AOL Journals 1st Old Hickory's Weblog

Old Hickory's Weblog has moved to Blogger/Blogspot!!!

2007-06-26T14:50:00.000-07:00

I've switched Old Hickory's Weblog's location from AOL Journals to Blogger (Blogspot).

Please come over to the new spot and check out the new version, still called Old Hickory's Weblog.

I'm still working on the template, like adding a mail-notification feature. So the template will be changing its appearance some over the next few weeks.

I feel a tad nostalgic about the AOL location since I've been posting here for almost four years now.

AOL has improved their features a lot. But after two years posting at the group blog The Blue Voice, I find that Blogspot is more user-friendly overall. In particular, it's easier to leave comments without having to go get an AIM ID through AOL.

I'm not taking down the AOL version. I'll leave it hear as long as AOL allows. I am putting copies of the old posts at the Blogspot location - being able to designate the date of the post is another advantage at Blogspot - but it will be a while before I get the full archive copied there. But all the AOL posts from 2007 are already there.

I thought it would be nice to let my last post in this location (except for this one) be a fun one, on the Zorro telenovela in this case.

For my goobye-to-AOL-Journals link, check out this YouTube video of Bring'em Home Bruce Springsteen & the Seeger Sessions Band.

Zorro: Capítulos 88-92 (June 18-22): Amazons and witches and poisons, oh my!

2007-06-24T20:59:00.000-07:00

"Machala, Esmeralda": Vanya and Asalaya, Los Angeles ~~hippies~~ Amazons, circa 1810

Zorro moved along briskly during this week's segments. By the end of the week, Esmeralda had gone from months confined in a basement to almost being murdered to being sold to slave traders to being in a ship that sinks to discovering buried treasure in what looks like a tropical jungle at a spot a few feet away from what looks like a swamp to joining up with a ferocious tribe of Amazon warriors in the jungle. All of it taking place with in a few miles of Los Angeles.

You didn't realize there were swampy jungles near Los Angeles? That's why you need to be watching Zorro.

Esmeralda Sanchez de Xena has apparently become queen of the Amazons and is intent on revenge against everybody who's hurt her

Altogether, it was an exceptionally exciting week for Esmeralda. At orders from el Comandante Montero, Capitán Pizarro took her out into the woods to kill her, but Sargento García saved her, as I related in my last Zorro post. Olmos then showed up with two pistols and persuaded Pizarro to leave Esmeralda and García with him. He promptly sold them to slave-traders, while Kamba back at the gitano camp got captured by his former fight promoters and sold to the slave-traders, too.

They were all put on a boat, where the crew leered menacingly at Esmeralda. The boat capital was name Gluck,played by Falvio Peniche, the brother of Arturo Peniche, the actor who plays el Governador Fernando. Esmeralda's amulet that her mother Sara Kalí had given her got a lot of attention this week, too. El Comandante ripped it off her neck just before he sent her out into the woods to be murdered. But Pizarro, who has faint remnants of a heart, gave it to her to comfort her in the minutes before he was going to shoot her.

Ouch, that's gotta hurt! Esmeralda's hand is branded with the map to her grandmother's royal treasure

On the boat, one of the crew ripped it off her neck, too, which kick-started Kamba's demon and so Kamba ripped off his steel manacles and starting strangling the crewman with the amulet. While doing this, he started a fire - to complicate matters on what's still a dark and stormy night - and the ship sank. But before they swam for their lives, Esmeralda grabbed the amulet, which had been heated by the fire and it branded its image into her palm but the burn caused her to drop it. When the ship sank, one of the crew saw it clinging to a piece of driftwood as he was swimming for his life in the stormy waters at night, and grabbed it. When he staggered into town, Diego was there and recognized the amulet. Diego took the amulet.

Back on shore that same morning, Esmeralda wakes up amidst the driftwood and finds García and Kamba still alive, as well. Thus they set off for a jungle adventure that is part Nancy Drew, part Blue Lagoon, part Treasure Island and part Xena the Warrior Princess. They plan to go find the gitanos but Esmeralda discovers Capitán Gluck, also still alive but immobile because of a broken leg and assorted other injuries. He was apparently washed or blown way out into the jungle.

Esmeralda nurses him a bit and he tells her a sob story about how he's not really a slave trader, he just needed a job and that's the only ship where he could get hired. He sees the brand in her palm and recognizes it as a star map. He offers to lead our jungle heroes to the spot. So Kamba and García carry him through the jungle, where he leads them to the indicated spot and they dig up a chest full of treasure. It's not pirates' treasure, it's Sara Kalí's mother's treasure, but it's buried treasure all the same. Esmeralda vows she's going to use it to avenge herself on everyone who's hurt her: el Comandante, Pizarro, el Gobernador her beloved stepfather, and, of course, Mariángel (Mangle).

In the jungle, no one can see you when your top falls down. At least that's what Esmeralda must have hoped when one of his biggest struggles in the jungle was to remain fully clothed

The captain gasps out his last breath to Esmeralda, who's staying with him while Kamba and García go to stash the treasure and get a cart to bring back the unfortunate captain, who warns Esmeralda that this part of the forest is muy peligroso beause Amazons live there. I thought when I heard this, it was too good to be true.

But, sure enough, Esmeralda soon spies a loin-cloth-clad woman being assaulted by a couple of Spanish low-lifes. Determined not to take any crap from anyone any more, she grabs a log and clobbers one guy in the head. The Amazon then escaptes the other guy, who then wrestles Esmeralda to the ground and tries to rape her. But the one Amazon has quickly been joined by several of her tribal sisters who promptly kill the assailant with several well-deserved arrows in the back.

I'm not sure if the Amazons are supposed to be Indians, or whether they are directly descended from Greek Amazons. Or maybe they are descended from refugees fleeing Carthage after Rome destroyed it, or possibly one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. In any case, they all have the remarkably healthy bodies one might expect from the air in pre-industrial Los Angeles and the presumed abundance of food and other good things in the tropical jungle that apparently was there around 1810. Or so it looks on the show, anyway.

One of the Amazons introduces herself as Asalaya. She summons another one, Vanya, to the front and puts her arm around her and says, "Machala". Then Vanya says to our heroine, "Machala, Esmeralda". I'm guessing this means "sister" in ancient Carthaginian. Then the Amazons bow deeply to her, and Esmeralda does the same in return. Apparently this cleavage-exposing gesture is a polite greeting ritual among the Los Angeles Amazons. At the end of Friday's episode, Esmeralda seems to have become their queen, or something, because she seems to be leading a hunting party that comes upon Kamba and García. Esmeralda looks at them with an enigmatic smile, perhaps hinting that the two of them are destined to become breeding stock for her newfound friends.

I have to say, this whole jungle adventure culminating with Esmeralda hooking up with the jungle Amazon tribe has been the coolest thing they've done in the whole telenovela so far. (That is, aside from introducing Valentina Acosta's the One the Only the Great Selenia, who as far as I'm concerned instantly became one of the top TV witches of all time.) With the Amazons on board, I'm thinking Zorro is going to be high on my list of Quality TV standards, along with such classics as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The way this is going, we could wind up with a final showdown, with General Alejandro's army facing off against Montero and Pizarro and they regular and hired-thug forces, with Zorro fighting on Alejandro's side at the head of an army of peasants, Indians, gitanos, the secret brotherhood of cowled democratic revolutionaries, and Amazons. Heck, Zorro might even persude those cannibals who almost made a human sacrifice out of Esmeralda in an early episode to join in!

"Loco por Olmos": Mangle only has eyes for him (until they do the Wild Thang, that is)

First, though, General Alejandro will have to smooth things out on the home front, where his Big Love arrangement has hit a snag. Almudena was down with the bigamy arrangement, even grooming Yumalai/Guadalupe to move into the wife #1 role after Almudena dies. But she had to process it in Spanish-lady style as Alejandro having an affair, which means he was supposed to be discreet about it. But Alejandro forgot that in telenovelas there's always someone hiding around the corner to evesdrop, and he talked to Yumalai about their little trist on his and Almudena's wedding night, and Almudena heard.

Now she has to be an outraged wife for a while. And she demands that Alejandro kick Yumalai off the hacienda. To complicate matters, Mangle has been putting small amounts of arsenic into the medicine Yumalai has been giving Almudena, and now Agapito the doctor/dentist/undertaker has found that out and told Almudena. Almudena thinks it's Yumalai and/or Alejandro that is poisoning her. Quite a sticky situation for all involved.

Even more exciting than Esmerada's adventures was the fact that Mangle now has the hots for Olmos thanks to Selenia's love potion and/or her hypnosis. Mangle is obsessed with with the little guy now. What Olmos doesn't know is that the spell is temporary. After Mangle makes love to him the first time, the hypnosis will wear off immediately.

Selenia is planning to leave town because after Olmos threatened to kill her. Olmos blames her for cursing him in his mother's womb and making him a hunchback. We learn from a conversation Selenia has with her magic dwarf Tasisio that it was Selenia's mother that cursed Olmos. Aha! Selenia's not on the Elixir of Eternal Youth. And to carry on the family tradition, she needs to have a baby. And Aaron the Exorcist may just be ready for a new gig ...

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who the coolest witch of all? Selenia visits Mangle's mirror (that's Mangle's red hair on the left)

On Friday, Selenia showed up in Mangle's mirror, telling Mangle how Olmos is just the right guy for her and looking pretty spooky, but also giving Valentina Acosta the chance to show off her talent for facial expression. Seriously, some actors just have a special ability to convey a lot with facial expression and motions alone. Clint Eastwood is one. Lena Olin on Alias is another. From what I've seen so far, Valentina Acosta also has a special gift for that.

Speaking of my man Aaron, he showed up just in the nick of time to save el Governador Fernando after Fernando hung himself.

Aaron the Exorcist earnestly strives to save Fernando's life and his soul

Sometimes having an exorcist stalking you comes in handy. Fernando was depressed because Don Alfonso proposed to María Pía and she accepted. This was after Fernando beat Alfonso to within an inch of his life. Even with the remarkable recuperative powers of everyone in this show - except poor Miguel the gitano after Pizarro beheaded him - Alfonso still had a bruise and a scratch on his face for two days or so, though it seemed to be completely healed by Friday. The fight scene where Fernando won but María Pía was even more committed to Alfonso afterward reminded me of a song from the Eagles' one album that rose about the level of catchy pop, Desperado. In the song, "Saturday Night", the lyrics say:

Whatever happened to Saturday night?
Finding a sweetheart and losing a fight
She'd say, "Tell me, oh tell me, are you all right?
Whatever happened to Saturday night?

After rescusing Fernando, Aaron the Exorcist persuaded Fernando to put on a white robe and let Aaron baptize him in a pond. When they came out of the water, Aaron put a brown robe and cowl onto Fernando, and we don't see Fernando's face. This could be the makeover Fernando mentioned once before. Probably he figures María Pía would really go for him in a monk's robe.

There was plenty of action on the political front this week, too. Zorro returned to the Queen's bedchamber to visit with her. El Duque Jacobo was there and el Comandante Montero charged in with his sword and a bunchofsoldiers. Zorro knocked a dozen or so soldiers unconscious and escaped, with a little help from Padre Tomás. Tomás set a wagon full of straw on fire and then hid behind a building and laughed in delight. He really enjoyed getting in on the Zorro action.

Padre Tomás conspires with the Queen under cover of the confessional

It turns out that the Queen already suspected that some funny business was going on, which is why she wanted to come to Los Angeles. Thanks to intercepting a confidential letter of the Queen's, el Duque knows that she's close to discovering his plot, which includes having murdered her husband the king. On Friday, the Queen goes to confession with Padre Tomás, who then lets her in on what he knows about the conspiracy and promises to help her. He also lets her know that he's in league with Zorro.

On the gitano front, Sara Kalí is unable to reconstruct the amulet map from memory. So they plan to attend a citywide masquerade ball that the Queen is putting on in order to talk to the Queen. Zorro is also planning to attend for the same purpose. Plus, Diego and Bernardo have also deciphered the map. Will Esmeralda's Amazon sisters be as impressed with him as she is? Inquiring minds want to know.

Also, on the gitano front, Ana Camila/Sor Suplicios and cute-but-useless Renzo become officially engaged. This makes everyone happy but eternally-brooding Laisha, who's always had a thing for Renzo.

Tags: valentina acosta, zorro, zorro telenovela

Robert Fisk on the idea of Tony Blair as special envoy for the Middle East

2007-06-24T13:08:00.000-07:00

British journalist Robert Fisk gives his caustic view of President Bush's suggestion that outgoing British premier Tony Blair be appointed the Quartet envoy to work on an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement: How can Blair possibly be given this job? Independent 06/23/07. Fisk consistently refers to Blair sarcastically as "Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara", referring to a city in eastern Iraq where British forces were defeated and 10,000 British soldiers compelled to surrender to the Ottoman army during the First World War. Blair hasn't actually been knighted yet, though it's customary for former prime ministers to receive knighthood soon after they leave office, so he probably will be knighted in the near future.

I suppose that astonishment is not the word for it. Stupefaction comes to mind. I simply could not believe my ears in Beirut when a phone call told me that Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara was going to create "Palestine". I checked the date - no, it was not 1 April - but I remain overwhelmed that this vain, deceitful man, this proven liar, a trumped-up lawyer who has the blood of thousands of Arab men, women and children on his hands is really contemplating being "our" Middle East envoy.

Can this really be true? I had always assumed that Balfour, Sykes and Picot were the epitome of Middle Eastern hubris. But Blair? That this ex-prime minister, this man who took his country into the sands of Iraq, should actually believe that he has a role in the region - he whose own preposterous envoy, Lord Levy, made so many secret trips there to absolutely no avail - is now going to sully his hands (and, I fear, our lives) in the world's last colonial war is simply overwhelming.

By "the world's last colonial war", Fisk means the Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and the conflict over them now entering its fifth decade.

The Independent also has an article on three Catholics on Blair's Downing Street staff who left their posts because of their religious objections to the Iraq War: PM's Iraq war 'helped drive Catholics out of Downing Street' by Andrew Grice and Andy McSmith 06/23/07.

Tags: robert fisk, tony blair

Soldiers and strategy

2007-06-23T17:23:00.000-07:00

One thing that the Congress needs to avoid is to simply add more troops based simply on the reality that troop shortages quickly developed in the Iraq War. The armed forces should be "right-sized" (to use a corporate clichee of a few years back) based on a long-term strategy of what kind of conflicts are expected. We already see how both parties can agree on "more" without any decision - or even discussion - on the longer-term assumptions.

Andrew Bacevich recently addressed this issue in More troops, more troubles Los Angeles Times 06/18/07. Citing the broad bipartisan support for increasing the number of active-duty Army and Marine soldiers, he writes:

In fact, this enthusiasm for putting more Americans in uniform (and for increasing overall military spending) reflects the persistence of a second consensus to which leading Democrats and Republicans alike stubbornly subscribe.

This second consensus consists of two elements. According to the first element, the only way to win the so-called global war on terrorism, thereby precluding another 9/11, is to "fix" whatever ails the Islamic world. According to the second element, the United States possesses the wherewithal to effect just such a transformation. In essence, by employing American power, beginning with military power, to ameliorate the ills afflicting Islam, we will ensure our own safety.

Increasing the number of troops is not right or wrong in itself. But it should be based on clear strategic decisions about the role the United States intends to play in the world. And continuing to pursue the neocon-inspired Bush Doctrine is not an acceptable option. Certainly Bacevich does not think it is:

The underlying problem is that the basic orientation of U.S. policy since 9/11 has been flat wrong. Bush's conception of waging an open-ended global "war" to eliminate terrorism has failed, disastrously and irredeemably. Simply trying harder — no matter how many more soldiers we recruit and no matter how many more Muslim countries we invade and "liberate" — will not reverse that failure.

Robert Dreyfuss recently wrote (Financing the Imperial Armed Forces TomDispatch.com 06/05/07):

[P]residential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are, at present, competing with each other in their calls for the expansion of the Armed Forces. Both are supporting manpower increases in the range of 80,000 to 100,000 troops, mostly for the Army and the Marines. (The current, Bush-backed authorization for fiscal year 2008 calls for the addition of 65,000 more Army recruits and 27,000 Marines by 2012.)

The armed forces in 2001 were optimized for conventional warfare with heavy reliance on high-tech airpower. Rumsfeld's goal for military "transformation" was to continue and increase such reliance, further minimizing the number of troops required for wars.

If that's the direction the Congress and the country want to continue, it may not make much sense to be expanding the size of the Army and Marines. But if the direction needs to change to optimize the services for expected counterinsurgency operations, then the need for the current level of investment in aircraft and missiles is too high. (The Star Wars "missile defense" program is a question of a different order; only if the goal is to optimize the military for boondoggle projects does that system make sense.)

Tags: andrew bacevich, military budget, robert dreyfuss

When hippies trash the military

2007-06-22T15:49:00.000-07:00

Here's another dang dirty hippie attacking the Defense Department (DOD), accusing it failure in The Surge, saying that the Iraqi don't have any security or sound infrastructure, that they could be there fighting 10 years or more at the current rate and of lacking integrity in their reporting! He even says we likely to lose in Iraq and that our worst enemy in the war has been ourselves.

This particular dirty hippie would be Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), one of the countries most respected independent military analysts who specializes in Middle Eastern issues.

He's evaluating the Pentagon's official June report on conditions in Iraq in his paper, Still Losing? The June 2007 Edition of "Measuring Stability in Iraq" 06/20/07. Check it out. Cordesman's analysis is 12 pages of mostly grim accounts of how bad the current military, political and economic situation in Iraq is.

I don't want to give a wrong impression of Cordesman's argument in the paper. Cordesman supports the war but, unlike so many frivolous war boosters, he has consistently tried to be realistic about the challenges - and even then he may be over-optimistic. He even echoes Republican rhetoric in the following passage when he suggests that Congress could accelerate defeat by forcing a withdrawal. Yet he also says what Republicans consider heresy, that we are losing in Iraq - although it could be debated whether the transitive form "are losing" or the present perfect form "have lost" or the simple past tense "lost" is more accurate. Cordesman writes:

Finally, the June 2007 report may not openly say so, or try to deny the fact, but the US is now losing in Iraq. The pace of this defeat can easily be accelerated over the next six months by continued Iraqi failures at conciliation and growing unwillingness to sustain the war by the US Congress and American people. The facts on the ground can change to the point where the US may be forced into a rushed withdrawal, have to try to ameliorate displacement and separation and/or sectarian and ethnic cleansing, or deal with a level of humanitarian disaster it can now say it will ignore but not be able to ignore if it actually occurs. (my emphasis)

But there seems to be little hope that the Cheney-Bush administration is going to take seriously Cordesman's optimistic-but-hard-headed-realist approach seriously. Cordesman says of the DOD report:

The latest Department of Defense report on "Measuring Stability in Iraq" attempts to put a bad situation in a favorable light. It does not disguise many of the problems involved, but it does attempt to defend the strategy presented by President Bush in January 2007 in ways that sometimes present serious problems. More broadly, it reveals that the President’s strategy is not working in any critical dimension. (my emphasis)

He calls attention to an increasingly troubled area, one which is likely to become much more so as this year goes on, the city of Kirkuk:

A Kurdish struggle for autonomy and control of the north, displacing Iraqi Arabs, Turcomans, and other minorities, and seeking control of Kirkuk, Iraq’s northern oil resources, and the territory along the ethnic fault line in the north extending westward towards Mosul. Increased violence by displaced Sunni insurgents – including Al Qaeda - against Iraqi Kurdish civilians and politicians, concentrated in Mosul.

He doesn't expand on it here. But in this paper, he argues that "counterinsurgency" is the wrong approach, and that what is needed instead is "armed nation-building":

Victory [sic] in Iraq requires success in armed nation-building – a process that can extend over a decade or more – not simply the defeat of the most violent elements in an insurgency. In fact, efforts to bring local security in a narrow area like Baghdad have almost certainly done more harm than good. They have focused toomany resources on one limited task and created a "center of gravity" that cannot have major importance without a far more effective national government and progress towards national conciliation. (my emphasis)

He harshes on the administration for bad reporting. In the world of Serious Military Analysis, this is really a strong criticism:

The US is often the first to call for transparency and integrity in the reporting of other governments. It has never provided transparency or integrity in its reporting on the war in Iraq. It has downplayed the growth of the insurgency and other civil conflicts. It exaggerated progress in the development of Iraqi forces, and has reported meaningless macroecomic figures claiming "progress" in the face of steadily deteriorating economic conditions for most Iraqis outside the Kurdish security zone, and does so in the face of almost incredible incompetence by USAID and the Corps of Engineers.

Perhaps most significantly, the US government has never openly discussed or analyzed its failures in not planning for stability operations or conflict termination, in creating an electoral process that polarized Iraqi politics around inexperienced sectarian and ethnic leaders and parties, and in creating a constitution that helped divide the nation without resolving any of the key issues it attempted to address. The same is true of US actions that blocked local and regional elections, allowed de-Ba’athification to remove many of the nation’s most competent secular and nationalist leaders and professionals from power, and failed to act on plans to disband the militias before transferring power from the CPA. (my emphasis)

Cordesman argues that this dishonest reporting in effect eleveated short-term public-relations/propaganda considerations above long- and medium-term effectiveness:

It seems likely that, in retrospect, this lack of transparency and integrity will come back to haunt the US. More honesty, objective self-criticism, serious effort to develop credible strategies and operational plans might well have prevented all of Iraq’s current civil conflicts and problems from reaching anything like their current scale. In fact, if the US loses in Iraq – as seems all too possible – its primary enemy will not have been Al Qa’ida, but the US government. (my emphasis)

The fact that some of the most serious criticism of the Cheney-Bush administration's Iraq War policies, and some of the strongest, is appearing in military journals and Web sites and is coming from military-oriented consulting groups like CSIS shouldn't be surprising. Debate over results and a self-critical attitude are necessary elements of getting things right. And its a good thing we're seeing such work from sources like this.

But not so much of this information seeps through to our mainstream press. They're too busy pursuing John Edwards' haircuts. Cordesman does get quoted a fair amount in the press. But CSIS is providing a large volume of material like this, easily accessible on their Web site and each normally containing far more meaningful information than ever emerages from one of Tony Snow's White House press gaggles. (I realize that's setting the bar very low.) These are good resources. If bloggers can find them, so can regular reporters.

Tags: anthony cordesman, iraq war

The analogy that never dies

2007-06-21T16:12:00.000-07:00

A conference has been going on this week in Virginia Beach called, Transformation WARFARE 07 whose theme is "Reconstituting and Reinventing the Force".

Toni Guagenti summarized the speech by former US Iraq commander Gen. John Abizaid, now retired, in General Abizaid Outlines Iraq War Strategy Focused on Unified Network at the Naval Institute Web page 06/20/07. Among other things, Abizaid used guess-which-analogy:

He emphasized the need to defeat the enemy before the extremist views are thrust upon the majority Middle Easterners, and the world is thrust into another world war. He compared it to Hitler taking over Germany before World War II, even though the majority of Germans didn't support Hitler's politics or his fascist ideologies.

Apparently, in the Long War we're always going to be fighting Hitler and it will always be 1938 and the West - or at least the United States - will always be on the verge of capitulating at the Munich Conference, unless our far-sighted Churchills can keep us alert to the danger.

This is what's known as "threat inflation". The companies there looking to promote their products, i.e., high-tech weapons of various sorts, presumably don't feel an incentive to contest such threat inflation.

Pravda and Izvestia, aka, the Washington Post and the New York Times

2007-06-20T14:11:00.000-07:00

Up until 10 years ago or so, maybe even later, a title like that would almost certainly be announcing some rightwing rant about the Jew Commie Liberal Press! Liberal Press! Liberal Press!

No more. After Whitewater, the Iraq War, Judith Miller, the Scooter Libby case and various and sundry other illustrations of the dysfunction of our "press corps", that's no longer true. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post still do have responsibile reporters, of course. Even some of their columnists are worth reading most of the time. David Broder the Dean Of All The Pundits from the Post is not one of them.

But it really has reached the point where the news consumer needs to pay close attention to which reporter's byline is on the article to tell whether you're more likely to be looking at real reporting or simple dictation. Sometimes that gets tricky. At the Post, for instance, you have to remember that it's Dana Priest who does solid reporting on foreign affairs but Dana Milbank who vigorously pimps lazy press corps scripts about politicians.

