Stop Me If You Think That You've Heard This One Before

The leading Democratic Presidential candidates can't stop answering Mike Gravel's question, "Who do you want to nuke, Barack?" The senate just voted overwhelmingly to further expand the Executive Surveillance State, because, after all, this Executive has proven to be ethically rigorous and practically restrained in its use of the vast powers already conferred on it by the Congress, and yet, "That this could ever turn out not to be the case is simply astounding, and it is a measure of just how much damage the George W. Bush 'administration' has inflicted on our Constitution." Might we now safely say that it was not the George W. Bush administration alone, that there may have been some co-conspirators at the scene of the crime? That quote was pulled from a post fronted on DailyKos today, entitled "There is someting fundamentally wrong here." I'll say. There are now a couple thousand Kossians shuffling in and out of fluorescent-lit conference rooms to learn how best to pimp and underwrite the party of Pétain. John Dean just told them that his biggest fear is that a Democrat will be elected President and, surveying the buffet of newly acquired presidential powers laid out before him, will say, "I like what I see." His remark was greeted by the silence of self-doubt and self-recognition. Unfortunately, this crowd has epiphanies like a whore has johns: often and not for long.

Having honed my predictive powers watching this same history repeat itself ever-faster for the last half-decade, allow me a magic 8-ball moment. The Democratic blogs will rapidly begin Project C.Y.A. by parsing the Ayes and the Nos from the Democratic ranks, and the cries of disappointment, shame, and rebellion will quickly devolve into turgid discussions on whom to selectively "target." They will draw on their successful campaign to oust Joe Lieberman and replace him with an anti-war liberal. Through all this useless blather, they will all still promote the Democratic Party as an institution. Well, I've got my popcorn.

T. Rex

Even though he's become something of a fuddy-duddy, and even though the New Yorker for which he writes has turned contemporary fiction and poetry into a quiet beach on which Ian McEwan's characters prattle on lyrically about their penises without ever using them properly, I will admit to a certain fondness for Hendrik Hertzberg. But this is nuts, and I'll tell you why:

No one naked around here. No chaos at YearlyKos. No “sweet smell of marijuana,” as the straight papers used to refer to it. No demands for revolution. No denunciations of bourgeois democracy. The Democratic National Committee Chairman is listened to respectfully and cheered enthusiastically.

I think the difference between today’s left and yesterday’s is partly explained by the difference between the wars that have energized them. Vietnam was, as Bob Dole might say, a “Democrat war.” You couldn’t protest it just by putting your energies into electing Democrats, and of course you couldn’t do it by trying to elect Republicans, who liked the war even more. You had to go to the left of the Dems, and if you hadn’t happened to have already acquired a moral/political compass, you might keep going till you ended up at the feet of Chairman Mao. This war is an all-Republican affair. And this generation, thank God, is perfectly content to stick with Chairman Howard.

In other words, YearlyKos is another boring industry confab, one more tacky convention in a nation replete with tacky conventions, in which the high points are the free danish and the low points are the uncomfortable convention-center D-chairs, where a moment of excitement might be a middle-aged divorcee with a few extra pounds picking up a middle-aged widow with a few extra kids at the hotel bar for a round of mildly regrettable, enthusiastic, unathletic sex. One therefore wonders: Why does it merit coverage by the nation's preeminent weekly publication? Perhaps because politicians show up, but there isn't a diner in New Hampshire of which that isn't also true, and most of them get by with an occasional remote from some CBS affiliate in Hartford. Unlike revolutionists of yore, I'm generally untroubled by the bourgeoisie and their cute democracy--no more than I'm troubled by cows grazing in pastures along the interstate. But I'm hardly going to slow down for it, either. If no one is naked, no one is denouncing anyone else, no one is rioting, no one is shooting tear gas, no one, in other words, is doing anything other than listening politely to speeches before once again hitting up the coffee bar, what, pray tell, is the point? An amusement park without roller coasters is just a parking lot with fried food. Etc.

