Remora

Notwithstanding the difference of their characters, the two emperors maintained, on the throne, that friendship which they had contracted in a private station. The haughty, turbulent spirit of Maximian, so fatal afterwards to himself and to the public peace, was accustomed to respect the genius of Diocletian, and confessed the ascendant of reason over brutal violence. From a motive either of pride or superstition, the two emperors assumed the titles, the one of Jovius, the other of Herculius. Whilst the motion of the world (such was the language of their venal orators) was maintained by the all-seeing wisdom of Jupiter, the invincible arm of Hercules purged the earth from monsters and tyrants. - Edward Gibbon,


LI imagines that the War has been a godsend for the British papers -- right now, you have to go to the Guardian, the Independent, even the Telegraph to find out what is going on. Except for the LA Times, American papers seem to have aligned themselves unilaterally with the unipolar power in a uni-fiesta.

This, we think, is not really due to media enthusiasm for the war -- that does exist, but outside of the WashPost it doesn't govern the way the papers are working on this issue. It is due to the vacuum which goes by the name of the Democratic Party. One of the oddities of the two party system is that the papers, and the news, can't comprehend the world beyond it. And if they can't comprehend it, they can't report on it, they can't analyze it, they can't spoon feed it to their readers -- they can't do anything the Press is supposed to do.

This mutually corrupting interdependence is naturally effected by the decline of one of those parties. And if ever there were a party in decline, it is the Democratic Party. Bested by Bush in a coup, bested again in the elections last year, bested as a money machine, bribed in the nineties by the corporate interests to taking positions directly contrary to their grass-roots base, unable to represent that base or replace it, led by non-entities who range from the truly unctuous (Joseph Lieberman) to the truly obnoxious (John Kerry), it is hard to see how this party is going to survive as an opposition, or as a real pole of power.

As a sign of this, consider that in D.C., attention is riveted as much on the Oxley grift as on Iraq.

Apparently, Democratic relics are being denied the milk and honey that flows to the defeated and to the suckers-up in the form of lobbyist sinecures. The Republicans are pursuing unilateral power on all fronts, apparently, and at warp speed. Is this going to be good for democracy or what? It upsets Dems politicos. The consolation prizes in politics are sweet. No matter how repulsive your personality, no matter how badly you've been battered by the folks back home, or how you've spent your career shitting on them, you and your little court of aides can still lick up the gravy in D.C. by using your contacts for private good. The P.R. firms, the pseudo think tanks, the boards of directors, the lobbying groups! It's Pinocchio at the fair. Well, big bad wolf Tom DeLay wants there to be only Republicans at the fair, and not utterly corrupt Democratic marrionettes and he's doing his best to Republicanize the place. Its rather like Richard Nixon's Vietnamization -- there are a few collateral casualties along the way.

The Dems, of course, are up in arms. Not to have their fair share of treats at the fair is intolerable! They might roll over about Iraq. They might roll over about the nutty tax cuts. They might allow Ashcroft to burn the Bill of Rights in his office fireplace. They might act in utterly dishonorable ways that are leading the country to disaster. But not to have a position with decent pay (say, +200,000) when you've ended your brilliant career voting for the wealthy and venal, or working for one of those geezers who did same -- why, that's cause for a revolt!

The WashPost (which has a relationship to the business of politics much like the Variety's relationship to the entertainment industry) has been featuring the machinations of Representative Oxley, who is the Representative from Anderson Accounting -- a man honorably engaged in making peculation safe for the stock option set.

Oxley, genius that he is, strongarmed the Mutual Funds lobbying group to fire the Democrat they hired. Here are the grafs on the grift:


"The K Street Project, which involves top Republican lawmakers and party officials, was designed to track the party affiliation and political contribution of hundreds of lobbyists in Washington. The data are made available to lawmakers -- so they can deny access to Democrats if they so choose -- and to top party officials so they can lobby companies and trade associations to hire Republicans for top-paying jobs. The ethics committee in 1998 admonished then-Majority Whip DeLay for pressuring the Electronic Industry Association not to hire former Rep. David McCurdy (D-Okla.) to run the group.

Democrats said they would base their call for an investigation of Oxley on a Feb. 15 report in The Washington Post that detailed how Oxley and his staff have leaned on the Investment Company Institute -- the mutual fund industry's main lobbying arm -- to oust Democratic lobbyist Julie Domenick. Six sources, Republicans among them, told The Post that two of Oxley's top aides told industry officials that a House investigation of the industry was linked to ICI's strong ties to Democrats. Oxley spokeswoman Peggy Peterson said, "Rumors of some quid pro quo are exactly that: rumors."

We urge our readers to email their congressmen in support of Project K street. It is probably the best chance we have for reforming politics as it now stands.

Remora

One of the oddities of the upcoming war (may Popeye avert it!) is that those opposing it are accused of having no "solution" to the situation in Iraq. Usually this accusation is made by supporters of the war, like Salman Rushdie , who support an entirely different war than the one justified by Bush and Blair. LI thinks it is fair to assume that Bush and Blair will not invite Rushdie, or Hitchens, or any of the rest of them, into their counsels of war when the invasion begins. So arguing about the Rushdie/Hitchens war is a pointless exercise: that war is neither contemplated nor likely to be fought.

However, the idea that we, who speak no Arabic, or Kurnamji, who have no stake in Iraq, and who have no sense of the fabric of the culture, come up with "solutions" to how Iraq should be governed is... curious. It is one of those problems that remind me of why, in spite of my overall disagreement with Hayek, I am sympathetic to some of his grander themes. Hayek's objection to centrally planned economies was that planning diverges from reality at just that key point where reality is lived -- because that is the point of accident, of emergence, of unexpected outcomes, of intangible knowledge, of everything that falls in the domain of acquaintance, as William James puts it, rather than propositional knowledge. The history of the No Fly Zone in Northern Iraq is a case in point. It is also a case that should receive more attention. If we want a picture of the forces with which the American occupiers of Iraq would be contending, it is a good idea to look at a genuine slice of the post-Saddam countryside.

Susan Graham-Brown gives us a nice potted history of the decisions that led to the No Fly Zone on the globalpolicy site There was no consideration of the the need for democracy in Bush the first's order that American aircraft purge Northern Iraq of Saddam Hussein's military. It was, rather, a response to the refugee problem:

"
The original northern no-fly zone was first declared by President George Bush in early April 1991 to protect coalition aircraft during the airdrops of aid to Kurdish refugees on the Turkish border and then to protect coalition ground troops advancing into northern Iraq as part of Operation Provide Comfort. This action, Britain, France and the US asserted, was taken under the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 688, which called on Iraq to cease repression of its civilian population. However no explicit endorsement in the form of a Security Council resolution was obtained for either Operation Provide Comfort, or the no-fly zone.

"When coalition ground troops were withdrawn, the no-fly zone was left in place, ostensibly to "protect"
the Kurds and the international humanitarian workers based in the north. After the Iraqi government decided, in October 1991, to withdraw its ground troops -- and all funding -- from the three northern governorates, the region came under Kurdish control but had no formalized status. It was part of Iraq but not under government control. The no-fly zone and the presence of international humanitarian staff may have deterred the Iraqi regime from trying to retake the northern region, but as a protection mechanism it has had considerable limitations."

So, a decision in one context, of military and political action, leads to a situation that was not planned -- the withdrawal of Saddam Hussein's power from the three northern governorates. For the first time since the end of World War I, the inhabitants of Northern Iraq are liberated from the governance of the Arabic south. What happened?

There's a nice story of democracy, free markets, and prosperity that is commonly retailed in the media. However, the real story is more complicated, and involves armed factions, smuggling, and unsavory alliances. In 1996, when the Free Fly Zone suddenly hit the news again, this is how David Plotz summarized the recent history of Northern Iraq:


"The United States, France, Britain, and Turkey delivered humanitarian aid, established a no-fly zone, and pressured Hussein to withdraw from Kurdish territory. With Western help, the Kurds elected a Parliament in 1992. Based in Irbil, the Parliament split evenly between the KDP and the PUK.

Democracy didn't last. With no Iraqis to fight, the Kurds turned on each other. Civil war broke out in 1994, and more than 2,000 Kurds were killed before the United States brokered a peace in 1995. That peace collapsed this summer. The PUK helped Iran conduct an incursion into northern Iraq. Barzani's KDP, in turn, asked for Hussein's help (even though Hussein had slaughtered thousands of Barzani's supporters during the 1980s). Hussein accepted the invitation. On Aug. 31, 30,000 Iraqi troops and thousands of KDP fighters drove the PUK from Irbil. This raid inspired United States cruise-missile strikes on southern Iraq. After securing Irbil, Barzani's men quickly routed the PUK from its other strongholds. Talabani fled to the Iran border, and the PUK is all but defunct. Barzani insists that he's not Hussein's puppet, and that Iraqi troops have withdrawn to the south. But Hussein's secret police have settled in; the Kurdish Parliament has collapsed; and experts doubt that the KDP can resist Iraqi bullying."

Well, experts were wrong. Not only did the KDP and the PUK resist Hussein's bullying -- with a little help from their friends in the sky, raining down bombs -- but the fighting between them trickled off. Which isn't to say that there isn't still a great deal of factional struggle. For the latest news on Kurdistan, in fact, there's no better place to go than to Kurdistan Observer, and even a glance at its contents tells you that fraternity has made considerable inroads on hostility since 1996. But our point is that the supposed moral front, which is aglow with the idea of a democratic Iraq growing under the benign eye of an American governor, is fantastically different from the patchwork of conflict and compromise that appears in the only post-Saddam Iraq we know. And that is going to only increase when the Ba'athist structure collapses. The best "solution" is for the Iraqi peoples to have control over that collapse, rather than have it micro or macromanaged by Americans. This will turn out not to be a solution at all -- it is LI's idea that all solutions are Final Solutions. Solutions are about death -- in living societies, they just don't happen.

