Iraq–Five Years Later
In a week we will enter the sixth year of our War In Iraq. As some of my correspondents have pointed out the “manufacturing of consent”, first elucidated by Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion
Would those be President Bush’s goals of a model democracy that causes an spontaneous overthrow of all the authoritarian regimes of the Mid East? William Polk, who lived in Iraq, has an answer.
First, of course is a truism that we all share: no people wants to be ruled by foreigners. Often we don’t even want them in our country. But from the American revolution onward, people all over the world have struggled to get foreigners to leave them alone. The Iraqis are not different from Americans on this matter.
But there are more pointed reasons. I won’t trouble you with all the details, but will say merely that we have destroyed the social fabric of Iraq. That sense of coherence is the most important attribute of any society. It dwarfs in importance physical things. Without it no society can exist. Consider your own city: it is possible for a small police force to keep order here because your neighbors accept the general order. Were this not the case, order could not be maintained by a whole army. That is the situation in Iraq. 160 thousand heavily armed soldiers plus what remains of the Iraqi army and police and about 20,000 mercenary security people cannot prevent mayhem because the social fabric has been shredded.
Other things matter — hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed, many more have been wounded and still more have lost their homes and livelihoods. Practically speaking, there are very few Iraqis who have not lost a parent, a child, a spouse, a cousin or a neighbor. All observers agree that the Iraqis blame America for these things.
Or would the goal be the defeat of the Insurgency–the tactic Admiral Fallon and the now extolled Counter-Insurgency genius, General Petraeus fell out over? Polk, from his deep experience with the counter-insurgency program we launched in Vietnam, thinks this is a pipe dream.
Comparing them to Vietnam, I began a quest that would lead me to study a dozen other wars and write the book before you, Violent Politics
* * *
So what can we do? Consider carefully our position in Iraq. President Bush has said we must “stay the course.” But also remember that we did that in Vietnam for nearly 16 years. Even after the Tet Offensive had shown that we were deluding ourselves with the hope of “victory,” and at least some of us realized that we could not “win,” we stayed and suffered an additional 21,000 casualties.Is there a lesson in this? General David Petraeus tells us there is. He says that what we have been doing in Iraq did not work, but that he has a new formula — Counter Insurgency — that will work. I agree with him that there is a lesson to be learned, but unfortunately it is not the one he identifies.
Why is this? It is simply that the “new” formula he prescribes is the same old one we tried in Vietnam and the same old one the Russians tried in Afghanistan.Listen to the editors of the Pentagon Papers. They had access to everything we learned about the war in Vietnam so their account is the most complete ever compiled on an insurgency. They commented (and I quote) our “program there was, in short, an attempt to translate the newly articulated theory [that was 40 years ago] of counterinsurgency into operational reality. The objective was political though the means to its realization were a mixture of military, social, psychological, economic and political measures. The long history of these efforts was marked by consistency in results as well as in techniques: all failed miserably.”
General Petraeus admits (and again I quote) that “Political power is the central issue in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies; each side aims to get the people to accept its governance or authority as legitimate.”
Can we do that?No, we cannot. In our age of politically conscious people, natives refused to be ruled by foreigners. That is why in our Revolution we threw out the British. The Iraqis today are following the trail we blazed. Napoleon bitterly remembered that his efforts at counterinsurgency cost him his army – Spain was a worse defeat for him, as he remembered in exile, that Russia. De Gaulle almost lost France because of the counterinsurgency of his army and the Secret Army Organization. Greece’s counterinsurgency gave rise to the bitter dictatorship of the Colonels. And so on.
Final potential goal–To make our Energy supply dependable and cheap. Have we achieved that goal?
How much does oil cost? If you are a broker, you can answer immediately, somewhere around $100 dollars a barrel. That should be alarming since it has risen from about $27 since the Iraq war began. And it is generally accepted that each $5 rise per barrel reduces our national income by about $17 billion a year. That is a total of roughly 200 billion dollars.
But, that is not a complete figure. Actually, factored into the price of oil are at least two other major costs: the first is what we have to do to create the environment in which we get access (often by bribing governments or nations) and the second is how we protect that access by stationing military forces in the neighborhood. Estimates vary of course but everyone who has looked into this matter agrees, I think, that they cannot be less than 100 billion dollars a year and is probably many times that amount. So the “national” cost of oil is probably already something like $150 or even $200 a barrel.
Einstein said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. From the Crusades forward, the people of the Mid East have fought foreign occupiers. Empires as powerful as England in the 1880′s have learned the brutal lesson of the futility of occupation. Santayana reminded us that, ”those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
We live in an age of forgetting. The monstrous information flow that washes over us on a hourly basis, pushes out recent events and their lessons and fills our minds with new obsessions: Spitzer, Ferraro, Spears, Market Meltdown. The fact that men and women are dying and being maimed in their loyal service to a fatally flawed policy is soon pushed off our TV screens and the front pages of our newspapers. Communications scholars have long understood the power of governments to persuade by obfuscation and fear. If the coming election is to serve the purpose of renewing our commitment to Lincoln’s government “of the people, by the people and for the people”, then we must not forget our brothers and sisters dying on the plains of Iraq. We are in the role of British Redcoats and Hessians on the commons of Concord, Massachusetts 232 years ago. We must take our soldiers out Iraq and let the Iraqi people decide their own fate.
“Would it be churlish of me to ask what goals? ”
No sir, here they are…
1) Increasing their social fabric. They just had elections (that dwarf ours BTW). Passed their first laws, and came up with a way of splitting their oil receipts. Almost anyone over there says things are getting better. I know you’ll accept that analysis, however grudgingly.
2) Getting ourselves situated in some long term bases. We have bases everywhere, why are you acting like having bases in Iraq is a problem? They are asking us to stay, they are democratically elected, what fool wants to leave entirely? None. Not Obama, not Hillary. I think edwards said, “no bases” but he was pandering.
Having bases is not leaving. So, we are not leaving. You want to see the fighting stop? Me too. We’re on that path. Why do you disregard the feedback from the boots on the ground guys? You think they are wrong?
3) Oil prices are higher mainly because of China and India, and the OPEC cartel. It is silly for you to use $27 -> $110 a some war thing.
Iraq has a fine chance of being the true US / ME friendly with the largest (and cheapest to extract) supply of oil. You’ll be grateful later.
And please answer me this:
Are you going to be pro-US in Iraq, if Obama wins and suddenly he says, hey, we’re gonna calm down the fighting, but we’re keeping our bases there?
You’re a communications guy, you understand debate. How’s about answering the questions asked?
On other question, if god forbid, this thing continues turns out ok, and we actually figure out how to not have a Vietnam on our hands, which country do you want to invade next?
Is that your fear, that if this one doens’t end in dread, we won’t learn our lesson?
Great post, Jon. Always a joy.
Morgan,
Oh how I remember so succinctly Colin Powel in front of the United Nations holding up that vile of the Iraqi’s “social fabric” decrying how it is our job to increase their oh-so-lowly quantities of this essential substance of civilization OR ELSE. The thing about “communications” is that it is easy to mis-direct and change the expected outcomes in the minds of people with a short memory or attention span. What you stated you wanted to see and what everyone (I think) would like to see is an end to the fighting. The point that Jon and Mr. Polk were making is that history is telling us that the fighting will not stop as long as we are there occupying their country…so let’s not confuse the issue.
By the way Jon….love the posts. Keep it up.
Thanks.
Captain Morgan:
1.) How (please be specific) are we increasing their social fabric? The accounts I have been reading for 5+ years now, and the news reports, and the stated reports of the military seem to indicate a significant amount of the Iraqi population reverting to overt tribalism (political divisions based upon lineage, religious sect, etc.), barbarism (stonings with rocks not weed, beheadings, mutiliations, etc.), and a devolution into increasing lawlessness.
Thousands of professional-class citizens fleeing their country in order to pursue their livelihoods, or their sexes, or simply to pursue life period?
Do you mean new threads of a social fabric, in that they are being exposed to other cultures in the form of contract workers being brought in from the Philipines, India et. al, to do manual labor for the Haliburton families of companies?
2.) How, pray tell, did their elections dwarf ours? Individuals were threatened with bodily harm, death, disfigurement for planning to vote. Families of individuals were threatened with the same.
3.) Division of oil revenues being a goal you point to, when the plan was proposed, finalized, tweaked to the Nth degree by… (wait for it) … oh, yeah, the Oil Companies? If I am to understand the broader context of the Oil Revenue Sharing program, the Iraqi people get to pay the oil companies for infrastructure and maintenance of same, and get to keep something like 25% of the profits to distribute amongst their citizens while the oil companies net 75%? Now, granted, given your stance on capitalism as evidenced by your comments on this site, that is a helluva deal brokered by some lucky bloke(s), and we should be proud of them for garnering such expected wealth for themselves.
Now please tell me how this helps the capitalists of Iraq?
Lastly, how does this thing continue to turn out ok? Are you positing that this whole misadventure has been ok? In what sense please, and for whom?
As for which country to invade next, I am assuming that you are either a.) joking, b.) maniacally sociopathic, c.) have considerable stocks, options or other interests in the military-industrial complex, or d.) mind-bendingly perceptionless or daft.
Here is a nice little thought-experiment for you: Say that come November of this year, that China and Russia get together and determine that our elections were flawed, not transparent, and were such a mistake as to require them to invade our country to ‘put things right’ and give the American people back our democracy. Assuming they manage to bring enough guns and boots to take and hold territory in the U.S., and assume please that the market (my precious) responds favorably and rampant uncontrolled (at least perceptibly) capitalism is set to take new hold on our soil. Would you be standing shoulder to shoulder with me saying “Pass the ammunition”, or would you side with our ‘liberators’ in the spirit of free markets and continued booming enterprise?
I can’t conceive of how you think that the Iraq war in any sense is right, just or moral. If I am to understand correctly, as the economists crunch the numbers, we would have been money ahead to just buy oil on the open market at $200 / barrel. And it looks like we are headed there anyway. If OPEC is filled with good little capitalists like yourself, wouldn’t they be happy to turn their spigots to 11 if we were paying them say, a 50% premium to sell their oil to us in the quantities we want to buy?
*boggle*
- Zhirem
Frankly Zhirem, if you were here right now, I’d be offering you a massive high five.
And Morgan, having bases in a country isn’t the issue. Acting as the default militayr/police force/enforcement agency for the local government is.
Zhirem, Well-done.
The great American MSM are still taking guidance from the geniuses in the White House and Pentagon. If troop deaths are down because we’ve flooded Baghdad with US forces, then the surge must be working. Right? Never mind what appears to be happening elsewhere. Never mind that little guy behind the curtain.
Zhirem,
Iraqi turnout, even the the face of all those threats you list was 57-72% (dependning on who you ask). So voting was something they were down for…
Then in February this year, the Iraqi parliment passed its first budget. This was a serious endeavor. Many different factions all represented and passed three measures:
“1) The 2008 budget.
2) a law outlining the scope of provincial powers, a crucial aspect of Iraq’s self-definition as a federal state
3) an amnesty that would apply to thousands of the detainees held in Iraqi jails.”
That’s not impressive to you? AID groups are getting in. There is less violence. Look things are better.
—-
It seems your annoyance is that, if you admit things are better, you don’t get to scream about mistakes made. Let me make it official, you can still scream about mistakes made, now please admit things are better. And since they better, we need not spend so much time listening to “get out now.”
On oil:
Oil was always going to be $200, but having oil companies control like 60% of Iraq’s oil fields means full throttle production for the next 20–30 years. It is the anti-OPEC solution. Which means a much better chance to realistically convert to alt.energy. What *boggles* you about that?
Meanwhile, President Bush has simply declared his judgment on Iraq to be ‘forever correct’.
That’s not a joke. It also explains why, in the infallible judgement of our dear leader, no cost can be to be too high, no risk can be too great, and no dissent can be tolerated.
Nor does it make historical precedent – no matter how convincing – worth the slightest thing. All you’re going to do is irritate a man who feels like he’s got a free pass from God to operate above the law, and beyond all reason.
Even the Pope would blush before making the claims like this.
Bush is the decider!
Jon,
The key step in manufacturing consent is to frame the question to ensure an acceptable answer. Hence no mention of “what price” or any details about “what goals.”
The key step in Republican governance during this decade has been to eliminate the budget constraint. We can have all the tax cuts we want, all the aggressive military foreign policy “we” want, all the prescription drugs through Medicare we want (well almost), all the … well … you get the picture.
With an eye to the economic horizon, I have a feeling the United States is about to be reintroduced to the concept of a budget constraint. The Fed is trying to sustain the illusion a while longer, but is losing credibility by the day.
And I here I thought conservatism was dead!
Morgan
Your contribution to this blog is really great. Seriously. And thank God, with a capital G, that all Bush will soon be deciding is how long a bike ride he wants to go on. Did you see his display at the correspondent’s dinner, whatever it is called? Man. That cat is super tone deaf. He can’t possibly be from Texas. Maybe the Dixie Chicks were talking about his singing. I’m pretty sure that’s right. And then his dancing, so to speak, on the White House steps! He is definitely ready to get the fuck out of there, if you will pardon my Freedom. And still not a fraction of how ready almost everybody else is for him to get the fuck out of there. The Great Decider. How in the wide world of sports did this ever happen?
All the best
JH
Morgan- The Sunnis have already backed out of the 2nd legal provision you cited and as far as I know they have not let many detainees out of Jail
STS-The dollar hit an all time low against the Euro today. The notion of “what price” will indeed be reintroduced to our national conversation.
JH- Bush’s singing was pretty awful. Remember he was born in Connecticut, so that lets Texas off the hook for him being so tone deaf (literally and figutatively). But his joking about how Scooter was gonna miss him was pretty sick.
Tom Lehrer is rolling over in his grave, and he’s not even dead yet.
Morgan- Zhirem and I would like nothing more than to truly think “things are better” and that ultimately we could achieve some “goal” in Iraq. But we are members of the Reality Based community, unlike our President & Vice President. You are a strange combination of romantic pragmatist–you should do a cost benefit analysis of your 100 year strategy to dominate oil with military power. YOu will find that you are wrong and that without the war, Oil would be $50 a barrel.
Well shheee-OTT, Jon, thanks for de-fending the honor of Connecticut, but that shore don’t spill no beer in Midland!
Well, I’ve been on Chapter 2 of “Einstein for Dummies” for three months now, and that yellowjacket still stings me from beneath my nightstand stack, but I can already tell you that that Einstein feller was one genius who shoulda stuck to his what he knowed, ’cause his definition ain’t the one fer “Insanity”; it’s the definition of something else.
Morgan shot us the Confessions of the apostate Mamet yesterday, and the playwright opened with a quote from J.M. Keynes that got it right: “When the facts change,” saith our Lord Keynes, “I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?” Now, if Keynes isn’t High Church enough for you Proggies, I call as my witness none other than your very own John Dewey. Because to that great American philosopher’s mind, what Einstein defined was textbook “obstinacy”, whereas Keynes was defining its pragmatic opposite: discipline.
President Bush is a disciplined man. Evidently he was not always so, but he is so now. On Iraq he has proved, in the end, disciplined. He set his sights on a change in the Middle East, decided with Prime Minister Blair and other allies on a course to getting there, and he held to that course. When the course was shown, at bloody great length, to require reexamination, he had the discipline to take his coordinates, review the data, and make a course correction. That, in a nutshell, is the application of the only known native American philosophy, and in the case of that “idiot” from Connecticut, Yale and Harvard, it worked just like Pragmatism is supposed to “work”, provided you apply it with discipline.
I’m not biting on the invitation to read out anew our miliary objectives in Iraq. Morgan has done that here today, and I did it last night, and the President and General Petraeus have, in my opinion, made those objectives just a bit too clear for comfort. So if mature and informed people want to give me some jazz about how they don’t know what the plan is, then I’m with Satchmo: “Man, if you don’t know, I can’t tell you.”
As for Lippmann’s consent factory, I mean WTF? The scene now is BABEL. It’s pande-frigging-around-the-clock-MONIUM. Lippman, that carpet tack who spent his life pretending he was a hammer, would take one long look at “journalism” today and not know which way is effing UP!
So many outlets; so little content. So much journalistic training; so little call for it. So much 24-hour publicity stuntwork, so little gumshoeing. So much spinning of so few narrative cliches. So much, so much. SO GODDAM LITTLE TO SHOW FOR IT. Awaiting every dawn, a CASCADE of quotable inanities—some of them even telegenic!—and none of them vetted with so much as a keystroke. CONSENT? WHAT?
Is there a phenomenologist in the house, please? Quick! Get a pot of boiling water and some clean sheets! We need to clue in some very smart people on something for which Lippmann required a prosthetic ear: ideology. The real workings of that phenomenon, not some “True Tales of Yellow Journalism” or “Shocking Scandals of the Great Press Barons” or “Real Forensics of Think Tanks, Then and Now”.
Nope. The real thing. The thing that requires no factory, except one single huge one, for children. The younger the better.
Hugh-Maybe in the land of the BBC, its hard to manufacture consent, but I can assure you, in the run up to the war, everyone of the major media companies (not just Fox) was beating the drums of war, like we were going to the Ultimate Superbowl. The Internet may be a huge source of news, but the agenda can still be Broadcast only on TV.
The problem, as the French discovered with counter insurgencies, you have to be willing to stay for a long time, and in the end you still could loose it. Between us and the French we were in Vietnam for 20 years or more.
Well that goes with the territory, now, doesn’t it? Maybe all that SERIOUS kriegspieling over what we’d learned from Vietnam and since, and what we ought to do better about insurgents and counterinsurgency, paid off. Maybe we ought to have had a whip-smart military science nerd do a frigging dissertation on the subject, and to have run some fuzzy imponderables through RAND and the Energy Labs and Hopkins and the War College.
Look, I’m sick of sarcasm everywhere at all times. Especially in myself. It all comes down to how in hell we can trust Systems when we are ourselves but fecal pellets of Systems. If you guys want to take that on—because Halberstam don’t cut it—then good. I’m just saying, start by looking to your own skirts. My skirts and yours. And as long as I’m milking dry metaphors, let’s throw in “apron” and “purse” strings. I’ll flip, you call it: Ibn Saud or al-Saud? Carnegie or Rockefeller? Annenberg or Milken? ARPA or Army Research Board? NEA or AFT?
God bless you bronze surfers, really. But you’re in a rip tide. The media ebb clawing you offshore, the liberal God-complex towing asunder. A sea of shrinking petrodollars. Tread water and ride it out? Go under? Fight ashore? Do you Trojans remember how to escape a rip, Jon?
It’s your call.
The importance of looking at the condition of the social fabric of Iraq cannot be understated, yet it is often overlooked. The social fabric is something that simply cannot be measured in numbers, commodity values, washed over with political rhetoric or even made real through human interest stories. The human fabric exists before, during and after the war. To consider the condition of the social fabric is to put a human face on every aspect of foreign involvement and, as I think Jon is suggesting, put yourself in the shoes of the Iraqi people. I have yet to meet someone who was from a country that was occupied in some form or another (and having lived in several former eastern bloc countries this is quite a few), who can say that there was any long term benefits to that type of situation. Many in fact, felt that as long as they held on to their determination to regain sovereignty, the clock was ticking for the forces that occupied. In a sad twist of fate, I’m sensing that people here in the US are believing this to be the case with their own government.
Just a plug here for Dahr Jamail’s independent reporting from Iraq, a good source for broader perspectives from the inside the social fabric.
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/
Morgan,
Thanks for the feedback. Now I understand some
of what you are/were saying.
1.) Stronger, Throbbing, Harder Elections – I get it. The turnout was huge. Gotcha. And I concur, that their turnout on a national basis, is comparatively large when the comparison country used is the U.S. – Saddam won all the previous elections by 99% or so, which somewhat lessened the poll-going patriotic Iraqis at that time, I am sure. About 1 in 4 Iraqis eligible to vote outside of the country actually did so, and Sunni turnout was at about 12% (if I recall correctly). You are quite right in that the Shiites really took to voting with relish, as well they should being the collective whipping-boys of Saddam for years. The results of that election was a government that certainly represented the interests of the long-oppressed majority, but the other two key factions (Kurds and Sunnis) were a little less than well-represented.
2.) Eek! More Government! – The budget of Feb. this year. Fantastic. They are on par with our own Congress of only requiring roughly 26-odd months or so to get to agreement on a budget. Now, I grant you, this is their first one. So doubtless it was tough. Even with the help of the Big Oil companies assisting them with all the details and the wording of the oil revenue sharing part of the income columns on their balance sheets… Kinda like the insurance and credit card companies helped our hapless and hopeless Congress rewrite the bankruptcy laws that insure these entities certainly get paid and that one cannot escape from their money-purse clutches. (I do however, agree that bankruptcy laws needed to be looked at. I just don’t think that business has much of any role in actually *writing* the legislation.) That said, I agree with you that it is a significant achievement. A needed one. Now, if some of those monies are set aside for the much-needed security measures so they get back to a “tolerable level of car-bombings per week” (see one of our previous exchanges in an older post), then I am willing to forgo my intuitive sense of forboding a while longer.
Now, I also concur with a previous poster that your voice and contributions to this blog are noteworthy, perhaps needed, and doubtless thought-provoking (no one learns anything in an echo chamber); but please, please do not piss on my head and tell me it is raining. The precipitation stinks a bit to much to be falling from clouds. Acidic or otherwise.
The end of your previous post, you state that my
“annoyance is that, if you admit things are better, you don’t get to scream about mistakes made. Let me make it official, you can still scream about mistakes made, now please admit things are better. And since they better, we need not spend so much time listening to “get out now.”
Annoyed? Yes. Far more than that. I am ashamed for my country in this debacle. I am saddened, anguished perhaps at the loss of life. What seems to me to be a wholly *avoidable* loss of life. For all parties.