The second paragraph is more objectionable on its merits. The idea that this is a "Republican War" is the hoariest bit of self-flattery that I've heard in quite a while, and Hertzberg is usually a more adept and observant journalist than the sort you'd expect to regurgitate so patent a falsehood. Whatever feelings the folks at YearlyKos may personally hold about war, this war, any war, the national politicians who disgrace the convention with their presence almost to a man have voted again and again to fund and authorize it and its excesses. The cheerleaders may be mostly Republican, but there are plenty of Democrats at the bake sale. Go Team! "Chairman Dean" spoke passionately about ending the war four years ago! Et puis ? This isn't merely sang-froid on my part; here you have thousands of people, Hertzberg among them, who are for all intents and purposes consenting to spend a week being lied to. I read their blogs and their posts and their diaries, and so I know that on some deep, ever-repressed level they understand they're being sold a bill of goods. They cry out in writing at each betrayal of the promise of their legislative majority; they observe keenly each instance of capitulation; they mock each outbreak of Congressional cowardice; they parse the pablum of their Presidential candidates to determine who is most likely to bring this particularly sorry episde of American imperial overreach to a close. Then they get together to "applaud politely."

What you have, then, is every indication of a deep sickness of the soul. It is one thing to be lied to, but to know that you're being lied to and still sit around as if stuck at a staff meeting, accepting all the hortatory blather of motivational speech, strategizing, comparing tactics, expounding points of procedure . . . why, it's a farce. It's pornographic. It's sad. It's bathetic. And it is the face of ruin and defeat.

Hello to Nice Blog Thank You Glorious Coming

Since a recent post has been widely quoted and many of you may be newcomers: wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome. Meine damen und herren, mesdames et messieurs, ladies and gentlemen: Who Is IOZ? operates on a few basic principles best expressed thusly: When the government talks, it lies. When Democrats and Republicans tell you what they're going to do, the Republicans are lying about the what and the Democrats about the do. Cheers.

Number One

A Post reporter has made the shocking discovery that Iraqi communities are motivated by self-interest and that each community and subgroup thereof is trying to maintain and increase its comparative advantage. And furthermore it appears that the political factions representing Iraq's ethnic and religious groups are using their positions in government to provide disproportionate benefits to their particularist constituencies rather than seeking "consensus," whatever that is. It appears, moreover, and much to everyone's evident surprise, that a political party which originated as a resistance movement seeking to overturn Saddam Hussein's secular government in favor of a Shi'ite theocracy is in fact seeking to turn Iraq into a Shi'ite theocracy. Why, it just might be the case that certain other factional players in Iraqi politics, having acquired and equipped private militias, are in fact using them. It seems that Ahmed Chalabi--remember him!--is in charge of something called "de-Baathification," and curiously enough this once-exile and always-con-man is using the de-Baathification process to systematically deny Iraq's Sunnis a place at the table. My goodness. What an entirely unpredictable outcome.

Foodie Friday VIII

If you grew up in a little town in Western PA, then you surely attended plenty of firehall weddings and graduation parties at the VFW full of baked ziti in pans and breaded chicken and pigs-in-blankets and stuffed cabbage. Here's a little update on the idea of stuffed cabbage.

Baby bok choy leaves stuffed with spicy pork and Thai basil

Baby bok choy is definitely the cutest member of the cabage family, and its leaves have a delicate, sweet taste. The pork has a little heat and spices to accentuate its own natural sweetness as well as that of the bok choy, and the Thai basil, which is stronger in flavor than European basil cultivars, adds pungency and bite. I serve these as appetizers, but you could make a meal of them by serving them in either a simple tomato sauce made from fresh, garden tomatoes or in a clear pork or chicken broth topped with more shredded basil and cracked black peppercorns.

4 heads baby bok choy
1/2 lb. ground pork (lean, but not too lean)
thai basil
cumin
anise seed
celery seed
allspice
cayenne pepper
sea salt
chicken stock (or bullion)

Bring a pot of water to a rolling boil. While it comes up, separate the bok choy stalks and leaves from the head, cut off the stalks (reserve them for stir frying or salads that night or the next day), and thoroughly rinse the leaves.

Grind a combination of a pinch of cumin, a pinch of celery seed, a few all-spice berries, and a pinch of anise seeds in a mortar and pestle. Mix with a pinch or two of cayenne pepper and fine sea salt. Beat together one fresh egg. Mix the spices, egg, and ground pork. Set aside.

Blanch the bok choy leaves for a minute or two in boiling water, then transfer immediately to a bowl of chilled water to stop cooking. Let them rest and cool for a few minutes. Then lay the leaves flat on a prep surface. Place one leaf of thai basil on each leaf of bok choy. Using a teaspoon, spoon a small ball of ground pork onto the leaves. Close them up as if you were closing up a box: fold in from the right, then left, then top, then bottm. Pinch and twist gently at the top making sure not to tear the leaves.

