the children our future or firefighters heros. It's just a prettier poster to paste over a crumbling wall. We could invade Antarctica or the Moon, and someone somewhere would link it to the security of Israel. The usual suspects among big Donkle blogs will cry and wail: "Bush has a 3% approval rating; why won't the Democrats oppose him!" It's because they don't oppose him. They want to go to war with Iran. But they've learned that their political fortunes and therefore their pocketbooks benefit from keeping their fingerprints off the shotgun, so they're going to once again let the Elmer Fudd executive go blasting into the underbrush, then claim in a few years that they never expected he'd do what it was patently obvious from the very get-go that he intended. They want to attack Iran. It bears repeating. There is a bipartisan consensus in Washington on the "threat" to "our interests" that a "hostile Iranian regime" poses. All the jockeying you see is the antefacto attempt by the complicit parties to "limit exposure," as we say in business, to limit the perception of culpability for the benefit of the bottom line in the event that the plan fails, which, of course, it will.

Peace Is Our Profession

Fred Hiatt's them-crazy-Ruskies bit in today's WaPo is full of the usual fatuities, none of which bear repeating, but there is a stand-out sentence that parts ways with the usual ruling-class scene-chewing and lands so squarely in the Nation of Utter Nonsense that I thought it merited a quotation:

As to NATO: On the one hand, you have, say, Estonia, a democracy of 1.3 million people, freely joining in 2004 an alliance of like-minded democracies.

Now I'm not opposed to a little rhetorical legerdemain when a point has got to be made, but from what faraway perch on what misty mountain do you gaze upon the thing that is NATO and call it "an alliance of like-minded democracies," wondering innocently as you do how anyone could imagine its expansion to one's borders as remotely threatening.

Somewhere Leon Brezhnev is giggling in his grave and wishing he'd dreamed up "An alliance of like-minded socialist republics."

Oceana has always been at war with Eurasia.

Where We Stand

What you have to understand about the rise of totalitarian/proto-fascist Russia--potentially a world disaster--is that it has all been driven by Chechnya. In a way, this could have been a remote, obscure independence movement. But Yeltsin tried to put his foot down: it was the almost-arbitrary point at which he decided to stop his empire disintegrating.

~Crispin Sartwell~

This is the kind of stuff that happens when the war on terror is used as an excuse to circumvent our civil liberties, which has become the hallmark of the Bush administration.

~Jack Cafferty~

9/11 changed everything.

~Everyone and his mother~

Jack Cafferty is right in the general sense and wrong in the specific. The error is in the phrasing. The "when" clause implies an exclusion that doesn't exist. It suggests a possible, parallel "war on terror" that exists as something other than an "excuse to circumvent our civil liberties." The phrase following the comma identifying such abuses as "the hallmark of the Bush administration" makes a similar implication: that in the hands of some other president, some other government, such a backwards-day "war" might well exist. But it wouldn't. It couldn't. The "when" is always. The "war on terror" is an arbitrary designation crafted specifically and intentionally to make palatable--to make desirable--a parcel of authoritarian practices at home and abroad.

Crispin Sartwell goes on to say this about Russia in Chechnya:

the russian army, the russian nation, and the russian president were humiliated there in the way a tiny, fierce, cohesive people can humiliate a decaying empire.

Humility isn't a valued trait in an empire. The natural and practical limits of power don't command proper respect, but rather provide affronts to an esteem founded on a falsely masculine military pride. Russia was humiliated in Chechnya, just as its predecessing Soviet Union was humiliated in Afghanistan, just as America and France before were humiliated in Vietnam. Vietnam survived beause after killing millions and losing tens of thousands of its own, the United States hadn't the stomach or the monies to continue killing. Afghanistan survived, but just barely. War with the USSR exhausted it. The resulting internal strife enervated it further. War with the United States continued the demolition. The peoples of Afghanistan--most of them, anyway--will survive, but any sort of unitary political future is doubtful. Chechnya--the nation, the people, the culture--will probably disappear.