Dope

An assembly, an association, a crowd or a sect has no idea other than that which is whispered to it by someone; and that idea, that indication more or less intelligent of a purpose to pursue, or a means to employ, however much it propagates itself in the brain of an individual or the brains of a group, it remains the same. The whisperer is thus responsible for its direct effects. But the emotion joined to that idea which propagates with it does not remain the same in growing, it intensifies by a sort of mathematical progression... The heads of a gang or of a riot can reasonably be called to account for the shrewdness and the craft by which they have executed massacres, pillages, arsons, etc., but not always for the violence and extensiveness of injuries caused by criminal contagions. � Gabriel Tarde, L�opinion et la foule


In our last post, we made reference to reputation � a seemingly forgotten element in the cool analysis of social action. The defenders of the Iraq war, having failed to find any reason for the war in matters of state, or any reason that would convince civilized people, have recently fallen back on moral reasons for the war. Indeed, who could argue that Saddam Hussein is a moral ruler? He�s a tyrant who employs torture and imposes mortal hardships on his people while wasting their wealth on himself, his army, and his family.

But what of his accusers? What of the cabal of the eager, the Rumsfelds, Wolfowitzes and Bushes? And what of the Blairs?

Before we accept what they whisper to us like their syncophants and servants � like, that is, America�s corporate media � we might want to inquire into whether, in the very country, Iraq, which has provoked such moral dudgeon, the United States and Britain haven�t encouraged tyranny � haven�t, in fact, aided in the mass murder of dissidents and the setting up of the structure that Saddam Hussein has utilized to his own purpose.

Today�s sermon, kids, will come from Said Aburish, the journalist I mentioned yesterday. It concerns a very convoluted coup. The coup occurred in February, 1963. Its object was an Iraqi strongman, General Abdel Karim Kassem, or Qasim. Kassem had staged a coup himself, overthrowing Iraq�s king. Kassem proved to be that Western nightmare, a populist with a leaning to communism. Or at least so he was interpreted both by the CIA and by Nasser. Nasser was anti-Western, in his way, too, but he was definitely hostile to Communism. So as Kassem started redistributing land, got the British controlled Iraqi Petroleum Company to hand over a bigger share of the wealth to the state, and he stood, for a while, in the way of Arab nationalism. For the latter virtue, he was initially supported by the Brits. But by 1963, he had made it clear that he was getting cozier with Iraqi commies, and he was also not so necessary to stopping Nasser.

What ensued was a plot with multiple aspects. Nasser agreed to let the CIA train some military men in Cairo for the eventual overthrow of Kassem. Bagman for the CIA was none other than a young officer, Saddam Hussein. A CIA man named Critchfield oversaw the operation, supported by a military attach� in Baghdad, William Lakeland. The coup successfully implemented Ba�athist military power in the state. After it was over, it was purge time. A mini Phoenix program ensued, avant la lettre. Lists of leftist were compiled, with the CIA�s help, and maybe five thousand people were variously tortured and murdered. Among the makers of the lists, Aburish claims, was the friendly Time Magazine reporter on the spot, William McHale. Not himself a CIA officer, he did have friends in the agency, including his brother, Donald. Now, we have some doubts about this point, since according to the NewsMuseum, William McHale died in a plane wreck in 1962. In fact, due to the wondrous internet, we even have an account of how McHale died. The plane was sabotaged. The sabateur's name was Laurent, the target was an Italian petro-official named Mattei, and McHale was definitely not around to compile lists. That account is here, in French. Given this discrepancy of fact, I am a little wary of Aburish's account. Other accounts have been collected on the Center for Research on Globalization site. Whether Aburish is over-reaching with his McHale story or not, the upshot is, Americans contrived the very structure of tyranny they now seek, with freshfaced virtue, to overthrow.

The idea of an American occupation of Iraq has to evoke some horror in those who are familiar with this history. There�s a wonderful phrase of Rebecca West�s. She is reading the papers in the hospital, and she reads that the King of Yugoslavia has been assassinated, and she thinks of the assassination that started World War I, and other assassinations. And she writes: �I was really frightened, for all these earlier killings had either hastened doom towards me or prefigured it.�

Speaking of hastening doom, here's a story from the Guardian:


�In a meeting with American congressmen last week, the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, nominated three countries to be tackled after Iraq: Iran, Libya and Syria.
Mr Sharon also met John Bolton, the US under secretary of state, who reportedly told him that it will be "necessary" to deal with Syria, Iran and North Korea after an attack on Iraq. That puts Syria and Iran into the lead with two votes each, followed by Libya and North Korea, with only one.
The attraction of this approach is easy to see. After Afghanistan and Iraq, conquering Syria and Iran would create an unbroken chain of puppet regimes stretching from the Mediterranean to China.�

Remora

Hawks have my head, Doves have my heart, reads the headline of Ian McEwan's essay about the Iraq war. On the evidence of the article, the hawks are getting screwed.

Of course, McEwan's heart seems to be standard issue fare. While his Id no doubt bubbles away, consciously he does not want men, women and children to be eviscerated by bombs, or perforated by bullets, or just plain fragmented by the soldiery's everyday explosives, or so he presents himself. Isn't that nice?

But his head makes your standard belligerent knock down arguments - which are more knock em down than reason. He tells us that Saddam Hussein is evil. Thus, eliminating that evil is good. Q.E.D., here's your red hot reason for a war.

McEwan, like so many belligerents, suffers from the delusion that he gets to make up the reasons for fighting the war. This is very convenient: it allows him never to confront the official reasons for fighting the war. That's because the official reasons are so weak that they wouldn't convince a child. Although McEwan writes that Hussein "has obsessively produced chemical and biological weapons on an industrial scale, and has a history of bloody territorial ambition," this is a partial truth at best. Hussein's history of chemical and biological weapons is not one of him "producing them" by himself - no, he was given vast and crucial help by Western governments, corporations, and scientists. Since the end of the Gulf War, in fact, the threat from Hussein, which we are supposed to think reaches to London and New York City, hasn't even reached to Erbil, the headquarters of the Kurdish government that, in effect, runs most of Northern Iraq. Bloody territorial ambition has been, effectively, crushed for ten years. In the last war, the American military faked reports of a vast assembling of Iraqi troops on the border between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia; in this one, they don't even bother with evidence that Saddam Hussein is planning an incursion, well, anywhere.

However, it is part of the fraudulent logic of bellicosity to evoke principles in order to attack Saddam Hussein and then, quietly, dismiss those same principles when it comes to judging the U.S. and Britain. McEwan is quick to dismiss the idea that the Anglo allies previous history in the area has anything to do with what is happening now:

"To the waverer, some of the reasoning from the doves seems to emerge from a warm fug of illogic. That the U.S. has been friendly to dictators before, that it cynically supported Saddam in his war against Iran, that there are vast oil reserves in the region-none of this helps us decide what specifically we are to do about Saddam now.'

Really? The only past that counts, apparently, is Hussein's past. The warm fug of illogic is the manufacture of McEwan's self-vaunted brain. If McEwan hired a lawyer who defrauded him, or a plumber who flooded his house, would he go to that same lawyer when he needed to defend himself in court, or that same plumber when his drains clogged? Of course not. Reputation isn't a phantom. One of the oddest aspects of the colonial mentality is the expectation that sub-altern people have no memory. They can't remember that the CIA sold them out to be slaughtered. They can't remember that the Western oil companies did their best to monopolize the one natural resource they possess that is of value. They blink, and they forget. So when the master comes around again and finds, among his native bearers, a certain resistance �. It must be on account of some immoral passage in the Koran, or in Lenin. Or something.

LI's been reading two books this week: Jonathan Kwitny's Endless Enemies, a page turner when it came out in 84, and A Brutal Friendship by Said Aburish , a Palestinian journalist. Both have their problems. Aburish is anti-Israeli in that way that makes me a little suspicious. Kwitny is vain, and, as fits a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, a little too confident of the absolute rightness of capitalism. However, they make very seasonable reading.

Kwitny devotes a nice chapter or two to the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. This is an often told story. Kermit Roosevelt, a CIA man, and various military and political advisors (among whom there was one H. Norman Schwarzkopf, military advisor at that time to the Iranian gendarmerie) managed the overthrow of Mossadegh, an Iranian nationalist who inconvenienced the West by being the Shah's prime minister. Mossadegh was determined to make the monarchy constitutional, and had wrested executive power from the Shah. The CIA paid for thugs to riot in Teheran for the Royalist side, and resurrected one Fazlollah Zahedi to be the new prime minister. The recent talk about how the left is allying itself with Islamofascists, popular with the Hitchens set, is rather inflected here, since Zahedi, who was imprisoned for pro-Nazi activities in the war, was propped up by Americans who were quite forgiving - being masters of dispersing mental fugs, apparently - of that faux pas.