Gene Lyons, who was one of the first to perceive how badly the mainstream print press was going off the tracks over the Whitewater pseudo-scandal, who compares the Times and the Post to the old Soviet-era paper Pravda (News) and Izvestian (Truth): 'Act of madness' gains allies in complacent media Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 06/20/07. He quotes the cynical old Soviet joke, "There is no Pravda in Izvestia, and no Izvestia in Pravda".

The "act of madness" to which he refers is a military attack on Iran. He focuses in particular on a Washington Post story, Iran Curtails Freedom In Throwback to 1979 by Robin Wright 06/16/07, that passes on Chenyist/neocon propaganda about Iran as though it were something other than war propaganda. Pointing out something in the story that doesn't make sense in context, he observes, "Editors are least apt to notice contradictionslike that when they’re taking dictation."

Today's New York Times offers another example, this one related to our ever-expanding victory in Iraq, U.S. Seeks to Block Exits for Iraq Insurgents by Michael Gordon 06/20/07.

Now, pretty much all you need to know about Michael Gordon is that he shared Judith Miller's byline on some of her phony stories about the non-existent Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction", phony articles which played an important role in starting the Cheney-Bush administration's unnecessary invasion of Iraq. So you can pretty much count on his articles being straight dictation from some official or other. Which can be interesting to see what the administration prefers to have us think is the true story.

This piece reads pretty much like a Pentagon press release. For example:

In the first hours of the American military assault, after midnight early Monday, helicopters flew two teams of American troops and a platoon of Iraqi scouts so they could block the southern escape routes from the city. Stryker armored vehicles moved along the western outskirts of Baquba and then down a main north-south route that cuts through the center of the city.

By the time dawn broke on Tuesday, the insurgent sanctuary in western Baquba had been cordoned off. Then, the American forces established footholds on the periphery of the section and slowly pressed in. "Rather than let the problem export to some other place and then have to fight them again, my goal is to isolate this thing and cordon it off," said Col. Steve Townsend, the commander of the Third Stryker Brigade Combat Team, Second Infantry Division.

That last paragraph is the article's first reference to a source. But not only those two paragraphs but the whole article read like something straight from a military PR page.

Gordon's dictation tells us that the foe is "Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia". Of course. All the Terrorists in Iraq seem to be "Al Qaida" these days.

Another piece of evidence that Gordon took dictation straight from some Pentagon PR hack:

Officers are hoping that local residents and even former insurgents who have splitwith Al Qaeda may quietly help the American troops pick out insurgents. American troops have already begun to work with more than 100 Iraqis on the eastern side of the city — a group American soldiers have nicknamed the "Kit Carson scouts." (my emphasis)

Kit Carson scouts? What can you say about that? The PR guy thinks they're huntin' Injuns out there? Good grief!

Far down near the end of the article, there is a noteworthy fact, if you happen to get that far and are still paying attention, about how Gen. Petraus' forces is fighting an urban counterinsurgency war in the city of Baquba:

This American counterinsurgency operation has some of the firepower associated with conventional war. American forces have already fired more than 20 satellite-guided rockets into western Baquba. Apache helicopters have attacked enemy fighters.

Warplanes have also dropped satellite-guided bombs on suspected roadside bombs and a weapons cache, which produced spectacular secondary explosions after it was struck. M1 tanks have maneuvered through the narrow city lanes. The Americans have responded to insurgent attacks with mortar fire. (my emphasis)

But if there happen to be any civilians killed - you think that will happen with firing rockets and dropping bombs into a populated urban area? - it's their own fault:

American helicopters dropped leaflets last night urging the residents to stay in their homes. The hope was to keep civilians off the streets while American forces began to close in on the insurgents. The appeal appeared to have little effect, though, as large groups of civilians mingled on the streets Tuesday and some students even sought to go to the local university.

The presence of so many civilians on an urban battlefield affords the operatives from Al Qaeda another possible means to elude their American pursuers. If the insurgents do not manage to sneak out, some may hide their weapons and try to blend with the city’s residents. (my emphasis)

Hopefully the leaflets were in Arabic, at least. But they got fair warning. And if some of them get killed, it's their own dang fault. Because whatever bomb or rocket kills them was precision-aimed at "Al Qaida". You know, "Al Qaida" withoutweapons. Blending in to look just like regular noncombatants. But our bombs and rockets can tell the difference.

But there is a mushroom cloud involved. These two paragraphs end Gordon's transcription:

On Tuesday afternoon, a Stryker company tried to blaze a path through the road believed to be full of buried bombs by firing a line-charge, a cable festooned with explosions. The hope was that the explosion would cut the wires that the Qaeda fighters use to set off the blasts.

After a delay in getting the line-charge to detonate, the weapon went off. There was a resounding thud and the skies over Baquba were smeared by a spiraling mushroom cloud.

Now let me understand this. This means laying a string of explosive along an urban street for, what, a block? five blocks? ten blocks? And then you set off the explosives all along the street.

Well, I guess since it's only "Al Qaida" we're fighting, we don't have to worry about any of that "hearts and minds" nonsense, do we?

But I wonder if the people who live along the street will flock to the Americans and the Iraqi government forces to inform on "Al Qaida" afterwards.

Gordon's dictation transcript doesn't both to mention that Baquba is mostly a Sunni city and that the Iraqi government forces with the Americans are probably all or mostly Shi'a. I guess taking all that dictation from the Pentagon PR guy and typing it up - or did he just have to cut-and-paste from an e-mail - poor Michael Gordon was too tired out to call, say, Juan Cole, who might have told him something like this (Everyday Apocolypse in Iraq Informed Comment blog post 06/20/07):

The US offensive in Baquba, the capital of Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, is intended to root out Salafi Jihadi forces among the Sunnis that have come to dominate entire neighborhoods and entire towns in the province, which lies between Baghdad and Iran. But most of the forces involved seem to be American and Shiite (the 2,000 'paramilitary police' mentioned are surely from the Badr Corps paramilitary of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council [SIIC], the leading Shiite party with links to Iran). Diyala has a Sunni majority, and a lot of the problems in thatprovince began politically in the first place because SIIC has dominated it politically. In the short term, this operation may 'pacify' Baquba. But likely it will inflict tremendous damage on the city, will cause a lot of the 300,000 or so inhabitants to flee and become refugees, and will likely not change the political situation, which is Shiite dominance of Sunnis along with some Kurdish separatist plans for parts of the province. Falluja had 2/3s of its buildings destroyed and tens of thousands of its former inhabitants are living in tent cities in the desert with bad water, and Falluja is still not secure--kidnappings, shootings, mortar attacks, even car bombings are all still taking place there and in its environs. (my emphasis)

That's our "press corps", well into the fifth year of this war.

Tags: establishment press, iraq war, mainstream media, mainstream press

Changing perspectives

2007-06-19T16:02:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when I look back at something written or said prior to the Cheney-Bush administration, I'm surprised at how much my own way of looking at things has changed. But it's not 9/11 that "changed everything" for me. For that matter, I don't think I've had any drastic turns or breaks in my way of looking at things. But the Iraq War and the administration's torture policy have made me look at some things, particularly in relation to foreign policy, in a different way than I did before.

I was reminded of that coming across these three articles:

Andrew Bacevich, The World According to Clinton First Things June/July 1999

The Idea that Is America by Anne-Marie Slaughter TPMCafe 06/19/07

American Exceptionalism by any other name... by David Rieff TPMCafe 06/19/07

Prior to 2002 or so, Bacevich seems to have published his articles on military and foreign policy issues mainly in conservative journals, of which First Things is one. In the 1999 linked above, he is making a thoughtful if somewhat caustic criticism of the Clinton's administration's use of history in terms that apply even more strongly to the neoconservative ideologues who defined not only the surface ideology but also the policies of the Cheney-Bush administration.

David Rieff is replying to the Anne-Marie Slaughter post that elaborates a 2007 version of the kind of Clintonian historical moralism that Bacevich discusses. Slaughter's piece is pretty general. But here is how Slaughter describes her Wilsonian framework for US foreign policy:

We need not only to embrace a vigorous national debate on what we stand for, but also to launch a global debate about the meanings and trade-offs of universal values. Liberty, democracy, equality, justice, tolerance, humility, and faith bind Americans together, but these values do not stop at the shores of the Atlantic and Pacific, or the banks of the Rio Grande and Saint Lawrence. We have always insisted that our values are universal values. Indeed, part of what we think makes us distinctively American is that we hold to a set of values that apply around the world. (my emphasis)

I'm always dubious when people start talking about "launching a debate". That's one of those things where I want to say, okay, if you think we need to launch a debate, then launch it, don't talk about the need to launch it.

Her article's main point is pretty tame. She's saying that Americans need to learn a lot more about how other democracies in the world work. I'm down with that.

Where Rieff challenges her is on her moralistic vision of American history as the story of the progress of democracy, which he calls "Whig" history:

But leave what we have wrought in Latin America from James Monroe through Woodrow Wilson (self-determination, indeed!) to Henry Kissinger and Ronald Reagan to one side. There is, more generally, something strangely over-intellectualized as well as over-sentimentalized about Anne-Marie’s account of our own history. Take, for example, her argument that our debates about what our values mean constitute what she calls “the essence of our politics, the secret of our success, and the source of our strength as a vibrant, open society.” Frankly, while I might wish this were so, I don’t think there is really much historical basis for the claim.

Rieff takes a shot at the assumption that democracy produces capitalism and vice versa:

Would an economic historian agree that political and moral debate was the secret of our economic success? Perhaps one who subscribes to the neo-liberal and neo-conservative view that democracy engenders successful, liberal capitalist societies would do so? But that, frankly, is utopianism disguised as economics and is, in any case, foundering as China and Russia demonstrate the economic viability of capitalism in an authoritarian political context.

I would add that Wilhelminian Germany and France under Napolean III also provide examples of thriving capitalism under an authoritarian-type government.

Rieff also calls attention to the fact that much of the world is unlikely to share a Wilsonian vision of American moral virtue:

I try to imagine a historically-minded Latin American reading Anne-Marie Slaughter’s claim that the essence of American patriotism is its commitment to “liberty, democracy, equality, justice, tolerance, humility, and faith,” without exploding in bitter laughter and I find that I cannot. ...

But is history really a progress, as Anne-Marie claims? Perhaps we are not going ‘forward’ at all, but backwards, or sideways. Frankly that seems far more likely to me and I can’t help wondering, were Anne-Marie herself not trying to ‘rehumanize and revitalize’ what I believe she would think of as the American project, whether she would really disagree? Again, when Anne-Marie speaks of the need to “get our foreign policy back on track,” or, in her justifiable consternation over the Bush administration’s suicidal foreign policy, refers to nations friendly to the United States that think that we Americans “no longer (italics mine [Rieff's]) listen and learn,” I come back to my fantasy of a Latin American reading these words, and I invite Anne-Marie’s readers to ask themselves what any non-American would make of such a claim? I also cannot help wondering if the nations and peoples who did once believe this were any other than the Europeans grateful at America’s role in their liberation from the Nazis. But Europe is not the world, and I do not believe that Latin Americans or East Asians ever believed anything of the sort. (my emphasis in italics)

Rieff writes about the notion of American exceptionalism which he finds in Slaughter's work, "What a florid romance Americans make of America!"

Bacevich in 1999 was also arguing for a more restrained, more realistic, less messianic vision of America's role in the world. But it was the Clinton administration, then dealing with the Kosovo crisis, to which his main criticism was directed:

The view of history espoused by President Clinton - and the vast aspirations that he and his lieutenants have concocted - appear by comparison naive and pretentious. For this Administration, the true object of the exercise [of promoting its particular interpretation of history] is not understanding or wisdom. Rather, it is to package the past into nice inoffensive bundles, neatly lined up on the near side of the President’s bridge to the new millennium. As we step off into the twenty-first century, Mr. Clinton would have us leave that history behind. But we had best step lively. For the contents of those bundles remain toxic and Mr. Clinton’s packaging is imperfect. Indeed, the bundle marked Kosovo just sprang a leak.

Bacevich in that article discusses at some length the ways in which the Clinton administration tried to promote an interpretation of American history that was optimistic and humane, but also directed toward justifying it's own policy orientation. He argues that the reason such an undertaking was such a priority for Clinton had to do with "the 1960s". Bacevich's description of what that means reflects his own background adhering to more the conservative side of what we now commonly call the "culture war" (although as late as 1992, it sounded shocking and extreme to hear Pat Buchanan talking that way at the Republican National Convention.)

Bacevich describes the relevant elements of the "1960s" view he saw as follows:

Foremost among those myths was the assertion that in the twentieth century survival itself had become problematic. ...

A second and related element of this mythology was a deep-seated skepticism about the nation’s founding ideals. ...

The third element was a corresponding skepticism about America’s role in world affairs.

But, Bacevich says, the Clintonians discovered that "as a blueprint for governance, the mythology of the 1960s is next to useless." He then cites several examples of Clinton administration rhetoric that I find far more problematic today after seeing Bush, Cheney, Rummy and the neocons bring democracy and liberty to Iraq through bombs, bullets and torture. He writes:

In the new age of globalization that beckons, according to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in a speech at Tennessee State University, the United States provides the "organizing principal" [sic]. America’s place is at "the center of this emerging international system." Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott has gone a step further, declaring that the United States is "hegemon and proud of it." ...

The American claim to being the "organizing principal" of the new age rests on the certainty that the United States embodies that right side, and that Americans, especially senior government officials, are uniquely equipped to discern the direction of world affairs. After all, as Secretary Albright has explained, "We stand tall, and therefore we can see further into the future." The mission of the United States on the eve of the new millennium is to coax others into acknowledging the direction in which historical forces tend, to commend those nations that are moving in concert with history, and to chide the reluctant to get with the program. (my emphasis)

And this one particularly caught my eye after seeing Bush and Cheney's faith-based foreign policy in action:

Thus, during President Jiang Zemin’s 1997 visit to the United States, Mr. Clinton publicly rebuked the Chinese government for being on "the wrong side of history." A year later, explaining the rationale for his own trip to China, the President told reporters that "one of the things I have to do is ... to create for them a new and different historical reality." (my emphasis)

Now, the Clinton administration never had the absurd level of hubris Cheney and Rummy and the neocons have displayed in recent years. In general, the tried to keep themselves "reality-based".

But still, I think we have to be careful about letting our leaders, Republican or Democratic, hide behind pretty abstract ideals. We have to look at the realities their actions are producing. And when it comes to wars, we should (1) avoid them whenever reasonably possible and (2) insist that policy-makers take full account of the specific realities of that country instead of invading the country that imagine is there instead of the country that we're actually invading.

Today, the following comment of Bacevich's resonates with me much more strongly than it would have in 1999:

There are those, on both the left and the right, who will find much to applaud in the prospect of the United States exerting itself to "shape history." There are others, again across the political spectrum, who will judge such an endeavor to be suffused with arrogance and doomed to fail.

Tags: andrew bacevich, anne-marie slaughter, david rieff

Zorro update: Selenia comes through!

2007-06-18T23:23:00.000-07:00

In the June 18 episode, #88 by my count, Selenia finally put the hoodoo on Mariángel (Mangle) to make her madly in love - and wildly in lust - for Olmos the evil hunchback. Mangle and Olmos deserve each other. And this is going to fun to see!

The One the Only the Great Selenia visits Mangle's sickbed (with the local doctor/dentist/undertaker Agapito in the background)

Selenia arrives at Mangle sick-bed and insists she needs to talk to her alone. It's still a dark and stormy night and lightening flashes and thunder crashes as Selenia walks in. Sure, it's melodramatic and corny. But in the telenovela genre, it works just fine.

Selenia hypnotizes Mangle with her red ring. We don't get to hear what all Selenia tells her. But Mangle wakes up hot for Olmos. As she tells her dear daddy el Gobernador Fernando when he comes to visit later, to his considerable surprise. It's not entirely clear whether it was the love potion, the hypnosis or the combination of the two that got Mangle going. I'm guessing both, but who cares? She's going to be lusting after evil little Olmos now, who displayed his character in this episode by selling García and Esmeralda to slave traders - at a cut rate, even.

But García did save Esmeralda from being executed by Capitán Pizarro. Esmeralda was pretty much completely out of it, but she had a lucid moment or two, during one of which she told Pizarro that as long as she was alive, she would seek revenge for the death of her baby. Who we know isn't really dead and is safe with Diego at the hacienda. But she doesn't know that.

Zorro had a nice chat with Queen Ana Louisa in her bedchamber. He came off aggressive at first, accusing her of being behind the murders of Sara Kalí and Esmeralda. (Neither of whom are dead but Zorro doesn't know that.) But the Queen was surprised and promised to follow up on it. Other than sneaking into her bedroom armed in the middle of the night, he was the perfect gentleman. Except he refused to take off his mask despite repeated royal demands to do so.

Zorro promised to return the following night to talk to her and el Duque Jacobo, who was not thrilled to hear about this. But they have a date.

We didn't see Yumalai/Guadalupe in this episode. But I mentioned in a earlier post that she's into the Guadalupe Spanish mode at the moment.

Yumalai in Guadalupe mode

Tags: zorro, zorro telenovela

Zorro: Capítulos 83-87 (June 11-15)

2007-06-18T20:56:00.000-07:00

Only the Shadow knows...Zorro visits the Queen in her bedroom

The action on Zorro moved ahead rapidly during the week of June 15 because they skipped six months into the future. Also, five out of five episodes included the One the Only the Great Selenia, a trend which I hope will continue. By the end of the week, Zorro was in the bedroom of Queen Ana Louisa, la Reina de España. La Reina has arrived in Los Ángeles and insisted on meeting first with the De la Vegas, who she considers allies.

El Duque Jacobo was obviously not thrilled with this. Diego communicates some of his suspicions of el Duque to Alejandro and María Pía. El Duque wastes no time plunging into new intrigues. He tells one of his co-conspirators that he will make sure the heads of el Comandante Montero and el Gobernador Fernando roll, literally, if Sara Kalí turns up alive.

Sara Kalí rallies the gitanos to confront the Queen of Spain

Speaking of Sara Kalí, she has revealed herself to the gitano tribe and she's ready to go to Los Ángeles to contact the Queen, who is her cousin Ana Louisa. Sara Kalí says the Queen was not part of the plot to kill off her family and she thinks that the Queen will do the right thing if they can just get to her and convince her that she's really Mercedes Mayorga de Aragón.

After the time-jump, both Mariángel (fondly known as Mangle to many Zorro fans) and Esmeralda have their babies on the same dark and stormy night that the Queen arrives in town. There are some nice plot parallels involved. Bothare assisted in the birth only by a short guy, Esmeralda by García and Mangle by Olmos. Esmeralda has the better deal.

I should mention here that, to my surprise, el Comandante before the time-jump managed to get Esmeralda back into her basement cell, where she languished for the next six months. After she gives birth to a health Diego, Jr., with García's help, el Comandante takes the baby away and gives it to el Capitán Pizarro to kill.

Ooohhhh... Olmos! Do you think the One the Only the Great Selenia is impressed with your little gun? Selenia and her magic dwarf Tarsisio face down a distraught Olmos

The births also highlight the characters of the short guys. García is bumbling, feckless, a bit cowardly, and not terribly bright but basically good at heart. Back at Mangle's bedside, the scheming Olmos also shows his character. Mangle's baby is born dead, because Olmos couldn't wait to give us Selenia's love potion. It killed the baby and Mangle still doesn't love him yet. She's also dying it seems, though Selenia says she can save her. Olmos is panicked and can only think of going to kill Selenia. Which he can't pull off, of course.

But it winds up that Pizarro leaves Esmeralda's baby (Diego's real child) in the cemetery and Olmos picks him up and substitutes him for Mangle's still-born child. So baby Diego winds up at the De la Vega hacienda.

There a poison plot parallel, too. Mangle winds up poisoned because love-crazed and sex-starved Olmos gave her the love potion while she was still pregnant. Meanwhile, Mangle has been poisoning Almudena back at the hacienda for six months.

Almudena is still hanging in there, but just barely. Yumalai has apparently learned a lot of Spanish ways in the missing six months, because after the time-jump we've so far onlyseen her in her Spanish/Guadalupe mode.

Does Aaron the Exorcist have a girlfriend? (she can't measure up to the One the Only the Great Selenia, I'm sure!) - Aaron flirts with a señorita while he stalks el Gobernador Fernando

Before the time-jump, we see Aaron the Exorcist in the background discretely paying close attention to el Gobernador Fernando. Fernando tells his guard not to bother him, that he's a strange saint, or something to that effect.Aaron the Exorcist, Selenia and Yumalai/Guadalupe are my favorite characters in this telenovela.

And it would be a shame to conclude with one more Selenia note. Here she's watching the Queen arrive but chatting with Tarsisio the magic dwarf about Olmos and Mangle:

Gratuitous Selenia picture

Tags: zorro, zorro telenovela

Christian cultism?

2007-06-18T20:01:00.000-07:00

Cults don't always look like this (actually, this is Aaron the Exorcist from the Zorro: la espada y la rosa telenovela, one of my favorite characters)

The 04/19/07 issue of Rolling Stone carried an article by Jeff Sharlet about Ron Luce's fundamentalist Christian group BattleCry, "Teenage Holy War". Rolling Stone placed an excerpt from the first part of the article online.

Sharlet's article is disturbing enough. But I was struck by one passage in the print version that shows that the group has some definite cult-like tendencies. But Sharlet didn't flag them that way. I can only guess what decisions he or his editors may have made. But it's also possible that Sharlet, like most journalists, wouldn't recognize these as warnings of cult tendencies.

He reports on the Honor Academy, which is prominently featured on the group's Web site at the present writing. The Academy is said to be a one-year experience for teenagers. Sharlet reports, "Students, called interns, come for a year or more between high school and college."

And he describes one of the striking features of the Honor Academy "campus":

There's also what they call the "Back 40," several hundred acres on which stand more primitive structures, retreats for toughening up the kids, and a Quonset-hut officer's club for those who stay to become employees or permanent volunteers, forgoing college or earning mail-order degrees from Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.

That mention of some of the kids deciding to stay living in apparently Spartan conditions permanently really caught my eye. Especially giving the socially restrictive conditions Sharlet describes. Here's his portrait of a typical day there:

Intern days begin as early as 4:45 A.M. •with an hour of group exercise on the court near the Academy's swimming pool. Mornings are for classes: There's "Character Development," which focuses on "obedi-ence" and "purity," and the "World View Mocule," in which one learns to see current events around the world through the lens of obedience and purity.

"Purity" for BattleCry means, especially, no sex. And presumably no lustful thoughts, either.

Then there's this:

Further reinforcement comes from the Academy's required "Life Transforming Events," the most grueling of which is ESOAL (Emotionally Stretching Opportunity of a Lifetime). Luce was reluctant to share details about the "Opportunity," a fifty-to-ninety-hour sleep-deprived endurance test, but a short video of the 2005 ESOAL provides revealing glimpses: students weeping and dragging giant wooden crosses on their shoulders; a boy rolling and puking across a field while a senior intern "sergeant" in camouflage and a helmet urges him on; a platoon of weeping girls; a shell-shocked boy mumbling into the camera, "Don't know what time it is.... Don't know what matters. ... Don't even necessarily know who I can trust." (my emphasis)

The Web site presents a 2006 ESOAL video as of this writing.

As hair-raising as that sounds, Sharlet's article doesn't provide enough information about the right factors, such as what kind of personal authority Luce and his senior assistants exercise over their most devoted members, to say definitively that he's describing a cult.

But there are some screaming warning signs there that this group could be a cult, or a group evolving into a cult.

In any case, it's hard to imagine a camp like that is really constructive or healthy for 17-, 18- and 19-year-olds.

Tags: battlecry, cults, ron luce

Iran War propaganda

2007-06-18T16:38:00.000-07:00

Gareth Porter writes on Cheney's Iran-Arms-to-Taliban Gambit Rebuffed Inter Press Service 06/11/07. He writes that the drug trade certainly accounts for some trafficing of arms along the Iran-Afghanistan border:

[Defense Secretary Robert] Gates and [NATO Afghanistan commander Gen. Dan] McNeill are obviously aware of the link between arms entering Afghanistan from Iran and the flow of heroin from Afghanistan into Iran. It is well known that Afghan drug lords who command huge amounts of money have been able to penetrate the long and porous border with ease. They have undoubtedly been involved in buying arms in Iran with their drug proceeds for both themselves and the Taliban, which protects their drug routes. Smuggling is relatively easy because of the money available for bribery of border guards.

