Blogging Sells, and Sells Out: "But as long as blogs remained on the commercial fringes, the playing field at least was relatively level. Audience was largely a function of reputation � for the frequency or quality or ideological appeal of the blogger's posts. Costs were low, and few bloggers were trying to make a living at it, so money wasn't an issue. It may not have been egalitarian, but it wasn't strictly hierarchical, either."
though it is probably a bit premature, he will ultimately be correct. At this point it would take a lot to create a "tipping blog" from scratch. But then again, it took a long time for people to get to this point.
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
New Democrat Network
Some really interesting ads--the most vibrant and direct that I have seen--that are geared toward the spanish speaking population. If only there was a movement that was trying to inspire as much hope among english speakers.
other things I would read today i I wasn't reading Habermas...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/magazine/26BLOGS.html?pagewanted=1 on the blogs covering the converntions and other recent events
http://harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html Naomi Klien on Iraq
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200411/green?ca=ZylnpoS9tWz%2B384zl5EGISsgVsrssaIe5iIZmRrDHug%3D on "bush's brain"
http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=5240190 on bush assertions re: Iraq
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6098633/site/newsweek more screed on blogs
http://www.nationalreview.com/frum/diary092704.asp resonding to the other two articles on blogs--all of these from Sully
Some really interesting ads--the most vibrant and direct that I have seen--that are geared toward the spanish speaking population. If only there was a movement that was trying to inspire as much hope among english speakers.
other things I would read today i I wasn't reading Habermas...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/magazine/26BLOGS.html?pagewanted=1 on the blogs covering the converntions and other recent events
http://harpers.org/BaghdadYearZero.html Naomi Klien on Iraq
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200411/green?ca=ZylnpoS9tWz%2B384zl5EGISsgVsrssaIe5iIZmRrDHug%3D on "bush's brain"
http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=5240190 on bush assertions re: Iraq
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6098633/site/newsweek more screed on blogs
http://www.nationalreview.com/frum/diary092704.asp resonding to the other two articles on blogs--all of these from Sully
Saturday, September 25, 2004
The New York Times > Washington > Campaign 2004 > Republicans Admit Mailing Campaign Literature Saying Liberals Will Ban the Bible
Can't believe that they actually admitted they did it.
Can't believe that they actually admitted they did it.
New media era dawns in U.S. - 09/22/04
It is so strange that these articles are only happening now. This phenomenon has been happening for years and only now are the big media picking up on it. Nevertheless, what is so absent from any of these is any admission that this is still affecting only a small amount of people--and that the people it is affecting are predominantly the more wealthy members of the culture.
It is so strange that these articles are only happening now. This phenomenon has been happening for years and only now are the big media picking up on it. Nevertheless, what is so absent from any of these is any admission that this is still affecting only a small amount of people--and that the people it is affecting are predominantly the more wealthy members of the culture.
Thursday, September 23, 2004
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Read Thomas Hazlett article for class today and was a bit surprised at the tack it took. I tried very hard not to scoff at much of the first part which speaks about the only problem the FRC was assigned to solve was the problem of transmission overlap. Of course his minor argument is that prior to the court decision that invalidated the 1912 ruling that allowed the secretary of commerce to regulate the spectrum, Hoover (in that role) was pretty much letting the market take care of it and not having to use the big boot of government that often to keep things in order.
I was fairly certain that he was going to agree with Coase (1958?9) that the auction would have been the best approach to redistributing the wavelengths and that it would have been much more efficient to simply sell spots on the dial to the highest bidder, thus reducing the possibility for "rent seeking" behaviour on the part of networks or regulators. This is the party line and I expected him to follow it. Surprisingly, he was much more interested in looking critically at this moment and, except for his unwillnigness to admit the inequities of power among the "interest groups" involved (this is where McChesney is really useful in that he focuses on the civil society aspect, however ineffectual it actually was) Hazlett ultimately has a fairly rich understanding of what went on. It was really refreshing to see that it is possible to employ those methodological tools and still come up with an ideologically complex understanding of a social, political event.
And he also inadvertently indicates something that is often overlooked in this debate, it was always about the audience and the legitimacy that an institution builds for itself within that audience. He uses the analogy of Homesteading, which is really politically problematic when we think of the way that practice has been used (somewhere between squatting and genocide) but nonetheless, he is right that from that perspective handing out bandwidth to the major networks made the most sense. And, furthermore, both he and McChesney (in the chapters we read for today anyway) say that one of the fundamental weaknesses of the movement for non-profit media allocations is that those people didn't really have a product to present yet. It makes projects like Pacifica and Democracy Now! so much more important in our current day because they are doing what these eariler folks seem to have been unable to do--and what more people should be doing. It is so easy to bitch about all of this, to look at the problems and get pissed off. But if there are people out there--or if we believe at all that things on TV begin to create their own demand--who are interested in alternative ideas, then why not just use the model that exists instead of fighting tooth and nail to get someone else to pay for it. Ultimately that is what it will take. Except for the internet (and even this takes precious labor time as well as al sorts of energy) all of these forms of media production will cost money--to get it produced, distributed, etc. And if the goal is to reach as many people as possible, our ancestors have already built this great big megaphone for us to use. The bandwidth allocation is small potatoes compared to the problems of funding the adventure until you can get some public (i.e. popular) support for it. If we have faith in people to really be ready and willing to hear the ideas we think should be out there, then we should do something about it. There is obviously an issue to be resolved, and watching the FCC ownership rules to keep the consolidation from getting any more insane is imperative, but we should also make the media change ourselves rather than begging them to do it b/c we happen to be loud and, sometimes, smart.
I was fairly certain that he was going to agree with Coase (1958?9) that the auction would have been the best approach to redistributing the wavelengths and that it would have been much more efficient to simply sell spots on the dial to the highest bidder, thus reducing the possibility for "rent seeking" behaviour on the part of networks or regulators. This is the party line and I expected him to follow it. Surprisingly, he was much more interested in looking critically at this moment and, except for his unwillnigness to admit the inequities of power among the "interest groups" involved (this is where McChesney is really useful in that he focuses on the civil society aspect, however ineffectual it actually was) Hazlett ultimately has a fairly rich understanding of what went on. It was really refreshing to see that it is possible to employ those methodological tools and still come up with an ideologically complex understanding of a social, political event.
And he also inadvertently indicates something that is often overlooked in this debate, it was always about the audience and the legitimacy that an institution builds for itself within that audience. He uses the analogy of Homesteading, which is really politically problematic when we think of the way that practice has been used (somewhere between squatting and genocide) but nonetheless, he is right that from that perspective handing out bandwidth to the major networks made the most sense. And, furthermore, both he and McChesney (in the chapters we read for today anyway) say that one of the fundamental weaknesses of the movement for non-profit media allocations is that those people didn't really have a product to present yet. It makes projects like Pacifica and Democracy Now! so much more important in our current day because they are doing what these eariler folks seem to have been unable to do--and what more people should be doing. It is so easy to bitch about all of this, to look at the problems and get pissed off. But if there are people out there--or if we believe at all that things on TV begin to create their own demand--who are interested in alternative ideas, then why not just use the model that exists instead of fighting tooth and nail to get someone else to pay for it. Ultimately that is what it will take. Except for the internet (and even this takes precious labor time as well as al sorts of energy) all of these forms of media production will cost money--to get it produced, distributed, etc. And if the goal is to reach as many people as possible, our ancestors have already built this great big megaphone for us to use. The bandwidth allocation is small potatoes compared to the problems of funding the adventure until you can get some public (i.e. popular) support for it. If we have faith in people to really be ready and willing to hear the ideas we think should be out there, then we should do something about it. There is obviously an issue to be resolved, and watching the FCC ownership rules to keep the consolidation from getting any more insane is imperative, but we should also make the media change ourselves rather than begging them to do it b/c we happen to be loud and, sometimes, smart.
