Monolycus, the way I see it, we’re working within the Juan Cole theory, which is “Sometimes, you’re just fucked.” Then we just note the behavior of our leaders and marvel.

Posted by: Rowan | Oct 17 2006 5:32 utc | 3

I was hoping that I might be able to get a few good ideas from the barflies on piece of art I am working on. I will not bore you with all of the details of the show I am planning but one piece is a reinterpretation of Gustav Dore’s engraving of Don Quixote. I want to draw a parallel between Don Quixote in his library being assailed by his imaginary demons and knights with President Bush in the oval office being assailed by his imaginary demons and knights – If you care to make suggestion please ignore the obvious ones. Of particular interest to me would be titles of classic American books on expansion or even European. Please see the link if you need a visual.
http://www.stefanmart.de/12_quixote/1201z_dore_1.jpg
I do not want to rely on just inserting the obvious but acknowledge I do not know enough historically to insert the more subtle and biting suggestions, like manifest destiny.
In addition, if this is an inappropriate request for this forum I apologize and will refrain in the future. I only post here because for the last few months I have been reading the posts and comments and I find the regulars to be very intelligent (does flattery help?)
Thank you –
I chose to comment under this post by Bill Mon because the reference to Bush as “his majesty” seemed to loosely relate the theme of my next art display.

Posted by: Fiat Lux | Oct 17 2006 5:48 utc | 5

@Fiat Lux #5
I’ve seen several photoshops done along similar lines. I don’t know how “subtle” one can be, or even how desirable subtley is in these expressions. When Billmon calls Bush “the Dauphin”, he’s not being subtle, but his message is entirely accessible. One can just put a word balloon over a photo of Bush’s (or Cheney’s) head that says “L’etat c’est moi” and get the same point point across.
Art is funny that way. I’m currently working on a painting of a snarling Bush and Cheney dressed in skins and horned helmets a la viking plunderers. It amuses me, but probably won’t persuade anyone that they are the “raiders” I view them as being. Ars grata artis… or something like that. Go with your gut.

Posted by: Monolycus | Oct 17 2006 6:11 utc | 7

that’s one hell of a link fran. post the second part tomorrow!
monolycus, i think bush is playing a roll. of course he wants the division. anyway, cheney is running the WH show.
all the minions are sceaming bloody murder w/their pockets open

Posted by: annie | Oct 17 2006 7:08 utc | 9

Great link Fran, worst suspicions confirmed (again). This fuckers gonna blow — before December.
annie, the second link is found at the beginning of the first.

Posted by: anna missed | Oct 17 2006 8:44 utc | 11

The Nation piece from Naomi Klein pulled from the above link, a taste of James “study group” Bakers dealings:

The goal of maximizing Iraq’s debt payments directly contradicts the US foreign policy aim of drastically reducing Iraq’s debt burden. According to Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University and a leading expert on government ethics and regulations, this means that Baker is in a “classic conflict of interest. Baker is on two sides of this transaction: He is supposed to be representing the interests of the United States, but he is also a senior counselor at Carlyle, and Carlyle wants to get paid to help Kuwait recover its debts from Iraq.” After examining the documents, Clark called them “extraordinary.” She said, “Carlyle and the other companies are exploiting Baker’s current position to try to land a deal with Kuwait that would undermine the interests of the US government.”
The Nation also showed the documents to Jerome Levinson, an international lawyer and expert on political and corporate corruption at American University. He called it “one of the greatest cons of all time. The consortium is saying to the Kuwaiti government, ‘Through us, you have the only chance to realize a substantial part of the debt. Why? Because of who we are and who we know.’ It’s influence peddling of the crassest kind.”

But then again, if the aims of the USA are really the aims of corporate culture…. think again.

Posted by: anna missed | Oct 17 2006 9:41 utc | 13

Fiat Lux,
art is always an appriopriate subject, though an open thread might be the best place if you want to make another request in the future.
If find it hard to recommend any particular works. It seams too inplausible that Bush would read “The Prince” or “Mein Kampf” (no particular connection between those to except they leapt to my mind) or for that matter any book at all that is older then a couple of years. Maybe he would instead read comic-books (Superman?) or have DVD-cases lying around with real (Them!) or fictionous titles (The People knows what you did last summer).

Posted by: a swedish kind of death | Oct 17 2006 14:35 utc | 15

It’s called Delirium Tremens, or the DTs for short.
So empty bottles then?