Let's talk about America, though. The humiliation of Vietnam and the economic turmoil of the few years following was sufficient to tamp down momentarily the national enthusiasm for imperial adventurism, but the governing class, purged by practice and propaganda of any significant dissent to the view that America held a "special place" in the world that not only excused but required intevention in affairs far beyond its own borders--euphemized as "democratization" or "spreading democracy"--would never allow a return to "isolationist" sentiments. Luckily everyone loves a parade. Or a minor intervention in a harmless nation. The Reagan years, "morning in America," were basically a stage test for a resurgent American militarism. Publicly, soft targets were chosen--Grenada; Noriega. There were hiccups. Beirut. Public revelation of those South American interventions not designed for popular consumption. But whatever else can be said about Reagan's presidency, it's clear that he left office having presided over the reinvigoration of popular militarism. America could "walk proud" or "stand tall" again. Under George H.W. Bush, Saddam Hussein, a long-time client-dictator of ours, launched a miscalculated occupation of neighboring Kuwait, which let the United States launch a video-game air war against a nation much-weakened by its 8-year conflict with Iran--a conflict encouraged, armed, and funded on both sides by the United States.

Acceptable militarism alone is not sufficient grounds for the full implementation of authoritarianism at home, though. That requires a more pernicious enemy. It requires fear. It requires humiliation. The examples of terrorism under Carter and Reagan didn't occur within the United States, and didn't serve the necessary purpose.

It was during Bill Clinton's tenure that we witnessed the twin narratives of internal enemies and national humiliation at the hands of terrorists. In February of 1993, the World Trade Center was bombed for the first time, killing six and injuring over a thousand. One of the principle architects of that attack, Ramzi Youssef, had been living in the United States for a year. In foreign policy circles, "radical Islam" and "al-Qaeda" and other now-familiar buzzwords began circulating. A little over two years later, in 1996, Timothy McVeigh and "others unknown" successfully bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building, ostensibly to mark the anniversary of the US Government's disastrous and deadly raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, TX. Bill Clinton wagged his finger at the cameras: "You cannot say you love your country and hate its government." There was a brief flurry of interest in "militias" and "survivalists," but the simmering, lasting belief that wafted out of the ashes was that whether Muslims or some "patriot movement," there lurked within America an internal enemy that our military might alone could not adequately combat. In 1996, President Clinton signed into law the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which created new statutory limits on the application and protections of habeas corpus--limitations later firmed and expanded with the passage of the PATRIOT Act and, most recently, by the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

The more recent history is more familiar. In September, 2001, the World Trade Centers were destroyed by hijacked airliners. President Bush declared a "war on terror." Patsies like Andrew Sullivan and a broad clique of mainstream authors and pseudo-intellectuals began to fulminate about "enemies within" and "fifth columns." Conversations about "balancing freedom and security" arose with increasing frequency, and with a few exceptions it was roundly accepted across the deep-but-narrow political spectrum that certain "sacrifices" had to be made in a "new era" of "security concerns." This is a familiar theme. One doesn't have to be a conspiracy theorist to understand the signifacance of these certain strokes of luck for the many advocates of powerful government. Martin Van der Lubbe, after all, did start a fire, and really was a communist.

If there has been a recent impediment to the continued building of American militarism and domestic authoritarianism, it's been the main spokesman himself, who is too hollow and who speaks too poorly for the job. George W. Bush was a one-hit wonder, and despite the mighty efforts of the legislative branch in this country to confer on him the mandate of heaven, he has faltered right along with imperial policy, proving neither slick nor adaptive enough to keep the people tuned into the show. Now Sartwell says:

At any rate, I vibe the us turning away [from nascent authoritarianism], though the consolidations of executive power will hardly be reversed.

I'm less sanguine. Whoever takes up the pot of "political capital" at the end of the rainbow in 2008 will have in his hands a police mechanism of extraordinary breadth, power, and complexity, as well as a national culture of soldier-worship that, despite the stumblings of "the mission," has only increased in the past months, as the patriotic fervor once directed at The Decider is transferred to The Troops. Both Iraq and Afghanistan are completely beyond our control at this point, but those facts have yet to fully penetrate the national awareness. Even as majorities say they support "withdrawal," it remains clear that commensurate majorities don't understand what "defeat" in Iraq or Afghanistan means to the imperial project that they tacitly support, even though the naming of it remains anathema. Potential conflicts with Iran and Syria are worrying enough, but I fear the spasms of violence this country may be capable of if, two years hence, our Middle-Eastern adventures lie in further ruins and a new executive, unburdened by past administrative failures, takes up the sceptor and seats himself on the throne.


UPDATE: See James in comments for a couple of factual corrections.

Milton

Brad Delong posts a great old interview with Milton Friedman. Somewhere after the 25th minute he says:

Government is an institution whereby the people who have the greatest drive to have power over their fellow man get in a position of controlling them.

Think on that, homeys.