Sunday, September 19, 2004
Monday, September 13, 2004
Friday, September 10, 2004
AlterNet: DrugReporter: 'Crack Babies' Talk Back
This is a somewhat groundbreaking story I think. I have read about the Crack baby myth, but usually I take it with a grain of salt because the critics seem to be so angry at the Reagan administration for the drug policies that came out of this era. The stories of these kids--most of which would probably be about my sister's age now--are important for us to hear at this point when the spectacle of the next horrifying media phenomenon is just around the corner. The only problem is that this article doesn't connect this with the larger political scene and the mandatory drug sentences set for crack which have caused the prison population to explode--and, very likely, caused almost as much family grief as the drugs did in the first place. Odds that the mass media will really pick up on this story: slim
This is a somewhat groundbreaking story I think. I have read about the Crack baby myth, but usually I take it with a grain of salt because the critics seem to be so angry at the Reagan administration for the drug policies that came out of this era. The stories of these kids--most of which would probably be about my sister's age now--are important for us to hear at this point when the spectacle of the next horrifying media phenomenon is just around the corner. The only problem is that this article doesn't connect this with the larger political scene and the mandatory drug sentences set for crack which have caused the prison population to explode--and, very likely, caused almost as much family grief as the drugs did in the first place. Odds that the mass media will really pick up on this story: slim
Thursday, September 09, 2004
Welcome to anncoulter.com!: "Which candidate will best protect America from terrorist attack? Hint: It's not the guy whose running mate (sounding so much like Sean Hayes from 'Will and Grace' it was eerie) said their message to the terrorists was: 'We will destroy youuuuuuu!' "
yet another example of Ann Coulter and the right using some thinly veiled homophobia to criticize the Democrats. It's all just so fascist I don't know how they get away with it. I guess when you are making a joke it's okay to talk that way--you can take a joke, can't you [wuss]? It's just so tremendous to have bullies in charge of the most powerful nation in the world. I'm sure everyone sleeps better knowing that. I sure do.
yet another example of Ann Coulter and the right using some thinly veiled homophobia to criticize the Democrats. It's all just so fascist I don't know how they get away with it. I guess when you are making a joke it's okay to talk that way--you can take a joke, can't you [wuss]? It's just so tremendous to have bullies in charge of the most powerful nation in the world. I'm sure everyone sleeps better knowing that. I sure do.
Wednesday, September 08, 2004
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
Friday, September 03, 2004
French Muslims take off scarves
Like women in Iran in the early 1980s who put them on as a statement in defiance to the US feminists telling them to take them off, French Muslims are taking off their scarves in solidarity with their countrymen--in other words, where there might have been more internal protests about the scarves, as there were last spring, the hostage situation actually kept the muslims in france from doing what they might otherwise have done. People really are unpredictable.
Like women in Iran in the early 1980s who put them on as a statement in defiance to the US feminists telling them to take them off, French Muslims are taking off their scarves in solidarity with their countrymen--in other words, where there might have been more internal protests about the scarves, as there were last spring, the hostage situation actually kept the muslims in france from doing what they might otherwise have done. People really are unpredictable.
Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | A terrible lesson from a classroom in Beslan:
"Putin pins the blame for the escalating crisis, perhaps the gravest of his presidency, not on home-grown Chechen fighters but, primarily, on an international Islamist conspiracy linked to al-Qaida.
The evidence for his contention is thin and often contradictory. But one thing is undoubtedly true. Since plunging recklessly back into Chechnya in 1994, Putin, his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, and the once proud Red Army have caused such untold misery, such rank injustice, such fury and despair that, like the Americans in Iraq, they created a breeding ground and magnet for the religious extremists they struggle to extirpate. "
An interesting analogy. The fact that both Russia and Israel have suffered some severe terrorist attacks in recent weeks has been raised as evidence that their harsh methods--reminescent of the premptive war of the 2002 strategic doctrine of the US--are actually working against the ultimate goal of ending terrorism in those areas. On the other hand, Andrew Sullivan seems hopeful that the French traitors of the Iraq war will finally be brought into the fold now that two of their journalists have been taken captive. He is hoping that the preemptive front will expand and France will stop being a tool for the Jihadists to use against "us".
As compelling as Sullivan's take is--and as sinister as the dispatch is from these would be terrorists--the difference is that, as usual, he is only considering this from a political and ideological level, ignoring completely the material realities. Ideology isn't something people put on like their socks. It is something that only becomes attractive when it seems to explain where you are. If Al Queda operatives are active in Chechnya the only way that their extremism is able to take hold in such a foreign land is that there is the "fury and despair" that was there first. it is much more neat and pat and easy to dismiss as lunacy and criminality when one can assume that everything else is equal except for the way people interpret the world; if these rebels would just sit down and read the Bible, think about Adam Smith, and have faith that someday they'll get a leg up, well they'd just be as happy as clams because, other than murder and repression by an occupying army, what do they really have to complain about?
The French journalist issue actually seems to show more how fragmented this movement that is supposedly the front united against us. We don't really know anything about the people who are holding these journalists (nor do we really about the people in the school--of whom, evidently, over 100 are now dead, including children, thanks, in part to the blunt instrument of "storming the castle" that the Russians used: disgusting. A replay of their use of what turned out to be lethal gas in the theatre two years ago. Gosh if the Russians keep using that doctrine of overwhelming force that is supposed to work so well in dealing with terrorists, you'd think the terrorists woudl have stopped by now. Maybe there is actually something that happens before and after the terrorism that is a clue?) The problem is that, like communism before it, the ideas that we are up against don't have to be centrally dictated. These ideas begin to take hold in areas where there is little else to give people hope. This doesn't excuse their actions, but if we ignore these ideas as a possible explainations and neglect to consider new solutions--or additional solutions--then we have no hope of ever setting this unbalanced world back on its axis.
I am beginning to think that our leaders have figured out the same thing that third world leaders have been exploiting for a long time: that as unsightly as these terrorists are, they are very useful in centralizing control domestically. We have little hope for stability if instability is meant to guarantee the position of those in power. If we are supposed to keep the same party just because we are afraid to do otherwise, that doesn't give us much hope for change in the national leadership or even in the world at large.
It also points to the biggest problem I have with all of these people in charge right now: they really lack imagination. For some reason, I am supposed to believe that the only two options we have are capitalism and communism (or Giddens' "third way" which is basically capitalism but with a happy face.) Isn't that what people were told 100 years ago? Have we really made so little progress that we have nothing better to offer? I don't agree with all the things that are said at venues like the World Social Forum, but I do agree that the new mantra for the 21st century has to be "Amother World is Possible." Bush and the Republicans want us to believe that political liberty is the only thing that has made America what it is today. Perhaps this is why they also seem to believe that the only thing driving our enemies is ideas, bad ideas. We don't need to change anything in the material distribution: we just need to reiterate some different ideas. We don't need to face any material realities or confront hard questions about how much of Iraq our corporations should own: all they need is "liberty." And, like everything else, you don't need to present any evidence: if you say it, it is so. Orwellian era of Performative Politics has arrived in full and people seem to be eating it up.
"Putin pins the blame for the escalating crisis, perhaps the gravest of his presidency, not on home-grown Chechen fighters but, primarily, on an international Islamist conspiracy linked to al-Qaida.