Another factor helping to explain the influx of arms from Iran, as noted by former Pakistani Ambassador to Afghanistan Rustam Shah Momand in an interview on Pakistan's GEO television Apr. 19, is that the Taliban now controls areas on the Iranian border for the first time. Momand said the Taliban, which is awash in money from the heroin exports to Iran, buys small quantities of weapons in Iran and smuggles them back into Afghanistan.

But the Iranian government itself is not involved in the trade in arms, Momand insisted.

He also reminds us that the bulk of outside arms supplied to the Taliban is coming from Pakistan, an ally in Bush's Global War on Terrorism:

Afghanistan specialist Seth Jones of the Rand Corporation, who visited Afghanistan most recently in early 2007, says some elements of the Iranian government may be involved in arms trafficking but that it is "very small-scale support" and that Iran does not want to strengthen the Taliban.

NATO commanders in Pakistan have long been aware that the Taliban has been dependent on Pakistan for its arms and ammunition. The Telegraph reported Sunday that a NATO report on a recent battle shows the Taliban fired an estimated 400,000 rounds of ammunition, 2,000 rocket-propelled grenades and 1,000 mortar shells and had stocked over one million rounds of ammunition, all of which came from Quetta, Pakistan during the spring months.

Tags: afghanistan war, iran war

Kurt Waldheim, the "all-powerful lobby" and contemporary anti-Semitism

2007-06-17T12:29:00.000-07:00

Refugees from the Kozara massacre, perpetrated in 1942; Waldheim was in Bosnia as an intelligence officer on the staff of the West Bosnia Combat Group of Army Group 12 (later Heeresgruppe E) while Group 12 was helping Croatian fascists carry out the massacre and subsequent deportations of survivors to Croatian camps

In the tenth anniversary year of his 1986 Presidential campaign, Kurt Waldheim sat for an interview with G. Hoffmann-Osterhof of Profil magazine, which appeared in the 17.06.1996 number of Profil under the title "Everyone is Afraid". Here I'm going to give long excerpts from my translation of that interview with some comments of my own. Profil's questions are in italics. The bolding for emphasis is mine.

Keep in mind while reading these excerpts that Waldheim in his posthumous "reconciliation" plea complained mightily that he would like to have take a clear historical stand on the crimes of the Third Reich, even though he still denied having done anything wrong in his Wehrmacht service in the bloody partisan warfare and deportations of Jews, Bosnians and Macedonians in the Balkans. In this 1996 interview, he presumably had the opportunity to express his honest view of such matter.

He even says in his first response below that he believed enough time had passed to deal with these things dispassionately". So presumably, the 1996 interview reflected his dispassionate intellectual understanding of the issues he addresses.

Profil: Herr Doctor Waldheim, the title of your book that has just been published is "Die Antwort" (The Answer). But it contain little beyond that which you have already said in the course of recent years. Why did you really write this book?

Waldheim: I wanted to make a summary presentation of my case. On July 8, it will be exactly 10 years ago that I assumed the office of Federal President. Therefore I thought that enough time had passed to deal withthese things dispassionately. But when you say there is nothing new in it, then I don't share that view. For example, I describe what happened when the President of the World Jewish Congress [WJC], Edgar Bronfman, brought pressure to bear on the American Secretary of State, George Schultz, and the US Attorney General, Edwin Meese, to place me on the watch list. It weighed heavily on the two government officials that the Jewish organizations of the USA gave little recognition to the Republican Administration's services on Jewish concerns. Bronfman merely replied, "Our behavior in the Presidential election of 1988 depends on your behavior." When Meese asked, "And what should we do?", Bronfman declared that it would be a useful signal to place Waldheim on the watch list. That is a kind of pressure that is unusual in international life - especially when it concerns two states that have traditionally had friendly relations.

It's true that the World Jewish Congress and other Jewish organizations pressed publicly and privately for Waldheim to be placed on the US watch list, which effectively prevented him from travelling to the US. Waldheim does not mention that Greek organizations in the US were doing the same. He does not site his source for this alleged conversation of Edgar Bronfman with Meese and Schultz.

Hoffmann-Osterhof followed up with a sensible question:

But is it not normal in America that lobbies - Jewish and Arab lobbies, gun lobbies and environmental lobbies and many others - raise their concerns to the government? American politics these days is often described that way. What was so special about that?

The brutal form. I have established serious grounds for that of which I have just spoken.

Waldheim's "dispassionate" response was to duck the question and whine.

In your book, you write about the not merely "powerful" but rather "all-powerful" Israeli lobby, which exerts pressure on politics in America and other states. Perhaps the Israeli lobby has influence, but just how is it "all-powerful"?

We are not experts, but we have at least an insight, because we were compelled to occupy ourselves with it. You need only to read the book by Herr Rosenbaum, the current head of the [US Justice Department's] Office of Special Investigation. Everything is there. Howthe World Jewish Congress was glad that Meese declared himself ready to turn the Waldheim case over to the OSI, while they were thereby spared a lot of work - and above all money - if the investigation was carried out by the Justice Department. That is also something that doesn't come out here in this form - this cooperation. First Herr Rosenbaum was at the Jewish Congress, then he became chief of the OSI - the gentlemen exchange the positions over and over - Neil Sher, Rosenbaum, Sternberg and others.

The book to which Waldheim refers there is Eli MRosenbaum with William Hoffer, Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up (1993).

Waldheim's repeated references to Rosenbaum's book Betrayal are striking. He later says, "I can only recommend that you read the Rosenbaum book closely." Waldheim gives the impression that the book supports his argument of an "all-powerful" Jewish conspiracy against him.

In fact, Waldheim's comments were more of a "preemptive strike" against the book, which had not been published in a German-language edition at that time (and as far as I can tell from an Internet search, has never been published in German). As an experienced prosecutor and war crimes investigator, Rosenbaum makes a persuasive case that, during Waldheim's wartime service in the Balkans, he was directly implicated in criminal actions including: reprisal killings of civilians, among them the notorious the Kozara massacre in western Bosnia led by the fascist Croatian Ustashi forces; the murder of British prisoners-of-war; deportation of Jews to death camps; transport of Italian prisoners to slave-labor camps after Italy's surrender; and, the authorization of anti-Semitic propaganda leaflets. (One of the leaflets apparently authorized by Waldheim exhorted Soviet soldiers, "Enough of the Jewish war. Come over. Kill the Jews." See p. 338 of the book.) Rosenbaum also paints a highly unflattering picture of Waldheim during and after the 1986 election campaign.

But at that time there were also internal Austrian political aspects.

Yes, of course, the whole thing was first of all an internal political campaign. My political opponents in Austria at that time attempted to destroy my chances of becoming Federal President - and they did very well at it back then. The accusations and suspicions were then passed on to the USA. As a result - this is also in the book by Rosenbaum - they sent a Jewish emissary to Vienna, who met with an Austrian in the Stadtpark (city park).

Evidently with Hans Pusch, the head of the Cabinet of then-Federal Chancellor FredSinowatz...

The emissary is said to have met with him, among others. Therefore the Jewish Congress - as one can read in Rosenbaum - sent someone to Vienna at the wishes of the Lobby here in order to get incriminating information.

What Waldheim says here is consistent with Rosenbaum's account. In his book, Rosenbaum describes how he himself went to Vienna and met with a representative from the Socialist Party (since renamed the Social Democratic Party) who he identifies only with the pseudonym "Karl Schuller." In the following, Waldheim refers to Rosenbaum melodramatically as "the emissary."

As I said in an earlier post, I've never understood why the Socialists felt like that had to do such a cloak-and-dagger routine instead of surfacing the information themselves. For one thing, it did make it easier for Waldheim and his supporters to make the whole thing sound like a sleazy smear campaign.

According to Rosenbaum's account, it was Leon Zelman, director of the Jewish Welcome Service of Vienna and survivor of the Mauthausen and Auschwitz camps, who made the first contact with the World Jewish Congress about investigating Waldheim's wartime past. Rosenbaum describes Zelman as having "played a leading role in achieving a rapprochement of sorts between the Jewish world and the people of Austria." (p. 3)

What is so reprehensible about that?

What concern did Herr Rosenbaum and the Lobby over there have with the Austrian election campaign? The Presidency was an internal political concern of Austria...

With a candidate who was UN Secretary General for 10 years.

It is a generally recognized international principle that one does not interfere in the "domestic affairs" - as it is so beautifully called - in the internal political matters of another country.

Do you now mean the interference of the World Jewish Congress?

In the specific case, I mean the World Jewish Congress. But also seen generally.

But do many organization not interfere in the internal matter so states, for example, Amnesty International and Greenpeace?

I just think that it should have been a normal election campaign. I was most deeply convinced that I had not committed any crimes and that the accusations against me were unjustified. Three international commissions and institutions examined the charges against me and came to the conclusion that the accusations against Dr. Waldheim were unjustified.

The interviewer keeps challenging Waldheim with what should be obvious, that the things that the WJC did which Waldheim tries to make sound sinister and unusual were actually things that lobbies and various NGOs (non-governmental organizations) do all the time. Waldheim was also one of the most prominent people in the world at that time, having served two terms as Secretary-General of the UN.

Waldheim here applies a typical tactic of anti-Semites and other conspiracy-mongers. He omits the fact that there were many groups and individuals, both inside Austria and out, who were at a minimum concerned about the revelations.

Another aspect of the case that I haven't yet seen mentioned in the obituary summaries involves the fact that some of the material that implicated Waldheim in war crimes were held by the Communist Tito government of Yugoslavia. One questioned raised by the revelations in 1986 was whether Yugoslavia could have been using those materials in some way to blackmail Waldheim when he was Secretary-General of the UN. But, so far as I'm aware, there was never even circumstantial proof that such blackmail occurred. It was only a theoretical possibility. And that element was also not at all central to the controversy.

Waldheim didn't say which "three international commissions and institutions" it was to which he was referring. But the Report of the International Commission of Historians Designated to Establish the Military Service of Lt. Kurt Waldheim, a Commission assembledby Austrian officials with Waldheim's approval, concluded in its report issued February 8, 1988:

The resulting picture is one of varying proximity to criminal measures and orders under the rules of war. ... In general, some guilt must arise simply from knowledge of violation of human rights, when the person concerned - through lack of personal strength or courage - neglects his duty as a human being in intervening against injustices. ...

The Commission has received no indication of any case in which Waldheim raised objection to, protested at, or took steps against an order for an injustice of which he was certainly aware, in order to prevent or at least hinder the realization of the injustice. On the contrary, he repeatedly assisted in connection with illegal actions and thereby facilitated their perpetration. (my emphasis)

The Austrian Press Service responded to the Commission's report with a bold "preemptive strike" on behalf of their President. The day before the report was released, the Service released a statement stating simply that the Commission "found no evidence" of Waldheim's complicity in war crimes. President Waldheim himself said that his role in the war "was the normal fare of a young Austrian." Presumably, this sharply critical report is one of those to which Waldheim refers in this interview as having come "to the conclusion that accusations against Dr. Waldheim were unjustified."

In the following, the Profil interviewer continues to press him on his conspiracy theory about the vaguely-defined Jewish lobby that Waldheim described in his book as "all-powerful":

Nevertheless, you were isolated. How do you explain that such respectable independent newspapers as the "Neue Zurcher Zeitung" [Zurich] and "Le Monde " [Paris] reported on you negatively? Did they also come under the pressure of the Lobby?

Unfortunately, I cannot completely exclude it. Some are coming under this pressure - even until today!

What constitutes the power of this Lobby?

Look who rules in America. Then you will see it.

How is this pressure exercised concretely -for instance, on newspaper editors? Are they appealed to?

It is a worldwide network that is in operation here. It has great power. I can only recommend that you read the Rosenbaum book closely. There are revelations in it. It is emphatically confirmed that this worldwide network is enormously effective. There is also pressure against journalists. Some, that I still know of from my time in New York, have told me that they lost their jobs because they supported me and tried to counter the smears (Verleumdungen).

This is typical anti-Semitic conspiracy-theory talk. Waldheim again ducked the reality-based questions that the interviewer had posed. He didn't name any of the journalists who had allegedly lost their jobs because of supporting him.

In the following passage, the discussion refers to the major exhibition "War of Extermination: Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941-1944," which appeared in Hamburg in 1995 and Vienna in 1995-96. The exhibition challenged the tendency to minimize the role of the Wehrmacht, the regular armed forces in World War II, in war crimes and especially in the Holocaust.

The exhibit was very controversial because the popular image of the Wehrmacht in both Germany and Austria was that the Wehrmacht had largely performed as a professional military and had no distinct responsibility for the Holocaust, in particular. Since so many millions of German men had been required to served in the Wehrmacht - including men like Waldheim from the Ostmark (annexed Austria) - there was a particular sensitivity about any implication that simply serving in the Wehrmacht directly implicated a person in war crimes or crimes against humanity. Waldheim made full use of this general sentiment about the Wehrmacht to pose as an ordinary German soldiers who did his duty without committing war crimes.

Although it's not relevant to anything Waldheim says in the interview, the Wehrmacht exhibition received close scrutiny, and was eventually withdrawn from public viewing in order to make a number of corrections in response to some legitimate criticisms from historians, including some photos that were incorrectly identified in the exhibit.

A German speech by Hans-Ulrich Wehler, on of Germany's leading historians, is available online at Wehrmacht und Nationalsozialismus 27.01.2002, given on the occasion of the reopening of the corrected exhibit. The Hamburg Institut f ür Sozialforschung has a Web page on the exhibit, Verbrechen der Wehrmacht. Dimensionen des Vernichtungskrieges 1941-1944. An English version is also available.

In your book, you also write in detail about your time in the German Wehrmacht. Recently in Vienna, a much-noticed Wehrmacht exhibition was shown. Did you visitit?

No.

Why not? Didn't it interest you?

I had so many other things to do, and I knew the Wehrmacht.

For those born later, the exhibition was shocking because it shows how the Wehrmacht directly and in the very forefront of its operations in the East and in the Balkans was taking part in the destruction of the Jews. You, by contrast, portray the Wehrmacht very generously as an organization with many anti-Nazis, almost as a gathering point for oppositionists. Isn't there a contradiction?

The deportation of the Jews and their persecution is one of the greatest tragedies of world history. I am the first to regret this, shocked and in the deepest way Yet we didn't know about that. I did not know about the extent of this Jewish persecution - especially during the time of my military service. I first found out about the whole extent of the Holocaust after the war.

But the Wehrmacht provided the logistics for the deportations, and there was from the highest Wehrmacht leadership in Russia the so-called Commissar-Order, in the Balkans "atonement orders, " which directly referred to the destruction of the Jews. You were an information officer...

I never saw such orders.

They didn 't come across your desk?

No. If there were such orders in Russia or elsewhere, then I am shocked and regret it most deeply, because I find nothing more terrible than the persecution of people. If there were such orders, then they were criminal.

In his posthumous "reconciliation" plea, Waldheim wrote:

I regret most seriously that I - under the pressure of monstrous accusations that had nothing to do with my life and my thinking - waited much too long to take a clear and unmistakable position on the Nazi crimes. The reason for that was neither doubtful basic convictions nor any kind of political calculation, but rather the consternation, the offense, even the horror over the content and volume of these accusations.(my translation)

We see in the 1996 Profil interview what his "clear and unmistakable position" on the crimes of the Wehrmacht in service to the Hitler regime were. With reference to the old TV series Hogan's Heroes, We might call it the Sargeant Schultz defense: "I know noth-ink! I see noth-ink!"

In the last part of the published interview, Hoffmann-Osterhof pressed Waldheim for his clear and unmistakable position on the Wehrmacht's criminal actions:

Then the Wehrmacht actually waged a criminal war.

No war is anything good. In our time, we can do only one thing: to help see that such a war is not repeated, that there is no war at all.

Was there a difference between Hitler's war and other wars?

I would say, any war is a terrible experience.

That was Kurt Waldheim. Even in 1996, he was interested only in pandering to the far right. Waldheim's anti-Semitism and his unwillingness to distinguish Germany's war of aggression from any other war will be immediately obvious to most readers. He was probably skirting the borders of Austria's laws against anti-Semitic propaganda in this interview with his nonsense about the worldwide Jewish conspiracy.

Tags: kurt waldheim, second world war

Let's have more like this

2007-06-16T22:11:00.000-07:00

A fundraising letter from Al Gore on behalf of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee came Saturday. This was on the front of the envelope:

Tags: democratic party

Iran, Afghanistan and rumors of warmongers

2007-06-16T21:56:00.000-07:00

Lionel Beehner of the Council on Foreign Relations looks at the question, Is Iran Abetting the Taliban? 06/15/07. He begins by reporting:

U.S. officials say they have found evidence that Iran has supplied weapons to Taliban rebels operating along the Afghan-Pakistani border. This has prompted questions about why majority Shiite Iran would support a Sunni-led force it has opposed for more than a decade.

A very good question. International politics is oftena cynical business so it's not completely unthinkable. But it seems highly unlikely, given Iran's previously hostility to the Taliban regime that was unseated in 2001, Iran's encouragement to the US-backed Karzai government after he became president, and the fact that the Taliban previously hosted Al Qaida, who are Sunni Salafist violent extremists.

Glenn Greenwald recently reminded us that the push for war against Iran is not over, by any means, in More warnings about a U.S.-Iran war Salon 06/15/07 and The NYT on the administration's "debate" over whether to attack Iran Salon 06/15/07). So those of us who would prefer not to have the disaster known as the Iraq War to be extended into Iran and become a far bigger disaster need to pay attention to accusations like this. Remember back in 2002 Saddam Hussein's mountain of chemical and biological weapons, the emminent threat of a mushroom cloud from his booming nuclear weapons program, his hydrogen trailers of death, his plywood drones of destruction, and so on?

Beehner writes:

But experts disagree whether the Iranian government is directly involved. Some refute Gates' remarks and say the weapons could have been smuggled into Afghanistan via various third-party channels. Others suggest they are being supplied by hard-line components within the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, which has a separate agenda from the Iranian foreign ministry, which in turn has a separate agenda from Iran’s business community. "We’re talking about rogue elements," says Col. Christopher Langton, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, "maybe even cross-border organizational criminal groupings." He adds that arms factories in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province make copies of those weapons made in Iran. (my emphasis)

And he describes Iran's support of the current Afghan government this way:

U.S., NATO, and UN officials have all noted Tehran’s support of the current government in Kabul.

Let's stop there for a second. In the recent articles and news reports on the accusation that Iran is supplying weapons to Taliban rebels, do you recall hearing that officials from the United Nations, NATO and the United States say that Iran supports the Karzai government in Afghanistan? That would be the government that the United States actively helped install. The government that NATO is currently supporting with a high-risk military intervention, including 20,000 American soldiers on the last count I heard.

Beehner continues directly:

A number of experts stress that Iran wants stability and prosperity on its eastern doorstep for commercial and trade reasons. That explains why Iran has been such a large donor — giving about $600 million since 2001, according to its foreign ministry — for various reconstruction projects. Iran also wants its population of about 900,000 Afghan refugees, who have aggravated tensions among Iranians by competing for scarce jobs, to one day return to their homeland. Over 850,000 have been repatriated since 2002 but the pace of return has slowed in recent years. Finally, Tehran has sought to curb the flow of opium across the Afghan border, which has generated a drug abuse crisis in Iran; an estimated two million Iranians are drug addicts. “It’s a sensible decision on the part of Tehran if Afghanistan is rebuilt and becomes a normal autonomous state so that all the refugees can go home and the flow of narcotics ends,” says [W. Abbas] Samii [of the Center for Naval Analyses]. (my emphasis)

Iran has had particularly strong ties to Shi'a groups in Herat province. Beehner writes, "Iran has close linguistic and cultural ties to Afghanistan, particularly with Dari-speaking Shiite groups in Herat province and central Afghanistan."

The idea of "rogue elements" in Iran supporting the Taliban that a couple of the experts quoted in the article mention is theoretically possible. But if it's "rogue elements" who are assisting the Taliban - if they actually are doing so - would be a more of a reason not to attack Iran.

Greenwald in his 06/15/07 post is discussing this column by Anatole Kaletsky in the Rupert-Murdoch-owned London Times 06/15/07, Why we must break with the American crazies. Kaletsky reports:

While Mr Brown and the British media are still fretting about who said what to whom about WMD intelligence, the talk in American policy circles is about an article, The Case for Bombing Iran, published two weeks ago in Commentary and The Wall Street Journal and cited approvingly to anyone who cares to listen by officials close to Dick Cheney. Its author, Norman Podhoretz, is an intellectual mentor to the people who took America into Iraq. His self-explanatory message is that Iran today is more dangerous than Hitler’s Germany, since it could soon have nuclear weapons – and that Israel’s very existence is menaced now as never before. (my emphasis)

I linked to The Case for Bombing Iran in a previous post. Podhoretz' view of the world is preculiar:

What follows from this way of looking at the last five years is that the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq cannot be understood if they are regarded as self-contained wars in their own right. Instead we have to see them as fronts or theaters that have been opened up in the early stages of a protracted global struggle. The same thing is true of Iran. As the currently main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11, and as (according to the State Department’s latest annual report on the subject) the main sponsor of the terrorism that is Islamofascism’s weapon of choice, Iran too is a front in World War IV. Moreover, its effort to build a nuclear arsenal makes it the potentially most dangerous one of all. (my emphasis)

Under the umbrella of the vapid construction "Islamofascism", Podhoretz wants us to believe that Iran, a Shi'a theocracy, is the "main center" of the ideology of Al Qaida, the radical Salafist Sunni group.

With a civil war going on between Sunnis and Shi'a in Iraq, with American soldiers caught in the midst of it, you would think that a literate and sane person would be embarassed to write such things. But apparently, you would be wrong.

This is a very similar pitch to the one that led up to the Iraq War: alarmist fluttering about Iran's connection to terrorism, exaggerated presentations of Iran's potential nuclear capabilities, a blurring of critical distinctions behind the vague notion of Terrorism - which isn't an ideology, it's a technique that's used in war as well as in individual attacks that are not part of a war.

The last time we invaded a country (Iraq) on the confident advice of people like Dick Cheney and Norman Podhoretz, it quickly turned into a fiasco. An experience worth remembering when we see and hear scare talk about Iran.

Tags: afghanistan war, iran war

Waldheim's posthumous plea for "Versöhnung" (reconciliation)

2007-06-15T23:06:00.000-07:00

Kurt Waldheim (2nd from left), tireless doer of good deeds, in the Balkans on 05/22/1943 with (from left) Gen. Escola Roncaglia (Italian), Col. Herbert Macholz (Wehrmacht/German) and Artur Phleps (Waffen-SS/German), commander of the "Prince Eugen" Division

Kurt Waldheim left us a statement that was released after his death, to remind us what a rightwing sleaze-bag he was: Waldheim bittet posthum um Versöhnung Der Standard 15.06.07 (Waldheim pleads posthumously for reconciliation).

The full German text is here: Im Wortlaut: Das Waldheim-Vermächtnis Der Standard 15.06.07.

What better way to remember the old war criminal than by looking at his self-representation?

The first few paragraphs of his little testament to the world is blah, blah, I'm a great guy, I cared about the poor people of the world, yadda, yadda.

Then he proceeds to explain that he did nothing at all wrong during the war and that he hopes all them there Jews and socialists will realize how wrong they were to criticize an upright Austrian patriot like him. And how he would have spoken out more strongly about the crimes of the Nazi regime - which he had nothing whatsoever to do with, remember - but he couldn't because all those Jews were criticizing him so much.

Am I being unfair?

