Strata Lucida: Politik Archives

February 18, 2005

Saber-rattling or slip of the tongue?

There are more worrisome blips today on the attack-Iran front. One of the possible scenarios is a strike by Israel on select Iranian targets thought to be developing nuclear capability. Of course, to attack Iran, Israel would need permission to fly over Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or Iraq. Only the last is at all likely, and Israeli flyover of Iraq would imply American support for the mission. At a news conference Thursday, President Bush seemed to be of two minds on whether such an attack is imminent. Here's how it played out in the Associated Press:

Bush reaffirmed that Iran is not now in danger of a U.S. attack, despite the administration's belief that Tehran is developing nuclear weapons; Iran denies that charge. "There's more diplomacy, in my judgment, to be done," the president said.

Asked about his level of concern that Israel might attack Iran to prevent its Tehran from acquiring nuclear arms, Bush responded with an assurance to Israel of U.S. protection.

"If I was the leader of Israel and I'd listened to some of the statements by the Iranian ayatollahs that regarded the security of my country, I'd be concerned about Iran having a nuclear weapon as well," he said. "We will support Israel if her security is threatened."

Translation: "If we feel like attacking, we'll go ahead and do so, but we're going to keep a plausible distance from it by allowing Israel to do the deed for us."

The Telegraph plays the story rather differently. The article repeats the same "we will support Israel" quote, but goes on with a very different interpretation:

His comments appeared to be a departure from the administration's line that there are no plans to attack at present and that Washington backs European diplomatic efforts. The remarks may have reflected Mr Bush's personal thinking on an issue causing deep concern in Washington.

Moments later, Mr Bush was asked another question on Iran and appeared to return to his script - this time emphasising the need for a diplomatic effort.

(Hat tip: John Robb for the Telegraph piece.)

Posted by Chris at 09:18 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 14, 2005

At the risk of breathing my own...

John Robb, author of the impressively expert Global Guerrillas blog, notices my post on closed OODA loops and comes up with a perfect gloss on the situation:

Another way of saying "breathing your own exhaust."

Now, it seems that the closed OODA loop -- the trap of having your orientation confirm and produce your observations and actions -- applies to more than just military organizations. I think it works at a psychological level, too, as might be seen in certain psychic states like depression or mania. I'd like to draw that out some more, but this will have to wait for another day.

Posted by Chris at 09:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 31, 2005

Abyssal trench

Paul Farhi of the Washington Post reports that the White House is using "minders", escorts who tag along with reporters at certain official parties or other noteworthy occasions. The "minders" prevent journalists from venturing out of certain designated areas, but they are also there to keep tabs on the journalists' sources:

[T]he escorts weren't there to provide security; all of us had already been through two checkpoints and one metal detector. They weren't there to keep me away from, Heaven forbid, a Democrat or a protester; those folks were kept safely behind rings of fences and concrete barriers. Nor were the escorts there to admonish me for asking a rude question of the partying faithful, or to protect the paying customers from the prying media. ... [T]he minders weren't there to monitor me. They were there to let the guests, my sources on inaugural night, know that any complaint, any unguarded statement, any off-the-reservation political observation, might be noted.

I'm trying to remember where I've seen a precedent for this. Thinking... thinking...

Oh yes! It was in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, where government minders were notorious for dogging Western journalists' steps at every turn. There, too, the system was only partially designed to constrain the scribes; its real intent was to make sure the interviewees never forgot that someone was watching and recording everything they said, and that nothing outside the party line got aired.

I think this speaks for itself. And it certainly reminds me of one of Nietzsche's most famous aphorisms (from Beyond Good and Evil):

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Posted by Chris at 01:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 28, 2005

Closed loops, tungsten edition

This one seems to be making the rounds:

How many Bush Administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?

None. There is nothing wrong with the light bulb; its conditions are improving every day. Any reports of its lack of incandescence are a delusional spin from the liberal media. There is no shortage of filament. That light bulb has served honorably, and anything you say undermines the lighting effect. Why do you hate freedom?

(Via)

Posted by Chris at 12:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Closed loops

Chuck Spinney, writing for DNI, worries that America is about to become trapped in a closed loop of decision-making. Working from Colonel John Boyd's "OODA" schema (Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action), Spinney writes:

Observations feed into the organism's Orientation activity. Boyd showed how Orientation exhibits a shaping pressure on what is seen and on the interpretation of what is seen. Decisions and actions flow out of this two-way interplay of Observation and Orientation. He showed why the most dangerous internal state of an OODA loop occurs when the Orientation process becomes so powerful that it force fits the organism's observations into fitting a preconceived template, even when those observations threaten the relevance of that template. ... When this happens, the loop has turned inside itself. It loses its capacity to adapt to changing external circumstances, and in effect, the open far-from-equilibrium system becomes an incestuously amplifying closed system—and echo chamber amplifying its own echoes: Any tendency toward self-correction breaks down, because Observations of the results of its Actions are fed through the same non-adaptive template, over and over again. The organism becomes increasingly disconnected from reality.

The power of Boyd's intellectual achievement is that he showed why the inevitable result of such an inwardly focused OODA Loop is a build up of internal confusion and disorder (entropy). He showed why, when such loops are put under menacing pressure, the confusion and disorder naturally expands into panic and chaos, which in turn can generate overload, paralysis, and even collapse. Boyd's entire strategy of conflict centered on the idea of inducing his opponent's OODA loop to turn inside itself.

Now, of course it's tempting to observe the blogospheric tendency to become a closed loop that amplifies its own non-adaptive templates. But I don't want to dwell on that. Instead I want to open my own loop a bit by going beyond my usual group of blog references, and point to a post by Andrew Sullivan in which he considers the precarious security situation in Iraq and the difficulty of implementing a democratic government under such conditions:

I know Paul Wolfowitz has read Hobbes. Did he forget it? CPA adviser Larry Diamond hasn't: "You can't have a democratic state unless you have a state, and the fundamental, irreducible condition of a state is that it has a monopoly on the means of violence." As John Burns has written - again no sympathizer for Saddam or cynic - that simply isn't the case in Iraq. Our predicament is that you cannot have democracy without order and you cannot have a new order without democracy.

But American triumphalists from Wolfowitz to President Bush are stuck in an Orientation system that presupposes democracy as the condition of security. It's why Bush was able to say, in his inaugural speech, "The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world." It's why David Brooks was able to claim that the ideals are more real than reality itself. It's a framework that is exactly backwards: disconnected from the reality of the situation, it is becoming a closed, self-sustaining feedback loop. And, if Boyd is right, when you prod such a loop, it degenerates into paranoia and chaos.

Posted by Chris at 12:19 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

January 26, 2005

Oil and empire

I spent a good part of this weekend reading Michael Scheuer's outstanding book Imperial Hubris, which makes a forceful case that cultural presuppositions have led the West to badly underestimate the appeal of Osama bin Laden's global jihad. The core of the book is the argument that -- contra Tom Friedman and scores of other self-righteous commentators -- bin Laden is not engaging an offensive war because he hates what we are. Rather, he is struggling defensively (as he sees it) because of what we do to Muslims: occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan; US military bases on the Arabian peninsula; propping up Israel; supporting Russia, India, and China in those countries' war on their own Muslim populations. Exporting democracy at gunpoint won't help, argues Scheuer, because one the one hand it provides more antagonistic fuel for propaganda against us, and on the other because it does not address these core policy complaints. Unless we are prepared to alter our policies, we can only expect a long and bloody conflict.

Against this background I watched with interest a Newshour segment on the possible benefits of high oil prices. The key here is that high prices will create a real economic incentive for conservation in all its forms: more energy-efficient vehicles, production methods, housing, city planning patterns, work habits. Currently cheap oil is the foundation of the US economy, and (by implication) of the entire Imperium Americana: without cheap fuel lubricating our economy, our military strength would be diminished. And, of course, imperial ambition goes hand-in-hand with the need for this cheap fuel. So we support corrupt regimes like that of Saudi Arabia, regimes which are hardly credible among their own people, and which themselves preside over a society that produces thousands of jihadis.

Perhaps extremely high oil prices would be the lever that finally causes us to trim back our imperial wings. We can only hope. But, as observed in Slate today, some neoconservatives are embracing the energy-efficient lifestyle for its geostrategic benefits: using less oil will make us less dependent on Persian Gulf producers, which could allow us more flexible policy in the Middle East. The neocons, however, don't seem interested in reducing the American empire, but in preserving it. For them,

the fact that energy efficiency and conservation might help the environment is an unintended side benefit. They want to weaken the Saudis, the Iranians, and the Syrians while also strengthening the Israelis. Whether these ends are achieved with M-16s or hybrid automobiles doesn't seem to matter to them.

From a Green perspective the marriage of convenience with neoconservatives might make sense. But from an anti-imperial standpoint, it amounts to more of the same. We may withdraw our military from the Gulf, yes, but without changing other aspects of our position we're going to be stuck with a widespread global insurgency.

