America as a Suicide Bomber

As occasionally noted, Matt Stoller, the Natty Bumpo of Netrootsia, isn't the brightest star in the sky, or candle on the cake, but even we were shocked to find this (via Yglesias):

What frustrated me is that I wanted to go after Tom Friedman aggressively [in a recent speech at a forum he also attended], but I did not. He said in his speech that the biggest competitive challenge in the future will be between you and your imagination, and so I wanted to make a joke about him sounding like an Epcot ride. I sort of flubbed it. What I should have said is that Friedman holds a special place in my development. I took a class from him at college on 'globalization', and read most of his books. In 2002, he and Ken Pollack were the two people that I relied on for guidance with regards to Iraq. I trusted him. I believed in him. And he got it one hundred percent wrong. And while honest people tend to admit their mistakes, and when the mistake is particularly soaked in blood, do a lot of soul-searching and apologizing, he never has. My mistake in looking at the Iraq war still pains me, and though I was a 24 year old kid with no experience in foreign policy or politics, my gullibility and the betrayal from my former guides still colors my thinking. For someone like Friedman, who should know better and occupies the most valuable opinion space in the world, it's stunningly immoral to pretend to having no responsibility in this quagmire. All of us are responsible, and the first step is to admit error. Maybe if I said this he finally would have understood where we come from, though I doubt it. But I didn't say it.

Taking a class from Tom Friedman has got to be like wading through a sea of strophes as chanted by an aphasiac Homer. Doing it voluntarily? I guess if you were high all the time. (I guess that leaves me little room to criticize others' curricular choices.) Anyway, taking the class is one thing, and reading his books another, but what does it say about the reasoning skills of our author--his "critical thinking" in eduspeak--that he managed to emerge from that experience trusting and believing this "guide"? Tom Friedman is a Sam Cooke song made flesh. He don't know much about anything.

However gullible Stoller may have been, and all evidence points to "pretty fucking" as the appropriate modifier, it's clear that despite his self-sanctifying admission of error he's never succeeded in actually examining how it came to be that a third-rate newspaper thinker and ninth-rate metaphorist bamboozled him into accepting the invasion and occupation of Iraq as necessary and just. Here's the tell: He keeps talking about Friedman's mistake.

But Tom Friedman didn't make a mistake. His wrongness wasn't situational. He didn't fail to adequately consider the pros and cons of busting up Iraq. His wrongness proceeds from premise. He could never have been "right" about Iraq because his entire analytical model, the whole series of distorting lenses through which he views the world, is wrong, wrong, wrong. Every one of his particularist assumptions about American primacy, American exceptionalism, American potency, American justness, American uniqueness, American duty, and American right action is wrong. He didn't read the wrong tea lives or believe "flawed intelligence." His central belief is in what's usually called something like "the promise of America"--see Arthur Silber on that. Barack Obama poeticized it: "I believe that America is the last, best hope of the world."

You must understand that this is a religious belief, and to carry it out is zealotry even as we call it statecraft. Tom Friedman, Ken Pollack, Barack Obama, Matt Stoller, almost all Democrats, almost all Republicans, the national newsmedia, most of our families--all of them believe with a conviction no less fantastical or fanatical than that of any murdering suicide bomber in his peculiar catechisms that the United States has a positive right and duty to enforce its will on the rest of the world. We are the freest nation in the world. We are the great model and incubator of democracy. We are the most humane. We are the wisest. We are the most decent. We are "a force for good in the world." To have acceded at any point to the "necessity" or even the advisability or even yet the excusability of invading Iraq is to have accepted into the deep core of your moral being a belief that your nation has an instrumental right to kill other people in order to change the way that they live.

To return, then, and say it was a mistake--a war based on lies, support for a war because of those lies--without disavowing that American fanaticism is to condemn the Inquisition because it covicted the wrong guy. I'll repeat a very basic point I've made before: all wars are based on lies. There are moments when peoples act in immediate self-defense and resistance when something closer to honesty obtains, but war by its very nature banishes truth. Iraq was never, as John Kerry famously put it, "the wrong war at the wrong time," implying that under other circumstances the United States might go off to fight its inverse. The Iraq War was and is merely symptomatic of a disease at the very heart of the whole endeavor of America, and until that disease is examined and treated, there will be more wars, and there will be more "gullible 24-year-olds" who won't question their gun-raising mentors because they too accept the idea that American democracy, "the system," represents an historical apogee toward which all other nations must progress.