Here's the fifth paragraph in German:

Aber auch all jenen, die mir kritisch gegenübergestanden sind, gilt mein Gruß und meine Bitte, ihre Motive noch einmal zu überdenken und mir - wenn möglich - eine späte Versöhnung zu schenken. Vielleicht ist auch dies durch meinen Weggang von dieser Erde leichter geworden. Ja, ich habe auch Fehler gemacht - und glücklicherweise viel Zeit gehabt, um sie immer wieder zu überdenken. Es waren aber sicher nicht jene der Mitläufer- oder gar Mittäterschaft mit einem verbrecherischen Regime. Zu prägend waren für mich die Haltung und das Schicksal meiner Familie. Im Rückblick sehe ich die Ursachen für die zu späte Aufarbeitung des Geschehens vor allem in der Hektik meines übervollen internationalen Lebens und - über Jahre und Jahrzehnte hinweg - auch in meiner Abwesenheit von Österreich und Europa. Als Generalsekretär der Vereinten Nationen war ich nahezu täglich mit Kriegen, Gewalt und politischer Willkür, mit Millionen in Not und Verzweiflung lebender, mit verfolgten, gedemütigten und um ihre um Rettung - unsere Erfolge und unser Scheitern - verstellte, überwucherte zu lange die Erinnerung an die Verbrechen der Vergangenheit. (my emphasis)

This is the classic politicians aggressive non-apology apology - "I apologize if you feel bad because you're such a total jerk" - taken to an absurd extreme. In the first part I've bolded in that paragraph, he says, "But also all those who were critical of me, I give you my salutations and my plea to think over your motive again and - if possible - come to a late reconciliation with me."

This is something like an inveterate segregationist and total racist making a "reconciliation" plea by saying, "I hope all those blacks and Latinos who criticized me unfairly for the most despicable of motives will realize what filthy trash they are and have always been." It's not any plea for reconciliation; it's just more of the sleaze-slinging progoganda he cranked out for the last two decades of his life.

He admits "I've also made mistakes". Kind of like the torturers at Abu Ghuraib would confess that they made a mistake by not keeping the whole thing secret.

As he proceeds to say, "But they certainly weren't the mistakes of a fellow traveler - much less mistakes of someone involved with a criminal regime," i.e., the Third Reich. He says, darn, he would have liked to have said more about the awful things that happened under that regime - which he had nothing whatsoever to do with, nothing at all! - but he couldn't because his whole life he was so busy doing good deeds.

I already want to throw up. And there's still two paragraphs to go.

Es war aber wohl auch jene Staatsraison, die wir junge Nachkriegs-Diplomaten zu vertreten hatten und die uns Österreicher als "Hitlers erstes Opfer" den Weg zu Freiheitund Staatsvertrag geöffnet hatte. Zutiefst bedauere ich, dass ich - unter dem äußeren Druck monströser Beschuldigungen, die mit meinem Leben und meinem Denken nichts zu tun hatten - viel zu spät zu den NS-Verbrechen umfassend und unmissverständlich Stellung genommen habe. Ursache dafür war weder eine zweifelhafte Grundhaltung noch irgend ein politisches Kalkül, sondern die Betroffenheit, Kränkung, ja das Entsetzen über Inhalt und Ausmaß dieser Vorwürfe. "Übernehmen wir die Verantwortung für unsere Fehler in einer Form, die dazu angetan ist, künftige Fehler zu vermeiden", habe ich am 10. März 1988 - 50 Jahre nach dem "Anschluss" an Hitler-Deutschland - in einer Fernsehansprache gesagt. Mehr denn je bin ich heute der Überzeugung, dass alles, was wir Österreicher geschaffen haben, um es an kommende Generationen weiterzugeben, nur dann eine Chance auf Dauerhaftigkeit hat, wenn wir uns auch zu einem gemeinsamen Geschichtsverständnis bekennen. Wo immer ich konnte, wollte ich Menschen versöhnen und verbinden; wollte in Konflikten Brücken bauen und Gemeinsamkeiten stärken. Kaum eine andere Funktion war in diesem Sinn erfahrungsreicher als die des UNO-Generalsekretärs. Umso bitterer war meine Enttäuschung, dass ich diese globale Erfahrung für uns alle im Amt des Bundespräsidenten meiner geliebten Republik Österreich nicht so einsetzen und meine vielen Vorhaben nicht so umsetzen konnte, wie ich das erhofft hatte. (my emphasis)

Here, he whines so hard he rivals the whining of a old-time Mississippi segregationist complaining how badly us white folks are picked on by all those, you know, minorities. Here he explains why, in addition to all those good deeds he was constantly doing, he couldn't address the legacy of the Third Reich like he really wanted to:

I regret most seriously that I - under the pressure of monstrous accusations that had nothing to do with my life and my thinking - waited much too long to take a clear and unmistakable position on the Nazi crimes. The reason for that was neither doubtful basic convictions nor any kind of political calculation, but rather the consternation, the offense, even the horror over the content and volume of these accusations.

A shorter version would be, The Jews are to blame for everything! Yep, that's Kurt Waldheim. Speaking from the grave in the same voice in which he spoke in life.

Then he rattles on some more about how well he served his country and all his good deeds and good intentions and so on for the rest of the document.

I had to chuckle at the note Der Standard left at the end of the text. They said they had shut down the online comments on the article because of "der vielen pietätlosen Kommentare" (the many disrespectful comments) that were posted there.

Doggone, I so wanted to post my respectful comments from this post there. I guess my blog post will have to do.

Tags: austria, kurt waldheim

Kurt Waldheim

2007-06-15T21:27:00.000-07:00

Kurt and Jörg'l: Austrian rightwing "populist" Jörg Haider visiting with then-Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, 1991. Haider caused quite a stir in Austria and beyond in the 1990s with his friendly references to the Third Reich and the SS, but in the end he turned out to be mainly an egotistical clown who likes seeing himself of television. Waldheim was actually around during the Third Reich and was happy to give Haider's "brown" clowning a boost at the time.

Kurt Waldheim, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations (1972-1981) and President of Austria from 1986-1992, died this week. The obituary articles about him inevitably rehash the controversy over Waldheim's involvement in war crimes during his days in the German Wehrmacht during the Second World War. As Austria's current Social Democratic Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer put it this week, Waldheim's campaign for Austrian President "led to many discusstions, above all in connection with the confrontation with Austrian history and the past of our country." ("zu vielen Diskussionen" geführt" habe, "vor allem im Zusammenhang mit der Aufarbeitung der österreichischen Geschichte und der Vergangenheit unseres Landes". - apa/red, no direct link available)

I could write a lot about the whole notion of "Aufarbeitung", which is really means in this context the processing of history in terms of understanding it and confronting unpleasant aspects of it. The "unpleasant aspects" in the case of Austria often having to do with the Third Reich. Austria was annexed by Hitler Germany in 1938 by force, although the Austrian army was ordered by its own dictator not to fight. The late Simon Wiesenthal said in an interview with Der Spiegel 04.12.1995, "The marching Germans on their way to Vienna were hindered only by women with flowers in their arms."(my translation).

But Austria was officially an "occupied country" in the view of the Allies, and so it was regarded differently than Germany during the postwar occupation. Partly but not solely as a consequence of that, Austrian views of the war in histories and the popular tended to portray Austria as more of a victim of Germany and gave little emphasis to the active and often willing collaboration of Austrians during the war. Waldheim's 1986 election campaign, which I'll describe more below, was a catalyst for a more public re-examination of those issues.

First, the history. Without delving too deeply into the sources here, the following is my understanding of Waldheim's issues from his wartime days. This should be an inspiration to me to get my papers better organized. Somewhere around here are a bunch of notes I took about the old boy around 10 years ago, but I can't put my hands on them right away.

So far as anyone was ever able to determine, Waldheim was never a member of the NSDAP (Nazi Party), although his wife was. Waldheim was in a riding club prior to the Second World War that was affiliated with the Party, prompting the quip, "Oh, Waldheim wasn't a Nazi, only his horse was."

But Waldheim was in the German Army, the Wehrmacht. During the war, basically every able-bodied man was drafted, with some exceptions for those who were considered to be working in other vital positions. The Wehrmacht was dissolved after the war; today's German Army is called the Bundeswehr, Austria's the Bundesheer. The Wehrmacht was not considered a "criminal organization" in the Nuremberg Trial sense. But it was guilty of some systematic war crimes, particularly on the easter front, not least of them delivering Jews under their control to Eisatzgruppen and Order Police that the Wehrmacht officers knew would murder them. They also resorted to gruesome tortures, hostage-taking and executions in the partisan war in eastern Europe, a gruesome tendency with which Americans have unfortunately had recent reason to again familiarize ourselves.

Waldheim served for a while on the eastern front, and there was some question as to whether he had served in units that committed criminal actions there, but that was never established. However, several events in his military career which could have involved him in war crimes were established considerably more clearly.

Waldheim did serve as an intelligence officer during the Wehrmacht's partisan war in the Balkans, which was gruesome. He was implicated in rounding up Jews in Salonika, Greece, for deportation. His unit was involved in a notorious massacre at KozaraHe apparently helped round up civilians in Montenegro in areas sympathetic to the partisans to be sent to camps. And he is very likely to have participated in interrogations of captured British paratroopers who were executed after the interrogations. And, as the Italian front collapsed before the Allies, Waldheim played a key role in sending members of the demobilized Italian 11th Army to slave labor camps.

From what I know of it, this last incident is the most solidly documented and that was a criminal action. But any of them could have involved Waldheim in war crimes.

There's a question here of degrees of certainty. (I served on a jury this past week so weighing of evidence is particularly on my mind!) It was never clear to me that any of these incidents were so thoroughly documented - with the likely exception of the Italian soldiers' deportation - that a prosecutor could have shown that Waldheim was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of war crimes. Having said that, though, another apa/red story that also has no direct Web link quotes Neal Sher from the Justice Department's Special Investigation Division this week saying that there would have been sufficient evidence for a war crimes prosecution against him.

But historical standards are different. And from what I know, I believe that he was actually a guilty participant in those incidents that I've mentioned.

I was about to add that I wouldn't want to have a President that had been involved in such crimes. But that would just sound bizarre coming from an American in 2007. After all, today Austria has Heinz Fischer as President and Alfred Gusenbauer as Chancellor. We have George Bush and Dick Cheney. Let's put it this way. It's perfectly legitimate for me to criticize Kurt Waldheim's action of 60+ years ago. And it's fine by me if Austrians (or pretty much anyone else for that matter) want to criticize crimes committed by our current American leaders. Because they are serious. I try to make a regular practice of criticizing them, myself.

When Waldheim ran for Austrian President in 1986 with the support of his party, the ÖVP (the People's Party, conservative Christian Democrats), the SPÖ (Social Democrats, then called the Socialist Party) supported Kurt Steyrer against him. Waldheim had a good shot at winning according to the polls, although he had also run with the ÖVP's backing in 1991 and lost. He was known as a distinguished diplomat and projected animage that Austrian at that time understandably liked the world to see. He looked like a Statesman with a capital "S", in other words. (Well, all vowels in German or capitalized, but I'm using an English saying.)

But instead of slinging their own dirt, the SPÖ alerted the World Jewish Congress (WJC) to Waldheim's questionable Army record; Elim Rosenbaum, who worked on the case for the WJC, describes this in Betrayal: The Untold Story of the Kurt Waldheim Investigation and Cover-Up (1993). This has always puzzled me. I've never understood why the SPÖ couldn't have surfaced these issues more directly. Getting the WJC, based in New York, to take the lead publicly wasn't necessarily the optimal approach. But it's what happened.

Once the WJC started surfacing issues, one thing led to another. Journalists, especially those at Profil, began actively investigating and more and more of the story came out. Waldheim denied the charges and campaigned from a posture of being the victim of slander from foreigners, Jewish foreigners at that. It's worth noting, though, that the WJC did pursue the story even though of the incidents I listed above as being likely true, only the Salonika one involved Jews.

The most famous slogan from the campaign was "Jetzt Erst Recht", which is usually translated "Now More Than Ever". In this campaign poster, it's accompanied by the slogan, "We Austrians vote for who we want."

Critics pointed out that "Jetzt Erst Recht" had been a slogan the Nazis had used in the 1930s in one of their Austrian propaganda campaigns after the country was occupied by Germany. American political junkies may recognize "Now More Than Ever" as a slogan also used by the Nixon-Agnew re-election campaign in 1972.

I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

One of the odd aspects of this campaign was that Simon Wiesenthal, the famous "Nazi-hunter" and ÖVP supporter backed Waldheim against the WJC's attacks. He eventually criticized Waldheim for not being more honest about what his actual wartime service had been.

After Waldheim was elected, the Reagan administration, which can scarcely be suspected of being part of any "Jewish conspiracy", put Waldheim on the "watch list", which effectively meant he was not allowed to travel to the US. Many other countries followed suit. Since Waldheim's big appeal was his previous stature as a distinguished diplomat, the fact that we was scarcely able to travel to other countries in his role as Austrian President was embarrassing.

Waldheim's successor, Thomas Klestil, caused a bit of a ruckus by leaving his wife while he was in office in order to divorce and marry his girlfriend. This inspired a joke: "What's the difference between Kurt Waldheim and Thomas Klestil? Waldheim isn't allowed to travel abroad, and Klestil isn't allowed to go home."

Incidentally, Klestil little family disruption was going on in the 1990s, at the same time that across the Atlantic, the American press was collapsing toward it present-day broken condition by pimping endless sex stories about Bill Clinton. Just as the brouhaha didn't much damage Clinton's popularity as President, Klestil was re-elected after his split with his wife by a large majority.

Although Klestil's background was with the ÖVP, he was so widely respected after his first term that the SPÖ didn't bother to put up a candidate against him. And Klestil distinguished himself as President, largely wiping out whatever embarassing traces Waldheim may have left on the office.

Tags: austria, austrian politics, kurt waldheim, thomas klestil

Treat yourself

2007-06-14T23:21:00.000-07:00

To some of my favorite regular columnists, none of whom is likely to go gaga over Ron Paul. Columnists like these remind us of what American journalism could be. But definitely isn't today. Aside from the Cheney-Bush administration's torture policy, I'm increasingly coming to believe that the biggest danger for American democracy today is the pitiful state of the national press, especially TV.

Gene Lyons explains how Republicans have locked up the pundit vote Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 06/13/07:

Nobody knows who next year’s presidential candidates will be.

This column has no particular favorite and will make no predictions. Even so, it’s not necessary to be a prophet to know how Beltway pundits will handle the so-called character issue. The Republican nominee will be a virile, decisive straight-shooter who’s 100 percent "authentic" and "comfortable in his own skin." The Democrat will be an indecisive phony, uncertain of his/her identity, but willing to strike any pose or pander to any constituency in a self-serving bid for power. That was the basic script for the media’s astonishing "War on Gore" in 2000, the campaign of falsehood and vilification that helped elevate George W. Bush, an ex-preppie cheerleader and bicycling enthusiast dressed up in rugged "Texas Rancher" costumes, to the presidency over then-Vice President Al Gore.

... Mention a prominent Republican and the courtier-pundits swoon like 12-year-old girls at a boy band show.

This is also quite a quotable passage from Lyons:

By now only cultists impervious to facts expect anything but clueless, arrogant bluster from this president.

In short, there’s no evidence that the "Sabbath Gasbags," [i.e., Sunday morning talking heads] in Calvin Trillin's immortal phrase, have any more insight into the candidates' character than a trailerpark palm reader and somewhat less than my basset hound Fred, who could at least sniff their hands and figure out whose ears they’d been scratching.

Robert Scheer eons ago was editor of Ramparts, a leftie magazine (if I'm remembering right, it started as a Catholic leftie magazine) that was part of the 1960s alternative press, that time's rought equivalent of the left blogosphere. So he's wary of being too cozy with the Democrats, being conscious of their ability to get things really wrong at time. I found his gushing over Chuck Haegel, a hardline conservative who occasionally says something mildly critical about the Iraq War, just inexplicable. But his column on Joe Lieberman is more on the mark: ‘President’ Lieberman: A Cautionary Tale Truthdig.com 06/12/07. He writes:

Although now an independent, Lieberman provides a cautionary tale for folks who talk of backing “any Democrat” who can win. ...

Even as late as June 2004, when [the Iraqi National Congress leader and general scamster Ahmad] Chalabi was exposed by the United States as a spy for Iran, Lieberman continued to profess admiration for the architect of a policy that replaced the secular despot of Iraq with Shiite fundamentalists trained in Iran. “I met Dr. Chalabi and others of the Iraqi National Congress,” he said in a speech defending Chalabi after U.S. intelligence uncovered his contacts with Iranian spies. “It’s fair to say I found them to be patriotic Iraqis. Their counsel to us was important.”

In fact, Chalabi’s “counsel” concerning Iraq’s WMD program and ties to al-Qaida turned out to be totally fraudulent and as embarrassing to the United States as it was convenient to Iran’s plans to overthrow Hussein. Lieberman’s statement in support of Chalabi came two months after the National Security Agency reported that Chalabi informed Iranian agents that the United States had broken Tehran’s encryption code. At the time of the revelation, Chalabi traveled freely within Iran, where he maintained a residence.

Then there's Sidney Blumenthal, this week writing about Bush's European disaster Salon 06/14/07. (Isn't it redundant to write "Bush" and "disaster" together?) He writes:

Bush's procession through Europe was a pageant of contempt, disdain, delusion, provocation and vanity masquerading as a welcome respite from his troubles at home. In Albania he landed at last in a place where he was hailed as a conquering hero. His demolition derby of U.S. influence was presented as a series of bold moves, but it confirmed the fears of the other world leaders at the G8 summit (and elsewhere) that the rest of Bush's presidency will be an erratic series of crashes. His performance ranged from King Nod, issuing proclamations oblivious to and even proud of their negative effect, to King Zog (the last king of Albania). No president has had a more disastrous European trip since President Reagan placed a wreath on the graves of SS soldiers in the Bitburg cemetery. Yet Reagan's mistake was unintentional and symbolic, a temporary and superficial setback, doing no real damage to U.S. foreign relations, while Bush's blunders not only reinforced counterproductive policies but also created a new one with Russia that has the potential of profoundly undermining U.S. national security interests for years to come.

I would quibble with Blumenthal's characterization of Reagan's Bitburg blunder. It was a "symbolic" issue, that true. But it also produced the biggest problem in US-German relations (West German, then) between the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949 and the Cheney-Bush administration's 2002 push for war in Iraq. I posted about the Bitburg incident in D-Day, 1985 05/29/04. But Blumenthal's basic point is correct.

Also, it always puzzled me that Bush's crew seemed to think that the German Christian Democrats would be a lot more compatable in foreign policy than the red-green coalition there before. But even though the CDU Chancellor Angela Merkel has been trying to pursue an America-friendly policy, she got the same thing that pretty much everyone else gets who tries to cooperate with this administration: a thumb in the eye:

Bush quite deliberately upset German Chancellor Angela Merkel's proposal for climate change at the G8. She put before the summit a program for carbon limits and an emissions trading system supported by, among others, Tony Blair, as his final gesture to burnish his reputation before he leaves office on June 27. Bush countered with a proposal for voluntary limits that would have to be approved by China, India and other major industrial countries that would not agree. In short, Bush's program was no program at all, except as a gambit to push aside Merkel's. With that, Bush demolished the possibility of any positive plan emerging from the summit. He also deprived Blair of a last achievement. Were it not for his relationship with Bush and support for his Iraq policy, Blair would not be leaving Downing Street. He has sacrificed his career to Bush's fiasco. His advice on the reconstruction of Iraq ignored, his advocacy grew more passionate. From whom much has been asked, nothing has been given.

And that's how Bush treats his friends!

Worst. President. Ever.

Bob Dreyfuss isn't a regular weekly columnist. But he's still one of the best. This week he's writing about Bush's blank check Salon 06/15/07. Dreyfuss' column addresses a vital point, the need to "right-size" the American military - and at a significantly lower cost. He writes:

Nothing underlines the tacit alliance between so-called foreign policy realists and hard-line exponents of neoconservative-style empire building more than the Washington consensus that the United States needs to expand the budget of the Defense Department without end, while increasing the size of the U.S. armed forces. In addition, spending on the 16 agencies and other organizations that make up the official U.S. "intelligence community" -- including the CIA -- and on homeland security is going through the roof. ...

Neocons, war profiteers and hardliners of all stripes still argue that the "enemy" we face is a nonexistent bugaboo called "Islamofascism." It's easy to imagine them laughing into their sleeves while they continue to claim that the way to battle low-tech, ragtag bands of leftover al-Qaida crazies is by spending billions of dollars on massively expensive, massively powerful, futuristic weapons systems.

Finally, Jules Witcover, one of the best political columnists around who, unlike the Dean Of All The Pundits David Broder and his pals, is not only reality-based but also had the good sense to be critical about the Iraq War from the start, with Tooling Up the Obama Machine Tribune Media Services 6/15/07:

This time around, a consensus has formed among the Democratic presidential hopefuls that the war must be brought to an end, with the internal debate on how and how soon this goal can be achieved. Obama, who was only running for the Senate at the time that first critical 2002 vote was taken, nevertheless was on public record against the invasion, warning of the disastrous outcome it could yield.

The Obama phenomenon has obviously been motivated by wide public opposition to the war, Axelrod says. "But there's also a general sense that our politics have failed us, that Washington is in disarray at a time we have huge problems that have to be dealt with, and that the hyper-partisanship, the hyper-ideology, the hegemony of special interests, has made it impossible get anything done. The people are hungry for someone who can cobble the American community back together, and focus the country on the national interest."

Yes, we could have a press corps worthy of the name. And good enough to support a healthy democracy. Maybe someday we actually will.

Ron Paul is a hardline rightwinger

2007-06-14T22:12:00.000-07:00

Liberal columnist Saun Gonsalves is raving about the virtues of far-right Congressman Ron Paul in Ron Paul for President? AlterNet 06/11/07 because of his expressed opposition to the Iraq War:

I feel such gratitude toward the Distinguished Gentleman from Texas [Paul] for his words alone that I just might vote for guy - as a write-in, of course. You sure as hell don't hear Democrats talking like that, other than Dennis Kucinich whose been given the short - guy - with - big - ears treatment by the "liberal" media and therefore doesn't have a snowball's chance, unless ...

... the real conservatives stand up. And then maybe, just maybe, "progressives" and "conservatives" could get together to effect "regime change" in Washington. OK, now I'm getting carried away. Anyways, thanks Ron.

At The American Prospect's Web site, Zack Pelta-Heller, a graduate student at the New School, praises The GOP's Lonely Anti-War Candidate 06/11/07 also. She manages to mention - just barely - that Paul is anti-choice on abortion (she calls his position "pro-life") and that he's "adamantly opposed to amnesty for undocumented immigrants and birthright citizenship for their children."

People: Ron-Paul-is-a-rightwinger!!! Now, if he wants to vote against the Iraq War in the House, great. We'll take all the votes we can get.

But pragmatism is one thing. Liberals lionizing him as a some principled light in the Republican darkness is just goofy. Because in the dark corner of our political landscape where people take his ideas seriously on the gold standard, on how the current American dollar is worthless, on "states rights" and more more - the ones among those people who are against the war oppose it because they think it's all a giant Jewish plot. And not because they follow Likud Party politics in Israel, but because The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is one of their very favorite books.

David Neiwert provides a tour of Ron Paul's political neighborhood in Ron Paul vs. the New World Order Orcinus blog 06/08/07. Commenting on his late popularity among liberals who really should know better, Neiwert writes:

... Ron Paul has made a career out of transmitting extremist beliefs, particularly far-right conspiracy theories about a looming "New World Order," into the mainstream of public discourse by reframing and repackaging them for wider consumption, mostly by studiously avoiding the more noxious and often racist elements of those beliefs. Along the way, he has built a long record of appearing before and lending the credibility of his office to a whole array of truly noxious organizations, and has a loyal following built in no small part on members of those groups. ...

While I think the evidence that Paul is incredibly insensitive on racial issues -- ranging from a racially incendiary newsletter to his willingness to appear before neo-Confederate and white-supremacist groups -- is simply overwhelming, it isn't as simple to make the case that he is an outright racist, since he does not often indulge in hateful rhetoric -- and when he has, he tries to ameliorate it by placing it in the context of what he thinks are legitimate policy issues.

Go check out Neiwert's post for much more detail.

Seeing that silly Sean Gonsalves column reminded me of that saying, credited to Robert Frost (maybe apocraphally), that liberals are people who are so open-minded they won't even take their own side in a debate.

In this case, it appears that some liberals don't even know what their own side is.

Any kind of liberalism (American-style, not European-style, which is something different) worth the name is not the same side as people who support racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, and anti-labor policies and positions in the name of unrestricted freedom for big capital to do whatever its owners feel like doing.

Tags: ron paul

More Iran warmongering?