Posted by Chris at 09:45 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

January 22, 2005

We believe in nothing, Lebowski

One of the prominent mysteries of fourth-generation warfare tactics -- the practice of asymmetric warfare by non-state actors using unconventional target selection -- is why they became common only in the last third of the 20th century, and are mainly restricted to Third World societies resisting external or internal occupation. William Lind, a paleoconservative defense theorist who is highly critical of the Iraq misadventures, addresses this oddity in DNI this week:

As one of the founders of the concept of Fourth Generation war, I would like to take a stab at solving this riddle. The key to it, I think, is precisely “the triumphs of rationalism.” Rationalism, or more broadly modernity, believes in nothing. Belief is the opposite of rationalism. Fourth Generation war is triumphing over the products of rationalism because people who believe in something will always defeat people who believe in nothing at all.

If we look at those who are fighting Fourth Generation war, America’s opponents in Iraq and elsewhere, one characteristic they share is that they believe very powerfully in something. The “something” varies; it may be a religion, a gang, a clan or tribe, a nation (outside the West, nationalism is still alive) or a culture. But it is something worth fighting for, worth killing for and worth dying for. The key element is not what they believe in, but belief itself. ...

The death of the Modern Age actually comes with World War I; in 1914, the West, which created modernity, put a gun to its head and blew its brains out. The ninety years since have merely been the thrashing of a corpse. The rise of Fourth Generation war, and its triumph over state armed forces in Iraq and elsewhere, mark the real beginning of the new century, a century that will be defined and dominated not by the West’s ghost, nor by the Brave New World that is that ghost’s final, Hellish spawn, but by people who believe.

I'm inclined to agree with Lind's assessment, at least in part. Al Qaeda is not an isolated terrorist network; it's a popular movement with broad, worldwide support. Belief, of course, is not sufficient to motivate a popular resistance; there must be concrete offenses (American support for tyrannical, un-Islamic governments, say) to provoke people to war. But belief provides an orientation against which certain decisions are made. It cushions the believer against uncertainty, and can provide moral comfort that soothes the anguish of bloodshed.

Now, some would say that belief in ideals is just as present in American culture. President Bush's inauguration speech offered plenty of ideals in which he says he believes. Today, addressing these, David Brooks becomes a kind of dialectical materialist in reverse as he opines:

If you want to understand America, I hope you were in Washington on Thursday. I hope you heard the high ideals of President Bush's inaugural address, and also saw the stretch Hummer limos heading to the balls in the evening. ... What you saw in Washington that day is what you see in America so often - this weird intermingling of high ideals with gross materialism, the lofty and the vulgar cheek to cheek.

The people who detest America take a look at this odd conjunction and assume the materialistic America is the real America; the ideals are a sham. ... But of course they've got it exactly backward. It's the ideals that are real.

Brooks does not mention the other major feature of Washington on that day: a complete clampdown on the city, and a massive military presence. There were surface-to-air missiles on the Mall, secret command centers, helicopters flying overhead, and miles and miles of barbed wire. If our ideals of liberty and freedom are so real, why is our inauguration -- a day of national symbolism -- turned into an armed garrison? With no specific or credible threat, the display of militarism only served to underscore the contradiction between our lofty rhetoric of liberty and our base practice of imperial majesty. These contradictions were present in Bush's speech, as well: to invoke freedom in a city where everyone had to present special passes to get through the gates is the rankest hypocrisy. Even as his minions prevented protesters from crossing his path, Bush was intoning "there is no justice without freedom, and there can be no human rights without human liberty."

It's a long stretch to characterize ideals like this as "real". What is real is the cognitive dissonance that supporters of this rhetoric must experience. It's a kind of doublethink: the ability to believe two directly contradictory things, while experiencing no twinge of discomfort. Placed against those who fervently and thoroughly believe in their own internally consistent system, this belief amounts to no belief at all. That jarring difference between an ideal of liberty and a capital in lockdown is a sign that the corpse of rationalism is thrashing indeed. Up against contradictory and incoherent dogmas such as this, it's clear why a man of belief such as Osama bin Laden was able to put his finger on the jugular of American empire.

Posted by Chris at 08:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 21, 2005

Fiction in the driver's seat

An excellent Tomdispatch entry has me thinking about the vaporous world of fiction in which our country's leaders are living. Here's Tom expounding his central theme:

Under the President's determined, even steely, excesses of optimism lie dystopian abysses and half-a-century-plus of history in which policy-making projections about the future, another form of reality-based fiction, and the deepest sort of end-of-time gloom have met and melded. ... By 1950, our top civilian planners had plunged with utter seriousness into fictional scenarios that seemed to outstrip the wildest science fiction novels, not to speak of leading directly into the charnel house of history – and there the Pentagon followed with alacrity. In the wake of the "stalemate" of the Korean War, throughout the rest of the 1950s, actual war-fighting ceased to be a military matter. The CIA was the outfit that fought covertly in the global "shadows," while left to the armed forces in those years was fantasy.

The very power and destructiveness of our utmost weapons rendered it impossible to use them in a real war. So the Pentagon slipped into a perpetual war-gaming mode, in which all possibilities were considered, but none actually implemented. By the time of the Vietnam War, war games were so deeply entrenched in the planning mindset that the entire war effort became a kind of game, an effort to see if we could win a war without really trying. Along the way we missed vital pieces of information from the real world, such as the depth of Vietnamese committment to self-rule, and its total superfluity to our power struggle with the Soviet Union.

After Vietnam, realism and covert operations ruled for a time. The CIA took care of business in Central America and other locations, while the Pentagon worked up its strategy of using overwhelming force: the Powell Doctrine. But all that prudent, hard-nosed realism dissolved when Bush came to power. Last week's story by Dana Priest on the new report by the National Intelligence Council revealed that the Iraq war has created a "training ground for the next generation of 'professionalized' terrorists". What's more, it created an Iraq-Al Qaeda link that previously existed only in the imagination of Bush administration officials:

Before the U.S. invasion, the CIA said Saddam Hussein had only circumstantial ties with several al Qaeda members. Osama bin Laden rejected the idea of forming an alliance with Hussein and viewed him as an enemy of the jihadist movement because the Iraqi leader rejected radical Islamic ideals and ran a secular government.

So the administration hawks, blinded by an ideology that blurred the differences and very real friction between separate groups of Muslims hostile to the US, based their rationale for war in part on ties that never existed. Their eagerness to embrace allegations of a tie between Osama and Saddam was also fueled by their realization that it was the best way to use the weight of September 11th to justify the war against Iraq. It's a sad and tragic case of committment to a fiction.

John Robb, who blogs with no little expertise about fourth-generation warfare and global guerrilla tactics, argues that the US nation-building policy in Iraq follows an upside-down version of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Maslow, of course, contended that we must meet basic, physical needs (food, security) before abstract ones (belonging, love, self-actualization). The words of Brecht prefigured this structure in a literary register: "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral" ("food first, then morality"). In Robb's view, the insurgents in Iraq are targeting the basics: simple infrastructure, security, food and water supplies. The US, on the other hand, focuses most of its effort on the abstract: elections, soverignty. This puts us in a weak position, because the goal we are trying to reach (a democratic Iraq) cannot be achieved without some basic assurances of stability and security.

Robb identifies another area of upside-down thinking in the administration's typical approach to fighting networks of terrorists. Essentially, it amounts to the old sci-fi movie standard of "kill the leader and they all disperse". Going after bin Laden or Zarqawi or "terrorist HQ" in Fallujah is almost beside the point, because their organizations are decentralized networks. They have lots of built-in redundancy, fluid hierarchies, built-in fault tolerance due to rerouting around disrupted communication channels: all the characteristics that make the Internet immune to centralized attacks also work for globalized terror networks. But the Pentagon, because it is a strongly hierarchical state-based organization, has trouble coping with the way that diffuse non-state organizations behave.

These upside-down policies are born of another fiction, an ideological outlook that conceives of the democratic process as a prerequisite to a safe society. If that were true, then authoritarian or dictatorial regimes would not have a chance at any kind of stability. But we see that -- at least in the short run -- they do manage to stand. As a man who believes that all authority vests in God -- the ultimate top-down arbiter -- George W. Bush is the perfect leader to engineer this kind of mistaken thinking. You can't just install elections on top of an insecure and shifting society and hope they will work. A free society starts with meeting basic needs and assuring basic safety. In other words, the essence of freedom starts at the bottom and trickles upward. But to a certain kind of religious worldview, it's exactly the opposite: essences come from the top and filter down.