That pridefulness allows us to wield the greatest instrument of destruction ever known on this Earth, to do so callously and blindly. That pridefulness allowed us to create this extraordinary mechanism of death and destruction. Most Americans are fortunate in that they never get near its physical consequences, much less suffer them themselves. Those are the advantages of national wealth and power. But if you ever find yourself thinking how alien is the impulse to strap dynamite to your chest and kill innocents in a marketplace in service to your political religion, consider that the very same impluse is what allowed this once-24-year-old and most of his countrymen to support that "mistake" in the first place.

Keeping out of It

In today's Post, Michael Gerson panegyricizes the soon-to-be late and unlamented Tony Blair as the new Gladstone! You know: "the Victorian-era, Liberal prime minister who symbolizes high-minded, humanitarian intervention." There's a Forster novel in there somewhere I suspect.

For all the talk of new worlds after 9/11, it's always been evident that our soi-disant forward thinkers are in fact nostalgists. Gerson makes clear that while the cruder ranks of warmakers long for the clarifying polarization of a Soviet menace or a Nazi war machine, the sophisticated, burdened White Man longs for the clean convictions of the Victorians. If the Turks of our times must have their empires, let us look down our noses at their barbarism, and let the rest of them be Christianized, liberated by our unselfmotivated interference in their affairs, gladdened that we popped in to knock off the shackles of whatever local tyranny terrorized them, and unperturbed when we decided to stick around for a spot afterward.

Whether current heads of state or American presidential hopefuls or libearl op-editorialists, that Victorian conviction that we are on a civilizing mission, that we represent civilization and that to oppose our civilizing is to oppose civilization itself, holds powerfully to the imagination. Blair says, Why, we rid them of their oppressors who killed hundreds of thousands of them. It quite clearly does not occur to him that we, in the process, committed commensurable crimes. As much as I try to avoid the indulgence of naïveté, I have to say it still shocks me once in a while to note how radical it remains to suggest that we might just leave other people the fuck alone.

Foghorn Leghorn

Why-ah, when-ah ah wen ta yoonahverstee back in those thah sixtees, things was ah might lot differn than today, by gaw. Fo one thing, no one nevah taw no femnisms or nuthin bout no coloniah guvmin. Now, in ma day, hiztree was basic'ly ya battles hee-ah and ya battles thay-ah. Slayvree. Hitler. Th'Alamo. An a right lot ah uthahs, I ashure ya. Buh today, hoo-boy, why-ah, ah man's pratically gotta turn on tha ole teevee ta learn a durn thing bout the milterry. So doan give no money ta tha yoonahverstee unless they-ah teach it right.

On Drugs but Off the Ranch

If, as the ubiquitous news-story modifier has it, former Attorney General John Ashcroft was "heavily sedated" for his nighttime visit by Al Gonzales and Andy Card, then isn't all the late-breaking-ish news about the further skullduggery under and around the NSA wiretapping scandal just more evidence of the cosmic, cartoonish ineptitude of these uniquely American villains? It's true that the bungling bad-guy is a staple of American popular culture--where would the 60s Batman be without him, after all? Nevertheless, if we can agree that "heavily sedated" means "doped out of his mind on opiods," then the failure of Bush's heavies to get the guy to sign off is something heaven-high-ridiculous to behold. The last time I was heavily sedated--admittedly a more, you know, voluntary state for me--I was so goddamn blissed out that I would've certified my old fluffy white cat as the executor of my estate. If I could've written . . . but I'm sure legibility wasn't really an issue here.

Non Serviam

Cast away from you all your transgressions, whereby ye have transgressed; and make you a new heart and a new spirit: for why will ye die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord GOD: wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye.

