I don’t think the administration would blink twice about abandoning the entire Iraq adventure if sunk costs were the only issue. But the stakes are obviously a lot higher than that. Putting empire ahead of democracy (bases ahead off security and stability) would seem like a recipe for a even bigger disaster down the road. But walking away could leave an Iraq in chaos — or, even worse from an Israeli-American point of view, an Iraq that slides steadily deeper into Iran’s orbit.
Back to Main
July 1, 2005
WB: Democracy or Empire?
Comments
Yu’r ‘Money’, Baby!
Sitting in what’s left of my cubicle as our corporation division
melts down, filing project development drawings in binders
that noone will ever read, archiving e-mails in folders that’ll
be lost on some recycle-center hard drive, wiping down the
white boards of their IT gobble-de-gook, I glanced out the
window at the street below, and it was like a bonifide vision
of The Virgin Mary … driving by at that exact moment was a
big beautiful black new SUV with the words ‘Titan Corp.’
in helvetica bold, writ large on the gleaming side panel.
Corporate hadn’t shut down our network yet, and we were
free to look for new employment until our layoffs on Friday,
so I Googled “Titan”, and what do you know, it’s part of L-3,
the big Defense conglomerate. “Titan is a leading provider
of comprehensive information and communications products,
solutions, and services for National Security and the Security
of our Homeland.” Titan has 1098 IT job openings right now,
for US citizens only, with security clearances. In other words,
another white male deadwood welfare agency, and one part
of the sum of the 175,000 new jobs created by US Defense,
every month. Just Google on L-3, or Lockheed, or Boeing.
That’s where the new job creation goes, into Fed Deficit.
While IT private side is melting down and outing overseas,
the Defense Department has been quietly building a little
Neo American apartheid Homeland for IT good old boys,
laid out here: http://www.governmentcontractswon.com/
It’s big business, so big, in fact, it’s the fastest growing
e-industry sector there is, civilian contracting for Defense.
No wonder Carlyle Group has gotten so wealthy on war,
and no wonder we are augering-in so horribly in deficit.
I remember riding with my pa for his private pilot’s license
checkout flight, a long, long time ago. The instructor said he
should stall the plane, whatever that meant, then he set the
flap roller over a notch, and pulled back on the wheel. I got
that funny feeling like the clik-clik-clik on the roller-coaster
ride before you nose over and drop, and then the stall alert
came on. “Ee-n-n-n, e-e-n-n-n, e-e-n-n-n!” and the plane
snapped off it’s left wing and headed straight for the ground
in a wicked tight spiral, like the US stock markets this week.
That memory, and countless like it, came flooding back
yesterday when der Busch spoke blue-screen to all of US,
and McClellan did his dipsy-dango best to say, “That’s not
what he meant, were you even at the speech?” as though
you had to have sat at Moses’ knee to understand his Writ.
And another memory surfaces, of a friend of my fathers’, a
skeet-shooting German guy from Nebraska who used to
hunt pheasant in the fall with my pa. We were sitting at the
table, eating the roast and picking the lead shot out of our
teeth, when this guy tells us the story how, as a Hitler Youth,
he had bounced on the Fuehrer’s knee. Apparently his own
pa was some high-placed Nazi from the Schwartzwalden.
And it occurs to me, Titan and their ilk are exactly what the
Nazi’s did in Germany, a National Corporate Socialism as
Moussolini described it, the Party becomes the economy,
and all the jobs go to the party elite, the Aryan white males.
“After May 1937 public employees were required to become
Nazis, or lose their jobs.” Shades of Homeland Defense!
By the end of WWII, only four years long, brief by Gulf War
standards, Nazis had 12,000,000 loyal defense workers.
This war is as much a political-economic power struggle,
as some mop-up campaign against Middle East terrorism.
I’d go further. Whether we “win”, or “lose” and get driven
out of Iraq, Iran or whereever, war becomes la manière,
the means to its own end: Neo racist white apartheid,
the rise of a new class of wealthy white defense elite.
I remember a paragraph from the Nuremberg Tribunals,
describing how these Hitler Volk had once been bakers,
butchers and barbers, but once they put on those boots,
and carefully tailored uniforms, they were transformed,
transmogrified into monsters who could gas a thousand
innocents in a morning, then eat schnitzel and sourbraten
all afternoon, and laugh the whole time they were doing it.
It’s close to the tipping point now. The Conservatives
and the Veterans, G-d bless them, have had the veils
torn from their eyes these last few months. They see.
They know. They link, and distribute and spread the
word. That’s why Bush got no bounce. The Emperor
has no clothes. But he still owns the Fundamentalists,
and the NeoCons, and the Likudniks, and he has the
hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of the civilian
defense contractors and the Homeland Security and
Pentagon civilian employee staffs, most of the brass.
And he owns the Legislature, and soon, the SCOTUS.
Iraq, and here in America, is pitching towards civil war.
Maybe when Deep Impact slams into Tempel One
on Fourth of July, the explosion will be so colossal
the heavens will light up, and each evening the new
star will shine in the West, and three kings will rise
up, and journey towards a New Jerusalem, and a
New Tabernacle, and a New Ka’ba, then once again,
the world may breath some peace, free at last from
this Neo Millenium scourge of Anti-Humanism, free
from the curse of two thousand year old goat herders.
We can only hope.
“We will stay in the fight until the fight is done.” GWB
Jesus H. Christ, if that’s not feral insanity, what is?!
Posted by: tante aime | Jul 1 2005 7:47 utc | 1
But walking away could leave an Iraq in chaos — or, even worse from an Israeli-American point of view, an Iraq that slides steadily deeper into Iran’s orbit.
Could is important here. I have much hope that the real authorities in Iraq, Sistani and the AMS (Sunni religious leaders) plus the tribal leaders would make a powerful call for peace and unity and a powerful call against Iranian intervention.
If, after a retreat, the US would stop to intervene in Iraq by sanctions or other means, there would be good chance that Iraq could be up healing in a fairly short time.
Unfortunatly, that will not happen. After a withdraw of troops from Iraq, the US would immediately start its revenge campaign.
Over to Helena Cobbin:
What I am saying is that if the US is forced to withdraw forces from Iraq in some form of disorder, as now seems extremely likely, then we should expect that withdrawal to be accompanied (“covered”) by the US taking some extremely vindictive actions against the country. These would have two aims:
1. to “punish” the Iraqi people for having failed to rally round the American plan for their country, and
2. to “send a message” to everyone else around the world that the cost of challenging US power around the world will still– even though the US may have been forced to suffer a defeat in Iraq– continue to be high.
Moreover, if past practice is anything to go by, the US authorities might plan to continue these acts of “punishment”– as in the case of Cuba or Vietnam– for many years or even decades after the moment of the defeat itself. For US strategists, such policies are couched in the broad terms of retaining or regaining the “credibility” of the “US strategic posture” in the world.
…
Whether the US pullback in Iraq is partial or total, no-one should expect it to be (from the American side) either gracious or smooth. We can definitely expect the present powers-that-be in Washington to attempt to “punish” the forces in Iraq judged to have forced the US into a retreat—even if these attempts are highly destabilizing to the international system, including to global oil markets. Large-scale, extremely serious, Washington-sponsored sabotage of Iraq’s already badly battered oil-production facilities—as a way of denying these facilities to nationalist Iraqis for many years to come—cannot be ruled out.
This will be the real problem after the retreat. Americans do have an immense urge for vengeance anytime they are shown to the door (See the Iran embassy hostage discussion now). They may stop bombing Iraq after a pullout, but they will never stop harressing the country whenever possible, independent of what party might rule in DC.
‘ Maybe I’m seeing distinctions where none actually exist. But for me the dichotomy between evil and foolish and just foolish was symbolized during Bush’s first term by the Pentagon’s neocon power couple: Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz. ‘
With all respect billmon their motives are irrelevant. I don’t think there are evil people, at least not ones that I can reliably sort out, so much as evil things that happen, the result of choices made or not made leading up to them.
These guys have unleashed a world of evil. Whether they were trying to save or destroy the world is irrelevant.
Similarly, their cause has now set in motion a string of effects that will inexorably play out regardless their intentions. They’re little people really. The sorceror’s apprentices.
What they have done is given themselves up to greed, no matter what story they’ve told themselves. It doesn’t take a very big person to do that.
It does take an unusually selfish group to roll the dice on the scale these folks have, with so many others having so much at stake, willy nilly, on their “feelin’ lucky”.
Posted by: John Francis Lee | Jul 1 2005 8:22 utc | 3
I haven’t put any faith in Wolfowitz’s democracy claims since he said he was disappointed the Turkish military didn’t intervene in the decision to allow our troops to invade Iraq. His friend Wurmser said that Wolfowitz believes very strongly that power can be used very effectively to create more power”, which sounds very Kissingerian to me.
As for Diamond, he had a little more to say about Iraqi bases in a talk at UCLA earlier this year:
One of the things that is necessary to wind down the insurgency…is for Iraqis to become convinced that we really are going to leave… I urged the administration to declare when I left Iraq in April of 2004, that we have no permanent military designs on Iraq and we will not seek permanent military bases in Iraq. This one statement would do an enormous amount to undermine the suspicion that we have permanent imperial intentions in Iraq. We aren’t going to do that. And the reason we’re not going to do that is because we are building permanent military basis in Iraq.
…the repeated insistence on the part of the United States that Iraq write into its interim constitution a provision that would enable a treaty, for example, a treaty granting permanent military bases, to be approved by the lowest possible threshold imaginable. Initially our position was, signed by the prime minister should be good enough. Then when the Iraqis, one of whom was a lawyer trained in the United States who has taught law in the United States and understands our constitutional system well, said, “Well, you have two-thirds vote of the Senate to ratify your treaties. That sounds like a reasonable threshold,” there got to be an interesting pushing and shoving match between the Iraqis and the United States. They said two-thirds, we said simple majority. It went back and forth down to the final night of the writing of the Iraqi interim constitution. And guess which vote was enshrined into the Iraqi constitution? Simple majority.”
BTW, b, you’re right about our vindictiveness, and this is bipartisan. Biden said last week that if we fail to stabilise Iraq we should just arm the Shias and Kurds in a war against the Sunnis.
Posted by: Vin Carreo | Jul 1 2005 8:36 utc | 4
Bernhard: Exactly. The US won’t learn the lesson with a mere withdrawal. For the US elites (and the blood-thirsty part of its population) to learn and for revenge to be beyond-the-point, the US needs to be humiliated and thoroughly defeated in Iraq. Which basically means the physical near-annihilation of the US troops there. That’s bloody and unfair for the poor guys who were conned into enlisting, but short of a rebellion of the military there who shoots the officers and walks to the Kuwaiti border on their own, this is the only other way I can see. If they can get out without much trouble or losses, BushCo (or CheneyCo) will just go on to loot aother country, like a plague of locusts.