I heard another striking example of fiction driving reality on NPR this week. Eric Westervelt had a report on the "Iraqi express", a supply convoy that runs from Kuwait to a base north a Baghdad. In the report, Staff Sgt. Jeff Drushel mocks his adversary, flippantly saying: "IEDs, mortars, RPGs, small arms -- hajji can't shoot, and hajji can't surf." This is life imitating art -- a pithy paraphrase from Apocalpyse Now brought in to capture a war whose dark origins lie in a day everyone described as being "just like an action movie".

Those action movies cited by 9/11 onlookers comforted us with a vision of American strength and glorious (though justified) violence: what else are Die Hard and Rambo if not a celebration of honorable cataclysm? And just as the action movie template follows one explosion with another with the slenderest logical thread binding them, the Iraq war grew as a response to 9/11 on the slimmest of pretenses and the most transparent of fictions. Our country's tenacious grip on fiction in the face of reality is surpassingly strange, but is also increasingly the motor of our history.

Posted by Chris at 12:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 19, 2005

A steel cocoon

There's a tidy little piece in the NYT today about the massive security preparations that are making D.C. into a lockdown city:

As the capital prepared to celebrate President Bush's inauguration, the city appeared on Tuesday more like a place under siege. Hour by hour the city of grand buildings and marble statues seemed to disappear behind curtains of steel security fences and concrete barriers.

The article's (web) title has a delicious double entendre if you read it with squinted eyes: "Capital Weaves a Steel Cocoon for a Big Party".

Turning the nation's capital into an armed garrison is bad enough, sending all the wrong signals about what our society is becoming. The crowning insult to these lavish celebrations, though, is this: their leitmotiv will be "a tribute to those who have served". Reportedly, President Bush doesn't want a top-heavy presence from the military; he said "It's my party. I want junior people, and I don't want them overwhelmed by the brass."

This is life during wartime, but not as we used to envision it. We're not being asked to pay higher taxes, or limit our consumption of goods, or even to think much about it. The war rages on, young men and women continue to get killed, and the President celebrates by holding a lavish ball wrapped behind barbed wire. This inauguration shows the brutal contradiction in American life more than most recent events. The rich and connected -- the controllers of the capital that wraps the GOP in its cocoon of steel -- get a huge party, at taxpayer expense, while the poor and isolated die. And -- for one day only -- those out on the front lines get trotted out in front of the cameras to illustrate the leader's compassion for them.

Shameful.

Posted by Chris at 12:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 13, 2005

It's the process, not the results

At right is an image the Washington Post used to highlight this story on how the Bushviks want to lower the bar of expectations for the upcoming elections in Iraq. I think the picture itself is worth a thousand -- no, ten thousand -- words, what with the helicopter ominously overshadowing a poster with what appear to be repeated images of a single candidate.

But the article quotes a senior administration official -- anonymous, naturally -- who perfectly maps the American model of electoral legitimacy onto the Iraqi situation:

"I would ... really encourage people not to focus on numbers, which in themselves don't have any meaning, but to look on the outcome and to look at the government that will be the product of these elections," a senior administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity at a White House briefing yesterday. The official highlighted the low voter turnout in U.S. elections as evidence that polling numbers are not essential to legitimacy.

No, for these guys, victory is essential to legitimacy. And the victory doesn't have to correspond to anything so crude as numerical measurements. Hey, if you can get the press to call it legitimate, who cares how many people vote for whom?

Posted by Chris at 11:54 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

January 06, 2005

What I really said was

I have just returned from a much-needed Death Valley vacation. Photos and ruminations are forthcoming, as is a post following up on the Zeppelin/Kinkade/anti-intellectualism business.

For now I just want to note Alberto Gonzalez's very interesting take on reality. In his confirmation hearings, he let this peevish comment drop:

"Contrary to reports, I consider the Geneva Conventions neither obsolete nor quaint," Mr. Gonzales said, implicitly repudiating or at least qualifying adjectives he used in that early 2002 memo.

Yes indeed. In the 2002 memo, Mr. Gonzalez writes:

In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions requiring that captured enemy be afforded such things as commissary privileges, scrip (i.e., advances of monthly pay), athletic uniforms, and scientific instruments.

Methinks he is parsing his speech in what the Right might call a "strikingly Clintonian" mode: he can honestly say he does not object to the Geneva Conventions, only to some of their provisions. Specifically, he may very well approve of the Geneva Conventions as a whole -- just not the third one, with its irritating requirement of humane treatment for prisoners of war, and provision of those quaint, reality-based scientific instruments.

Posted by Chris at 04:05 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

December 22, 2004

More on the torture story

PBS finally posted the transcript to the interview with Neil Lewis that I mentioned in the last post. One passage I particularly noticed was this:

[I]n the larger sense, I would say, in addition to the details in the memos, they do tell us that I think we can be fairly confident now that what was occurring in at least Guantanamo was systematic, intentional, done with the consent of the senior authorities, that there was a real intent to have a system of prolonged psychological and physical coercion in the interrogation process -- which is different, I might add, very importantly, from the story that the military had put out early on and held to fairly consistently that it was a more or less gentle interrogation process, building rapport with the detainees.

So, Lewis knows the real story isn't the new details of abuses, or further corroboration of them (although that is significant); it's that the orders for the practices came from somebody high, high up in the government, perhaps from the President himself. Lewis is being very careful not to jump the journalistic gun, and so far, Bush gets a pass from him. Lewis simply observes that "they [the White House] have shied away from any suggestion that President Bush has had any direct role in approving these harsh techniques."

I think that the press needs to pursue this "shying away" much more aggressively.

The other aspect of the Lewis interview that struck me was on a moral dimension. When asked what he felt the interrogators had in mind when they were applying their lit cigarettes to detainees' ears and such, Lewis replied:

Privately, when people talk to me about this, who were involved and generally approve of it in the government, one refrain is always, "Let's not forget the emotion and anger we felt in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11." In other words, they're doing good work and important work that has to be done. So I think that's the pervasive belief of the people who are involved with this. It's obviously not the view of outsiders, and it's not the view of many FBI people who thought it wasn't even effective in getting information.

So in the view of these officials, strong emotion is justification enough. That's more than depressing; it's a sign of complete moral bankruptcy. And it emanates from the highest levels of our government.

Posted by Chris at 02:05 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Shock the monkey

Most of the American media continue to duck the most important revelation from the ACLU's lawsuit against the government: that the incidents of torture were deliberate and systemic policy, rather than the actions of a sadistic few. However, I noted watching PBS's Newshour that the New York Times' Neil Lewis did describe it as a systemic problem, although he was very gentle in the terms he used, and moderator Terence Smith didn't pursue the point. (I'll post some quotes once they have the transcript up.)

Today, however, there is an editorial by William Pfaff, writing for the International Herald-Tribune, which is quite disturbing. The torture policy was not accidental, and began very early in the Bush administration. Pfaff writes:

Days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the administration made it known that the United States was no longer bound by international treaties, or by American law and established U.S. military standards, concerning torture and the treatment of prisoners. By the end of 2001, the Justice Department had drafted memos on how to protect military and intelligence officers from eventual prosecution under existing U.S. law for their treatment of Afghan and other prisoners.

This resonates with something Neil Lewis said to the effect that the interrogators felt their harsh techniques were justified by the fact that the detainees were terrorists, that they had attacked us, that they were likely to strike again, etc. This is a line of reasoning that you sometimes see in the right-wing blogosphere: the enemy doesn't observe the Geneva Conventions, so why should we?

But this argument amounts to saying that the enemy is subhuman, so inhumane treatment is not only justifiable but necessary. But if we treat another as less than human, we give up some of our humanity in the bargain. (I'd like to recommend a reading of Hannah Arendt, particularly Eichmann in Jerusalem, on this point. One of these days I'll get around to a post drawing that work together with what we know about Abu Ghraib et al.)

By adopting torture as policy, we reduce ourselves to the level our enemy allegedly lives on. At the same time, we dissolve our credibility and renounce our moral standing. Here's Pfaff:

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Bush administration is not torturing prisoners because it is useful but because of its symbolism. It originally was intended to be a form of what later, in the attack on Iraq, came to be called "shock and awe." It was meant as intimidation. ... Destroying cities and torturing prisoners are things you do when you are losing the real war, the war your enemies are fighting. They are signals of moral bankruptcy. They destroy the confidence and respect of your friends, and reinforce the credibility of the enemy.

Posted by Chris at 11:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 21, 2004

Bush personally ordered torture?

A couple of days ago I speculated that evidence President Bush himself authorized the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo would be shortly forthcoming. Now, as part of its lawsuit against the government, the ACLU is alleging that an FBI email "states that the President directly authorized interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, stress positions, the use of military dogs, and 'sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc.'" via an Executive Order.

This lawsuit has been all over the press today. The NYT article treats the "abuse" allegations in vivid detail, but omits any mention of the ACLU's question about Bush's executive order. The Washington Post mentions the claim, but dismisses it, saying "White House and FBI officials said yesterday that such an order does not exist." While both American papers treat the story as if it is an internecine squabble between FBI and DoD, the Guardian focuses on the nut behind the ACLU lawsuit: that the torture was directly ordered and controlled by the whole military, not just the brutal acts of a few "bad apples".