As Kwitny writes, this story has been told before, notably by Barry Rubin's Paved with Good Intentions. However, as Kwitny is quick to point out, Rubin's book didn't even have an index entry for Standard Oil. The oil companies were completely left out of a story that begins when a nationalist nationalizes oil fields claimed by the Anglo-Iran Oil Company (aka B.P.) As Kwitny says, Rubin, like most foreign policy analysts, shows a world in which ideology, embodied by diplomats, military men, spies, and politicians is the sole motivation for political action. No lucre here. But in fact the men who overthrew Mossadegh benefited enormously, starting with Kermit Roosevelt himself, who went on to sell the Shah arms on behalf of Northrup, a weapons manufacturer, and who claimed, in the first version of his autobiography, that the coup was suggested by B.P. Kwitny also got hold of a report written by the New York Times reporter on the scene, Kennet Love. The report didn't go into the paper, though - it went to Alan Dulles, head of the CIA. It recounted Love's patriotic cooperation with the CIA operatives, including his humorous recount of how Love "accidentally" precipitated the final assault on Mossadegh's compound. For the McEwan's of the world, this is so much old, old news. However, for those of us whose heads aren't stuck up some hawk's unmentionable orifice, this bears a deadly relevance to the machinations of the belligerent cabal. We want to talk about the CIA's role in a lesser known coup, staged in Iraq, that is detailed by Aburish - we will get to this in the next post. However, given the background of the Iran coup story, one can't read the Washington Post's report of the Bush "plan" for a post Saddam Hussein Iraq without dread. Here's a few grafs:

"Officials said other governments are being recruited to participate in relief and reconstruction tasks under U.S. supervision at a time to be decided by Franks and officials in Washington. Although initial food supplies are to be provided by the United States, negotiations are underway with the U.N. World Food Program to administer a nationwide distribution network Opposition leaders were informed this week that the United States will not recognize an Iraqi provisional government being discussed by some expatriate groups. Some 20 to 25 Iraqis would assist U.S. authorities in a U.S.-appointed "consultative council," with no governing responsibility. Under a decision finalized last week, Iraqi government officials would be subjected to "de-Baathification," a reference to Hussein's ruling Baath Party, under a program that borrows from the "de-Nazification" program established in Germany after World War II.
Criteria by which officials would be designated as too tainted to keep their jobs are still being worked on, although they would likely be based more on complicity with the human rights and weapons abuses of the Hussein government than corruption, officials said. A large number of current officials would be retained."

And this, we are told, is the way Bush people think Iraq is going to be ruled for an indefinite period. Vietnam be damned; this is imperialism raw. The no blood for oil slogan, we are told repeatedly told, makes no sense - because American taxpayers will be forking over hundreds of billions of dollars for oil that will bring in maybe half that amount. That's an argument for those who are either terminally na�ve or have the brains of McEwan. The coincidence of interest between the taxpayer and the D.C. poobahs is limited to what the poobahs can abstract from the taxpayers pocket - but the friends of those poobahs have every interest in the fifty billion or so bucks, diverted, no doubt in the interest of democracy, towards their own patriotic bank accounts.

Dope

I had a large post today. Alas, the system froze for some reason, the blogger didn't post, and it is gone. Hmm, I don't feel like reconstructing it at the moment. Here, at least, is how it started out.

Remora
The crocodile tears of Rambo

Years and years ago, LI was a graduate student. I lived in a house with a flying circus of roommates, one of whom was a Mexican Marxist on a downer. The low was due to a deadly combo of misplaced affection, excess alcohol and Ronald Reagan. To cheer himself up, H. would rent films and watch them while drinking Papst Blue ribbon and eating little pieces of cheese and sausages. To liven the meal up, sometimes he would stick little toothpicks in the sausages. His favorite film, the one that he considered one of the great comedy classics of all time, was Rambo. Sometimes I would join him. I didn't find Rambo as worthy of repeated viewing as he did, but it was funny.Our favorite part was the final scene. After Rambo had personally kicked North Vietnam into the sea and freed a whole campful of MIA/POWs that were getting the guinea pig treatment from the sadistic Orientals, Rambo confronts some conventional military type who asks the sweat drenched superhero (the sweat oozed out of him by the bucketloads in the film, as I remember) what he wanted. In a strangled voice that was apparently some hommage to Clint Eastwood's on screen laconicism, Rambo said:

"I just want... my country... to love me... as much as I love it!"

At least, that is how I remembered it. At this point both H. and I would completely crack up. This had to be one of the funniest things ever said on film. I've since looked it up on the Internet, and it turns out I'm misremembering the line --- it is "We just want ...etc."

I'm not much of a prognosticator, or I would have understood that a whole new political sensibility was going to spring from Rambo's crocodile tears. A weak-kneed jingoism, a lachrymose nativism. This first became evident under the first Bush's term. The weirdly resentful revolt led by Buchanon in 1992, which dominated the Republican convention even as its candidate was visibly a minority phenomenon, arguably cost Bush I the election.

Well, we wonder whether the same thing isn't happening again. Since 9/11, the Bush administration has been shamelessly playing to the tearful jingoists. It's a constituency that is captured, heart and soul, by the senile barking of Donald Rumsfeld, and whipped into a frenzy by every newspaper headline that hints at skepticism about its general bellicosity. So far, so good. However, it is easy to imagine that this kind of constituency might hold its panderers captive in the end. A replay of 1992 is a distinct possibility, with Bush having to mouth a position that is much more reactionary, much more nativist, than one he really holds. We think that if Bush can't navigate between this vocal group and the rest of the country, which may find extreme and expensive foreign policy adventurism mildly repulsive, he might do himself in. ...

Well, this is as much of the post as I've reconstructed so far. We'll publish the rest of it in the next entry.

Notes

For some reason, although we read blogs, we don't often refer to them. This is sheer irresponsibility. But we want to point our readers to one blog today -- Junius -- written by Chris Bertram, a philosophy guy in Bristol, England. Bertram is a dithering dove and frankly, LI does not share his dithers. But we like Bertram's mixture of Burke-ishnesss (the very name, Junius, refers to Burke's ally in the war against Warren Hastings, Phillip Francis) and socialism.

For us, the problem with philosophy guys and war is that they immediately plunge into talk about whether a war is just or not. Now, it is interesting whether a war is just or not. But that is obviously only one consideration in deciding that one supports a war. The mix of motives that eventuate in any social act should include justice, and should also include interest, costs and benefits, honor, pertinency, past actions, context, etc. The moral issues at stake in the invasion of Iraq often smell of ether -- odorless, tasteless, and absolutely unrooted in the history and culture of Iraq or the culture and history of Britain and the U.S. -- who have left a long, dark trail in the area. For those who believe justice should override all other considerations, we urge a reading of that great tale by Heinrich Kleist, Michael Kohlhaas.

Anyway, in the spirit of Burke, we wrote Bertram a little letter (yes, the war fever is driving us crazy. We know this. We know we've gone insane) to shore up the case against the War. Here it is.

Dear Chris Bertram

I read your post on human rights and the just war approach to war in Iraq.
Surely the antiwar argument stands on strong Burkean grounds, making something like the following two points:

One, replacing an unjust order with a just order is best done by the people themselves. Why? Because replacing an unjust order with a "revolution from above" presumes a mechanical, non-representative politics alien to the organic structure of society. In Hayek's terms, it is the ultimate in central planning -- planners with no knowledge (not even tacit knowledge) of Iraqi society usurp for themselves the right to change it radically. If Burke supported war against the directorate in France, it was because the directorate had recently overthrown what he viewed as the legitimate governors of France. His model, however, seems to have been the Glorious Revolution. Although King William enjoyed the support of some foreign powers, his right to the throne was founded not only in the spirit of the English order, but in the acceptance, by the British, of his rule -- an acceptance that expressed itself in supporting and supplying King William's forces.

The second point would be: are there indications of Iraqi self-organisation on Burkean lines? I'd say yes -- in the case of Iraq, we already have a "liberated zone" that is making fractious efforts to organize itself in terms of representative government.

Given these two points, the question is: what would both instill a legitmate representative govenment in Iraq and preserve it from the kind of military dictatorship to which American allies in the Middle East (vide Pakistan) are heir? It would seem here that invasion is actually injurious to that objective. The argument against war -- at least, invasion by foreign powers -- should then countenance the preservation of the current zone in Northern Iraq, in order for the people to work out for themselves the proper structures of their order. As it becomes stronger, it will act as an attractor for the legitimate interests of the Iraqi people, which will ultimately be crowned by the internal overthrow of the Ba'athist structure. In fact, it has taken a long time for that to happen in the North -- the endemic warlordism of the middle nineties has only recently lost its grip on the countryside.

The only objection to this is that Saddam Hussein is strong enough to suppress such internal change, and that his strength hasn't changed over time. But I don't think that is a strong enough argument for invasion -- although it might be a strong argument for supporting the liberated zone in more concrete ways.

Burke was very conscious of the continuity of character, and he would certainly have found suspicious that the cabal of D.C. officials who now advocate war were once so favorable to Saddam Hussein's government that they covertly supplied it with military aid while it was gassing Kurds and Iranians. In fact, it is easy to imagine what he would have said about this. Just read the speeches in the impeachment of Warren Hastings.
Yours,
Etc.

....

We received an email from our friend T. in New York re the birthday of Kazantzakis. We liked it. Here it is, in all its crabby splendor.

"Salon was decent enough to acknowledge the anniversary of NK's birth today, and showed further decency with the selected passage from Zorba. Although NK should not be considered "minor" and I have tried and failed to make him "nomadic", to my mind, he is just not spoken of often enough when discussions move to the subject of "the novel"; hell, he wrote at least three wonderful ones - The Greek Passion, The Last Temptation of Christ and Zorba. Something like twenty years ago, those, Dead Souls, Quixote, Anna Karenina and The Bros. K brought me to a sense of what a novel is and why it is important to have such things around and why one should go to the trouble of keeping them close at all times. Perhaps he is "too ethnic" to be included in matters of the novel (?) More than Greek, he was Cretan.

Maybe its that the image of Anthony Quinn is too strong for me, but Zorba never was The One for me. No, The One has always been The Greek Passion. My esteem altogether reinforced with those extraordinarily intimate books The Saviors of God and Report to Greco. Is it twenty years ago that I first read the later? Mere sentimentality: Shortly after I had finished cluelessly turning the pages of Zarathustra, I read the Report for the first time. NK still strikes me (and herein is the sentimentality) as amongst the most passionate (exuberance, merciful sympathy) readers of FWN (heres there with Batille, Blanchot, Deleuze and Klossowski).

Unlike the others, however, his introduction to Fritz was as personal as imaginable: he was told that he looked like Nietzsche!
Also, I never fail to recall that he was excommunicated (not even Friedrich the Antichristian could pull that off).

Anyway, I'm in no position to tell his tale (I include a link to a detailed chronology of his life below), but I can at least spit out a blurb on this anniversary.

I hate the snow, and I hope that you are well and good.

Remora

The focus groups in the street

"Size of protest, it's like deciding, 'Well I'm going to decide policy based up on a focus group.' The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security - in this case - security of the people." - Bush, Washington Post

"I understand the concerns of the thousands who marched on Saturday. -- Tony Blair, Guardian

Millions of Soviet people are profoundly sympathetic with the Hungarian workers' struggle to successfully transform their homeland into a free, sovereign socialist state. We understand the desire of the Hungarian workers, peasants and intelligentsia to raise the standard of living of the population, utilizing the great advantages of the people's democratic system to do so. -- Pravda, November 1956, commenting on the Hungarian Revolution


The reaction to the protests is very -- as Donald Rumsfeld might say (vide our last post on him) --- interesting. We have been especially amused by NPR. They excerpted Bush's speech, and followed it with the explanation that "thousands" demonstrated over the world. Expect that same innumeracy when it comes to Iraqi casualties in the war (Some tens were killed in Baghdad's bombing today...). But there is a more profound issue here than that of war or peace in Iraq. The question is: who runs things. The dismissal of the Protesters has been breathtaking in its reach, and revealing in its vocabulary. In the Figaro, there was an interview with Laurent Murawiec which, we think, is representative. Murawiec was the man who caused a bit of a stir last summer when he instructed Richard Perle's White House sponsored Defense council on the advisability of overthrowing the Saudi government. Here he is breathing the very air of the Bellicose cabal:


"What do you think of the anti-war protests last Saturday?

The "pacifists" believe they are giving peace a chance, but in fact, the only thing they are giving a chance to is their blindness. The protests last Saturday were the marriage of John Lennon and Neville Chamberlain. A naivete pushed to the point where there is an absolute unconsciousness of the issues of the conflict, a complete contempt for reality. There's nothing to be expected from such an alliance."

This is the tone of Pravda on the Potomac. What is more disturbing, however, is that the assumptions underlying this tone are shared, to a large extent, by the opposition in this country. I talked on the phone to my best friend yesterday, and he was rather mocking about the demonstrations making any difference. It is that frozen response to the mechanism of oppression that shows just how much oppression has become the default, in this country. It is a conviction that false consciousness is all there is to consciousness. Flattering both to elitist policy makers in right wing think tanks and academic leftists, who have provided themselves with a wonderfully narrowed field of action, it seems to me so clearly false, so clearly not the story of the last couple hundred of years, that I am surprised how prevalent, how almost universal it is. "Resistance" in academia is almost invariably trivialized: it is a matter of choosing to watch Buffy the Vampire Killer, or dressing Barbie in a strange way. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the Enlightenment project of adults governing themselves. In this way, the "union sacre" to use Murawiec's words has been consumated between the world view of Madison Avenue and the world view of Cultural Studies. It is coupled with another idea, also immensely flattering to those educated in expensive Universities: that the popular mood is infinitely malleable. This has animated both the makers of Wag the Dog and the busy staffers working for Karl Rove. But why would anybody, in the long run, believe it? Two hundred years of history, from the American and French Revolutions to de-colonization to the end of the Soviet empire, show how badly Revolutions from above fare.

But we don't have to look at the Grand Pattern - all we have to do is look at the spectacular failure of media and policy elites to impeach President Clinton. That is a history replete with the comedy of secret makers and shakers betting on the magic of the coup. Well, it didn't work. Once again, those makers and shakers are betting on the magic of a coup - running roughshod over the popular mood to create a war. Well, they might just create a war, but the damage is becoming clear. Those who have attached themselves to the Cabal of belligerents (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld) are going to have severe trouble retaining their 'leadership" roles - starting with Aznar in Spain and going through Tony Blair in the U.K. Let's take Aznar first. Here's a report from the Voice of America, not a leftist bastion:

"Anti-war demonstrations took place in 57 cities throughout Spain, including all the provincial capitals. The two biggest were held in Madrid and Barcelona with a total of about two million people. Spain's Prime Minister Jos� Mar�a Aznar has been a staunch supporter of U-S policy toward Iraq despite the fact that polls show that the vast majority of Spaniards are against the use of force to make Iraq disarm. The result has been that his ruling Popular Party has stood alone in parliament in defending the U-S policy on Iraq.

The peace demonstrations were organized or supported by the major opposition Socialist party, the United Left Coalition, the major labor unions, and various non-government organizations like Green Peace. Following Pope John Paul II's opposition to the war option against Iraq, Catholics led by priests and nuns turned out in large numbers and church bells chimed in some cities during the demonstrations.Both the Madrid and Barcelona demonstrations were headed not only by opposition politicians and union leaders but by Spanish actors and artists as well. Film Director Pedro Almodovar, nominated for Oscars as best script writer and director, read the closing manifesto in Madrid."

And this, from today's Guardian:


More significantly for Mr Aznar, opinion polls have shown that, for the first time since securing a clear victory in elections three years ago, the Socialists have overtaken the People's party in voting intentions.

Mr Aznar also faced embarrassment yesterday when it was revealed that in 1997 he had offered to pay Baghdad in "aid" if it gave oil contracts to the Spanish-owned Repsol company. The government was ready to make a "donation" if Repsol was given a concession in the Nasiriya field, despite the fact that the UN had just issued a series of resolutions condemning Iraq's continued blocking of inspections, according to El Mundo newspaper, which quoted official documents."

As to Tony Blair, I don't need to quote polls.

Now, the point here isn't just that the war is unpopular, but that the very ability of the American media to analyze the factors which would be set in motion by Bush's foreign policy have been almost universally pathetic. That because the media has bought into the common 'educated' perception that elites run things while the common man drools over brainless celebrities. This is comically illustrated in the analyses, leading up to the U.S. foreign policy debacles of the last couple of weeks, that France wasn't "serious" about opposing the U.S. policy. No, they'd get out of the way at the last moment. That was the almost universal opinion, in spite of the fact that there are plenty of reasons to think France's interest, especially as interpreted by Chirac, would be precisely the opposite of that. This isn't a matter of opposing the war: it is a matter of understanding, outside the filter of one's personal opinions, the interest of the other. The expectation that the popular mood just doesn't count has so seized the educated that it has become inscribed in the very way that even those who oppose the war here think about politics. The war is inevitable refrain is partly about the fact that the clever top class always gets what it wants.

Well, the quietism of the left in America is a scandal which we aren't going to embark on analyzing at the moment. But we do think that somebody ought to ask: if the planners are so smart, why is the plan so dumb?

Instead of believing that democracy is a mere sham concealing the puppetmasters pulling strings and getting their way, LI subscribes to the belief of the Psalmist: "Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength."

And of Blake: "How do you know but every bird that cuts the
airy way, is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?"

These are the pillars of our politics, mes amies.

Remora

Powers of Thought

The best American coverage of the protests world wide was carried by the Los Angeles Times. LI would bet that if ten million people around the world had protested in favor of Bush's position in Iraq, the Washington Post and the New York Times would have been alight with celebratory headlines. But no, we will give no headlines for peace marchers. Heavens.

The LA Times went with an honest report. It didn't mix protest against Tony Blair's policy in London with machine gun toting thugs marching in Baghdad as a species of the same thing. We liked these grafs in Sebastian Rotella's story:

"Leslie Druce, 70, marched in London carrying a placard that proclaimed "Bush and Blair ... Liars and Bullies."

"They treat us like we have no power of thought," Druce said. "Who are they kidding? Do they really feel threatened by the Iraqis? The U.S. could be such a power for good in the world, but Bush has chosen to be the bully boy instead. It really bothers me that Bush has used Blair as a veil of decency through all of this."

Many protesters were members of Blair's Labor Party who have broken with their leader over the war.

"We voted for Blair, but on this he's totally wrong. It's immoral," said Peter Burton, who made the 237-mile trip to London from his Exeter home along with his wife, Rita. "He has totally misjudged how dangerous this is to the Middle East and how destabilizing this has been to the United Nations. And we believe in the United Nations."

There is, in politics, one rule of success that seems pretty constant. You have to help your friends. Eventually, the consistent, serial betrayal of allies will undermine even the most secure of empires. The D.C. cenacle of belligerents has concluded that their only friends are to the right: the frothing academics in various conservative think tanks or the Likudniks at the Weekly Standard. Hence the unceasing flow of vituperation directed, for instance, at France. This has taken on a logic of its own that is undermining its objective. The creation of an atmosphere in which all impediments to war with Iraq are treated as the hostile and nasty acts of terrorists is going to make it impossible to justify retaining that closeness to Bush's administration that Rumsfeld's 'New Europe' has been trying to impress upon the world. You know that when even Chili goes against you at the U.N., something is seriously wrong.

Speaking of France...