Posted by: a swedish kind of death | Oct 17 2006 15:17 utc | 17

about the stupidity of bush, his puerile reactions to complicated problems, suskind’s book (novel?) is loaded w/ amusing examples. generally, suskind’s technique is to juxtapose the earnestness of cheney/rice/etc. with bush’s impetuousness:
>blockquote>Then Cheney and Rice fired questions at both. How do we know that? What are you planning next? Who are we after?
It wasn’t about evidence-that was for the slow-footed, for lawyers building cases. This was about action. The one percent rule had found its next application. First there was al Qaeda in league with nuclear scientists. Now Zawahiri was heading up a bioweapons program, at the same time the country was in an anthrax panic. Cheney wanted targets.
“Who do we hit first?” he asked CIA.
They knew only so much. The answers started to be: “I’ll get right on it.” There was much work to do.
Cheney then looked hard-eyed at both, natural, institutional enemies. He turned to FBI. “You see any foreign connections whatsoever in your investigation, you have to share it with those guys down the river. Are we clear!” The FBI officials nodded, knowing not to speak.
He turned to CIA. “You guys down the river. If you can help the bureau in any way, you better do it-and not just the minimum. You cross all the lines. You tell them everything. Make sure nothing’s left out.”
He got up-meeting’s over-and looked at both groups with disdain. “You guys don’t cooperate for shit. Well, I’ll be damned if that’s going to happen here.”
George W Bush was sitting in the Oval Office receiving reports on progress throughout much of each day. He was now, as he often liked to say, “a wartime president.” Whether he had changed after 9/11, or had simply discovered qualities that had lain dormant, he had surely found his metier. Bush had long been comfortable making quick decisions without the luxury of precedent or detailed study and investigation. In his first nine months, this had prompted concerns among some senior staff in the White House, members of the cabinet, and seasoned hands in Congress-was he reading the materials, was he thinking [73] things through? Now, a staccato rhythm of swift decisions seemed to be the thing needed. There was no precedent to what had been done to America and what the country now faced, and that was liberating. The moment demanded improvisation, a demand that freed Bush. Left unfettered, and unchallenged, were his instincts, his “gut,” as he often says, and an unwieldy aggressiveness that he’d long been cautioned to contain.
Other top officials soon learned what Tenet knew when he called in Cofer Black. Military or intelligence advisers who’d killed men-the more visceral, the better-knew that tales of combat would be readily received by a leader who was most focused, always, when he could make things personal. Tactile. Visceral. The President himself designed a chart: the faces of the top al Qaeda leaders with short bios stared out. As a kill or capture was confirmed, he drew an “X” over the face. “Making progress,” he’d joke, ruefully.
On that score, he’d had a particularly glorious Presidential Daily Briefing in early December. An Afghan military chief told CIA operatives that Zawahiri had likely been killed in an air attack near the eastern city of jalalabad.
Tenet excitedly made the report to Bush at the morning briefing. Bush grabbed a lead pencil with the presidential seal, marked an “X” across the wide, meaty, bespectacled face of the Egyptian, a man whose importance to the Islamic jihad movement all but matched that of bin Laden. There was rejoicing in the Oval Office.
and on and on.
but he fetched a 1206 on his sat.

Posted by: slothrop | Oct 17 2006 15:59 utc | 19

@ slothrop – He turned to CIA. “You guys down the river.”
I believe it’s up the river.
🙂

Posted by: beq | Oct 17 2006 16:30 utc | 21

Very interesting reader’s comment at Fran’s link @6:

Well, Have you seen the satellite pics of Iraq/Kuwait border?
Even if we pull out we still get their oil. How??? Slant drilling from Kuwait. I was corresponding (adopted a soldier in Iraq) with a soldier who was stationed in Kuwait near the border and he sent me currency before it was made into fiat currency and pictures of the huge megalith pipeline laying along the inside of the Kuwaiti border that went underground on the Kuwait side. This was early on. He said we or the oil company personnel were working 24/7 to lay that huge pipeline. You could drive a huge truck through that thing it was soooooo big.
So then I found the satellite pictures from Popular Mechanics showing the area along the Kuwait border BEFORE THE INVASION and next to it, a satellite picture AFTER THE INVASION. When you viewed these pictures side by side as the article points out, you understood the reason for that huge pipeline that the soldier talked about. It appeared they were building derricks and burnoffs of the gas on the Kuwait side and you could see the increase in the lights as a result of that burning of the gas which wasn’t there before the invasion.
…

Commenter’s url for the satellite pictures is wrong. Correct link is here

Posted by: Alamet | Oct 17 2006 17:31 utc | 23

Of course ‘ethnically divided’ is a smokescreen implemented to convince the TV watching public.
you’ve gotta be joking.