If Bush really did sign an order authorizing harsh interrogation tactics in Iraq, this deserves real investigation and reporting -- not lurid and pornographic focus on the ghastly details, but careful explication of the whole structure that led to them. As usual, our press repeats the technicolor detail and completely fails us on the overarching problem.

UPDATE 3:30pm PST: Eli at Left I On the News also notices the big papers burying the lede on this story, but is a tad more restrained than I:

Now there are legitimate questions about whether the Executive Order referred to actually exists; the White House denies it. Nevertheless, the fact that there exist FBI documents which allege such an order is blockbuster news, right? Well, not according to the Washington Post, who buries that fact in the fifth paragraph of their story, and uses the phrase "presidential order" (lower case) and fails to include the name "Bush" in their story. Not according to the Los Angeles Times, who buries that fact in the tenth paragraph of their story. And definitely not according to the New York Times, which does not mention the Executive Order at all!

Posted by Chris at 11:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 17, 2004

Right from the top

Salon's Joe Conason, working from documents obtained under FOIA by the ACLU, reports that torture techniques at Guantánamo were explicitly approved at the top:

[A]n internal FBI memo indicates that the directive to discard traditional restraints came from the very highest civilian official in the Pentagon: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

That revealing memo is dated May 10, 2004, a time when the Abu Ghraib revelations were humiliating the United States before the entire world. An e-mail, it is addressed to FBI counterterrorism officer Thomas J. Harrington from an agent whose name is redacted (along with much else), and its subject is captioned "Instructions to GTMO [Guantánamo] Interrogators." The memo's obvious purpose is to set down, for the record, the FBI's opposition to the Pentagon's use of coercive and abusive methods when questioning the Guantánamo detainees. It describes the FBI's fundamental disagreement over interrogation tactics with Gen. Geoffrey Miller and Gen. Michael Dunlavey, then the military commanders at Guantánamo Bay.

"I will have to do some digging into old files," the unnamed author begins. "We did advise each supervisor that went to GTMO to stay in line with Bureau policy and not deviate from that ... I went to GTMO ... We had also met with Generals Dunlevy & Miller explaining our position (Law Enforcement Techniques) vs. DoD [Department of Defense]. Both agreed the Bureau has their way of doing business and DoD has their marching orders from the SecDef [Secretary of Defense]. Although the two techniques [of interrogation] differed drastically, both Generals believed they had a job to accomplish."

This is indirect evidence, so it's not exactly a smoking gun. But many other pieces of evidence point to our government's adoption of torture as official policy: the "Geneva Convention protections are quaint and obsolete" memo from Attorney-General-nominee Alberto Gonzalez; the consistency of techniques of torture in various places; the military intelligence officer in Abu Ghraib who used a photo of the naked Iraqis as his screensaver. This document just places the trail of responsibility closer to the top of the government.

I suspect it won't be long before something emerges to show that President Bush himself endorsed the torture. Perhaps not, however; he may be too clever to leave a paper trail on something like this. Nevertheless, Rumsfeld works for him, and if Bush does nothing to stop the policy even after the Abu Ghraib pictures and many Red Cross reports, that amounts to acceptance.

UPDATE 12:15pm PST: Not only has Bush not distanced himself from Rumsfeld in the wake of the latter's policy of torture and hopeless mismanagement of basic supplies for the military, he's giving Rumsfeld a new vote of confidence:

"Secretary Rumsfeld is doing a great job leading our efforts at the Department of Defense to win the war on terrorism and to help bring about a free and peaceful Iraq, and the president is focused on working closely with him on those matters," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

I'm not even sure what to say.

Posted by Chris at 11:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 13, 2004

Angry journos

My post about the RAND study of embedded journalists drew an angry response from Carl Prine, author of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's report on the study. Prine is angry because I tagged him for rearranging the RAND press release nearly word-for-word. Now, I welcome angry comments on my blog, especially when it's from journalists I've criticized. But his anger gets the better of him, and simple logic eludes his grasp. Here's Prine in his comment:

Considering I pre-read the very study, and was cited therein, it's a laugh to suggest I simply "re-arranged" the press release. I would suggest you actually read the work RAND did before you conclude something so ridiculous.

Now, I have not had time to read the study in full, although I plan to do so. My conclusion had nothing whatsoever to do with the content of the actual study (PDF here). My inference that Prine reworked the press release was drawn from simple comparison of the article to the press release.

Line-by-line fisking is unnecessary, because reading the two together proves the point just as elegantly. The structure of the two is essentially identical, the first two paragraphs are carbon copies, and the article uses extensive block quotes to make its points. Prine mentions the possibility that propagandistic necessity might be the driving force for embedding, but only in order to reject it out of hand:

Key fears of critics before the war that the press would be manipulated or heavily censored by the military -- or that the actions of reporters would lead to the deaths of servicemen -- didn't pan out, Paul said.

No evidence is adduced to support this quote, which comes from the chief author of the RAND study.

Prine mentions himself within the article as one of the embedded journalists under study. And the full study gives him a credit for "helpful reviews of this document during the quality assurance process". So a writer thoroughly emplaced within the propaganda system helps to review the study that justifies the propaganda system as "a major success for the military, the press and the American public". And when he's called on that, and the fact that he didn't bother to treat of any possible objections or criticisms, he responds with petulance.

This, my friends, is Your American Media.

Posted by Chris at 10:03 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

December 10, 2004

Lame duckhood has its privileges

How cool is San Francisco Supervisor Matt Gonzalez?

Cool enough to let graffiti artist Barry McGee tag Gonzalez's private office with "SMASH THE STATE" in day-glo orange paint.

In SF, this is brilliant retail politics. A disaster anywhere else, of course.

Posted by Chris at 03:41 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 08, 2004

Take the laugh test with RAND Corp

Dateline Washington (December 7, 2004): Blatant propaganda system examined thoroughly, found to be working well.

A RAND Corporation study focusing on the Pentagon's embedding of journalists in military units found that that system "appears to be the best solution to date at balancing the needs of three core constituencies — the press, the military, and the public." What's more, "the Pentagon has finally overcome the knee-jerk distrust of news media coverage that has influenced so much of press-military relations since Vietnam."

Perhaps it's easier to trust someone when you have them bound, gagged, and completely dependent on you for their security.

Extra kudos to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's Carl Prine for his rearrangement of the press release. We wouldn't want to raise any disturbing questions, would we now, Carl?

(Hat tip: Cursor.)

Posted by Chris at 01:04 PM | Comments (1)

Stuck in the middle with you

Matthew Yglesias links approvingly to an amazingly retrograde article in the New York Observer entitled, diplomatically, "Stuff It, Emo Boy!" Purporting to be a sophisticated exercise in up-to-the-minute trendspotting, the article in fact is a backwards exercise in ironized propaganda for traditional gender roles. Of the offending "emo boys", the article says

Emo boy is not your mother’s "sensitive New Age guy." "He’s not Alan Alda, who’s a little too sappy," as Sharon Graubard, the creative director of ESP Trendlab, a trend-spotting firm, explained. "You could talk to him and he could express feelings, but I feel like the new emo man is more arty, more poetic, has more of an interior life."

Ah, the interior life. What that means, more than anything else, is that he’s conflicted—and he needs a woman ... to support him, to help him keep his head on straight and, above all, to listen to him as he goes on and on and on. ...

Emo boys are known to favor soft, floppy vintage T-shirts, flip-flops and low-riding women’s jeans that display a hint of pubic fuzz. "It’s like longer hair and introverted and sensitive," said Ms. Graubard. "Being skinny without muscles is a big part of it."

You can tell an emo boy, according to Ms. Graubard, by the snug fit of his clothing. "They wear a shrunken jacket. It gives them a little tender, boyish, vulnerable look—like they outgrew their clothes," she said.

Notice how the emo boy is constructed in terms of fashion. Having an interior life is not sufficient; you have to dress in a particular way, and a certain skinny build is mandatory. The article quotes Judy Kuriansky, a Manhattan psychiatrist, as saying "This is the type of man that women have been screaming and begging for for years." This demand by women reduces the emo boy to a decorated peacock: an ornamental extra, a trophy for the post-feminist woman. The emo boy is thus placed in an objectified state that women have worked long and hard (not entirely successfully) to resist.

But the trophy, once won, loses much of its glitter. The emo boy is not so desirable anymore, contends the article:

Constance Wyndham, a 24-year-old art critic who lives in the East Village, also decried the role that women have played in creating the emo-boy type. "All of this falls under the broad category of the collateral damage of feminism," she said.