A wonderful example of how polemical talent cannot survive its own debauch is Christopher Hitchens recent screed about Chirac, which was published, appropriately enough, on the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Hitchens used to know something about the deadly insult: the polemicists great truth is that truth itself must, given the moral occassion, exaggerate. But insult without the backing of truth, insult in the service of a blind and conniving power, destroys even the truths it embraces. As Mary McCarthy once said about Lilian Hellman, every word she says is a lie, including "the" and "a," So, too, in this incredibly silly piece about the ever corrupt Chirac, entitled Saddam's pal, Chirac the Rat. Among the carious verbiage we loved this passage:

"However, the conduct of Jacques Chirac can hardly be analysed in these terms. Here is a man who had to run for re-election last year in order to preserve his immunity from prosecution, on charges of corruption that were grave. Here is a man who helped Saddam Hussein build a nuclear reactor and who knew very well what he wanted it for. Here is a man at the head of France who is, in effect, openly for sale. He puts me in mind of the banker in Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale: a man so habituated to corruption that he would happily pay for the pleasure of selling himself.

Here, also, is a positive monster of conceit. He has unctuously said that "force is always the last resort". Vraiment? This was not the view of the French establishment when troops were sent to Rwanda to try to rescue the client regime that had just unleashed ethnocide against the Tutsi. It is not, one presumes, the view of the French generals who are treating the people and nation of Cote d'Ivoire as their fief. It was not the view of those who ordered the destruction of an unarmed ship, the Rainbow Warrior, as it lay at anchor in a New Zealand harbour after protesting against the French official practice of conducting atmospheric nuclear tests in the Pacific. (I am aware that some of these outrages were conducted when the French Socialist Party was in power, but in no case did Chirac express anything other than patriotic enthusiasm. If there is a truly "unilateralist" government on the UN Security Council, it is France.)"

Of course, as faithful readers of LI know, the corruptions of Chirac are entangled with the corruptions of Hitchen's great "pal," George Bush. Chirac was the first European politician to congratulate Bush after the coup in Florida -- a result that Hitchens, proceeding through his accustomed tergiversation, is surely happy with. After all, democracy has a limit. And among those corrupt supporters of Chirac, we have previously mentioned an arms dealer, Pierre Falcone. Pierre Falcone runs with a highly smelly contingent of criminals including the well known Russian-Israeli Mafioso, Arcadi Gaydamak. Gaydamak can come to the U.S. to parties honoring the likes of his friend, Ariel Sharon, and remain unmolested by the FBI, which is so vigilant, otherwise, in incarcerating brown skinned working class men who happen to speak Arabic. Falcone is in jail in France, but his wife, beauty queen, Sonia, lives in Arizona and is highly active in Republican circles.

Here's a corpwatch article that fills in the details:

"According to Global Witness, the links between Angola's corrupt government and the Bush administration are just as odorous as those linking Luanda's leadership to past and current members of the French government, both Socialist and Gaullist. In addition to the French oil giant Total-Fina-Elf, oil companies like Chevron, Texaco, Philipps Petroleum, Exxon Mobil, and BP-Amoco -- all with close links to Bush and his White House oil team -- were heavily involved in propping up dos Santos in return for profitable off-shore oil concessions.After transferring some $770 million in oil revenues to their own private bank accounts, dos Santos and his cronies became convinced that pluralism in their country would be a very dangerous thing for their future business deals. They also quickly abandoned their former Marxist beliefs in favor of the type of capitalist principles embraced by George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac.

Paris, Texas

There are similarities between dos Santos' new relationship with George W. Bush and the Bush family's historical ties to the House of Saud. Both represent the murky nature of oil politics that places US economic, national security, and human rights interests far behind the priority assigned to ensuring maximum corporate profits for a tight-knit and secretive international oil fraternity.Just as Bush's past financial links to the Bin Laden family have been exposed by the media, so too have his links to Angolagate and Falcone. Falcone's wife, Sonia, a former Miss Bolivia and a friend of First Lady Laura Bush, became a big-ticket contributor to Bush's 2000 election campaign. Contributions were made to the campaign through Sonia's Essant� Corporation, a distributor of health, beauty, and sexual pleasure products (such as a cream called Entisse that Essant�'s web site says is guaranteed to duplicate the effects of Viagra). http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=2576 We recommend the whole Corporate Watch article as a nice introduction to the chamber of horrors which financed the Bush campaign."

Thieves can fall out, but it takes the blind vanity of a Hitchens to take the side of one of those thieves as a moral imperative. For those who want to know more about the Chirac-Bush arms connection, read our post of 6/19 last year.

Remora


Michael Kelly's column on Joschka Fischer, Germany's foreign minister, profiles his new left career, from street protests against Vietnam to street protests against the supposed suicide of Ulrike Meinhof. The tone is set by the use of Stern magazine via an article by Paul Berman for the accusation that Fischer beat a policeman -- because, of course, there is no judicial accusation of this act. The tirade was unleashed by Joschka Fischer's reply to Donald Rumsfeld. Here's the beginning graf:

"Excuse me. I am not convinced."
-- German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, lecturing to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in Munich last week, after Rumsfeld's argument for war against Iraq.

Mr. Rumsfeld may have convinced the leaders of 18 European nations, but not you, Mr. Fischer. It's personal. This seems to me the right way to look at it. The question of failing to convince must be seen in the context of whom we have failed to convince."

We, in turn, have a question: who is the "we" to whom Kelly is referring? To determine this, let's ask, on a personal level, about Mr. Rumsfeld, who may have convinced the prime minister of Spain, but not 70% of the population; who may have convinced the prime minister of the Netherlands, but not 72% of the population; who may have convinced Tony Blair, but not the 52% that see him as George Bush's poodle ; who may have convinced Berlusconi, but not 72.7% of Italians.

Mr. Kelly's column then references pictures published by Stern that purportedly show Mr. Fischer in various criminal acts:

Sometimes "who" explains "why."Mr. Fischer, who are you?

You are the foreign minister of Germany. You have been that since 1998, when Germany's left-wing Greens party, of which you are a leader, won enough in the polls to force the Social Democratic Party into the so-called Red-Greens coalition government.

But for the formative years of your political life, you were no man in a blue government suit. You were a man in a black motorcycle helmet. That is what you were wearing on that day in April 1973 when you were photographed, to quote the New Left historian Paul Berman, "as a young bully in a street battle in Frankfurt."In 2001, Stern magazine published five photographs of you in action that day. What these pictures depicted was described by Berman in a deeply informed 25,000-word article, "The Passion of Joschka Fischer" (The New Republic, Sept. 3, 2001). The photos showed you, Mr. Fischer, inflicting a "gruesome beating" on a young policeman named Rainer Marx: "Fischer and other people on the attack, the white-helmeted cop going into a crouch; Fischer's black-gloved fist raised as if to punch the crouching cop on the back; Fischer's comrades crowding around; the cop huddled on the ground, Fischer and his comrades appearing to kick him . . ."

Thus, according to Kelly, Mr. Fischer. Well, on the principle that who's lead to why's, perhaps we should find out who Mr. Rumsfeld is, the man who was appointed to be Secretary of Defense after the Supreme Court forced the nation to ignore the popular vote totals in favor of the dubious balloting practices of Florida and elevated George Bush to the Presidency. Let's start with a picture, too. How about this one, of Mr. Rumsfeld as Reagan's "personal envoy" shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in 1983? No black gloved fists are involved. Rather, we see only the oiliest cordiality all the way around. The pic was published by CNN, who interviewed Rumsfeld. 1 Here's how that went:

McIntyre [CNN reporter]: Well, let me take you back to about 20 years ago. The date, I believe, was December 20, 1983. You were meeting with Saddam Hussein, I think we have some video of that meeting. Tell me what was going on during this meeting?

Rumsfeld: Where did you get this video, from the Iraqi television?

McIntyre: This is from the Iraqi television.

Rumsfeld: When did they give it to you, recently or back then?

McIntyre: We dug this out of the CNN library.

Rumsfeld: I see. Isn't that interesting. There I am.

McIntyre: So what was going on here, what were you thinking at the time?

Rumsfeld: Well, Iraq was in a battle, a war, with Iran."

To explain about the who, the Rumsfeld who was being browbeaten, Mr. Kelly has it, by the bullying Mr. Fischer, scum that arose from the very streets, here's a little background from the Washington Post:

"Among the people instrumental in tilting U.S. policy toward Baghdad during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war was Donald H. Rumsfeld, now defense secretary, whose December 1983 meeting with Hussein as a special presidential envoy paved the way for normalization of U.S.-Iraqi relations. Declassified documents show that Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad at a time when Iraq was using chemical weapons on an "almost daily" basis in defiance of international conventions."

Interesting, as Rummy might say. So, shall we add up atrocities so far? On the one hand, we have Mr. Fischer supposedly beating up a policeman and attending a rally in which someone was killed. On the other hand, we have our Defense secretary being wined and dined by Saddam Hussein, whose case he later represented to his boss, President Reagan, while, what was it? 300, 000? 500,000 Iraqi and Iranian casualties were, even at that time, piling up. Interesting.

Ah, and it gets more interesting, doesn't it? Return with us to March 24, 1984. On that day the UN released a report on the Iraqi use of chemical weapons. Does Mr. Kelly find those kind of weapons shocking? Does he find them cause, now, to invade Iraq? Well, on March 24, 1984, Mr. Rumsfeld didn't. No, Mr. Rumsfeld was returning ot Baghdad on that day to resume meetings with Iraqi ministers.

Interesting. And did that meeting have consequences? Oh, yes it did. Here is the chronology from the cooperative research site:

November 26, 1984. The United States Government re-established full diplomatic ties with Baghdad [Gwertzman 11-27-1984] even though it was fully aware that Iraq was using chemical weapons in its war against Iran.


1985. U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz successfully convinced Rep. Howard Berman to drop a House bill that put Iraq back on the State Department's list of states that sponsor terrorism. Shultz argued that the United States was actively engaged in "diplomatic dialogue on this and other sensitive issues," and asserted that "Iraq has effectively distanced itself from international terrorism." The Secretary of State further claimed that if the U.S. discovered any evidence implicating Iraq in the support of terrorist groups, the U.S. Government "would promptly return Iraq to the list." [Jentleson 1994 p. 54]


Here's how Kelly's column ends:

"So, that's who you are, Mr. Fischer, the man we haven't convinced. You are the man for whom Munich wasn't enough, the man who needed Entebbe to convince him that murdering Jews was wrong. You ask to be excused. You have been excused."

And here's how we will end this post: "So that's who you are, Mr. Rumsfeld, the man who wants to convince us now to go to war, but who once found nothing inexcusable in a relationship with a country who was daily using chemical weapons to fight an aggressive war in 1983; the man who, in 1984, acting as a go-between, was instrumental in sealing a "special relationship" between Iraq and the United States which, by happy coincidence, preceded the use of scud missiles against Iran to the extent that perhaps 300 rained down upon Teheran in 1988; the man whose boss, President Bush, was clearly using the jingoistic side of the potential war to defeat the wan opposition in November, 2002; the man who now tells us that war is so urgent that it should be fought in a matter of days, but who once was so careless of the Iraqi use of the weapons of mass destruction that he made it an opportunity for profit on the part of American military contractos. You tell us that the European opposition isn't inexcusable. Well, no, Mr. Rumsfeld, it isn't inexcusable. Your hypocrisy, though, is."

Dope


A few days ago we mentioned McClellan and Grant as the two poles of the American attitude towards war. The more we've mulled over this point, the more we think there is a tasty essay here. The point is simple. Empires persist because of a willingness of the citizens of the empire to endure a certain constant level of casualties in the course of maintening the empire. If we take the British empire, for instance, its expansion through numerous small wars in the nineteenth century was made possible, at home, because of a willingness to sanction an annual tribute of British lives to the ideal of maintaining and expanding the empire in India, Central Asia, and Africa. From the Sepoy Mutiny to the Boer War, this willingness was often tested, and rarely provoked the kind of backlash that would rein in the imperial ambitions of the British Government.

In contrast, the United States did not seek that kind of empire. Briefly, the U.S. embarked on an expansion at the turn of the century, but in comparison to the French, the British, and even the Germans, the American effort was relatively minor. A recent book by a Wall Street Journal writer, Max Boot, documents the many small wars that America has engaged in to shore up the idea that Empire is, indeed, in the American grain. However, more significant is the rarity of any long-term occupation resulting from those wars. Occupation means more than soldiers being stationed in a place -- it means the gradual transfer of a whole administrative apparatus. This was the backbone of the British empire, but only the Phillipines, and, briefly, Cuba, tempted the Americans to do likewise. There's a reason for that: while Americans have traditionally shyed away from situations that involve attrition over the long term. It is that reflex which dooms the imperial project.

It is not that Americans are averse to bloodshed. While the British were constructing their empire out of multitudinous border wars, Americans did endure, in the Civil War, violence of a much more concentrated and horrific kind. And in the twentieth century, the U.S. engagement in World War I and II also saw committment to wars which were comparable, in terms of casualties, to any of the participants. However, I think the pattern of American behavior is more normally represented by the Korean and Vietnam war. In both wars, the reality of high casualties and the expectation that optimal victory would exact more of the same had a determining effect on the American conduct of the war. General Westmoreland once said, famously, that more American lives were lost on the highways during the sixties than were lost in the Vietnam war. This was taken, and should be taken, to be a callous statement. Nevertheless, the callousness it reflects is necessary for any sustained imperial effort. There are no painless empires.

This American pattern is often ignored by American policy makers. The latest example is the kind of ambitious policy in the Middle East being promoted by the circle around Paul Wolfiwitz. According to this circle, America is, in reality, an empire. So using that imperial power, we can remake social and political situations that we don't like in our image. The language of empire now fills our foreign policy journals, as well as conservative weeklies. The opposition to the Bush administration's aggressive plans in the Middle East has concentrated mainly on the cost of war in the narrow sense -- the cost, that is, of invading and defeating Iraq. However, the real question is about the cost of the war in the larger sense -- the cost of exposing an occupying force to the constant attrition of a guerilla war, and to the unexpected violence of factional conflict. This is where the imperial model has failed in the recent past, from Saigon to Somalia. Empires require some legitimation that goes beyond the mere aggrandizement of power. Americans have never accepted any legitimation, over the long run, except national defense. Neither glory nor ideology have garnered American support for a war.

To explain the paradox of American power -- that combination of a high level of military spending with a low level of acceptable risk -- I believe this, it is useful to use McClellan and Grant to represent the two poles of the American dialectic. Both McClellan and Grant started from the same premise: the prerequisite to fighting a war was amassing a force disproportionately greater than the enemy's. However, while the strategic premise was the same, the tactics were much different. McClellan Civil War career has become infamous for the chances he refused to take. He was tender for the lives of his men. It was a this caution that doomed his Virginia campaign of 1862. As one private wrote, "We are at a loss to imagine whether this is strategy or defeat." (Gallagher)

Grant's tactics were very different. He used the advantage of a more numerous army to raise the level of casualties he would accept. This made it possible to continue inflicting casualties on the enemy in a more prolonged way than was ever seen before, in the campaign. The general stress broke the army of Northern Virginia. It is easy to forget that Grant's ultimate success was preceded by general shock at the the bloodletting he was prepared to countenance -- a shock that so shook the Union side that Lincoln, in the middle of the election campaign of 1864, thought he was going to lose. Grant's position was made plain in a telegram Sherman, with whom he was in perfect agreement, sent to Halleck, one of the incompetent Union commanders, after Vicksburg:

``War is upon us, none can deny it. It is not the choice of the Government of the United States, but of a faction; the Government was forced to accept the issue, or to submit to a degradation fatal and disgraceful to all the inhabitants. In accepting war, it should be `pure and simple' as applied to the belligerents. I would keep it so, till all traces of the war are effaced; till those who appealed to it are sick and tired of it, and come to the emblem of our nation, and sue for peace. I would not coax them, or even meet them half-way, but make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it....

This is the kind of language spoken by legendary American commanders, like Sherman, Grant, Patton and Macarthur. The words are stirring. We shouldn't be deluded, however, into thinking that the feelings are typical. McClellan's caution has never been submerged by Grant's boldness in the mix of American foreign policy and military strategy. In fact, it is the McClellan pole that drives the fundamental US military strategy of the moment: replacing the manpower of battle with military technology. The goal is to achieve Grant's objective with McClellan's tenderness for American life. This works in the case of those military engagements that can be decided solely by weaponry. However, occupation is, by definition, not one of those strategies. In fact, by raising the optimistic vision of a bloodless (at least for our side) war, it prepares the guerillas advantage -- blows struck against the occupying forces will be illogically magnified because they are judged against the background of a military technical utopia.

The best argument against the imperial design of the Wolfiwitzes is to appeal to the reality of this American pattern, in which the cost of an enterprise is judged rigidly against the benefit it brings. The benefit brought by regime change in Iraq is obvious -- but the benefit wrought by invading and occupying Iraq is not. The landscape, as it appears to D.C. foreign policy honchos, is one of overwhelming American power. But the landscape since 9/11 has changed. Guerillas may not possess nuclear missiles, but they can forge the weapons of mass destruction out of boxcutters and American airliners. in treating Iraq as though it were merely a problem amenable to a Grant-like solution, we are putting ourselves into a situation in which all alternatives are impalatable. Assuming that 9/11, and the suicide bombers in Israel, are omens of things to come, the occupying U.S. forces in Iraq will be subject to the constant low attrition of guerilla warfare, with its morale breaking concomitants: a desire to strike blows against a dispersed enemy driving general dispersed acts of mayhem against the native population, which in turn creates mutual distrust between American forces and the native population, which in turn creates a gap between the ostensible reasons for the American presence (that they somehow 'represent' the aspirations of the native people) and the reality of it. Bush is edging into a situation in which the choices will be an unacceptable withdrawal from Iraq, and an unacceptable occupation of Iraq.

This situation should look familiar. It is Vietnam.

Remora
Peace, he said tediously, again, and again, and again...



This is a heartening story. The antiwar demonstrations are supposed to be huge this weekend. Here's the Guardian forecasting the demo weather:

"Many countries will witness the largest demonstrations against war they have ever seen. The majority will be small but 500,000 people are expected in London and Barcelona, and more than 100,000 in Rome, Paris, Berlin and other European capitals. In the US, organisers were yesterday anticipating 200,000 marching in New York if permission is given. A further 100,000 are expected to march in 140 other American cities."

We wonder, though, why these vast masses seem to have no healthy effect on their leaders. Tony Blair might be threatened, but Berlusconi and Aznar, among others, seem to be doing just fine. There's a sense in which it seems that opinion, in Europe, is moving in suspended animation, while the leadership, elected by the good burgers to their offices every manjack, seem not to care.

And another anti-war story in the Observer, by Mary Riddell, deserves to be read -- if not for its argument, at least for its style. Here is the heart of the thing, beginning with the Colin Powell speech:


"All suspicion and no proof, Le Monde complained the next day. That is not quite fair. It is true that, in trying to hitch Iraq to the war on terror, Bush and Blair have offered the long-running impression of a Jane Austen matriarch attempting to betroth an ageing daughter to a regency buck. Once again, Secretary Powell offered no credible evidence that Saddam and al-Qaeda are an item. Otherwise, his case was plausible, if you discount the toytown security dossier compiled by the internet pirates of Downing Street. Saddam, as we knew, has chemical and biological weapons. He is a murderous tyrant bent on obfuscation. Powell's assertions of mobile laboratories and field officers whispering of nerve agents did not sound mad. The absence of even a smoking catapult may not matter. You can buy almost the entire Powell package, agree that victory might be swift and still reject the case for war.

It is late. We are past the five to mid night set by Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector. Saddam's attempts to turn back time are likely to be spurned by Bush. The 'Screaming Eagles', the 101st Airborne Division whose 36-hour deployment capacity makes it the harbinger of war, have landed. In this time of nemesis, doves are pitied, or reviled in the case of Tony Benn and his Listen with Saddam broadcast, suitable for credulous under-fives.

And still the case for peace is stronger than the argument for war. The imperative of smashing Saddam before he goes for us ignores three caveats. There is no sign he plans to do so. Pre-emption encourages the bellicose, from Washington to Pyongyang, to arm up and strike first. And we have been here before."

There are polemics and there are polemics. The only kind worth a shit, in the end, are the thick ones -- dense with cross-references, sublimated madness, indignation lighting up the flow charts of reason like search lamps illuminating a landing area for risky craft. Riddell writes like that

Here is the opposition. From the Telegraph, we have this incomparable bit of propaganda:

Next Saturday, more than half a million people are expected to march to Hyde Park Corner. They will be demonstrating against the attempts of George W Bush and Tony Blair to prevent a man who is a proven mass murderer from holding on to his weapons of mass destruction.

Here are some of the facts the half a million or so marchers do not recognise: Saddam Hussein has already demonstrated his willingness to use chemical weapons; he has started two wars with unprovoked attacks on neighbouring countries; he was the only Arab head of state who openly celebrated the suicide hi-jackers who killed nearly 3,000 people in the US on September 11, 2001; he was also the only one who made Osama bin Laden his "man of the year". And, for those who care about the UN, Saddam Hussein has blatantly violated UN Resolution 1441."

Those are some facts all right. We especially like the "man of the year" thingy. We thought Time Magazine was the only institution bold enough to make such choices -- but no! Saddam is encroaching on Time's turf! So we turned to google, and sure enough -- Saddam has a site, Mykindofmanoftheyearohdear.com. It goes back to 1971, when, of course, Charles Manson swept the field. As S.H. said, at the time, Fearfully cool, the way he whacked those weak American sonovabitch! It was a mother of a whacking, if I say so myself. Charlie, I like the Beatles too, which I listen to in my secular Ba'athist military headquarters before I go out bashing Kurd head -- but I can't compare my fanaticism to yours, brother!" Other men of the year have included Pol Pot, John Gacy, and -- a special twofer -- those Columbine cuties, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. As Saddam said at the time, 'these two remind me of myself in my youth, except of course I was sexually much more fertile, like unto the bull. Ah, like them, I lacked only one thing -- a nice bazooka! Dad wouldn't give it to me! Ay, he regretted his fiendish stinginess as soon as I became Supreme Commander of All I Survey! But again I say, do not blame this killing, may God Bless it, on Eric and Dylan's listening of the riotous sounds of Marilyn Manson! He has stolen too much, may he die and suffer in the fires of hell, from Kraut Rock, this so called Marilyn! Eric and Dylan would never be so fooledly foolish! As for Nine Inch Nails, what can I say? They were once as tough as a corps of Republican Guards, and now are as wimpy as, well, the Kuwaiti Army.

Notes

The Lion and the Lizard

My friend, H., who is traveling about the world, is not yet writing for the Iranian. This is a pity, since the Iranian is one of the most interesting sites on the web, and if H. ever comes across these words, we'd like to know why he hasn't contacted them yet. Why, H.?

There's a sad essay by Abbas Milani, a Persian (he insists on Persian) intellectual, who dilates on the varied glories of Persian culture -- glories which are reflected in a mirror we know, the mirror of Western writers. After tracing fragments of the Persian interlocutor in this history -- a figure that I must imagine from footprints and echoes, since I am ignorant of the very rudiments of Persian history -- he ends with this coda:

"Furthermore, as the West began to take its leap into modernity, we fell into a dread abyss of tyranny, religious fanaticism and irrationalism. We have yet to altogether free ourselves from these benighted conditions. Khayam could have been referring to our time, when he wrote, "They say the lion and the lizard Keep/the court where Jamshid gloried and drank deep."

Maybe on nights like these we are allowed to dwell on the glories of our past; we are, after all, gathered here to help support the education of a new generation of Persians, whose critical understanding of the accomplishments of our much abused nation will make them wise and gallant torch-bearers in the long, complicated, sometimes terrible, often glorious march of our history and heritage."

The lion and the lizard are at least respectably iconic beasts. What can we say of the ruinous Bush administration, except that the armadillo and the diamond back rattler seem to keep their swampy watch/where Lincoln once made his melancholy round.

And getting back to Italy...
When LI first started this site, we served up several juicy meditations about the intricacies of Italian politics. We were brought up short by Alan, who now runs the Gadflybuzz site. Alan advised us that Italian politics was probably repulsing more readers than it was drawing.

Alas, this was good advice. So we lowered ourselves to comment on, well, American current events. Not as exciting, not as exciting. Italian politics is so exciting that it eventually wears down the participant. This might be the reason that more isn't being made out of the latest scandal to exhibit the unhealthy roots of Berlusconi's fortune, and its prolongation in his government's evident plan to nurture corruption. Here's the latest, from the World Press:


"On Jan. 7, 2003, Antonino Giuffre�once a key aide to the fugitive Mafia kingpin Bernardo Provenzano, now an informer�confirmed that Mafia figures had been in contact with members of Berlusconi's Fininvest company to negotiate the terms of their political support for Berlusconi�s election campaign. He also clearly stated that several Mafiosi, including a Palermo boss named Stefano Bontade, had met the Italian premier at his villa outside Milan many years before Berlusconi entered politics in 1993. According to Giuffre�s testimony, Bontade used to go to Berlusconi�s villa to visit his friend (and Mafioso) Vittorio Mangano, who was employed as the stable manager at Berlusconi�s country estate, Villa D�Arcore.

Giuffre is testifying in the ongoing trial of Senator Marcello Dell�Utri, who stands accused of laundering mob money through Publitalia, the publishing company he formerly managed. Publitalia, which is Italy�s largest publishing house, is owned by Berlusconi�s company Fininvest. Prosecutors allege that the Sicilian-born Dell�Utri was very close to top mobsters and allowed the Mafia to use Fininvest accounts to launder dirty money."

Anybody who has followed Berlusconi's fine effort to instantiate Marx's dictum in the 18th Brumaire (Hegel says somewhere that all great events and personalities in world history reappear in one fashion or another. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce) will know that the man's fortune has been entangled with suspect mysteries and peripheral frauds from the beginning. That, in fact, the impetus to his political career might well have been simply to avoid trial. But the latest is truly fascinating. Here's another graf from the story:

On Nov. 27, Berlusconi himself was questioned during Dell�Utri�s trial. He exercised his �right to silence,� refusing to reveal the source of 99 billion lira (US$55.3 million) used to build his empire between 1978 and 1983. Prosecutors suspect that the money came from Mafia boss Bontade. According to Rome�s center-left La Repubblica (Nov. 28) �the Italian premier had the right to refuse to answer, but he also had the moral duty to clarify the issue since he is the prime minister of a democratic nation.�

On Dec. 3, La Repubblica revealed what Giuffre had told the police a month earlier: �The Mafia have chosen to support (and vote for) Forza Italia because the Mafia always choose the best horse. Boss Bernardo Provenzano managed to find three direct channels to the leader of Forza Italia, Silvio Berlusconi.�

Italy, though, is strangely quiet. As Berlusconi throws his unconditional support (although no Italian soldiers) behind Bush, as he refuses to divest himself of his media empire, as he pushes throught he worst kind of anti-labor legislation, Italy takes it. This is the politics of numbness, the anaesthetic that follows the revelation of systemic corruption. It is never counted on by the reformer, whose sense of shock is enlivened, rather than deadened, by the intensity of the injury. Freud's paper on War Trauma, written in 1915, certainly applies to the infamous system of corruption that has formed Belusconi as its clown-herald, and that is now debauching the rights of labor in Rome. Substitute, in the following quote, politics for war, and you will have the attitude towards corruption that emancipates it from the indignation it deserves:

"War carries off the levels of silt deposited by civilization and leaves in us only the primitive man. It puts us in the attitude of the hero who doesn't believe in the possibility of his own death; it shows us, in the stranger, the enemy, who will will either have to eliminate or at least wish to eliminate. It counsels us to guard our cold bloodedness in the face of the death of beloved persons. But war doesn't let itself be suppressed. There will be as many wars and there will be differences well enough dug between the conditions of existence of peoples and in as much as they feel towards one another a deep enough antipathy. The question posed in these conditions is the following: given that war is inevitable, wouldn't we do better to accept it, and even to adapt ourselves to it?"