The evidence for his contention is thin and often contradictory. But one thing is undoubtedly true. Since plunging recklessly back into Chechnya in 1994, Putin, his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, and the once proud Red Army have caused such untold misery, such rank injustice, such fury and despair that, like the Americans in Iraq, they created a breeding ground and magnet for the religious extremists they struggle to extirpate. "
An interesting analogy. The fact that both Russia and Israel have suffered some severe terrorist attacks in recent weeks has been raised as evidence that their harsh methods--reminescent of the premptive war of the 2002 strategic doctrine of the US--are actually working against the ultimate goal of ending terrorism in those areas. On the other hand, Andrew Sullivan seems hopeful that the French traitors of the Iraq war will finally be brought into the fold now that two of their journalists have been taken captive. He is hoping that the preemptive front will expand and France will stop being a tool for the Jihadists to use against "us".
As compelling as Sullivan's take is--and as sinister as the dispatch is from these would be terrorists--the difference is that, as usual, he is only considering this from a political and ideological level, ignoring completely the material realities. Ideology isn't something people put on like their socks. It is something that only becomes attractive when it seems to explain where you are. If Al Queda operatives are active in Chechnya the only way that their extremism is able to take hold in such a foreign land is that there is the "fury and despair" that was there first. it is much more neat and pat and easy to dismiss as lunacy and criminality when one can assume that everything else is equal except for the way people interpret the world; if these rebels would just sit down and read the Bible, think about Adam Smith, and have faith that someday they'll get a leg up, well they'd just be as happy as clams because, other than murder and repression by an occupying army, what do they really have to complain about?
The French journalist issue actually seems to show more how fragmented this movement that is supposedly the front united against us. We don't really know anything about the people who are holding these journalists (nor do we really about the people in the school--of whom, evidently, over 100 are now dead, including children, thanks, in part to the blunt instrument of "storming the castle" that the Russians used: disgusting. A replay of their use of what turned out to be lethal gas in the theatre two years ago. Gosh if the Russians keep using that doctrine of overwhelming force that is supposed to work so well in dealing with terrorists, you'd think the terrorists woudl have stopped by now. Maybe there is actually something that happens before and after the terrorism that is a clue?) The problem is that, like communism before it, the ideas that we are up against don't have to be centrally dictated. These ideas begin to take hold in areas where there is little else to give people hope. This doesn't excuse their actions, but if we ignore these ideas as a possible explainations and neglect to consider new solutions--or additional solutions--then we have no hope of ever setting this unbalanced world back on its axis.
I am beginning to think that our leaders have figured out the same thing that third world leaders have been exploiting for a long time: that as unsightly as these terrorists are, they are very useful in centralizing control domestically. We have little hope for stability if instability is meant to guarantee the position of those in power. If we are supposed to keep the same party just because we are afraid to do otherwise, that doesn't give us much hope for change in the national leadership or even in the world at large.
It also points to the biggest problem I have with all of these people in charge right now: they really lack imagination. For some reason, I am supposed to believe that the only two options we have are capitalism and communism (or Giddens' "third way" which is basically capitalism but with a happy face.) Isn't that what people were told 100 years ago? Have we really made so little progress that we have nothing better to offer? I don't agree with all the things that are said at venues like the World Social Forum, but I do agree that the new mantra for the 21st century has to be "Amother World is Possible." Bush and the Republicans want us to believe that political liberty is the only thing that has made America what it is today. Perhaps this is why they also seem to believe that the only thing driving our enemies is ideas, bad ideas. We don't need to change anything in the material distribution: we just need to reiterate some different ideas. We don't need to face any material realities or confront hard questions about how much of Iraq our corporations should own: all they need is "liberty." And, like everything else, you don't need to present any evidence: if you say it, it is so. Orwellian era of Performative Politics has arrived in full and people seem to be eating it up.
Thursday, September 02, 2004
Guardian Unlimited | US elections 2004 | No 10's silent support for Kerry
"By his manner, his rhetoric and sometimes his actions George Bush has presented to the world an image of America that its friends know is not its true face. That is why those who recognise that American leadership is vital and a force for good in an uncertain world will wish John Kerry well." --Tony Blair's journal Progress from its upcoming Sept. issue
"By his manner, his rhetoric and sometimes his actions George Bush has presented to the world an image of America that its friends know is not its true face. That is why those who recognise that American leadership is vital and a force for good in an uncertain world will wish John Kerry well." --Tony Blair's journal Progress from its upcoming Sept. issue
TomPaine.com - What Ownership Society?
more on the ownership society and how personal debt makes it practically impossible at the current time.
more on the ownership society and how personal debt makes it practically impossible at the current time.
AlterNet: Politics of Risk
On risk society...the difference here is that it points to the way the society itself feels at risk, aka the Culture of Fear that Glassner talks about, where we are basically afraid all the time, but often we are afraid of the wrong things. This of course could never be said in a public forum. Unfortunately, programs for school lunches aren't nearly as newsworthy as military contracts.
The author says that Kerry wants to "democratize risk." Here he misspeaks: Kerry wants to democratize risk management--but only for the risks that most obviously effect every class of people. The real issue if the risk has already been democratized. A few months ago when I was working on the Hummer paper and thinking about the fortress society, I looked at an article in Newsweek in which a mother lamented that her son would have to live in fear. I don't know that I ever really got to the point here, but my first reaction was that her problem wasn't that people had to fear suicide bombers or live with global terrorism--but that she and her children had to live with it. It was something that only "they" had to worry about "over there" and then it was just an unfortunate fact of life, "too bad for them."
But now risk is seen as having been democratized. It isn't of course: people in the third world still have much more to fear than we do. But the appearance of such a democratization is still powerful. But rather than realize just how terrible it is to have this kind of fear in one's daily life, most people, like this mother, just want things to return to the way they were, when people in the global first world had nothing to fear. And the best way to do this, they seem to think, is to create a completely militarized state.
Zell Miller and the Republicans last night--and for most of the week--talk about the need for a strong military force to face "the new threat of terrorism." He gives Kerry trouble for the senator's not voting on certain weapons systems and makes this the example of how Kerry is undermining the fight against terrorism. Nevermind that no one on either side of this nasty rhetorical squabble has bothered to define terrorism or that, in practice, Kerry is really as hawkish as Bush, the problem is that Zell Miller, the codger that he is, seems to believe that huge weapons systems are the way to combat "the new threat of terrorism."
If he wasn't a person in power, just an old man carrying on while sitting in his rocking chair, playing with his teeth, this sentiment would be almost mildly amusing in its nostalgia. As he lists off these weapons systems "the trident missle, the patriot missle, the f-14 tomcat, the f-16 fighting falcon..." one could dismiss his rantings as just that: the things that senile people dwell on so much that they think you too must agree and feel their anguish. Unfortunately, Zell Miller does have some power, or at least enough to give him a national platform on which to recite his litany of products generously produced for us by the military industrial complex.
His laundry list is supposed to make us see big holes in the fortress, to give us the feeling that we have these problems because we don't have enough big guns pointed outwards. This is, of course, the fortress society thinking. And the desire is for us to return to the way things were before, when we could count on mutually ensured destruction to keep anyone from disagreeing with us in any meaningful way.