Emo boys are an obvious post-feminist phenomenon: as women stood up and demanded their right to self-expression, men gradually followed suit. Furthermore, as feminism installed itself in an implicit way in the consciousness of young women (even if they disavow the label of "feminist"), men discovered that being sensitive and emotive worked to their benefit. The sexual revolution worked in both directions, opening both sexes up to new possibilities that traditional gender roles prohibited.

But to the array of women quoted in this article, being sensitive is not enough: you have to be tough, too. It's a have-your-cake-and-eat-it scenario, where the new sensitivity is expected to bloom, while keeping in place the old rough Marlboro Man edges. That's a balancing act as impossible for a man as the unrealistic expectations that have been heaped upon women forever: to be at the same time perfect mothers, angelic virgins, demons in the sack, always smiling, but still emotionally open.

These impossible demands on both sexes exemplify the way in which the fashion system, with its eternal demand for constant change, undermines both sexes. The idea of an "interior life" -- an actual way of being in the world -- is anathema. Emotional sensitivity is cast as a matter of style, as if it were a pair of acid-washed jeans to be worn for a couple of seasons and then discarded, remembered only with embarassment. Dr. Kuriansky again:

What I hear from men is: "You’ve asked me to be this way, but there is still a group of women who still go for the bad boy."

With immense pressure to consume, and an infinite array of fashion choices -- or worldview choices -- there is no choice you can make. No matter what you choose, someone in the world will deride you for being out of style. The trendspotting system extends fashion to matters of personality: this year, emotive is out; next year, who knows? What gets lost is any sense of authenticity, or individuality, or simply being who you are. After all, there's no worse crime to a fashion maven than being yourself.

Posted by Chris at 10:52 AM | Comments (0)

December 07, 2004

In-group, out-group

Via Digby I discovered a fascinating article by Davidson Loehr, which takes as its starting point the work of The Fundamentalism Project, a massive interdisciplinary study conducted by the AAAS. The crux of the article is the essential similarity of all the world's various forms of fundamentalism (and fascism):

The scholars ... noted that all their papers were sounding alike, reporting on “species” when studying the “genus” was called for, that there were strong family resemblances between all fundamentalisms, even when the religions had had no contact, no way to influence each other.

The only way all fundamentalisms can have the same agenda is if the agenda preceded all the religions. And it did. Fundamentalist behaviors are familiar because we've all seen them so many times. These men are acting the role of “alpha males” who define the boundaries of their group's territory and the norms and behaviors that define members of their in-group. These are the behaviors of territorial species in which males are stronger than females. In biological terms, these are the characteristic behaviors of sexually dimorphous territorial animals. Males set and enforce the rules, females obey the males and raise the children. ...

It is easier to account for this set of behavioral biases as part of the common evolutionary heritage of our species than to argue that it is simply a monumental coincidence that the social and behavioral agendas of all fundamentalisms and fascisms are essentially identical.

The article goes on in some detail, and ends by contrasting fundamentalism's exclusivity with liberalism's expansiveness:

The essential job of liberals in human societies is to enlarge our understanding of who belongs in our in-group. This is the plot of virtually all liberal advances. ... While society is a kind of slow dance between the conservative and liberal impulses, the liberal role is the more important one. It makes our societies humane rather than just stable and mean.

But for the liberal impulse to lead, liberals must remain in contact with the center of our territorial instinct and our need for a structure of responsibilities. Fundamentalist uprisings are a sign that the liberals have failed to provide an adequate and balanced vision, that they have not found a vision that attracts enough people to become stable.

Now, I worry that taking the sociobiological approach to explaining fundamentalism will reinstate various patriarchal myths about the inferior status of women. True, human males are biologically stronger than females, but that is heavily dosed with cultural conditioning: men get encouragement in sport, etc., while women do not. Even given those reservations, the evolutionary model does have some value; I'm just not willing to subscribe to a "sole cause" model here.

I'm reminded of Kate Millet's Sexual Politics, in which she argues that the subjugation of women to men is the model and archetype for all subsequent oppressions. It's the first mover in a series of in-group/out-group determinations that produce the outsider as a threatening and/or sinful presence. Religion takes the patriarchal impulse as its motivator, and then reverses the equation: in religious terms, god is superior to all, and that produces the model for men to be considered as superior to women. Hiding its roots in this original domination, (fundamentalist) religion nurtures the most ancient behaviors in the name of truth. Loehr again:

What conservatives are conserving is the biological default setting of our species, which has strong family resemblances to the default setting of thousands of other species. This means that when fundamentalists say they are obeying the word of God, they have severely understated the authority for their position. The real authority behind this behavioral scheme is millions of years older than all the religions and all the gods there have ever been.

Posted by Chris at 09:54 AM | Comments (2)

December 06, 2004

Subversive marketing

Today I noticed a story about a report by the Defense Science Board, a Pentagon advisory committee, which was released to the public just before Thanksgiving. I saw the story at the time, but its import didn't sink in for me until today. The report is extremely critical of the Bush administration's theoretical and practical framework for the "war on terror", and goes so far as to state

Muslims do not "hate our freedoms", but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favour of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the long-standing, even increasing support, for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan and the Gulf states.

The report takes a classically American direction in its recommendations, however. Forget a change of policy or tactics: what we really need, it argues, is better public relations: "The U.S. must adopt the strategies and tactics of the insurgent, not the incumbent: waging a proactive, bold and effective U.S. strategic communications effort."

It's as if the DSB panelists had been up late at night reading old Baffler articles and decided there's really something to that hipster guerilla marketing technique after all. The report goes on at length about how U.S. propaganda can be improved by adopting private-sector marketing techniques. By casting the government's propaganda system in the mode of "insurgent" media, the report's recommendations point toward a total commodification of opposition, one in which voices familiar to the Muslim world are used to bolster the popularity of the "U.S. brand".

At last, our government gets the idea that the cooptation of hip is the way to spread consumer capitalism to the most resistant sectors. And with that, rebel consumerism wins the day -- even in enclaves where you'd be surprised to find it, like the Pentagon.

Posted by Chris at 10:40 AM | Comments (0)

Trees and paradoxes

Andrew Sullivan has an interesting, thoughtful piece in the Sunday Times that addresses what I was on about the other day: the critical uselessness of geography as an analytical tool to comprehend the split in American politics, and the ways in which the red/blue dichotomy undermines itself. Musing on why the "red staters" preach hardest about moral values that they themselves do not observe, he cites lots of statistics on things like divorce rates, abortions, and teen pregnancies, all of which are highest in the regions that decry them the loudest. His conclusion is thought-provoking:

The spasms of moralism that have punctuated American history from the first Puritans all the way through Prohibition and now the backlash against gay marriage are not therefore a war of one part of the country against another. They're really a war within the souls of all Americans. Within many a red state voter, there's a blue state lifestyle. And within many a blue state liberal, there's a surprisingly resilient streak of moralism. And it is this internal conflict that makes America still such a vibrant and compelling place. The conflict exists perhaps most powerfully within the red states themselves - as they grapple with the "sin" of their own practices and the high standards of their own aspirations.

In other words, if you base your perceptions on the red/blue division as a strictly geographical one, then looking at the conflict between red states' rhetoric and their reality produces a paradox. But it's not the reality which is contradictory, it's the seeing.

For years, biologists thought of the duck-billed platypus as an impossible creature; its warm blood and egg-laying habits were mutually exclusive, they thought, so the platypus was to be regarded as an oddball, a violation of the rules. It wasn't the platypus that was in the wrong: it was the classification scheme. Restructuring the phylogenetic relationships was necessary to fit the platypus into a logical order.

So it's not just regional affinity that can explain the schism in America today. If a blue stater thinks some red thoughts, and a red stater thinks blue thoughts, then the very distinction is meaningless: how can I be in two states at the same time?

Posted by Chris at 09:38 AM | Comments (0)

November 29, 2004

Who says we need a lefty Rush?

Strata Lucida reader Marcus sent a great response to Saturday's post. He followed the Urban Archipelago link and got irritated enough to rant at the editors of that site:

Brilliant. We progressives are so hopping mad about the election that we've hit on a new strategy: bigotry. It works for the other guys, doesn't it? Relying on crude stereotypes ("fat," "rube," "Christian"), we drive a bulldozer over complex cultural and class issues by demonizing some caricatured Other as the scapegoat for our discontent.

I dunno. Sounds pretty provincial to me.

Good thing thinkers like Thomas Frank haven't been suckered by the whole mainstream media red-state/blue-state whitewash. Guess you've been too busy listening to Le Tigre on your iPods while sipping soy lattes and building your Art Car for scooting around out on the playa next year.

See how easy it is?

When you allow the Republicans to dictate the terms of the debate (rural vs. urban, religious vs. secular, American vs. un-American), you've already lost. Calm down, Beavis, and try again -- maybe a little less reactionary next time.

I realize people are pissed about the election. But to resort to that level of full-on prejudice blew me away. I guess some on the Left say we need our own Rush Limbaugh. I always thought the point of being a liberal was being proud that we didn't.

