Saturday, September 18, 2004

Posted here Saturday, September 18, 2004 at 9:42:56 PM     If we knew our own history the events in Iraq would not seem so strange . I have been reading a a very helpful book , the faith : a history of Christianity by Moynihan . Calvin gave his last sermon on February 6, 1564. " Within six months, forty-eight members of a Huguenot were slaughtered in Champagne by Catholic ultras. Political inlastic ambition, and desire for plunder fueled religious war. In the "alvinism surged among the burghers of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, There, too, it fused with politics and nationalism in bloody revolt h and Catholic domination. In Germany, a third element was tie struggle between Catholics and Lutherans. Gore, not glory, was immediate legacy. ********

Posted here Saturday, September 18, 2004 at 4:31:48 PM     Here is a post that moves into the richness of the poetic, but with the added sense of significance: telling us about the stor we need to know. Remember, these are rough cuts, pieces of a larger picture to be assembled. Pasted from <http://www.montana.edu/corona/4/school.html> THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT by Frederick Turner 1593 was a plague year in England. A plague makes nothing matter: the black noise of apparently random and horrible death amid blooming health and plenty drowns out the subtler vibrations of moral and political significance. They come, they go, they trot, they dance: but no speech of death. All that is good sport. But if she [that is, Death] be once come and, on a sudden and openly, surprise either them, their wives, their children, or their friends, what torments, what outcries, what rage, and what despair cloth then overwhelm them? . . .At the stumbling of a horse, at the fall of a stone, at the least prick with a pin, let us presently ruminate, and say with ourselves, What if it were death itself? –from John Florio's translation of Montaigne   England herself was sick: the euphoria of 1588 at the defeat of the Spanish Armada had soured by 1593; Philip Sidney, the stellar fire of English civilization, had died at Zutphen; Raleigh was in disgrace; Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, with its odor of brimstone and despair, was touring the provinces. At a performance of the play in Exeter the actors noticed there was one devil too many in the damnation scene: they closed the show and left the place in terror, and the actor Alleyn wore a cross thereafter when he played Faust. ..... And in The Tempest, islanded off from history, the Magician-Artist-Scientist-Philosopher is free within his magical theatre to revise the moral rules of the world for the better. Surrounded by the nothingness of the sea, "rounded" with "a sleep," uncoupled from the responsibilities of the old world, a new paradise is brought into being by Prospero. In it Miranda, his Eve, and Ferdinand, his Adam, can re-enact the story of the Fall without its evil consequences. Creativity and change need not be necessarily evil. Prospero's prohibitions, unlike Jehovah's, are meant to be broken. Sexuality is not, as in Genesis, permitted in Paradise and cursed after the expulsion from Paradise, but marvellously transformed into a reward for that disobedience and generosity by which the young seize to themselves their freedom from their parents. Prospero, instead of making toil into the punishment of disobedience, as Jehovah did, transforms it into the trial of love, and gives us the beautiful spectacle of Miranda helping Ferdinand pile up logs. Most important of all, Shakespeare grounds his new ethics neither on nature (you cannot trust Caliban) nor on the inborn essential soul (you cannot trust souls of Antonio and Sebastian), but rather on an act of art, a social chess-game in which the game itself establishes the spiritual identity of its players. The climactic moment of revelation that sums up Shakespeare's life of art is the drawing aside of the curtain to reveal Ferdinand and Miranda at chess. The brave new world, the moral America, is, like a game, ungrounded, for it needs no ground. It generates its own values; it writes its own constitution. Prospero is a juggler, like Marlowe's Moses: but he sets his children free not only physically but spiritually too. He breaks his staff and drowns his book, freely renouncing the authority that his children have claimed as their birthright. His noble lie does not conceal the fact that it is "only" a fiction, an "insubstantial pageant" which, having served its purpose, can dissolve, solemn temples and all, and "leave not a wrack behind." The best posterity is the freedom and self-command of one's descendants. Perhaps (and this is mystical) Shakespeare intended to let his plays perish without being put into a book.   It is here, in The Tempest, that we find the last words of that debate on Nothing that began in the French ambassador's house in 1583, continued across the Atlantic, into Virginia, through Hariot's abbey of Molanna in Ireland, through the plague years at Sherborne, to its darkest moments at Sion House and the Tower of London in the time of the Gunpowder Plot. Suppose, went the debate, the world were founded on nothing? Where is the edge of the world? Would not the boundary between all and nothing constitute a fulcrum whereby we could get tremendous leverage on the world–even if that boundary existed in all matter, depending on its density or rarefaction? Suppose the soul itself were not so much an entity, a being, as a reflexive process at the boundary of being–or even a systematic absence whose suction galvanizes the world into action-like desire, for instance, which, like a lack, disappears when it is fulfilled? If we are masks, can masks love each other? Why not? Is there a fertility not of the order of nature but of the order of art? What is justice, if the soul is artificial? If the world is unfounded, like a game or a language –that is, if it is conventional by nature–what constitutes a new move or a new utterance in that game or language? What is translation if language is no less real than the world? Can we change the rules? Should we change the rules? In the process, the conversation gave us much of our algebra, astronomy, and optics, the roots of our political theory, and a rich legacy of poetry and drama.   ********