Posted by: Clueless Joe | Jul 1 2005 9:14 utc | 5
Billmon, I had similar impressions about Wolfie. I add on him: his current girlfriend is an Arab. He is a doofus compared to Perle.
On the Cheney admin as a whole, I’m not sure – I think both President Cheney and Commander-In-Chief von Rumsfeld are more cynical and reckless than Wolfie. I don’t think that they believe their own preaching on democracy, rather than having no clue about what democracy really is like Wolfie. Rumsfeld in particular, with the OSP and TIA and so on, and with that cynical smile I hate even more than the Chimperor’s smirk, strikes me as someone quite consciously Orwellian.
@Billmon. It doesn’t have to make sense. Stop looking for logic. This is not an Agatha Christie plot.
Better historians than I will point out at range of varying motivations and degrees of badness and insanity within the Nazis’ top echelons.
Why shouldn’t we have our Speers and Himmler and Goerings and even Hess? (Wolfowitz dating an arab = Hess parachuting in Scotland?)
Nazis didn’t behave like the Red Skull in CAPTAIN AMERICA. Go and watch HOTEL TERMINUS — full of good intentions they were.
Posted by: Lupin | Jul 1 2005 12:02 utc | 7
Let’s be very clear here. This ain’t about individual ‘evil’ men operating in isolation without bi-partisan backing.
The Invasion of Iraq was a cut and dry example of ‘Agressive War’. The exact same crime we successfully prosecuted a defeated leadership of in 1946 at the Nuremberg Trials.
There is more than enough evidence already in the public domain and as the wheels fall off there’ll be more. Including no doubt something akin to the US version of the DSM, or better.
The current cabal did’t think this ‘American Exceptional Empire’ strategy up overnight, this has been in evolution and a core personal committment of these guys since at least 1992. They are not going to step back from a doctrine and concurrently a desire to fundamentally restructure American society in pursuit of that doctrine lightly. Especially given the potentoial personal cost and repercussions of such a course, nor thier backers.
The neocons AND the neolibs are comitted to the expansion of empire in order to save it. As the French Para General said of their methods and the cost re securing Algiers “The means is justifed by the end”.
When LBJ faltered, Nixon campaigned on a platform of ending the Vietnam War. The subsequent actions, rather than public rhetoric, did anything but. The conflict became ever more escalated, widened beyond Vietnams borders and became increasingly brutal in searching for that elusive ‘win’. What is conveniently forgotten about Vietnam is that the primary geo-political and stategic purpose there was the creation and retention of US military bases to dominate and contain the then emergent China. Expanding the US’s military and political spheres of influence in South East Asia whilst concurrently containing the same for China and to a far lesser degree Russia. All the crap people remember is about the public claims throughout the war … never the real objective … and what price were Amerikas elites willing to pay and risk then ? How very De javu …
A little flashback to the first invasion of Iraq – the unfinished work of Bush I.
Because we were under a limited UN mandate that did not allow for regime change in Iraq, only the liberation of Kuwait, we supposedly had to stop inside Iraq and ‘leave the job undone’ in 1991.
Its a little more involved than that.
We KNEW Saddam had chemical and biological weapons then and the missiles (Scuds) that had been fired into Israel and Saudia Arabia could be fitted with such warheads instead of HE if Saddam was desperate enough, i.e. a march on Baghdad and ‘regime change’.
The US and Israel could’nt risk it. Compounding that was the damned live press, primarily a then not fully emasculated/co-opted CNN broadcasting the graphic ‘Highway of Death’ and masses of Iraqi surrender footage. Blatant eveidence of an obviously defeated enemy and a sustained ‘turkey shoot’ was not going to be conducive to the continuance of hostilities to obtain an unstated goal of ‘Regime change’.
In any case the Coalition would have collapsed overnight and lost all legitamicy as the facade of Arab and Islamic nations support disappeared due to summary withdrawal of participation in disgust.
The Southern Shia were encouraged to rebel and decieved into believing they would recieve Coalition support. Why ? So Saddam, our long time buddy would have an opportunity to ‘clean house’ and ensure the Iranians did’nt obtain advantage from the coalitions failure to finish the job and the collapse of the Iraqi Army.
Right. Then we have the No Fly Zones, sanctions, and the progressive destruction and verification of Saddams WMDs concurrent with the development of a new Pentagon and therefore Exceptional Amerikan Empire policy starting with Wolfowitzs first draft in Feb 18 1992, the Defense Policy Guidance for Fiscal Years 1994-1999. Concurrently doing eveything possible to encourage an Iraqi General/strongman to take over from Saddam and be our biggest bestest buddy against the evil of Iran. i.e. something to compensate for the loss of the lost Shah of Iran and the then proxy US military dominance of the Persian Gulf and into Central Asia.
We invaded Iraq becasue we KNEW they had no WMDs. We did it uniltaerally and intentionally without UN support via the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ so that none of the restraints and handicaps that had prevented fulfillment of the original objective in 1991 would recur. ‘Cause it was obvious we had taught Saddam too well and he was’nt about be replaced by a new puppet from within.
Hence the CPA, Chalabi, the IGC, then Allawi and all the associated activities since.
A nation such as as the US, with virtually the full support of both parties and thier associated supporting elites does not commit to such a sustained course of action over 14 years to walk away just because the domestic side of politics is showinmg signs of getting a bit ‘frettful’. Whether individual representaives may be a little concerned about getting re-elected or not, it does’nt change the long term geo-political goals of the US government and both the Republicans and Democrats in the ‘Great Game’ since 1991. The Dems under Clinton did not revoke the original doctrine of Wolfowitz from 1992, they continued and developed it, a more presentable face to the public tho, and still do.
Think on it.
Posted by: Outraged | Jul 1 2005 12:42 utc | 8
I think the shorthand express you are looking for is: Oil, Israel, Logistical bases.
Posted by: otto | Jul 1 2005 13:04 utc | 10
SW’s Energy Gap: June 2005: “One of the significant questions raised by the Downing Street Minutes has been echoing around the public consciousness recently. If the Bush administration was well aware of the fact that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capability was somewhat less dangerous than that of Libya, and that they were not an immediate threat to either us or their neighbors, just why did we invade? Why was it so important to this administration that we invade Iraq?
We are all familiar with the Neocon argument, and the suspicion that part of the rationale is in defense of Israel. The PNAC crowd has a long paper trail and has made no secret of their objectives. Many commentators have pointed out that it is interesting that there appears to have been a multiplicity of motivations. Underlings in the defense department were certainly card carrying member of the neocon cult. The President may have had his own twisted Oedipal motivations that I would prefer to leave unexamined.But anyone who follows this administration should know by now that when there are a multitude of voices expressing differing views and a choice must be made you won’t go wrong if you just listen to one guy. Dick Cheney.
As an example take the recent dust up about the idea of closing Gitmo. Amnesty International calls it a Gulag. The administration circles the wagons. Then some cracks begin to form. Even the President entertains the notion. Then, Big Dick weighs in and all that soft-headed nonsense is put to rest. Rummy is back on the straight and narrow. Etc. Is Dick Cheney a dyed-in-the-wool neocon? I think not. At the start of this administration Dick Cheney fancied himself an energy expert. He was given two tasks. The energy task force and the terrorism task force. He put all his time and effort into the energy task force. The terrorism task force never met.
The neocons were able to bring Dick Cheney on board for the Iraq project because of the Energy Task force. During the energy task force, Matthew Simmons an energy investment banker from Houston warned Cheney that the Saudi oil reserves were being drastically over-estimated. Unless about two million barrels per day of new production capacity could be brought on line by 2006 the world would face a shortfall in crude oil production. If you look around the world, there was only one place where it looked like there was that kind of low-hanging fruit available for the picking. Saddam’s Iraq.Why do you think that Cheney has been willing to fall on his sword to prevent the workings of this task force from being made public? To protect executive privilege? Please. The answer to the question ‘Why did we invade Iraq?’ is that it was an integral part of Dick Cheney’s energy policy. You remember. The energy policy that considers conservation to be a sign of personal virtue but essentially useless in the grand scheme of things. The sad fact is that intuitively, the American public understood this. People have soured on the Iraqi adventure, not because of the death and the chaos. Prewar estimates of American casualties projected 2000 American deaths and we didn’t blink. The average American citizen has soured on the war because it failed in its prime objective. It didn’t result in cheap plentiful gasoline.”
Let’s keep it simple, REAL SIMPLE. The social history of mankind is a progression of organizational framework entities from the family to the clan to the tribe to the city state to the linquistic group in a broad geographical region to the nation state, etc. BUT whatever works in a given territory tends to be where progress stops. In Iraq and Mesopotamia, they have had a strongman or tribal chieftain form of government for the last 50,000 years. To impose democracy from the top down on this schema is doomed to failure.
It is absolutely clear that even if the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld experiment in imposing democracy works for a time, within ten years one of two things is certain to happen. Either a government in power will effectively suspend democracy to remain in power, or a classic colonel’s coup will depose and end the democracy. Either form of return to dictatorship will promise new elections in the future, no doubt, and some form of wholly fraudulent election may even be held.
But the Iraqis don’t understand, don’t want, and can’t cope with real democracy, because they have no mental equivalent for democracy, not even the ones with dual US citizenship, who have lived in the USA for a period of years. If they did, they would self-identify as Americans and remain in the USA, not returning to Iraq.
Posted by: Wirdo Absurdosono | Jul 1 2005 13:17 utc | 12
The neocons were able to bring Dick Cheney on board for the Iraq project because of the Energy Task force. During the energy task force, Matthew Simmons an energy investment banker from Houston warned Cheney that the Saudi oil reserves were being drastically over-estimated. Unless about two million barrels per day of new production capacity could be brought on line by 2006 the world would face a shortfall in crude oil production. If you look around the world, there was only one place where it looked like there was that kind of low-hanging fruit available for the picking. Saddam’s Iraq.Why do you think that Cheney has been willing to fall on his sword to prevent the workings of this task force from being made public? To protect executive privilege? Please. The answer to the question ‘Why did we invade Iraq?’ is that it was an integral part of Dick Cheney’s energy policy. You remember. The energy policy that considers conservation to be a sign of personal virtue but essentially useless in the grand scheme of things. The sad fact is that intuitively, the American public understood this. People have soured on the Iraqi adventure, not because of the death and the chaos. Prewar estimates of American casualties projected 2000 American deaths and we didn’t blink. The average American citizen has soured on the war because it failed in its prime objective. It didn’t result in cheap plentiful gasoline.”
Posted by: SW | Jul 1 2005 13:17 utc | 13
@Wirdo Absurdosono
None of these events are about Democracy for Iraq. That argument has about as much ability to fly as those about Iraq WMDs, Iraq & 9/11, Iraq threatening the US of A, or selective compliance with certain UN resolutions.
The US administration doesn’t give a shit about the nation of Iraq itself and certainly doesn’t lose sleep about the fate of it’s people, let alone individual Iraqi’s.