Amen, brother.

Posted by Chris at 10:45 AM | Comments (1)

November 27, 2004

Maps make you stupid

Thomas Frank has an excellent article in the NYT today that reviews several books about the divided American electorate, most notably The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America, by John Sperling et al. Sperling and his co-authors take the ubiquitous red/blue narrative and run with it, but they cleave the country along urban/rural lines instead of strictly regional ones. This analytical move will be familiar to readers of the Urban Archipelago manifesto, which is breathtaking in its contempt for what it calls "raving neo-Christian idiots".

For the Great Divide, the rhetoric is less fiery, but not by much:

The essential cleavage in American life, the authors argue, is not between left and right or business class and working class; instead, it is a regional matter, a cultural divide between the states, polarized and unbridgeable. One America, to judge from the book's illustrations, works with lovable robots and lives in ''vibrant'' cities with ballet troupes, super-creative Frank Gehry buildings and quiet, tasteful religious ritual; the other relies on contemptible extraction industries (oil, gas and coal) and inhabits a world of white supremacy and monster truck shows and religious ceremonies in which beefy men in cheap clothes scream incomprehensibly at one another.

This reminds me of the widely circulated red/blue maps with their multifarious visualization schemas: straight-up Electoral College results, cartogram skewed by population, county-level binary color maps, county-level proportionally shaded, and permutations of all of these. It's a nice exercise that seems to liberate your thinking from the rigidity of the standard Electoral College map, which seems to suggest that 75% of the country voted for Bush, but essentially each map is a convenient substitute for research and thought. Seeing the red and blue splotches (or purple, red, and blue) we get hypnotized by the neat spots of color, and lead ourselves to believe that the determining factors on who voted for whom must be regional. So we go looking for other regionally correlated variables that match up with the election results maps, and we find patterns of extractive vs. information industries, or evangelical vs. Catholic faiths, or low birthrate vs. high birthrate.

But all of these mapped demographic figures provide a convenient way of not talking about the real issues of social class. Back to Thomas Frank:

Economic determinism ordinarily rubs Americans the wrong way, but for some reason this particularly blunt variety enjoys extravagant popularity with the map-and-poll set in Washington. Economics are fate, in the most sweeping sense, with people of all classes bearing the political imprint of whatever industry is statistically dominant in their region. The actual process by which this imprinting operation takes place, however, is never explained or even really examined. The even more glaring question of why poorly educated, low-wage labor in Retroland would vote for a system that only benefits its masters is scarcely raised. In ''The Great Divide'' we never find out precisely how it is that coal mining clouds the minds of the people who live in coal states; the map is supposed to be sufficient evidence of the effect. Coal mining is here and here and here, and these places voted Republican. Ergo, extraction industries make people ''Retro.''

What we see here is a classic case of an obvious and convenient binary opposition serving a political agenda: to divide two groups of people, stoke their mutual dislike and disrespect, and cover up the more insidious divisions within society.

On the one hand, the opposition between red and blue obscures all that the two sides have in common with each other. It's certainly possible to find urban hipsters who voted for Bush, or oilmen who voted for Kerry. By slicing the populace in half this way, the interconnections between the two groups are obscured, and each is constructed as Other: irreducibly strange, alien, and hostile. But in this very move, you deny yourself the capability to recognize yourself in the Other, and vice-versa. Even the staunchest blue stater will have some conservative views. To imagine yourself as a strict "blue" political actor slices out half of reality, making you something less than whole. And it makes it vastly more difficult to relate to "red" voters as what they truly are: fellow human beings, with their own problems, interests, and convictions.

On the other hand, in the political sphere, the red/blue divide is a handy scapegoat, taking all the blame for the schism in American life. This schism is overwhelmingly due to a conflict between the needs of free-market capitalists and the needs of everyone else. By framing the struggle as one between the coasts and flyover country, or cities and exurbs, or Republicans and Democrats, the entire red/blue paradigm obscures the way in which both parties, as agents of capital, are responsible for transferring wealth up the income pyramid. True, the Democrats are less egregious and less single-minded in this regard, but they are still essentially owned by corporate interests. If we're not allowed to talk about class conflict, then all we can see is red and blue.

Posted by Chris at 11:23 AM | Comments (0)

November 19, 2004

Do we choose cruelty, or foolishness?

As reported in the Times, US and Iraqi forces stormed mosques in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq today. This is obviously going to produce more moral ammunition for the anti-American side of Muslim opinion. There is a growing pattern of violence in mosques and hospitals in Iraq, most notably the mosque in Fallujah which was the scene of the apparent execution of an unarmed, wounded Iraqi by an American Marine.

With so many examples of atrocities and violence targeted against civilians, we can't hope to win any hearts, much less minds. Our moral standing and credibility, already questionable after Abu Ghraib, is entirely gone. Many on the right seem unwilling to acknowledge the cold, hard truth here, and would prefer to attack those who simply report the events.

We're stuck in a bind here. The insurgents are using fourth-generation techniques: they take up positions in civilian buildings; they melt away into the populace when confronted; they set off car bombs and boobytraps. So if we don't target the mosque where they're hiding, they can continue to mount their operations from it. If we do target it, we look like bullies and blasphemers.

Martin van Creveld, author of The Transformation of War, writes in a new article:

[H]e who fights against the weak – and the rag-tag Iraqi militias are very weak indeed – and loses, loses. He who fights against the weak and wins also loses. To kill an opponent who is much weaker than yourself is unnecessary and therefore cruel; to let that opponent kill you is unnecessary and therefore foolish.

This paragraph perfectly captures our dilemma. By taking up a guerilla stance, the insurgents use their very weakness as their biggest strength. This is analogous to how a small group of hyenas can kill a lion: by surrounding it, tagging it with small bites and running away, until the lion gets confused and weakened from having to defend itself on every side.

(Tip of the hat to James Wolcott for the van Creveld article.)

Posted by Chris at 12:05 PM | Comments (0)

November 18, 2004

Never mind the Pollacks

More blips that seem to indicate Iran is next on the Bushies' must-conquer list. Ken Pollack -- not the funny Pollack, but the subdued loony one -- has a new book out, The Persian Puzzle, wherein he argues that Iran's nuclear capabilities are a gathering threat that we must face. This is the guy whose book on Iraq tipped the center-left toward the hawkish side, and who turned out to be a chief popularizer of the laughably false Iraqi WMD claims.

The other blip was on the Newshour this week. In a story about Porter Goss's CIA purge, Margaret Warner interviewed Rep. Jane Harman, a member of the House Intelligence Committee. Harman, who as a member of the Intelligence Committee certainly knows more than she is allowed to say, let forth with a very suggestive verbal slip:

The directorate of [CIA] operations ... is the target of this purge, and it doesn't make much sense to me, given the fact that these are not the folks who brought us the faulty intelligence reports that led up to 9/11, or led to the mistaken view that they were stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in Iran... in Iraq.

Now, maybe that's just a slip, and maybe it's not. The Newshour transcript includes the slip, so perhaps they thought it was substantive enough.

At any rate, with Goss eliminating reality-based operatives from CIA, there will be far less standing in the way of the invade-Iran crowd. Of course, the military is stretched too thin to support a second third invasion force, but as Chris Bowers suggests, another terrorist attack just might swing the country to support a draft, which would clean that manpower problem right up.

Interesting times...

Posted by Chris at 01:36 PM | Comments (0)

Of fungus and wolves

There are more signs that the administration and top military brass continue to misunderstand the nature of what is going on in Iraq. The NYT has two conflicting reports today. One details in breathlessly optimistic tones the capture of what's alleged to be Zarqawi HQ:

The senior U.S. Marine commander in Iraq said the U.S.-led offensive launched last week in Fallujah has ``broken the back of the insurgency'' by seizing their main base of operations.

``We feel right now that we have, as I mentioned, broken the back of the insurgency. We've taken away this safe haven,'' Lt. Gen. John Sattler told reporters at the Pentagon in a video teleconference from Fallujah.

The other important story presents a very different view of the situation in Fallujah. The story quotes Marine intelligence officers from the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force as warning that

Insurgents in the region will rebound from their defeat ... despite taking heavy casualties in the weeklong battle, the insurgents will continue to grow in number, wage guerrilla attacks and try to foment unrest among Falluja's returning residents.

The most telling quote in this article comes from the brass:

"The view from the tactical level has been generally more pessimistic," said one senior Marine officer in Washington, referring to the view from the ground. "They may well be right, but I would also say that tactical intel is almost always more dour than that done at the strategic level."

Which is a curious way of spinning the truth: the senior officer is implying that the people with their boots on the ground really don't know what they're talking about. Perhaps they can't see the forest for the trees, and are blinded by their proximity to events.