But these enormous defense systems are largely unnecessary when your primary foe is a person willing to die for their cause and using a box cutter. These old school solutions to external threats posed by rival states are the lumbering artifacts of wars gone by. Unfortunately, the momentum of the corporations that make these systems will make it impossible to fight the war we need to fight--if it can be considered a war at all. The only solutions this administration has are the big industry answers to the threat of thermonuclear war. Obviously this threat is still real--and the more we piss off our allies the more we risk facing a state with nuclear weapons in the near future--but that is not the "new threat" posed by the terrorists.
In the cold war there was always the accompanied war "for hearts and minds." This, it was understood, was essential to combatting the war of ideologies abroad. But this war of hearts and minds wasn't only fought in propaganda, there was also an awareness that actions mattered as well. In one of Nixon's campaign commercials for his 1960 bid, he had this to say about the struggle for civil rights:
I want to talk to you for a moment about civil rights, equal rights for all our citizens: why must we vigorously defend them
On risk society...the difference here is that it points to the way the society itself feels at risk, aka the Culture of Fear that Glassner talks about, where we are basically afraid all the time, but often we are afraid of the wrong things. This of course could never be said in a public forum. Unfortunately, programs for school lunches aren't nearly as newsworthy as military contracts.
The author says that Kerry wants to "democratize risk." Here he misspeaks: Kerry wants to democratize risk management--but only for the risks that most obviously effect every class of people. The real issue if the risk has already been democratized. A few months ago when I was working on the Hummer paper and thinking about the fortress society, I looked at an article in Newsweek in which a mother lamented that her son would have to live in fear. I don't know that I ever really got to the point here, but my first reaction was that her problem wasn't that people had to fear suicide bombers or live with global terrorism--but that she and her children had to live with it. It was something that only "they" had to worry about "over there" and then it was just an unfortunate fact of life, "too bad for them."
But now risk is seen as having been democratized. It isn't of course: people in the third world still have much more to fear than we do. But the appearance of such a democratization is still powerful. But rather than realize just how terrible it is to have this kind of fear in one's daily life, most people, like this mother, just want things to return to the way they were, when people in the global first world had nothing to fear. And the best way to do this, they seem to think, is to create a completely militarized state.
Zell Miller and the Republicans last night--and for most of the week--talk about the need for a strong military force to face "the new threat of terrorism." He gives Kerry trouble for the senator's not voting on certain weapons systems and makes this the example of how Kerry is undermining the fight against terrorism. Nevermind that no one on either side of this nasty rhetorical squabble has bothered to define terrorism or that, in practice, Kerry is really as hawkish as Bush, the problem is that Zell Miller, the codger that he is, seems to believe that huge weapons systems are the way to combat "the new threat of terrorism."
If he wasn't a person in power, just an old man carrying on while sitting in his rocking chair, playing with his teeth, this sentiment would be almost mildly amusing in its nostalgia. As he lists off these weapons systems "the trident missle, the patriot missle, the f-14 tomcat, the f-16 fighting falcon..." one could dismiss his rantings as just that: the things that senile people dwell on so much that they think you too must agree and feel their anguish. Unfortunately, Zell Miller does have some power, or at least enough to give him a national platform on which to recite his litany of products generously produced for us by the military industrial complex.
His laundry list is supposed to make us see big holes in the fortress, to give us the feeling that we have these problems because we don't have enough big guns pointed outwards. This is, of course, the fortress society thinking. And the desire is for us to return to the way things were before, when we could count on mutually ensured destruction to keep anyone from disagreeing with us in any meaningful way.
But these enormous defense systems are largely unnecessary when your primary foe is a person willing to die for their cause and using a box cutter. These old school solutions to external threats posed by rival states are the lumbering artifacts of wars gone by. Unfortunately, the momentum of the corporations that make these systems will make it impossible to fight the war we need to fight--if it can be considered a war at all. The only solutions this administration has are the big industry answers to the threat of thermonuclear war. Obviously this threat is still real--and the more we piss off our allies the more we risk facing a state with nuclear weapons in the near future--but that is not the "new threat" posed by the terrorists.
In the cold war there was always the accompanied war "for hearts and minds." This, it was understood, was essential to combatting the war of ideologies abroad. But this war of hearts and minds wasn't only fought in propaganda, there was also an awareness that actions mattered as well. In one of Nixon's campaign commercials for his 1960 bid, he had this to say about the struggle for civil rights:
I want to talk to you for a moment about civil rights, equal rights for all our citizens: why must we vigorously defend them
Wednesday, September 01, 2004
The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: A No-Win Situation
Okay so I just rambled on for hours trying to say what Krugman just did in his 500 words or so. I guess that's why I'm in grad school and he's the NYT columnist.
Okay so I just rambled on for hours trying to say what Krugman just did in his 500 words or so. I guess that's why I'm in grad school and he's the NYT columnist.
AlterNet: Election 2004: Grand Old Attacks on Michael Moore
Nichols is right here that McCain's jab at Moore is certainly something unprecedented. I sincerely doubt that it will make any hardcore Republican go to see it, however, because it has already been branded as something to be avoided. Perhaps if people were exposed to it in any sort of objective-ish setting, they would feel a bit different. I think it would just be interesting for people on the right, who accuse the mass media of being leftist and anti-Bush to actually see what something like that looks like, i.e. to see what it would look like if someone actually was all of these things. Perhaps they won't see the distinction in any meaningful way, but after seeing Moore's film, it is difficult to turn on ABC or CNN and think of it as propaganda for a left wing agenda. It is certainly sensationalistic and dumbs down the conversation--but that is just what the pro-war crowd wanted before the war: black and white, with us or against us, do this now or face a mushroom cloud, etc. NOW they are asking for nuance, for a balanced account of "our" progress in Iraq (the fact that it is usually framed as "our" is telling in itself). I don't subscribe to the Postman theory that TV is incapable of this knid of discussion simply by its virtues as a medium: I think it has more to do with its economic needs of competing with _Fear Factor_ and _Survivor_. This, of course doesn't explain why we aren't reading about Iraqi's surviving life drinking water from a river of sh*t, which is more death defying than eating cockroaches--though I guess less appetizing to show at dinner time. (Susan Douglas actually has some fairly good ideas for Realiy TV shows that haven't been tried yet. She's kidding, but a few of them would be really interesting.)
Anyway, the interesting back and forth between McCain and Moore--who was in the audience, though McCain didn't know it--is also unique, foremost because, in this age when the brilliance of telecommunication is touted, when the President introduces his wife in NY from PA via satellite, we were given an example of how powerful it is to have co-presence, for people who are arguing to occupy the same space. It is becoming rarer these days and makes it much easier to dismiss your opponent as some sort of rogue.
My biggest problem with all of this discussion is that it doesn't get at the conventional wisdom (pun intended) that there was no other way to handle things in Iraq--and that it is okay to give our real reasons for invasion after the fact. It becomes so easy to forget what happened at the time, especially when you have the 1984 history machine out there changing the facts to fit its own needs. The narrative we're asked to accept is that Saddam didn't allow inspectors, that the UN was weak in enforcing it's role, that the opening of Iraq was inevitable (via lifting of sanctions) and that once sanctions were lifted he Iraq would have acquired the weapons we thought they already had. More importantly "everyone" thought that Iraq already had these weapons and we were just as dumbfounded as "everyone" else when we didn't find them. There are, of course, some folks (like the very neo-con Front Page Magazine) that insist we have found WMDs (like 3 or 4--but we should assume there are more where those came from) and that the liberal media is just unable to report these things because they all love Saddam and hate America.