It ain’t about Democracy in iraq. It’s about the same reasons we and the British overthrew Mosadeq (?) in Iran in 1953 (?) and installed the Shah of Iran and beefed up his massive military machine. It’s about the same resaon we managed coups in Iraq and the installation of Saddam in Iraq and beefed up his massive military machine and enticed him to invade Iran re the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war … to overthrow Iran and regain control of the Persian Gulf, Central Asia and the co-located energy resources. For more than 50+ years …
We didn’t give a shit about Democracy in Iran from the fifties to 1979. We didn’t give a shit about Democracy in Iraq before 1979 and not until after we invaded in 2003. And we still don’t give a shit about Democracy in Iraq today or into the future.
This is all about the geo-political significance of the territory of the eastern Middle East, the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, its energy resources and the containmane of Pan-Arabism, nationalism and the containment of Russia-China-India and most recently (last 25 years) Irans power projection and spheres of influence in the same region.
The Exceptional Amerikan Empire …
and
“But the Iraqis don’t understand, don’t want, and can’t cope with real democracy, because they have no mental equivalent for democracy, not even the ones with dual US citizenship, who have lived in the USA for a period of years. If they did, they would self-identify as Americans and remain in the USA, not returning to Iraq.”
is not worthy of a response.
Hmmm, an interesting AKA Wirdo Absurdosono, possible troll alert ?
Posted by: Outraged | Jul 1 2005 13:43 utc | 15
A quick response to some of the comments above.
My personal opinion is that it never pays to underestimate the ability of people to believe their own bullshit. That goes doubly, maybe quadruply, for people in power. Most imperialist motherfuckers don’t want to believe that they’re imperialist motherfuckers — or corporate lackeys or soulless bureaucrats or fascist monsters or whatever other evil label applies. And so they invent (or rent) ideologies to justify what they do. And because they believe in those ideologies, sometimes they act up on them.
That was always the problem with the original Marxist conception of the base/superstructure. There are times when the superstructure drives the base — to wreck and ruin, even. It took a Gramsci to develop a theory of hegemony, to explain why ideology sometimes trumps short-term class self interest.
Which is why I take the neocon rhetoric about “democracy” seriously. There may be cases — I’m not saying Iraq is one, but it may be, at least partially — where it has as much explanatory power as corporate greed or thirst for oil or moves on the geostrategic chess board.
Of course, it’s easy to be an idealist when you’ve convinced yourself your ideals completely justify your material or political self interests, which the neocons certainly appear to have done before they invaded Iraq. But, as Diamond correctly notes, the pedal hits the metal when the two come into direct and unavoidable contradiction, which they are now doing in Iraq.
Of course, the one possibility I didn’t mention in my original post is that the neocons could make a choice between bases and “democracy” in Iraq and still end up with neither. And that may be the most likely outcome.
Posted by: Billmon | Jul 1 2005 14:34 utc | 17
Lupin: Better historians than I will point out at range of varying motivations and degrees of badness and insanity within the Nazis’ top echelons.
Why shouldn’t we have our Speers and Himmler and Goerings and even Hess? (Wolfowitz dating an arab = Hess parachuting in Scotland?)
Good point. (And fuck Godwyn’s Law!)
Violence in Iraq and US presence
By Laith Saud
…
Asked whether the Americans were “liberators” or “occupiers”, 71% responded “occupiers”; there is, therefore, a context by which most Iraqis view this occupation.
…
However, it (the elcted Iraqi Government) has failed to address the status of the occupation in any recognisable fashion, let alone secure a timetable for withdrawal. Thus it seems when Iraqis speak with a clear political voice and do so within the mechanism of elections, little is accomplished.
In short, the elections failed in bringing a foreseeable end to the occupation, although that is what the majority of Iraqis voted for; it is only logical that the armed resistance then would gain in momentum as it is evident that a political end to the occupation is not forthcoming.
The truth, however, is that the current government has not represented the will of the Iraqi people and the majority of Iraqis sympathise with the resistance’s goal of ending the occupation.
Since the Iraqi government has (publicly ?)accepted the American presence as morally and legally sound, it can be assumed by the resistance that the Americans will remain for some time in spite of the wishes of the Iraqi people.
The only alternative that remains for those opposed to the occupation, therefore, is an armed one.
Posted by: Outraged | Jul 1 2005 14:51 utc | 19
As Billmon said, they may believe this crap, some at least, and sometimes. After all, Hitler may well not have just been an evil schemer, but he may have ended up believing all the crap about superior race and untermenschen – just look at his “secret weapons that’ll turn the tide” and “average German citizen, full of Nazi belief and virtue, will best the battle-hardened Red Army”. At some level, it’s possible that many ideologues have some kind of schizophrenia, of cognitive dissonance, and may be able to live with it, or even to suppress the reality-based part of their mind.
Concerning Wolfie, he may be slightly less Evil than the rest of the bunch, hard to tell. I seem to remember he favored some of the recent peace attempts in Israel, not only Road Map but the Geneva peace plan and other things like that – which would make him far less insane than Feith for instance.
But still, even a neocon wet won’t betray the movement that easily, not unless the end is coming and he tries to sabotage the rest of the gang in the hope that he’ll keep some power for himself. (I mean, Himmler eventually believed he could deal with the Allies when the Soviets were marching on Berlin, and other top Nazi officials were still hoping to keep power after the war, with some imposed changes to the regime of course).
Concerning Iraq, well, yes, they had clan chieftains. it’s also worth noting that we speak of Mesopotamia, which is the area were the concepts of city and empire were born, the part of the world where you got, for a big part of history, the biggest cities and the most populated empires. In fact, during most of recorded history, you couldn’t claim to be the biggest empire if you didn’t control (part of) the area – and most of the time, the core of the empires were based there; heck, even someone with a classical Greek education like Alexander understood that and ruled from Babylon.
So, “strongmen and clan chieftains”, yes. They just had world leaders at a time where most of mankind was still hunting boars with wooden spears – particularly people from European, notably Anglo-Saxon, origin.
Posted by: Clueless Joe | Jul 1 2005 15:05 utc | 20
KISS (keep it simple, sweetie pies) —
sorry if I missed this if it was already posted, but if you did not see or hear Democracy Now! yesterday, this segment is definitely worth a read:
In a newly-published article in The Nation former New York Congressmember Elizabeth Holtzman, who served on the committee that voted to impeach Richard Nixon calls on the public and the press to demand President Bush and his senior White House staff be held accountable for the torture of Abu Ghraib and be prosecuted under the 1996 War Crime Act.
Here is Holtman’s article in The Nation as well.
No less a figure than Alberto Gonzales, then-White House counsel to George W. Bush and now US Attorney General, expressed deep concern about possible prosecutions under the War Crimes Act of 1996 for American mistreatment of Afghanistan war detainees.
This relatively obscure statute makes it a federal crime to violate certain provisions of the Geneva Conventions. The Act punishes any US national, military or civilian, who commits a “grave breach” of the Geneva Conventions. A grave breach, as defined by the Geneva Conventions, includes the deliberate “killing, torture or inhuman treatment” of detainees. Violations of the War Crimes Act that result in death carry the death penalty.
In a memo to President Bush, dated January 25, 2002, Gonzales urged that the United States opt out of the Geneva Conventions for the Afghanistan war–despite Secretary of State Colin Powell’s objections. One of the two reasons he gave the President was that opting out “substantially reduces the likelihood of prosecution under the War Crimes Act.”
Then-Attorney General Ashcroft sent a memo to President Bush making a similar argument. Opting out of the Geneva Conventions, Ashcroft argued, would give the “highest assurance” that there would be no prosecutions under the War Crimes Act of “military officers, intelligence officials, or law enforcement officials” for their misconduct during interrogations or detention.
…Gonzales opined, it was “difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels” acting in the future. (The “future” could be a very long time indeed, because there would be no statute of limitations on War Crimes Act prosecutions in cases where the victim died.)
…as in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and…
Remember the speech (state of the union?) in which Bush sneered that there were people who were no longer a problem? –wouldn’t this perhaps indicate that deliberate killing under the War Crimes act would make Bush eligible for the death penalty?
Isn’t karma a bitch? Bush the butcher, who put to death more people in Texas, as governor, than anyone else…it would, in truth, be a karmic moment if he were the first pres. to be executed…or ex-prez…since there is no statue of limitations, and when this horrific moment of Bush Junta rule is over (b/c they will fall, no doubt)…
my dad lied about his age because he was always in trouble in high school and ended up in Italy during WWII. He marched around Mussolini as he hung upside down from a scaffold and, on command, spit on him and his mistress after the resistance got their hands on Mussolini and killed him.
That was the only war story he ever told willingly. I think it was about justice after seeing his best friend killed lying beside him in a foxhole, and after marching through mud and starving and learning to live on dandelions.
The Bush junta has always made me think about my dad and the ways in which nations and people change because of the actions of a few…and the way those same actions are repaid.
Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 1 2005 15:15 utc | 21
Nothing would please me more than to see the Butcher of Crawford (it really ought to be his “official” nickname) tried for his crimes.
Posted by: Lupin | Jul 1 2005 15:20 utc | 22
Clueless Joe: I think for most of recorded history China has always been the biggest empire, except for brief blips when it fragmented (when the Roman and British Empires became the new frontrunners). I’m talking about population of course, not landmass or economics.
If I think more about it, an analogy to the neocons that could express both what Billmon wanted to say and what Lupin thought is countering it, is not the Nazis but leaders in the communist countries in the Eastern Block. For none of the differing Nazis saw themselves as harbringers of something good and egalitarian for the conquered: they were overlords to slaveholders to exterminators (depending on the subjugated ‘race’).
But many of the Soviet leaders and their allies possibly really saw themselves as guarantors of the ‘dictature of the proletariat’ and such – but that didn’t kept them from crushing any population-based movements, and killing any initiative from below, including in the economy[*]. If anything, such beliefs made it easier for them to push forward.
[*] Hence some call ‘real existing socialism’ “state capitalism” – expressing the de-facto ownership of capital by the Party and its choices for bosses; many of whom after 1989 managed to switch into private business with success.
Highly recommend the following article:
Stay the Crooked Course
By Ray McGovern
Wednesday 29 June 2005
…
As was the case in Vietnam, the Iraq war is being run by civilians innocent of military experience [Chichenhawks] and disdainful of advice from the colonels and majors who know which end is up. … So when the president assures us, as he did yesterday, that he will be guided by the “sober judgment of our military leaders” he is referring to the castrati.
…
Is there no top military official – active-duty or retired – around to tell it like it is? Active-duty? No. …
A General with the Courage to Speak Truth
…
Here is my translation of what Gen. Odom said last September on German TV’s Panorama program:
When the president says he is staying the course, that makes me really afraid. For a leader has to know when to change course. Hitler did not change his course: rather he kept sending more and more troops to Stalingrad and they suffered more and more casualties.