Ezekiel 18:31-32

Of all the encomiums--grudging and otherwise--published and propounded on the death of Jerry Falwell, the craziest is the idea that he wrenched a soulcentric movement of passionate devouts out of their concerns with the hereafter (the thereafter? the everafter?) and turned them into political hound dogs. This is pure, patent nonsense. From the moment of its inception, this nation has never lacked for preachers and flocks proclaiming America to be a Christian Nation. Who supported William Jennings Bryan, the Senior Years, and who the Temperance movement? What Jerry Fallwell did was get himself on the TeeVee where he appeared as a loud mirror to a lot of Americans: intolerant, superstitious, and proud. Now that he's gone there's not much to do but laugh at his passing. He was a man of vast appetites, and that's what did him in. His last name was always an unmentionable joke about the Angel Lucifer, and now the joke's on him.

Debating Society

So. Ron Paul is all, like, maybe a 10-year bombing campaign in Iraq and other American meddling in the Muslim world had something to do with 9/11. Crazy Rudy says, "You take that back." Ron Paul says, "Fuck all y'all. I'm not gonna take it back. Here, bitches. I'm gonna say it again."

Double the C, Double the S, What Does It Spell? Success!

I see that the new plan for Afghanistan involves exporting the successful and efficacious methods that the United States and its South American allies used to eradicate coca cultivation.

Wait. What?

PayGo

Pay for Antiwar if you're able, mes p'tits.

Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content! / Farewell the plumed troop and the big wars / That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!

My feelings about the World Bank are confined to the singular sentiment that it should go away, and my feelings about Paul Wolfowitz likewise. An enterprise of state capitalism masquerading as a proponent of "markets," whose function among the nations of the world is that of a second-rate urban loan shark among houseing projects, I have very little use for it. Governments giving money to a governing body to lend money to governments to give money to the various serfs and peons of the inAnglicized world is not my cup of libertarian tea. The fact that it's run by the Meshugge Messiah is just one more demerit. Nevertheless, in the sea of human injustices that attract my attention, the institutional fortunes of the World Bank, its president, and his lady friend are small waves indeed. To Christopher Hitchens, of course, they are not.

I have been living in Washington for a quarter of a century and have said some mean things about people and had some mean things said about me. Fair enough. I sat and thought for quite a while today and decided that this is the nastiest and dirtiest and cheapest campaign of character assassination I have ever seen.

Really, Christopher? I read that passage, and the image that comes to mind is of a one-eyed caddy staggering up to his golfer and offering the distance to the green.

The gross awfulness that so offends his sensibilities is The Media calling Shaha Reza Wolfowitz's "girlfriend," when "companion" or some such would be preferably. How delicate! Hitchens is constantly ascribing the values of straight talk to himself; he is a man who sees the world as it is and says so; he styles himself a disciple of George Orwell! But in reporters' failure to circumlocute on the point of Wolfie's gal, he finds nefarious intent--"character assassination." It doesn't matter. Like all the defenders of the beleaguered Wolfowitz, Hitchens insists on making the questions about his conduct more complex than they are. The question is not: Is Shaha Reza a capable and accomplished woman with the skills to dispatch her new job at the State Department? No reasonable person disputes that she's exactly such a person. The question, rather, is whether or not it's appropriate and ethical for someone who's dating his subordinate to actively participate in any matter related to her employment. We don't have to turn into a world of WalMarts where collegial dating is strictly prohibited to recognize simply that arranging a job for your squeeze, however deserving she may be, is ethically dubious. If there are questions out there somewhere about Reza's fitness for her role, they are solely the result of her and her "partner's" blindness to this basic tenet of the working world: In the matter of human resources, fucking is dispositive.

The Digested Read

The only book reviewer worth reading these days is Jim Crace, whose The Digested Read at the Guardian is a fine weekly dose of disdain. Some good bits:

ON Travels in the Scriptorium BY PAUL AUSTER:

For this should tell both you and him everything you need to know; that you are trapped inside some meaningless pretentious crap that is passing itself off as cutting-edge post-modern metaphysicality.

ON The Castle in the Forest BY STORMIN' NORMAN MAILER:

I hear you say this is so far nothing more than some heavily signposted teachings of Dr Freud bolted on to a ridiculous tale of the supernatural. But it is far more than that; greater even than the Maestro, I am a megalomaniac author in my 80s who can write any old crap - I use that word in its nugatory sense - and know that my craven people will take it seriously.

ON House of Meetings BY MARTIN AMIS:

But as I grow older, I find my style has mellowed. I am no longer constrained by my inflated sense of self.