Posted here Saturday, September 18, 2004 at 11:00:37 AM     It is Important to realize how deep it and widespread was the discussion about the difficulties of the war in Iraq before it started . The normal Bush position that everyone was for it is very wrong . Secret papers show Blair was warned of Iraq chaos By Michael Smith, Defence Correspondent The Telegraph, September 18, 2004. Tony Blair was warned a year before invading Iraq that a stable post-war government would be impossible without keeping large numbers of troops there for "many years", secret government papers reveal. The documents, seen by The Telegraph, show more clearly than ever the grave reservations expressed by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, over the consequences of a second Gulf war and how prescient his Foreign Office officials were in predicting the ensuing chaos. They told the Prime Minister that there was a risk of the Iraqi system "reverting to type" after a war, with a future government acquiring the very weapons of mass destruction that an attack would be designed to remove. The documents further show that the Prime Minister was advised that he would have to "wrong foot" Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war, and that British officials believed that President George W Bush merely wanted to complete his father's "unfinished business" in a "grudge match" against Saddam. But it is the warning of the likely aftermath - more than a year in advance, as Mr Blair was deciding to commit Britain to joining a US-led invasion - that is likely to cause most controversy and embarrassment in both London and Washington. More than 900 allied troops have been killed in Iraq since the end of the war, 33 of them British. More than 10,000 civilians are believed to have been killed. At least 13 civilians died yesterday in a suicide bomb attack on a police checkpoint in Baghdad. The Iraqi health ministry said a further 45 civilians had died in US air attacks on Fallujah overnight. Mr Straw predicted in March 2002 that post-war Iraq would cause major problems, telling Mr Blair in a letter marked "Secret and personal" that no one had a clear idea of what would happen afterwards. "There seems to be a larger hole in this than anything." Most of the US assessments argued for regime change as a means of eliminating Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Mr Straw said. "But no one has satisfactorily answered how there can be any certainty that the replacement regime will be any better. Iraq has no history of democracy so no one has this habit or experience." Senior ministerial advisers warned bluntly in a "Secret UK Eyes Only" options paper that "the greater investment of Western forces, the greater our control over Iraq's future, but the greater the cost and the longer we would need to stay". The paper, compiled by the Cabinet Office Overseas and Defence Secretariat, added: "The only certain means to remove Saddam and his elite is to invade and impose a new government, but this would involve nation-building over many years." Replacing Saddam with another "Sunni strongman" would allow the allies to withdraw their troops quickly. This leader could be persuaded not to seek WMD in exchange for large-scale assistance with reconstruction. "However, there would then be a strong risk of the Iraqi system reverting to type. Military coup could succeed coup until an autocratic Sunni dictator emerged who protected Sunni interests. With time he could acquire WMD," the paper said. Even a representative government would be likely to create its own WMD so long as Israel and Iran retained their own arsenals and Palestinian grievances remained unresolved. But there would be other major problems with a democratic government. If it were to survive, "it would require the US and others to commit to nation-building for many years. This would entail a substantial international security force." The documents also show the degree of concern within Whitehall that America was ready to invade Iraq with or without backing from any of its allies. Sir David Manning, Mr Blair's foreign policy adviser, returned from talks in Washington in mid-March 2002 warning that Mr Bush "still has to find answers to the big questions", which included "what happens on the morning after?". In a letter to the Prime Minister marked "Secret - strictly personal", he said: "I think there is a real risk that the administration underestimates the difficulties. "They may agree that failure isn't an option, but this does not mean they will necessarily avoid it." The Cabinet Office said that the US believed that the legal basis for war already existed and had lost patience with the policy of containment. It did not see the war on terrorism as being a major element in American decision-making. "The swift success of the war in Afghanistan, distrust of UN sanctions and inspections regimes and unfinished business from 1991 are all factors," it added. That view appeared to be shared by Peter Ricketts, the Foreign Office policy director. There were "real problems" over the alleged threat and what the US was looking to achieve by toppling Saddam, he said. Nothing had changed to make Iraqi WMD more of a threat. "Even the best survey of Iraq's WMD programmes will not show much advance in recent years. Military operations need clear and compelling military objectives. For Iraq, 'regime change' does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge match between Bush and Saddam." From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;sessionid=YNCEP4C2AGEHNQFIQMGCM5WAVCBQUJVC?xml=/news/2004/09/18/nwar18.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/09/18/ixportaltop.html ********