2007-06-14T20:19:00.000-07:00

From Gates links Iran to Taliban weapons Boston Globe/AP 06/14/07:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates tied Iran's government to large shipments of weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan and said yesterday such quantities were unlikely without Tehran's knowledge. Gates's comments, following accusations by a State Department official, were the strongest yet by a Cabinet secretary about Iran's support of the militant group in Afghanistan.

Whether or not the Sunni extremist "Taliban" is getting weapons from Shi'a Iran is certainly an interesting question.

But let's go on the record early on this one. If Mr. Gates and his Republican friends attack Iran and it goes badly - as it surely will - they will squeal that the problems are all due to the dirty hippie Defeatocrats. No, Mr. Gates, if that happens, it will be another great achievement of the Cheney-Bush administration.

Tags: iran war

Zorro miscellaneous

2007-06-13T20:50:00.000-07:00

I unintentionally posted this Tuesday evening in unfinished form. In case you were wondering why it seemed so cryptic if you saw that version.

My favorite new character on the Zorro telenovela is the One the Only the Great Selenia, a witch who arrived in the New World from Spain. She's rumored to be 150 years old or so. But she has the secret of eternal youth.

Selenia is played by Valentina Acosta, who seems to be particularly good at conveying thoughts, moods and attitudes with her facial expressions. For instance:

Here's the One the Only the Great Selenia on a good day

Here's Selenia on a bad-hair day

Doesn't that expression just say "I'm about to turn you into a toadstool?"

Here's Valentina Acosta displaying a variety of coquettish expressions on the 2006 Colombian telenovela Merlina, Mujer Divina (link to YouTube clip; she appears around 2:38 min. in it).

Merlina, Mujer Divina is currently showing on Telefutura in its 5PM slot, although it's apparently in the final part of its run.

Valentina also appears in a short-film clearly made a few years ago called 3 AM. She plays a woman around 20 or so who the two guys of about that age who star in the film with her might call a "ball-buster". Their characters would, anyway. But her expressions were impressive even then.

There's also a YouTube link. Warning for Baptists! There a brief topless scene at 4:48.

In the story, Valentina's character is riding around in the car during the wee hours with her boyfriend and his buddy. She kisses her boyfriend goodbye when they drop him off. And he goes inside as he lets his friend drive her home. Big mistake! You can guess what happens next.

It just goes to show you, women can certainly mess up perfectly good guy friendships. I mean when I was 20, would I have let a woman like that mess up one of my guy friendships? Um, uh, mmmm, of course not!!

This is supposed to be Zorro miscellany, not just Valentina Acosta miscellany. So here's an image that takes off on Zorro's Robin Hood aspect:

This Che Zorro poster went with a play that was put on last year in (of course!) Berkeley: Culture Clash's funny 'Zorro' slashes to the heart of the matter by Robert Hurwitt San Francisco Chronicle 03/24/06.

Tags: velentina acosta, zorro

Factional fighting in Gaza and the road to Middle East peace

2007-06-13T19:35:00.000-07:00

The title of this El País editorial, Gaza, fuera de control (Gaza out of control) 13.06.07. The Los Angeles Times reports on the latest fighting there: Palestinian infighting worsens in Gaza by Rushdi abu Alouf and Richard Boudreaux 06/12/07. Donald Macintyre reports for The Independent, Hamas seizes Fatah base as bloody battles push Gaza towards civil war 06/13/07.

This is where things stand, 40 years after the Six Day War that left Israel in "control" of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. If we measure the results of that war by the long-term outcome, how much did Israel actually win?

Robert Fisk, also writing for The Independent, recalls in Lies and outrages... would you believe it? 06/09/07 that the French press and public opinion in 1967 were strongly sympathetic to Israel around the Six Day War. So much so that Charles De Gaulle was unusual in a perceptive observation he made, possibly reflecting his own experiences with Algeria:

Only the president of France, General de Gaulle, moved into political isolation by telling a press conference several months later that Israel "is organising, on the territories which it has taken, an occupation which cannot work without oppression, repression and expulsions - and if there appears resistance to this, it will in turn be called 'terrorism'". This accurate prophecy earned reproof from the Nouvel Observateur - to the effect that "Gaullist France has no friends; it has only interests". And Believe It or Not, with the exception of one small Christian paper, there was in the entire French press one missing word: Palestinians.

The American Prospect's June 2007 issue is a special issue on the Middle East. It includes several articles on the Israel-Palestine conflict and possibilities for a real peace agreement, including (articles in the current issue may be behind subscription but soon become generally available):

And the Land Was Troubled for 40 Years by Gershom Gorenberg 05/29/07 (available generally):

Politics was transformed. In 1967, "The agenda changed from building a nation to maintaining an empire," says Shlomo Swirski, academic director of the Adva Center, a Tel Aviv social-policy institute. Before the war, Swirski says, government goals included providing jobs and housing for the Jewish refugees who had flooded Israel in its early years. Those projects had not been completed, but they were pushed aside. "Right" and "left" had previously referred to positions on economics; now they stood for views on settlement, Palestinians, and whether to keep all of the land or give up some for peace.

To this day, every other issue has been postponed -- indefinitely, eternally. Schools deteriorate; national health care covers steadily less; tax cuts for the wealthy barely merit debate. In its first years, Israel was a social democracy; now it is ruled by Friedmanism. Yet a party that campaigns on economics declares itself marginal. What matters is territory and security. In the meantime, social gangrene sets in.

Before 1967, nation building also meant turning a movement into a state, establishing the rule of law and civil liberties. The occupation reversed that process. From the start of the settlement effort, the cause has trumped the law. In the summer of 1967, Allon funneled government funds for the unemployed to the first settlers in the Golan Heights. Aid from officials to lawbreakers has continued ever since.

American Jews and the Mideast by Jo-Ann Mort 05/20/07 (currently behind subscription):

The fact is that 40 years after the 1967 War, which did threaten Israel's survival, Israel's survival is threatened once again. The current threat doesn't come from Hamas terrorism or even Iran; it comes from Israel's failure to extricate itself from the occupied territories in a manner that will ensure its security and future as a Jewish and democratic state - a threat that surely harms U.S. interests in the region as well.

Past Failures, Future Possibilities by Shlomo Ben-Ami 05/20/07 (currently behind subscription):

The solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies in an outline that is embodied in the main peace plans on the table: the Clinton peace parameters and the all-Arab peace initiative of 2002, recently reconfirmed by the Arab League in its Riyadh summit March 28–29. The inadequacy of a strictly bilateral approach was well understood by the initiators of the all-Arab peace initiative. That initiative is, most importantly, a call to regionalize the solution to the conflict after the bilateral approach ended in failure. The loss of mutual trust between the parties and their total incapacity to take even the smallest step toward each other, let alone to observe their commitments without being nursed by third parties, make the creation of an international framework for peace the last and only way out of this dangerous impasse.

Ten Commandments for Mideast Peace by Daniel Levy, Ghaith al-Omari and Robert Malley 05/20/07 (currently behind subscription):

It is in the nature of Israel's democracy to be vibrant, unpredictable, and utterly unmanageable. That is sometimes good (as when an independent commission holds the government accountable for its mismanagement of the Lebanon war), and sometimes less so (as when all government action is seemingly halted as an entire nation awaits the cabinet's fate). The United States cannot afford to shape its actions on the basis of the latest poll or coalition maneuver. Instead, and without being oblivious to political realities, Washington should remind itself that a credible peace plan enjoying strong American backing can count on majority Israeli public support. This, rather than the latest round of cabinet musical chairs, is what should guide U.S. policy-makers. ...

There often will be temptation to play Palestinian politics, especially when parts of the leadership appear nonresponsive to U.S. pressures or, worse, hostile to U.S. interests. And there rarely will be a shortage of Palestinian leaders offering themselves up as potential allies in the hope that ties to the United States will strengthen their hand in the domestic competition. Yet every time the United States has sought to meddle, the meddling has backfired, with results ranging from the ineffective to the outright counterproductive. Lack of understanding is part of the reason, but part only. Added to that is the reality that America's embrace can do more harm than good to those it seeks to benefit. Attempts to isolate and bypass Arafat, to mention but one glaring example, not only failed to reduce his standing; they also contributed to Fatah's fragmentation and to the loss of U.S. credibility and leverage. (my emphasis)

Europe and the Middle East by Chris Patten 05/20/07 (currently behind subscription):

Present policies lead nowhere except to more deaths and to the destruction of more hope. Should Europe continue to think its role is to whistle past the graveyard, hoping for better news while secretly fearing the worst? It may not be popular to say it, but while the road to a peace in Jerusalem did not lead through Baghdad, the road to a more peaceful Middle East certainly demands -- early in the journey, at least -- a peaceful settlement between Palestine and Israel.

I want to see a prosperous and democratic Israel, reflecting values that most of us share on either side of the Atlantic, living at peace with its neighbors -- the sort of peace that the Geneva Initiative would have brought. That is not an anti-Israeli statement, or a pro-Arab one. It is a pro-peace argument, with an outcome that the United States and Europe should recognize is hugely in their own interest.

What, after all, is the alternative?

Also, there is this recent Web-only piece on the subject:

The Year that Never Ended by Jo-Ann Mort 06/13/07, a review of Tom Segev's 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East, just published in English:

Historians disagree about the final moments leading up to the war -- could the superpowers have halted it? Was Egypt really going to strike? Did its closure of the Straits of Tiran foretell more to come? And what about Syria and Jordan? Segev's point -- a critical one, I think -- is that no matter what the situation actually was inside Egypt, Israelis felt certain that they were on the brink of extinction. "War with Egypt was inevitable," he claims. "There is no doubt that the Israelis expected a second Holocaust. I collected 500 letters, mothers to daughters and more, [saying as much.] Rabbis in Tel Aviv were sanctifying football fields because they thought they might have to bury hundreds of bodies. Egyptians don't have a national archives, so we don't know what they really wanted." There are the memoirs written by Egyptian generals, Segev notes, but then adds, "I don't trust Israeli generals, so why should I trust Egyptian generals?". At any rate, what Egyptions really intended is "not the point. It's what Israel thought."

Tags: israel, palestinians, robert fisk

The General's petition against Iran War

2007-06-12T20:36:00.000-07:00

No, not Jesus' General. Wesley Clark.

Clark is promoting an online petition at his home site SecuringAmerica.com and also at the separate stopIranWar.com site he maintains opposing any rush to war with Iran.

The immediate impetus was Joe Lieberman's latest round of warmongering, which Glenn Greenwald deconstructs at some length in Joe Lieberman, warmongering centrist Salon 06/10/07.

Norman Podharetz, one of the intellectual godfathers of the neoconservatives, pleads The Case for Bombing Iran in the lead article of the June 2007 Commentary. It includes a neocon flashback on the glory days when (in their mythology) Ronald Reagan's bold visionary foreign policy defeated the godless Soviets. But in the neocon worldview, that just freed us up to face another world of endless threats and perpetual war for perpetual peace, this time in the guise of Islamofascistodefeatocratomism.

Yes, going to war with Iran would be crazy as all hell. But remember who The Decider is: Dick Cheney, with his assistant George W. Bush.

Tags: iran war

The US future in Iraq

2007-06-11T11:33:00.000-07:00

Steve Benen at the Talking Points Memo cites a Tom Ricks report on the Pentagon plans for a long-term presence in Iraq. One problem with many of these reports and discussions is that they often assume that the choice of how long to stay is exclusively that of the US. It's not, and US troops will eventually have to leave.

But leaving that aside for now, Benen reminds up that all this talk about reducing the number of troops in 2008 and adopting the "Baker-Hamilton" approach and so on has been going on since 2003, with only slight variations in the formula:

This comes on the heels of a report two weeks ago that the White House is "developing what are described as concepts for reducing American combat forces in Iraq by as much as half next year." It'd be more encouraging if we haven't been hearing similar rhetoric for years.

Indeed, the same problem exists here. As publius noted today, we've seen reports just like Ricks' for a long while, and none came to fruition.

Tom Englehardt also looks back at how much we previously knew about the administration's plans for permanent bases in Iraq, lately known as the "Korean model": The Great American Disconnect TomDispatch.com 06/07/07.

Tags: iraq, iraq war

Zorro: Capítulos 79-82 (June 4-8) (Updated)

2007-06-10T18:03:00.000-07:00

It's not nice to fool Mother Nature! (Valentina Acosta as the One the Only the Great Selenia)

Olmos demanded that Selenia demonstrate her powers before they completed their transaction for the love potion. The One the Only the Great Selenia was not happy. But she waved her new magic ring so that it sparkled three times, which let her hypnotize Olmos so that he would see himself in her mirror as dashingly handsome, the way she promises that Mariángel/"Mangle" will see him once the potion takes effect.

Cathy at Caray, Caray! was also reminded by this scene of Selenia and Olmos of the old TV commercial where Mother Nature gets grimly threatening at the end because some shampoo or other is imitating her work too closely.

A common scene in telenovelas is one that I think of as the "bitch face-off". Maybe someone can tell me if there's a standard trade name for it. But it's where two female characters, usually rivals in love and/or business, confront each other with nasty looks and barbed words. Sometimes the face-off is followed by another hallowed convention, the cat-fight. We saw that progression this week when Mangle visited her half-sister Esmeralda in the basement where el Comandante Montero is holding her.

The bitch-face-off is a good way of establishing the power hierarchy of the moment, and it's also a way of establishing character. In the Mangle/Esmeralda one this week, Mangle was obviously in a more powerful position at the moment. But Esmeralda responded with tragic dignity. Mangle recognized that she'd lost the face-off when she jumped Esmeralda.

There are face-offs between men and women, too.

Diego with his adoring wife

Diego had one with Mangle when they got back from Esmeralda's (presumed) grave. Diego doesn't trust her and knows she's bad. He just doesn't realize yet how bad. This week he offered to make sure she was taken care of and that the child is educated. But he says there's never going to be any romance between them. Mangle's trying hard because, well, that's just what she does. Anyway, this expression of dignified and restrained but unmistakable contempt pretty much sums up Diego's attitude toward Mangle.

The men don't always win the man/woman face-offs, by any means. For instance, the Queen had a face-off with el Duque Jacobo and told him, in a polite, regal kind of way, to cut out the stalling and set up her trip to the New World.

La Reina straightens out el Duque

Then there are guy-to-guy face-offs, which in Zorro often involve weapons. We had a few of those this week, including Alejandro almost killing el Gobernador Fernando, Fernando almost killing some guy in the tavern who was daydreaming out loud about María Pía and Zorro facing down Pizarro and one of his thugs, each of them holding pistols. But Zorro had two pistols, and his were revolvers and theirs were single-shot. So they had to lower their pistols and acknowledge that Zorro was the alpha-dog of the moment.

Two-gun Zorro shows he's the alpha dog - or alpha fox, as the case may be

But somehow, in the telenovelas the face-offs between the women are often particularly dramatic and ferocious. At the end of the week, Mangle was ridiculing Olmos with her madwoman cackle and ~~demanding that he set up an appointment for her with Selenia~~. The Mangle/Selenia face-offs are going to be fun. If Mangle is out of her depth in dealing with Diego and his family, she'll be deep down in the pit confronting Selenia! [Update: Margarita pointed out at Caray, Caray! that it was actually the old blind Indian medicine woman that Mangle was demanding to see. I checked the tape, and she's right. Darn! I had a Freudian mis-hearing on that one, because I really wanted to see Mangle and Selenia have a showdown. Too bad.]

Selenia has had only one of that kind of face-off so far, with the barmaid at the tavern. It was no contest. Mangle is going to wind up feeling as small as Tarsisio, Selenia's magic dwarf. I assume he's magic, but so far all we've seen him do is serve her table. Tarsisio set up Selenia's triumphant line of the week by praising her brilliant sorcery. To which she replied that she was "la única, Tarsisio, la única, la Gran Selenia", (the One, the Only, the Great Selenia).

Separated at birth? Selenia's magic dwarf slave Tarsisio and the Mad Hatter

Selenia's appearances have become the highlights for me. But plot-wise, the most important development of the week was Esmeralda having her second "resurrection". As I mentioned in an earlier summary, her mother Sara Kalí/Mercedes Mayorga de Aragón was presumed dead but was "buried" in the dungeon for 20 years, then she was literally buried and dug up by Agapito the surgeon and general jack-of-all-trades. Like Elijah the prophet, he can even raise the dead! (For the godless heathens out there, that's Elijah from the Old Testament.)

Esmeralda is presumed dead and was "buried" (it was actually a body substituted by el Comandante), but she was really "buried" in the dungeon, too, just like her mother. She was moved to another "grave", the basement room in the cabin in the forest. And this week she escaped.

Esmeralda resurrected

The visuals of Esmeralda escaping in the night running through the woods hiding from el Comandante's thugs, tinted in blue as in this screenshot, were some of the best of the series. In this moment, Marlene Favela gets to combine the tragic adult Esmeralda with her intrepid Nancy Drew girl-adventurer side. This combination has been one of the appealing aspects of her character all along.

And it's worked well in the story. For instance, at the end of the week, she has made it to the edge of the De la Vega hacienda, where she would be safe. But she sees Diego's carriage right at the moment that Mangle is throwing herself at him yet again. She impetuously decides that the smooching is voluntary on Diego's part and let's the carriage go right by her without calling out. Instead she stands there feeling sorry for herself like a jealous teenager. Now, since she was being held in a basement with her family and her True Love thinking she was dead, being tortured and starved by her sadistic husband el Comandante Montero, feeling sorry for herself is understandable. But the more mature Sara Kalí or María Pía would have done a double take for a second or so, then called out to Diego for help, whether he was smooching her rival or not.

As we see in the previews, el Comandante catches up to her just after that. So it's potentially a fatal delay. It won't be, of course. Having been resurrected, I'm guessing she won't even wind up back in her "grave" in the basement.

Zorro Hood: Zorro distributes Montero's fortune - which he liberated shortly before - to the poor

Zorro had some good action this week. He saved the Marquesa on her way back to Mexico City from being assassinated by Pizarro and some hired thugs. And he robbed el Comandante Montero's treasure stash from the El Callao prison,leaving a big Z behind slashed on a blanket on the wall. Montero does not take this well.

Zorro steals Montero's fortune - Montero responds by nearly allowing his head to disintegrate

Here we get to see Zorro in his Robin Hood role that makes him so popular among the poor of la Ciudad de los Ángeles. In the scene where he hands out Montero's treasures to los pobres, he thinks to himself that this is money and valuables that el Comandante essentially stole from Esmeralda through her forced marriage and torturing Diego. So he's doing this particular action for her, getting revenge on el Comandante and also making sure that the money goes to help the needy, because that's where her sympathies lie, as well.

One of the things I find appealing about telenovelas is that they give more serious attention to social issues like immigration (for the ones set in the present day) than the typical American TV series does. Not that they are didactic social dramas, far from it. The issues often arise in the stock romantic situation of a poor woman falling in love with a rice man, or a rich man with a poor woman, etc.

In Zorro, the condition of los indigenos, the native Indian tribes, gets a lot of emphasis. Of course, the notion of a Spanish priest like Padre Tomás and the convent being strong advocates for protecting the Indians and sheltering escaped slaves is a romanticized version of that period in California history. Despite the Pope's ill-considered pronouncement in Mexico last month, the Church not only forced conversions but enslaved many Indians outright. There were individual dissenters, and there may very well have been individual characters like Padre Tomás in the 1810-1820 period in which Zorro is set. But his character seems to owe more to social-activist priests of the last century than to the actual Californio priests of the 19th.

As I mentioned in comments atCaray, Caray!,the Isabel Allende novel El Zorro gives some background that I think is helpful for the telenovela. For instance, "limpieza" (pure blood) was a big theme in Spanish life going back to the days of the Inquisition. And in her novel, the various distinctions between "pure blood" Spaniards, local-born "pure" Spaniards, mestizos and native Indians is discussed quite a bit. In the telenovela, it comes up explicitly in the discussion of why Toypurnia/Regina went back to her tribe while Alejandro went to Europe. And Diego's mixed blood was mentioned a couple of times in connection with the suitability of his marriage to one of Fernando's daughters. The intense contempt that Mangle showed for Yumalai/Guadalupe in Friday's episode could also be understood in that context.

Interestingly enough, despite the number of tough and determined women in this telenovela - Esmeralda, Yumalai/Guadalupe, Toypurnia (in flashbacks), María Pía (off and on), Almudena (despite her physical weakness), the Marquesa, Selenia, of course - the story also depicts the Spanish women as being clumsy and inexperienced in things like horse riding and handling weapons. Actually, it was more the norm at that time for the colonial women in California to be very good on horseback, for instance. Even in the pulp serial The Curse of Capistrano in which author Johnston McCulley first introduced Zorro to the world in 1919, Zorro's love interest, Lolita Pulido, is an expert horseback rider. Isabel Allende tells us in the last part of her novel that Diego would eventually marry Lolita Pulido.

Of course, this week there was a scene which was apparently inserted to show that Sara Kalí is also not someone who takes to being pushed around. Still disguised as a leper, she and a group of others from the leper colony are harassed by some soldiers sneeringly "flirting" with them. As one young guy addresses Sara Kalí individually, she slugs him in the face and he goes down on the ground. I guess she spent a lot of time doing pushups for those 20 years in the dungeon!

The Tobías comic-relief thread took another step this week, though it's getting darker. Tobías was playing around in his Zorro suit when Maestro Samaniego walks in the room and is (literally) scared todeath by the sight. But while trying to get approval for his burial - there's a bureacratic snag because el Maestro doesn't have family around - Tobías watches el Capitán Pizarro and Tobías wife Catalina doing the Wild Thang again. Pizarro this time talks about murdering Tobías to get him out of the way. Catalina objects, but proceeds to make love to Pizarro anyway. Tobías could be forgiven for thinking this was less than a whole-hearted defense on Catalina's part. At the end of the week, he's calling her a slut and choking her with his hands in the room with el Maestro's coffin. Could be ominous symbolism for Catalina's immediate future.

María Pía finally leaves the convent this week after fessing up to her undying love for el Gobernador Fernando. But she doesn't intend to marry him, with his being a serial killer and all. But she gets drunk at the tavern with Diego and then tells him that el Gobernador was the one who murdered his mother Toypurnia/Regina. As J.R. puts it in her detailed summary of the episode at Caray, Caray!, Diego "is muy impactado".

And the Almudena death watch continues. She's accepted her near-term death as inevitable. But she's determined to complete her training of Yumalai to be a proper Spanish lady (Yumalai's Guadalupe mode) and expects her to take over as Alejandro's husband. Something Alejandro will no doubt solemnly agree to do, since he practically drools every time he sees Yumalai.

Almudena prepares Yumalai to take over as Wife #1

Silvia in comments at Caray, Caray! poses a question that's crossed my mind, too, "I wonder if she would be so encouraging if she knew her beloved Alejandro boinked little sister [Yumalai] on his wedding night?"

Actually, I'm thinking that Almudena pretty much figures that something like that is going on. After hanging around with Fernando and a bunch of aristocratic Spanish types all her life, she probably figures a mistress is just part of the deal. Plus, she genuinely likes Yumalai. By training Yumalai to be Guadalupe, she bridges the gap between the best of Spanish culture and the best of native culture.

After all, in the native world whose rules Yumalai plays by (well, except when she doesn't), and which the De la Vega family generally honors, the tribal rules say she's Alejandro's wife and doesn't have a real choice. Alejandro has already said she would not be able to take a husband in her tribe because of the rule. So he's not going to do the Hagar routine on her. (Another Old Testament reference, Abraham kicks Hagar and Ishmael out to die in the desert because his wife Sarah is jealous.) And the fact that María Pía's immediate reaction in an earlire episode when Alejandro first told her that Yumalai was Toypurnia/Regina's sister was amusement because of the little-sister rule, tells me that Yumalai is going to wind up more as Rachel (another O.T. reference, Jacob has to marry to homely older sister Lea but works another seven years to marry his true love Rachel, too) than as Hagar.

Finally, the Zorro mystery of the week. El Gobernador Fernando keeps a picture of a woman on the wall behind his office desk. It doesn't appear to be María Pía and that's unlikely anyway. He hates Esmeralda and Sara Kalí/Mercedes, so it's not likely to be one of them. It could be Almudena or Mangle. I'm guessing Mangle's mother. But it adds a ghostly touch to Fernando's office.