To cook, steam over good chicken stock. You will know they're finished when they feel solid but still slightly springy when squeezed between two fingers. Set on a paper towel for a minute to drain any additional water and fat. Serve.

But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness

Via Jim, I see that Greenwald has emerged from the burrow, seen his shadow, but decided against the advice of the other groundhogs to stay in the sun for a while. And yet.

For many decades now, people like Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky and James Bovard have been airing what we now call the imperial critique, which, as someone once said, has the unique benefit of being correct. Men like Chalmers Johnson have affirmed it from the inside. Its basic tenets are empirically demonstrable. Its fundamentals comport with nearly everything we know about American policy at home and abroad. It provides a basic intellectual framework through which all the events, actions, and outcomes that so puzzle Democrats ("I'll never understand why we went to war in Iraq in the first place. How could this have happened?") become understandable and predictable. It provides a clear history of the precedents to our current politics and current wars. It allows us to easily grasp the linkages between our militant posture abroad, our system of worldwide military satrapies, our inability to extricate ourselves from ill-conceived foreign adventures, our slow militarizing of the mechanisms of law and law enforcement within our own borders, and the otherwise inexplicable complicity of the supposed opposition party in all of these things. It is plainly, clearly, almost self-evidently true, and for fifty years at least it has been scorned as a conspiracy theory or an intellectual parlor game for bored old men, crank writers, and the comfortably tenured.

So when Glenn Greenwald says:

This is the most extraordinary aspect of our political culture. Rep. Davis' assumption is that we are going to be fighting a series of "wars." That is just a given. And the only question is whether we will fight our wars "wisely" or unwisely. We are a nation more or less permanently at war, and we really do not debate whether that should be the case. Enforced Beltway orthodoxy requires that this is a given and anyone who challenges that premise will be deemed extremist and insane (see e.g., Ron Paul, Mike Gravel, "paleoconservatives," the "anti-war left", "isolationists," etc.).

The Grand Beltway Consensus, one that encompasses both parties, is that War is how we rule the world. The only debates allowed are how many we should fight, where we should fight them, and how "wisely" we prosecute them. And the principal reason that we don't really debate the fact that we are a Nation permanently at war is because such a tiny percentage of our population -- and an even tinier percentage of our Beltway opinion-making elite -- actually bears the burdens of those wars (at least directly).

I want to tear out my hair. The United States finished the Second World War and never stepped down from its war footing. The entire government of the United States was methodically rearranged to support imperial ventures. The threat of the Soviet Union was consciously and carefully manipulated, exaggerated, and propogated to justify the construction of the vastest military capacity the world has ever known--and, hopefully, ever will know. Intelligence services were created with the specific capacity and intent to control, influence, undermine, and subvert foreign governments. A long series of territorial skirmishes in Asia, Africa, and Latin America commenced. A complex system of proxy wars, client states, and puppet governments was begun. Post-War affirmations of universal rights were conspicuously repurposed, as goes the current neologism, as "humanitarian intervention," which, you'll note, is a euphemism for military actions in foreign territory for purposes other than immediate self-defense. The phrase "vital national iterest" entered the lexicon as a euphemism for using the military to control resources, access, and assets. This is not some hidden, secret history. It requires no special discipline or competency; no access to state secrets; no extraordinary skills as an analyst or historian or economist. It is neat, accessible, and sitting in plain view for anyone with the slightest inclination to shed the enforced--and not very skillfully, I'd add--doxologies of the American Empire, principle among them: That America is not an empire.

Nonetheless, I have listened to these ideas mocked or dismissed since my earliest recollection of political awareness by people who call themselves "liberals" or now "progressives" or always "Democrats." These are the people who now claim to be antiwar, who have spent the last six years rightly lamenting the horrors wrought by the present executive, finding that the institutions of representative democracy have been seriously undermined and exist at present mostly as formal ritual and tradition, and discovering that their party of identification is not actually interested in taking concrete measures to rectify any of it, although they'll occasionally complain about it before voting to authorize this or that further expansion of military funding, presidential power, domestic surveillance, ad inf. These are the people who coined cute phrases like "the new Naderism" and who treat as children anyone who notes that the line they toe is naught but dust on a windy day. They say to those of us who absent ourselves from the current liturgies and catechisms of phony democracy that we're lazy, have no program, and take no action. But of course the whole purpose of writing this history day in and out is to try to convince enough people of it to create a program and to have something to do. Even then, I wouldn't be optimistic, but enough people could at least put a small wrench in the imperial works from time to time. And when we seem cranky, irritable, and misanthropic, it's because so very many of these liberals and progressives and Democrats are willing to walk right up to the edge, as Greenwald does, and to acknowledge the legitimacy of our critique, and to acknowledge that it's true their party has sold them out again and again and again because it is dedicated to the bipartisan, imperial governing consensus, only to come back, a day or two later, pimping some Democratic Party nonsense and some Democratic Party candidates and telling us that we are assholes once again for refusing to make the expression of our political will the choice between a blond imperialist from Chappaqua and a balding imperialist from Manhattan.