My recent favorite is the Digested Read of the new Tolkein exhumation:

ON The Children of Húrin BY SOME TOLKEIN OR OTHER:

For more than 30 years I have been wondering what to do with my father's unfinished ramblings. But then the Lord of the Rings movies did very well, so I decided to cash in.

[...]

Notes on Pronunciation

W - the w before a double l, as in "The Children of Húrin is complete Bowllocks", should always be silent.

[...]

"Forsooth," he swore. "Henceforth shall I remain a derivative Wagnerian hero and wander mindlessly through the realms of Middle-Earth on a quasi-symbolic quest and, Children of the Eldar, resolve only to talk in sentences of unspeakable leadenness, punctuated by manifold parentheses."

The Trial of This Particular Period of Several Weeks to One Month of the Century!

Fuck. Yeah.

The long-awaited trial of José Padilla, against whom accusations have been reduced from We'-re All Gonna Die to some sort of lame conspiracy charge in which the government will seek to prove that J.P., like, totally would've done it, dood, but you know, like, he promised his mom that he'd babysit his sister that weekend and it, like, totally wasn't fair. Laff-line:

To prove conspiracy, prosecutors will have to show that each of the three was involved in at least one act to provide material support to extremist groups. In Padilla's case, a key piece of evidence is an application to attend an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan that prosecutors say he completed in July 2000.

If I were Padilla, I'd just be like, Yo, that training camp was just my safety school. I was totally going for early admit at Stanford.

Where, I have it on good authority, Mr. Padilla intended to join the Totally Heterosexual™ Fleet Street Singers.

We Don't Do It So You Don't Have To

Back in the dot-com era--honestly, did it ever rise to the office of an era?--it was common to turn on the television and see a commercial in which something odd, artful, and entirely absent of meaning occured. Then the name of a company appeared on the screen. What is it? What did it do? What did it offer? To the corporate Tristan Tzaras of the day, these were not the pertinent questions. Questions themselves were impertinent. Among the lesser stars of the period, those who wrote and attempted to think about what was occuring, or not occuring, rather than those who made it occur, or who did not make it occur, or who made it not occur, there was a tendency to write of the revolutionary qualities of their movement in the style of manifestos, which is to say proclamatory, evangelical, orotund, and embarrassingly adolescent.

It's popular to say that epoch passed, but as with any aesthetic it didn't pass; it evolved. The internet-based non-service providers may have gone mostly belly-up, but the vast agglomerations of the Enrons of the world, in which tremendous sums of money shuffled between accounts in the buying and selling of imaginary commodities whose real-world counterparts existed but did not necessarily obtain. Or matter. There was a certain quantum grandeur to it, an Escherian, virtual-particle-set, one-cancels-the-other loveliness. But in the end the left hand couldn't really draw the right, and that moment gave way to the next.

Now arrives Guiliani Partners a spectacular global network of donothingdom. The Mayor of 9/11, who because he did nothing in the days, weeks, and months following the attacks was able to focus the full energies of his immense internal dynamo toward appearing poised and confident. Because The Mayor exists entirely disconnected from any event, opinion, or emotion outside of his own thick and oddly-shaped skull, and because all events within that skull occur in a guidoland fantasy of lovely women and Rat-Pack background music, though without any cigarettes, poise and confidence were easy to evince. Because he is if nothing else a man of unsual energy, his own efforts in that direction produced something of a supernova of confident poise. Because many Americans were momentarily traumatized by the attacks, they took comfort in the imperterbable face of "America's Mayor." They didn't bother to ask the obvious question: Does such calm in the face of such disaster signify superhuman inner resources, or does it instead signify that the man is simply a sociopath? Nor did most people ask just what it was that The Mayor was doing? And if it was nothing much, really, then what?

When you consider what we now call "the lessons of Hurricane Katrina," by which we mean the validations for personal world-views drawn from the aftermath of that catastrophe, one sobering realization remains conspicuously absent. It isn't that venal government performs poorly or that government itself is an inadequate mechanism to respond to tragedies of that magnitude. It isn't about government at all. The most important conclusion is much more obvious, and so much easier to miss. It's this: there are some disasters that are simply so grand in scale they exceed any human managerial capacity. By that I mean they call into question--and rightly so--our faith that with judicious thought and reasonable foresight, through the application of calm direction and practiced skill, men working more-or-less cooperatively can meaningfully mitigate even the most awful disaster. That notion is an error. It was easy to point fingers at Ray Nagin or Katherine Blanco or Ol' Brownie or George W. Bush, and it's certainly true that each of them to varying degrees could have done better. So too could the local police, the national guard, the population of New Orleans. But in the end, in the confused, sometimes plaintive, often pathetic incapacity of all these characters to marshall themselves to the full, equal measure of the challenge before them, what we all saw was quite simply the limits of the human.