Tags: zorro, zorro telenovela

Shakira Makes History In Mexico

2007-06-10T14:30:00.000-07:00

That's the title of this YouTube video of her performing "Te Dejo Madrid" in Mexico City on May 27. It was featured on the front page of her Web site, so I'm guessing this was an officially-authorized video.

Tags: shakira, shakira mebarak

Al Gore and "amygdala politics"

2007-06-09T16:40:00.000-07:00

Al Gore's new book The Assault on Reason (2007) has already received a lot of comment and attention, much of it reflecting the mainstream press hostility to Gore that made possible the election theft of 2000. Digby thought Gwen Ifill's recent interview with the author was so awful that "Ifill was practically chewing gum and popping bubbles in Gore's face as she asks him about his, like, totally boring book."

The video of the interview, Gore's New Book Criticizes Bush Administration PBS Newshour 05/30/07, is very worth watching, because Gore got his message across despite Ifill's airhead approach. One surprising example was Ifill's last question:

GWEN IFILL: Let me ask you one final question, which is, as you were putting this book together and assembling your thoughts about what you see as a broad-based collapse in a lot of the way we think and reason in our society, did you ever think to yourself, based specifically on the indictment that you make against the Bush administration, that perhaps you conceded too soon in 2000?

AL GORE: Well, there was - I took it all the way to a final Supreme Court decision. And in our system, there is no intermediate step between a final Supreme Court decision and violent revolution.

So, at that point, having taken it as far as one could, then the question becomes, are we going to be a nation of laws and not people? Do I support the rule of law, even though I disagree withthe Supreme Court's decision? I did disagree with it, and I think that those of us who disagreed with it will have the better of the argument in history.

This kind of hostility by our so-called "press corps" to Gore himself as well as their general indifference to substantive issues of the sort he raises in his book is all we could expect from them, of course.

Fortunately, we can expect a lot more from Al Gore. And he delivers. The book's title, The Assault on Reason, is appropriate because he has organized the book as a defense of Enlightenment ideals of reason in the age of Freud and the Internet. You could say it's a case study, focusing on the genuine crisis in American democracy that the Cheney-Bush adminstration has created.

I found myself thinking as I read it that Gore must have sat down at some point for a long series of conversations with Jerry Brown and the Christian philosopher Ivan Illich, and emerged with his own vision of Jacksonian democracy for the digital era. But the book is neither a list of legislative proposals nor the sort of extended stump speech that usually emerges when politicians write a book. It is written in accessible language, which might give the impression by just selecting a few paragraphs at random that it leans toward vague an "safe" rhetoric. That impression would be wrong. Maybe the fact that Gore knows that anything he writes will be savaged by our sad excuse for a "press corps" gives him a freedom to describe the present crisis of democracy and the dictatorial inclinations of the Cheney-Bush administration in straightforward ways.

His bluntness about two things in the book was especially striking to me: his strong and prominent condemnation of torture, and his recognition of the literally criminal nature of the administration's decision to invade Iraq.

Reflecting in part his own Christian religious values, Gore first brings up the Cheney-Bush torture policy on the first page of the introduction:

To take another example [of "what has gone wrong with our democracy"], for the first time in American history, the executive branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutiony War.

Gore recognizes that throwing the gates open to the kind of brutal, sadistic torture that has resulted from the Bush policy - mock executions by partial drowning, extreme sexual humiliation and perversion, rape, beatings, tying prisoners into painful postures for extended periods - that allowing this opens the way to a kind of lawlessness and brutality that has far-reaching consequences. A Pandora's box image is an appropriate one for the impliations of Cheney's and Bush's decision to make torture the official policy of the US government; they've let demons out of the box that will be very hard to put back in.

Gore recounts many instances of lawless behavior by this administration and explains in some detail the problems with Cheney's radical Unitary Executive theory under which he and Bush have operated. And Gore not only doesn't hold back from criticizing Bush's violations of international law. He emphasizes who very problematic they have been. Attacking the Bush Doctrine of preventive war, he writes:

At the level of our relations with the rest of the world, the administration has willingly traded in respect for the United States in favor of fear. This administration has coupled its theory of American dominance with a doctrine of preemptive strikes, regardless of whether the threat to be preempted is imminent or not. George Tenet, director of the CIA from 1997 to 2004, made it clear that the Agency never said Iraq was an imminent threat. For this administration, the threat to be preempted didn't have to be imminent. ...

If other nations asserted the broader right to preemption that the Bush administration has, ... then the rule of law would quickly be replaced by the reign of fear. Under this approach, any nation that perceives circumstances that could eventually lead to an imminent threat would be justified in taking military action against another nation. In other words, President Bush initiated one of the most fateful military doctrines in history. He abandoned what we thought was America's mission in a world in which nations are guided by a common ethic codified in the form of international law. (my emphasis)

This is also a good example of Gore's approach in this book. He sticks with the official term "preemptive" war and does not try to explain the more technical legal distinction between preemptive war, which is legal, and preventive war, aka, a war of aggression, which is not. But the passage I just quoted focuses on the substantive distinction between the two and recognizes the legal distinction, as well. Given the near-total lack of decent reporting on issues relating to the laws of war, it would require at least a page or two to give an intelligible description of what the distinction between "preemptive" and "preventive" war means.

Gore's book covers a wide range of issues: the Iraq War, international treaties and alliances, fighting terrorism, the politics of secrecy, the concentration of wealth, the conservative strategy to pack the courts with rightwing zealots, and, of course, global climate change. He describes this administration's crimes, failures and misdeeds in enough detail that it can be pretty, let's say, sobering to read two or three chapters at one stretch. In other words, not at all boring but also not light entertainment.

It's important to recognize the idea that organizes the book, especially since it's so far outside the comprehension of our "press corps" gatekeepers of the news, focused as they are on critical national issues like John Edwards' haircuts and Mike Huckabee's faulty memory for Ronald Reagan's birthday.

And the organizing idea is not, let's sit down and reason together, as Lyndon Johnson used to say. The idea is to repair the damage to American democracy and revitalize citizen participation so that the powewr of reason can be brought to bear on national problems.

Kenneth Galbraith: More relevant than ever

Gore proceeds from two key assumptions. One is the reality of modern marketing, which the late John Kenneth Galbraith was unusual among economists in recognizing: the fact that consumer needs can be created, manufactured. As Galbraith himself formulated the issue in the last book he published during his lifetime, The Economics of Innocent Fraud: Truth for Our Time (2004):

As does the voter, the buyer has the right to exercise independent choice, to opt out. This some do; they resort to a lifestyle outside the system that is thought eccentric, even slightly insane. The existence and exercise of such choice does not lessen the force of market persuasion. Ecnomics as taught and believed lags well behind the reality in all but the business schools.

The concept of consumer sovereignty, to repeat, is still avowed in economic instruction and in defense generally of the economic system. There are still the curves and the equations. Once, after describing the reality, I was sought out for severe professional economic criticism. Advertising and salesmanship were of atmospheric irrelevance. The demand curve featured the truth; the consumer ruled. I was sternly and repeatedly reminded that even the all-powerful Ford Motor Company had failed to persuade consumers to buy an oddly shaped vehicle named for a Ford descendant — the Edsel. Here was proof of consumer sovereignty; not even a Ford could prevail.

Belief in a market economy in which the consumer is sovereign is one of our most pervasive forms of fraud. Let no one try to sell without consumer management, control.

Central to this transformation in the relation of citizens and consumers to government and business has been the technology of television. Gore describes the way in which the printing of books, pamphlets and broadsides in the highly literate American society of the late 1700s was basic to the type of democracy and the notion of citizen participation that generated the American Revolution and became embodied in the American Constitution.

In the 20th century, first radio and then television produced a different relationship of the citizen to the news and information we receive about public affairs. Whyat was a far more interactive process in the days of Thomas Paine has become overwhelmingly a one-way transmission of information and opinion.

This dependence on television makes the politics of fear practiced by the Cheney-Bush administration a far more dangerous possibility:

Research shows that television can produce "vicarious traumatization" for millions. Survey findings after the attacks of September 11 showed that people who had frequently watched television exhibited more symptoms of traumatization than less frequent TV viewers. One analyst of this study said of respondents describing their reactions to 9/11, "Those who watched the most television reported the most stress."

The physical effects of watching trauma on television — the rise in blood pressure and heart rate—are the same as if an individual has actually experienced the traumatic event directly. Moreover, it has been documented that television can create false memories that are just as powerful as normal memories. When recalled, television-created memories have the same control over the emotional system as do real memories.

Gore is not aguing here that seeing a violent scene on TV causes people to run out and hurt somebody. He is arguing that it mobilizes emotional responses in a way that receiving information by print does not, making it less likely that reason will play its necessary role in judgment.

Benjamin Franklin, man of the Enlightenment, champion of reason and democracy, one of the greatest scientists of his day

He uses the phrase "amygdala politics" as a description of political fear-mongering, based on the part of the brain that is activated during traumatic events and results in those fear-inducing memories being stored in the brain in a different way than others. He quotes research psychologist Michael Fanselow of UCLA: "The available evidence suggests the amygdala learns and stores information about fear-arousing events but also modulates storage of other types of information in different brain regions" (Gore's emphasis).

Present-day science has not only learned more about how the brain works. It also enables that knowledge to be put to use in sophisticated persuasion techniques. Gore uses the story of Sigmund Freud's nephew Edward Bernays, who emigrated from Austria to the US and "adapted the revolutionary insights of his uncle to create the modern science of mass persuasion". He writes:

One of Bernays's first breakthroughs involved his work for the American Tobacco Company, when he interviewed psychoanalysts to discover the reason women in the 1920s would not smoke cigarettes. Upon learning their view that women of the era saw cigarettes as phallic symbols of male power and thus inappropriate for women, Bernays hired a group of women to dress and act as suffragists. They marched down New York's Fifth Avenue in a parade for women's rights and upon passing news photographers pulled out and lit cigarettes, proclaiming them "torches of freedom." The strategy worked to break women's resistance to cigarettes.

Gore is not talking about the legendary "subliminal persuasion", as in the often-told tale of the movie theater whose popcorn sales soared when the owner flashed pictures of popcorn onto the screen too fast to register in conscious perception. (That story is urban folklore, by the way.) Bernays' strategy to identify cigarette smoking as the mark of an independent-minded woman was scarcely "subliminal". It was in-your-face obvious.

The point is that the predominance of television as the primary news source for most voters provides an excellent vehicle for Karl Rove's "amygdala politics" on terrorism. And the increasing control of the media by huge entertainment corporations creates additional pressure to emphasize lurid and emotionally gripping stories even in regular news broadcasts.

Kenneth Galbraith began the final chapter of his excellent and vastly under-appreciated 1992 book The Culture of Contentment with these words:

Books of this genre are expected to have a happy ending. With awareness of what is wrong, the corrective forces of democracy are set in motion. And perhaps they would be now were they in a full democracy - one that embraced the interests and votes of all the citizens. Those now outside the contented majority would rally, or, more precisely, could be rallied, to their own interest and therewith to the larger and safer public interest. Alas, however, we speak here of a democracy of those with the least sense of urgency to correct what is wrong, the best insulation through short-run comfort from what could go wrong.

There is special occasion here for sadness - for a sad ending - for what is needed to save and protect, to ensure against suffering and further unpleasant consequence, is not in any way obscure. Nor would the resulting action be disagreeable. There would be a challenge to the present mood of contentment with its angry resentment of any intrusion, but, in the longer run, the general feeling of security in well-being would be deepened.

Gore's book doesn't end on quite so glum a note; Galbraith's final chapter was called "Requiem". Gore points to developments like Internet organizing, blogging and interactive Internet TV as technological developments that open up new possibilities for democratic participation, what I called above Jacksonian politics for the Internet age.

But The Assault on Reason could be seen as a continuation of Galbraith's The Culture of Contentment. Because Gore doesn't claim to present any magic-bullet solutions to the problems he describes so dramatically. Democracy and the rule of law are in real trouble in the United States.

Although it's not like we're going to wake up one day and find out the President claims total power to do what he wants, even reading our mail and tapping our phones and checking our library books on his own discretion, or arresting American citizens and holding them indefinitely without charges, or ignoring any laws he wants to, or, uh, wait a minute...

Tags: al gore, assault on reason

Romney, inspections and the start of the Iraq War

2007-06-09T12:09:00.000-07:00

Hans Blix. Yes, Virginia, there were UN weapons inspectors in Iraq in 2003 before the war (no matter how many times leading Republicans lie about it)

Is it really too much after all this time to expect the mainstream media to at least inform their readers when a major Presidential candidate is misstating the most basic, verifiable facts about the Iraq War?

Apparently so: Romney's Iraq Gaffe Ignored: GOP contender's bizarre pre-war history FAIR 6/8/07.

The misstatement in question is this one from Mitt Romney in the June 5 Republican Presidential debate:

If you're saying let's turn back the clock, and Saddam Hussein had opened up his country to IAEA inspectors, and they'd come in and they'd found that there were no weapons of mass destruction, had Saddam Hussein, therefore, not violated United Nations resolutions, we wouldn't be in the conflict we're in. But he didn't do those things, and we knew what we knew at the point we made the decision to get in.

Some things are interpretations, some things are judgments and some things are verifiable facts. The fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors were admitted to Iraq in response to the 2002 UN Security Council resolution demanding it is just not in doubt. As FAIR puts it:

Romney's suggestion that weapons inspectors were not permitted into Iraq before the war started is, of course, incorrect. Weapons inspectors from UNMOVIC (the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission) returned to Iraq on November 18, 2002. Led by Hans Blix, the inspectors spent months in Iraq, issuing reports on Iraqi compliance that were a crucial part of the debate over whether to invade Iraq.

Blix himself provided a great deal of detail on the experience in his 2004 book Disarming Iraq.

Commenting on the nasty and dishonest criticism leveled at him by American war hawks during the inspections in Iraq just prior to the US-British invasion, Blix writes:

[T]he fact that Saddam Hussein's regime was one of the most brutal the world had seen and had long been a danger to the region did not justify any twisting of observations or uncritical attitude to evidence.

Something worth remembering, both in terms of looking at the sad history of the Iraq War and in current controversies like that over the Iranian nuclear program.

It was on March 14, 2003, a Friday, that the negotiations over a follow-up Security Council resolution authorizing military action against Iraq broke down. The Bush administration had agreed to ask for this resolution largely at the request of their faithful ally Tony Blair, who believed he needed the political cover, though the evidence in the public record leaves little doubt that he and Bush had agreed months before to invade Iraq regardless of weapons inspections.

On Sunday, March 16, the Bush administration asked Blix to withdraw the inspectors from Iraq, prior to the initiation of military hostilities. Blix withdrew them on the following day. Blix writes that the Security Council required his inspection team to present a four-month work program on March 19, even though it was clear that efforts to avoid war had failed:

The reason why many members of the Council wanted to have the [proposed work] program on the table was no doubt that they were keen for the world to see that the inspections were going on in the good order set by the Council itself, and that the interruption was not the result of any failure of the inspections regime. It was caused by an unjustified armed action by the U.S. and the UK. (my emphasis)

The bombing began on March 20. And as of today, there's no end of the war in sight.

For good measure, here's the "just the facts, ma'am" description of the sequence of events leading up to the war from the Encycopædia Britannica ("Iraq." Encyclopædia Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica 2006 Ultimate Reference Suite DVD. [Accessed June 9, 2007]):

By the end of 2002, Iraq had announced that it would cooperate with the inspectors on the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, andInspection Commission (UNMOVIC) on weapons of mass destruction (WMD). ... Thereafter, UN inspection teams worked for several weeks in Iraq, but their final report was inconclusive. Meanwhile, the U.S. and the U.K. continued to build up military forces around Iraq (mainly in Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain). They claimed that Iraq was still concealing some WMD and threatened military action if Iraq did not disarm. Other countries, notably France, Germany, and Russia, demanded that UN inspectors be allowed more time to reach conclusive results. The U.S. and the U.K., however, decided to act on the authority of UN Resolution 1441. This resolution, adopted unanimously by the Security Council on Nov. 8, 2002, demanded that Iraq accept rigorous arms inspection.

On March 17, 2003, U.S. Pres. George W. Bush issued an ultimatum demanding that Iraqi Pres. Saddam Hussein (see Biographies) and his cohorts leave the country within 48 hours. The U.S. ultimatum was rejected, and the UN inspection team left Iraq. On March 20 the first air attacks on Baghdad began, and soon afterward U.S. and British ground forces invaded southern Iraq from Kuwait. (my emphasis)

It's pitiful that after all this time, our "press corps" can provide excruciating details about Paris Hilton's drunk driving jail sentence, but still can't be bothered to correct blatant falsehoods from leading Republicans about the Iraq War. But, hey, Al Gore is putting on weight again, isn't he? And do you think he's had some cosmetic surgery around the eyes there?

Tags: iraq war, mitt romney

Steve Gilliard, 1964-2007

2007-06-09T10:43:00.000-07:00

Photo by Lindsay Beyerstein, from Steve Gilliard's News Blog site

I haven't written anything before now on the death of Steve Gilliard, who was one of the pioneers of the liberal blogosphere. He was one of the original front-page bloggers at Daily Kos. I learned a lot from reading his blog. And I'd like to think I've incorporated a couple of elements of the non-nonsense bluntness of his writing style into my blogging.

The blogging I most appreciated of Steve's was his work on military affairs. He was extremely good at reading between the lines of official statements that were designed to hide problems in the Iraq War. He never lost sight of the fact that events on the ground were going to drive the course of the war there. Or, as the military puts it, the enemy has a say in the outcome.

I also found his writing on African-American politics, and on the neo-Confederate and other far-right ideologies, very helpful. In particular, he was very good about stressing that we shouldn't get too distracted by the religious talk of the Christian Right, no matter how "sincere" their beliefs may be. Because he always kept a focus on the fact that white Christian fundamentalists and white folks who really don't like black people are two groups that heavily overlap. So, for instance, mealy-mouthing about abortion rights isn't going to win the Democrats any votes from people who vote for the Republicans because they see them as the White People's Party.

Steve will be greatly missed. He left us far too soon. If there's a Heaven, I'm sure he's there right now, trying to set straight any Republicans who also may have gotten in.

Steve's passing reminds me that as valuable as the blogosphere has been in American politics the last 6+ years, it has a somewhat more transient nature than non-virtual media. The notice at Steve's blog says that his site will be taken down in a few weeks, which is a real loss for the online community. I hope that someone somewhere - university libraries, the Libarary of Congress, major public libraries - are archiving his posts so that they will be available in the future.

The clowns in our mainstream media - Steve might have used the term "assclowns" - who meekly repeated the White House line on the Iraq War for years were dead wrong about that war. Steve Gilliard was right about the war far more often than they were. Historians in the future could benefit by having his material readily available.

Tags: steve gilliard

The (Air) Force strikes back

2007-06-08T16:19:00.000-07:00

True believers in air power never lose faith. No matter how many times experience in the real world fails to live up to their expectations. A new technological innovation like unmanned surveillance flights, a new approach like the famous "shock-and-awe" campaign, an adjustment of doctrine to allow even more bombing with even fewer restrictions, something has always just been developed or is just around the corner that will make air power invincible and ground forces obsolete.

Of course, in the world of military budgets and organizations, inter-service rivalry among the Army, Navy and Air Force play a major role in perception of which approaches are more effective. Sometimes, the results can seem very counter-intuitive. For instance, the Marines may point out embarassing deficiences in the performance of Army units, problems that the Army generals would prefer not to publicize any more than they have to.

I recently came across this classic case of air power True Faith, as applied to counterinsurgency operations. Counterinsurgency by air power, you ask? Faith knows no bounds. The article is America's asymmetric advantage by Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap, Jr. Armed Forces Journal Sept 2006. He begins in the first paragraph by sneering at advocates for ground forces:

Is air power the new face of successful war-fighting? Much to the dismay of the boots-on-the-ground zealots, or BOTGZ (pronounced bow-togs), the answer for today's democracies may well be "yes."

Bowtogs? You know a high-minded essay is under way.

He proceeds to say that while those pokey Army and Marine doofuses were screwing around and spinning their wheels, the Air Force was getting things done:

During the summer [of 2006], while U.S. ground forces in Iraq were distracted investigating potential war criminals in their midst, air power delivered a major success. The killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was, if not a decisive victory, still the best news of the season.

Of course, that "major success" seemed to have approximately zero effect on the course of the war. Other than that, it was spectacular. But notice also that in his first paragraph, he highlights the "war criminals" among the Army and Marines.

He does go on to call the Army and Marine "the finest ground forces in the history of warfare" - but from the true believers in air power, that's scant praise. In parts of the article, she sounds a bit like Noam Chomsky arguing against American imperialism:

As Tom Ricks' new book about Iraq, "Fiasco," argues convincingly, absent overwhelming numbers, it is virtually impossible for even well-equipped and conventionally trained ground forces to defeat terrorist insurgencies in the midst of sullen populations often sympathetic to the enemy. ...

... With respect to the overwhelming numbers scheme [of fighting counterinsurgency], there are daunting practical problems. Specifically, the end of conscription obliges the U.S. to provide costly incentives to populate our all-volunteer force. With personnel costs soaring, not even the wealth of the U.S. can support the hundreds of thousands of troops that, for example, flooded Germany and Japan at end of World War II to prevent resistance to occupation from taking root. Today, such numbers do not exist and it is unrealistic to believe they are politically feasible to recreate.

Plus, there's the eternal bogeyman of our generals, The Media:

As television screens fill with heartbreaking stories of dead and wounded soldiers and their families, such images over time often create political limitations as to how long a democratic society will sustain an operation like that in Iraq. This is true even though the casualty rates are, in purely historic military terms, relatively low. This media effect is a fundamental change from earlier eras.

Those assumptions are axiomatic for those who want the armed forces optimized for conventional warfare. But it's all based on bad assumptions, not least among them the notion that the US military "won" in Vietnam but were stabbed in the back by The Media and cowardly civilian politicians.

And here we get to the pitch for air power, based on those bad assumptions, that has been persuasive to military and civilian leaders alike - combined with another swipe at those undisciplined ground forces:

When thousands of troops are on the ground fighting an insurgency such as that in Iraq, it is, regrettably, all but inevitable that you will have situations such as Abu Ghraib and Hadithah arise from time to time — horrific and tragic, but predictable and even unavoidable. Yet, to a degree unprecedented in past conflicts, real and perceived illegalities are subject to exploitation not just by adversaries but also by legitimate political opponents. Regardless, the result is an erosion of the public support that democracies need to conduct any kind of protracted military operation. The point is that, again, information-age realities limit boots-on-the-ground options. (my emphasis)

Besides, it's no longer the good old days when the ground forces could just go in and massacre a bunch of natives and be done with it:

Most important, their hearts and minds are simply not amenable to the reasoned techniques that underlay classic counterinsurgency texts. They are not rational actors in the sense that they are propelled by some political or social ideology; instead, they are driven by unyielding religious fanaticism. In the past, such insurgencies did exist and were crushed the old-fashioned way: by annihilation. That is not exactly a viable option in a world where human rights groups, the media and others too often choose to find something good about the most sadistic terrorist organizations. (my emphasis)

Dang, boy, if it wasn't for all those sissy human rights organizations, we wouldn't have to worry about all this counterinsurgency crap!

Fortunately, a solution is at hand: air power!

So where does that leave us? If we are smart, we will have a well-equipped high-technology air power capability. Air power is America's asymmetric advantage and is really the only military capability that can be readily applied across the spectrum of conflict, including, as is especially important these days, potential conflict. Consider the record. It was primarily air power, not land power, that kept the Soviets at bay while the U.S. won the Cold War. And it was not just the bomber force and the missileers; it was the airlifters, as well. There are few strategic victories in the annals of military history more complete and at so low a human cost as that won by American pilots during the Berlin airlift. Armageddon was avoided. (my emphasis)

Yeah, the Berlin Airlift was pretty much like the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars except that, well, it wasn't.

But this is the pitch. Air power minimizes American casualties. And it doesn't risk so much bad publicity, because when you drop a 2,000-lb. bomb on a village or an urban neighborhood, you can claim that all the bodies lying around down there afterwards are terrorists, or Al Qaida, or Taliban:

Air power also doesn't have the multi-aspect vulnerabilities that boots on the ground do. It can apply combat power from afar and do so in a way that puts few of our forces at risk. ...