You Can't Fool Me! There Is No Sanity Clause!

Our new favorite blogger, Goldstein!, is back in action with a follow-up cleverly titled "Follow-up," and subtitled, "semiotics, intention, and reading 'Scott Thomas'." Goldstein! has the charming quirk of presuming that "leftists," by which he means those who disagree with him, spent their formative years sucking mango lassis around a campfire while the sultry, Anglo-Indian voice of Gayatri Spivak entranced them with readings of her translations of Derrida. I for one am willing to aver that the majority of the anti-this-war Donkle contingent on the internet neither knows nor cares two damns and a shit about textual indeterminacy, moments of signification, or, ahem, "the 'death of the author' [as] a hermeneutic construct." I suspect that most folks who read such turgid, undergraduate nonsense wonder in their own words what Groucho Marx once wondered: Can you sleep on your stomach with such big buttons on your pajamas?

Says Goldstein!

In interpretive situations, the appeal is always to the author’s intent, because it is intent that governs meaning. But the intent--and the meaning--is fixed at the moment the signifiers are signified. It is the author at that moment that we are interested in when we are trying to determine what a text means, from the perpective of interpreting it.

This, of course, is precisely the sort of dense-but-facile cant that gave post-structuralism a bad name and helped give lit-crit a reputation as a joke from which it's only very slowly recovering. Beneath all its pompous jargon beats a jealous yearning for critic to usurp both author and reader. All the high-flown yammer about indterminacy boils down to bathetic efforts to justify the critical enterprise as necessary to mediate "indeterminate texts." You may be familiar with them in their common names: articles, stories, poems, books.

The idea that we as readers might approach our readings with rigor, asking not only "what did the author intend to say" but also "what did the author end up saying" is a valid and valuable one. The idea that we might untether words and sentences entirely and let them mean fuck-all what we want is the professional envy of the world's vast and expanding population of failed writers, lame William Gass impersonators, and wannabes to political-cultural relevance. Those people also deserve jobs, and I begrudge no man his money-making scams and schemes, but really. The idea that authorial intent can be a weilded as a cudgel against an author's credibility but not offered in return as bona fides is nothing but loaded dice. The proper critical response to Scott Thompson is not to yawp about the signfied signifier signifying signification, but simply to point out that his writing is rather derivative and his anectdotes likely exaggerated, but that what he, as a young man, says and feels about war is true. It is horrible, irrational, and drives men occasionally to bravery and often to cowardice and horror. That this simple framework for understanding the soldier's diary entirely escapes Goldstein suggests that he should have spent less attention to Jacques Derrida and more, say, to Stephen Crane and The Red Badge of Courage when it was assinged to him in the seventh grade.

Doublewide Democracy

Say, Kos: "What is the Democrats' plan to restore Constitutional Government?" So asks one nervous Democrat. I'm not sure if the doyen of internet Donkledom has quite formulated a response, but Harry Reid, capo of the made men of the Fighting 110th has a reply:

"I am committed to giving our intelligence community the tools they need to fight terrorism and am working very hard with the most senior members of the administration to do that as soon as possible," Reid said.

It's not even fun to mock these people anymore.

You gotta leave him Luanne. You pack up your shit and get the kids and get outa that trailer 'fore he kills you. You keep goin' back there, sweetie, and he keeps tellin' you he's sorry an' he loves you an' why do you make him do it. Well it ain't yer fault, honey. But it is gonna be yer fault if you stay.