When the president says he is staying the course it reminds me of the man who has just jumped from the Empire State Building. Half-way down he says, “I am still on course.” Well, I would not want to be on course with a man who will lie splattered in the street. I would like to be someone who could change the course …
…
Commenting on the farcical pre-election-campaign “intelligence reform” last summer, he wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, observing:
No organizational design will compensate for incompetent incumbents.
Odom is spot-on. In my 27 years of experience as an intelligence analyst I learned the painful lesson that lack of professionalism is the inevitable handmaiden of sycophancy. Military and intelligence officers and diplomats who bubble to the top in this kind of environment do not tend to be the real professionals.
…
When the president spoke last evening, Medal of Freedom winners former CIA director George Tenet, Gen. Tommy Franks, and Ambassador Paul Bremer no doubt were cheering him on from their armchairs. A most unsavory spectacle.
If they question why we died,
Tell them because our fathers lied.
— Rudyard Kipling
Posted by: Outraged | Jul 1 2005 15:32 utc | 25
I opt against the execution of the Bush junta – that would be the easy way out for them. I would prefer to see them spend the rest of their life in Gitmo. Well, maybe not, after all they still would have that tropical life stile and two different fruits per day and even chicken. Have to think of something a little harsher.
Posted by: Anonymous | Jul 1 2005 15:32 utc | 26
If Democracy is rule by the decision of the people, how can a foreign power ever impose it on another country? A Republic must be founded from the ground up by the decisions of the native populace and their leaders. Iraq doesn’t meet these qualifications.
Posted by: la | Jul 1 2005 15:37 utc | 28
i found that holtzman democracy now interview a bit frustrating yesterday. juan & amy should have pressed her more, b/c she came across as somewhat naive. did gonzales come up w/ this suggestion on his own? or was he instructed to find a way around int’l laws, the same way he aided gov bush wrt all those executions in texas? on the issue of all the nazi’s rescued by the u.s., it was a very superficial discussion. a step in the right direction though, so long as it doesn’t end there.
Posted by: b real | Jul 1 2005 15:37 utc | 29
Here are working links from fauxreals post
this segment and The Nation
Posted by: Outraged | Jul 1 2005 15:43 utc | 30
Simstim, I think that about China applies only from around 500 BC, but it does apply. Had Alexander The Great crossed the Gobi, he would have met on the army of Chin statelet (the eventual uniter and establisher of emire) – and Western history wouldn’t have heard of him anymore. (Tough smaller both in area and total population, this hyper-militarised state had a better economy and more troops than Persia.)
It is worth to note that history has two direct comparisons: while China had a standoff war with the Huns for centuries, including in times of internal disintegration, one band of Huns found no match in Europe but the pestilence[*]; and the Mongols couldn’t be stopped in the West and South, while it took them generations to conquer even a divided China.
[*] I took into account doubts about the Roman account of ‘victory’ at Catalaun, and the archeologically well-founded alternative to the Catholic version about why Attila turned back at Rome.
The Nation link above didn’t work when I tried it, so here it is again…hopefully this one works.
Wolfowitz: East Timor. Suharto.
Poindexter, Abrams, Otto Reich, Negroponte, (and their teevee cover, Ollie North): Iran-Contra
Perle, Wolfowitz, Rumsfield, Cheney: (Reagan era arming of Mujahadeen, then Team B, George the First, during a time when the USSR was already showing signs of crumbling, Gorbie was trying to find a way to withdraw from Afghan. and save face…TeamB was demanding space weapons (..just like now…hmmm, who owns them?) and overestimating the threat of the Soviets and, thus, perhaps helping bin Laden, more and more, in terms of arms and strategy…while civil war broke out in Afghan and…say hello to the Taliban… George the First, btw, got rid of them…and in George the Chimp’s immature oedipal confusion, maybe that’s why he has embraced the neo-cons…not the same as mom, but close enough.
…whether the Bush junta is sincere or not, history might note that the various people involved seem to be consistently wrong-headed and their actions create more problems than they solve.
however, the legal maneuvering concerning prosecution for crimes against humanity would indicate they were aware of a world beyond their fantasies.
funny…before the invasion, I emailed the WHouse…first time ever in my life. I wrote that I thought Bush should be prosecuted as a war criminal for the invasion of Iraq since it violated the Nurembury principals we helped to write. I didn’t know about the 1996 War Crimes Statute…had no idea that Abu Ghraib was in our future…but some people just telegraph their…contempt for anything that stands in the way of their…way.
Now I’m to the point that whatever I think might be possible for the Bush Junta is no longer beyond the pale, and in fact, worse is probably brewing in some black heart among them.
Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 1 2005 15:48 utc | 32
Thanks Outraged. btw, your posts on your experiences are heart-rending. Thank you for coming back to the moon.
Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 1 2005 15:52 utc | 33
The Gonzales Indictment
By Marjorie Cohn
Alberto Gonzales should not be the Attorney General of the United States. He should be considered a war criminal and indicted by the Attorney General. This is a suggested indictment of Alberto Gonzales for war crimes under Title 18 U.S.C. section 1441, the War Crimes Act.
COUNT I: Application of Geneva Conventions; Definition of Torture
On or about January 25, 2002 through January 16, 2005, Defendant ALBERTO GONZALES, Counsel to George W. Bush, the President of the United States of America, did write, commission and concur in memoranda that advocated conduct by United States military forces, amounting to war crimes under Title 18 U.S.C. section 1441 (The War Crimes Act ).
Posted by: Outraged | Jul 1 2005 16:05 utc | 34
On our charismatic leader:
For a leader has to know when to change course.–Gen. Odom, from the Ray McGovern article linked by Outraged
————————
The more resolute a commander in chief, the Bush aides said, the more likely the public will see a difficult conflict through to the end.–Baker & Balz, Bush Words Reflect Public Opinion Strategy, NYT, June 30, 2005
————————-
Charismatic domination. Personal authority also may have its source in the very opposite of tradition. The power of command may be exercised by a leader whether be is a prophet, hero, or demogogue who can prove that he possesses charisma by virtue of magical powers, revelations, heroism, or other extraordinary gifts. The persons who obey such a leader are disciples or followers who believe in his extraordinary qualities rather than in stipulated rules or in the dignity of a position sanctified by tradition. Under a charismatic leader officials are selected in terms of their own charisma and personal devotion, rather than in terms of their special qualifications, status, or personal dependence. These “disciple officials”
hardly constitute an organization, and their sphere of activity and power of command depends upon revelation, exemplary conduct, and decision from case to case, none of which is bound either by rules or tradition but solely by the judgment of the leader.–C. Wright Mills, from the Weber book
———————————-
Fascist regimes could not settle down into a comfortable enjoyment of power. The charismatic leader had made dramatic promises: to unify, purify, and energize his community; to save it from the flabbiness of bourgeois materialism, the confusion and corruption of democratic politics, and the contamination of alien people and cultures; to head off the threatened revolution of property with a revolution of values; to rescue the community from decadence and decline. He had offered sweeping solutions to these menaces: violence against enemies, both inside and out; the individual’s total immersion in the community; the purification of blood and culture; the galvanizing enterprises of rearmament and expansionist war. He had assured his people a “privileged relation with history.”
Fascist regimes had to produce an impression of driving momentum”permanent revolution”-in order to fulfill these promises. They could not survive without that headlong, inebriating rush forward. Without an ever-mounting spiral of ever more daring challenges, fascist regimes risked decaying into something resembling a tepid authoritarianism. With it, they drove toward a final paroxysm of self-destruction.
Fascist or partly fascist regimes do not inevitably succeed in maintaining momentum.–Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism 148
How long our permanent revolution?
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 1 2005 16:24 utc | 35
Did you see Der Busch was smirking uncontrollably during his press conference, on the news Justice O’Conner was retiring? It was all he could do to keep from busting out laughing!
Now Bush can pitch SCOTUS far to the right, and in so doing, protect his pasty white ass against war crimes under the US War Crimes Act of 1996. Busch, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, Aryans all.
With O’Connor gone, leaning-right court balance, the Neo Cabal can never be impeached, and can never be declared war criminals. No matter what.
Sweet!
Posted by: tante aime | Jul 1 2005 16:25 utc | 36
I think Helen Cobban raised a distinct possibility that had not occurred to me. It is quite plausible that the United States under the present administration will strike out in an irrational way to make up for it’s horrible mistakes in the MIddle East. I’m not so sure the military will go along, as they still seem to have the long-run interests of the United States at heart, but one never knows.
There is something else. The Neocons were right about one thing, even though they botched it all up beyond repair. The true danger to the United States are other states, not terrorists. I am of course aware of the potential danger of a biological attack, but the technology required to execute one seems to be beyond the power of any institution short of a state, so we are back in the same box.
Terrorists kill people, which is of course a very bad thing to do and we should try not to do it on purpose, but killing people doesn’t kill a state. The 911 attack killed a lot of innocent people but it had no effect at all on the structure of our then functioning state. The problem is that the American people have been infantlized to the point where they can’t conceive the difference. They want cradle to grave security, and there are plenty of politicians prepared to pander to that desire for the impossible.
If we wanted to limit terrorism, we would do a deal with the Palestinians to get them back the territory the Israeli’s stole from them. Tough on the Israeli’s, but I think most people would agree that our security trumps theirs, and we could always be the Protector of the New Palestine State to keep them from doing anything rash. As to the rest of the world, we are dealing with states and we have our old stand-by massive retaliation to handle any potential threat to our national security. But in the short run, it is almost certain that the American people would prefer that we bomb Grenada again, or perhaps Nauru, which is sinking into the rising sea and it’s destruction really won’t matter anyway.
Posted by: Knut Wicksell | Jul 1 2005 16:38 utc | 37
Coded messages from the NYT –
Nation hijacked; can’t talk; KGB minding
In the now-familiar coded message format, the New York Times, our psychically fractured national paper, once again sneaks in a warning to all that hostage takers with absolute contempt for international law can possibly end up running entire countries. By long-established protocols of communication under KGB (Kommissariat for George Bush) surveillance the NYT’s story “about” an elected foreign leader of an Oriental country and his anti-American past will be understood to refer to our own national hostage situation. Hotheadedly ignoring standard dis/re-information procedures designed for his own protection, Krugman actually included the code key in naked format. Advice to Paul, don’t ride in ‘copters with sellout credit card company executives too often.
PaulK needn’t have bothered, the gray lady already included here own secret decoder ring with the familiar Oriental tag signal:
Told of the dark side of Mao’s record known to historians but not to most Chinese, some of the students grew defensive. “What do you expect us to do, drag him from his grave and flog him,” one asked. “The emperors of the past are regarded as great if they moved the country forward, no matter how much the people suffered. With Mao it is the same.”
Others, however, grew pensive. “You might say that China is a very different country in the way it deals with history,” said one young woman. “But you must understand, foreigners have much more information than we do. There’s no real freedom to discuss these kinds of things here.”