I have seen little evidence that there are any biological or chemical weapons that have been found and I find it not even remotely logical that if there were even a shred of evidence the Bush campaign would be including it in every speech (rather than referring to "WMD related programs" as he did in the state of the union.) Furthermore, the fact that everytime it is mentioned by supporters of the war they say, "we didn't find those, but we did free the Iraqi people," leads me to believe that there is nothing for the really right wingers to rest their claims upon.
Nevertheless, this claim about freeing the Iraqi people seems to be a recurring one. It is ridiculous as a claim at this time when something like 300-500,000 people are in danger of starving to death at the hands of Islamic rebels in Sudan and we are doing almost nothing about it and saying even less about what we could or should do. I am not necessarily an advocate for US intervention around the world, but I do see blatant hipocrisy in a crowd who claims to want to help suffering people AND fight this war against "Jihadistan" and yet they stay away--even rhetorically--from the issue of the Sudan at all costs. (an exemplary exception, again is Front Page Magazine, who claim that it is the liberal human rights organizations who are staying away [an objectively false claim] because they are on the side of radical Islam, aka the new communism.)
But, again I digress, the problem I see with this line of thinking isn't that I want to quibble with how free the Iraqi people are or were, or whether we were the people to do it or this was the time: obviously things weren't awesome under Saddam, obviously many people were happy about getting rid of him; less obvious is how much better they are faring on a day to day level. The real issue is that this wasn't the argument that we presented for going to war: it is an externality. When the president presented the case to the American people, he said it was because Iraq posed a threat, because it had these weapons; when Powell went to the UN, the war was justified on the basis of the threat posed by the WMDs. We didn't try to go to war on the basis of liberating the people of Iraq because that is not how the UN works. The UN is specifically designed to respect the sovereignty of nations.
This, of course has innumerable problems, first of which that it honors obviously oppressive governments with the boon of authority to speak for the people, the resources, and the rights of a state, regardless of how representative they are of the will of that people. From a democratic perspective, this is very problematic. However, it is not enough to simply dismiss this as some sort of bureaucratic nightmare or an ineffective strategy for multilateral cooperation. The attacks on the UN for its implicit support of repressive regimes are completely laughable when made by Americans, Europeans or even Japanese.
Though the UN may give political legitimacy to these regimes, they do it not just so we can all sit around and twiddle our thumbs. This practice of honoring repressive regimes with legitimacy is an old Westphalian tradition that goes back many centuries. And while the UN and its constituent nation-states may grant a government legitimacy, multinational corporations give that government money, support it financially and help it to thrive under this umbrella of legitimacy. The government in Saudi Arabia would have virtually no way to oppress its people if it weren't for the oil revenues that continued to flow into its coffers. The scandal over the UN oil for food program in Iraq, which should be fully investigated, has far less to do with the UN itself as a corrupt organization than with the obscure regime of sanctions we all agreed to impose on Iraq. And if we are to believe that key players in Europe and the US were really ignorant of what was going on until just now, I suppose we should also believe that Richard Nixon wasn't a crook.
But I keep getting away from the point. We never said that freeing the Iraqi people was our mission. That isn't what we said we were gonig there to do. That isn't why many americans agreed to it or believed in it. Fear was used as the primary tactic to rally public support. Freeing the Iraqi people wasn't the argument we presented before the UN because that is not something the UN is designed to do. If it were in the power of the UN to decide when a government can be overthrown, or to agree that a country could overthrow another, without attack, for their own reasons, then the UN would be corrupt. We could have been given the authority to intervene in Iraq for humanitarian reasons. But the fact is that there was no humanitarian crisis in Iraq--or at least not any more so than there had been in the past twenty years. The Kurdish minority was much more in danger across the border in Turkey; in Iraq they were fairly safe thanks in part to the restrictions placed on Saddam by the sanctions. Yes Saddam was a bad guy, but there are lots of bad guys around the world and, believe it or not, that is not necessarily an objective fact. Even America thought Saddam was an okay guy for the first twenty or so years of his reign. That this changed so suddenly should give us some notion of how difficult it is to define "evil" when there are so many different notions of "good."
Unfortunately, most of the pro-war crowd has little doubt that they know the one right way that everyone in the world should be and they have no qualms about imposing that on anyone they can. They actually see their way as the "natural way" and believe that when other regimes are removed, people will naturally revert to the "american way"--except that they won't be allowed to have freedom to do what they want as a country unless the real Americans say it's okay. Somehow these folks have the ability to overlook the sort of dictatorial totalitarian character of this form of action. Even if you agree with the ideas, it is hard to agree with their implementation. Like the Greek empire, it is difficult to extend democracy to other countries against their will. Democracy and empire are incommensurable ideas and the only way that they can seem so is if you overlook the destruction of a culture (good and bad) in favor of seeing only the way that the new culture, post-empire, seems democratic. This has been the favored ideological standpoint of people like Niall Ferguson, who has defended the British Empire for the "civilization" that it brought to places like India.
So these folks are basically mad that the UN isn't designed to give them a blank check to re-make the world in its image. They overlook the fact that the UN was designed to end empires simply because they seemed to be a de-stabilizing factor in the global political economy. That nation-states turn out to be as equally de-stabilizing, should only encourage us to dig deeper for ways to consider global governance, not to revert back to isolationism and imperialism. In one of the more lucid observations about the current war, Johnathan Schell had this to say about the War:
The need for new forms of global governance is inarguable; what form that governance should take is an argument that most neo-liberals don't want to have. They simply want the rest of the world to bow to America as the once and future knig, back on his high horse, dispensing freedom as he (and usually this kind of America would be gendered as "he") sees fit.
This is the kind of America that the republican party wants us to get behind. And to do this, they want us to focus not on the ways that we break with international law to make war or the false pretenses. But that is just here at home. Abroad, they are stuggling--though not very hard, not hard enough--to retain the legitimacy that they might have had in some circles. The whole "beacon of democracy" thing will work only if we can manage to have an uncontested election ourselves this year. The reasons for the war, for anyone who takes the time to remember, are objectively different than Bush, Blair and the other supporters would have us believe. Always reverting to the "freedom" argument, they cover over the "bad intelligence" problem by saying that everyone thought the weapons were there: if we didn't find them, it's not our fault. McCain claims that Saddam threw out or wasn't cooperating with the inspectors. All of these are outright lies.
Though some of the US, UN, and British intelligence pointed to these vast stockholds of WMDs, there was a small group of folks who said there weren't any weapons: the UN weapons inspectors. Scott Ritter--who was withdrawn by the US after Saddam rightfully claimed that the UN was spying for US and Britain--was a weapons inspector who said that there were no weapons. He was simply discredited by the Administration as a child molester, which, regardless of the charges should theoretically have little bearing on his ability to distinguish a barrel of oil from a tub of sarin or anthrax. Hans Blix, who was the head weapons inspector on the ground before BUSH told them to leave because they weren't finding WMDs (go figure), said he didn't think there were any. He f0und a few technical inconsistencies (like some missles that were longer range than they were permitted) but certainly not evidence of the kind of program Powell insisted existed. The international atomic energy comission said that there wasn't evidence of a nuclear program and the two things that inspectors (and Powell and Bush and the Brits) claimed were evidence of the attempt to start a program--the metal tubes and the nigerian uranium--were both discredited by that agency weeks before the war. Finally, the testimony of the Iraqi defector (Saddam's son in law) in the early 1990s, which Powell and others endlessly cited as evidence of the presence of these weapons, actually includes, in the parts they don't talk about, his testimony about how the weapons were all destroyed long before he defected.
And that is just the stuff that I know about and remember. Robert Greenwald's film Uncovered does a much better job of illuminating this silenced dissent in the intelligence community. I won't claim that it says unequivocally that there weren't any weapons, but it certainly was fine intelligence and it said something very different than Bush, Blair and Co. said.