What You Have Heard Is True

Now I'm as sure as the next guy that another proxy war in Asia would be a jolly good time, and surely no one disputes the plain fact that nothing says "Trust us :) ;) lol !! xoxo" like "teams of CIA officers and Special Forces soldiers . . . providing . . . weapons and money." And does anything say, "I'm on your side," like a covert incursion across an international border in disputed territory? Flowers? Baskets of artisanal jams and mustards? Certainly nothing will palliate the oft-articulated grievance that the United States subverts and interferes with other nations, peoples, and governments like arming the breakaway tribal leaderships of a restive foreign province so that they can combat al-Qaeda without--needless to say--ever even considering using their new arms and funds to solidify their status as polities independent of the central Pakistani government. You know, I've rather talked myself into it. This is a fantastic idea.

Now read this:

Intervening in another Muslim country is risky, to put it mildly. That's why a successful counterinsurgency program would need Pakistani support and why its economic and social development components would be critical. The concept should be President John F. Kennedy's "Alliance for Progress" to counter radicalism in Latin America, rather than "Operation Iraqi Freedom."

Yes. Because we all recall what a sky-high success the Alliance for Progress was. You remember. The program to counter the rising threat of Communist Cuba. A rising threat that did not, in fact, exist. The program that failed entirely to produce land reform, that fomented the rise in right-wing military dictatorships, that laid the groundwork for the failed narco-interventions of the seventies, eighties, nineties, and today. The program whose development portion turned out to be an immense boondoggle for funneling government money to American companies which were privileged by law as the unique recipients of aid, construction, and development contracts. The program that more than anything else turned Latin American populations decisively against the United States and laid the foundation for the current explosion of populist, anti-Americanism throughout the region. The program that even more than our canal-zone hijinks and United Fruit Company invasions in the earlier years of the century turned the Monroe Doctrine into a vast, bloody, cocaine-fueled enterprise in repression and nun-killing. You remember. That program. Hey, at least Joan Didon got some good material out of it.

Anyway. That's what David Ignatius advocates we try in Pakistan. Instead, you know, of invading. Those being are the only two options.

THE COLONEL

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of the wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

by Carolyn Forché from The Country Between Us

Bet My Money on the Bob-tailed Mare, Somebody Bet on the Bay

Yglesias has been on the journalists are morons disinclined to substance cuz it's hard beat for a few days now, and although I'm inclined to agree with him in general terms about the lazy habits of top journalists, I'm not sympathetic to the idea that their failure to parse the policy differenes of Clinton and Obama In Re: Meeting With Foreign Potentates.

The truth of the matter is that Obama and Clinton have outlined depressingly similar foreign policy prerogatives. Then they've thrown some red meat to the so-called base with applause lines built around the not-discreditable notion that everything George W. Bush has ever done in his entire life is an unmitigated disaster for children, bunnies, kittens, Mother Earth, Father Time, Iraq, Iran, and the Texas Rangers. The suggestion that Obama represents a sea change in consensus foreign policy while Clinton represents Tradition strikes me as more than a little fatuous based in large part on Obama's willingness to stand up before a roomful of people and talk unabashedly about invading Iran.

A break with current policy might sound like this:

Tim, "all options on the table" is code for a nuclear first strike, and this country will never use nuclear weapons offensively. The idea that negotiations with Iran can't occur unless they think we might nuke them is a murderous lie.

And indeed there are candidates who say such things. Their names are Mike Gravel and Ron Paul.

In other words, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye. I notice a lot of pretty smart Donk bloggers and writers lamenting the press' inability to deal substantively with candidates, and certainly these are relatively more sophisticated, careful critiques than the old "Emessemm is Dhimmitude I am John Doe Aieeeeee!" that erupts, regular as Old Faithful, from the right. Yet when it comes to the plain facts that the leading Democratic candidates do indeed endorse "enduring bases" in Iraq, the idea that "the world cannot accept a Nuclear Iran," and the idea that we must win "the War on Terror" without the slightest ironical note when they pronounce that ridiculous turn of phrase, they are either silent or in the sack, chalking it up to mere political expediency and going on to speculate--just like the despised press corps--that they say such things purely for the sake of appearance in the horse race that is politics.

The instant of the decision, if there is to be a decision, must be heterogeneous to the accumulation of knowledge

Who Is IOZ? is really hitting the big-time. We now find ourselves linked by a blogger who is definitely not interested in anal sex, Goldstein!. Hot.

I want to respond, but I have no idea what any of it means. Consider:

But when truths appealing to shared philosophical assumptions have been eradicated (it is not a stretch to say that, for some, this was the primary goal of an ongoing project to deconstruct Enlightenment thinking), and consensus becomes the new ground for determining meaning, it is not surprising that “truthiness” gains currency, and the will to (rhetorical) power takes to place of observed or empirically “provable” truths.