Rudolph Giuliani didn't display any limits because he wasn't doing anything. You can't divide by zero. He strode around and looked into cameras. He said some things. That was what he did. And now, that's what he does. From doing nothing very well in the aftermath of 9/11, he has leveraged a business in which he does nothing very profitably. That is certainly his right, and in a sense it's in a great American tradition. Perhaps even The Great American Tradition. But let us not forget the wise words of Jorge Montaño, Mexico's former ambassador to the United States: "[P]eople who paid Mr. Giuliani and his associates really made a great mistake. With all honesty, nothing that they suggested was successful."

Madagascar Revisited

At the end of a post rounding up the latest in Iraq, Pat Lang notes a trend and asks a question:

The neocons and their allies are making noises about "unleashing" the Shia and the Kurds against the Sunni Arabs. Hmm. The unleashing would be, what..? If the Shia and the Kurds could beat the insurgents they would have done so by now. What are the neocons suggesting? Mass violence against Sunni Arab civilians?

Yes. That is what they're suggesting.

Putin It Together, and Whaddaya Get? Anudder Year Older and-ah Deeper In Debt

“The number of threats is not decreasing. They are only transforming and changing the guise. As during the Third Reich era, these new threats show the same contempt for human life and claims to world exclusiveness and diktat.”

Day-amm. He talkin bout you mama, son! Strong words, Mr. Putin. And what do you have to say, America? Surely not claims to world exclusiveness and diktat. Let's bend an ear to Daniel Fried, the assistant secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs:

He added that what was needed was sustained engagement, mixed with firmness, to try to help influence Russia during its “unfinished transformation.”

Mr. Fried also made clear that the West need not be fully impressed by Mr. Putin’s ambitious posturing. Russia remains in many ways underdeveloped and disconnected from Western values, he said, and should still be held to account.

“We do not want a weak Russia, but a strong Russia must be strong in 21st-century, not 19th-century, terms,” he said.

“A strong center is part of this healthy mix,” he added. “But a strong center in a state of weak institutions, is not.”

Mr. Fried also called on Europe to stand against Russia’s desire to continue to have influence over countries the Soviet Union once occupied, a reminder that even as Russia complains about what it calls interference in its own domestic affairs it openly supports separatists in Georgia and Moldova, and has tried to bully Ukraine and the Baltic states.

“We should not pay a price for cooperation, nor indulge Russia when it behaves as if a residual sphere of influence over its neighbors is its due,” he said.

Okay. Maybe a little exclusiveness and dictat. But certainly not contempt for human life.

On Tuesday, barely 24 hours after American officials apologized publicly to President Karzai for a previous incident in which 19 civilians were shot by marines in eastern Afghanistan, reports surfaced of at least 21 civilians killed in an airstrike in Helmand Province, though residents reached by phone said the toll could be as high as 80.

While NATO is now in overall command of the military operations in the country, many of the most serious episodes of civilian deaths have involved United States counterterrorism and Special Operations forces that operate separately from the NATO command.

President Putin and his chorus-line Tsarettes are hardly models of Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men, and it's a little embarrassing that a 4'9" serial assassinator who runs Russia the way a small-dicked man drives his Hummer is the global figure most accurately calling America on our bullshit. All that jazz about Russia meddling in its former satellites is a roundabout way of saying that this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black, and yet here is the thing about that misunderstood idiom: the kettle is black. The moral ground for critique by a commensurate offender is questionable, but the accuracy of the assessment is not.

Still, it isn't really the Third Reich on which the US is currently modeled, but the very USSR from whose titanic corpse Putin is reanimating a respectable giant. Doddering, unweildy, and self-deluded. Publicly grandiose, but rusty within. Bedevilled by dusty revolutionaries. Confounded by Islam.