As for screaming, I really try not to be shrill in my tone, nor bombastic in my statements. Try anyway. I don’t use ALL CAPS FOR PURPOSES OF CONVEYING SHOUTING. That is not a subtle dig at your style or previous posts, just something I choose not to do.
Side note: I love Ben Franklin. He said: “You are raising your voice instead of reinforcing your arguments.” Or something like that. Very wise and sage man that Ben. Fitting that he is on the highest denomination of circulated currency. BTW, The First American is a book I am currently reading, a biography of the man, and it is quite good.
Now back to work: and hers is the key point I want to make to you:
Things are better now.
Are they? According to what standard? Better now that Americans and corrupt militias / peace officers / police / whole departments of the Iraqi government are the ones directing the torture, killings, reprisals, et. al? Now, Please, Please, Please do not mistake that statement for my implying that our military is over in the Tigris/Euphrates valley raping, beheading, pillaging the local populace and their property. I do not have such a dim view of our military, the great, vast majority are serving with honor, distinction and sacrifice you and I and the rest of the citizenry will not know the full measure of which, possibly for decades, if ever.
But…
Abu Gahrib was certainly not a shiny, happy place. Nor the discovery of the acts and deeds done there something that you, I or our fellow citizens should be proud of. I wholly doubt that it was the work of a few low-level soldiers and other miscreants.
That is one, and perhaps the gravest example.
But what I ask you to consider, is that Iraq had roughly 26 or 27 million citizens before we invaded. The U.S. has roughly 300 million. What I would like to know, really, truly like to know, is what is the butcher’s bill on the Iraqi side? How many Iraqis are no longer breathing (or if you prefer spending any dinars) in direct correlation to our country’s involvement in their liberation from Saddam? When you think of all the reports of casualties, the bombing victims, the beheadings, the reprisal killings, the honor killings, the blood, death and gore – - Multiply those figures in the news by 12. Then ask yourself, would the U.S. tolerate such a level of loss, such a significant death toll at the hands of a foreign power on our soil, all under the guise of liberating our people from a despot who threatened them.
George W. Bush has threatened. He is not a complete idiot, therefore he does not threaten China. Nor Russia. Nor India. He does not threaten anyone he thinks we cannot absolutely roll-over the top of militarily.
But he threatens Iran.
He threatens Syria.
He threatens North Korea.
And perhaps he should. I do not know the full measure of his calculus, nor would I hazard a guess as to whether or not I could understand his reasoning process. It certainly has been quite beyond me for pretty much his entire term in office. Perhaps he is indeed crazy like a fox. Then again, perhaps he is just quite simply: a complete and utter doorknob.
But enough of my pontificating and creating 3000-word posts… If I am to understand your recent postings and previous ones, and please correct me if my assumptions are amiss, you believe that calling this a war for oil is the right moniker. Furthermore, you really (honestly) have no problem with that.
I ask you to consider, despite your proclivities, were the shoe (somehow, just work with me here) on the other foot, how would you feel about that?
Again, even in the face of increased capitalism provided by my thought experiment of my previous post, would you not be standing with me, as I drew the sights of my rifle along the heads of our occupiers saying: “Make sure you adjust for the crosswind.” ?
Thank you for reading, and once again, I actually do appreciate your input and viewpoint. We are not as far apart as you might think.
- Zhirem
Hughvic, great post. I agree with most all of it. Damn, but I am really liking this blog. The conversations for the most part are civil and thought-provoking. How is it that most of you don’t hold elected office? I have more faith in your reasoning and discernment than 99% of the people that are supposed to represent us. How is it that these voices are *not* being heard in the mainstream media? Give me some intelligent, reasoned debate. Start from the same givens, and as Moynahan said: Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, not their own facts.
The only problem I have with your post Hughvic, is that of the liberal god-complex. I see where you are coming from with that, but I think that the great majority of liberals I know do not have such delusions of grandeur, it is just that many if not most of them I know want a simple return to sanity. To honesty. To knowledge, information and the dispersal thereof. Sans spin. Sans agenda. The American people can take it. Murrow tried to raise the discourse, to provide not only information but some analysis. Reasoned, (mostly) partisan-less analysis.
However, that and $1.75 might get you a cup of coffee these days. That is if the cafe still takes dollars. I hear the ones in New York are partial to Euros now…
- Zhirem
Yes, Azmanon. Yes, indeed. And in the U.S. military services, it would be Army Special Forces and one David Petraeus who would agree with you. As a matter of fact, I think it’s even historically responsible to say that President Kennedy agreed with your emphasis on embedding within the social reality of the indigenous citizenry. That in fact is the military tradition in which Petraeus steeped himself, and which he has sought throughout his career to further.
While we’re at it, nation building. Boo. It’s a concept drawn from Sociology, as you may know. Do we like nation building when we approve of the President doing it and want the nation where he’s doing it upbuilt? Do we ridicule it otherwise? Secretary Rice, when she was still in the traces of her tenure track, worked under a Ford Foundation grant to study what external nation building efforts could and could not do to achieve peace and stability in the new states calving off the USSR. If we happen not to like Dr. Rice and her boss and the diplomatic doctrine she serves, do we then reject nation building because it is associated in part with her?
Should we have given up on ultra-variate simulation modeling because RAND botched it in Vietnam? On war gaming because we failed to anticipate the oil fires and sand storms of the Gulf War? On Skunk Works because we just didn’t feel that Carter and Reagan could be trusted to go black for Stealth? On space defense because Kubrick made Teller look like, you know, a mad scientist?
To me, what makes a more indigenous approach trustworthy is that it pursues democratic aims—in Iraq and Afghanistan, now, on the ground—by devolving power from the most frighteningly powerful people in the world, to the all but powerless. All this business of polling the public to second-guess the Surge operation—I mean, what?? But at least we’re trying to regain some agency in these highly professionalized, specialized, systematized matters—science, defense, diplomacy—by making them more democratic.
If only the sidelined “experts” would accept that that is exactly what Gen. Petraeus is charged to have our forces and our civilian personnel do. Not here, but in Iraq and Afghanistan. So that’s the place from where I’d like to start in all of this. How do we do something here worthy of the democratization and empowerment that our countryfolk and friends are doing overseas? How do we take our most precious possessions out of the reach of our grasping systems—those jealous gods—and spill those possessions abundantly, without depletion?
As the chief told Frank Laubach, “Each one teach one, or I will kill him.”
You’re right, Zhirem, and I was cartoonish. I’d like very much to put my finger on the ideological mechanism—I’ve been trying, believe me, for 20 years—but so far I have only bookend data and a fairly rank hypothesis. The hypothesis is that most people of the liberal persuasion are attracted to social meliorism, especially to Justice, but that their goodwill redounds instead to social control. The STD in the loving act is power lust. If it’s not already incubating within you by the time you commit to meliorism, then you soon will catch it from the controllers. Because Orwell may have been crude and depressive, but he got this right: the Party really does seek power for its own sake.
Jon and his colleagues are, it seems to me, in part working up an updated and refreshed Jeffersonian Pyrrinism. It’s astute, just as it was in Mr. Jefferson. But intellectually and morally it’s a land of shadows and demons just waiting to be ignored or denied. To do what Jefferson and his brethren did, you have to force yourself to see the State devouring, before you can know how it can be contained and fed without devouring you. This is terrible.
And the Nazi metaphors, while they allude to a kind of torah, are not even the last war; they are the war before the last war. We’d go one step closer to facing Jefferson’s beast, in our time, were we to pay very careful attention to our colleagues and immigrant neighbors from Central and Eastern Europe, especially to those who have come through the Refugee Program. When we tell them about Spitzer, do they laugh it off, or do they become chilled? What portents they might tell.
Again, it’s terrible, but straightforward and honest. It must be done honestly, however. It should go without saying that it won’t work unless one listens too respectfully to indulge in tendentious agendas. And I know that this must sound absurd and grandiose, but I think it could save the university. The 12th Century one. The real one.
Zhirem-I feel the same way about this blog. Why can’t civil society carry on like this?
Hughvic-The state already has devoured us. The devolutionary changes I seek under the notion of New Federalism are certainly Jeffersonian, but your use of the word “pyrrinism”-assumed to be from a root of pyrric–seemed to indicate that our victory would come at too great a cost. Is that what you meant?
Azmanon-How long will it take to repair the fabric of a country like Iraq, once we leave?
Duh. Pyrrhonism. There now. That’s better.
Oh, and I say let’s draft Jon, Zhirem, even if he doesn’t have my politics. He can handle his own media and I guess I could play bag man one more time. You ask me, that right there is a good start toward a winning campaign. What do we run him for? Maybe we should ask him…
Oh. Jon, I meant his extreme, and extremely wise, skepticism, especially in the form of his distrust of the State. I like the New Federalism moniker, but of course he would have disapproved. (But then he could be a silly old cracker.) The one time I studied him in earnest, I enjoyed the privilege of a very enlightening conversation as a guest at the home of the late Jeffersonist Dumas Malone. Mr. Malone told me that Jefferson was disappointed that the states did not take a more forthright and explicit approach to establishing social contracts, e.g. in the rights and duties set forth in the state constitutions. (He had his vanities obviously, but I’m not sure that he ever truly realized how isolated he was by his brilliance; he seemed to have expected that every state would have its Jeffersons and Adamses and Franklins to draw up its charters, when mostly what they wound up doing was cribbing Adams and him, making the states mini-feds, which for Jefferson and Virginia wasn’t the idea at all.) Anyway, in short he wanted a clear-cut contractual tit-for-tat, while the theoretical signatories, State and individual, were still coequal bargainers and, per you, yet undevoured. Precisely a Von Neumann thing, it seemed to me. What exactly does the citizen owe the State, and in exchange what does the State owe the citizen? Spell out the debts, the reasons, the obligations and boundaries, explicitly. Not only so that there won’t be so much constructionist food for the lawyers, but so that the People will know the score for themselves. (Like the Reformers and their vernacular Bibles.) Then—then—set the game afoot.
I mention my correspondence and visit with Mr. Malone in connection with your New Federalism. Merrill Peterson at UVA knows far more about this line of Malone’s Jeffersonian understanding.
You’re right, we have been devoured; we’re schooled. Jefferson never wanted that to happen the way it did. I remember I asked Mr. Malone what Jefferson meant by “asportation” of schoolchildren. The professor’s answer: “Kidnapping.”
Regarding bases, wasn’t our military presence in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia given as a major reason for the campaign of terror attacks culminating in September 11th? How will permanent bases in Iraq lay the ground for anything more than massive blowback.
Not saying that we should be knuckled under by al Qaeda etc but if we don’t listen to what drives terrorism and try to make adjustments how are we ever going to win the so-called Global War on Terrorism?
In any give month, try taking the number of Iraqis reported killed and dividing it by 27 million. You’ll get the percentage of Iraqis now suddenly dead. Now multiply 300 million by that percentage. You’ll get the equivalent percentage that would be dead in the US if they were us and we were them…
The numbers are frightening, even in the best of months…
That’s progress…for those who think there are too many people in the world and want a quick fix…
Hmm, where to start?
Jon manufactures consent, or atleast tries I guess. But I’m not complain, I support it just like the war for oil. I’m a little disappointed that whenever someone loses a policy decision, political campaign, girl at the bar, or a child to drugs they assume the opposition had an unfair advantage.
The best debaters never blame the judge or the other side, because it establishes a mental barrier, for it establishes on of the following:
1) You just aren’t good enough.
2) The audience is retarded.
3) The other guy cheats.
None of those assumptions take you to your best game. So stop it. Jon, I get that you are a communications guy – but so am I. There is no “they” who control the media, there is no sheeple who aren’t good judges, and the other team might just be smarter.
And then there’s facts. Ideas and opinions are nice, but ultimately you gotta make policy, and policy has gotta work or eventually it gets found out. Deficits are facts. Voting yourself someone else’s stuff is an idea. Vietnam was a bad idea. That’s now a fact. The jury is still out on Iraq. No calling the people stupid. No calling the other guy cheaters who are manufacturing consent – you gotta raise up your game.
New Federalism and Jon’s arguments in general – YES, but you gotta put something on the table first. The way to prove,this is really a new thing is to hammer away at the scary parts liberals won’t like states/cities having more control – which means speaking against the federal government. I want to see lots of “while it would feel great to regulate that at a federal level, they need to back off…” That convinces me. That makes me want to run you for office.
hugh, who are you man? I wanna party with you dude.
War for oil. Damn. Is there anyone who didn’t know this was a war for oil? Seriously. Comedians say it. Military history says it. Oil corporations say it. And if comedians, military history, and oil corporations agree on something, by Allah, it has to be right.
Why are we pretending the American citizens wouldn’t authorize a pure war for oil? If OPEC as cartel is really, really effective and sees oil at $200 a barrel – you think we won’t fight for it? Why in a world where everyone knows instantly how to behave on a reality TV show, do you think they are not smart enough to do what people throughout history have done? And be responsible/culpable for it?
Now before everybody gets all amped up, let me issue some qualifiers:
1) 9/11 was the Saudis. Maybe not the house of Saud, but proof they couldn’t keep their house in order. Iraq was our backup for oil. If 9/11 hadn’t happened, we’d be probably have still toppled Hussein, just not with a full blown war.
2) Eventually, Hillary, Obama, or McCain is going to have to explain why Iraq is not Darfur, or wherever. I differ slightly with Hugh here, because I’m pretty sure everybody – the masses – the “everybody” Jon thinks consent gets manufactured on, we all know it makes more sense to fight where the oil is, than where it isn’t. So, while I grant that people will tend to support nation building, if it is their guy doing the building, I disagree that it is that simple. People hear “blood and treasure” and they sense there is treasure we are fighting for.
3) Free state. Democratically elected. Asks us to keep our bases there. U.S. Oil companies owning the fields on 25-35 year contract. If it isn’t a counter-insurgency nightmare in 5 years, it’ll be much harder getting Jon into office.
A friend of mine once concluded that it is unlikely that humanity, under the guise of “civilization”, has ever gone more than 5 generations without facing war and in many cases, near self annihilation. We just don’t know what lies beyond 5 generations of “peace” in a civilized world unless it actually lies outside of civilization. This implies that war is inherent in the process of “civilizing” which runs in direct contrast to our idea of behaving in a civil manner brings peace. Under modernism some called it creative destruction. Now its is called things like stabilization or normalization. But either way, there is a cruel paradox that confronts all of us so called civil people every day. The conservatives can use honest discipline to justify it while the liberals can deny it through elaborate exercises of the intellect (as puritan Americans we tend to embrace the full spectrum, say one thing but do the other). The question still remains though, are there really peaceful alternatives to war within civilization or is this the illusory nature of the beast?
Civilization, it seems, must be built at someone’s or somethings expense. So the game, or should we call it strategy then is to try and be on the winning, or lets say constructive side of civilization and pay as little of the price as possible. Now looking back through history and on up into the modern era I would argue that there were alternatives to civilization and societies that did lie outside its domain. Call them what you will, there were tribes and remote societies existing relatively autonomously in the world up until and even into the 20th century. Along come two world wars and those alternatives start to thin out dramatically and become rather obsolete in comparison to a singular dominant civilization (that eventually tries to impose a singular dominant culture etc…).
Civilization certainly did not end with those wars. In fact it was spring boarded into action and spread like virus until it matured into globalization. As I’ve said, civilization does not (and I doubt has ever) come cheap and now with fewer options and resources available, the costs are starting to become insurmountable. To reformulate one of the themes in this blog into a rather existential sounding question; can civilization borrow its way into productive development? I think the answer is unraveling before us and might be more confounding than we can imagine considering that civilization is now a global phenomenon.
My answer to Jon’s question may not sound like overly optimistic one (simply because I dare not speculate as to when or how this crisis might end). If we look at the recent wars since the second world war, one could say that the US never really left (Europe, Japan, Korea, Vietnam). Sure some sovereignty was gained, but many social fabrics were lost for good. As some people understand, the social fabric of Iraq is torn, in some places, torn apart and into shreds not only from the recent US interventions but also the Iran-Iraq war. Much of this can never be repaired or rebuilt but will have to be transformed. That is not to say that life won’t go on, it will and with the possibility that radically new forms of culture and ideas will develop out of the sheer necessity of rebuilding such a devastated society.
I’ve come into this discussion somewhat late, and I’m going to stay away from the major issues for the most part, I just thought I’d comment on a certain kind of argument Morgan made recently.
Firstly, to quote: “So stop it. Jon, I get that you are a communications guy – but so am I. There is no “they” who control the media, there is no sheeple who aren’t good judges, and the other team might just be smarter.”
As far as I can tell, Morgan is making an inference of the kind:-
1) There is no centralised force controlling the media (‘they’).
2) Therefore, there can be no general trend distorting the information the public receives.
There is also the additional caveat that:-
3) Even if there were such trends, they would not overly affect the decisions made by the general populace, because:-
3a) People do not just passively take in what they are told (they are not ‘sheep’).
3b) Therefore they must make there decisions in a way which is for the most part independent of the kind of widespread media bias which some are positing.
What seems to be involved here are two very potent false dichotomies, which enable falacious inferences:-
1) That either something is completely intentional (planned and orchestrated by a centralized force, or ‘they’), or it is completely unintentional, or accidental.
2) That either people are passive zombie sheep, or they are fully self-determining individuals who make all of their own decisions without any form of deferral to the opinions of others.
If you get someone to accept one of these dichotomies (either explicitly or implicitly), you can infer from the absurdity of one side to the necessity of the other. The first dichotomy is the most well used in mainstream political discourse, as a great way of deferring responsibility for something. All you have to do is show that there was at least one aspect of the blunder which was not planned, or unintentional, and people then implicitly leap to the conclusion that there were no bad intentions involved at any point. Its what I like to call the conspiracy theory dichotomy: either you think there is some massive conspiracy behind the phenomena in question (i.e., you are loony) or you must recognise that no one has any kind of blame for any of it.
The second dichotomy is just as problematic, because it prevents us from seeing the reality of the way in which people form opinions and make decisions, namely that there are different levels of relative autonomy that people display in reasoning, depending upon what context of reasoning they are in and what social groups they are situated in.
It is obviously the case that the media does not just tell people what to think, but you are not therefore justified in concluding the opposite extreme, namely, that the selective choices the media makes have little to no influence over the opinions people form and the decisions they make.
To elaborate on my rather thin premise of how ready Bush is to get out of the White House- interesting that he chose to parody as his valedictory song, a story about a condemned man sleeping on death row, dreaming of a happy life on the night before he is to be hung. His return home is under ground. Macabre. Gallows humor. Not a War President, A Death President.
The old home town looks the same
As I step down from the train,
And there to meet me is my Mama and Papa.
Down the road I look and there runs Mary
Hair of gold and lips like cherries.
It’s good to touch the green, green grass of home.
Yes, they all come to meet me, arms reaching, smiling sweetly.
It’s good to touch the green, green grass of home.
The old house is still standing
Thought the paint is cracked and dry,
And there’s that old oak tree that I used to play on.
Down the lane I’ll walk with my sweet Mary,
Hair of gold and lips like cherries.
It’s good to touch the green, green grass of home.
Then I awake and look around me,
At four grey wall surround me
And I realize I was only dreaming.
For there’s a guard and there’s a sad old padre
Arm in arm we’ll walk at daybreak.
Again I’ll touch the green, green grass of home.
Yes, they’ll all come to see me, as they hang me from that old oak tree,
At last I’ll touch the green, green grass of home.
This is an excellent forum and conversation to be had for sure. It is good to know that (for the most part) there are people that understand the situation as it exists and how we got to where we are. Yes, it is a war about oil. Yes, it is a war meant to establish some military presence in another oil rich region, with the excellent advantage of having a base next to our new military enemy of the moment. But there is still the question of now…looking past the mistakes already made….the question remains. Is there a way for this fighting and killing to stop with our continued presence in Iraq? It is a question the the presidnetial candidates will have to answer in greater detail in the coming general election, and it is the central question of the initial post. It is good to see Morgan being intellectually honest and saying that the jury is still out, but that his feeling is that we have learned from past mistakes and will do this one the right way. I will let history be my guide, and that has influenced my thinking on this central issue. This history is not only of the somewhat distant past of Vietnam or the American Revolution, but the recent past of a completely mishandled war up to the moment Gates and Petraues brought some calm. Nothing about the way our political ideologues and their military armature have acted in the past give me any confidence in their ability to do any better this time around. Gates is a politcal anomoly and Pertraeus is in the right place at the right time. He is not a military genuis, he has just been put in a position where the politicians are forced to listen to him and it will not last.
So who is the optimist now?
John Hurt, I’m absolutely sure George Bush is comfy going home. But, not for your reasons. Like Reagan before him, you see in Bush, having done his two tours, the sense of, “sure, I’d rather be someplace else.”
I want someone to cling to long (see the Clintons). I don’t think being president was the best job Reagan had, it is the best job George Bush had. I have this way of looking at most Republicans and Democrats, it always strikes me that elected office, being a bureaucrat, is the best job most Dems ever hold in their lifetime, and its just the opposite for the leaders of the GOP. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of anomolies, but all the way down to the local level it rings true.
Going and serving should feel like a sacrifice, not a power grab.
Pete, I didn’t create false dichotomies. I granted you that all speakers/media, Jon in this example, deploy ther force of their opinion artfully or in-artfully.
My point was that overtime, the truth is found out, because the ideas have to become policy, and policy has to work.
I think civil rights, gay rights, low taxes, free speech, and a slew of other negative rights all have proven to work. The fact that they work, is why no amount of consent against them can be manufactured for too long. History is a long march towards negative rights. Everytime someone throws up a positive right, eventually it is found out and discarded, and it all serves to dramatically slow down history.