Sattler and the unnamed senior officer both imply a view of the insurgency as just another conventional military force: a hierarchical group which withers if you can just kill the leader, as if the battle were a bad science fiction movie. But the insurgents aren't playing by those rules. They are fighting a fourth-generation war, in which the hierarchical chain of command gives way to decentralized webs of fighters. Traditional lines between civilian and soldier get blurred, as do the expectations that the enemy will show up on the battlefield to face you.

That's why it's odd and misleading to characterize our takeover of Fallujah as a "defeat" for the insurgency. On their terms, it wasn't a defeat: they just melted away. On our terms, it was a victory of sorts, because we didn't have to fight them (yet). But to view it as such is a myopic enterprise, because they're bound to turn up again in other cities. And if we move to invade those cities, they'll return to Fallujah. The comparisons to the game of "whack-a-mole" are very apt here, as the 1MEF report indicates.

The inability to grasp the nature of this decentralized fighting force appears to stem from ideological blinkers. Specifically, the Bush administration is ideologically committed to top-down models of the world. Some of them model this in a corporate framework (the CEO's orders direct the whole company), others theistically (God is the supreme authority over all). This is an outgrowth of the administration's odd alliance of fundamentalism and corporate capitalism. Neither group can even acknowledge the existence of weblike organizations that lack a single true leader who commands everything. To do so would invalidate their whole philosophy of how the world is structured.

The administration conceives of Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations as corporations: cohesive units under the direction of a single charismatic leader. But the reality is they operate more like franchises, or software. You don't have to swear fealty to Osama to become an Al Qaeda cell; all you have to do is download his handbook, invoke his name, and mouth the appropriate propaganda.

The administration seems to think we're facing a wolf, and can just cut its head off to kill it. In reality, Islamicist terrorism is more like a mold. To kill a mold, you must either (a) flood the room with toxins, and repeat regularly or (b) remove the mold's habitat by drying out the room and bringing in sunlight. Current policy falls far short of (a), since there are nowhere near enough soldiers (fungicide) in the country. And option (b), which would involve a reconsideration of broad swaths of US policy in the Middle East and elsewhere, is completely invisible. Outside of the leftist press, it isn't even possible to raise it as a question.

Posted by Chris at 11:32 AM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2004

Big Brother goes to school

A few months back I posted in semi-paranoid dudgeon about Wal-Mart's impending adoption of RFID tags for their goods. Ever-sensible brother Dylan commented and suggested I hold off on the paranoid tip, since Wal-Mart's RFID adventure consists in "only using it to track pallets". "It all depends on the application," he wrote.

Well, an undeniably sinister application has inevitably come to pass. Here's the story according to The NYT Online:

Hoping to prevent the loss of a child through kidnapping or more innocent circumstances, a few schools have begun monitoring student arrivals and departures using technology similar to that used to track livestock and pallets of retail shipments.

Here in a growing middle- and working-class suburb just north of Houston, the effort is undergoing its most ambitious test. The Spring Independent School District is equipping 28,000 students with ID badges containing computer chips that are read when the students get on and off school buses. The information is fed automatically by wireless phone to the police and school administrators.

And as the story continues, it becomes clear that the system is immune to even the most trivial cost-benefit calculations:

The administrators ... said the technology, when perfected, would eventually be a big help. Parents at the Spring district seem to feel the same way. They speak of momentary horrors of realizing their child did not arrive home when expected.

So, in this view, the "momentary horror" of not knowing your child's location outweighs the everlasting horror of state-sponsored tracking of individual movements. This is "security at any price" politics taken to ludicrous extremes. It starts with the children, because they are viewed as having no rights (or rather, they have rights only through their parents). But once these children grow up, accustomed to being monitored wherever they go, the value they place on privacy will be effectively nil -- having had it torn away from them during their minority. At that point, it will be trivial to install tracking devices on everyone, even adults.

Posted by Chris at 02:54 PM | Comments (0)

October 01, 2004

The banality of the president

The first "debate" -- with the restrictive ground rules negotiated by both campaigns, it seems fair to use the scare quotes -- really brought out Bush's lack of curiosity and intelligence last night. He was relentless in pushing his grab bag of stock phrases: He said "We won't achieve if we send mixed signals" several times, and repeatedly used the phrase "sending messages" -- as if the foundation of all policy is how it is perceived, not how it responds to reality.

More illuminating than Bush's pauses and grammatical incoherence, which some score as a strong point, was his impatience and testiness. He sighed, rolled his eyes, and made a number of petulant responses. (Kerry: "Saddam Hussein didn't attack us. Osama bin Ladin attacked us." Bush: "First of all, of course I know Osama bin Ladin attacked us. I know that.") At one point, with plenty of time left on his clock, he raised his hand and said to moderator Jim Lehrer "Let me finish." It was an odd echo of his 2000 debate with John McCain, where he repeated the phrase several times with growing, and obvious, anger.

The evening put Bush in a situation that is no doubt very unfamiliar to him: He had to directly face an opponent who strongly disagrees with him. Seeing his irritability, his childish petulance, and his insistence on sticking to a preformed system of simplistic slogans, reminded me of the dry drunk hypothesis of Bush's character: as a former addict, Bush sticks to a Manichean, melodramatic worldview, guided and shaped by canned rhetoric.

It also carries resonances of Hannah Arendt's take on Adolf Eichmann's moral vacuity, in terms of his inability to grasp reality without his comforting stock phrases at hand. Bush insulates himself from the world with poll-tested cliches, and mistakes the consistency of repetition for the solidity of principle: "We never change our beliefs, the strategic beliefs that are necessary to protect this country in the world." By substituting cliche for judgment, Bush turns his core convictions into his entire ethical outlook -- which ignores the crucial fact that moral decisions depend upon subtle and specific responses to particular situations.

Posted by Chris at 07:21 AM | Comments (0)

September 29, 2004

Outsourcing torture

In my last post, I was tempted to argue that allowing the military to ignore the Geneva Convention in places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib would have a corrosive effect back home. You know, if we decide that it's acceptable to treat foreign "unlawful combatants" like animals, that will have an effect domestically in the long run. But I couldn't make this argument come together with anything more convincing than a simplistic slippery-slope case.

Fortunately, real events have done the arguing for me. Via Obsidian Wings I see that Dennis Hastert has introduced a provision into H.R. 10, the "9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act of 2004," which, according to Representative Edward Markey, will

[R]equire the Secretary of Homeland Security to issue new regulations to exclude from the protection of the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, any suspected terrorist - thereby allowing them to be deported or transferred to a country that may engage in torture. The provision would put the burden of proof on the person being deported or rendered to establish "by clear and convincing evidence that he or she would be tortured," would bar the courts from having jurisdiction to review the Secretary's regulations, and would free the Secretary to deport or remove terrorist suspects to any country in the world at will...

So the "quaint provisions" of Geneva, recently suspended for suspected terrorists in various detention zones, are about to be revoked for anyone living stateside who smells like a terrorist, looks like a terrorist, or walks like a terrorist.

How long until we have torture chambers in every police station in America?

Posted by Chris at 01:37 PM | Comments (0)

Operation Enduring Shame

It's been months since I've blogged anything. Largely it was the Abu Ghraib situation that disillusioned me, and made me loath to keep up on the endless details of scandal-of-the-day. But Mark Danner's review of two official reports on Abu Ghraib in The New York Review of Books is a must-read, and provoked me to post yet again. Perhaps if I can keep my eye on the big picture, and not get lost in details and swept up in blogcentric trivia, I will keep posting.

Anyway, Danner:

The delicate bureaucratic construction now holding the Abu Ghraib scandal firmly in check rests ultimately on President Bush's controversial decision, on February 7, 2002, to withhold protection of the Geneva Convention both from al-Qaeda and from Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The decision rested on the argument, in the words of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzalez, that "the war against terrorism is a new kind of war," in fact, a "new paradigm [that] renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions...." ...

For torture, this decision was Original Sin: it made legally possible the adoption of the various "enhanced interrogation techniques" that have been used at CIA secret prisons and at the US military's prison at Guantánamo Bay. As it turns out, however, for the administration, Bush's decision was also Amazing Grace, because, by implying that the US military must adhere to wholly different rules when interrogating, say, Taliban prisoners in Guantánamo, who do not enjoy Geneva Convention protection, and Iraqi insurgents at Abu Ghraib, who do, it makes it possible to argue that American interrogators, when applying the same techniques at Abu Ghraib that they had earlier used in Afghanistan or at Guantánamo, were in fact taking part not in "violent/sexual abuse incidents," like their sadistic military police colleagues, but instead in "misinterpretation/confusion incidents."

In other words, by using an interminable and global war as justification, the Bush Administration has an excuse to do whatever it wants. This is the "September 11th changed everything" argument run amok, run wild, even to the point where the rule of law is considered a "quaint" obstacle to be shoved aside like so many outdated niceties of etiquette. Abu Ghraib, shows that for the Bushies, the rights of man are a dead letter, and no one in the United States wants to acknowledge it.