Remora

The NYT does a soft soap job on Jose Maria Aznar, who represents the dwindled ghost of Francisco Franco and is otherwise employed as the Prime Minister of Spain, in today's paper. As part of the comedy of human relations, we are told that the U.S. is shifting its strategic priorities to such as Aznar, and Burlesque-oni in Italy, and whoever in Poland. What this could possibly mean, in military or economic terms, is beyond LI. Are they planning on kicking the Daimler factory out of South Carolina and alluring in its place, uh, the Polish branch of Fiat? Beyond rhetorical support, we know that Aznar is not so incautious as to commit the Spanish army to the invasion of Iraq. Like his model, Franco, who wisely avoided involvement in that unpleasantness known as World War II in spite of his debt to two of the war's big players, Aznar realizes the exchange value of rhetoric, in this case, is way beyond its real value. Pen a letter, get your profile in the Times. The idea is, surely Bush can do something for the most syncophantic of his allies. However, that is one problem with the administration's unipolar policy. Allies are not rewarded on the Cold War scale anymore. Instead, promises slowly melt into cheap dribs and drabs of aid. Krugman has a column about Bush's followup today that sums it up.


To return to the Aznar soft soaping: in the last grafs of the piece, the picture changes, somewhat:

"This does not always play well at home, especially in an atmosphere of prewar tension heightened by popular opposition to a war in Iraq. Opinion polls show that more than 70 percent of Spaniards oppose intervention in Iraq.

Asked about anti-Americanism in Spain, Mr. Aznar said: "There might be people who believe that to ensure peace and security in the world, we must distance ourselves from the U.S., but I don't see it like that. I believe that rifts between the U.S. and Europe have signaled bad times for global peace."

Mr. Aznar's arguments in support of force to disarm Mr. Hussein are dismissed by other Spanish political parties. Most scorn what they see as Mr. Aznar's willingness to fall into line with Washington.

The opposition Socialist leader, Jos� Luis Rodr�guez Zapatero, accused Mr. Aznar of seeking support for "whatever Mr. Bush says." Guillerme V�zquez of the Galician Nationalist Bloc told Mr. Aznar, "You are the voice of your master," while Gaspar Llamazares, leader of the United Left Party, called him "a vassal" of the United States. "

Vassal is a good one, but 'voice of your master" isn't. Aznar is, to say the least, not in the inner circle of his master; he's no where near the voice box. The article makes the obligatory reference to Bush's spanish speaking skills. It makes no reference to his last spanish language buddy, Mexican President Fox. If Aznar wants to find out what being close to the inner circle and then being discarded like a stray piece of toilet paper feels like, he might ask Fox.

Remora

First, let's note that the D.C. crowd that has told us, for months, that France wouldn't go eye to eye with the U.S. over Iraq seem to be wrong. And the LI, of course (our record is as perfect as the Wizard of Oz's) spotted this assumption for what it was: baseless confidence.

However, there is trepidation all over Europe about this. Tageszeitung, which is certainly a lefty paper, calls the way the German's casually told the press, first, about the Franco-German initiative Stuemperei -- bungling.


"And even the healthy suggestion that Washington with its power dynamic driving it to war should be braked by the massive strengthening of the inspection regime in Irak has been, almost certainly, condemned to fail through the manner in which the whole undertaking was pursued by Berlin."

The editorialist for Point could work for the Washington Post, so eager is he for this war, so repelled is he that Chirac would desert the American side for the confused pacificism of those Germans


"L'�tonnant, chez nous, est d'avoir paru �pouser d'aussi pr�s la contorsion �lectoraliste allemande d'un chancelier chancelant, encore �trill�, dimanche dernier, dans son propre fief de Basse-Saxe. Etonnant, encore, d'avoir n�glig� � ce point l'�cart des nations latines - Italie, Espagne, Portugal -, dont la solidarit� importe tant � la France dans les �quilibres europ�ens. Par quelle outrecuidance euphorique avons-nous pu ignorer la division europ�enne que nous allions ainsi fomenter ? Quant au l�galisme international invoqu� pour l'Irak, convenons que nous l'avions ailleurs, et par deux fois, �corn� : d'abord en d�cidant de recevoir � Paris le tyran zimbabw�en Mugabe ; ensuite en nous abstenant dans le vote bouffon qui allait porter la Libye � la pr�sidence de la Commission des droits de l'homme des Nations unies."

(Astonishingly, we appear to have nearly espoused the German electoral contorsions of a tottering chancellor, still injured by the results, last sunday, of the elections in his own fief, Lower Saxony. And even more astonishing, we have neglected to this point the latin nations: Italy, Spain and Portugal -- whose solidarity means so much to France in the european balance of power. By what overbroiled euphoria could we have ignored the european divisions that we are fomenting? As to the international legalism invoked for Iraq, lets agree that we have not been so tender two other times, recently: firstly, in deciding to receive Mugabe in Paris, and then in abstaining in the clownish vote that carried Libya to the post of presidency of the commisssionof the rights of man at the UN.)


Finally, the Independent columnist Donald Macintyre is most distressed at the French German proposal, too. He contrasts the U.N's finest hour (which turns out to be the Bush I coalition) with today's mess:

How different now. "It's the UN that's really on the line," says Professor Michael Mandelbaum, one of America's best foreign policy specialists.

"Transatlantic relations will be noisy and contentious. But they'll be like the workings of a democracy, where disputes ultimately are secondary to what bind the parties together.

"Iraq is now shaping up for the UN's credibility as the 1930s Manchurian crisis did for the League of Nations. The odd thing is that those who profess to love the UN the most (ie the French) are undermining it, while those that don't greatly like it (the US), are trying to give it teeth. If it fails, no one would lose more than the French."

The latter is something we doubt. It is clearly the intent of the US, under the present regime, to go it alone if it feels like it. Columnists have decided to loftily eliminate popular sentiment from the equation. But is it true that, say, in Spain, where 70% of the population opposes any war, France is losing respect? I think not. Bush is urging a course upon the nations of Europe which is directly opposed to the popular sentiment, and has been for the past year. We've already seen Schroeder get re-elected on the strength of that sentiment -- in spite of his economic record. Of course, the Spanish and the Italians prime ministers, signing love letters to the US via the Wall Street Journal, is one thing -- paying for invading Iraq is quite another thing. For that, America wants to turn to Old Europe. But Old Europe doesn't want to spring for this party.

Dope

We've been preparting to review Neill Ferguson's Empire for a certain paper. So we have been drifting through The Cash Nexus, Ferguson's hefty volume about money and power in the world system since 1700. We found the chapter on state deficits quite helpful in getting our bearings about the coming red inkiness that will be the legacy of the Bush era.

Ferguson points out that governments in the early modern period were quite cavalier about owing money. The French defaulted on their debts almost every decade, until Louis XVI fatally called a halt to the practice. It was the refusal of France's creditor's to lend more money that prompted the court to call the Estates General into session, and we know that heads literally rolled after that. So never say that a national debt has no effect on our real lives. although that is the current smoke drifting out of D.C. Interesting, too, is the US history of debt. After the Civil War, the debt level was around 50% of GNP -- which was extraordinarily low for a state the size of the U.S. We suspect that this figure is not quite accurate -- does it include Confederate debts that were repudiated, as well as the distributed debts of the states? The federal system has a way of spreading out the true indebtedness of the government, just as it spreads out the tax burden. Interestingly, for a Tory, Ferguson is pretty calm himself about governmental borrowing -- not for him the nostrums of the balanced budget. Which already puts him ahead of the IMF crowd, at least.

However, looking over his dense stats, the one thing that stands out is that debt and the military are indissolubly linked, the price of the latter being paid for by the former, and the former then driving the policies that inevitably resulting in the use of the latter. The cash nexus, here, is an arms nexus. From the money spent by the British establishment to destroy Napoleon to the money spent by LBJ to destroy Ho Chi Minh, it is obvious that "defense" -- or, to give it another, more appropriate name, "offense" -- has driven government economics. A level can be reached at which the commonwealth is ruined to the extent that it can no longer re-arm -- but this simply means that others will arm in its place, and often on its soil. Germany has been the most pacific of nations during the last fifty years, but it has also been the place with the largest concentration of tactical nuclear missiles, as well as a vast staging area for US and, until 1989, Russian troops.

Pacifists often act as though war is simply a matter of directed violence; what they ignore is that violence is a functioning part of a larger culture: that it creates an order; that that order creates dependents on the order; and that those dependents have a tradition to draw on that is quite attractive to the leaders of a state, who are often (as in the case of Cheney, et al) one and the same people. The unimaginableness of an economy from which violence had been eliminated acts on states to create seemingly irrational situations. Whatever else we say about Saddam Hussein, we have to say that his resistance to exploring weapons research for weapons he cannot effectively use -- since he has been in no position to use them for the past ten years -- shows that he is, even fatally, addicted to the cash-arms nexus.

Peacetime economics has not actually happened, at least in the modern era. We wonder what it would look like.

Samuel Brittan has an interesting review of Ferguson's book that seems, now, to be pretty prescient. Here's a graf that we especially liked:

"In conclusion Ferguson moves onto more interesting ground in his theory of "under-stretch". He looks at a world full of rogue states and genocidal regimes. In deliberate contrast to Kennedy, he considers that this world can only be made safe if the US and its allies are prepared to restore defence budgets which have shrunk so much since the end of the Cold War. I wonder. In the Kosovo conflict which the West only won - if it did win - by luck and bluff, it was not the lack of military spending but the refusal to risk a single American casualty which handicapped the campaign."

Unexpectedly, the American aversion to risk has so far magnified casualties of those who oppose American forces, by upping the amount of firepower thrown upon them, as well as stimulating technologies that will massively decimate them. This is solidly in the American military tradition. It takes Grant's inelegant, but efficient, military strategy of overwhelming might and tries to eliminate its glaring vice, to American eyes: the high casualties. You might say it is Grant's strategy combined with McClellan's timidity. The failure of this strategy in Vietnam stemmed from the fact that a rate of small casualty losses, strung out over an extended period, has an effect on the morale equal to large casualties suffered over a short period. We think this hypothesis is about to be tested.