The people are not sheeple means just that. What they believe they believe willingly and willfully. Folks who claim the masses are mislead by the mass media are the same folks losing the argument. And I have some news for ya: They are losing their arguments in part because they are lowering their game. Everytime they complain about the unfairness of the system, or the stupidity of the people, they teach themselves they are not capable. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Manipulating the media is easy. Getting your point out there gets easier everyday. Simply most ideas, most points don’t have the ring of truth – and I mean truth as in it works as a policy. Most ideas suck. So most idea havers are pissy types. Raise your game.
Finally, social fabric. What the hell are you talking about? It sounds to me like this mythical stuff sure rips easy and often, I can’t believe there is any left anywhere.
Morgan
I was recently having a macro type non political conversation with a friend of mine, the guy that installed Bush as president of the Texas Rangers and has known him for some time, and at some point in the conversation, I mentioned that I thought he, my friend, would probably make a good president. He said that he would never get into politics. He said look at George Bush, he’s a smart guy, but politics has destroyed him.
I feel for Bush. I’m reading a great book right now called The Art of Power by Thich Nhat Hanh. It comes from a talk he gave at Davos. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Here is something he has to say.
“Power is good for one thing and one thing only: to increase our happiness and the happiness of others. Being peaceful and happy is the most important thing in our lives and yet most of the time we suffer, we run after our cravings, we look to the past or the future for our happiness.”
“Who has more power than the president of the United States? President George W. Bush is the commander in chief of the most powerful army in the world, the leader of the strongest and richest nation in the world. Not many people have that kind of power. But this does not mean the president is a happy person. Even with all these so-called powers, I believe he still feels powerless and suffers deeply. He is caught in a dilemma: to continue or not to continue in Iraq? Continuing with the war is difficult, and not continuing is also difficult. It’s like when you eat something and it gets stuck in your throat.You cannot spit it out and you cannot swallow it. I don’t think President Bush sleeps well. How can you sleep well when young people are dying every day and every night in Iraq? How can you avoid nightmares when hundreds of thousands of people are dying because of your policy? You are very lucky you are not the president of the United States; if you were, you’d be suffering a lot right now. It is very clear that if political leaders do not have compassion and understanding as their foundation, they will misuse their power and make their own country suffer, and make other countries suffer.”
That, I believe, is wisdom.
We can theorize all we want about what the future may bring and all the rest of it, but next to what Thich Nhat Hanh has to say, it is all just a video game. A game of Risk.
Respectfully,
JH
Just when I am girding myself to respond to libertarian brothers, new voices like Pete, Azmanon and Another John enter the conversation. I’m not sure I can top them.
Azmanon- I’m implying from your email address that you are in Estonia. Correct? Does some of your understanding of “tribal” behavior stem from the experience in your own country?
Morgan-Your qualifier to the manufacturing consent debate is that “over time” the truth will emerge. This is true. Overtime it emerged that the New York Times, Washington Post and every major network were conned by Cheney over Aluminum tubes, Mobile bio warfare labs and nuclear stockpiles in Iraq. But “over time” was too late to avoid the jingoistic consent of the invasion of Iraq. Hysterical conduct can be sustained for a few months by lies. Thats all it takes.
WINNING A LOST CAUSE
Before retracting his “straight talk” John McCain said Monday that if
the surge doesn’t work in Iraq he will lose the election. While this
sounds right, he could be proven wrong. Many patriotic Americans feel
vindicated by superficial evidence of a dramatic turnaround in Iraq.
However the few Arabic-speaking Intelligence officers and members of
the Iraq Study Group who know Iraq, have warned in recent interviews
that the “surge” is just the lull before the next storm. The drop in
U.S. casualties they argue has less to do with troop levels but is
more the result of the belated deal with the devil the White House
eventually made to arm the insurgents who were killing us, to kill off
Al Qaeda. But the Sunni Awakening militias will soon turn on the
Shiite “Persian” government, army and police we put in power and the
whole place will blow up. The best hope is to contain the pending
civil war inside Iraq but a regional war is likely. This leaves us
with the choice to retreat now, or later under fire.
You might ask; having made us less strong, less safe and less free,
with an economy in freefall and a lost war in Iraq about to blow up in
their faces, how could the Republicans get away with it? Assuming
Obama wins the nomination, his opposition to the war will have surely
helped him, but it won’t play against McCain in the general election.
As Obama has reminded Kerry, Edwards and Hillary Clinton, it was the
loyal opposition who authorized this disastrous war, and although Bush
already declared he won it, they are stuck with a war we’re told we
can’t afford to lose.
Now Democrats are gifting their tormentors again, this time by buying
into the surge myth, while trapping themselves into a meaningless game
over troop numbers. How did George W. Bush’s mistakes become their
problem and his blunders our burden? If you can answer that, as the
Democrats have consistently failed to do, then Senator Obama will be a
shoe-in. So why doesn’t Obama take a stand and turn the tables,
forcing the war party to explain their strategy and objectives and
account for their losing record?
In spite of the clear and present evidence, a silent majority of
Americans don’t want to swallow defeat and John McCain is offering
them the chimera of victory, claiming the surge he championed is
working. The Republicans may well be grasping at illusions, but
unless Obama stakes a claim based on the real situation in Iraq, he
will lose.
This presidential election will be a platform for the “Straight Talk
Express” to combine John McCain’s candid criticism of past tactical
errors in Iraq with a promise to restore American pride, patriotism
and power. McCain’s recycled neocon fantasy will appeal to wounded
patriots who resent being told the world has turned against us. They
believe the “Islamofascists” hate us for who we are, not for what we
do and McCain’s call to arms will immunize voters against the apparent
prospect that America could be defeated by uncivilized fanatics in a
war to defend Judeo-Christian values.
If the expert’s predictions are right, who will be better situated
when a new war erupts in Iraq? No matter how unpleasant the “October
surprise” might be, McCain will be able to claim his steady hand is
needed and this is no time for on-the-job-training. Meanwhile Obama’s
vague talk of a withdrawal timetable will be spun as “surrender in the
war on terror”.
However, if Obama were to insulate himself now, by pointing out the
best way to avoid humiliation is to get out of its way, then when
reality inevitably collides with the Bush/McCain Express, he will not
suffer collateral damage. Meanwhile, in the absence of an alternative
strategy, conservatives, independents and swing voters will rally
around the promise of victory, especially coming from an authentic
hero who defied Rumsfeld and the North Vietnamese torturers.
Will old nightmares overpower new dreams as fear beats hope? Can an
angry man harking back to Ronald Reagan’s atavistic world of black and
white win over the rainbow coalition of young fresh faces from
America’s melting pot? You bet! Especially if there’s a war going on
that the Democrats bought into and were left holding the bag.
The future is not theory, unless we are to make the jump into the metaphysical discussion. Actions now mean consequences later and pontificating on power’s effects on one man’s phsyche is not going to stop people from killing each other. We should not be interested in the underlying reasoning behind a person taking specific actions. We should listen to what they have to say, agree with them or disagree with them, and then hold their feet to the fire when they go against their word.
Pop psychology does the discussion no good.
Nhat Hanh vs. Ayn Rand, are you kidding me?
Look, there are no greater souls than ours. No massive deep insights. No magic bullet statements. We are not drunk and we do not need a moment of clarity.
JH, is it really that sad in your eyes? Look here:
http://www.militarycity.com/valor/honor.html
Make that your home page in your browser. Then support the war. Many do. The ability to hold two opposing view points / differing ideas / competing emotions and not turn into a personal train wreck, who doesn’t sleep at night and is sad all say – is the mark of a worthy human.
I find it weird, backwards even, that you think George Bush can’t decide whether to continue the war in Iraq. I think Hillary can’t decide. I think Obama can’t decide. But Bush and McCain, they have decided.
JH, there is a time when the flags are lowered, and there is a time where you live life. That said, I 100% wish, that everyone had that as their homepage – that this country was in war garden mode. I’m a believer that the quickest way to end this world wide struggle, is for all of our enemies to see the determined look in our eye. It’d be nice if Jon didn’t spend his time broadcasting a wavering commitment. But he is a liberal and others are here to rebut it.
“More than a year after the initial success of the invasion, Obama explained, “There’s not much of a difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage.” And he was correct. In July 2004, he argued that America had an “absolute obligation” to stay in Iraq until the country stabilized. “The failure of the Iraqi state would be a disaster,” he said. “It would dishonor the 900-plus men and women who have already died.”
Two months later, Obama criticized Bush’s conduct of the war, but repeated that simply pulling out would further destabilize Iraq, making it an “extraordinary hotbed of terrorist activity.” And he signaled his openness to the deployment of additional troops if this would make an eventual withdrawal more likely.
In June 2006, Obama still opposed “a date certain for the total withdrawal of U.S. troops.” “I don’t think it’s appropriate for Congress,” he said, “to make those decisions about what happens in the field.”
By late 2006, as public support for the Iraq War disintegrated and his own political ambitions quickened, Obama called for a “phased withdrawal.” When Bush announced the surge, Obama saw nothing in the plan that would “make a significant dent in the sectarian violence that’s taking place there” — a lapse in his prophetic powers.”
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/03/obama_and_iraq.html
“Recently, this pledge was called into question by Obama’s now-former adviser, Samantha Power: “He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. senator. He will rely upon a plan — an operational plan — that he pulls together in consultation with people who are on the ground.”
Ayn Rand? I’ve had her. She’s nothing.
One other thing. Regarding your theory about the best job people have had. What better job did Reagan have? Hosting Death Valley Days, hawking Twenty Mule Team Borax? Getting his legs sawed off in King’s Row? President of the Screen Actor’s Guild? (Maybe governor of California is a better job than president of the United States. The weather is certainly preferable. By a light year or two. Funnier people to hang out with as well. Or rather people who are funny at all.)
I would agree that being an actor is, in almost every case, a more noble profession than being a politician. You may have found the one exception. In fact, I can’t think of one example that proves your theory. It seems to be based on the romantic notion that great men of business step down to selflessly serve their country, or something along those lines.
In Texas we have a word for that. Or maybe it’s two words.
At any rate, I admire your spirit. I’m a fan.
Another Jon, you are really stomping my buzz.
Morgan -
Do you ever stop to read the stuff you are writing? Your posts, while always thought provoking, border on schizophrenic at times. I suppose it’s my fault if your all-elbows approach causes me to lose sight of where you are coming from.
In on sentence you claim that being able to hold opposing viewpoints is virtuous, and in the next you criticize Obama for supporting the troops without supporting the war.
As I’ve heard Obama say before, he wouldn’t have chosen to drive the bus into the ditch, but he is certainly going to help get it out.
I meant to post this awhile ago, and never got around to it:
I read David Harvey’s The New Imperialism (http://www.amazon.com/Imperialism-Clarendon-Lectures-Geography-Environmental/dp/0199264317/ref=si3_rdr_bb_product) for school a couple of years ago, and since it was a thought provoking but accessible read, I thought you folks might want to check it out. I’m thinking that it might add a bit more complexity/depth to this discussion. Harvey’s book might also be an interesting read given the US’s current economic situation and the “threat” of China…
“the next you criticize Obama for supporting the troops without supporting the war.”
Huh? I think you mis-read Obama. Those quotes simply say Obama supported the war at times. I’m sure he always supports the troops.
Sorry John Hurt.
It is not that I do not know what you are saying (or in some way empathize) but my Zen approach is to not confuse the issue when the rhetoric is already thick.
As an aside…..I do find it to be a waste of an intellectual excercise (that I have unfortunately partaken in myself) to try and understand the philosophical underpinnings, and physchological responses to, bad decisions being made at the highest level of authority.
And generally when someone tells me that George Bush probably sleeps poorly….my knee-jerk reaction is to let the elbows fly.
But as far as I am concerned, Ian Masters summed the discussion up well enough for me so I will remain quiet for a spell and let you return to your happy place.
Another Jon
I was joking around. Your point is well taken. At the same time, Thich Nhat Hanh is no pop psychologist, and The Art of Power is from a very smart address at the Davos Economic Forum in 2001. It’s not about trying to understand George Bush, it is about, well, the artful use of power. That is something we need to consider deeply. And I seriously will take him over Ayn Rand every day of the year. By a long, long shot.
I agree with Morgan about the determined look type deal, but if that hearts and minds meme means anything, we are not going to win that war with a steely gaze and tough talk. I believe we have to out think them. We have to confound them. Ayn Rand is not going to get us there. For me, that is a match race between Secretariat and a bag of hammers, or better, a bird and a rock.
I also think Ian Masters nailed it. I forwarded that on to the Obama camp. I hope he reads it. I hope he internalizes it, if that is not too bronze surfer a thought. I hope he acts on it.
Anyway, I won’t bring up George Bush’s sleep habits anymore. It was only a metaphor in the first place. I don’t really give a flying fuck about his sleep habits. I really should have just posted the whole book. I knew I was probably going to get in trouble with that post.
I have great respect for everyone in this Jon Taplin zone. I am asemi metaphysical abstract artist, and I don’t much like this kind of thing, but I like it here. Thank you for your kindness. You’ve got great things to say.
Ian Masters, you’re the first I’ve seen to do what so many dare not do: openly root for a “humiliation” of the U.S. in Iraq that will vindicate the Democratic Party. You’ve coddled yourself in unreality in a manner reminiscent of the Jimmy Carter who knew not of the existence of sin, until the Soviets showed him what sinning can do for you.
I’m sorry that your defeatest cause is lost, but you don’t have to take it so hard. I mean, maybe the Iranians will turn things around or something. Maybe the not-all-bad gray people are massing for the long-awaited Spring offensive after all, and can give the U.S.-led allied forces a really whupping and send them running home defeated and humiliated in time for your nominee to be a “shoo-in”. Maybe it is all “illusory”, this U.S. success in Iraq. Maybe you can dream “new dreams”. They’re better than old dreams, after all. They’re newer, these dreams of defeat and humiliation.
Let’s hope the Democratic nominee will act on these dreams, eh? Someone should forward them on to her…
Oh the wonders of differing opinions.
I like your post, however I do not agree with it on many different levels.
Let me be clear as someone who has bleed in the ‘sand’ of Iraq, Ive seen the difference first hand.
It has been pointed at many times what ‘our’ goals should be and what they are, as well as why we should and or should not be there in the first place helping people out.
All of which are of genuine concern to those who ask them.
My biggest problem is not that we went there. It is not that many say it turned into a quagmire, it is not the politics of the pundents. It is however the hypocriscy of the left leaning crowd who on a daily basis decries some cut in government spending as away to somehow ‘hurt’ people.
This’hurt’ is exactly why the left crowd should be up in harms about staying in Iraq and other places in the region. Violations of human rights happen more on a second basis than on a daily basis. Kids, women, indigent souls getting the worst treatment on the planet, and yet they have no voice. When is the left ‘the party for equality’ going to stand up and actually do something that represent what they preach to the rest of society?
I’m just going to respond to Morgan’s response to my criticism of his argument.
To simply claim that the ‘truth will out’, is not only an incorrect statement but also a very dangerous one. More than this, to posit some overarching trend of history whereby the positions you hold (negative freedoms and the like) are destined to become prominent is just plain silly.
I’ll take the latter point first, and then I’ll tackle the claim that ‘truth will out’ in general in a separate post. On said latter point, you’re just as bad as the Marxists who claimed that the inconsistencies of capitalism were destined to reveal themselves, and to bring it down from within, citing the numerous revolutions in the 20th century as evidence. We all know how this turned out. As an additional point to this, how does the development of states who have tended towards positive freedoms (e.g. the scandinavian states, lots of europe and increasingly parts of south america) or massive centralised governmental structures (e.g. China, Russia and some of the above) square with this overarching trend? Are these just blips on the path of progress, or is your inexorable historical swing toward negative freedom and small government a unique feature of the US’s destiny?
Simply put, teleological (or ‘destinal’) views of history are intellectually bankrupt. This isn’t to say you can’t make claims about historical trends in opinions and ideas, but you need to base these on concrete observations, and separate them from any claims that we are coming closer to the Truth.
Another problem here, is that you seem to be depending upon the opposite move as well. This is to say that you’re using what you take to be the actual shift in mainstream discourse toward your position to be a reason for claiming its truth, i.e. you are inferring from this claim that ‘the truth will out’, and the current trends in political opinion, that they add support to your position.
This is somewhat implicit in your rebukes against those of us who think that media bias is a problem. An additional point I’d make here, is that these rebukes seem to be contradict the arguments you were making when we were discussing global warming, where you were all too happy to claim (and cite articles about) media bias against your position.
Implicit to my rebuke to those who argue media bias: you are hurting yourself. You are demeaning the audience. It is a weak argument to make.
Let’s use global warming as an example. Either there is global warming or there is not. It won’t take 30 years to decide. If it keeps getting colder, in three, five, ten years, Al Gore won’t be allowed near a TV camera again. If it keeps getting warmer, he might eventually be made king of the world. I totally understand “why” The Weather Channel decided to support global warming (it makes money). I understand why conventional socialists have re-aligned to pitch market controls to appease the weather god. I think they themselves are biased. I don’t think they control the media. I’m the media. You are the media. And my side is whooping your side.
Global warming is either right or wrong. Democracy (voting yourself someone else’s money) is either right or wrong. Communism was either right or wrong. In all of these cases, the “market” decides. I don’t even think that the market doesn’t support government, it clearly does.
But there obviously is a limit on the growth of positive rights in our country. The experiment we are currently running called Democracy (as opposed to a Republic) ran into a wall in 1980.
We are all talking about the worst financial crisis since the depression, and this time the only way out is cutting planned social spending increases. We’ll see who is right soon enough. Money and capital will flee this country if the deficits aren’t fixed. Money supply is going to have to be tightened. That’s a product of democracy. In a Democracy, those against taxes and social programs are incentivized to deficit spend.
The gorgeous reality of the Europeans holding the line on budget deficits is because they are essentially a new federalist state. All those governments sharing the same currency, means they can’t / won’t let each other deficit spend, because it “unjustly” inflates everyones currency, not just the turks, or the italians.
The Euro was the best thing that ever happened to Europe, because now, each nation’s government is financially constrained. Deficits matter to each european nation more than they ever have! If they raise taxes to much, the economic base flees, if they provide too many services, they get in trouble for deficits. And so, unless they all give up their cherished national identities (President of Europe), the nation states are forced to be competitive.
Pete those are real observations. I’m not being teleological, tautological, and any such thing.
I’ve lived outside the US for more than 8 years working for cultural and humanitarian NGOs. Most of my time has been spent in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Seeing American Foreign policy at work from another angle definitely sheds new light on things. The US influence is huge to say the least. One thing I’ve heard from numerous people abroad is the complaint that US foreign policy is so influential, affecting them on a daily basis, that they see it fit to demand the right to vote in US elections. What does one say? Well you don’t pay taxes in the US. And they say, but our soldiers are fighting and dying right there with yours, your media is our media, your president supports our president, etc.
Having been to Bosnia a half-dozen times and to Serbia just after the NATO bombing I have a bit of experience seeing the effects of war and trying to figure our how to “rebuild” afterwards. I could write volumes on (bad) policies, both foreign and local, but I’m not sure it would do any good. There is never enough time to go back on whats already been done and as a consequence people fail to learn. As with any policies towards foreign conflicts you’re bound to make mistakes and when you make mistakes, more policies are often made to cover those mistakes. Similar patterns go for budgets, especially with budgeting policies that adhere to strict spending cycles (which most are). The bigger the failure the larger the budget needed to attempt to repair the damage.
I certainly don’t feel as sharp as others here toward these political debates and will try not to fill the space with too many abstract and tangential remarks. I do appreciate Jon’s willingness to put the issues he’s concerned with on the table and allow others to freely engage with their feedback (sorry Morgan, this is not what ‘manufacturing consent’ looks like). I wish there were similar possibilities with mainstream media outlets and elected officials, who it seems to me, are far more out of touch than most of us.
And yes, I’m living in Estonia at the moment. Its a small country full of contrasts. On the one hand you have politicians like Mr “flat tax” “economic miracle” Mart Laar who helped develop the nations economic policy (he later admitted only reading a single book on economics, ‘Free to Choose’ by Milton Friedman). On the other you have minority groups who’s culture and traditions have survived more than 1000 years through war and countless occupations yet are starting to feel more threatened by the recent arrival of capitalism. I’m rather intent on following the case of the latter.
hughvic
I see why you are sick of his own sarcasm.
The War in Iraq is a war the United States did not have to fight.
Sorry, hughvic, I see why you are sick of your own sarcasm.
John, about the sarcasm, fair enough. But count up the modifiers and intensifiers in Ian’s tendentious paragraphs 3-5, and you’ll see how venemously snide that post is at its core; how it snides into position rather than bothering to argue into position. Moreover, the truth claims are bogus. So I might say that Ian’s is a losing argument, except that he doesn’t make an argument. So how about, it’s losing snidery. It’s “losing” because it is so hatefully defeatist.
Anyway, that’s why I took the “sarcastic” approach you remark upon. (In lit. the device actually has a name, “satire by exaggeration”. It’s a way to hold up, not a mirror, but a funhouse mirror to a writer.) And anyway how can I be nice when someone’s licking his chops over the prospect of my countryfolk and our best friends falling in the field in “humiliating” fashion?
And as for your statement that the U.S. did not have to fight, yes. That’s absolutely true. I can’t think of a war that the U.S. did have to fight, but I suppose that’s a digression.
In any case, I’m proud of what the U.S. did with her allies in Iraq, and am proud of the forces now. They’ll be home soon, in large numbers. Many of them will exercise their higher education options, and I expect them to cause some real shake-ups on the campuses when they find out that the professoriat has been pontificating about them, without knowing anything of what they know. I further would guess that a surprisingly large proportion of returning vets, who will not allow themselves to be “reeducated” whilst they are pursuing their education, will soon assume positions of leadership in civilian society, and will exert a disproportionately large and beneficial influence in shaping American society.