And, of course, bombs will go awry. Allegations will be made (as they are currently against the Israelis) of targeting civilians and so forth. But the nature of the air weapon is such that an Abu Ghraib or Hadithah simply cannot occur. The relative sterility of air power — which the boots-on-the-ground types oddly find distressing as somehow unmartial — nevertheless provides greater opportunity for the discreet application of force largely under the control of well-educated, commissioned officer combatants. Not a total insurance policy against atrocity, but a far more risk-controlled situation.

Then he soars into a mystic state of visionary bliss. Not only does air power save American lives and kill lots of foreigners without too much bad publicity. It puts the fear of God into those backward natives! Then they won't mess with us Americans any more. Hail, we didn't even need those useless ground forces for the initial invasion:

The advances in American air power technology in recent years make U.S. dominance in the air intimidating like no other aspect of combat power for any nation in history.

The result? Saddam Hussein's pilots buried their airplanes rather than fly them against American warplanes. Indeed, the collapse of the Iraqi armed forces was not, as the BOTGZ would have you believe, mainly because of the brilliance of our ground commanders or, in fact, our ground forces at all. The subsequent insurgency makes it clear that Iraqis are quite willing to take on our ground troops. What really mattered was the sheer hopelessness that air power inflicted on Iraq's military formations. (my emphasis)

This is part of air power dogma. Bombing breaks the will of the enemy, including the enemy population. Despite the fact that this theory got an extensive laboratory test in the Second World War, and even more so in the Vietnam War (where a greater tonnage of bombs was dropped than in the entire European theater in the Second World War), and it didn't work out that way - the dogma still has to be true. At least for the faithful.

He sees the same smashing success in Afghanistan:

So what explains the rapid collapse of the Taliban and al-Qaida in 2001? Modern air power. More specifically, the marriage of precision weapons with precise targeting by tiny numbers of Special Forces troops on the ground. The results were stunning. Putatively invulnerable positions the Taliban had occupied for years literally disappeared in a rain of satellite-directed bombs from B-1s and B-52s flying so high they could be neither seen nor heard.

This new, high-tech air power capability completely unhinged the resistance without significant commitment of American boots on the ground. Indeed, the very absence of American troops became a source of discouragement. As one Afghan told the New York Times, "We pray to Allah that we have American soldiers to kill," adding disconsolately, "These bombs from the sky we cannot fight." Another equally frustrated Taliban fighter was reported in the London Sunday Telegraph recently as fuming that "American forces refuse to fight us face to face," while gloomily noting that "[U.S.] air power causes us to take heavy casualties." In other words, the Taliban and al-Qaida were just as tough as the mujahideen who fought the Russians, and more than willing to confront U.S. ground forces, but were broken by the hopelessness that American-style air power inflicted upon them.(my emphasis)

Of course, if all this were true, no one would be fighting the Americans or our NATO allies today in Iraq or Afghanistan. But they are. And air power didn't succeed in nailing Bin Laden and his chief lieutenants in the Battle of Tora Bora. Bin Laden and most of his most trustworthy cadre got away.

In the end, this boundless faith in the terror-inducing power of bombing is the core of the air power gospel:

It is no exaggeration to observe that almost every improvement in the military situation in Iraq and Afghanistan is attributable to air power in some form; virtually every setback, and especially the strategically catastrophic allegations of war crimes, is traceable to the land forces.

So why give those clowns any budget dollars? Just send it all to the Air Force and we'll build a Star Wars missile shield and everything will be all right. And if some of the natives in far-away countries get restless, we'll just go crush them in sanitary strikes from the air by making them quake in fear at our power:

This illustrates another salient feature of air power: its ability to temper the malevolent tendencies of societies accustomed to the rewards of modernity. Given air power's ability to strike war-supporting infrastructure, the powerful impulse of economic self-interest complicates the ability of despots to pursue malicious agendas. American air power can rapidly educate cultured and sophisticated societies about the costs of war and the futility of pursuing it. This is much the reason why air power alone delivered victory in Operation Allied Force in Kosovo in 1999, without the need to put a single U.S. soldier at risk on the ground. (my emphasis)

The Kosovo War is superficially a case in which air power lived up to its potential. But it's not nearly that simple, as I plan to discuss in a future post. Let's just say here that it's been in the news this week that the Western powers and Russia are still disputing over Kosovo's independence. Substantial NATO forces - those useless ground forces - are still there keeping the peace. And the peace is reportedly pretty precarious. Eight years later, the absolute victory supposedly won by air power is still of uncertain prospects. Dunlap would probably assure us that had we just patrolled Kosovo with airplanes and occasionally fired rockets at suspicious-looking characters instead of wasting time having NATO ground troops there, that everything would be fine now.

He goes on to argue further about the general obsolescene and irrelevance of ground forces and the incredible fecklessness of the "bowtogs". Besides, his argument suggests we need to forget about all this counterinsurgency nonsense and keep preparing for war with Russia, or China, or Islamofascomism, or whatever else keeps the bucks flowing to the Air Force. And if we do have to fight one of these silly counterinsurgency wars, we'll just handle it with air power:

The point is how much of our air power — our most effective national security component — do we want to sacrifice to maintain large active-duty formations of ground forces useful only in selected contexts?Given his general argument, it's hard to imagine he thinks their useful in any context.

Does anyone truly believe America will do a nation-building "Iraq" again anytime soon? Are we likely, with the benefit of our experience in Vietnam and now Iraq, to attempt yet another hearts-and-minds campaign the BOTGZ seem to desire?

This was the grand post-Vietnam solution embraced by the officer corps of all services: just don't do counterinsurgency any more.

Or is the more likely scenario one in which the need is to destroy an adversary's capacity to project power that damages U.S. interests? If so, air strikes to demolish enemy capabilities, complemented by short-term, air-assisted raids and high-tech Air Force surveillance platforms, are the answer, not colossal boots-on-the-ground efforts.

Yep, air power does it all.

This desire to market their talents and accomplishments is presumably why the Air Force provides regular summaries at its public puff-piece Web site on the air attacks it's making in Iraq and Afghanistan. For instance, in the June 7 airpower summary (published 06/08/07), we read that there were 42 combat ("close air-support") mission flown in Afghanistan and 62 in Iraq. If what Dunlap writes is correct, you would think that after over four years in Iraq and well over five years in Afghanistan, that the terrified Tabliban and Iraqi terrorists and all the other bad actors would have long since laid down their weapons and stopped causing trouble. Maybe another four or five years of hundreds of air missions a month our invincible Air Force will persuade everyone to cower in terror and not fight the Americans.

Or not.

Tags: air power, air war

Somalia

2007-06-08T14:48:00.000-07:00

Katrina Vanden Heuvel observes at her Nation blog this week (The Somalia Strike 06/04/07):

Here's something that didn't come up at Sunday's Democratic debate: Under what authorization did President Bush order a military strike on Somalia this past Friday [June 1] - essentially widening the "war on terror"?

While the Dems argued about the best way to get out of this failed and disastrous war in Iraq, what Friday's military strike reveals is how our political system continues to evade the challenge of finding an exit from a misconceived "war on terror" - and the damage that "war" continues to inflict on our security and engagement with the world.

This isn't the first time the US has made direct strikes in Somalia recently. In fact, the Cheney-Bush administration is running a counterinsurgency effort with dubious prospects there, too, relying heavily on Ethiopian troops to support the current Transitional Federal Government (TFG).

The CIA's World Factbook gives this summary of recent political history in Somalia:

The Transitional Federal Government (TFG) has been deeply divided since just after its creation [in late 2004] and until late December 2006 controlled only the town of Baidoa. In June 2006, a loose coalition of clerics, business leaders, and Islamic court militias known as the Supreme Council of Islamic Courts (SCIC) defeated powerful Mogadishu warlords and took control of the capital. The Courts continued to expand, spreading their influence throughout much of southern Somalia and threatening to overthrow the TFG in Baidoa. Ethiopian and TFG forces, concerned over suspected links between some SCIC factions and al-Qaida, in late December 2006 drove the SCIC from power, but the joint forces continue to fight remnants of SCIC militia in the southwestern corner of Somalia near the Kenyan border. The TFG, backed by Ethiopian forces, in late December 2006 moved into Mogadishu, but it continues to struggle to exert control over the capital and to prevent the reemergence of warlord rule that typified Mogadishu before the rise of the SCIC.

The "Courts" group is also known as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU).

Ethiopian enjoyed the cheers of American conservatives for a few days when they helped the TFG retake Mogadishu from the ICU. In their view of the world, this was a display of admirable "toughness". But see below for how things have progressed.

Jennifer Cooke of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) writes on the Fading Hopes for Somalia Crisis 06/04/07:

A brutal crackdown by Ethiopian and Somali government troops in early May has done little to end an incipient insurgency, and disaffected clan militias and remnants of the vanquished Islamic Courts Union (ICU) have resorted to increasingly guerrilla-like tactics, including suicide bombings and a series of remote-controlled car bombs detonated in the last several weeks.

She writes that the African Union peacekeeping forces there, currently actually 1,400 troops from Uganda, "has been largely ineffective." The TFG government is on shaky ground:

The TFG, which is internally divided and deeply unpopular in Mogadishu, has failed to take the necessary measures to broaden its support base and expand the governing coalition. A national reconciliation conference has been postponed twice and is now slated for June 15. Rather than seizing the opportunity early on in its tenure to reach out in a genuine way to disaffected groups and moderate remnants of the Islamic Courts Union, the TFG has instead chosen to rely on Ethiopian military force and the support of the international community to consolidate its position in Mogadishu. This is not a sustainable tack: Ethiopia will not remain in Mogadishu indefinitely: it is taking hits in Somalia, it has been accused by human rights groups of perpetrating war crimes, and it cannot long sustain a costly occupation given other domestic and regional security preoccupations. Further, having achieved its immediate objective of dispersing an increasing radicalized ICU leadership, it has much less compelling interest in the long hard slog of building Somali governing institutions or pushing the TFG to expand its base. (my emphasis)

You may remember earlier reports about US planes attacking Somalian villages, targeting "Al Qaida" targets that somehow they had pinpointed. Cooke writes:

Further, U.S. air strikes against fleeing ICU leaders and al Qaeda suspects in southern Somalia, with cooperation from Ethiopia, have led to the widespread perception (both in Somalia and Ethiopia) that the United States fully endorsed and supported the Ethiopian invasion and subsequent occupation. In January, the United States knowingly allowed Ethiopia to secretly purchase arms from North Korea in violation of UN sanctions that the U.S. had been instrumental in passing. Human rights groups have accused the United States of cooperating with Ethiopia, Kenya, and the TFG in a secret detention program for individuals fleeing Somalia, with U.S. intelligence agents interrogating detainees in Kenya, who were denied access to legal counsel and consular representatives. All these factors will make it difficult for the United States to disentangle itself, in perception and fact, from Ethiopian policy, which is a source of deep resentment among many Somalis. (my emphasis)

Somalia is one of those countries whose political situation does not easily fit into current US counterinsurgency doctrine. (This is a broader issue that military scholar Steven Metz takes up in a just-released monograph which I will be discussing here in an upcoming post.) The official government does not enjoy widespread legitimacy. The groups opposing the government include a variety of militias, some of whom may have little real interest in seizing control of the Somalian state. And the situation is further complicated by the government's reliance on unpopular foreign troops, in this case from the long-time rival nation of Ethiopia.

It doubtful whether United States involvement which identifies us with the TFG regime and its Ethiopian allies is a sensible approach. But then, we're talking about the Cheney-Bush administration here.

Tags: somalia

Green Rolling Hills

2007-06-08T13:50:00.000-07:00

This is a YouTube video of Emmylou Harris and Mary Black singing "Green Rolling Hills", one of my favorite folk songs. Beautiful and chilling.

Today's Republican Party

2007-06-08T10:05:00.000-07:00

It's not exactly the cowardly Preston Brooks beating Charles Sumner senseless with his cane.

But it ain't pretty, either. It's a video of Alabama Republican State Senator Charles Bishop punching out one of his Democratic colleagues, reminding us once again how old-fashioned Southern thuggery is more and more dominant in today's authoritarian Republican Party:

This video shows the assailant saying "it shouldn't have happened out there" - but it's all the Democrat's fault anyway.

Next, we're bound to see news commentators saying the Democrat winds up looking bad because he didn't immediately charge over and wallop the goony old Republican sleaze-bag. Or pull out his six-shooter and gun him down.

Republicans, this is your Party on OxyContin. Y'all wanted to get the votes of the most hardcore Southern bigots and thugs? Well, you succeeded.

Tags: authoritarianism, republican party

Ron Paul and "principled" conservatives

2007-06-08T09:47:00.000-07:00

Hi, I'm Ron Paul, and I'm a flaming rightwinger

Have "principled" conservatives gone the way of "moderate Republicans", i.e., effectively out of existence? Digby isn't exaggerating much when she writes of the Rep Presidential candidates:

Looking at what these bloodthirsty id ticklers are selling, I have to say that I think we ware going to look back at the swift-boaters with a sort of warm and fuzzy nostalgia. These guys are making George W. Bush look positively subtle. They aren't even trying to present themselves as sane, much less "compassionate." There are no paeans to freedom and democracy and with the exception of Brownback and Huckabee, they aren't even pushing zygote worship very much. It's pure lizard brain.

But Glenn Greenwald is trying hard to find those fabled "principled conservatives". But he's apparently getting exhausted by the effort:

When I first began blogging, I wrote frequently about the handful of conservatives who were vigorously arguing that Bush's lawlessness and extremism were intolerable regardless of political ideology and that it contravened the allegedly defining conservative "principles" - the Bruce Feins, Bob Barrs, even George Wills. I even devoted a substantial bulk of a chapter in How Would a Patriot Act? to those conservatives, in order to demonstrate that objections to Bush's radical executive power theories and outright lawbreaking were compelled not by a belief in liberal or conservative political ideology, but by a belief in the most fundamental and defining American political principles, really just by a basic belief in the rule of law.

... There was a time when I, at least, expected far more conservatives to object meaningfully to the endless series of decisions which so plainly contravened the storied, theoretical "conservative principles," yet it never happened - until Bush's popularity collapsed and his presidency widely viewed as a failure of historic proportions.

He delivers a harsh judgment on the so-called "movement conservatives". But he has good grounds for it:

One cannot say - and I never have said - that there are no conservatives who dissented from the Bush worldview, but their numbers are so tiny as to be irrelevant. That is because this movement's belief in its ostensible political principles is plainly illusory, just a crass political prop. And they simply do not believe in the basic constitutional values which have defined the country since its inception, nor do they believe in the rule of law (hence the virtual consensus that convicted felon Lewis Libby should be pardoned). What else do they need to embrace in order to eliminate all doubts about that? ...

The "Republican base" has become virtually monolithic and easily recognizable - it is the swooning crowds cheering for torture and a doubling of Guantanamo, threatening war with Iran, urging still more surveillance and limitless government power in the name of the All-Consuming, All-Important Glorious War with the Scary, Dangerous, Never-Before-Seen Muslim Terrorists. Anyone who opposes that vision - The Bush Vision - is not considered to be a Republican at all, let alone a "conservative." Just ask the tax-opposing, spending-hating, small-government-advocating Ron Paul. Or Bruce Fein. Or Andrew Sullivan.

Ron Paul has also received praise from other war critics for speaking against Bush's War in Iraq during the Republican debates.

I also pay attention to conservative antiwar arguments. But it's important to understand that the rightwing opposition to the Iraq War has mostly come from an old-fashioned "isolationist" viewpoint. Andrew Bacevich - who describes himself as a conservative Catholic - has rightly pointed out that the often-heard warnings about the alleged dangers of "isolationism" are largely based on a straw man. There aren't that many actual isolationists around. And the ones that are there don't have major influence in either of the two major parties. Ron Paul's isolation (pardon the pun) within the Republican Presidential field illustrates that.

But real isolationists have been prominent among war critics. Pat Buchanan is one. You can find plenty of actual isolationist writing at the neo-Confederate LewRockwell.com and at Antiwar.com. Ron Paul, whose positions have been close to the Liberatarian Party's during his Congressional career, is another.

And we got a glimpse in Tuesday's debate of what lies behind that kind of real, old-fashioned isolationism when Paul said in criticism of the Iraq War:

So we're not making progress there, and we should come home. The weapons weren't there, and we went in under U.N. resolutions, and our national security was not threatened. (my emphasis)

For rightwing isolationists, the United Nations is a major bogeyman. So what he was saying here was that the war is illegitimate because "we went in under U.N. resolutions". Of course, the United Nations did not authorize the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. So, ironically, by making this point he's actually giving a boost to one of the phony prowar arguments.

Rightwing isolationism and aggressive unilateralism are at least first cousins. Maybe even siblings. Narrow nationalism and nativism can lead to either, or both.

Sara at the Orcinus blog has been writing about The Trouble with Ron [Paul] 06/06/07:

As a libertarian leftist, I understand viscerally the charm of Paul's message. Who wouldn't be charmed? He's anti-war, anti-torture, anti-drug war, and anti-corporation - a real progressive dream date. Until you reflect on the fact that he's also anti-choice, anti-gay, anti-environment, anti-sane immigration policy, and apparently, anti-separation of church and state as well[.]

From other material she quotes, it seems that Ron Paul has expressed his approval for state secession, his broad-minded admiration for cross-burning, and and his compassion for the bomber of an IRS building. She also writes:

Then, there's the 100% legislative ranking Paul got from Cannabis Culture magazine - a fact that lifts liberal spirits everywhere, and is very consistent with his libertarian views. But we shouldn't let that blind us to the fact that he also got 100% rankings from both the Christian Coalition and the John Birch Society - two entities far more powerful and serious than Cannabis Culture,, and which actively wish ill on people like us. Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson actively helped midwife Paul's budding political career: according to the New York Times, his political teams were circulating campaign letters promoting Paul over Bush I as a presidential candidate all the way back in 1988. (my emphasis)

Then there's his buddy-buddy relationship with the "patriot militia" groups.

A video of Ron Paul emphasizing his antiwar stance to Tucker Carlson

Geez, wouldn't you know it? The only antiwar Republican candidate is a fascist-minded loon. More from Sara in Man of the Hour 06/02/07 and Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast 06/04/07, in which she mocks Paul's excuse for what she calls his "decade of anti-black/anti-semitic/patriot whackadoodle writings."

The John Birch Society, a far-right hate group which was the mothership of a lot of the ideology that dominate the Republican Party today, has also been against the Iraq War. Here's an article from the Bircher Web site expressing solidarity with Paul, Ron Paul Ready To Drop the Next Bomb? by Jim Capo 06/05/07:

Being a non-interventionist of the Washington and Old-Right Taft variety it is of course unfair to suggest Paul would "drop a bomb" on his sumptuously paid detractors. However, while those in the "approved" media are undoubtedly staging for a second attempt to take down the upstart Congressman, perhaps Dr. Paul is keeping his garlic powder dry such that we might yet again enjoy watching the reaction caused by tossing it across the paths of the likes of Giuliani, Hannity and Malkin. (Forgive me if I admit to relishing watching members of that coven shriek in horror when having to react to the truth.) Can you imagine what the media vampires will say if someone gets on national TV and tells the American public that the "money" in their pocket represents the greatest bamboozlement in the history of mankind? It could get ugly. The Empire has no clothes — only debt!

I won't try to sort all that out. It's kind of like trying to unravel a neurotic symptom. But I think it has something to do with the Birchers wanting to be on the gold standard, because somehow the American dollar isn't worth anything.

The writer offers a teaser for his next commentary: "Sharia Law is not a threat to Western Civilization because of burkhas and the stoning of homosexuals."

That's some of Ron Paul's true believers! They may be against the Iraq War on the notion that it's a United Nations or it helps "the Jews". But they'd probably be all Yee-Haw! for a war against Mexico.

Tags: ron paul

Arms race: Bush postures against Putin

2007-06-06T15:18:00.000-07:00

Bush is scheduled to meet with Vladimir Putin this week at the G-8 summit in Heliegendamm, Germany. He prepared for it by giving a speech defending the stationing of the Star Wars "missile defense" system in Poland and the Czech Republic: President Bush Visits Prague, Czech Republic, Discusses Freedom 06/05/07.

Speaking in the Czernin Palace in Prague, Bush welcomed three of his guests as "three of the great advocates for freedom in our time". One was Vaclav Havel, former democracy activist in Cold War Czechslovakia and former president of the Czech Republic; no real argument about his role as an advocate for democracy and human right. José María Aznar, the former Spanish prime minister and former head of the conservative People's Party (Partido Populár, PP), who backed Bush's invastion of Iraq; Aznar was widely credited with bringing the PP (which is the "postfascist" descendent of dictator Francisco Franco's party) into the mainstream of European conservatism. The third was Natan Sharansky, who Bush sees as an advocate for Bush's self-claimed mission to spread democracy by force in the Middle East.

Giving a litany of various states that Bush considers hostile in some way to the US, he expressed his warm support for "freedom" in those countries. Including Putin's Russia:

In Russia, reforms that were once promised to empower citizens have been derailed, with troubling implications for democratic development. Part of a good relationship is the ability to talk openly about our disagreements. So the United States will continue to build our relationships with these countries - and we will do it without abandoning our principles or our values.

Not surprisingly, Russian positions and responses on this sort of thing are not given very thorough coverage by our Potemkin press corps. But Putin laid out the broad outlines of his current, more confrontive approach, at the Munich Security Conference this past February (Putin's Prepared Remarks at 43rd Munich Conference on Security Policy, Delivered Feb. 10, 2007 Washington Post 02/12/07). Putin also indicated his willingness to talk openly, as Bush put it:

This conference's structure allows me to avoid excessive politeness and the need to speak in roundabout, pleasant but empty diplomatic terms. This conference's format will allow me to say what I really think about international security problems. And if my comments seem unduly polemical, pointed or inexact to our colleagues, then I would ask you not to get angry with me. After all, this is only a conference. And I hope that after the first two or three minutes of my speech Mr Teltschik will not turn on the red light over there.

In other words, sure, Mr. Tough Guy From Texas, if you want to have these frank and uninhibited talks, as the diplomats say, and if you want to carry them on in public, well, shoot, I can talk tough, too.

He proceded to address the "anti-missile" issue:

Plans to expand certain elements of the anti-missile defence system to Europe cannot help but disturb us. Who needs the next step of what would be, in this case, an inevitable arms race? I deeply doubt that Europeans themselves do.

Missile weapons with a range of about five to eight thousand kilometres that really pose a threat to Europe do not exist in any of the so-called problem countries. And in the near future and prospects, this will not happen and is not even foreseeable. And any hypothetical launch of, for example, a North Korean rocket to American territory through western Europe obviously contradicts the laws of ballistics. As we say in Russia, it would be like using the right hand to reach the left ear.

Today, Wednesday, Bush claimed that those defenses are not aimed at Russia (Bush reiterates: Russia not an enemy by Terence Hunt AP 06/06/07):

"Russia is not an enemy," Bush said, seeking not to inflame a heated exchange of rhetoric between Washington and Moscow. "There needs to be no military response because we're not at war with Russia. ... Russia is not a threat. Nor is the missile defense we're proposing a threat to Russia."

Apparently, he did not say against what other threat they were directed, though the official line is that they are meant to protect against Iran (see below)..

With no small bit of irony, Putin in his February speech declared his country to be non-threatening to the West because of Russian democracy; democracies in the Bush/ Sharansky ideology don't go to war against other democracies. Putin said:

It is sufficient to look at recent history. Did not our country have a peaceful transition to democracy? Indeed, we witnessed a peaceful transformation of the Soviet regime - a peaceful transformation! And what a regime! With what a number of weapons, including nuclear weapons! Why should we start bombing and shooting now at every available opportunity? Is it the case when without the threat of mutual destruction we do not have enough political culture, respect for democratic values and for the law?

And as the Cheney-Bush administration complains about the "democratic deficit" in today's Russia, Putin has also begun pointing at alleged deficits in the democratic practice of Western democracies. And part of that, in his February speech, is the role of international law and the unilateralism of the Bush administration:

We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state's legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?

In international relations we increasingly see the desire to resolve a given question according to so-called issues of political expediency, based on the current political climate.

And of course this is extremely dangerous. It results in the fact that no one feels safe. I want to emphasise this - no one feels safe! Because no one can feel that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them. Of course such a policy stimulates an arms race. (my emphasis)

And, as Terence Hunt of the AP reports:

Asked if he anticipated a tense encounter, Bush replied "Could be. I don't think so ... I'll work to see that it's not a tense meeting."