Posted by: citizen | Jul 1 2005 16:43 utc | 38
Outraged, July 1, 2005 08:42 AM: We invaded Iraq becasue we KNEW they had no WMDs. We did it uniltaerally and intentionally without UN support via the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ so that none of the restraints and handicaps that had prevented fulfillment of the original objective in 1991 would recur. ‘Cause it was obvious we had taught Saddam too well and he was’nt about be replaced by a new puppet from within.
Hence the CPA, Chalabi, the IGC, then Allawi and all the associated activities since.
I widely agree with the thrust of that post of yours, but will pick bones with the above passage.
First, even the PNAC documents refer to WMD. But just the PNAC documents show ups that WMD was always an excuse, never seriously thought about. No, the US invaded because (1) the generally agreed policy of the elite for regional dominace, (2) the similarly agreed policy of controlling oil deposits, (3) the need for a staging ground for further wars (all neocons), (4) to try out a new army philosophy (Rumsfeld), (5) to use oil as strategic bargaining chip (Cheney, some neocons), (6) to spread ‘managed democracy’ (Wolfowitz and the State Department gang around Powell), (7) to spread free-market capitalism (most neocons and all neolibs), (8) war profits (all with variing degrees), (9) Israel’s regional dominance (for the hardcore Zionists among the neocons and the softcore ones among the neolibs), (10) making the President-Select more popular (Rove), (11) impress Poppa (Dubya).
The US did it with a CoW and without the UN because the US state department traditional imperialists and Britain failed to browbeat other UN SC members into voting for a war resolution, tough the neocons and their Machiavellian satellites (Rummy, Cheney) indeed wanted to destroy the UN. They were pushed back for a time by those who favored the UN as a cover, on the other hand they did everything to make the latter fail. Small, but to me important difference.
The variing puppets also express an internal struggle. The neocons wanted to install Chalabi, but both reality and the State Department stopped them. You may not remember, but I remember well the army of thousands of ‘free Iraqis’ that was supposed to be trained here in Hungary, but which failed due to very low number of applicants (a hundred or two IIRC). So Cheney and Rummy abadoned the neocons. But, as a compromise, the State Department sent in the guy who created ‘managed democracy’ in the Kurdish areas before, general Garner – and lo’, there were municipal assemblies with autonomy but without much to do on their own. But with the emerging resistance, the neocons again gained upper hand, enter Bremer, who dissolved the assemblies, created the IGC puppets while retaining real control, and started the neoliberal revolution. But the oil companies and the paleocons and realities on the ground said no to oil privatisation, pitting most neocons and Cheney against Bremer. Now, Chalabi was meant to be manoveured into position, but somehow and somewhy he was suddenly exposed as an Iranian spy. With the neocons and events on the ground having killed Bremer for them, the victorious State Department/CIA schemers brought in their original puppet, their Saddam Mark II, Allawi. And so it continued.
I draw the following morale from this story: while no group achieved all it aspired for, the mess they created while they tussled is on one hand worse than had one of them achieved policy dominance, yet on the other hand, it remains probably closer to the shared goals than had one of them achieved policy dominance. Thus that they aren’t a monolythic cabal doesn’t mean they are less dangerous or shouldn’t be all hunted from power.
slothrop quotes Robert O. Paxton: Without an ever-mounting spiral of ever more daring challenges, fascist regimes risked decaying into something resembling a tepid authoritarianism.
Good observation. Exactly that happened to Franco’s Spanish fascism.
“Those who excel in virtue have the best right of all to rebel, but then they are of all men the least inclined to do so.”
“Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.”
“If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the utmost.”
“A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.”
— Aristotle
Posted by: Outraged | Jul 1 2005 17:05 utc | 41
Bartcop connects some dots:
Ex-Hostages Say Iran Leader-Elect was a Captor
That means he worked with the BFEE 25 years ago and probably still does
Posted by: citizen | Jul 1 2005 17:16 utc | 42
@DoDo
No disagreement here.
Did not attempt to cover every relevant point, was merely to sustain a particular theme, my passion sometimes gets the better of me.
I’ve posted previously re Gen Graner and his prompt ‘removal’ because he was too much of a realist fo the WH tastes. Re the UN resolution, IIRC the indications are that the US administration never actually sincerely intended it going to a vote in the UNSC … they merely went through the motions as a sop to the Blairites and to maintain the public facade. I would argue strongly that this administration never inteneded nor is willing to accept UN authorization and therefore a degree of influence over such an act as invading Iraq, in this case specifically. It was intentional so as to remove the possible future restraint of a UN mandated Operation.
As you point out, the administration is not monolithic. And whilst Powell and State still had some influence they were given a small amount of slack on the ‘leash’ re the UN track. In a similar vien part of the inevitable chaos of undertakings of this scale, i.e. Iraq, is just as it was throughout Vietnam … Military (Field Commanders & Pentagon), Intelligence (multiple agencies), State, White House, et al players all pulling in different directions.
Key players following the core goal and script, many others honestly acting out thier part to the fullest to fulfill the everchanging ‘publicly’ stated goals or the particular agenda and policy of thier chain of command … all in a chaotic environment of lack of co-ordination and communication. Often acting at conflicting, cross and parallel purposes.
Posted by: Outraged | Jul 1 2005 17:34 utc | 43
@DoDo
The variing puppets … And so it continued
Purposely skipped the detail … analysis was done to death as the events transpired at Billmons Whiskey Bar … there are some serious gems tucked away in Billmons archived comments though … mixed in amongst chaff, ’twas overall much less disciplined than MoA.
Posted by: Outraged | Jul 1 2005 17:45 utc | 44
@DoDo
Last followup. We KNEW Iraq had no WMDs as at 1995, and subsequently confirmed and re-confirmed, regardless of any PNAC documents. It was the very fact that we knew there were no WMDs that made the use of brute military force re an invasion and an advance into Baghdad to accomplish ‘Regime Change’ thinkable.
I’ll dig up referenes re the true knowledge re WMD if you wish … 1995 was the interrogation of Saddam brother-in law, who was in charge of Saddams WMD programs and confirmed and enabled verification of prior destruction of Iraqs WMDs and programs shortly after Guld War I.
Posted by: Outraged | Jul 1 2005 17:57 utc | 45
A much stubbier BMon from above–
“….it’s easy to be an idealist when you’ve convinced yourself your ideals completely justify your material or political self interests…. But, as Diamond correctly notes, the pedal hits the metal when the two come into direct and unavoidable contradiction…”
But what if there is, ultimately, no contradiction?
As Vin Correo pointed out above @ 4:36 am, Mr. Wolfowitz appears to believe that the following mean is the key to winning the geopolitical endgame:
“power can be used very effectively to create more power.”
And is is this not the same game plan that is used day after day after day by Mr. Rove to win the quadrennial Realpolitical Superbowl ?
And ditto for the means used by Mr. Norquist to win the culture wars, and Mr. Cheney to achieve global energy hegemony, and Messrs Feif, Armitage and Perle to dominate the entire planet’s information.
And if it really is thus, when does the constant, never ending drive to acquire all that power, especially when it is all convergent, itself become the one, true ideology?
Personally, I think that transformative moment came and went sometime in the summer of 2002. And I’m not talking about the Downing St Memos here. Instead, it’s the Torture Memos that nail it for me, because there is absolutely no way that their contents can be squared with any notion of personal freedom, liberation and/or Jeffersonian democracy.
btw, it’s Canada Day here….
And all we believe in is peace, order and good government.
And, oh ya, marriages for all.
Not even sure there is an ideology there.
slothrop quotes Robert O. Paxton: Without an ever-mounting spiral of ever more daring challenges, fascist regimes risked decaying into something resembling a tepid authoritarianism.
Good observation. Exactly that happened to Franco’s Spanish fascism.
Took a lot of mass executions to get that point.
Posted by: Billmon | Jul 1 2005 19:11 utc | 48
I am remembering the possibly-apocryphal story of the contest in Canada to come up with a slogan “As Canadian as….” (to match “as American as Apple Pie,” or “as British as roast beef and gin” or whatever).
And the story goes that the winning entry was “As Canadian as… possible, under the circumstances.”
And that warmed my heart. There is the slogan of a sane, reasonable national culture.
There is the slogan of a sane, reasonable national culture.
Ah, sanity is WAY overrated.
Posted by: Crazed American Wing Nut | Jul 1 2005 19:32 utc | 50
“I am remembering the possibly-apocryphal story of the contest in Canada…”
That really happened, thru CBC’s Morningside program when Peter Gzowski was the host.
Posted by: sm | Jul 1 2005 19:50 utc | 51
The US supports dictatorships (Asimov..) and puppet Gvmts, in function of its own interests.
Mutterings about democracy in Iraq are senseless. In our life times, no.
Take the case of Saudi.
The Saudi Royals used the US to prop up their power, following the Rooselvelt-Ibn Saud agreement. That gave them a certain *gravitas.*
Then, to stifle internal dissidence, they gave over the running of the country to the Mullahs – as these had plenty adherents ready to rebel against foreign influence, rapine, despots, etc. The Royals reckoned that religion or trad. values would keep all quiet, by delegating power.
The Saudi Royals kept their hands on the money, the easy black gold moolah, and let fundamentalists run the place, with, essentially, the following results:
1) a population explosion – ‘feed em some cash’
2) no ‘democracy’ and women kept in the home veiled and breeding – poor education and overall lousy prospects for the ‘poor’. Men could entertain fantasies of domination and be kept quiet, given a minuscule platform of lets call it what it is – sadism
3) no development of civil society or political opening
4) no diversification in economic devp., clout
5) the necessity to *import* a lot of foreign labor to do the scut work – easily paid for until recently (now, the outskirts of Riyad are a huge slum ..)
6) the need to export *terrorism* (dissidence turned violent) to ensure that the country was kept stable, which involved negotiation and heavy concessions and much fuss with the US who has staunchly put up with it (why did Prince Bandar recently push off? I don’t know..)
7) Finally, a loosing position – being accused of ‘terrorism’ and ‘democratic deficit’ and being bombarded with ‘the need for reform’, an impossible demand, a double bind, as the Saudi Royals cannot ever instigate any reforms as those might diminish the hold of their masters, US military/trade power
8) …
E.g. Saddam: From a US client he became a rejected spat-upon lackey, a green clawed monster, who could not escape shock and awe and symbolically ended up captured and in jail, held by the US…paraded in his underpants!
Concl. The problem is though that by promulagating feudal coercion and slavery abroad, it finally comes home to roost
Today, there is not much difference between the Iraqi father weeping over his maimed child, his bombed home, and the American father, weeping over his impossibly mortgaged home, his lost job, his hysterical wife, and his child without medical care, autistic and doomed.
Posted by: Noisette | Jul 1 2005 19:51 utc | 52
But the Iraqis don’t understand, don’t want, and can’t cope with real democracy, because they have no mental equivalent for democracy, not even the ones with dual US citizenship, who have lived in the USA for a period of years.
With that amazing mind-reading capability, it’s a constant source of surprise that US foreign policy isn’t more successful.
Posted by: lll | Jul 1 2005 19:53 utc | 53
outraged
i find you recent comment even more pertinent than they were already at the whisky bar
the moment, the historical moment we are living through has become so debased, so corrupt & corrupting. what is happening in that country of yours is beyond any sense of sanity. it is without question, quite insane
gone are the old world capitalists who filtered their greed through good works & a ‘respect’ for the institions of power. they were considered bought in any case – they did not have to vulgarly control them like some caîtalist from a georg grosz drawing
their deeds were no doubt, terrible but amongst them i imagine there were those influenced by 19th century humanism
capital now acts with a triumphalism that would lead any normal person to feel only disgust for them – but more than triumphalism they are veangeful to the point of mania
i truly cannot understand why a mass movement has not been taking place in america – why are the people so cowed – all the institutions that they say are sacred – are profane – your legislative & jurispredential institution has become something so strange – so horrific in its repercussion today & tommorrow i cannot understand that there i not a mass movement on a parallel to that which helped defeat the illegal war against the vietnamese
what is happening today is to my mind – a great deal worse – worse in almost every aspect. & what is happening today is fed by fear – fear being incrementally accelerated until any solidarity will become impossible or illegal
i know i am like a person looking at a car accident – but i cannot transalte to you the full scale of the horro of what is being done in your name. even here from france – i feel physically – what is happening in your country
it is so far from business as usual – that i find almost repugnant the idea of those here who think the situation will return to normal at some other time. it is clear that that will not happen. that it will not happen at all. the only thing that can thwart the very real decomposition of your country is engagement, community & resistance
if we are to use the 1933 -45 parallel – you are somewhere in 1937 – where the process of living with quotidian horror had already been consolidated to a large degree. you are there
& it is true it is not a pretty picture elsewhere – that loathsome little man blair is pushing his poison all over europe – where an implicit rejection – a forgetting of the underclass as a population deserving of something more – has become their banner. in australia – they are installing an anti worker legislation that is without parallel in their history. & here in france & germany the little wolves of liberalism salivate at their future possibilities
& not one amongst this crowd of criminals – is substantial. they are so small, so vulgar – they do not understand their own culture, political culture let alone that of another people
& everywhere, fear. fear has become their lingua franca – that is their coin & it seems that the people fall in line quickly enough
the illegal war against iraq is one measure but it is not the only measure – they are taking us towards disgrace
& they will fall as all empires do – but what damage they will do – is completely unimaginable to me tonight – & in a way it is so horrifying i do not want to think about it
implicit in the arguments of comrade slothrop & my friend theodor – is the belief that things will fall back into place – i am being reductive when i say that but i feel deep in their arguments is a belief that capital is capable of organising events, humanely
i do not think so – they have gone past that point – in fact way past that point – hen young we would joke don’t vote – it only encourages them – but today their political institutions – often in great majorities are an absolute fiasco
i cannot believe that before this evil war started there was 12 million of us who opposed this criminal insanity. where are we now. i know all of us do our efforts outside our communication but i witness in country after country – levels of degradation that should shock humanity – our humanity is in fact becoming diminished. diminished to non existant
when i am with my communities here – i want to offer hope – i want to offer reasons for fighting – but sometimes it is just so hard to see that far & what one see often is the abyss
i am sorry to post here much that must seem bordering on nihilism – but it is the way i truly feel – every time i see any of cheney-bush junta & their stupid smirks – i want to reach for a rpg – & that would be convenient for them too – because this culture of violence recreates violence in its own shadow. there is no place for the human heart in their schemes
there is no place for the human heart in their schemes
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 1 2005 20:14 utc | 54
slothrop & my friend theodor – is the belief that things will fall back into place
Geez, implicit? Maybe when I say, for example, partition might be the sort of policy to rescue the bush doctrine, I don’t mean to imply I support such a move. Rather, I’m merely disarming what I think is an erroneous view shared by many here that America is doomed by the war. There are some options.
As for the overall picture–the “tendential” and “secular” crises afflicting capital expansion–I agree nothing except socialism can improve matters.
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 1 2005 20:50 utc | 56
@R’Giap
We all wish we had the answer … how many of us have struggled to see some solution … yes, the realization, the enormity can drive one to a dark, despairing place.
But they need us to fear, to silence voices, to denigrate and demonize critics. They need to cow us so that we do not educate … one another and others in turn, to ultimately lose the means to rally or resist.
Harden a portion of the heart and do not let the nihilism, the fear take hold, deny it to them, if out of nothing more than sheer defiance … apart from anything else educate and communicate freely, brutally, honestly. Look at how many in the polls now regard the war as wrong ? Slowly, incrementally, sleepers wake.
Like you I dread what must eventuate before the apathetic and asleep awake. What events may come to pass and the consequences beyond. Yet do we not draw strength from one another by the simple act of speaking candidly and freely of what media and ‘the bought’ will not ?
Many are suborned, yet in no category of choice do they hold a majority.
It is your very expression of humanity that I draw strength from, where otherwise I would tend to dry, objective, ‘restrained’, ‘correct’, impartial analysis or comment.
Every time they generate a new lie, a new variation of the justifications for a new crime it must be challenged, even if by nothing more than a raised, defiant voice.
The simple pleasures in life they cannot take … the innocent laughter and ignorant joy of children nor the unquestioning total love of a pet, the bond of a soulmate, nor the simple pleasure of a picnic.
Annies post of her nervous joy and excitement at the news and confidances of her Iraqi guests … did not such a simple, personal confidance renew and hearten hope ?
Still Steel, my friend.
Posted by: Outraged | Jul 1 2005 21:00 utc | 57
real woman
i know i shouldn’t apologise but sometimes i feel the dense clouds of my post can be overwhelming. certainly i feel them as being so & then i see the work of outraged or deanander or a great number of you capable of creating little lights – while not ignoring the obscenity we are living through
i was brought up with marxism -leninism but you could say that what informed it was the gramscian edge of my parents – who understood pessimism of the intellect – optimism of the will
& despite what many of my critics here think – it was the only place where i could see a construction of human decency. when you are borne in poverty you do not believe in dreams, american or otherwise – so the state socialism of comrade countries – i understood to be very far from what could be possible. but it is clear it was my own eyes, my own heart & communists who made me comprehend the real & the concrete basis of compassion & the very real & concrete need for change
i would say that it is obvious that i do not believe in american exceptionalism & yes there is something – that part which loves history as fact & hostory as breath – that says this empire will fall like all the others before them
what makes it different – is that this empire can cause considerably more damage than any empire before it has done – when it is falling & its fall will be like that vey american psychodrama of the man who kills the object of his supposed desire – he says out of desire – but the real cause is more often envy
& that leads me to say something tht mau appear paradoxal but i think it is not. empires & tyrannies while hating their subjects & those they vanquish – secretly envy them. envy them their deeper comprehension of the living heart of worlds & we can feel this in much of the later discourses of robert oppenheimer for example – he bcame obsessed with non commodified knowledge. not simple speech – or the thoughts of simple folk but that the real thought that exists on the margin is by its very nature , revelatory.
the slave sees what the master cannot
& what empires do by their very nature is to increase the number of people on the margins & that is starting to include blocs of populations who were previouslly protected out of the tyrants self interest but it would see that since they control – all seats of power in america – they have no need of their allies in the construction of fear
& it is the middle class i pity more because it is they who have complicitly entered into the faustian bargain knowing they were going to get diddled & that their dreams have come to naught – tante aime – on another thread has articulated this very well – indeed. john too in his desolation – speaks of sorrow that comes from having believed in something that turns out to be shit. but this middle class does not posess the knowledge that is derived from the margins & even in the darkest of times – these people will act against their own interests – even when they have fallen far further than those marginalised people they fear
they fear the homeless. well we are all homeless now
they fear the destitute. we are destitute in all things that matter
they fear madness. the world we live in could not be more mad
they fear the fallen when they have already fallen to kingdom come
& what is this culture that creates a fear of the ‘barbarians’ which has shown little else than barbarity, itself – who prefers the sham to the real – who really prefers the huckster bill gates to the more mundane but inventive steve jobs – tho it isn’t the best example i can come up with.
but it is a world of hucksters, of grifters, of small time & small town cheats – of all the characters that people jim thompson’s ‘histories’ who have hit the mother lode. there is not one dreamer amongst them. there is not a visionary to ne had & if they do have dreams they are wheels on fire & are from the book of ezeikel
i woulod gladly trade all the things i love in your culture – melville, crane, dreiser, o’neill, pollock, rothko, krassner, sun ra, coltrane bob dylan for just a shadow from the walls of ancient babylon
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 1 2005 21:14 utc | 59
my comrade slothrop
i do not begrudge anyine their comfort(s) but when those comforts & habitudes colour their perception then that comfort constitutes cruelty & that i will not forgive
i think that it is possible to live a full life & never be cruel. never. it is not from piety that i say that. perhaps a belief in karma but all i witness some days is cruelty & i feel like a hppie singer on a streetcorner singing that song from ‘hair’ – easy to be hard – & i forbid that in myself – i have lived a hard life & i suppose i am a hard man but i can truthfully say i have bever been cruel
& it is not nothing
because behind the barbarian logic of the empires all i see it terrible & insufferable cruelty
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 1 2005 21:24 utc | 60
i woulod gladly trade all the things i love in your culture
You are magnanimous!
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 1 2005 21:24 utc | 61
Not to approve of your generalizations, but I’ll admit my culture likes to watch things die. I’ve had a thrill or two, and admit if I believed in karma, those old pleasures are the reason for my present suffering.
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 1 2005 21:28 utc | 62
in my heart slothrop – if at this time all the gifts that your culture has give me could be exchanged for what has already been lost in iraq – since this evil war – i would
there is nothing in your culture that could not be recreated & that is not to demean it – but there are things that concretely have been lost – that can never be remplaced
this culture which has been besmirched – with any taint your tryrants or their trained ‘intellectuals’ can dribble out of their mouths will not hide the richness of the people of their land & of their history
this culture which has been painted with a fanatics brush by your culture’s hegemony is in fact the contrary of that & any reading, any reading at all would prove that. any understanding of their ancinet treasures or in fact of their contemporary painting or poetry would deny in a breath all the lies your administration tells
& yes for that i would trade all i have learned from dreiser of natalie merchant
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 1 2005 21:37 utc | 63
slothrop
you can mock me & my ‘generalisations’ but i feel them where it matters most – my heart. something your marxism seems to abhor. that there is something beyond mechanism – sorrow for instance
& yes i imagine my sadness is easy to mock for i feel as pablo neruda must have in those awful september days in 1973 in chile when kissingers gestapo were treading over the culture this man loved – this man who had fought for an idea all his life had seen it come to frution & he was murdered when watching – the legions of the american administration destroy it
& yes there are so many things i love. wonderment would for me be truer than your appelation ‘thrills’ & i witness it being turned into shit – every day & the fight i fight with my communities is a war of the flea
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 1 2005 21:44 utc | 64
This is from the fucker who approved of bombing the shit out of Fallujah.