At some more convivial time I hope you will tell me in what media you work as an artist, and what form your art is taking these days.
hughvic
Thank you for your kind, honest, and thoughtful letter. I didn’t read Ian Masters’ post as being snide, but I can understand and respect your sensitivity. Now I am afraid that I am going to get a little abstract here, but, as I understand it, thought itself is abstract, so if one desires to be non abstract, he must stop thinking completely, a phenomenon that is happening with great frequency in these modern times. (Fortunately, there does not seem to be a great number of concrete blockhead type deals in this forum, though there is an avalanche of them on the World Wide Web, I think you would agree.)
I don’t disagree with what I, in general, understand to be your emotions regarding the sacrifices our men women have made in this adventure. I do not mock your genuine feelings about the humanitarian mission you perceive our men and women to be involved in. As I have written elsewhere on this blog, I would prefer and think it more appropriate for people to be grateful for the sacrifices of our troops than proud of their sacrifices, since their sacrifices are not something we, ourselves, have accomplished. Pride seems to be a somewhat distorted response to their sacrifices and their accomplishments. And, if I’m not mistaken, Mr. Masters is not an American, so perhaps he can be forgiven for not experiencing the same sort of national gratification you seem to be describing.
I don’t think what Mr. Masters wrote was not coming from a place of love. I do think it was coming from a place of utter frustration. There are many of us that feel we have been lied to and manipulated (even as we knew we were being lied to) into a war we never sought, and which we feel is destructive to our country in many ways. Some of us believe that the damage done to our reputation in the world and to our economy in this, for better or for worse, global economy has been profound. Some us find the reverse engineering of a noble motivation for this invasion hard to swallow. Some of us feel the war in Iraq has been a distraction from larger issues we face and which we see unfolding now to disastrous effect in the financial sector. Perhaps terrorism is the great challenge to our country. Or perhaps we face a greater threat from within in the form of our own greed and hubris, our own egotism. Our own concupiscence. Our own fear. At any rate, we cannot concentrate on terrorism to the exclusion of all other concerns. We cannot turn a blind eye to our own corruption. Some of us find the idea that in fifteen or thirty years this will all be proven to have been a wise action to require a kind of faith that is hard to conjure, hard to arrive at. Some of us, including many in the military, believe that our private army has been put in the service of private interests which in the end do not benefit us, who are paying for this adventure, but rather benefit a very few who are enjoying windfall profits that flow through the blood of many thousands of actual human beings.
As far as wars we had to fight, the Revolutionary War, The Civil War, and World War Two would, I think, fall obviously into that category. I think in this day and age, with the stakes as high as they are, with all the apocalyptic rhetoric (especially coming from the fundamentalist thinkers whom George Bush claims as his spiritual guides including some extremely bloodthirsty and in some cases homophobic closeted homosexual war mongers, such as Ted Haggard who, until his unfortunate outing, advised George Bush every Monday; and segregationist type pompous, false prophet war mongers such as Jerry Falwell and his “ilk” as his “ilk” is so fond of saying), the constant threat of nuclear destruction and what not, I think we should be intensely careful about the use of our force, especially in that region which has been so widely publicized as the epicenter of the destruction of our world. We are under a constant threat of self fulfilling prophecy.
Some of us believe George Bush is living in a dream world, and it is not the American Dream we have heard so much about, the dream we have been sold so hard. Fred Kaplan had an interesting point to make in Slate this weekend. http://www.slate.com/id/2186554/
Gail Collins had an interesting observation in yesterday’s New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/15/opinion/15collins.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
As far as returning veterans, please remember that the second worse terrorist attack in our history was carried out by a returned Desert Storm veteran, and that we already have had many returned veterans from this war commit homicides, suicides, and familicides. I appreciate the optimistic picture you paint, but that picture is a one eyed jack. Many of our returned veterans are and will be time bombs. It is crucial that we provide them with the kind of medical and psychological attention they require. Caring for our veterans is an area that gets a great deal of my attention. Here is the web site of IAVA, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, an organization I work with, if you are interested. http://www.iava.org/
Let’s choose this time to be convivial. I seriously appreciate your conviction and your intelligence. I am curious as to what you mean by writing that you were or are a bagman, if I have not confused you with someone else. I am, as I tried to write earlier, a semi metaphysical abstract artist. I work in music and in film.
I hope I have not been contentious in the letter. I have not meant to be. I have meant to write to you with the respect your passion and commitment deserve.
All good wishes
John Hurt
Post Script
I would like to add the war in Afghanistan to the list of wars we had (and, in this case, still have) to fight. It looks as if we are going to have to make incursions into Pakistan, as well, a nation state that has claimed several underground nuclear tests. Bin Laden must be brought to justice. Even if he is dead, he cannot be allowed to exist as a phantom. It makes me sick that he is still at large as our president, who promised to bring him in dead or alive, dances on the White House steps and makes light of the malfeasance and mismanagement of our government and our financial institutions in song and speech. I am concerned that the president, who hears the still, small voice, has lost his mind.
And thank you for your elucidation of sarcasm. I am not unfamiliar with that particular literary device. I would like to respond with no literary device whatsoever that a funhouse mirror would, in my view, necessarily contain some element of fun. It’s that thing about humor- it has to be funny. Humor that is not funny is, well, confusing.
But, as I hope you know, I’m joking around there. I think I understand that you are using the term fun house mirror to mean the object’s reflection is distorted to the make the object appear grotesque- or to make clear the object’s own distortion.
At any rate, I sincerely do appreciate your thoughts. I hope I have not offended you. It is not my aim. With all this commotion, I am afraid I am opening myself up here to a just criticism of becoming obsessive. Maybe I can ratchet all this back a little. I really don’t like to hear myself talk this much. More than anything, I hope I have not wasted your time.
All the best
JH
As I go to press with this comment, as it is called, I have just finished what seems to me an interesting and fairly balanced article on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq in the New York Times. It can be read here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/weekinreview/16jburns.html?hp
Finally
There are some of us who, if we were not willing to suspend our critical facilities, to override our powers of discernment, to abandon our common sense, and accept a whole set of transparent deceptions, were called traitors by a loathsome group of power mad, greedy, self interested, self asserting, belligerent, ersatz patriot mother fuckers. I use that as a technical term.
Meanwhile, all of the power grabbed during that din was used, among other things, to eviscerate the Fourth Amendment. Yesterday, my girlfriend said she is afraid that if we didn’t have somebody to stop this, eventually much that we recognize as our Constitutional rights will have been compromised in the name of keeping us safe- that we would live in a police state. In reality, we are already in many ways living in a police state more completely than that of, say, the Soviet Union or East Germany. In East Germany, the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit had to rely on informants, bugging, stolen undergarments, and low tech gimmicks of that nature. In our country, everything we transmit electronically is recorded. All of personal communications, business disclosures, financial transactions, research, viewing, reading, and listening habits, and all the rest of it are available to those in power. Those who do not see that are blinded by the rockets’ red glare.
The Bill of Rights is one of the things in this country that is worth dying for. I wonder who is willing to do so.
Okay. Now I seriously am finished. I hope you will hold no malice toward me for the heated language of that last outburst. I suppose I just had to get that off my chest. I think I’ll go hit some golf balls. Hard.
Peace.
Well said JH…
[...] 16, 2008 · No Comments I don’t mean to boast, but this is as good a conversation on Iraq as you will find on the web. Thank you to all the contributors across this [...]
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/30316.html
John, I’m not sure whether you strictly intend it, but you may be even more manipulative than Ian is. Are you a full-time artist? I mean, I hope that you are—not enough of you—but you seem to hail from The Therapeutic Class of officious elites.
You begin the first installment of your trilogy with a warning that your thinking will be “abstract”, by which you make it immediately clear that you mean to “abstract” my reasoning into dewey-eyed emotivism. Before you even get under way, you have me pegged as a “sensitive” with tender “feelings” and “emotions” that lead me, in my “passion”, to romanticize what is really at best an “adventure” in Iraq as a heart-tugging “humanitarian mission”.
I don’t know a soul who answers to this woozy description, and I did not describe the Iraq war and occupation in terms either emotional or sentimental. On the contrary.
You mock my pride in my country’s conduct and that of my country’s “closest friends” (are you sure Ian is excluded here?) in Iraq, and you actually call it self-gratification! (I should think it would be more like the opposite of your obvious shame.) You have no idea what grounds I do or do not have for expressing such pride, as you would rather specify my grounds for yourself than ask me what they are. You do not even know to what conduct I refer.
I fail to discern the referent of your term “our private army”. Are you referring to private soldiers, the noncommission rank and file of the U.S. Infantry? Are you suggesting instead that the United States Armed Forces have been appropriated, such that serving personnel have been rendered bought mercenaries? Is this how you expressly regard the veterans with whom you work? As military prostitutes and “ticking time bombs”? Haven’t we all seen this compelling story line before? You know how it goes…the troops are dupes and “baby killers” who return, blood on their hands and heads full of KILL programs, to walk among us like secret cannibals, the drums beating ever louder in their heads.
We’ve been through that Hollywood jive, John. Nobody’s buying this time except some nostalgic graybeard Hippies and the kids whose first political memory is L’Affaire Lewinsky. Anti-war sentiment once again becomes, by the time it penetrates the strange brown glare of Hollywood, anti-military sentiment, and so far the onscreen expressions of the Industry’s smog-filtered anti-military movement nostalgia aren’t even selling to cable-direct. (Meanwhile the most revealing and cinematotropic comedy of errors is playing out Stateside: the Presidential Race of Races making fools daily of the pundits and even of the vestigial journalists, while meanwhile the public, despite the media, is proceeding apace with the formerly elusive “National Dialogue on Race”. But Hollywood, ever on the bunny slopes of politics, prefers to teach Peoria that war is hell and military men and women are at best pathetic and at worst crazed murderers.)
As for my prediction regarding the effects upon and through higher education of the return of large numbers of military personnel of unprecedented sophistication, I do not think that I implied in any way that it was summative of today’s vets. Rather, it was an hypothesis (actually grounded in research) of a very specific phenomenon, from the perspective of Sociology of Higher Education.
My work with veterans dates back decades, and is and always has been multiform. My faith bars me from saying more, from tooting my horn in that regard, as they do who wash each others’ backs with contrived awards and ceremonials. I reckon there’s no transgression in my telling you of something in prospect, though. The feds have before them a proposal to extend DoD’s telemedical program to intervene early with personnel in the field to prevent PTSD. The proposed methodologies are demonstrably efficacious, and evaluable. The program will result in a significant reduction in PTSD among deactivated persons. (As you surely know, the USDVA now reports a rate of almost 61 percent.)
By “bagman”, I meant a menial campaign fundraiser, a candidate’s hunter-gatherer, a shaker of trees, a rainmaker, a moneyman.
When I try to conjure a semi-abstract metaphysical artist working in music and film, I think back 20 years to when I taught a Sociology class in which I used Godfrey Reggio’s first of the “Kooyanisqatsi” trilogy, with what might have been the first of Glass’ many soundtracks, as a way to illustrate post-modernism. (Much more efficient, as it turned out, than negotiating the impish wordplay of French intellectual celebrities of dubious originality.) It worked like a charm. Much metaphysical in that visual/aural tone poem. Much cosmology, in fact. Am I anywhere near your bailiwick?
Do you, as a cinematic artist, find the funhouse mirror effect fun? I find it disturbing. It reflects a grotesque, of course. I used that image, as a kind of definition of one of the seven satirical devices, to imply what I believe: that Ian’s portrait of the Iraq prognosis was a grotesque to which I meant to hold up a mirror that magnified his grotesquery so as to call attention to the deadly distortions, in his work here as a geopolitical pathologist, that in my view rendered his post DOA.
I simply do not agree with you, our host Jon, Ian and so many others that the American public was “lied” into war with Iraq. I just don’t remember it that way. I do remember that the President and Prime Minister finally agreed that it had become ridiculous to continue to beseech the corrupt UN to administer the wet noodle yet again to Saddam Hussein for his increasingly frequent and violent acts of war against US and UK warplanes enforcing the 1991 Peace Treaty on behalf of the UN. I did not see how the U.S. and UK could hope to maintain their positions as the world’s mightiest forces for good by continuing to answer war provocations with polite protests to third-party nations that clearly enjoyed the jabs. And it seems ridiculous now to claim that it was the democracies’ belated agression against Saddam which caused our stock to fall in the diplomatic marketplace.
May I ask, how is it that you work with veterans and yet still wonder who is willing to die for the Bill of Rights?
Finally, I don’t think I’m being “sensitive” when I find Ian’s post snide. I consider the following a fair paraphrase of Ian’s “loving” snidery:
If John McCain says something true, then even if it is something of which we approve his truthfulness is perforce a fluke. But such a fluke was recorded when he admitted that his presidential bid cannot succeed unless the Surge does.
Americans who love their country and find progress in Iraq, in fact choose to believe in a self-serving myth, the myth of the Surge’s success, that only vindicates their own illusions of a U.S. worth loving. In reality the Surge has not occasioned a turning point, nor enabled allied forces or civil government in Iraq to accomplish their objectives, nor marked anything but a “lull” in Iraq that has allowed America’s enemies to gather strength.
A storm of defeat is inevitable and imminent. The whole of Iraq will explode in civil war. We can either cut and run now, or else cut and run later with our tails between our legs. Either admit defeat now, or face not only defeat but abject humiliation later.
The Republicans are getting away with destroying the U.S. economy and with making the U.S. less strong, and both less safe AND less free. The war has been a disaster for the U.S. The war continues, though Bush declared [not the successful accomplishment of the mission of invasion and regime-change, but] the “winning” of the American expedition in Iraq. Those who already declared the war won, nevertheless tell us that we can’t afford to “lose” in Iraq, but in truth we can afford it.
Debating the optimal speed of the draw-down of U.S. forces in Iraq is meaningless. There is no reason why congressional Democrats, who authorized the military action in Iraq, should be held partly responsible for the mistakes made in that military action or help to shoulder the burden of any problems in Iraq.
The GOP is the party of war, and the record of U.S. action in Iraq is a loosing record on the ledger of the Republican Party alone. There is clear and present evidence that the U.S. is in defeat in Iraq, and most of the American public has refused to make known to pollsters its refusal to accept that defeat because of that “silent majority’s” embarrassment in finding itself believing in the myth of the Surge’s promise of the possibility of eventual success in Iraq. While Republicans indulge their illusions, meanwhile Barack Obama can reveal the true situation in Iraq: defeat. If he fails to do so, he will lose his bid.
To promise to restore American pride, patriotism and global influence is to promise to restore a neocon fantasy that appeals only to patriots wounded by the unwelcome news that other countries disapprove of American foreign policy, to which news such wounded patriots respond with resentment. [As distinguished, evidently, from puzzlement as to why any American should give a damn whether our foreign policy has received the approval of a consensus of nations.] Islamofascists, who should not be called by that name, hate America not for who she is, but for her misconduct. Were America to shape up, “Islamofascists” would not hate us.
Republicans yearn to be told the comforting lie that the U.S. has not been defeated in Iraq. By denying defeat, they only postpone the humiliation of U.S. forces and therefore of their Party, the War Party. Judeo-Christian values are not worth fighting for. [But the Rights of Man, progeny of those values, are worth dying for, John?] John McCain represents Reagan’s atavism and his Manichean dualism between the geopolitical forces of good and those of evil. This is fear mongering, and nightmarish.
If Barack Obama will not only continue to invite voters to dream and to hope, but will also dare to declare the “war” lost, then when the final humiliation comes, he and his party will escape blame for the war and for the humiliation it brought, and will escape the humiliation itself, so that from the nation’s defeat will come a GOP defeat, and great victory for Obama and the Democrats.
All the best,
Hugh
Another rule of debate: when your opposition can argue your own side better than you – fold, and take notes.
What was/is the 2 main objective for the U.S. being in Iraq?! – #1, $War-Profiteering ; #2, Bush & Friends making $Money off of the War!! – So why saty in an un-Constitutional War? – Leave and we lose. Stay and we Lose even more!! America blindly followed LIES and Fear-tactics by the Bush Group to illegally attack Iraq. We could have easily removed Saddam thru other means, without spending $Trillions we needed elswhere, and losing Preciuos Lives of American Citizens! – Impeach Bush & Cheny NOW! -p.s.- World Help Tibet — Boycott China Olympics!
Oh Burn!
heh, seriously though….
I guess Ian’s mistake in taking the discussion from one of the practicalities of fighting an insurgency in an occupied country, to one of the political realities of extracating yourself from that situation, did not take into account the extreme egotistical view of winning vs. losing the oposing side may hold, as well as their continued ability to turn the argument into one of defeatism. At the risk of saying something inflamatory, my opinion is that this argument is nothing but vapid.
Political and tribal reconciliation cannot be had at the muzzle of an M-16.
Our military presence is there now to provide a safe context within which reconciliation can happen. It is not. Petraeus has said as much in the recent WaPo article, and will say it again when he testifies before Congress.
Winning and losing in this situation is a political construct playing on the jingoistic leanings of an electorate that cannot possibly fathom the idea that maybe some things are out of your control.
Forgive me for having wasted your time. I have only been able to make it through the first few sentences of your reaction because it seemed so filled with projection, stereotyping, assumptions, prejudices, anger, and more unfunny sarcasm. I didn’t accuse you of anything. You inferred all of that. I didn’t call you “a sensitive”, whatever that is. But, now that you mention it, I will say that your response, the beginning of it at least, does seems somewhat sensitive and emotional to me. I didn’t think what I was writing had anything to do with you personally. Perhaps I’ve got the whole thing wrong. I’ll try to read some more later, but if it is more of the same, why would I want to?
You have misunderstood me. I think you are looking for a fight. I have no shame over our action in Iraq. Or any of the rest of it. Are pride and shame our only two choices? Is gratitude a lesser quality than pride? Is pride not an emotion? Does it not come before a fall?
I look for a good outcome from Iraq. I am in the oil business. I have investments. I want things to work out.
Yes, I am one of the elite. I’m not ashamed of that either. Nor am I proud of it. It’s just something that happened. (I am also related to George Bush.) If I am being officious, I am going to stop now. I would hate to be one of those people who cannot admit they were wrong.
I shot a 68 yesterday.
“Winning and losing in this situation is a political construct playing on the jingoistic leanings of an electorate that cannot possibly fathom the idea that maybe some things are out of your control.”
Perfect! I won’t pretend to be able to catch up with you guys, but let me say this:
Iraq is a different culture than ours, and it will always be foolish to assume that they will assimilate our social and political mores without trouble.
Iran and Syria both are “democracies,” in that region, as is Israel. And none of them can keep their own peace. I’m not celebrating that fact, but I won’t romantically deny it, either.
So the faux-diplomatic argument that Iraq is important as First-Democracy in the region is simply not true. It is likely that, once we leave, the Iraqi government will turn into some sort of hybrid of Western democracy and Islamic state control. This is how the citizens of Iraq would prefer it, and we shouldn’t stand in their way. And it will bring about a pseudo peace for their country.
The only possible positive step in the situation is to stop offering Iraqis — and the unfortunate terrorist element we created — an opportunity to blame their troubles on American interference and easily recruit impressionable, disenfranchised young people to the cause of hatred and violence.
That is the only goal we should have. And it’s the only one we can achieve.
No offense taken, John. I was saying that I reject the therapeutic massage of having my arguments described by you, in concentrated succession, as the product of some “sensitivity”, “emotions” and “passion” (in that order) that form my “genuine feelings” of the kind of sentimentality that would be required for me to “perceive” U.S. military action in Iraq as the “humanitarian mission” I never claimed it is. This is all very sweet of you, but what are your arguments viz my arguments? Because if your unctuous treatment of my views doesn’t constitute attempted dismissiveness, well then golly gee, I’ve never in my life had someone piss up my leg and tell me it’s raining. As you say, though, nothing personal.
As to the facts. I made my claims. Now, rather than imputing, do some computing and refuting if you like. Just please leave the therapeutic ad hominem treatment, Buscaglia-style, out of it.
I’m not looking for a fight, and furthermore I need not go looking. There’s a fight on the Iraqi front, and a fight over that fight can be found, as Jon has indicated, right here in this string. You and Ian seem intent on waging this fight with adjectives and adverbs, with a conspicuous dearth of nouns. What you two evidently resist saying outright, you say sideways, with characterizations often contorted into caricature. Take, for example, your characterization of my position on Iraq, or Ian’s treatment of John McCain. I personally cannot stand McCain, and oppose him actively and forthrightly. When I do so I oppose the actual Senator John McCain and not my grotesque straw effigy of him.
Yours is a most formidable golf game. You’re quite the swinger, but I must ask what did you expect from Ayn, salsa picante?
Another Jon, if you want to discuss the tactics of successful withdrawal from a counterinsurgency footing—the area of expertise of U.S. Army Special Forces in general and David Petraeus in particular—then please don’t let our vapid “egotism” stop you.
As for your accusation of our “jingoism” somehow incapacitating our ability to “fathom” not being in control of something, I find the accusation rather odd, since Jon calls us “libertarians”, and libertarians see liberals and especially “progressives” as the social control freaks.
In any event, I agree with you about the political construction—and sleepless reconstruction—of the notions of “winning” and “losing” in the Iraq context. It seems to me really astute of you to point out the stakes in definitional control viz the terms “winning” and “losing”. (Presumably we’ve all noticed the proclivity of the Clinton campaign to fight for a similar definitional control in the race for the Democratic nomination.) It requres something like a roper’s fid, for example, to unsplice Ian’s weavings of “war”, “victory”, “won”, “winning”, “losing”, “defeat”, etc.
Wars are won or lost, or else they end in stalemate. Part of the problem with our continued talk of winning or losing “the war in Iraq” is that there is no war in Iraq. There was a war there recently, and from the perspective of Military Science, U.S.-led allied forces “won” it, with an unprecedented skeleton crew, in record time. The war took the form of an invasion, the stated aim of which was regime change. The invasion occurred. The regime fell. This feat of arms, the U.S. Commander in Chief chose, accurately but unwisely, to call a “Mission Accomplished”. The regime subsequently was replaced, and replaced again. Following the “winning” of the war, a bloody occupation ensued which has continued to the present day.