So basically, in a few lines of McCain's speech, he is able to re-write history, along with the rest of the republican party line, so that not only did we go to war for good reasons, but that the thoroughly discredited reasons that Saddam posed a threat to us. I guess if you repeat something enough, people will start to believe it.
To sum up...
1. The war can only be justified on the ground of freeing the Iraqi people if that was the reason given to go to war in the first place OR if the reason given to go to war in the first place turns out to be true as well.
2. This is especially true if the second thing you hope the war will do is to discredit the UN as a body for resolving international disputes peacefully. All of our resolutions had to do with WMDs so if the UN didn't approve the war on account of the WMDs, it is difficult to say they were wrong when the WMDs weren't present.
3. Regardless of the co-presence of intelligence saying these WMDs existed, one can't claim to have been ignorant or unaware of a great deal of evidence to the contrary, saying instead that "we didn't know; nobody knew." People knew, people told them, legitimate, knowledgeable people vehemently opposed their interpretation and their assertions: the pro war crowd simply chose not to listen and the media chose not to tell us. This cannot be dismissed as bad intelligence and fixed by having Tenet resign a few days before the reports come out. It was a willful deception of the people and maybe even of these leaders themselves.
4. If these leaders didn't lie, but instead just ignored all the evidence to the contrary, this should really not inspire any confidence in their abilities as leaders to make informed decisions. So far we have at least two events--maybe three with Abu Graib--where the people at the top simply claim they didn't know and expect that to get them off the hook. This is total bullsh*t. In any other setting if someone at the top of the ladder has people under them f*ck up royally time and time again, head need to start rolling or apologies and revolutionary reorganizations need to be visibly taking place. So far niether thing has happened. No one has been fired and no one has apologized: the failure to know the right information and/or to present the right information is simply presented as an accident that should be forgiven. With all of this rhetoric about accountability in regard to teachers and principles, it sickens me to see these same politicians and officials walk around like they shouldn't be help accountable for the decisions they made--however misinformed and however willfully that misinformation was gathered or believed.
5. Since none of the above is objectively true, since none of these things have happened, it is ridiculous to then turn around and try to hold up Iraqi liberation as some sort of token reward we're supposed to accept. Regardless of how "noble" or "good" it was to get rid of Saddam, that wasn't what we said we were there to do. As a mission, it is a failure. It has failed to make us more safe by diverting attention and funds away from the search for Al Queda--there are many reports from both Britain and the US but here is one and the most damning was written by the US Army War College. (The full text pdf is currently available here, but they move these around a lot) . Others have argued that it has opened up a new front for the war on terror, i.e. a place where the terrorists can fight us on the ground. Though this is theoretically and strategically correct, it isn't necessarily true in terms of the people on the ground. It seems to be in line with what Bush and others have claimed, but this seems somewhat unlikely considering the evidence from the Pentagon in July, 2004 that: "Suspected foreign fighters account for less than 2% of the 5,700 captives being held as security threats in Iraq, a strong indication that Iraqis are largely responsible for the stubborn insurgency." This, however, seems to point to an even more damning problem about Iraq: that all the people we are fighter are domestic insurgents, something Bush and people like McCain would hate for us to know because it undermines even the argument that we are there to free them: if they are fighting us, the only argument that we can make is that, even if freedom and democracy is the natural state of being, some people have to be forced into it and taught how to be natural. The truth of the matter is that the only way we want democracy in the Middle East is if it is a democracy we have total control of because otherwise we risk having another Iran: a popularly supported theocratic regime. (that this regime has stiff opposition is beside the point in this argument because it is ctually just further evidence of the skewed agenda of this administration: if they were really out to support democracy, they would have tried to intervene in Iran where there is a powerful student movement trying to push reforms. Instead they go to Iraq and don't even mention the attempts at democracy in Iran, painting its main problem, again, its attempt to gain WMDs. )
I don't really know why we went to war in Iraq--though lucrative re-construction contracts without real reconstruction, the prospect of privatizing the whole damn thing for American (and now French, German, and British) corporations, the second largest supply of oil and the threat posed to the global supremacy of the dollar by Saddam's trading his oil in euros instead of greenbacks all have their persuasive aspects; but I do know that it wasn't for WMDs, it hasn't made us safer as we were promised and that the liberation of Iraqis seems to be a mixed bag at best. I believe that we should keep an open mind about the last thing, but I don't think the US has any right to take credit for what ordinary Iraqis eventually end up doing with the chaos we have created: we obviously coordinated with the wrong expatriot informers (like Ahmed Chalabi, who gave us much intelligence, was paid by the Pentagon and is now being indicted in Iraq on charges associated with a murder) and miscalculated everything about the culture lying dormant beneath Saddam's oppression--and judging from Najaf, we still are doing so (the Marines decided that they shouldn't plan as the Army recommended but just go in full force that way they could crush them: sound familiar?)
I don't think that John Kerry is the answer to all of these problems. I just know that Bush has had his chance, he's made a mess and can't be trusted to get us out of it. Kerry is evidently the only guy we have to help us clean up. But once he's elected, we must continue to put pressure on him to reverse the neo-conservative/neo-liberal coalition of PNAC and set America back on firm ground. In Fog of War Erroll Morris's documentary about Robert McNamara, the Former Defense Secretary during Vietnam says of that conflict that the biggest mistake that we made --or the first indication that we were making a big mistake--was that our allies wouldn't support us in the UN. Whether it was from self interest or genuine concern, political or moral, for the new doctrine of pre-emption, this war was tainted from the very beginning by that same circumstance. Rather than chide that organization for not following us blindly, we should consider the lessons of history before we decide to go blindly forward in repeating it.
Nichols is right here that McCain's jab at Moore is certainly something unprecedented. I sincerely doubt that it will make any hardcore Republican go to see it, however, because it has already been branded as something to be avoided. Perhaps if people were exposed to it in any sort of objective-ish setting, they would feel a bit different. I think it would just be interesting for people on the right, who accuse the mass media of being leftist and anti-Bush to actually see what something like that looks like, i.e. to see what it would look like if someone actually was all of these things. Perhaps they won't see the distinction in any meaningful way, but after seeing Moore's film, it is difficult to turn on ABC or CNN and think of it as propaganda for a left wing agenda. It is certainly sensationalistic and dumbs down the conversation--but that is just what the pro-war crowd wanted before the war: black and white, with us or against us, do this now or face a mushroom cloud, etc. NOW they are asking for nuance, for a balanced account of "our" progress in Iraq (the fact that it is usually framed as "our" is telling in itself). I don't subscribe to the Postman theory that TV is incapable of this knid of discussion simply by its virtues as a medium: I think it has more to do with its economic needs of competing with _Fear Factor_ and _Survivor_. This, of course doesn't explain why we aren't reading about Iraqi's surviving life drinking water from a river of sh*t, which is more death defying than eating cockroaches--though I guess less appetizing to show at dinner time. (Susan Douglas actually has some fairly good ideas for Realiy TV shows that haven't been tried yet. She's kidding, but a few of them would be really interesting.)
Anyway, the interesting back and forth between McCain and Moore--who was in the audience, though McCain didn't know it--is also unique, foremost because, in this age when the brilliance of telecommunication is touted, when the President introduces his wife in NY from PA via satellite, we were given an example of how powerful it is to have co-presence, for people who are arguing to occupy the same space. It is becoming rarer these days and makes it much easier to dismiss your opponent as some sort of rogue.