Posted by Chris at 11:02 AM | Comments (0)

May 06, 2004

A paler shade of our enemies

Josh Marshall looks at the Taguba Report and sees a pattern of legal abuses that starts with the corrupt system we adopted at Guantanamo:

I can't think of a more tangible example of the corrosive effect our embrace of lawlessness at Guantanamo has had on our conduct. First we devise these outlandish rules to deal with the worst bad guys behind 9/11 and the next thing you know we're applying those brave new rules to miscellaneous bad actors who fall into our net in Iraq. What are we looking at here but the fraudulent connection between Iraq and 9/11 suddenly become flesh, as we look into our own faces and see a paler shade of our enemies looking back at us?

This has a disturbing echo in what Philip Zimbardo, one of the principal investigators in the infamous Stanford prison study, had to say in the Times today:

"It's not that we put bad apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything that it touches."

Posted by Chris at 07:36 AM | Comments (0)

May 05, 2004

House organs

So Bush has agreed to give 10 minutes each to two Arab news networks to explain how disgusted he is at the abuses of Iraqi prisoners. Trouble is, the two networks are Al Hurra and Al Arabiya, neither of which is going to have an ounce of credibility in the Mideast.

Both are quite new: Al Hurra launched this year, Al Arabiya only last year. Al Hurra is owned and operated by the U.S. Congress, based in Virginia, and described as "slanted, arrogant, and condescending" by Islam Online. Al Arabiya looks a little better on its face -- they got banned from covering the post-Saddam Iraq, after all -- but it's owned by a western-educated relative of Saudi King Fahd, who sees his mission thus:

You needed a model to show the rest of the Middle East that democracy can work. So if things go well in Iraq, I foresee people all over the Middle East clamoring for change.

So, one net run by the neocons' man in Dubai, the other by the neocons themselves. As the Talking Dog points out, it's pretty clear that the point of these appearances isn't to placate actual Arabs in actual Arab countries -- it's to sway the Arab-Americans. Especially those in important swing states, like Michigan.

Posted by Chris at 07:28 AM | Comments (0)

May 04, 2004

The purloined story

Earlier today I was wondering why the Taguba report on the torture of Iraqi prisoners surfaced now. Why -- and how -- did the New Yorker "obtain" the report? It made me suspicious, given the Bush administration's pattern of operation in the past, that somebody might have something to hide. You know, to cover up a major scandal, release the dirt on a relatively minor one, wait a few media cycles, then announce the major one -- hoping the media frenzy on the first will drown out the second.

Well, today I got my answer: the Pentagon now says it's going to keep the current level of soldiers (about 135,000) in Iraq until the end of 2005. In a not unrelated story, the Toronto Star is reporting on Pentagon plans to reinstate the draft, bump the age limit up to 34, and include women in the draft.

The Abu Ghraib situation, while horrible, is just the kind of scandal that's a perfect distraction from this sort of thing: everyone agrees it's terrible, and all their rhetorical heat gets used up decrying it. Meanwhile, politically untouchable stories get to fly in under the radar, hidden in plain sight.

Posted by Chris at 03:23 PM | Comments (0)

Bend over for democracy, boys

Peter Singer, writing for the Guardian, observes that the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison may be destined to swirl down a legal drainhole:

But the problem is that not all those involved were US soldiers. While the military has established structures to investigate, prosecute and punish soldiers who commit crimes, the legal status of contractors in war zones is murky. Soldiers are accountable to the military code of justice wherever they are located, but contractors are civilians - not part of the chain of command. ... Normally, an individual's crimes would then fall under the local nation's laws. But there are no established Iraqi legal institutions - that is why we are running their prisons in the first place - and, in any case, coalition regulations explicitly state that contractors don't fall under them. In turn, because the acts were committed abroad, and also reportedly involve some contractors who are not US citizens, the application of US law is problematic. As one military lawyer said: "There is a dearth of doctrine, procedure, and policy."

This leaves a vacuum. Phillip Carter, a former US army officer now at UCLA Law School, notes: "Legally speaking, they [military contractors] fall into the same grey area as the unlawful combatants detained at Guantánamo Bay."

This jibes rather well with what Seymour Hersh had to say on the Newshour last night:

[W]hat you're seeing is the result of a decision made somewhere up high up in the line that we're going to turn our prisons essentially into all of them in the Guantanamos, they're all going to become factories for eliciting intelligence.

So, on the strength of an arbitrary military decision that is not subject to any kind of judicial oversight, people -- even US citizens -- can be detained in a complete legal limbo. The system of privatization is designed to help this process of creating essentially stateless persons. Once people are rendered stateless, anything can be done to them, because no one will speak for them.

Posted by Chris at 01:04 PM | Comments (0)

Now under new management

On the stump today, our Fearless Leader exulted that his invasion of Iraq has made Iraqis better off:

As the US military continued to reel from photographs of troops abusing Iraqi prisoners, President Bush volunteered yesterday that Iraq is better off now that Saddam Hussein is gone and his "torture cells are closed," summoning an image that has haunted troops in recent days. "Because we acted, torture rooms are closed, rape rooms no longer exist."

Yep, the dirty old Baathist torture rooms are closed -- replaced with high-efficiency, high-productivity American ones. I feel so much better.

Seymour Hersh has the frightening lowdown on just how high up the chain the Abu Ghraib abuses go. This doesn't seem to be an "isolated incident", it seems to be official intelligence community policy. This is what "spreading democracy" looks like, folks.

Posted by Chris at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)

May 03, 2004

John Ashcroft, time traveler

Norbizness made me snarf today with a hilarious rundown of Patriot Acts present and future:

Patriot Act IV: Lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of government legislation are never filed, due to a little thing called the space-time continuum. Special Forces Rangers with liquid body armor are sent back in time to kill one of the direct ancestors of any and all lawyers, paralegals, secretaries, couriers, and Kinko's operators involved in what would have been the lawsuit.

Posted by Chris at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)

April 29, 2004

Unprecedented cooperation

From the Times today:

Mr. Bush chuckled at the suggestion that he and Mr. Cheney had chosen to be interviewed together so they could prop each other up or prevent discrepancies in their answers. "If we had something to hide, we wouldn't have met with them in the first place," he said.

I dunno. This list seems to suggest they really, really didn't want to meet with them in the first place.

Posted by Chris at 04:22 PM | Comments (1)

No laughing matter

After some laughably docile reportage on the issue yesterday, the Times tries to put some teeth in their coverage of Bush & Cheney's "friendly appearance" before the 9/11 commission. Their unsigned editorial turns up the heat, saying:

It would have been a pleasure to be able to congratulate President Bush on his openness in agreeing to sit down today with the independent commission on the 9/11 attacks and answer questions. Unfortunately, Mr. Bush conditioned his cooperation on stipulations that range from the questionable to the ridiculous. ...

Given the White House's concern for portraying Mr. Bush as a strong leader, it's remarkable that this critical appearance is being structured in a way that is certain to provide fodder for late-night comedians, who enjoy depicting him as the docile puppet of his vice president.

But, as Leila pointed out to me, Bush doesn't mind appearing like a fool if it distracts the public from what he really is: a villain. The unrecorded, off-the-record, completely controlled appearance isn't laughable, it's sinister. They want you to make a joke of it, so you won't pay attention to the serious truth underneath.

If you're paying attention to what's going on in the Supreme Court today, you can see the trend clearly: that the Bush administration wants the executive branch to have unlimited dictatorial powers and secrecy. When the media calls that "ridiculous", they're not wrong, but they're ducking half the issue.

Posted by Chris at 10:10 AM | Comments (0)

April 28, 2004

Bumiller-mania

The NYT is reporting that Bush & Cheney's appearance before the 9/11 commission won't be recorded, televised, or even conducted under oath. From the article:

Legal scholars said the lack of an official transcript would give the White House some deniability and make it more difficult to use the president's words as evidence in a future suit against the government.

"It gives them more maneuverability in case someone slips up or says something he regrets," Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University, said.

In a sane world, the lack of an official transcript would tend to remove any sense of credibility or authority from the appearance. But this is Elizabeth Bumiller's world, where she can ask questions like "really quick: is God on America's side?" and still keep her job.

Disgusting. I don't even know where to start.

Tim Dunlop sums up the history of Bush's waffling and manipulation of the commission. Three words: "Mickey. Mouse. Club."

Posted by Chris at 01:17 PM | Comments (0)

April 21, 2004

Behold, I am the angel of death

Via one of Atrios's readers comes this staggering photo of John Negroponte, the Bush administration's new ambassador to Iraq. Negroponte has a dirty little history of sponsoring death squads in Central America, as several bloggers have pointed out.

In this photo, we see an aristocratic Negroponte leering out at us with Picasso's "Guernica" in the background. Note also the Fox microphone in the foreground.

The photo looks authe