“I hope but I can’t yet be sure that there will be a specific initiative on the Israeli-Palestinian issue,” Blair told a news conference.
“I’ve set aside time within the summit now to do this because there have been developments over the past few days that lead me to believe we may be able to make some progress,” he said.
Fuck off War Criminal Blair
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Jul 1 2005 22:06 utc | 66
& you know i am not arguing against you – it is just here too that there is a left who secretly believes in the organisation supremacy of capital & that things will be set to rights – i just don’t believe it
i see no such supremacy – i see thoughtless stupidity
& i remember the first time the empire attacked iraq – jordans king hussein became a sort of messanger boy & i recall perhaps his last press conference before the war started – where you could see his speech was unprepared – & the gist of his argument – & of his heart’s eye – was that he could not beleive what was happening – was happening – it was like a child wonderment in front of a broken toy – it was if he beleived ultimately – all things were ordered & would fall into order – & that stupidity for it was a word he repeated – stupidity was going to lead us to catastrophe – not ideology, not money – but stupidity
& i remembered then that in every little bolshie heart like mine – there was a hidden conception – a conception that was fostered during the cold war that at the end of the day – the big boys would settle it all & get back to business. it was in this moment – too late – you might say – that i understood deeply that at the centre of capital was – chaos
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 1 2005 22:07 utc | 67
“pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”
r’giap is singing today… good words to live by. anyone remember Rebecca Solnit’s article “Hope in the Dark”?
over at euroboo I have encountered a pessimism to match my own… and yet, and yet, I still believe another world is possible. these jackbooted mediocrities vandalise and befoul and suborn and intimidate us and yet somehow I remain an altermondialista… Zeynep’s reports from the Tribunal (over at UnderTheSameSun) are somehow heartening as is this alternate Pledge of Allegiance from Steve Wishnia today at alternet:
I pledge allegiance to the human race, to everyone from Bangladesh to Uganda who wants to make the world a better place, not to the billionaire thugs demanding blind obeisance to their divine dominion.
Kunstler and Lundberg are singing despair (Lundberg today at FTW, free content, calls for a peak oil event threshold so steep that Americans will not know what hit them, barbarism, repression, darkness, Falluja in the USA)… but Zeynep offers a scrap of hope, a display of autonomous decency, optimism of the will.
reviewed today at alternet is Heda Kovaly’s ‘Under A Cruel Star’ — damn, another book I should be reading — and it seems in a way, that title, to sum up our human existence: born under a cruel star, we nonetheless can make the choice to be kind, to be decent. and Kovaly — says the reviewer — suggests that the real division in our world is not between religion and religion or ideology and ideology, but between those who choose decency and those who scorn it.
have I recommended Cosma Shalizi lately? Google for “Three Toed Sloth” and he should be the first text hit, below the great pics of real three toed sloths. a delightful writer and a reminder that academic credentials can sometimes go hand in hand with a lively conscience and creative thinking.
it was in this moment – too late – you might say – that i understood deeply that at the centre of capital was – chaos
rgiap you echo a slogan that I used to wear on an enameled pin on my lapel years and years ago: “Capitalism IS Organised Crime”. which connects with I think the fundamental internal contradiction between capitalism, i.e. unchecked profiteering, and civil society: DeAnander’s Law, it is always more profitable to do things wrong.
it is always more profitable to steal than to make or build. it is always more profitable to cheat than to be honest. it is always more profitable — for someone — to destroy things and then get paid to rebuild them. whether that be warehouses that my Mafia cousin burns down so that my other Mafia cousin can rebuild them, or the US trashing an entire country so as to hand out fat no-bid contracts to favoured corporadoes.
it is always more profitable to with-hold or enclose goods and force people to pay for them than to share them equitably for free as a commons. it is always more profitable to do business during a disaster, when people will pay anything for water, food, flashlight batteries, than in normal times — so yippee, let’s engineer some disasters! it is always more profitable to maintain a monopoly or a company store or a cartel than to permit genuine freedom of competition. it is always easier and more profitable to cheat in an atmosphere of secrecy and nondisclosure, so let’s restrict citizen access to information. it is always more profitable to adulterate the product. for the predator, predation is more profitable than cooperation or reciprocity. slave labour is cheaper than wage-slave labour which is cheaper than paying an honest living wage.
so when profit is the only yardstick of success, things will be done increasingly wrong, and the polity will approach the state of chaos — economic warlordism — of mafia (or mafiya) rule. lawlessness, rampant corruption, the war of all against all and me against my brother. this to me is the inherent contradiction between the reality of unregulated capitalism and its endless claims about “freedom” — in the degraded warlord culture no one is free, no one has autonomy, everyone is bound in a rigid feudalistic hierarchy of favours and fear and ass-kissing just to survive each day, paying protection money to the guy with the biggest guns or the biggest moneybags. only massive collective action, solidarity of the little people, and a very dangerous struggle against the pezzonovanti, can restore civic life, peace, order, some semblance of justice. S America seems to be at that point right now in several countries where the IMF/WB piratising has destroyed civil society to about this extent.
a kind of order can be experienced under warlord rule (the trains may even run on time) but in the end it is arbitrary, whimsical, there is no real security for anyone without the basic tenets of civil society: common law, probity, due process, open information, peer review.
dea
that is what i feel concretely with my communities – they live without any real & human notion of security & here at least the social sense(even if at times it reflects self interest – in that they are scared of becoming one of the fallen) remains strong despite the loathsome tirades of those two dwarves blair & sarkozy
i was thinking dea that – tad olson fits all the narritives pleasures of this administration to be the next supreme – he is clearly a shit – but his personal tragedy will cleanse him of all his crimes – & the democrats being their normal self hating selves will not yelp. one thing is guaranteed the more this criminal crew has to do with the functionement of law the further away from justice it becomes
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 1 2005 22:41 utc | 70
Purpose for invading Iraq: oil supplies for Israel.
Posted by: Wolf DeVoon | Jul 1 2005 23:11 utc | 71
Billmon — don’t be so modest. The Bush administration is a coalition. A majority agreed that taking on Iraq fit in with some component of each of their agendas. (The Kissinger/Poppy gang was the most reluctant — not because they didn’t like the idea, but because they prefer not to be so blatant in their geopolitical power grabs and they weren’t confident that taking over Iraq would be easy enough to avoid political backlash.) There only outcome all of them would accept in Iraq was that it had to be US friendly — that’s “Democracy” to them. Then they all agreed that WMD was the best way to sell it. The rest of it is post purchase customer service that’s getting harder and harder to do as more Americans realize that they are getting stuck with a lemon and a turkey.
Posted by: Marie | Jul 1 2005 23:13 utc | 72
One fast reply to Outraged: I’ll dig up referenes re the true knowledge re WMD if you wish … 1995 was the interrogation of Saddam brother-in law, who was in charge of Saddams WMD programs and confirmed and enabled verification of prior destruction of Iraqs WMDs and programs shortly after Guld War I.
Yep, Hussein Kamal said there was no more WMD. However, he wasn’t trusted – Rolf Ekeus, the UNSCOM chief leaving in 1997 (giving over to that Australian pawn in Clinton’s hand, Richard Butler) called him a “consummate liar”. His testimony, deemed worthless, was kept secret in order to make Saddam unsure about how much Kamel gave away. This had the benefit for the UNSCOM that a scared Saddam “found” a lot of documents on WMDs hidden at Kamal’s chicken farm; while later it also allowed the neocons to falsely claim that it was only him who gave away the secret of the bioweapons programme (rather than UNSCOM being able to find out on its own, as it happened).
R’Giap,
You are very perceptive. From November 1995
This gives me no pleasure whatsoever. I named my beloved first born for the Queen Empress Victoria. I named my beloved second born for my own late father and for the wartime King George. I grew up loving the game of cricket above all others, the more for the values it supposedly embodied. I am no revolutionary, and the truth I have learned about the land of my birth breaks my heart.
It gets only worse with time. The only palliative is to fight back on every front possible. I am now a revolutionary, and I see now only a violent end.
Posted by: John | Jul 1 2005 23:34 utc | 74
@tante aime – re 1st comment
Loved your prose style. The 1st couple of paragraphs looks like a good start to a novel if you are left with nothing much else to do.
BTW – seems to be a disproportionate number of IT people around here. Is it that cutting code or IT in general is so turgid that an escape is necessary?
Posted by: DM | Jul 2 2005 12:37 utc | 75
john
sometimes the simplest things can break a heart. i was brought up in poverty with a disproportionate respect for knowledge – so the university became for me a light on the hill. when i was the first amongst a population of my district of 40,000 people to ever enter university – i found it to be a marriage gudance counseelor for the rich, a large photocopier & the complete absence of original ideas. it broke my heart in a way the love of another never has. the effondrement of my dream took some time to reconstruct
& so it is today with many in the middle class who have hitherto benefited from the tyranny of capital – now the thing they value most – their health, their homes & their future is being attacked in many many countries
privileged people who normally were accepted into the welcoming arms of capital are being refused & they will inevitably join the ranks of the margianalised but unfortuantely they have no political consciousness so they will act against their own interests as the middle class under fascism have always done thinking it will break the fall
on the contrary, it will accelerate it
Posted by: Anonymous | Jul 2 2005 17:36 utc | 76
why isn’t the site remembering personal info
Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 2 2005 17:40 utc | 78
@DM ha 🙂 I think it is partly because IT people tend to sit at high speed networks all day long, so it is very easy to just sneak over to MoA and the pages take very little time to load… during a long compile or an unusually boring meeting with laptop in hand, the temptation is extreme… we’re also less closely supervised than clericals which makes a bit of sneaking around the Net easier to get away with.
Posted by: DeAnander | Jul 2 2005 18:45 utc | 79
Why not chaos in Iraq? We had our civil war, let them have theirs. Is our way of life so tied to their oil, that we can’t let the Iraqis have a destiny of their own?
Posted by: Anonymous | Jul 3 2005 2:40 utc | 81
DeAnander: Can you define “capitalism”? Aren’t most complex human societies balanced on a tightrope between chaos and despotism? When I read Marx 30 years ago I was blown away by the brilliance of the analysis. But now, I think that many of the things that Marx identified as “capitalist” have little to do with money and markets and a lot to do with complexity of production and power.
Posted by: citizen k | Jul 3 2005 19:17 utc | 82
I think that many of the things that Marx identified as “capitalist” have little to do with money and markets and a lot to do with complexity of production and power.
Engels, Anti-Dühring:
But every society based on commodity production has the peculiarity that the producers in it have lost command over their own social relations. Each produces for himself with the means of production which happen to be at his disposal and in order to satisfy his individual needs through exchange. No one knows how much of the article he produces is coming onto the market or how much will be wanted, no one knows whether his individual product will meet a real need, whether he will cover his costs or even be able to sell it at all. Anarchy of social production prevails. But like all other forms of production commodity production has its own peculiar laws, which are inherent in and inseparable from it; and these laws assert themselves despite anarchy, in and through anarchy. They are manifested in the only persistent form of the social nexus, in exchange, and impose themselves on the individual producers as compulsory laws of competition. At first, therefore, they are unknown to these producers themselves and have to be discovered by them gradually, only through long experience. Thus they assert themselves without the producers and against the producers, as the natural laws of their form of production, working blindly. The product dominates the producers.
As Marx also says in Grundrisse Capital “preposits” such limits on production which only capitalism can solve.
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 3 2005 19:56 utc | 83
But every society based on commodity production has the peculiarity that the producers in it have lost command over their own social relations.
So grain growers in Uruk and salt traders Warring Periods China and potato farmers in Inca had “command over their own social relations”?
Posted by: citizen k | Jul 3 2005 20:19 utc | 84
Precapitalist social relations are different from social relations defined by capitalist production. The latter is “anarchy of econ production.” Socialism is the rational organization of existing means of production to achieve greater resource equity, not the retrieval of precapitalist social relations.
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 3 2005 22:13 utc | 85
Actually, I think the Grundrisse english trans. language is “positing” barriers to accumulation, but can’t find the quote right now.
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 3 2005 22:15 utc | 86
Jameson, Late Marxism 240:
Exchange (of a local variety) is presumably age-old, and notions of identity and logical comparison have been with us since the first hominids. Capital, however, is a later original historical construction on that, which brings with it its own original logical derivations, most of which center around the paradoxical movement of capital as a single general force which is also at one and the same time a multiplicity of individual forces.
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 4 2005 0:03 utc | 87
So is “late marxism” a knowing joke on late, as dead, deceased ,no more, pushing up the daisies, or, is it simply late as in an evolutioanry product that has become something that it was not before, or a mere reference to “late capitalism” and what difference does it make anyway if it takes a recent literary theorist to crank out what is supposedly a law of production?
Post hoc being early latin?
Posted by: Anonymous | Jul 4 2005 0:37 utc | 88
recent literary theorist to crank out what is supposedly a law of production?
haha. See, you already betray the colonization of your own mind by the supposed inherent complexities of the social–have already accepted the complications, even outright impossibility, of any social totality. This is a primary ideology of capitalism, fooling, as is proved by the above unsigned comment, even an intelligent detractor of Marx.
Mandel:
the radical improvement in the conditions for the valorization of capital which resulted from the historic defeats of the working-class by fascism and war; its subsequent development through the Third Technological Revolution; its specific traits as a new phase in the development of capital – the abbreviation of the life-cycle of fixed capital, the acceleration of technological innovation (rents from which become the main form of monopolistic surplus-profits under late capitalism), and the absorption of surplus-capital by permanent rearmament; its particular interconnexion with the world market – the international concentration and centralization of capital that generates the multinational corporation as the main phenomenal form of capital, and the uneven exchange between nations producing commodities at different levels of average productivity of labour, that dominates world trade; and its new forms and `solutions’ of the problem of realization – permanent inflation and the typical latecapitalist trade-cycle, which combines a classical industrial cycle with a credit-expansion and credit-contraction ‘counter-cycle’ under the sign of inflation…
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 4 2005 1:33 utc | 89
“there is no such thing as society”–maggie thatcher
“the end of ideology”–daniel bell
pure bullshit.
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 4 2005 1:35 utc | 90
Slothrop:
So is Engels right or wrong? He sez that capitalism is characterized by a “peculiarity” which seems to me to be not peculiar at all.
If Inca is capitalist, “capitalism” means nothing. If Inca is not, then the manifest subordinated role of farmers, artisans, and soldiers who didn’t control their own production is clearly not a distinguishing property.
Then you write Precapitalist social relations are different from social relations defined by capitalist production. The latter is “anarchy of econ production.” and this doesn’t help much. Despite the fantasies of the Hayekians, since the middle ages, Europe and then the US have always had both massive state intervention in the economy and substantial and key economic sectors governed by monopolies or oligopolies. JP Morgan’s reorganization of the railroads or the 5o year operation of AT&T or Airbus, for example, are regulated by direct exercise of state or private power and don’t have much to do with “anarchy”.
You then quote for “Exchange (of a local variety) is presumably age-old, and notions of identity and logical comparison have been with us since the first hominids. and we are at a historical error. The massive long distance trading operations around the Indian ocean, through China and then the Mongol Empire, around the spice Islands, for example, are what? How about the long-distance movement of slaves and valuables during Roman and Greek times? Is Venice in 1200 Capitalist despite its aristocracy by-birth and the Arsenal? How about Guangzhou during Ming when China traded all the way to Yemen in vast state operated convoys? It’s all very easy to dismiss these as not fundamental to the operation of the economies, but that’s theory over practice.
Is there a critical difference between an Indian artisan of the Mogul period laboring away for wages paid by a merchant and a Manchester cotton worker of the Victorian period laboring away for wages paid by a merchant?
Posted by: citizen k | Jul 4 2005 1:42 utc | 91
Everybody’s having fun, I see, alternatively beating and resurrecting dead horses.
It’s about time for PETA to apply for warrants.
Posted by: Groucho | Jul 4 2005 1:44 utc | 92
Slothrop: You can’t defend Marxist economic analysis by attacking Thatcherism. We try to understand the machine of history that we inhabit and continue to build, but at least to me the Marxist analysis doesn’t do it and requires, as does “classical” economics an unending production of post-hoc explanations and data-fitting exercises. After all, as I understand them, Marx and Fred projected immiseration and revolution first in the advanced capitalist nations where falling profit margins, regimentation of labor, and collapsing wages would combine to produce an angry army of proles. What we’ve seen is different and all the post-hoc inventions of new “stages” helps not.
Groucho: Jeering is fine at baseball games and commencement speeches, but give it a break.
Posted by: citizen k | Jul 4 2005 1:57 utc | 93
@groucho,
When I see slothrop and citizenk sucking up bandwidth on MOA in one of their frequent arguments that are open to none but themselves, I go out for a smoke. A long one, a slow-burner. Upon returning to see that the argument is still in process, I go out for a drink, a nap, a walk with the dog, and hope that soemthing is settled upon my return.
Posted by: rapt | Jul 4 2005 1:59 utc | 94
See, you already betray the colonization of your own mind by the supposed inherent complexities of the social–have already accepted the complications, even outright impossibility, of any social totality.
Ahhm. Let me try.
Look man, this reveals der collectivization of one’s identity via purported built-in indeterminacies arising out of the interreleatedness of huamns – having now surrendered to the summed indeterminiacies, the very stupifying cannot be, of any fully summed interreality.
Nope. Didn’t help. This is not a job for PETA nor even Dr. STrangelove, but, Dr. Kervorkian.
Posted by: razor | Jul 4 2005 2:01 utc | 95
So is Engels right or wrong?
I think point there is the “many capitals” seem arranged in competition (markets clear, etc.), when in fact, the appropriation and allocation of resources and labor “anarchic” as in “inefficient.” You know, there’s more to this, I scrape the surface, but the totality produced by production for exchange is complex, “anarchic” by virtue of tyhe market failures.
JP Morgan’s reorganization of the railroads or the 5o year operation of AT&T or Airbus, for example, are regulated by direct exercise of state or private power and don’t have much to do with “anarchy”.
Ah. Excellent ex. The organization of rr by capital (weakly by legislation) actually a response to the anarchy of production–rr industry was plagued by excessive competition. This adjustment led to concentrated ownership. telkegraph/telephone same thing. Monopolization succeede in rationalizing production of communication network(s). Sehoulda just nationalized the fucking things in the first place. Expropriate Jay Gould. Monopoly capital or social ownership? Still a question always answered by the former. No dead horses I can see.
The massive long distance trading operations around the Indian ocean, through China and then the Mongol Empire, around the spice Islands, for example, are what?
Well, that’s a good question, answered I think by the historically discontinuous ways in which capitalism arrives as a truly global form of econ organization, replete with its own contradictions of expansion and regularity of crises. The same cannot really be said of feudal empires like l;ate ming w/ gongho’s junks sailing to east africa in search not of trade so much as the demonstration of china’s greatness. But, as for the disparate historical accounts chosen by you, I have not much to say, because I do not know.
Indian artisan of the Mogul period laboring away for wages paid by a merchant and a Manchester cotton worker of the Victorian period laboring away for wages paid by a merchant?
oh my goodness.
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 4 2005 2:10 utc | 96
You can’t defend Marxist economic analysis by attacking Thatcherism.
That’s not true. Because for neoliberalism, the only solution, say, to exurban irrational planning, would be the efficient response of capital to efficiently allocate resources. Well, we know very well the fantasies of these efficiences is what is going to propogate the disasters of resource depletion in the 1st place. Anarchy of production exists precisely because of the ad hoc response of capital to social problems.
Marx and Fred projected immiseration and revolution first in the advanced capitalist nations where falling profit margins, regimentation of labor, and collapsing wages would combine to produce an angry army of proles. What we’ve seen is different and all the post-hoc inventions of new “stages” helps not.
Please read Late Capital.
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 4 2005 2:23 utc | 97
Socialism, and small is beautiful market competition, will replace the idiocies of what passes as capitalism by default. That’s really obvious. Or, we’ll all be trading ratmeat at lunchtime.
Posted by: slothrop | Jul 4 2005 2:27 utc | 98
Rapt: Sorry to be so dull. These conversations don’t preclude more sparkling ones, as far as I know.
Sloth:
C’mon man. I asked for a definition. You provided Engels “peculiarity” which collapsed on inspection. Now you resort to “inefficiency” which is surely in the eye of the beholder: one person’s silly waste of resources for Yak butter lamps or day care centers is anothers salvation of the world, no? One can fault modern economic systems for inhumanity, for environmental destruction, and for proliferation of sheer stupidity, but these don’t seem unusual either. (c.f Thoreau on Ramses.)
As for JP, the big event was financial, not legislative. But it matters not. The decisive exercise of power by JP Morgan to seize control over a critical economic sector in blith disregard of “markets” or the imposition of the high period of AT&T’s monopoly by the US Department of Defense seem to me to be as characteristic of how our economic system operates as price wars on cell phone services. Both Marxist and “classical/neo-classical” economists want to insist on ideological grounds and in defiance of the data that these activities are somehow sideshows. But JP and the DOD are not sideshows.
How do you know that the junks were in service of empire not trade? We can’t blame Karl and Fred for euro-centrism and limited view of history, but we shouldn’t pretend that these giant holes in their knowledge didn’t limit their analysis.
Posted by: citizen k | Jul 4 2005 2:33 utc | 100