Does it still make sense to talk of “winning” the war in Iraq? Of “losing” the occupation? Of U.S. withdrawal from that country “with victory” or else “in defeat”?
I think we can all say comfortably we don’t care if Iraq is a democracy, all things being equal, we will accept whatever is the most stable in the form of oil production.
I think we can also agree, it likely that we are not leaving Iraq (Obama has us having bases there for 10 years & McCain for more) until we are sure the oil deals that have been done, can be faithfully executed without regional strife interfering.
Now that we are in agreement, what’s next?
Morgan (& Hugh)- You are always trying on thought experiments for me. So let’s try one for you. Take a look at the list of “suitors” for Iraq’s oil that I cited in the original post on oil that opened up this whole hornets nest. They are here- http://www.judicialwatch.org/iraqi-oil-maps.shtml
Now assume, we had never invaded Iraq and the biggest player on that list, Russia’s Lukoil had gone ahead in 2002 and developed the big field in the South they had contracted with Saddam for. Since Russia does not need to import oil, do you not believe that Lukoil would be more than happy to sell that oil to Exxon Mobil at a market price which without the war premium would have probably been $40 per barrel? Would that have not been a better outcome for our economy, the lives of our maimed and dead soldiers and our standing in the rest of the world?
Well I will start off by defending Ian’s original post…or at least what I understand the post to be about. It is about political strategy. Or how Obama shold go about having a debate with McCain on the issue of Iraq. We are all aware that these debates are structured around false dichotomies and do not reflect the complex realities of the situation as it exists. What I understand Ian to be saying is that McCain has one talking point about Iraq and that is that we are winning and do not let the pussy Democrats keep this from happening. All that needs to happen to blow holes in this argument is to ask McCain to define what winning is in this situation and then watch him flounder as he panders to the more jingoistic members of his base, which you may or may not be part of. I have no need for name-calling (liberal, libertarian, etc.). I will let everyone’s posts speak for themselves.
My take on it Hugh…is that your reaction, to what you perceived to be a snide post by Ian, is really a reaction to the two dimensionality our current political dialogue has turned into.
So McCain is not an effigy as a result of the words of Ian. He is an effigy because he has made himself into one by continuing to speak about complex and serious issues in two-dimensional terms that we (the more astute of us in the electorate) know are absolutely ridiculous.
Obama has sometimes shown himself to be the antithesis of this and, as such, has drawn quite a following from people that perceive nuance of thought and argument. Now weather he can get us the hell out of Iraq in the best possible scenario is another story.
What is next is the same damn question this post has been about the whole time…..
Is our presence there a detriment to the process of peace and stabilization in that region? Is stability more important to our oil supply or is economic and military control of the region more important?
How you answer these most basic questions will lead you down a number of different paths that have nothing to do with the scoreboard, or winning or losing a currently untenable situation.
McCain does not have the capacity to answer these questions…he is too busy trying to throw touchdowns and bang cheerleaders.
Ok….maybe that last part was name-calling.
Jon,
Well first it is my understanding Hussein had just said he wanted paid in something other than dollars.
Second, I don’t assume Hussein was doing that kind of deal. Lukoil was given a “service contract” which I believe means Hussein actually would continue to own his oil, and pay Lukoil only set fee. I do not believe Lukoil was going to get to sell to whoever they wanted.
Infact, based on the Oil-for-Food scandals, I assume the answer to any question would have been benefit anybody but the U.S. Probably, BNP Paribas (and Obama – relax jk).
The real issue is OPEC as cartel is a working functioning reality – this is not in our interests. Hussein figuring out how to get along with OPEC, again not in our interests.
You can’t say OPEC as cartel isn’t a myth. Before they couldn’t get their shit straight, now they have.
I don’t know why you assume $40 a barrel without the war, but it seems silly. China and India are the main cause of the price of oil. And now, the devalued dollar is the second cause. I’d say futures are the third reason.
Iraq wasn’t a large supplier of oil before. Instability in the region hasn’t done much to reduce production.
Look Jon, Obama expects bases in Iraq for atleast 10 years. There is a reason for that. The contracts the oil companies have now for 65% of Iraq oil are 25-35 years long, and they “own” the oil – pump as much as possible – looks and sounds likely, don’t you think?
Another Jon, I wouldn’t be surprised if McCain very quickly becomes the guy convincing the Iraqis to start governing. I could be wrong, but if I’m the Petraeus (McCain) – I’m telling all the tribal leaders, look guys, you can’t trust the Democrats, they will not protect you, you gotta get your shit together this summer.
Of course this begs the question, well if you are a jihadi – you certainly want to bloody up the troops before the election, so Obama or Hillary wins, dontcha?
Another Jon, to those who fail to appreciate Ian’s post you ascribe “two-dimensionality”. Evidently you consider Ian’s post too multidimensional for us binary simpletons. And yet Ian didn’t post his text only; he also summed it up his thesis in a headline: “WINNING A LOST CAUSE”. Sounds awfully binary to me.
It immediately becomes apparent to the reader of Ian’s essay that he does not mean “winning the lost U.S. military cause in Iraq”. On the contrary, he repeatedly states that that cause already is lost, and in this he sees victory. The actually very simple meaning of the essay, and of the headline, is that the defeat of the Allies in Iraq can spell victory for the Good Guys and their standard bearer, Mr. Obama. So how’s this for “two-dimensionality”, Jon? Because Ian’s thesis can be boiled down to two sides of a coin tossed on behalf of Democrats at the military: “Your loss is our gain.”
Were Ian American, we would do well to call that treason.
Hugh
I have written before that I did not know I was speaking about you at all. I certainly did not know I was, as you say, characterizing your position on Iraq. I have missed your position on Iraq. You don’t know what my position on Iraq is either. I was not mocking you or anything you think. I was and am writing with a light heart. I was trying to write with a light touch because I know how what, easily offended some of us are about these things. Your response to Ian Masters seemed heated to me. Now I see by the post I just read above how deeply offended you were by Ian Masters’ post.
You have misread me. Or maybe I just can’t write. I’m certain of the latter. Perhaps the former is right, as well.
I can understand how that word sensitivity would annoy you. I apologize for using it. I withdraw it. I did not mean to be dismissive of you. Would you accept this substitution- I accept and respect your point of view? I am worn out with all the hostile, aggressive, antagonistic language.
And yet trying to be tactful, to tread lightly, I antagonized you. And got called a lot of names. I’ll try to get better at this. (And while we’re at it, your deal has seemed semi ad hominem. Has it not?)
You don’t like McCain? Why not?
Who do you like?
Have you ever seen or read The Horse’s Mouth?
Have you ever seen Harold and Maude?
What painters do you like?
Do you listen to Howlin Wolf? Do you know his story?
Do you want to continue this conversation?
If so, what about the erosion of the Fourth Amendment? Would you fight our government over that issue?
That is what I was wondering.
What if that non subpoena power were transferred to someone you don’t trust, as I don’t trust the people who have it now? In fact, I don’t trust anyone with that power on any level.
At any rate, that is what I was wondering.
Haven’t seen this mentioned, so I’ll throw this onto the fire:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7299569.stm
Second, I’ve just watched “Dispatches” on the anniversary of Iraq – this is a a documentary style news programme in the UK that tackles topical issues with an investigative slant and more often than not wears its liberal bias on a big shiny badge on its arm. Nonethless, it painted a pretty intense picture. Like the poll cited above, it shows an Iraq divided. It reflects the anger and the hope in equal measure. It highlights the risks that Iraqis take merely trying to live their lives, for in doing so, they must take sides: Sunni, Shiite, American supporter, anti-American and so on. It showed kids playing in the sun and journlists being bused to and from the airport under military guard. It showed up against a wall interrogated by US military about Al Q members using the town as a base – ‘As soon as you are gone, they come back – what are we to do?’ It shows the mayor of a town, struggling to balance the needs of the US military with local militia, and all the while his own brother has been kidnapped by ‘insurgents’. It showed John Bolton arguing that the US has no vested interest in Iraq and that only the Iraqis will decide whether or not it will remain a democratic nation. And it showed the UK’s current foreign secretary, David Miliband, looking distinctly uncomfortable when asked point blank whether the invasion of Iraq did more to swell the ranks of Al Queda than anything else in recent history. And his awkward, half-arsed avoidance really didn’t matter a whole bunch, because one of the plotters who sent a firebomb truck into Glasgow airport last year subsequently admitted to having been recruited specifically because of the UK’s involvement in Iraq.
And finally, it’s a point that has been made, but I think it’s important to reiterate: there was absolutely and without question no reason to invade Iraq. Call it misdirection, call it misadventure, call it manifest destiny, call it whatever you want, but there was absolutely no justification for invasion. And until we all get ourselves out of the country – because like it or not, we’re right there with the soldiers – no-one will never know what Iraq is going to become.
As one man said on Dispatches, as he offered US forces a buffet of his own food supplies, ‘If you leave, come back in three months to collect me in my body bag.’
Sorry to ramble, but it’s late here and this debate is starting to feel a bit too privileged. We need to remind ourselves that people are dying – not just US military, but people, just people. And this is not a war, fighting off an enemy for the greater good – despite what our respective governments want us to believe – this was and is an invasion and occupation. These are not just “insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’, many are just people who see themselved as defending against foreign aggression.
It still feels like a Mexican standoff, despite the Surge. And I’m at a loss to see how anyone can claim to be ‘winning’ or that things are getting better.
John Hurt, I don’t think you need to be so apologetic, not because there might be some misunderstandings here, but because you should stand behind what you write. These issues are personal for most and there’s no getting around it. Its deeply personal for those who know anyone who has lost their lives in this war/occupation and it hurts even more when we can’t get straight answers and the country is going to tank partly because of it. Thats what makes talking about this so damn difficult.
And I’m sick to death of therapy trails. Had I lost the fear of standing up and engaging debate much sooner I wouldn’t have been on the therapy trail for so long. This stuff does not go away when you sit in denial. As the son of a veteran who fought in another great senseless war, I know.
As Howlin’ Wolf once sang at the top of his lungs:
Tell Automatic Slim , tell Razor Totin’ Jim
Tell Butcher Knife Totin’ Annie, tell Fast Talking Fanny
A we gonna pitch a ball, a down to that union hall
We gonna romp and tromp till midnight
We gonna fuss and fight till daylight
We gonna pitch a wang dang doodle all night long
All night long
A couple years ago some guys I know were involved in making and distributing a documentary called, “Voices of Iraq.”
The way the film got made, was that Archie Drury, and ex-marine got 150 DV cameras and handed them out around Iraq to Iraqis and got back like 3-400 hours of tape.
In a scene I remember, a guy is washing his car, and some other guys are yelling at him about wasting water, and he responds “Fuck you, I’m free.”
Some of you remind me of his tormentors. So used to eating it yourselves, you can’t just go about your business, you have to freak that he is going about his. No really, thats why I think you have no problem stealing people’s money (democracy), you feel like you had to make compromises yourself somewhere in your private life. Deep down you seem angry, but wimpy.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/01/22/DDGODATVGU1.DTL
“That’s what it’s really like in Iraq,” says Drury, 32, who attended UC Berkeley after getting out of the Marines. “In concentrated areas, of course, you’re going to have more negativity, like in Fallujah. But if you take the mass of the country, it’s a different view. And for whatever reason, the media is just concentrating on the negative stories. So (Americans) get the idea that it’s worse than it really is. Overall, I don’t think the media has told the story fairly. There are a lot of positive things going on.”
That was 2004. It has gotten better.
——-
Another good friend of mine was a hollywood agent who kinda freaked out and went rogue. He went to Iraq, got embedded with the marines in Fallujah and spent months going out on patrol every night capturing it all on HD. The guy got blown up by an IED, and stayed, went back.
http://patdollard.com/young-americans
——-
What I’ve seen or been told from anyone I know who’s been there, NONE of it is stuff that sounds like you guys talking here. They never say stuff like what gets played out in the NYT (which BTW Jon, is seriously biased – like worse than Fox News – it’d be great if you sourced deeper – more variety).
Guys this is not your Vietnam. Not in purpose. Not in losses. This is not your time to prove you too can change the world. Bush is not your Nixon.
This is a war about resources, which every great nation has had to seek out, discover, develop and bring home. This is about saving the world.
One side beats women and lives in violence. The other is a tragic hero. One side is weak. One side is strong. All for good reason.
You aren’t a sucker to the man if you are “proud” rather than grateful about your country – it means you are a man, the stronger sex. That irrational lungs bursting joy you get when your team, your friends, your nation triumphs, is not blind un-examined ignorant satisfaction, it is how fistfights are won. There have to be fistfights. Each generation doesn’t need its own woodstock, it needs something to defend. You will feel better about yourself if you plant a war garden, than if you flash mob at the cemetery.
France sucks.
—
With that said zestypete, I’m shocked it feels like a Mexican stand-off. The most surly angry rage boys from many Arab nations streamed into Iraq after we booted Hussein, and we killed them. The smart ones had 10th grade educations, the ones left fighting are being tricked into it – they are half retarded.
Tell me something ANYTHING that doesn’t sound like you are wishing for our men to die or for our country to lose. Say for example, “Morgan, if i could snap my fingers, and kill all the jihadis, so our guys could come home, I would.”
Tell me you don’t believe our country needs to be taught a lesson. Shock me. Tell me, you would LOVE to be wrong.
It is time for you hippies to offer up freely true kudos to the ROTC, because you wear the Birkenstock’s, but you come across like you bought them on daddy’s credit card.
Jon,
For you, man, I’d be prepared to violate the historian’s prohibition against indulging in retroactive hypotheticals. I mean, what if T.E. Lawrence had been billeted in muddy Belgium?
So I’d take your challenge but for its hinky odor. Here’s the thing. What if FDR had just left the Japanese to the business of building a pan-Asian common market, instead of objecting to their often attrocious methods. If the President hadn’t cut off their American oil supply, they probably would not have attacked Pearl Harbor, and so we would not have been drawn into war with Japan and, three days later, with Germany and then Italy. We’d have remained peacefully behind our two-ocean moat, and would have continued to climb out of the Great Depression on the strength of our incomparable civilian economy.
Do you not think that Japan, and by extension all Asia, would have been more than happy to engage in liberalized trade with us, and to enjoy the conveniences and good value of American goods? Instead of suffering the blow to our standing of most of the world, which then lay under the influence of the Axis powers, we would have been regarded as peaceful members of the world community. Instead of going to war and possibly getting maimed or even killed, our young people would have been able to stay at home and possibly even earn enough money to buy a new car, since the automobile factories would not have been converted entirely to war production.
Would that not have been a better outcome?
OMG, hugh, you are a ron paul guy huh? The plot moistens. Ok, but you have to listen to this speech:
http://www.turtletrader.com/speech.mp3
Hi John. I understand, and accept that I was wrong to believe that you were blowing off my arguments with diminutives that seemed to add up to calling my position an emotive one. Even in this string there is so much free psychotherapy offered to those of us who support the U.S. footing in Iraq that you would think we’re all a bunch of raving lunatics. For some reason that most ruthless style of ad hominem attack is considered acceptable provided it is cleverly and condescendingly handled, and I find these increasingly common attacks a more chilling sign of inchoate totalitarianism than anything the Bush Administration reportedly has done thus far that impinges our Fourth Amendment freedoms. The identification of God & Country values with insanity must be chilling to watch for veterans of the gulags and mental hospitals of Central and Eastern Europe.
So yes, that sort of treatment, of anyone, does have the power to make me fighting mad. Other public abuses that anger me even more than the Crown Tax on tea: random or blanket strip-searches of public schoolchildren; school site “zero tolerance” policies of any kind; court-ordered parenting classes; racial profiling; the abuse of the Public Figure doctrine as an immunization of a lazy and plagiaristic Press that would far rather publish defamatory rumors than have to research truth claims; the arrogation of press freedoms by “new media” outlets that bear none of the responsibilities and serve none of the functions of the Fourth Estate; the corruption of the scientific enterprise by those exercising offices of public trust; academic dogma imposed in public colleges and universities; musicians who record with their dead relatives; push-polling from campaign telephone banks; commercials before cinematic screenings.
To answer another of your questions, I am middle-aged and have fought the government, from inside and out, from Left, Right and Center, since I was 16. I’ve even fought a few foreign governments, with mixed results. I believe with all my being that all government rests in Satan’s gift.
Painters? I have to get a Chagall fix whenever I’m away too long. I still marvel at the anachronism of El Greco. Rothko’s orange work exerts some kind of telekinesis of which it seems I am a transceiver. I’m infatuated with this masterwork by the contemporary American painter Steven Kaltenbach: http://www.rasehallstudios.com/blog/archives/000970.html .
I don’t know about The Horse’s Mouth, but will look into it. (!) “Harold and Maude”? More times than I’d like, though as I recall it proved, on the first two of my teenage viewings, infallible. I don’t like McCain because the truth gets away from him too often. For reasons I won’t belabor, this is the first election season in which I’ve been able to participate freely in some 20 years. I’m really enjoying the freedoms I enjoy. All I wanted in a candidate was a conservative who was what he said he was. None of the three left standing is who he or she says he or she is, and the disappointment all but makes my chest hurt.
I’ve split my adulthood between politics and academe. And all of it spurious, vane, wasted—of as much use to me now as a prison tattoo. But it does equip me to fight.
Sure I’m alarmed by incremental Big Brotherism. I’m even more alarmed by its general discover only after 9/11. For Pete’s sake, it’s been disabling us for at least half a century.
Me, Ron Paul, Morgan? No, no. But I think that the House is lucky to have him, and that he’s found his place there. Some people belong there who aren’t there, and some who are there pretty obviously don’t belong there. But Dr. Paul is not any of those. I trust he’ll return to the Hill with new influence and renewed energy, and I expect we haven’t heard the last from him, nationally.
No, I’m an exceedingly orthodox and unimaginative conservative, so I’m one of the dinosaurs trying to weather this Ice Age.
BTW Morgan, about three years ago I reached your same conclusion about perceptions of Iraq. My then-wife was embedded there for a time, and despite her surviving an ambush on a Humvee in which she was riding, she said essentially what you say of Iraq. My friends and colleagues, both deactivated and in active duty, say the same.
What happens to The Story, in every sphere of public life, is getting to be of far greater concern than almost any Story itself. Figuratively, the printing presses have become mere playthings.
Hugh-Japanese expansion and the bombing of Pearl Harbor are not the moral equivalents of Saddam’s supposed intentions to dominate the Arab world with his WMD’s. When we are attacked we fight back, but Morgan’s assumption is that we have a right , through our might, to the Iraqi Oil is just wrong. And I would say the average Iraqi would feel that way. Which brings me right back to my British and Hessians on the plains of Yorktown. We have no right to occupy their country. If being an asshole dictator was all it took to justify our “just premptive wars” , when are we going to take on Mr. Putin, or Mr. Mugabe, or the Burmese Generals, etc?
Jon,
We didn’t hit Hussein because he was an asshole, we had to do something, and since he was an asshole, he was the easiest one to hit. His people weren’t fighting us, were they?
But now that the oil leases are done, and Obama will keep bases there for 10 years, are you saying he, your guy, is taking advantage of the Iraqis?
We and the Brits were attacked, almost daily, by obviously calculated and increasingly provocative acts of war by Saddam against our peacekeeping forces enforcing on behalf of the UN the 1991 Peace Treaty, which called notably for the protection of the Kurds from the Hussein regime. In addition to his surface-to-air provocations, Saddam kept cranking up his WMD rhetoric—very much in the same fashion as that of Kim Jong-il when he’s hungry for a feeding.
I’ve also had a sneaking suspicion that a concommitant prospect favoring the attack was not only to put other nations in the region on notice, but to demonstrate to the Russians and especially the Chinese that our military machine, even in its small peacetime instantiation, is capable without resort to nuclear options of overmatching China’s vast conventional standing army.
Thank you for writing, Hugh. I was writing to you as an ally. I view all of us here as allies. We are taking different paths, but we all want to end up the same place. Free. And loved. And loving. Is that not right? I was taken aback by your the ferocity of your reactions. I would have thought we would be in agreement, actually. I don’t know anything about psychotherapy. Haven’t noticed it, but I’ll look around. Now, just for the record, an ad hominem attack, as I understand them from looking around, is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. In all fairness, you have unleashed a barrage of that kind of thing in my direction. Minus the fact part. I don’t give a flying fuck, you didn’t lay a glove on me, but I think it is worth noting. You laid all these obnoxious, unctuous stereotypes over me and then shot them full of holes. You made up arguments for me, force feeding me your words and you were disgusted by them. Your own words. And then claimed I was setting up straw men. Physician heal thyself. And I mean that in a good way. I respect your stuff, whatever the fuck you want to call it. I’m not hung up on any of that. I’m not uptight. I have a really great life and have had for a very long time. I am deeply grateful for it. It has been a life full of love and imagination and creativity. I have been given that life by grace and by nothing else. I’m sorry that your life has been to you spurious, vain, and wasted. I’m certain you are wrong about that in the absolute. You have a powerful intellect. That kind of thing can be our worst enemy. Our greatest strengths are our worst weaknesses. We in this country, and that would, I think, make it a world wide phenomenon, externalize the things we hate and fear most in ourselves. We seem to need, and I use that word in the weakest sense, enemies. If we don’t have a real enemy, we invent him. I refuse to be your enemy. And that is not psycho anything. I see very clearly that that phenomenon is leading, in fact has led, to something much more pervasive than Big Brotherism. Big Brother is now quaint. I long for good old Big Brother. If Orwell could have imagined this electronic age it would have fried his synapses into a tostito to dip into that Ayn Rand salsa. I brought up Harold and Maude, because she is what we need right now. She is not afraid of death. She has nothing to lose. She is not careful. She is full of life. I would ask you with whatever small degree of humility I can muster and as your ally to be careless. You will make the world a better place.
maude = john mccain
old, but young men love him
doesn’t need expensive things
talks till the cows come home
maverick, contrarian, determined
—
would you two please stop beating the ayn rand as food item meme? it is like watching someone lick my grandma.
Well fair enough, John! If ever I should undertake again to feed your words back to you, I promise to try not to smuggle into your mouth any words of my own! In my previous post addressed to you, I was not describing you, by the way, but a kind of stigmatization phenomenon that creeps me out, a phenomenon in evidence even in this civil and cerebral House of Jon. And yeah, it alone is scarier than Orwell’s devices, and bears a closer resemblance to Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which of course Mr. Orwell didn’t live to see. But the surveillance technology, from Orwell’s two-way wallscreens to NSA’s satellite intercepts, to me isn’t nearly as frightening as the human engineering. Wouldn’t you agree? I seem to remember that when Gandhi was asked what caused him the greatest sadness, he replied, “The hardness of heart of the well educated.” The Dalai Lama said much the same thing at Emory University about seven weeks ago. Big Brother is merely quaint now, as you say, because now we have something infinitely more disabling: Big Mother. (Ooh, shades of Maude again?) Big Mother wants to get the children younger and younger, and never let go of them until their minds are clean, as Orwell put it. And you know what happens then.
I appreciate your grace-ful gratitude for your gifts, and your kind words for whatever mine may be. I would be ungrateful in turn were I not to mention that, by grace, I’ve been given an ineffable opportunity to begin my life—every department of it—anew. And consequently many things that once were old to me, now are new and fresh. Like tiny enchantments inhering and consubstantiating betwixt bits of plainsong prose. As it were a dance upon the grave of nihilism.
Hugh
I would agree. With all you say in this post. Deeply. And thank you, thank you for the wonderful news of your new life.
And for sending me to the dictionary.
Never mind the meltdown on Wall Street. Briteny Spears dines with Mel Gibson.
Blessings
JH
And Morgan
Shut the fuck up. Your gadfly tip is emphysemic.
Sincerely
John Hurt
John, you hurt mah feelinz.
Did you mean “trip”? I mispel alot so I understand if so. And do you really see me as a gadfly? And if so, why curse? (You must really not like gadflies). Do you think I don’t take you seriously? “Emphysemic” is a “good” descriptive. Kudos. Excellent icing at the bottom of this cake!
I meant tip. T-I-P. Tip.
Now, please continue not to address me until making me laugh.
Morgan
“Tell me something ANYTHING that doesn’t sound like you are wishing for our men to die or for our country to lose.”
I do not want any more people to die on either side of the line, if at all possible (which is why I want the troops to get out, slowly if necessary, faster if the generals think wise, but they must establish an agreed departure scenario so that everyone can move on to the next stage, which is where the real healing (or more hurt) will happen. And like I said, I do not believe there is a “win” scenario here (and we all know your position on this, so no need to repeat).
> ‘Say for example, “Morgan, if i could snap my fingers, and kill all the jihadis, so our guys could come home, I would.”’
This suggests that ‘killing all the jihadis’ is all that is involved. That’s way too simplistic and doesn’t even begin to address the complex internecine fighting that is going on and will continue to develop after we go.
> ‘Tell me you don’t believe our country needs to be taught a lesson. Shock me. Tell me, you would LOVE to be wrong.’
I think that the American people are experiencing one of the most significant lessons they’ve ever been through right now. That’s not a bad thing, nor is it a case of schadenfreude on my part.
> ‘It is time for you hippies to offer up freely true kudos to the ROTC, because you wear the Birkenstock’s, but you come across like you bought them on daddy’s credit card.’
Can’t speak for the rest of the board, but I for one am no hippy, trust me. I spent most of my youth in steel toed combats and a bastardised version of a mohawk. I suppose I’m just waiting for someone in power to at least be honest about what it is their trying to achieve, even if it is all about oil, long-term resources etc as you suggest. If Bush stood up and said, ‘Y’know whut? Iraq was all about taking control of the most important part of our supply chain’, then at least he would have the right to claim honesty. Instead he dips it in the same misleading bullshit we’ve been fed for so many years: for the greater good, fighting America’s enemies, keeping the dogs at bay so your children can sleep safe at night, spreading democracy, etc etc.
Trouble is, if this is all about resources, the price is too high. And it can never be repaid, no matter how cheap the barrel or how steady the supply.
Morgan-Don’t just keep repeating the same tropes. I agree with John Hurt. It gets boring. Try to move towards some common ground in a constructive fashion. Your irony (about American power, Cartels, etc) is wearing thin. I can hear you thinking before you post–”This will get them riled up.”
BTW-OPEC has not worked effectively as a cartel in years. The Iranians and the Venezuelans do whatever they want and cheat on the production caps. Saudi Arabia no longer has the spare capacity to control prices. Its those 600,000 new cars per month in China that are driving the oil truck now.
Now, Hugh, with your permission, I would like to add a little detail to your Big Mother construct. I would say that the Clinton administration had elements of Big Mother- I can feel your pain and all of that nurturing, empathetic type talk. Under this last group, however, I would say we have been very much under the heel of an extremely stern Big Father. I would say perhaps the most helpful handle would be Big Parent, or maybe Power Parent if we want to keep the alliteration. “I will take care of you. I will keep you safe. Children are to be seen and not heard. Now go to your room.” Can I get a witness?
You know, not that long ago, capitalism was discredited, figuratively and literally, world wide. We are approaching another such time. I don’t believe it is inevitable, but we are at a precipice. And Power Parent is not now just saying go to your room. He is saying, “We Power Parents are going to gorge on the fatted calf, but there is not enough for you children. You have been bad children. You have behaved irresponsibly. You have eaten too much. So go to your room without any dinner.” Except there is no room.
I heard someone with a southern accent, Ron Paul maybe, say on BBC radio last night that the executives and directors of the investment banking industry have taken three hundred billion dollars out of that industry in salaries and bonuses in the last some short period of time. Year? Is that possible? Maybe five years. We capitalists had better begin to behave responsibly. I don’t think the children are going to put up with this much longer.
Yeah, John, I remember. And I agree that it wasn’t long ago that capitalism was busily discredited, though I don’t recall the phenemenon being fully worldwide. It seems to me that that phenom reached its zenith in the years in which Barack Obama received his higher education. Then, quite suddenly, and to the utter surprise of all but a few of us academicians, it was another theoretical economic construct that was discredited, worldwide.
I’ll never forget the day the Berlin Wall came down. My old college roommate, reunited at the Wall that day with his East German cousin, thought to call me at my office in the States. “Do you hear that?” he asked, as he held out the streetside pay phone. “What is that?” I asked back, referring to the roar. “You’re missing the biggest damn party in THE WORLD!” I put him on speakerphone and asked the secretary to run Falcon’s and his cousin’s thougtful and joyous telephone call over the intercom to the rest of my office complex. No one later complained of the interruption; on the contrary!
When the call from Berlin ended I drove from my office in a domestic policy think tank to my other office, in a foreign policy think tank, and there I found my colleagues gathered around the same television, in the office of the Director’s Administrative Assistant.
As long as I live I’ll remember how astonished and sheepish were those muttering TV watchers, with three exceptions: the two of them who were Soviet foreign intelligence officers attached to our research house, and a young Czechoslovakia expert, a freshly minted Ph.D. and later close friend of your Texan family. The Russian spooks no doubt both were already thinking of operationalizing their plans to naturalize in the U.S.; both later did so. The young scholar had forecast that very event in a paper delivered to us many months before. The rest of the lost scholarly souls looked for all the world as if they had no idea where their next pot of soft money would come from, what with Communism giving up the ghost. And some of them muttered as much.
This story of mine did not occur in Los Angeles. Nonetheless, how soon USC forgets, eh? How soon we all forget.
You have had one interesting life. I was thinking about the Thirties, but thank you for evoking that extraordinary time when the revolution *was* televised. Totally mind blowing. Communism was a horse and buggy doctrine. It never had a chance in the space age. Let’s not become some version of that kind of deal.
By the way, that Steven Kaltenbach painting is intense.
I had a chance to buy it once, when it was in a private collection. In a sense I lost it to divorce, as I did most of the art we owned. Evidently the museum in which it is now housed is raising money for a new wing in which it will hold pride of place. I understand that it took Professor Kaltenbach something like 7 years to complete. It’s a full-blown knock-out, and surely worthy of a brick-and-mortar salute. Conceptual pieces aside, I really like, right now, either extremely efficient, almost minimalist, pieces, or else heavily worked, over-worried, encrusted ones almost spilling into the Busy Assemblage category. As I look to art for release from the ambient postmod irony of e.g. the increasingly unfunny late-night snidefests, I’m not big on artists who peddle rubber chickens as though they were inside jokes. Give me a competent little nude in Conte crayon, thank you, or a well made Catskill quilt. Better yet, give me a wrapped jetty, and spare the wrapper.
Horse and buggy, John. Well. Yes, but also a Scientism reaching even into grandiose metaphysics, the Church of Dialectical Materialism. Remember when we used to tweak the government about NASA or butter? What was the USSR’s excuse for rockets over bread? Soviet Tang? Mylarski? Gee, dyathink maybe they had a slight inability to put science in perspective? Sheesh.
So Ivan had sufficient sophistication to manage a moon program, and satellite and ICBM programs. Their medical research apparatus also was formidable, of course. So was their surveillance technology—and their use of it—sophisticated as well as crude.
But again, when it comes to the latest styles in totalitarian tech, in recent seasons the laurels have all gone to the Americans, with their wonderfully insidious and ever-inventive trend-setting fashions in human engineering. Year in and year out, a Champagne toast to the Dr. Yankensteins of the 21st Century! For where would instrumentalist couture be without the tele-eugenic campaigns of a Planned Parenthood or a Rob Reiner? If you can’t get ‘em when they’re young, nip ‘em in the bud!
That’s why I genderized the Orwellianism into Big Mother, John. It’s the Judgment of Solomon thing: which is the ontological Mother? That, and because “educatio” is Latin for breast feeding. The very kind Mr. Reiner should stick that in his mouth and suck it. It would do him some good.
Have you ever been to the Cosmonautics Museum in Moscow? The Church of Our Lady the Spacesuit. It is a fantastic place.
Did you see the Georgian movie, Monanieba, in English- Repentance? 1984. I would think that would be right up your street. I loved that movie. There is an incredible scene where some elaborate, probably useless but still functioning mechanical contraption is set up in the middle of a beautiful old, abandoned Greek Orthodox church with an ancient mural on the wall of Adam, Eve, and the Serpent in the Garden of Eden while some jazz song, I think “What Makes Little Boy Blue?” plays behind a voice over of a radio broadcast of Albert Einstein speaking.
Tele-eugenics. Did you coin that term? Just now?
No, I haven’t been to Moscow (Vladivostok and Prague were our places of concern), but for years I wanted to go specifically to see the deconsecrated churches turned into museums. I just thought somehow that would serve as some kind of postmodern memento mori; the kind of chill that, once it sets in, stays set; a religious democrat’s exercise in mortification of the flesh. That must sound weird, but truly that’s why I wanted to go. Actually I was slated to go when Gorby gave up the Space Ghost.
Thanks for the film tip. I’ll look it up. That scene sounds like one helluva cinematic pentimento layered in celluloid over a palimpsest church. One sometimes comes across the walking wounded of that time, Russian immigrants who themselves seems to answer to your description of that scene, their minds and souls a jumble of sacred profanations. “We understand Christianity,” the Kanaka chieftan supposedly told the tourist Mark Twain, “We have eaten the missionaries.”
Years ago, when I hung out with the intrigue set, I knew an Israeli intelligence officer posted as cultural attache to the embassy in Amsterdam. His cover was to restore and curate the historic synagogues in old Amsterdam that had been desecrated and stripped by the Germans and had lain vacant and derelict since the War. Needless to say, he had no training in e.g. curation, museum education, Judaica, etc. I asked him why a synagogue would need a “curator” anyway. He said that the structures were to be converted into a campus of museum buildings commemorating the history of Dutch Jewry. I must’ve been jet-lagged, because I remember being nauseated and having to excuse myself, returning later and apologizing and resuming the conversation. There simply wasn’t any postwar demand for a working synagogue, he explained quite equably. The Nazis had done their job.
And so here were the Israelis, in a sense finishing that job in Soviet fashion. Obituary: “God is dead. In lieu of flowers, send museums fashioned from churches and synagogues.” But in truth they were, aside from my friend’s other brief, waging a subtle competition against a cross-town rival, the Ann Frank Museum. Holland soft pedals its record of ultra-efficient wartime collaboration. It in fact conceals that record with true tales of the Resistance, and with the fig leaf of Miss Frank. (As they say in Hollywood, a good story is hard to come by.) To this, Israel thought to respond with what I’m sure is today the most vigorously tendentious illustration of why there is no such thing as neutral or objective curation.
For decades now I’ve wanted to turn that tactic against those who jonz for power so bad that they suck it out of us—even out of the youngest and weakest among us—by reifying us as so many “human resources” whose use they predetermine. I’m sure there are plenty of state mental hospitals that ought to be given the Soviet treatment. Certain of the examination rooms of Tuskegee would do nicely too. And of course a conceptual artist like Kaltenbach could always exhibit a nice installation featuring a mid-century American homeroom with all the fittings, each piece in the collection laminated and labeled with learned explanations of the quaint rituals that once took place in such settings. Imagine the glossy catalogue available at the museum store…
Oh. Tele-eugenics. Copyright’s all yours. I got a million of ‘em. I’ll be performing here all week.
Hugh
The president had this to say today:
“Defeating this enemy in Iraq will make it less likely we will face this enemy here at home.”
What’s the matter with this picture?
I’m out for the day. Let’s talk about this later.
JH
That’s the “tar baby” strategem. Draw them in and kill them there, not here. It’s part of our war rationale. Whether the strategem was also part of our causus belli, or was instead an unanticipated battlefield opportunity or even a justification in retrospect, is another question, and to me an interesting one. You?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120588186774146747.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries
brings a new phrase:
“arab radicalism”
and a great quote:
“In the past five years, the passion has drained out of the war’s defenders and critics alike. Our soldiers and envoys are there, but the public at home has moved onto other concerns. Still, the public is willing to grant this expedition time, and that’s for the good. There is no taste in this country for imperial burdens and acquisitions in distant lands. But Americans also know that the lands and sea lanes of the Persian Gulf are too vital to be left to mayhem and petty tyrants.”
I only have a minute, but I say kill them here first.
More later.
Morgan, I’m curious to know what you made of Barack’s speech. Jon posted on it today from flowery Yosemite, the braggart.
John, are we that good? Maybe we are. But then, how would we know?
As a private citizen, I put much more into the entertainment value I derive from politics. I like/love scandals – Haggard, Clinton, whatever, if you don’t have nice to say, broadcast it.
I think of our elected officials as comprised of a bunch of people far beyond their station. Hillary, if she did real work, would be like the regional manager of maybe 3 states worth of Wal-Marts (still a great job). Maybe she’d own 12 Taco Bells. Be partner in a medium sized law firm. She’d never be Bill Gates.
I view her (“her” as representing the raw base instinct – the true cause – of most politicians) thus as a thief. I think almost anyone can illegitimately better their station in life if they adopt the title “community organizer” or whatever pre-politicians call themselves. I find it to be pathetic. I think it is taking candy from a baby (but now much harder because of deficits) – it is easy to rile up those with less, promise them more, and steal from someone else, to give your followers something, and try and get elected, all really so you personally gain advantage/power in relation to your betters – Bill Gates.
Granted for years, there was an upside to voting for a politician (1913-1979). It was all so new and fresh, voting yourself free stuff. But I think we’ve reached a market equilibrium where it is impossible to steal more than 40% of a man’s money without harming the fabric of his work, and that is a VERY successful man. The rest of the debate is now tax schedule. 30% for how much income? 20% for how much? All the while either pissing off voters or making them happy.
This means there is a real quantifiable knowable amount of money the politicians can steal (total taxes) to buy votes, before the love of work and enterprise, held by the talented begins to deflate. This also means, you can’t cut too deep in the voter ranks (tax the middle class), or you actually lose votes in your theft sales pitch.
Dems love to complain that the American Dream causes poor people to vote like they themselves someday might be rich. They say this like it is a delusion. It isn’t of course, but forget that discussion – ultimately, the amercian dream cuts into the total amount politicians can extract. Which is politicians fundamental evil in a nutshell, eventually they have to want to kill the American Dream, or atleast dial it down.
In no world I believe in is Hillary Clinton supposed to exist in our minds-eye more than Bill Gates, Thomas Edison, Peekaboo Street, Tim Dorsey, etc. We aren’t supposed to know the name Hillary Clinton. She is unworthy (based on her talents) of consistent national attention. Now if she instead was being quoted every once in a while in a trade rag for the cosmetics industry – that’s about how much attention she’d garner of ours, without the theft.
Great men “as politicians” shouldn’t exist. Without war a foot, the only reason we’d spend time thinking about them, is because someone’s money/free stuff is on the table – and it might be yours.
—
In my business life, I worry that Obama didn’t put his best foot forward.
If I were him, I’d have dragged Rev. Wright out, and made him say Obama’s speech. Internally, there were a few inconsistencies, but to me the main one is this:
Obama is a great speaker. Rev. Wright is his family. Rev. Wright believes in him. Why can’t Rev. Wright come out and say, “the crap I said, when I said it, I NEVER thought you white people would EVER listen to Barrack. And I was totally wrong. Seeing him loved this way, by so many whites, makes my heart sing, and makes me ashamed for my years of preaching hate, because I know my words did not make Obama, he was made in spite of them, I have hindered his progress, and it will NEVER happen again.”
Why can’t he do that? Look, it isn’t enough to forgive the last generation their sins. We have to tell them, to be a true warrior in your life, you must do two things:
1) You must fight the good fight.
2) You must be in parades. You must let others acknowledge that you WON the war. Things are better because of you.
Obama said exactly this in his speech. The inconsistency, is that if Obama is a good leader, how come he is giving us this speech to forgive Rev. Wright, and not giving Rev. Wright this speech, to make him apologize to us?
Hugh
We better be. We better be state of the art as a motherfucker.
“I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.”
GWB
That sounds unvaguely familiar.
The novel’s title, its terms and its language (Newspeak), and its author’s surname are bywords for personal privacy lost to national state security.
A: “Grundrisse”
Morgan, I’m with you on keeping politicians in a perspective they perforce cannot have, and I esp. appreciate your peculiar way of expressing how they ought rightly to be anonymous in that being a politician is not an ontological category. In better days we called that the ideal of the Citizen Politician. (Lincoln, BTW, resented the fairly dishonest ways in which the patrician Jefferson had passed himself off as one.) But the pols are not after money, per se, Morgan. Believe me. Which brings the story to…
John, Power. Your post and Morgan’s both. It’s Power. With a capital “P” and that rhymes with “T” and that stands for Trouble. Your powerfully succinct encapsulation of Orwell’s ’84: it’s accurate of course, as far as it goes. But where does it lead, in Orwell’s creation? The privacy is not stolen for the SAKE of national state security, but rather in the NAME of nss, to consolidate and legitimate Power. The terrible climactic line of Orwell’s book is a revelation of mankind’s apocalyptic powerlust. See, Morgan has the politicians—men and women empowered with office—as profiteers. But to almost all of them, from City Council on up, it’s the Power of Pee. (Squared or cubed or sliced or julienned, or whatever slogans the flacks would sell us to disguise the grinding sweaty rough-sexy nakedness of that lust.)
I saw it in Mr. Obama’s face as he lied into the plexiscreens day before yesterday. I saw it in McCain’s when he last visited my town to grace us with his rehearsed lies. I see it errupting on Hillary’s latest face. Oh, the things they do for Power! Still, I never saw it on candidate Paul’s face, nor on candidate Giuliani’s. I never saw it on Bill Bradley’s face, or on George McGovern’s or Mo Udall’s. Never saw it on Ronald Reagan’s, or Shirley Chisholm’s, or Jesse Ventura’s or Kinky Friedman’s for that matter. (To say nothing of candidate Paulsen.)
What is going on here? Must we, in the end, love Big Brother?
Hugh, grant me this correction, I didn’t mean money. I meant power. I’m not against power, it just should be based on money and now celebrity (which is also money).
My “who Hillary would be” without theft/politics, is meant to be a description of the amount of power she would hold, based on her actual talents, if the game of “democracy, not a republic” wasn’t afoot. If there wasn’t a system of federal politics that takes say 40% or less of everyone’s money – there would be no power for her to achieve.
When I say we wouldn’t know of her, I don’t mean our politicans would be anonymous (that’d eb nice too) I mean that she has no skill set, that would get her beyond an upper middle class life in Arkansas.
When politics affords it’s practitioners a better life, more money, more “power” than they would have without politics, that is where they go. All the while claiming to be selfless.
——-
That’s why I say deficits trump democracy. It will not take too many election cycles before the voters recognize they never get any of the new shiney things they are promised when they vote.
I’m not kidding about being able to determine the exact amount that can be extracted from the top %, before the golden goose is killed, and working down from there. The total maximum amount of theft that can occur from the rich-upper-middle class to secure the votes of the middle-lower-poor, is knowable.
Identifying that dollar number would solve so many disagreements. Immediately the poor would have great reason to hate deficits spending, because they would get less next year (paying off the interest). All willful attempts to take more than that number, would prove there was less to steal the following year (less productio/investment by the rich). We could actually automate and de-centralize the theft, giving the poor each theft vouchers they could present to rich people and the rich would have to turn in a certain number of theft vouchers at the end of each year – or be robbed to the correct amount, maybe with a 5% spiff if they make good before their end of year robbing.
This would also more plainly determine how we feel about one another. Hi I’m X, and I’m a thief. Hi, I’m Y and I just got robbed. Looking in the mirror and saying that to one’s self – without all the rah, rah would only lead to fine and better developments in our economy.
People who are hungry will steal bread. We can forgive that certainly, but the best way to help them is to still call it theft.
That is the only newspeak we must fix. It all flows from there.
In your description, Morgan, I believe I recognize OUR system of the past 75 years, but there’s more to power-hoarding than bread. And so it has been in this place at other times, and at this time in other places.
Not just bread but also, especially without bread, circuses can do nicely of course. Alternatively, in many cases you can swing the Proles with a high-minded challenge (this is what I ask of YOU) that works even better than the Santa Claus schtick. Then there’s Orwell’s Two-Minute Hate, which seems to have worked well for Mssrs. Jeremiah Wright and John Hagee. (For about thirty years there the Japanese were quite good at it too.) But in the fullness of Liberal Time, once every person in society has been either stigmatized and marginalized or else has had the scope of his imagination safely enschooled, then the Peeps—especially the most enschooled ones—basically run on Auto.
Hence the speeches can just run accordingly on a kind of Pavlovian Auto. Something like that old stand-by, the Boxer Two-Step:
“This ______ [fill in issue] is not about RED BUTTON. It’s not about RED BUTTON. It’s not even about RED BUTTON, RED BUTTON or RED BUTTON. It’s about GREEN BUTTON. It’s about GREEN BUTTON. And above all, it’s about GREEN BUTTON. That’s what this ______ is about.”
On the Hill, it’s the village idiots of the nation’s fever swamp who favor this sort of blah-blah-blah-pushbutton, blah-blah-blah-pushbutton. So, one finds Pelosi steeped in this mindless ritual, her eyes on AutoPie a lot. Dennis Kucinich wouldn’t know what to do without it, a lobotomized mind addressing something less than the latest series of robots. It’s not at all limited to Democrats, of course, because everyone in America, except for the early dropouts, is enschooled to await his or her fish-feeding. So not only the idiots, but sometimes even the bright students, dish it. Even educated fleas do it.
Such as Barack Obama.
WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
You see something in Obama’s face that I don’t see. I believe he is honest. I believe his election will confound the Muslims- that his election will destroy their narrative. Screaming Jay Hawkins eradicates Osama Bin Laden. Completely annihilates him.
Azmanon wrote that I should stand behind what I write, and I would like to say that he, of course, is right, and I do. Then he quoted a little Wang Dang Doodle. That absolutely destroys all of this. That is stuff for the ages. I’m not exactly sure what all of this is for. But Howlin Wolf is more of that which keeps me breathing. Nothing any of these politicians says or does comes close. Until Obama. I mean, he doesn’t come close either, but he is light years closer than any of these other political types in my lifetime.
Last year, my girlfriend and I happened to be in the national swamp on Memorial Day. About midnight, we decided to go over and walk around the monuments. It was staggering. Wandering around in the sweltering heat reading the words of our past leaders and visiting the memorials for our veterans was flat out mind blowing. Every one of them. The last one we got to was the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial, and somehow, after hours of deep emotions, that one just brought me to my knees. Maybe it is because he is the closest to us, but to read his words, the great distance we have fallen since then became almost too painful to take. The menial things these guys say these days are meaningless foam from the mouth. Except Obama. I heard some of that stuff from him the other morning. He has not had to rise to the challenge the way that Roosevelt or Lincoln or the others did. But if he is elected, he will have to, and I believe he will. He is smart. That same kind of smart. He has scope. He is soulful.
America doesn’t need change. America needs to change.
Yunno I want so badly for that to be true, John, that I open myself up for obvious ridicule. (“Make me believe!”) But seriously, keep selling me on it, I might buy. Still, the guy can lie about anything, flawlessly. I just hope he’s in the rare political habit of choosing not to.
Does he know who he is? If so, is he comfortable telling us how he came under the wings of one adoring Marxist tutor after another, for more than 30 years? Because a lot of us who were there, ain’t done that. And are glad we didn’t take that shortcut. What’s his excuse, that his grandmother made him do it?
OMG.
This is the thing of the past. It is not to be excused. Not in Obama’s preacher, not in FDR, not in any history book.
None of the past is a good as we are today. We are smarter. We are more intelligent. We are funnier. We are more open. We are more evolved. We are healthier. We have more free time. We live longer. We run faster. We sing and dance better. All of it. And tomorrow will be better than us.
We can be thankful for the past, like we are thankful towards our old crazy uncle.
But be sure, when we are the old crazy uncle – our children and their grandchildren, will say, PLEASE for my uncle for railing against corporate interests. Please forgive him for screaming that we need nationalized healthcare, or need protective trade measures. He still thinks it is ok to rob from the rich, back in his day, that’s how they got elected.
No one would choose to live back then, it would suck. And we do no need to convince ourselves that our struggles matter more or less than theirs. If we lived back then, we’d do as good or better.
We do not have such trying times, there aren’t any giant things to fix, our path is a positive one, this was as much so with Clinton (Bill), as our current Bush. It is a trend that started with Reagan, and it is a downward slope towards a less and less and less powerful government – will have some hills and valleys, but the long term looksy – just keeps going down.
And that’s a positive thing. Give thanks.
“It is no secret to the Muslim nation that the nearest battlefield of jihad to support and assist our fellow Palestinians is Iraq.”
New tape from Bin Laden? (I still think he’s dead):
http://www.breitbart.tv/html/65914.html
Hugh
I cannot imagine that anyone would ridicule you. You are a serious man.
JH
“A young writer said to me, ‘We are better than the old writers because we know so much more than they,’ to which I replied, ‘Yes, and they are exactly what we know.’” TS Elliot
I go away for a second and it turns into an Obama conversation. Here is a good article about Obama’s economic policy and its fundamental basis.
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=4d40a39e-8f57-4054-bd99-94bc9d19be1a
This Marxist tutulage argument is silly. I used to masterbate with my left hand.
“Does he know who he is?”
Hugh
That is a good question. I have read both of his books and spent a fair amount of time with him and I say, yes. His books, by the way, are great.
Just for starters, he is the only one out there with any upside potential at all. Ms. Clinton’s got nothing to say at all next to Obama. Kenny G vs Coltrane. And as far as I’m concerned, McCain can’t even get a note. So at the very least I’m stuck. But I like this guy. A lot. It is the first vote I am going to cast happily and with my whole heart in my life.
I forgot to say that the upside potential with Obama is mind blowing. He is the most powerful lever in the world to deal with these fundamentalist criminals. If I were he, I would take a page out of Reagan’s playbook, and the day after the election, I would begin to talk with Pakistan to turn over Bin Laden the day after the inauguration. No Muslim country would ever be able to make a deal with Crusader Bush, but they would be able to with Barack Hussein Obama. Especially since they already know that whether they make a deal or not, he is going to torch the motherfucker. This is business.
See, John, now you’re gettin’ to me. The Kenny G vs ‘Trane thing. Damn. My ex and I used to call the former “The Snake Charmer”. The excerpt he read Tuesday was both Afro-centric and narcissistic, and I have no frigging idea why he chose to read it, except that it flowed~~~so pretty. It was one of the weirdest contortions of Christianity I’ve heard since Boff. When it comes to casting for Elmer Gantry, go for Huckabee every time. Obama for Prostitute, maybe.
Another Jon, it’s no joke, and it’ll come out. It’s consistent, unbroken, and as up-to-date as last week. And it’s not like Mandela and the ANC taking guns off the CP; not like Churchill shaking Stalin by the tail; not like Barack ran off and joined the Lincoln Brigade. Nope. It’s not hyphenated anything; it’s flat-out unmistakable, doctrinaire shit. Only way to hyphenate it is with the now faddish prefix Neo-, as in the Neo-Marxists with whom Jeremiah Wright ran for years.
What is this? So a bunch of nostalgic old New Lefties teach the sophomores how to do homefront battlefield reenactments because an embarrassingly inarticulate Republican with a Texas accent loosed the very dogs of war they thought they’d trained not to pee on the carpets, so now all of a sudden everybody’s seized with 1989 aphasia, like the Year that Never Happened? For what, so we can go back to the days when we academic elites were the Go To hierarchs with the secrets to the Kingdom of Man? IT DOESN’T WORK! IT DOES MORE HARM THAN GOOD! IT CAUSED DEATH AND SUFFERING ON AN UNIMAGINABLE SCALE!
What is Barack’s excuse for not having disabused himself, with either hand?
To go back to Iraq, when I wrote earlier that in some people’s view we were lied into war, you wrote you didn’t remember it that way. I recall the same thing you do. I also recall a lot of other things.
Remember that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the September 11 attacks?
That Saddam Hussein was allied with Osama Bin Laden?
Remember that Iraq was an imminent threat to the US?
Remember for months we heard about mushroom clouds?
Remember when President Bush and Secretary Powell repeatedly claimed they had evidence that Iraq attempted to buy 500 tons of uranium oxide from Niger?
Remember for months we heard about centrifuges, magnets, mobile biological weapons labs, that Iraq had a growing fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be used for missions targeting the United States?
Remember for months we heard about weapons of mass destruction? 
Colin Powell at the UN holding up a tube of, what was that again?
Remember that the war would be over in weeks not months?
That it would cost 60 billion dollars?
That the Iraqis would be throwing flowers at our feet?
None of that was true.
When I was talking about lies, that is what I was talking about- the part that none of it was true.
“I don’t believe anyone that I know in the administration ever said that Iraq had nuclear weapons.” —Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, at a hearing of the Senate’s appropriations subcommittee on defense, May 14, 2003
“We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” —Vice President Dick Cheney on NBC’s Meet the Press, March 16, 2003
There. That’s what I was talking about.
So yes, I think the question of whether the Tar Baby stratagem was part of our casus belli, or was instead an unanticipated battlefield opportunity or even a justification in retrospect, is a very interesting one. There are other options, as well. I haven’t heard any of our military voice that strategem, although they may have. (Nor have I heard them voice or second the “Bring em on” stratagem.)
We are in a conflict without borders. We are not fighting the Cold War, yet Cold Warriors initiated and have been in charge of this action. Has this administration not been Nixon Redux?
Equivocation has entered the president’s Newspeak. Meeting the enemy has been up/downgraded to “less likely”. Perhaps he is, at this late date, trying to find his voice. But the tactic, however diminished, remains. In this hand I have this enemy; in this hand I have this enemy. I’m going to put my hands behind my back…
As much as anything, the war appears to about reputation, and not the reputation of the United States.
I remember 1989. It was a very good year. The year that modern life outstripped the Soviet Union.
I don’t think there is any way to argue that it is possible to organize the people of this world around the principles of Karl Marx. It is completely impossible that the three hundred million people of this country be organized so. I do think it is semi possible that a significant number of the almost two billion Muslims in the world could be organized around some policy based on hatred of the Crusaders.
(The cat is out of the bag. People world wide know how much we use.)
How is it that you are able to so finely calibrate the deception and lust for power on Obama’s face through a television camera lens and leave out the lies above and all the (millions of) permutations of those lies that have followed?
JH,
I don’t remember it that way.
I remember hearing it was Saudis on those planes and thinking to myself, “Jesus Christ, too much money unearned, and they couldn’t keep their people together. If their receipts had gone to build an economy, and those kids had jobs, we wouldn’t have to deal with this.”
JH, remember you hear me saying it now, just so years later, you don’t say no one told you so – permanent bases in Iraq, atleast 10 years (with Obama), 65%+ of Iraq’s oil fields controlled by western companies, maximum production, break the back of OPEC. That’s the plan. You have now been told.
Were we smart to think Iraq had mustard gas / chemical weapons? Yes. Why? Because they had mustard gas before. Don’t be dumb. A guy has a gun, last time you saw him, you assume he has a gun now. Period. You don’t listen to Hans Blix.
Should we have been worried about Hussein unleashing an attack on us? Should we have worried about him helping out a pissed-off expat Saudi in his next effort?
Now heres what I remember back then, and I know you do too, most everybody wanted to go hit back, to generally lash out, just strike against “them” one of our known enemies. To show “them” our own fury.
This wasn’t manufactured consent, this was politicians generally representing the will and style of our people. We elect leaders who have the same attitudes we have. The only reason Obama was giving his 2002 speech, is that his electorate was Wright’s “chickens coming home” churchgoers.
We also like the death penalty. Thats who we are. I’m from mid-American town in Ohio, and in 2001-2, people were not being manipulated by the White House, they were SCREAMING that we had to do something, and the people they elected, are their kind of people, they pretty much think the same kind of thing. The media runing waving flags covering the war, were not manipulating us, they were serving up exactly what the customer ordered.
Dear Morgan
You have addressed me without having made me laugh. Perhaps that will never happen. I am, however, going to respond to you because even though you have disappointed me, I am, nevertheless, very fond of you.
[I remember hearing it was Saudis on those planes and thinking to myself, “Jesus Christ, too much money unearned, and they couldn’t keep their people together. If their receipts had gone to build an economy, and those kids had jobs, we wouldn’t have to deal with this.”]
That sounds like Jim Wallis. I agree. If we want to overcome this battle of ideas, this intellectual, spiritual malaria, we have to drain the swamp.
[JH, remember you hear me saying it now, just so years later, you don’t say no one told you so - permanent bases in Iraq, at least 10 years (with Obama), 65%+ of Iraq’s oil fields controlled by western companies, maximum production, break the back of OPEC. That’s the plan. You have now been told.]
We have all been told that many, many times. In fact, we have been told that by you many times on this very blog. I don’t see how that is avoidable. Nor do I have a particular opinion about any of that. (You think *we* can break the back of OPEC? Three hundred million US? One point three billion Chinese? One point one billion Indians?) But, I hear your prophecy, and I tremble. (I’m joking around with you, Morgan, but if you weren’t blowing so damn hard, it would not be possible, or even any fun.)
[Were we smart to think Iraq had mustard gas / chemical weapons? Yes. Why? Because they had mustard gas before. Don’t be dumb. A guy has a gun, last time you saw him, you assume he has a gun now. Period. You don’t listen to Hans Blix.]
We believed Hussein had mustard gas because we sold it to him. That video of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Hussein in 1983 was taken when Rumsfeld was CEO of Serle. Serle sold the chemical weapons to Hussein.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2763509924114159191
Here are a couple more lies from Rumsfeld.
“We do know that the Iraqi regime has chemical and biological weapons. His regime has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons — including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas.”
Rumsfeld, 18 September 2002
“We know where they [Iraq's weapons of mass destruction] are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.”
Rumsfeld, 30 March 2003
What an extraordinary blockhead!
[Should we have been worried about Hussein unleashing an attack on us? Should we have worried about him helping out a pissed-off expat Saudi in his next effort?]
Should we be worried about one or more of almost two billion Muslims unleashing an attack on us? If so, perhaps we should bring in fresh management to reevaluate and upgrade our strategy.
[Now heres what I remember back then, and I know you do too, most everybody wanted to go hit back, to generally lash out, just strike against “them” one of our known enemies. To show “them” our own fury.]
To go into Afghanistan was something I had been advocating for a couple of years by 2001. The Taliban needed to be dismantled. Some people just need killing. Certainly after the attacks of September 11, going into Afghanistan was the right thing to do. I didn’t want to lash out. Perhaps you did. You seem to be an excitable boy. Some people did, and some of those people were in charge of a very powerful force. But not a very powerful strategy.
[This wasn’t manufactured consent, this was politicians generally representing the will and style of our people. We elect leaders who have the same attitudes we have. The only reason Obama was giving his 2002 speech, is that his electorate was Wright’s “chickens coming home” churchgoers.]
You are presenting theory as fact. I don’t for a split second buy it, but perhaps you are right. But perhaps Obama, like many, many other smart people, did not believe the rationales being put forward for the invasion of a sovereign country outside international law. Perhaps he was saying something he actually believed.
[We also like the death penalty. Thats who we are. I’m from mid-American town in Ohio, and in 2001-2, people were not being manipulated by the White House, they were SCREAMING that we had to do something, and the people they elected, are their kind of people, they pretty much think the same kind of thing. The media runing waving flags covering the war, were not manipulating us, they were serving up exactly what the customer ordered.]
What? Dude. Your whole joint is desperate. Let’s just be friends. If you have something for me, I would be very grateful. In the meantime, it wouldn’t matter if I had something for you, what with you having your fingers in your ears and everything.
JH, I’m very friendly. No fingers in ears. but my memory is as good as yours, and I remember a very different world, funnily enough, it the same one as I see today.
Today, many many people are upset Wright’s speech. Even Obama was disgusted. Those very people, undecided voters, right now are demanding Obama distance himself – and where is Wright? Politicians poll, mostly, so they can do what they are told.
Political reality is that people demand actions and results they then deserve, they don’t get ramrodded into lies, wars, and bad house loans. They take their own reins, they accept responsibility, they actively threaten the political lives of politicians, if their demands are not answered.
I’m not desperate. I’m obvious. The people’s wants shall not be denied. It seems your problem is with the people.
Let’s be friends. But be friends with the masses too, they know just as much as you and me.
Morgan
Jesus Horatio Christ. I remember the world you remember. Surely you are not saying you don’t remember the things I listed above. Now you are claiming “the people” as your authority?!? (The people remember those lies.)
I was responding to this:
“The only reason Obama was giving his 2002 speech, is that his electorate was Wright’s ‘chickens coming home’ churchgoers.”
That, I wrote, was presenting theory as fact. I don’t believe you.
JH
Well you both manage quite nicely to make me laugh, as well as think.
First the apples, John, then the oranges. Apples. Obama. I don’t read his Tuesday speech as deceptive because I think I can read his face as a Palmist reads hands, but rather because I read his speech—as in the transcript of it before me—as a smokescreen, so that when I review the video of him I marvel at the nonchalance on his face as he waves his prevarications over the smouldering fire.
He’s really good. Like our host and you and others here, I’ve known some really gifted actors, not a few of them afflicted with celebrity. But this dude is so good he’s gonna make all Hollywood jump the Good Ship Billary for one of their own, Barry from Oxy. Kudos for Oxy’s Drama program.
As for Bushlies, I thought that our disagreement had been whether Bush lied us into war. I still don’t believe that he did so, nor do I believe that he is a liar. And I already detailed what I remember as the chief, and utterly sufficient, causus belli, Iraq’s acts of war against peacekeeping forces bearing the insignia of the U.S. and the UK.
Having said that, I can only call Rumsfeld’s remark of May 14, as you quote it here in juxtaposition to Cheney’s of eight weeks earlier, a lie. To me that lie is made all the more remarkable by two things: (a) that Secretary Rumsfeld obviously knew what the whole world knew, namely, that Secretary Powell presented the evidence of Iraqi WMDs to the United Nations in open session; and (b) that Don Rumsfeld is, to my personal knowledge, a man of such natural integrity as to give one the impression that he considers lying not only beneath his moral standards, but beneath his level of competence. It’s difficult for me to imagine him so afraid of anything as to want to lie about it. I hope that this estimate of his character will not serve to exclude me from those who find, in Mr. Rumsfeld, the repository of many of the most consequential mistakes made by the U.S. concerning Iraq. Indeed he counts himself in that throng.
Two of your first bulleted aides de memoire imply claims that were never made by President Bush but which instead were placed in his mouth retroactively at great expense to e.g. Citizen Soros and CNN. They are: Saddam as culprit of 9/11; and Saddam’s backing of bin Laden’s 9/11 attacks.
The “mushroom cloud” rumors I simply don’t remember, though I don’t doubt your recall. What is it about mushroom clouds that was alleged?
Finally, I believe that the WMD ground for military action—which ground was bolstered somewhat by the Yellow Cake findings of British and U.S. intelligence—was appropriate, given that Saddam did in fact remain keen on the development of WMD, was experienced in their use, did increasingly flout the treaty by choreographing and evading UN weapons inspections, did provocate the democracies with increasingly bellicose boasting of his WMD capabilities, was found to have been in possession of WMD, and probably did smuggle WMD to Iran or Syria during the run-up to invasion.
Nonetheless, the President has repeatedly acknowledged the breaks in the intelligence trail that led to the invasion, and so did Prime Minister Blair acknowledge them. If only for the reasons I’ve given here repeatedly, I agree with both men: given the chance to decide again, I’d invade.
JH,
I find this instructive as a distinction between us. Do you generally accept this idea:
“Wright’s rantings are not reflective of Obama’s views on anything. Why did he stay in the church? Because he’s a black Chicago politician who comes from a mixed marriage and went to Columbia and Harvard. Suspected of not being black enough or sufficiently tied to the minority community, he needed the networking opportunities Wright afforded him in his church to get elected. If he had not risen to the top of Chicago black politics, we would never have heard of him. But obviously, he can’t say that. So what should he say?”
We can’t fault politician for representing their people, it is the only way they survive.
And the people wanted to have an Iraq invasion. Did you see the congress vote? Did you hear Obama’s own words in 2004? Why do you want to pretend it wasn’t the will of the people? Why try and say that we, the people, were lied to? Do you need an excuse for your own feelings? Did you support the war, and now feel betrayed?
“provocate”? Yikes. Provoke. Thank you.
Your talent for Bush mimicry is rubbing off, evidently.
Good God Hugh- It is beneath you to pretend to have forgotten the key line of Bush and Rice-”we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” And to still be using the trumped up charges of Niger Yellowcake? You cannot rely on American’s short memories to forget all the lies that took us to War. There will be hell to pay for years to come because of Bush and Cheney’s prevarications.
The Neoconservative philosophy of preeemtive war may have another day in the sun in this country’s distant future. But that day is not now.
Well then no wonder I was thrown off, Jon. It’s because by the time that smoking gun line had worked its way around the sewing bee of “Americans’ short memories”, that line had become an unrecognizable “for months we heard about mushroom clouds”. Good God Jon, do you mean that Saddam left to his own devices would not have posed a nuclear threat by now? Good safe bet, old sport!
It was John who brought up the Yellowcake allegations; I merely acknowledged the fact that those allegations did play a part in the run-up to invasion.
I’m quite comfortable with your calling Cheney a prevaricator, but nonetheless I consider the President a truthful person—at least as much so as President Truman was. I don’t know what hell there will be to pay for years to come. The Democrats have whipped themselves—or each other deliciously—into a fit of hatred over their historical embellishments and shockingly callow ignorance of warfare, and that particular Iraq backlash might bury the GOP for a good long time were the Democratic Party headed for its own private Antietam. The whole thing is a damned dirty business, I admit, and really not fit for the young Kosbots.
Jefferson launched a preemptive war, as you’ll remember.
I can’t get anything right tonight. (I’m all thumbs on a new iPhone; I’ll switch to desktop.) I’d meant to say “were the Democratic Party NOT headed” for its own bloody civil war, a war I truly hope will be mercifully brief and decisive, so as not to leave 72 million American Democrats with “hell to pay for years to come.”
Candidate Obama demonstrated simply and clearly this week that he’d far rather address Iraq than his Black Liberation Theology. As best I can see, there is no indication (other than Ehrenreich’s revelations of Hillary’s own cult skeletons) that either of the other leading candidates would be inclined to oblige Senator Obama’s diversionary preferences in oratorical subject matter.
Jon, you are doing the same thing as JH… Are you telling me you were a gung-ho war supporter based on trumped up lies? Did you get duped?
Because if you didn’t get duped, no one did. There were plenty of French and Germans playing loyal opposition – everyone had plenty of opportunity to argue. There was no rush, we discussed it at length, for many Americans the debate lasted too long.
The anti-war side lost that argument.
Why do you want to say that side lost because of “lies?” Do you think it will change the next decision? Do you want to absolve the voters on the pro-war side? To pretend they were duped?
I’m asking because it seems so intellectually dishonest. Why not blame the American public that supported, demanded, voted for the war? It seems much meaty a discussion, why did the public support it? And none of that “manufactured consent / big brother” stuff, please.
As another “thought exercise” assume the public are rational actors, and that everyone had most of the information everyone else had… why would the majority here invade?
Clear thinking, Morgan. Perhaps the debate, as framed, is tendentious caricature.
As to your thought experiment, in the context of Jon’s Lippman redux, I recall that at the time of the drumbeating I worked out at dawn daily, and as I suited up in my monkey suit with the other naked apes, we’d tease each other over whichever cable news channel had been selected to watch the morning’s drumbeat. If it be CNN, we “neocons” (!) would rib the liberals and catcall at the slanted coverage; if Fox, the liberals would rib us good naturedly, and mock the rightward slant. Everybody knew where he stood, everybody knew where everybody else stood (no phallic jokes here), and everybody sure as hell knew where the cable networks stood. (The broadcast news was generally regarded as a waste of time.) What manufacturing? What consent?
On November 7, 2002, President Bush said that Saddam Hussein” is a threat because he is dealing with Al Qaeda. . . . A true threat facing our country is that an Al Qaeda-type network trained and armed by Saddam could attack America and not leave one fingerprint.”
Hugh
Morgan’s post above is so not clear thinking that I am not even going to try to untangle it. It has nothing to do with me or anything I think.
Here is what I think.
The idea of democracy is that power is broadly distributed not because man is so good, but because he is so bad.
I do not like the centralization of power that has taken place in this administration.
That is what I think.
As for the people. Sometimes the people are right. Sometimes we are wrong. Sometimes we behave rationally, sometimes not. Sometimes we are a lynch mob. I admit, I do have a definite problem with blow hards.
There are so many of those quotes from this administration, I could post them for years. Literally. In real time, just like it happened the first place.
Hugh and Morgan, you are ignoring obvious facts, exercising selective memory. Doing things you decry. Even engaging in the therapeutic stuff.
It’s alright with me. I appreciate the both of you. Glad to make you laugh, Hugh, if I actually do. I mean to. Would you like me to continue listing the lies about Iraq and Saddam from this administration?
One last thing, then I am going to count my money for a few hours before I have to take Jessica Alba (or some other starlet, I can’t remember which one, Scarlett Johansson, maybe) over to King King for a little house music. I’ll figure that out later.
In the meantime, as far as who won the argument regarding the Iraq War, unless you stand with that saucy minx, Dana Perino, and Dick Cheney who both essentially said the American public gets to think once every four years, here is a new CBS News poll.
CBS News Poll
“Looking back, do you think the United States did the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, or should the U.S. have stayed out”
3/15-18/08
Right Thing 36%
Stayed Out 59%
Unsure 5%
http://www.pollingreport.com/iraq.htm
I was against the invasion of Iraq. I thought it was a mistake at the time, and I still think it was a mistake. A monumental mistake. Now we have no choice other than to make the best of the reality we now find ourselves in.
I hope you both have a beautiful and meaningful Easter. He is risen.
But I’m not exercising willful ignorance nor distortion of the record, John. By training I’m an historian. We shudder at the thought of such things, and because my area of specialization is historical anthropology, I’m also accustomed to identifying and minimizing my own ladenness, in part by bringing it out in the open at the outset. I’ve tried to do that, but on the other hand I’m not engaged in scholarship here, only in opining and in conversing with you all as to your take on things and how it meshes with my gears or else grinds like the gearbox of my first Fiat. If you guys seem to require it, then sure, I take a deep one and summon my historiographical chakra, because that’s the methodology I know.
I don’t know what you mean by my therapeutic stuff. I’m certainly not trying to control or marginalize anyone by presuming to psychoanalyze them and pronounce them pathological and in need of Kampuchean reeducation (see Gore’s responses to the “Holocaust deniers” who differ with his pidgin Climatology). There’s a lot of that about, as I’ve said, but while I am often ascerbic in an effort to render sharp prose that conjures more than its share of bits and bytes, I’m not interested in putting people in place with psychodebilitation—much the trope of our time and place, as it was of Solzhenitsyn’s.
What you just said you think—I think it too. I don’t like the centralization of power either, and that is precisely the source of my digust with the Administration and with the fraudulent McCain—their liberalism in the name of some hyphenated conservatism. (Pick a prefix; it really doesn’t matter as long as they have one.)
I used to teach Sociology and do research in that field, for which I have only a grudging respect. Of the half-dozen schools of sociological thought, the one I most respect is phenomenology, to which I’m indebted for the insights it afforded me in my own field. Phenomenological Sociology is largely devoted to anatomizing ideology and its mechanics. OK.
So with that prefatory blurb I want to let you know that I do not believe that the Bush cabinet, past or present, have been ideologues, per se. (Rev. Wright is an ideologue; my brother Cornel West is an omniphibious ideologue, and duly proud of it; Ira Magaziner is an ideologicon, a restless machine that churns ideology; Rush Limbaugh—now there’s an ideologue.) No, Bush and the Bushmen and Bushwomen are not ideologues; they are ideological slaves unawares. They know not what they do. And anyone who believes that those people are, en bloc, minions of neoconservatism, just doesn’t understand much about the workings of ideology. This isn’t the Revolution, the Bolshevik one or the Reagan one. It’s somnambulant liberalism. Somnambulance, as in “call and ambulance!”
I’ve been provisionally convinced for years that the Hussein regime in Iraq did make common cause with al-Qaeda, did provide refuge to al-Q higher ups, did provide money and equipment to al-Q, and did specifically support al-Q training. This doesn’t mean that I believe that Saddam and Osama had a sit-down, or chatted about their mutual fondness for the work of Francis Coppola, or plotted 9/11 together. But you can take it to mean that I believe the US should have taken Czech intelligence a damn sight more seriously when Prague (which DID put its money where its mouth was) reported that Saddam’s people and Osama’s were meeting in far-flung locales, as well as meeting within Iraq. This should indicate to you how far I believe your opening quote to be so positively ahistorically decontextualized as to fit only into a Soros-generated reality.
You needn’t tell me that most politicians—even the non-lawyers—lie for a living. I did a lot of lying for them for years. I don’t have to do it anymore, and I don’t have to vote for a candidate who does it. That’s why my presidential vote, which I hold very damn dear, will lie fallow for the next four and-a-half years.
And that’s why, for me, the whole race has come down to a contest of “Knock Out the Bigger Liar”. I just happen to be on Obama this week.
Thank you, John, and a blessed Easter to you as well. Da Naz iz riz indeed!
Hugh
From Morgan:
“Why try and say that we, the people, were lied to? Do you need an excuse for your own feelings? Did you support the war, and now feel betrayed?”
That was the therapeutic stuff I was talking about, though I might have got that wrong, as well.
At any rate, I greatly appreciate all you had to say in the post above. It is not far fetched to think Hussein and Bin Laden found common cause. They certainly had a common enemy.
And your assessment of the current administration is believable. I want to say that George Bush, in his youth, was a rebel. I don’t think he has yet thought things through far enough even to be an ideologue.
I do strongly object to the raw intimidation employed by his administration. I strongly object to the high handed, ham fisted tactics employed by his political operatives- that they were in the White House, that they defamed their critics, that they outed a CIA agent.
Hugh, we were lied to unceasingly, transparently, cynically, and with extreme recklessness. Remember when the president said that if anyone in his administration had anything to do with the leak of the identity of a CIA agent, that person would be dealt with swiftly? Remember all of that? And he never walked down to Karl Rove’s office and asked him. We are expected to believe that. For months on end, the president and his closest adviser never have a conversation about it. So he didn’t fire Karl Rove, who was proven to be involved in the leak. And he serenades the disbarred Lewis Libby, who was, under Cheney’s orders, the main source of the leak. The leak of the identity of an undercover CIA agent specializing in Weapons of Mass Destruction. *That* is treason. The president covered it up. What is that?
The disrespect this administration has shown to We the People Morgan has been attempting to represent is staggering.
You know way more about all of this than I do, but I can’t see how history will treat these people kindly.
This country has been mismanaged for so long it is a miracle we are still standing.
On that thought, which I will take as happy, I will bid you good morning. Thank you for writing.
JH
“This country has been mismanaged for so long it is a miracle we are still standing.”
JH, we are still recovering from the mis-management.
1969 – 1982, inflation averaged 7.5 percent / unemployment 6.4 percent.
1980 – 14% inflation
Consider perhaps that the actual truth of competing ideas have played themselves out – to our benefit – since 1980.
If Republicans run up the debt and Democrats balance the budget, and the end effect of this not only the above, but no further growth of social programs – meaning there isn’t much more to take in, so there isn’t much more to give out.
Maybe in the giant scheme of things, things aren’t being mis-managed, we are making slow incremental improvements to fix what ails us.
Please don’t cavaliarly argue for a deviation of what is finally working. Republicans run up the debt, and Democrats balance the budget. There is a certain poetry to it, if you think about it. It used to be the other way around, and thats what caused all the problems.
On this holiday of giving thanks and eating reindeer, maybe we should be amazed that the stone was rolled back, and our economy survived 1913-1980, when everything was horrible and full of despair.
Since then, we have the longest sustained period of growth, and jesus, think of the innovation, our poor have the microwave, broadband and 500 channels of American Idol. We’re comfy electing any man or woman of any race to any office. And we did that, not our forefathers, not the hippies, us.
Morgan-Neither the public nor the MSM were “rational actors” leading up to the war. The TV media loves a war story (CNN was longing for the ratings spike of Gulf War I) and hysterical jingoism can be sustained for at least 6 months before the facts invade–”Truth is the first casualty of war”. As for the New York Times and the Washington Post–they have all raked themselves over the coals of regret–Judy Miller, Thom Shanker, etc.
The rational actor theory is the basis for most post 1980 financial deregulation as well. Read this piece in the New York Times about Credit Default Swaps and tell me there was anything rational about it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/business/23how.html
Can you talk yourself into a recession? Sure.
Are there mobs? Yes.
Do people overlook truth, or have a lower standrd of evidence, when they want to go fight? Yes.
Are these group dynamics made up of individuals? Yes.
Are the individuals each rational actors unto themselves, making demands of their leaders and their media? Yes.
Jon, I’ll say it again, if you were a rational actor leading up to the war, so was everyone else.
I now see what you meant by Morgan’s headshrinking. It hadn’t caught my eye, I think, because usually the psychodebilitating I’d done to marginalize or at least disarm the Other, whereas Morgan enobles us by suggesting that we weren’t duped because we were not and are not dupes.
While I agree with much of your desciption of the Administration, I fail to see how it differs, in other than its particulars, from previous administrations. And as to particulars, your account of the Plame case is not accurate in its legal particulars, which are matters of court record. Yours is the account the junk media would wish us to give, after the propaganda war is through.
I do hope that Ms. Alba was everything I think her to be, and more. And more and more.
hughvic
I am the veriest tyro at all of this WWW type blog deal. It is very helpful that you have alerted me to the hierarchy of the parts of speech in these debates, if I may call them that. And so now here I have gone and used a noun, treason, and you have attempted to shoot it down with an adjective, junk. I see why you don’t like that. I am not an historian. I haven’t, to this point, applied the rigors of an historian to the stuff I have written though I understand it is not good manners at the very least to indulge in self assertion. At the same time, I am not a consumer of junk media, or any media at all, for that matter, though that is not to say that I might not have been infected by some piece of dis or misinformation that is floating around out there. I would appreciate, if it’s not too much trouble, your pointing me in the direction of those court records that will clarify what I have gotten wrong. One of the last things I want to do is bear any false witness. I am curious whether I have missed the spirit of what went down, or whether I have gotten on the wrong side of a big fancy legal decision. I am also curious as to what disinformation I have fallen victim.
One thing that is irrefutable is the fact that the president said he would fire anyone involved in the leak of a CIA agent, and he not only did not, but, by the sin of omission at the very least (the sin he considers the worst of sins) covered that leak up. That is in the White House press records, if those are to be trusted.
This is from the horse’s mouth (Don’t forget The Horse’s Mouth):
http://www.wilsonsupport.org/
From Ms. Plame:
“I am outraged to learn that former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan confirms that he was sent out to lie to the press corps and the American public about two senior White House officials, Karl Rove and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby who deliberately and recklessly revealed my identity as a covert CIA operations officer.
Even more shocking, McClellan confirms that not only Karl Rove and Scooter Libby told him to lie but Vice President Cheney, Presidential Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and President Bush also ordered McClellan to issue his misleading statement. Unfortunately, President Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s felony sentence has short-circuited justice.”
I want to believe you are not being pedantic with your last post. I want very much to trust you. As an historian, can you tell me of another administration in which the president, the vice president, and their top several aids have participated in the outing of a covert CIA operative to silence criticism of one of their policies?
Please don’t make me research the court cases, John, as I’m already having to burn the midnight oil for the amicae fighting that stupid homeschooling decision in CA, and promised memoranda for the AM. The facts of the Plame case, as I remember them, are that she was not “outed” in any manner carefully defined in law to prohibit just such a thing, because she was not an agent on assignment, nor was she a “covert” officer, nor was anything revealed that wasn’t common knowledge, and nor was anyone found to have violated the law against breaching the security of CIA and its employees.
I believe that, given this, the perfervid self-aggrandizement of Ms. Plame and her rather silly husband was reprehensible. I venture to guess that the courts thought so too.
To give others some background…
“After working for the CIA for twenty years, she retired in December 2005, as a result of the publication and compromising of her classified cover identity by an American journalist in the summer of 2003.
On 14 July 2003, Robert Novak identified “Wilson’s wife” publicly as “an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction” named “Valerie Plame” in his syndicated column in The Washington Post.[7] In that column Novak was responding to an op-ed entitled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” written by Wilson and published in the New York Times the previous week, on July 6, 2003. In his op-ed, Wilson stated that the George W. Bush administration exaggerated unreliable claims that Iraq intended to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger to support the administration’s arguments that Iraq was proliferating weapons of mass destruction so as to justify its preemptive war in Iraq.[8]
Novak’s public disclosure of Mrs. Wilson’s then-still-classified covert CIA identity as “Valerie Plame” precipitated what is known as the Plame affair, leading to the CIA leak grand jury investigation, which resulted in the indictment , conviction and commuted sentence (prior to the anticipated full pardon by President Bush) of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby in United States v. Libby on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to federal investigators. A civil lawsuit filed by the Wilsons, Plame v. Cheney, against current and former government officials, followed, but was dismissed on July 19, 2007, in the District Court for the District of Columbia. The Wilsons appealed the decision the next day.”
After working for the CIA for twenty years, she retired in December 2005, as a result of the publication and compromising of her classified cover identity by an American journalist in the summer of 2003.
On 14 July 2003, Robert Novak identified “Wilson’s wife” publicly as “an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction” named “Valerie Plame” in his syndicated column in The Washington Post.[7] In that column Novak was responding to an op-ed entitled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” written by Wilson and published in the New York Times the previous week, on July 6, 2003. In his op-ed, Wilson stated that the George W. Bush administration exaggerated unreliable claims that Iraq intended to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger to support the administration’s arguments that Iraq was proliferating weapons of mass destruction so as to justify its preemptive war in Iraq.[8]
Novak’s public disclosure of Mrs. Wilson’s then-still-classified covert CIA identity as “Valerie Plame” precipitated what is known as the Plame affair, leading to the CIA leak grand jury investigation, which resulted in the indictment , conviction and commuted sentence (prior to the anticipated full pardon by President Bush) of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby in United States v. Libby on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to federal investigators. A civil lawsuit filed by the Wilsons, Plame v. Cheney, against current and former government officials, followed, but was dismissed on July 19, 2007, in the District Court for the District of Columbia. The Wilsons appealed the decision the next day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Plame
—
This always makes me mad. If your wife was a serious real covert operative in service to the Bush Admin, would you be writing “What I didn’t find in Africa?”
Here, for what it is worth, is Patrick Fitzgerald’s summary of Plame’s employment with the Counterproliferation Division of the CIA.
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/070529_Unclassified_Plame_employement.pdf
Well John I really do not know “what it is worth”. It might be worth a lot, but then, considering its provenance, Fitzgerald, it might be worth little. I don’t know. Do you have an opinion?
More to the point—because unlike Barack I don’t want to digress and distract (or I’d tear into Joe Wilson as the Bush apologists do)—who should have been fired, by an honest President keeping his word, and when and for what?
Armitage? When?
I’ve already given my own game away, you guys, with my—and this time I’ll encode it slightly—location of political cience, in the academic taxonomy, as a subdivision of that branch of theology which is theodicy. So I can’t see that much worse could be said of this entire cast of characters (among whom, apropos nothing, I would cast Mike Huckabee as a kind of jester had he not already done so himself). If you’d have me say much worse, John, I suppose I could give it a try, but I never tell tales out of school.
And I’m sure NOT saying, “Bush is yesterday, so leave him to historians”; but I do think that right now there are four urgent targets that deserve to be hit with every legal and legit piece of ordnance we’ve got: Hillary Clinton; John McCain; Barack Obama; and this infallibly fallible, moribund Fourth Estate, the House of Usher, MSM.
I don’t know either.
“I. Lewis Libby, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney told a federal grand jury that President George W. Bush authorized him to leak information from a classified intelligence report to a New York Times reporter.”
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/graphics/pdf/libbyplame.pdf
We are already lost in legalisms. By his first pronouncement, that anyone involved in the leak would be fired, the president should have fired himself. His father would have, without a doubt, fired everyone involved in this had it happened on his watch. But it never would have. His father said that people who revealed the identity of intelligence agents were the lowest form of traitors. The president then changed the standard to anyone who committed a crime would be fired.
Q Scott, the President seemed to raise the bar and add a qualifier today when discussing whether or not anybody would be dismissed for — in the leak of a CIA officer’s name, in which he said that he would — if someone is found to have committed a crime, they would no longer work in this administration. That’s never been part of the standard before, why is that added now?
MR. McCLELLAN: No, I disagree, Terry. I think that the President was stating what is obvious when it comes to people who work in the administration: that if someone commits a crime, they’re not going to be working any longer in this administration. Now the President talked about how it’s important for us to learn all the facts. We don’t know all the facts, and it’s important that we not prejudge the outcome of the investigation. We need to let the investigation continue. And the investigators are the ones who are in the best position to gather all the facts and draw the conclusions. And at that point, we will be more than happy to talk about it, as I indicated last week.
The President directed the White House to cooperate fully, and that’s what we’ve been doing. We want to know what the facts are, we want to see this come to a successful conclusion. And that’s the way we’ve been working for quite some time now. Ever since the beginning of this investigation, we have been following the President’s direction to cooperate fully with it, so that we can get to the — so that the investigators can get to the bottom of it.
Q But you have said, though, that anyone involved in this would no longer be in this administration, you didn’t say anybody who committed a crime. You had said, in September 2003, anyone involved in this would no longer be in the administration.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/07/20050718-2.html
Scott McClellan has admitted that the top five officials in the administration, starting with the president, told him to lie.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601070&sid=aoeVzcoWZAqc&refer=home
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/11/hbc-90001739
This is the only opinion I have about this, the lesson that I think can be learned from this- I would like our country to be led by men who court criticism, rather than by men who use intimidation to attempt to silence criticism. Glasnost. We seriously need a more transparent, less paranoid administration of our government.
Evil is real.
[...] this Progressive-Libertarian coalition that we are experiencing in extraordinary dialogues like Iraq Five Years Later could actually contribute some new ideas to rescue us from what I think could be a deep financial [...]
You said:
“I would like our country to be led by men who court criticism, rather than by men who use intimidation to attempt to silence criticism. Glasnost. We seriously need a more transparent, less paranoid administration of our government…Evil is real.”
I’m with you on that, John. Heart and soul.