Posted by: slothrop | Oct 17 2006 20:15 utc | 25

noirette
as much as anyone here, i welcome the ambition to condemn american power as destructively racist and classist. but you’re out of your mind if you think the civil war in iraq is owed solely to u.s. occupation.
finding in the royal sign “arab” continuities of affinities among divers people in the m.e.–people divided by tribe, religious sectarianism, class, language–is also a kind of “orientalism.”

Posted by: slothrop | Oct 17 2006 22:01 utc | 27

it’s obvious in the literature acknowledged here at moa for the past 3 years, that any fantasy of panarabism/panislam(ism)–whatever fealty of common interests existed among arabs and moslems–is shattered by this war. cole’s sacred space, kiddie’s book on modern iran, the numerous works cited here on the viability of partition, nir rosen’s and galbraith’s recent books, etc etc. explain what is beyond any doubt now. the war(s) is clearly conflagrated now by indigenous struggle that is much more various and volatile than any heterogeneous “insurgency” against u.s. and nothing by this point in the catastrophe can be called a nationalist unification, let alone an “arab” confrontation against “the west.”

Posted by: slothrop | Oct 17 2006 23:46 utc | 29

the stupidity of bush, even in the quasi-history of suskind, rivals the worst vaudevillian farce. reading this sort of account, closing the eyes, one can only imagine don adamns in get smart wooing agent 99 & the irascible chief w/ nonsequitor nonsense disguised as secret knowledge explaining the inscrutable universe.
but, why would someone as ignorantly prideful as bush, concede so much authority to cheney and rove?
suskind explains the need, pursued largely by cheney, to insulate bush by providing the dimwit with consecutive moments of “plauisible deniability”:

The thinking of several former Nixon administration officials, including Cheney, was not that the break-in and similar actions were the problem. The problem was that the President should have been “protected” from knowledge of such activities.
A president, in this model, can even say, in a general way, that he’d be happy if something were to occur-and have his subordinates execute such wishes-and still retain what, during the Reagan administration, was termed “plausible deniability.” That was what Ronald Reagan essentially did by telling advisers that he wouldn’t mind if they found a way to get around congressional bans on aid to the antiCommunist contra rebels in Nicaragua, but then, when later questioned in a videotaped deposition, saying that he hadn’t “any inkling” of what they actually did.
For some presidents, like the first President Bush, this didn’t work. He demanded to know everything pertinent in making decisions, so he wouldn’t make mistakes. Presidents generally don’t like being surprised, or ending up on a “need to know” basis.
The idea of being inexplicitly briefed to water down accountability, or of using oft-reviled inefficiencies of government “process” to counteract the heightened transparency of the media age, is repugnant to them.
With this new George W Bush presidency, however, Cheney was able to shape his protective strategy in a particularly proactive way. Keeping certain knowledge from Bush-much of it shrouded, as well, by classification-meant that the President, whose each word circles [175] the globe, could advance various strategies by saying whatever was needed. He could essentially be “deniable” about his own statements. Whether Cheney’s innovations were tailored to match Bush’s inclinations, or vice versa, is almost immaterial. It was a firm fit. Under this strategic model, reading the entire NIE would be problematic for Bush: it could hem in the President’s rhetoric, a key weapon in the march to war. He would know too much.

explains a lot about the “cheney administration.”

Posted by: slothrop | Oct 19 2006 2:20 utc | 31

you’re out of your mind if you think the civil war in iraq is owed solely to u.s. occupation.
here’s what she said
Does the average Iraqi hate his Sunni neighbor? or Shiite neighbor? Or local Christian Mom? Or Greenlander? Or Buddhist..?
I don’t think so.
i spend way too much time on iraqi blogs, they confirm noirette. the gov trolls that hang out there all spread this meme that iraqi’s have been ‘dying to get at eachothers throat for years’
had the US not invaded, do i think a civil war would have broken out? no. in this regard it is owed to the US alone. we knew the likely weak areas, the seeds of discontent and we exploited them. we dug holes, planted the seeds and watered. but we didn’t make the seeds.

Posted by: annie | Oct 19 2006 5:10 utc | 33