Manufactured consent.

Put down the scissors and the absinthe, Tristan Tzara. I've read more coherent instructions on a pack of chopsticks.



There's one question I understand, though. So never let it be said that I ignore my detractors. (Hell, I'm just happy to finally have my own detractor!):

Is there nothing unsavory for which these twits won’t act as intellectual apologists?

No.

Yes. Where IS the Outrage?

Here are the first four of Mark Twain's nineteen rules governing literary art for romantic fiction, with references to Fenimore cooper omitted:

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.

2. They require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it

3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.

And here is an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

I confess to having not the slightest clue what Messrs. Rivkin and Casey, as the Journal calls them, are talking about. The problem with obfuscatory prose in narrative writing is--you may have guessed--that it obfuscates. Let me put it to you this way, homeys: That shit's not real clear. Fortunately I was once a teaching assistant in an undergraduate literature course, tasked with reading, commenting on, and grading sixty students' weekly reactions to many Divers and Poetical Readings. In other words, I am not unskilled in the Ouijan arts of discernment.

Here, then, is the Rivkin-Casey Thesis: A government spying program about which no one knows anything, rendering all critiques baseless, is entirely necessary to our national well-being, and changes to the program about which no one knows anything have weakened it from its former state, about which we know nothing. All good Americans should be outraged.

That Escherian argument is lost amidst a cast of characters as various and a prose as dense as the opening pages of Daniel Deronda. And yet I do find myself quivering with outrage that something entirely unknown to me has been altered in a manner which cannot actually be revealed to become something else entirely unknown to me. It is imperative that my government be able to assure me that its operations-in-secret are secretly operating. Since no terrorist has successfully attacked the United States in years, there are surely vast, impressive edifices to our secret successes at surveilling those Sunnis suborning seditions against these States. Remember: successive speculations about succeeding series of super-secret spy-service subversions of civil standards only support and substantiate those scare-stories still circling the seamless scandal scams of domestic sociliasts socialists.

Who's On First?

Can it be true that the United States is engaged in a clandestine effort, using its own special operations troops, to support Turkish incursions into Iraqi territory to combat the PKK and other "Kurdish guerillas"? Sure!

Consider. The United States invaded Iraq and deposed its Sunni Arab Ba'athist government. After months of inept proconsular hijinks that guaranteed Insurgency Now! instead of Insurgency One-ah-dese-days!, hasty elections were mounted under a bloc-lists system of proportional representation, which guarnateed that Iraqis would not actually know whom they were voting for, and which also guaranteed a substantial Shia majority in the parliament. At about this point, the Americans discovered--holy shit!--that Iran is, in fact, a Shia nation, and that these Shia politicians had the backing of Iran. And not only that, but they were, like, trying to consolidate their power with private militias and death squads and various and sundry other subversions of that old shibboleth, Democracy. Of course, America took the only reasonable course of action. It began arming the very Sunni Arab groups that had been fighting both the American occupation and the Iranian-occupied government, in order that the Sunni Insurgents--now referred to, of course, as former Sunni Insurgents--could contain the Iranian influence and combat these death squads and whomever else it was they were supposed to be combatting. Meanwhile, in the North, the Kurds basically created their own country, with their own military, governmental institutions, laws, customs, and flag. Turkey, America's nominal ally, didn't like this one bit. But of course, America was funding and supporting Iraqi Kurdistan--an oasis of relative calm in a bloody desert. Now, it turns out, America is also supporting Turkish efforts to wage a cross-border counterinsurgency against the coethnoreligionist Kurds in Iraq as an outgrowth of their repressive efforts against Turkish Kurds.

So. To keep score. The United States is supporting: the Shia government, which funnels money and arms to Shia militias, death squads, and insurgent/terrorist groups; the Sunni opposition, which funnels money and arms to the Sunni insurgency; the Sunni insurgency directly, so that they will combat the Shia militias as well as al-Qaeda in Iraq, a group of Sunni terrorists supposedly supported by Shia Iran; the Saudis, who fund Sunni insurgents as well--almost surely--as Sunni terrorist groups; the Iraqi Kurds, who have their sights set on an independent nation that includes a de-Arabized Kirkuk; and the Turks, who have their sights set on never, ever seeing an independent Kurdish entity anywhere, anyhow, anyway, ever, amen.

To which I can only commend the following bit of incisive commentary on our present situation: