Monday, May 10, 2004

Posted here Monday, May 10, 2004 at 10:45:33 PM     The shift in perspectives is quite dramatic. David Brooks writes a column in tomorrow's NYT that looks good because of his sift in viewpoint but tellingly naive. One part says http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/11/opinion/11BROO.html Now, looking ahead, we face another irony. To earn their own freedom, the Iraqis need a victory. And since it is too late for the Iraqis to have a victory over Saddam, it is imperative that they have a victory over us. If the future textbooks of a free Iraq get written, the toppling of Saddam will be vaguely mentioned in one clause in one sentence. But the heroic Iraqi resistance against the American occupation will be lavishly described, page after page. For us to succeed in Iraq, we have to lose. He says nothing about what this does to the war on terrorism (hopefully redefined to a more precise effort against a few with multilateral agreements). But earlier in the article he says Nonetheless, it's not too early to begin thinking about what was clearly an intellectual failure. There was, above all, a failure to understand the consequences of our power. There was a failure to anticipate the response our power would have on the people we sought to liberate. They resent us for our power and at the same time expect us to be capable of everything. There was a failure to understand the effect our power would have on other people around the world. We were so sure we were using our might for noble purposes, we assumed that sooner or later, everybody else would see that as well. Far from being blinded by greed, we were blinded by idealism. Having traveled quite a bit, taken a number of anthropology courses and read a good deal of history, I find the naiveté in Brooks' prose amazingly uninformed, and hinting that his colleagues were as naive..., well,  that anyone could have believed this, just appalls me. From the start the bombing was not going to create friends, and the looting showed that the mission was unplanned, as was the threat to the supply lines very early. This is not just an intellectual failure, but a failure of imagination across cultural and class lines.   ********

Posted here Monday, May 10, 2004 at 4:55:31 PM     The following is slightly rough younger generation european talk, but important as part of the Iraq discourse, both for what it says about the culture of that group, but also for insights into the underlying larger factors at work. ----- fake newsreels depicting simulated torture of iraqi war prisoners ----- why i want to fuck george w bush ----- the optimal way to communicate white trash s&m fantasies ----- optimum wound profile of public iraqi sex slaves witch of bagdad grew up in a mobile home, the fat of her face rumsfeld "Iraq and sexual polymorphism of individualized relationships of a physical character. The need for more polymorphic roles has been demonstrated by television and news media. sexual intercourse can no longer be regarded as a personal and isolated activity , but is seen to be a vector in a public complex involving automobile styling, politics and mass communications.the iraq war has offered a focus for a wide range of polymorphic sexual impulses, and also a means by which the united states has re-established a positive psychosexual relationship with the external world.""The effectiveness of a number of political figures, e.g. george w bush and condoleezza rice, in mediating the latent sexual elements of the war indicates that this may well be their primary role." i wonder whether in secret, some of the senators questioning rumsfeld the other day actually enjoyed the photographs and have hence tried to get a hold on the movies. rumsy himself appeared as a ill-behaved toilet slave, desperately trying to contain himself in order not to stain the painfully polished floor.> These snapshots tell us more than we may perhaps want to know about> our society's heart of darkness. u kidding...... yawn yawn cut that prudish crapthere isn't anything new in that article, some psudo-ashamed rationalization of something that probably can't be rationalized.the author's attempts to cope are as perverse as the acts themselves, and aimed at an audience just as well, the bloody same way i'm typing this shit right here now.performance of some re-assuring ritual, like saying "hey, but, there's still some life in my loins, i am truly shocked"-- what's that gonna prove? that your tolerance levels remained pretty low despite the world we're living in? "now that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike, one has to bear in mind the positive merits of the sexual perversions.the picture series of Lynndie England's ritualistic performace of the mutilation of iraqi sex slaves is in fact vital literature, a kindling of the few taste buds left in the jaded palates of our so-called sexuality" # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net ********

Posted here Monday, May 10, 2004 at 4:45:26 PM     Economic reporting is such a mind maze. This from Gas Prices Drivers Tend to Shrug Off High Gas Prices, for Now Neela Banerjee New York Times, May 4, 2004, Page C1  .... In the late nineties, wages were rising by approximately 2 percentage points more than inflation, each year... But note that is aveage wages, which include the faster rising wages at the top and the broadly lowering wages from about (hinting I am not sure where this break point is, and may be higher) 60% down. hence wages were only higher than or equal to inflation for a minority of workers. ********

Posted here Monday, May 10, 2004 at 3:41:50 PM     Worth reading for deeper background in diplomacy and policy. H-Diplo Roundtables are now archived at http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/roundtables/ -------------------------------------------------------------------- Carolyn Eisenberg Hofstra University At last an Assistant Professor, who is willing to think in bold, broad terms about core issues of international politics and the internal affairs of nation-states. One casualty of the still mounting pressure on young scholars to rush into print is that it discourageswide-canvass books and original speculation. Jeremy Suri has broken this mold and written an original, challenging work of synthesis that brings together topics that are often treated in isolation. Power and Protest is a genuine work of international history. The accessibility of foreign archives, particularly those from the former Soviet bloc, has generated repeated calls for a new international history. In practice, however, few historians have been able to avoid an American-centered or Soviet-centered history. Suri has managed an overview that enables the reader to view international politics from multiple perspectives and to provide a broader context for understanding national decisions. The author also links the study of high politics within nation-states to their social and intellectual history. Diplomatic historians have long recognized the importance of this sort of inquiry, but have had difficulty implementing it. With the same facility that he displays, moving back and forth between the capitals of the great powers, Suri examines the social movements inside these states and their impact onforeign policy. click on link above to get the full review and discussion ********

Posted here Monday, May 10, 2004 at 3:37:37 PM     Links and articles from the new New York Review of Books Bush and the Lesser Evil By Anthony Lewis Suppression of civil liberty in the name of national security is an old story in the United States. It has happened repeatedly in times of war or fear since the early days of the republic. In 1798, just seven years after the Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution, the Sedition Act made it a crime to criticize the president; the supposed reason was the danger of French Jacobin terror infiltrating America. The Civil War, World Wars I and II, and assorted episodes of national fear were all made occasions for punishing speech and depriving people of due process of law. We are in another bad time for civil liberties now. November 6, 2003: Terror & the Attack on Civil Liberties by Ronald Dworkin The Rise of bin Laden By Ahmed Rashid On Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 by Steve Coll. 'Doomed to Failure' in the Middle East A letter to British Prime Minister Tony Blair from fifty-two former senior diplomats. ********

Posted here Monday, May 10, 2004 at 2:46:39 PM     The deeper difficulty with Iraq is that circumstances of american politics allowed a painful moment of crisis, 9/11, to define an andministration, and to allow all actions to be governed by that emerging definition (war on terror), at the expense of all the other real issues that should have been the defining framework for the first administration of the 21st ccentury. ********

Posted here Monday, May 10, 2004 at 2:44:20 PM     This picture is our enemies? That was not smart. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/10/international/middleeast/10CND-IRAQ.html Iraqis Rebuild Cleric's Office Iraqis reconstructed the Baghdad headquarters of Moktada al-Sadr today after U.S. troops killed some three dozen militiamen loyal the Shiite cleric ********

Posted here Monday, May 10, 2004 at 12:52:22 PM     Rove gave a commencement address at Jerry Falwell University (the mind boggles). A short Washington post report has the following.. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11035-2004May8.html Rove also shared how he persevered in politics from an early age. "At the age of 9, I put a Nixon bumper sticker on the wire basket in the front of my bicycle. Unfortunately the little Catholic girl down the street was a couple years and about 20 pounds on me. She was for Kennedy. "When she saw me on my bike with my bumper sticker for Nixon, she put me on the ground, flattened me out and gave me a bloody nose," he said. "Despite that beating I never lost interest in politics." The insertion of "Catholic" hints at a style in American life of deep and natural" disdain for "others". In this case he takes a swipe at Kennedy, Catholics, and uppity women. I think he thinks his followers are in easy alignment with this story. I've been in several conversations that included "an Arab guy in Denver screwed us in the deal," "blacks are getting worse, not better, but at least they seem to have a lower profile," "women just don't get it,", and many others in the last few weeks with some travel. It seems as if many Americans are deeply insecure in personal identity and feeling surrounded by hostile economic forces that are "racially embodied". Many Americans it seems are too insecure to be more interested in the world than prejudiced. ********

Posted here Monday, May 10, 2004 at 11:58:08 AM     And a very compelling essay on the colonial history of torture and humlation. http://www.nationinstitute.org/tomdispatch/index.mhtml?pid=1430 ********

Posted here Monday, May 10, 2004 at 9:56:34 AM     Part of the Iraq problem is that the number of actual "terrorists" has been very very small. Even the vast majority of the schools have not turned to terrorism. The problem with the Bush approach from the day of 9/11 has been to treat many as the enemy when it was only a few. That makes those treated as enemies - like detainees in Iraq most of whom are Innocent of any action toward the US - or were because pushed to it by immediate circumstances created by US presence - into confused normal people who are trying to get by. In Iraq, instead of befriending as many as possible, the attempt has been to define many as "the enemy" when they should Be just folks caught up in circumstances. ********

Posted here Monday, May 10, 2004 at 9:37:08 AM     A very good essay on Bush's intelligence - it is there but chose stupidity as a way of life. http://www.slate.com/Default.aspx?id=2100064& ********

Posted here Monday, May 10, 2004 at 9:17:10 AM       Overheard   By refusing to hold anyone accountable, the president has also shown he is not really in control.   Pasted from <http://www.crookedtimber.org/>   This is part of the story: the lack of a modern management style - learning and participatory -. Also lacking is a sense of history, such as Rome's collapse and the British in Iraq in the 20's.   This begins to suggest a voters guide   On a scale of 1-5, how   1. Adequate is the candidate's management experience? 2. Adequate is the candidate's understanding of history 3. how good is the candidate's rounded education in relevant matters (politics economics, technology, etc). 4. How articulate is the candidate? 5. How values based is the candidate? 6. Are the candidates experience relevant to upcoming major issues? 7. How good is the candidate's circle of advisors and potential cabinet appointees? 8. Are the candidates values aligned with your own? ********