My biggest problem with all of this discussion is that it doesn't get at the conventional wisdom (pun intended) that there was no other way to handle things in Iraq--and that it is okay to give our real reasons for invasion after the fact. It becomes so easy to forget what happened at the time, especially when you have the 1984 history machine out there changing the facts to fit its own needs. The narrative we're asked to accept is that Saddam didn't allow inspectors, that the UN was weak in enforcing it's role, that the opening of Iraq was inevitable (via lifting of sanctions) and that once sanctions were lifted he Iraq would have acquired the weapons we thought they already had. More importantly "everyone" thought that Iraq already had these weapons and we were just as dumbfounded as "everyone" else when we didn't find them. There are, of course, some folks (like the very neo-con Front Page Magazine) that insist we have found WMDs (like 3 or 4--but we should assume there are more where those came from) and that the liberal media is just unable to report these things because they all love Saddam and hate America.
I have seen little evidence that there are any biological or chemical weapons that have been found and I find it not even remotely logical that if there were even a shred of evidence the Bush campaign would be including it in every speech (rather than referring to "WMD related programs" as he did in the state of the union.) Furthermore, the fact that everytime it is mentioned by supporters of the war they say, "we didn't find those, but we did free the Iraqi people," leads me to believe that there is nothing for the really right wingers to rest their claims upon.
Nevertheless, this claim about freeing the Iraqi people seems to be a recurring one. It is ridiculous as a claim at this time when something like 300-500,000 people are in danger of starving to death at the hands of Islamic rebels in Sudan and we are doing almost nothing about it and saying even less about what we could or should do. I am not necessarily an advocate for US intervention around the world, but I do see blatant hipocrisy in a crowd who claims to want to help suffering people AND fight this war against "Jihadistan" and yet they stay away--even rhetorically--from the issue of the Sudan at all costs. (an exemplary exception, again is Front Page Magazine, who claim that it is the liberal human rights organizations who are staying away [an objectively false claim] because they are on the side of radical Islam, aka the new communism.)
But, again I digress, the problem I see with this line of thinking isn't that I want to quibble with how free the Iraqi people are or were, or whether we were the people to do it or this was the time: obviously things weren't awesome under Saddam, obviously many people were happy about getting rid of him; less obvious is how much better they are faring on a day to day level. The real issue is that this wasn't the argument that we presented for going to war: it is an externality. When the president presented the case to the American people, he said it was because Iraq posed a threat, because it had these weapons; when Powell went to the UN, the war was justified on the basis of the threat posed by the WMDs. We didn't try to go to war on the basis of liberating the people of Iraq because that is not how the UN works. The UN is specifically designed to respect the sovereignty of nations.
This, of course has innumerable problems, first of which that it honors obviously oppressive governments with the boon of authority to speak for the people, the resources, and the rights of a state, regardless of how representative they are of the will of that people. From a democratic perspective, this is very problematic. However, it is not enough to simply dismiss this as some sort of bureaucratic nightmare or an ineffective strategy for multilateral cooperation. The attacks on the UN for its implicit support of repressive regimes are completely laughable when made by Americans, Europeans or even Japanese.
Though the UN may give political legitimacy to these regimes, they do it not just so we can all sit around and twiddle our thumbs. This practice of honoring repressive regimes with legitimacy is an old Westphalian tradition that goes back many centuries. And while the UN and its constituent nation-states may grant a government legitimacy, multinational corporations give that government money, support it financially and help it to thrive under this umbrella of legitimacy. The government in Saudi Arabia would have virtually no way to oppress its people if it weren't for the oil revenues that continued to flow into its coffers. The scandal over the UN oil for food program in Iraq, which should be fully investigated, has far less to do with the UN itself as a corrupt organization than with the obscure regime of sanctions we all agreed to impose on Iraq. And if we are to believe that key players in Europe and the US were really ignorant of what was going on until just now, I suppose we should also believe that Richard Nixon wasn't a crook.
But I keep getting away from the point. We never said that freeing the Iraqi people was our mission. That isn't what we said we were gonig there to do. That isn't why many americans agreed to it or believed in it. Fear was used as the primary tactic to rally public support. Freeing the Iraqi people wasn't the argument we presented before the UN because that is not something the UN is designed to do. If it were in the power of the UN to decide when a government can be overthrown, or to agree that a country could overthrow another, without attack, for their own reasons, then the UN would be corrupt. We could have been given the authority to intervene in Iraq for humanitarian reasons. But the fact is that there was no humanitarian crisis in Iraq--or at least not any more so than there had been in the past twenty years. The Kurdish minority was much more in danger across the border in Turkey; in Iraq they were fairly safe thanks in part to the restrictions placed on Saddam by the sanctions. Yes Saddam was a bad guy, but there are lots of bad guys around the world and, believe it or not, that is not necessarily an objective fact. Even America thought Saddam was an okay guy for the first twenty or so years of his reign. That this changed so suddenly should give us some notion of how difficult it is to define "evil" when there are so many different notions of "good."
Unfortunately, most of the pro-war crowd has little doubt that they know the one right way that everyone in the world should be and they have no qualms about imposing that on anyone they can. They actually see their way as the "natural way" and believe that when other regimes are removed, people will naturally revert to the "american way"--except that they won't be allowed to have freedom to do what they want as a country unless the real Americans say it's okay. Somehow these folks have the ability to overlook the sort of dictatorial totalitarian character of this form of action. Even if you agree with the ideas, it is hard to agree with their implementation. Like the Greek empire, it is difficult to extend democracy to other countries against their will. Democracy and empire are incommensurable ideas and the only way that they can seem so is if you overlook the destruction of a culture (good and bad) in favor of seeing only the way that the new culture, post-empire, seems democratic. This has been the favored ideological standpoint of people like Niall Ferguson, who has defended the British Empire for the "civilization" that it brought to places like India.
So these folks are basically mad that the UN isn't designed to give them a blank check to re-make the world in its image. They overlook the fact that the UN was designed to end empires simply because they seemed to be a de-stabilizing factor in the global political economy. That nation-states turn out to be as equally de-stabilizing, should only encourage us to dig deeper for ways to consider global governance, not to revert back to isolationism and imperialism. In one of the more lucid observations about the current war, Johnathan Schell had this to say about the War:
Let us admit, however, that the sudden popularity of global imperial ambition in
the United States is not due entirely to arrogance and lust for power, evident
as these are. It is also a response, however perverse, to requirements of the
time that even the antagonists of empire will acknowledge are inescapable. The
earth is fragile, and the earth is becoming one--economically, ecologically and
digitally. A global politics to deal with both conditions is required, and the
idea of empire, especially of global empire, offers the most familiar answer,
historically speaking, to this need. That it is a desperately wrong answer is
shown by the sweeping failure of the Bush policies. But defeating the Bush
Administration will not be enough. The need for a truly global politics--a need
that, in part, called forth America's misbegotten empire--must be met.
The need for new forms of global governance is inarguable; what form that governance should take is an argument that most neo-liberals don't want to have. They simply want the rest of the world to bow to America as the once and future knig, back on his high horse, dispensing freedom as he (and usually this kind of America would be gendered as "he") sees fit.
This is the kind of America that the republican party wants us to get behind. And to do this, they want us to focus not on the ways that we break with international law to make war or the false pretenses. But that is just here at home. Abroad, they are stuggling--though not very hard, not hard enough--to retain the legitimacy that they might have had in some circles. The whole "beacon of democracy" thing will work only if we can manage to have an uncontested election ourselves this year. The reasons for the war, for anyone who takes the time to remember, are objectively different than Bush, Blair and the other supporters would have us believe. Always reverting to the "freedom" argument, they cover over the "bad intelligence" problem by saying that everyone thought the weapons were there: if we didn't find them, it's not our fault. McCain claims that Saddam threw out or wasn't cooperating with the inspectors. All of these are outright lies.
Though some of the US, UN, and British intelligence pointed to these vast stockholds of WMDs, there was a small group of folks who said there weren't any weapons: the UN weapons inspectors. Scott Ritter--who was withdrawn by the US after Saddam rightfully claimed that the UN was spying for US and Britain--was a weapons inspector who said that there were no weapons. He was simply discredited by the Administration as a child molester, which, regardless of the charges should theoretically have little bearing on his ability to distinguish a barrel of oil from a tub of sarin or anthrax. Hans Blix, who was the head weapons inspector on the ground before BUSH told them to leave because they weren't finding WMDs (go figure), said he didn't think there were any. He f0und a few technical inconsistencies (like some missles that were longer range than they were permitted) but certainly not evidence of the kind of program Powell insisted existed. The international atomic energy comission said that there wasn't evidence of a nuclear program and the two things that inspectors (and Powell and Bush and the Brits) claimed were evidence of the attempt to start a program--the metal tubes and the nigerian uranium--were both discredited by that agency weeks before the war. Finally, the testimony of the Iraqi defector (Saddam's son in law) in the early 1990s, which Powell and others endlessly cited as evidence of the presence of these weapons, actually includes, in the parts they don't talk about, his testimony about how the weapons were all destroyed long before he defected.
And that is just the stuff that I know about and remember. Robert Greenwald's film Uncovered does a much better job of illuminating this silenced dissent in the intelligence community. I won't claim that it says unequivocally that there weren't any weapons, but it certainly was fine intelligence and it said something very different than Bush, Blair and Co. said.
So basically, in a few lines of McCain's speech, he is able to re-write history, along with the rest of the republican party line, so that not only did we go to war for good reasons, but that the thoroughly discredited reasons that Saddam posed a threat to us. I guess if you repeat something enough, people will start to believe it.
To sum up...
1. The war can only be justified on the ground of freeing the Iraqi people if that was the reason given to go to war in the first place OR if the reason given to go to war in the first place turns out to be true as well.
2. This is especially true if the second thing you hope the war will do is to discredit the UN as a body for resolving international disputes peacefully. All of our resolutions had to do with WMDs so if the UN didn't approve the war on account of the WMDs, it is difficult to say they were wrong when the WMDs weren't present.
3. Regardless of the co-presence of intelligence saying these WMDs existed, one can't claim to have been ignorant or unaware of a great deal of evidence to the contrary, saying instead that "we didn't know; nobody knew." People knew, people told them, legitimate, knowledgeable people vehemently opposed their interpretation and their assertions: the pro war crowd simply chose not to listen and the media chose not to tell us. This cannot be dismissed as bad intelligence and fixed by having Tenet resign a few days before the reports come out. It was a willful deception of the people and maybe even of these leaders themselves.
4. If these leaders didn't lie, but instead just ignored all the evidence to the contrary, this should really not inspire any confidence in their abilities as leaders to make informed decisions. So far we have at least two events--maybe three with Abu Graib--where the people at the top simply claim they didn't know and expect that to get them off the hook. This is total bullsh*t. In any other setting if someone at the top of the ladder has people under them f*ck up royally time and time again, head need to start rolling or apologies and revolutionary reorganizations need to be visibly taking place. So far niether thing has happened. No one has been fired and no one has apologized: the failure to know the right information and/or to present the right information is simply presented as an accident that should be forgiven. With all of this rhetoric about accountability in regard to teachers and principles, it sickens me to see these same politicians and officials walk around like they shouldn't be help accountable for the decisions they made--however misinformed and however willfully that misinformation was gathered or believed.
5. Since none of the above is objectively true, since none of these things have happened, it is ridiculous to then turn around and try to hold up Iraqi liberation as some sort of token reward we're supposed to accept. Regardless of how "noble" or "good" it was to get rid of Saddam, that wasn't what we said we were there to do. As a mission, it is a failure. It has failed to make us more safe by diverting attention and funds away from the search for Al Queda--there are many reports from both Britain and the US but here is one and the most damning was written by the US Army War College. (The full text pdf is currently available here, but they move these around a lot) . Others have argued that it has opened up a new front for the war on terror, i.e. a place where the terrorists can fight us on the ground. Though this is theoretically and strategically correct, it isn't necessarily true in terms of the people on the ground. It seems to be in line with what Bush and others have claimed, but this seems somewhat unlikely considering the evidence from the Pentagon in July, 2004 that: "Suspected foreign fighters account for less than 2% of the 5,700 captives being held as security threats in Iraq, a strong indication that Iraqis are largely responsible for the stubborn insurgency." This, however, seems to point to an even more damning problem about Iraq: that all the people we are fighter are domestic insurgents, something Bush and people like McCain would hate for us to know because it undermines even the argument that we are there to free them: if they are fighting us, the only argument that we can make is that, even if freedom and democracy is the natural state of being, some people have to be forced into it and taught how to be natural. The truth of the matter is that the only way we want democracy in the Middle East is if it is a democracy we have total control of because otherwise we risk having another Iran: a popularly supported theocratic regime. (that this regime has stiff opposition is beside the point in this argument because it is ctually just further evidence of the skewed agenda of this administration: if they were really out to support democracy, they would have tried to intervene in Iran where there is a powerful student movement trying to push reforms. Instead they go to Iraq and don't even mention the attempts at democracy in Iran, painting its main problem, again, its attempt to gain WMDs. )
I don't really know why we went to war in Iraq--though lucrative re-construction contracts without real reconstruction, the prospect of privatizing the whole damn thing for American (and now French, German, and British) corporations, the second largest supply of oil and the threat posed to the global supremacy of the dollar by Saddam's trading his oil in euros instead of greenbacks all have their persuasive aspects; but I do know that it wasn't for WMDs, it hasn't made us safer as we were promised and that the liberation of Iraqis seems to be a mixed bag at best. I believe that we should keep an open mind about the last thing, but I don't think the US has any right to take credit for what ordinary Iraqis eventually end up doing with the chaos we have created: we obviously coordinated with the wrong expatriot informers (like Ahmed Chalabi, who gave us much intelligence, was paid by the Pentagon and is now being indicted in Iraq on charges associated with a murder) and miscalculated everything about the culture lying dormant beneath Saddam's oppression--and judging from Najaf, we still are doing so (the Marines decided that they shouldn't plan as the Army recommended but just go in full force that way they could crush them: sound familiar?)
I don't think that John Kerry is the answer to all of these problems. I just know that Bush has had his chance, he's made a mess and can't be trusted to get us out of it. Kerry is evidently the only guy we have to help us clean up. But once he's elected, we must continue to put pressure on him to reverse the neo-conservative/neo-liberal coalition of PNAC and set America back on firm ground. In Fog of War Erroll Morris's documentary about Robert McNamara, the Former Defense Secretary during Vietnam says of that conflict that the biggest mistake that we made --or the first indication that we were making a big mistake--was that our allies wouldn't support us in the UN. Whether it was from self interest or genuine concern, political or moral, for the new doctrine of pre-emption, this war was tainted from the very beginning by that same circumstance. Rather than chide that organization for not following us blindly, we should consider the lessons of history before we decide to go blindly forward in repeating it.
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