Putin has accused the U.S. of starting a new arms race and said if the U.S. pressed ahead with its plan, Russia would revert to targeting its missiles on Europe as it did during the Cold War. China joined Russia in saying the missile defense plan could touch off a new escalation in nuclear weapons.

The move to put the missile defense shield in former Warsaw Pact nations — purportedly as a defense against a future missile launch from Iran — clearly fanned Putin's anger.

William Arkin looked at the current budding arms race and observes (Live by the Cold War, Die by the Cold War Washington Post 06/05/07):

... the missile strategy arises from the kind of Cold War thinking that we should have left behind with, well, the Cold War. Not only does it complicate relations with our allies in Europe, it's also unlikely to be effective in the new kind of war the Bush administration says we are fighting. ...

Technically, of course, the puny system planned for Poland and the Czech Republic doesn't threaten anything in Russia. ...

I'm arguing instead that missile defenses are so old-think. First, Iran's ballistic missile force is hardly the most significant or pressing threat, especially when stacked up against terrorism, a Persian Gulf war, even potential WMD. Second, by the time a workable system is up and running in Europe, even if that is possible, technologies will have changed. Third, "missile defenses" connotes the very kind of passivity that the Bush administration usually decries. We are going to wait for Iran to develop an arsenal of threatening ballistic missiles to threaten Europe? The United States has a policy of preemption, supported by both parties, and it has the means of attack that makes it clear to Iran that if it wanted to lash out with conventional military force, it will be destroyed. ...

We have fanned the flames in Russia, complicated life for NATO members Poland and the Czech Republic, and rewarded Iran. An improvement in our defenses indeed.

It's also worth remembering the basic flaw in the missile defense system, even if it ever starts working on any kind of reliable basis. For the system to really be a missile shield, it has to be very close to 100% effective in shooting down all incoming missiles. If even a few nuclear warheads get through, it could still impose unacceptable losses on the target country.

But the "missile defense systems" are very expensive to build. And the systems to evade them, like the mobile missiles Russia recently tested, are much cheaper to construct. That may make American missile manufacturers and suppliers happy. But it's not the optimal way to spend defense dollars.

Tags: arms race, putin, russia, russland

Selenia y Marie

2007-06-05T21:25:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in a recent Zorro post, The most intriguing new character in the telenovela is a witch named Selenia, apparently modeled on Marie Laveau, who appears in Isabel Allende's Zorro novel. It's not an exact match. Selenia comes from Europe and markets her magic to the wealthy. But her communion with the spirits reminds me of the character of Marie Laveau in the novel.

In her story, Diego winds up on the island controlled by the pirate Jean Lafitte off the Lousisiana coast. One of the characters there, Madame Odilia, takes her ill daughter Catherine to see the legendary Louisiana witch:

... Marie Laveau, suma sacerdotisa del vudú. Se internaron en los bosques más tupidos, lejos de las plantaciones de azucar de los blancos, entre islotes y pantanos, donde los tambores conjuraban a los espíritus. A la luz de hogueras y antorchas, los oficiantes danzaban con máscaras de animales y demonios, los cuerpos pintados con sangre de gallos. Los poderosos tambores vibraban, remeciendo el bosque y calentando la sangre de los esclavos. Una prodigiosa energía conectaba a los seres humanos con los dioses y la naturaleza, los participantes se fundían en un solo ser, nadie se sustraía al embrujo. Al centro del círculo, sobre una caja que contenia una serpiente sagrada, danzaba Marie Laveau, soberbia, hermosa, cubierta de sudor, casi desnuda y preñada de nueve meses, a punto de dar a luz. Al caer en trance sus miembros se agitaban sin control, se retorcía, se le bamboleaba el vientre de lado a lado, y soltaba una retahíla de palabras en lenguas que nadie recordaba. El cántico subía y bajaba, como grandes olas, mientras el recipiente con sangre de los sacrificios pasaba de mano en mano, para que todos bebieran. Los tambores se aceleraban, hombres y mujeres, convulsionados, caían al suelo, se transformaban en animales, comían pasto, mordían y arañaban, algunos perdían el conocimiento, otros partían en parejas hacia el bosque. Madame Odilia le explicó que en la religión vudú, llegada al Nuevo Mundo en el corazón de los esclavos de Dahomey y Yoruba, existían tres zonas conectadas: la de los vivos, la de los muertos y la de los que aún no han nacido. En las ceremonias honraban a los antepasados, llamaban a los dioses, clamaban por la libertad. Las sacerdotisas, como Marie Laveau, efectuaban encantamientos, ensar-taban alfileres en muñecas para provocar enfermedades y usaban gris-gris y polvos mágicos para curar diversos males...

My translation:

[... Marie Laveau, high priestess of voodoo. They went deep into the densest forests, far from the whites' sugar plantations, among little islands and marshes, where the drums conjure the spirits. By the light of bonfires and torches, the celebrants danced with masks of animals and demons, their bodies painted with the blood of roosters. The powerful drums vibrated, swinging the forest and heating the blood of the slaves. A prodigious energy connected the human beings with the gods and nature, the participants merged into a single self, no one got away from the witchcraft. At the center of the circle, on a box that contained a sacred serpent, danced Marie Laveau, proud, beautiful, covered with sweat, almost naked and nine months pregnant, on the point of giving birth. Falling into a trance, her limbs shook out of control, writhing, her belly swaying from side to side, letting out a stream of words in languages no one remembered. The song rose and fell like big waves while the vessel with the blood of the sacrifices passed from hand to hand so that all could drink. The drums accelerated, men and women convulsing fell on the ground, tranformed into animals, ate grass, bit and scraped, some them lost consciousness, others left in pairs for the forest. Madame Odilia explained that in the voodoo religion, brought to the New World in the hearts of slaves from Dahomey and Yoruba, there exist three zones connected to one another; that of the living, that of the dead and that of those who have not yet been born. In the ceremonies, they honored their ancestors, called on the gods, clamored for freedom. The priestesses like Marie Laveau cast spells, inserted pins into dolls to cause sicnesses and used gris-gris and magic powders to cure various ills...

Unfortunately, even Marie Laveau's powers weren't enough to help the ailing Catherine.

Marie is not a major character in the Zorro novel. Her presence is largely atmospherics which reinforce the native wisdom that Diego and Bernardo learned from Toypurnia and her tribe. In the novel, Diego does a spirit quest as a young man and his totem animal turns out to be a fox (un zorro). She uses touches like that throughout to give the Zorro character a more mystical and mysterious character. Meeting your personal zorro on a native spirit quest just has a different feel about it than picking the name Zorro for your masked bandit persona because foxes are sneaky.

Tags: marie laveau, zorro, zorro telenovela

The Six Day War

2007-06-05T15:18:00.000-07:00

We're now in the 40th anniversary week of the Six Day War of 1967. That war's effects are still very much with us. And for Americans, now that we're involved in an ongoing war in Iraq that has no end in sight, the US is part of the neighborhood in a way that we haven't been before. Increasinly, people in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East are reportedly identifying the United States with Israel more and more closely. And, in fact, the Cheney-Bush administration has uncritically supported current Israeli policies to an extent no other administration, Republican or Democrat, has done.

The Los Angeles Times had this analysis today, Israel's lost 40 years by Meir Shalev 06/05/07:

Forty years have passed, and Israel has indeed choked. The country is busy dealing with one matter: the occupation — the territories, the Palestinians, terror, holy sites, the establishment and evacuation of settlements. Forty years have passed, and Israel has neglected everything that the Israel of 1948 wished to occupy itself with: education, research, welfare, health.

"Forty years" is not just some round number. It is a period with traditional meaning, a number through which God tends to emphasize his will. The flood continued for 40 days and 40 nights; Moses remained on Mt. Sinai for 40 days and 40 nights; the Jewish people wandered the desert for 40 years; Jesus sequestered himself there for 40 days. It seems to me that God is sick of religious figures and generals and politicians who claim to speak in his voice. He is taking advantage of this mathematical moment and letting everyone know that now is the time to settle up.

Tags: israel, six day war

Scooter Libby and neoconservatism

2007-06-05T09:16:00.000-07:00

Since today is Scooter's sentencing day, I thought I would celebrate by posting a link to this article about him in the current (June 2007) American Prospect, The Apprentice by Anthony David 05/20/07. (As of this writing, the article is behind subscription but the Prospect makes all its articles available two or three weeks or so after the current issue is published.)

David looks specifically at how Scooter received the neoconservatism wisdom from one of its godfathers, Albert Wohlstetter. It's important in showing how the Bush Doctrine of preventive war grew directly out of the nuclear first-strike doctrine advocated by hardliners like Wohlstetter. Along the way, he touches on how Wohlsttetter influenced Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle (the "Prince of Darkness", as his admirers nicknamed him), Ahmad Chalabi, Zalmay Khalilzad, Douglas Feith, Francis Fukuyama and David Wurmser. David writes of Wohlstetter's justification for a first-strike nuclear doctrine:

Wohlstetter singled out the doctrine of "mutual assured destruction" (MAD) as proof of the national-security elite's dangerous anachronism. The "realists" believed that nuclear weapons had made war obsolete. Only an "insane adventurer" would launch an attack, and professional diplomats assumed that the totalitarian beast in Moscow would probably behave rationally. But, argued Wohlstetter, the Soviet Union was not necessarily a rational actor: The Russians had lost 20 million people during World War II; there was no reason to assume they wouldn't risk losing many more to become the premier global power.

Wohlstetter argued that scientific progress in the hands of such a tyrannical regime would pose an impossible threat to both American security and the cause of human liberty. In the thermonuclear age, the possibility, however remote, that a tyrant could risk a nuclear strike required that tyranny abroad be contained and eventually defeated. (my emphasis)

Since nuclear weapons are particularly fear-inducing, that "however remote" sets a very low bar for initiating nuclear war. The US never adopted such a policy of nuclear preventive war.

So the terms of this particular dispute remained relatively obscure in public discussion.

I need to digress at this point for a couple of definitional points. The US during the Cold War would never make a blanket promise that we would never make "first use" of nuclear weapons. That was largely because the NATO defensive strategy in Europe assumed that an initial Soviet conventional attack on western Europe would be countered by US use of "tactical" battlefield nuclear weapons. That's a very different matter than planning for a preventive strike.

Also, I wish people writing articles like David's would be more careful about the terms "preventive war" and "preemptive war"; David's use of "preemptive" in the sentence referring to the Peace of Westphalia is incorrect. The terms are separately defined in international law, the difference being that "preventive" war is equivalent to illegal aggressive war, while "preemptive" war specifically refers to an attack meant to avert an immiment threat. The Six Day War of which today is the 40th anniversary is a classic example of a "preemptive" war, in this case launched by Israel in the face of strong evidence that Arab armies were about to attack them.

David goes on to describe a further development in Wohlstetter's strategic thinking:

But the most compelling aspect of Wohlstetter's mixture of apocalyptic and utopian thinking, and the reason he won over a devoted band of talented followers, was his radical moral message of the need for a new band of leaders to battle tyranny using policies that would spread liberal democratic values. The logic behind MAD precluded any attempt to defeat evil. The true liberal, Wohlstetter taught, must not be resigned to the enslavement of half the planet; he must desire, and plan for, the triumph of freedom, if need be through the use of tactical nuclear bombs. And the leaders capable of such a daring expansion of American military power, he firmly believed, were not Establishment men trained in the old tradition of diplomacy and foreign policy, speaking the obsolete language of détente; they were a new breed of activist intellectuals who would give Western democracies "a new image of ourselves in a world of persistent danger." (my emphasis)

This is also an interesting factual tidbit about Paul Wolfowitz and his mentor, Wohlstetter:

After the Israeli-Arab War, in 1967, just as his young protégé was casting about for a dissertation topic, Wohlstetter added a new ingredient to his theoretical mix: the danger of nuclear proliferation in dangerously unstable corners of the globe, in particular the Middle East. One key cause for the heightened tension between Egypt and Israel leading up to the Six Day War was the Israeli nuclear facility at Dimona, in the Negev Desert. After the war, the Johnson administration -- assuming that the recurrent wars in the region were rational fights over water and land -- proposed building three nuclear plants, one each for Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, to desalinate water and bring agriculture to millions of acres of desert. The scheme was called "A Proposal for Our Time."

Wohlstetter saw in the proposal the same old delusions: The bureaucrats were blind to the dangers of nuclear technology and the irrationality of authoritarian regimes. He argued that there would be little to stop these nations from diverting some of the materials from their civilian reactors toward the development of nuclear weapons. Then he traveled to Israel, where he got his hands on a raft of top-secret documents showing how the Egyptians were planning to use the American peace initiative to construct a nuclear device. He returned to the University of Chicago and handed the documents over to Wolfowitz, who used them as the basis for his dissertation. (my emphasis)

David doesn't go into some of the other major influences on the body of thought that came to be known as "neoconservatism". From Trotskyism, they took the notion of the value of wars of liberation and the supposedly redeeming power of violence. From the philospher Leo Strauss they took the notion that deceit on a grand scale is a necessary part of sound statesmanship.

But the link of neocon and Cheney-Bush administration preventive-war doctrine to nuclear-first-strike thinking is a important link, and one that under-appreciated. And that's the focus of David's article on Scooter.

Tags: neoconservatives, scooter libby

Terrorism, the old-fashioned kind

2007-06-04T15:47:00.000-07:00

There's a good slideshow (with German captions) summarizing the history of the Rote-Armee-Fraktion (RAF), aka, the "Baader-Meinhof gang", Germany's best-known domestic terrorist group from 1970-1998, in Die Opfer, die Täter, der Terror Süddeutsche Zeitung 01.06.07. The RAF is a good reminder that "terrorism" is a technique of violence and warfare, not a movement or an ideology in itself.

The RAF is getting retrospective stories in the German press for several reasons: the 40th anniversary of the death of Benno Ohnesorg, killed by police in a demonstration in (West) Berlin against the visiting Shah of Iran on 06/03/67, a key event in the growth of radical protest in Germany; the 30th anniversary of 1977's "German Autumn" series of RAF attacks, which were hyped hysterically by the outlets of the rightwing Springer press; the release from prison of Brigitte Mohnhaupt in March of this year after more than two decades; and, the public discussion of the possible release from pirson of Christian Klar, about whose conviction new questions have recently become public in Der Spiegel about possible prosecutorial misconduct.

Klar, along with Birgit Hogefeld and Eva Haule-Frimpong, are the only three remaining RAF prisoners in Germany.

The group formally dissolved itself in 1998.

For more on Benno Ohnesorg's death and the political significance it had at the time, see Polizeipräsident legt Kranz für Ohnesorg nieder von Oliver Das Gupta Süddeutsche Zeitung 02.06.07, and especially Der Tag, der die Republik veränderte von Volker Ullrich (a leading German historian) Die Zeit 17.05.07.

The closest American equivalent of the RAF was probably the Weather Underground, who saw themselves as a similar organization. The RAF, though, carried out kidnappings and assassinations. The Weather Underground didn't do those kinds of actions, though they did plant bombs in buildings considered to be sympathetic targets. So far as I'm aware, only one bombing possibly related to that group killed someone in a building. Three of the group's members blew themselves upaccidentally while building bombs in a townhouse in 1970. One of their most daring and famous actions was springing LSD guru Timothy Leary from prison that same year.

The FBI Web site has articles on the latter group. Obviously, the FBI is not an entirely disintered group when it comes to that subject. The articles include:

1975 Terrorism Flashback: State Department Bombing 01/29/04 (The paragraph called "The Chase" is pretty garbled.)

Weather Underground Organization (Weatherman), a 1976 official FBI Chicago Field Office report of 420 pages. Page 3 of this report (in the Part 1a) link show some of the FBI obsessions of the time. Though the Weather Underground, like its European counterparts, held the orthodox Communist Parties of the time as hopelessly "revisionist" and ineffective or worse, just on that first introductory page, we get citations about the American Communist Party ("CPUSA", in FBI jargon) and even Whittaker Chambers' book Witness, one of the favorite conservative books of the 1950s and, I suppose, even to this day.

Here are some reviews of the well-regarded documentary about the group, titled "The Weather Underground".

The Weather Underground by Rob Nelson Mother Jones Mar/Apr 2003

Notes From the Underground by David Greenberg Slate 06/06/03

For 11 years, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers were on the run from the FBI. In the film 'The Weather Underground,' the anti-war activists explain why they fought the law - and why they have no regrets by Edward Guthmann San Francisco Chronicle 07/21/03

When terrorism was cool by Andrew O'Hehir Salon 06/07/03. O'Hehir writes:

As misguided and counterproductive as the Weather Underground's activities may have been, after the townhouse bombing [1970] the group never again planned attacks against human beings. Their post-1970 bombings were symbolic in nature and happened at night when the buildings were empty. For all the vitriol heaped on the Weather Underground by other leftists - and especially by ex-leftist neocons like David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh - it never killed or injured anyone except its own members. (In this regard, it's striking that right-wingers routinely employ the excesses of Weatherman to paint the entire left as anti-American terrorist sympathizers, while the left is either too civil or too cowardly to use the hateful acts of Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph and James Kopp to attack conservatives in general.)

Tags: raf, rote-armee-fraktion, terrorism, weather underground

Mexican President Calderón: the drug problem is the demand in the United States

2007-06-04T15:01:00.000-07:00

Mexican President Felipe Calderón says that main reason there has to be a "war on drugs" in Mexico is the demand for drugs in the US market (En EU, la causa de guerra contra narco: Calderón El Universal 04.06.07):

La causa fundamental de la guerra que libra el gobierno contra el narcotráfico "no está en México, sino en Estados Unidos", aseguró el presidente Felipe Calderón, quien consideró que el problema en nuestro país es la demanda de drogas en el mercado estadounidense.

En entrevista concedida a la agencia de noticias DPA, Calderón reclamó de Washington "una colaboración más clara y un compromiso mucho más palpable en el tema". ...

"Es evidente que mientras haya mercado, mientras haya consumo de drogas en Estados Unidos, va a subsistir este problema en México", aseveró el mandatario.

"Nuestro problema es la demanda de narcóticos que tiene el mercado americano (estadounidense)", dijo.

He says a more clear collaboration with more flexibility on the US side in the drug war. The article doesn't provide specifics of what he meant by that.

He blamed the drug traffic with the US for bolstering the strength of organized crime in Mexico, which he says is spreading its reach:

Indicó que el crimen organizado está diversificando sus actividades: "Controla en la plaza el secuestro, los centros de juego, los centros nocturnos, incluso cobra ya cuotas a empresarios y productores locales".

En la entrevista comentó que a partir del final de la guerra fría "ahora estamos enfrentando otro tipo de guerras (en el mundo), que no son contra ejércitos localmente definidos, uniformados, sino que son guerras de violencia urbana".

Tags: felipe calderón, war on drugs

Democrats and the Iraq War

2007-06-04T13:52:00.000-07:00

Look for continuing Democratic Congressional pressure on the war, in part aimed at forcing the Republicans to vote again and again and again for Bush's War. Tom Hayden writes in Democrats Likely To Harden Anti-War Stance As "Surge" Fails and Election Year Approaches Huffington Post 06/02/07:

Seeking to keep pace with public opinion, key Democratic leaders will soon be considering a peace initiative including full withdrawal from Iraq, revision of the United Nations authorization, and a diplomatic offensive to engage other countries in assisting Iraq.

The proposal represents a sharp difference with the Iraq Study Group -- and current Democratic -- suggestion that combat troops be withdrawn by next spring while leaving tens of thousands of American troops to train the Iraqi armed forces. The notion of "training" a largely-dysfunctional and sectarian Iraqi army, in the absence of a sweeping overhaul of the Baghdad government, is viewed increasingly as unrealistic. The pressure of the anti-war movement and restless public opinion is also propelling these strategists to recommend a stronger withdrawal position than the Congressional majority and presidential candidates currently are taking.

The position of the Bush White House is unpredictable but Pentagon generals in Iraq are calling for a much lengthier counter-insurgency campaign and the brokering of a South Korean-style outcome in Iraq.

For more, see also Marathon, Not A Sprint by Christy Hardin Smith FireDogLake 06/04/07.

At the end of his piece, Hayden writes, "The persistent pressure of the peace movement is having an effect, though more slowly than the morality and patience of many can bear".

Tags: iraq war, tom hayden

Zorro: Capítulos 74-78 (May 28-June 1)

2007-06-04T11:53:00.000-07:00

This week, we didn't see enough of Selenia, though Fernando did have a long consultation with her about María Pía. I think Selenia should have a couple of scenes in every episode from here on out. Speaking of Selenia, the Zorro series Web site just added several of the newer characters to their Personajes page - but Selenia isn't included! What were they thinking?

Not only that: they left off my man Aaron the Exorcist, too! People, who do you have putting those Web pages together?

I know that the general idea of the telenovela is that the story ends and you go on to another one. And I'm down with that, for the most part. Stories need to have an end. Otherwise, they can stay around until they die a slow and sad death. Think X-Files.

Aaron the Exorcist is currently off searching for God - but I'm sure he'll be back

Still, it would be great if they would do a novela where Selenia the Megawitch and Aaron the Exorcist were the main protagonists. I think that would be awesome. Of course, I think Twin Peaks is still the high point in the history of television, so maybe I'm not quite mainstream on this.

Anyway, this week, Zorro got to again humiliate el Comandante Montero by breaking into the prison yet again and escaping even after Montero locked him in a cell in the hidden dungeon where he'd been holding Esmeralda. One of the attractive features about this Zorro is that for his ability and cunning, he screws up a lot. In the very first episode, in the concluding scene where he first got tangled up (literally) with Esmeralda, he was there to help Miguel the Gitano escape from El Callao prison. But he only made it there after el Comandante's Montero's men shot the poor guy once.

How could Zorro just walk into a cell and not notice that Montero and his boys were hidden all around him? Anyway, he pulled off an escape in a cloud of smoke. Still, the escape was pretty impressive and gave Montero yet another thing to steam about.

The pressure is starting to get to el Comandante. This week he was showing some real signs of paranoia, taking Capitán Pizarro to his private bedroom and telling him to whisper because Zorro might be anywhere. Of course, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. And it didn't calm el Comandante when he discovered that Zorro had carved a Z onto his sheets. Although, the way he acts with his men, it could have just as well have been one of them. Or maybe Capitán Pizarro.

Mariángel/"Mangle" had quite a week. Olmos the hunchback has to get some of Mangle's tears for the potion or spell that Selenia promised to do for him to make Mangle attracted to him. Olmos managed to move into the De la Vega mansion and Mangle insisted he have the room next to hers. It turns out that Mangle has a little wooden box that she pulls out in her room and cries over.

What's in the box is a letter from a guy named Santiago Michelena, a former boyfriend of Mangle's back in the Old Country. Mangle shows signs of having the remnants of a heart over Santiago. But she later confronts Esmeralda in the basement of the house out in the woods where Montero is now holding her, and she rants at Esmeralda about how she stole the one guy she ever loved and so on. Esmeralda tries to tell Mangle that what she had seen was actually Santiago trying to force himself on her. But Mangle didn't want to listen.

I'm thinking this scene was a notice that Mangle is now officially crazy. Almudena mentioned at one point that Mangle's mother had been insane and she was worried Mangle might be following her down that path. Seeing how angry she was over Santiago and Esmeralda, especially since she's generally about as cold-hearted as it gets when it comes to men, and seeing that she was willing to leave her pregnant half-sister (she still thinks Esmeralda is Fernando's biological daughter) to rot in a basement in the woods, well, I think she's now officially a loon.

Which reminds me, we still have to get an accounting of who Esmeralda's father really is. And is Mangle's mother really dead? They could both show up still.

Tobías saw Catalina doing the Wild Thang with Capitán Pizarro. So now he's out for revenge. His "shadow Zorro" gig is still mostly comic relief. But he showed some spine for about the first time this week. He even snuck up on Pizarro and threatened him to stay away from Catalina. Which could be a heavy clue that it was really Tobías behind the mask that time, though Pizarro didn't seem to pick up on that. The fact that Agapito is convinced that Tobías is Zorro after treating his wound in the butt is pretty entertaining, too.

Almudena is moving closer to the grave. Yumalai was sure that Almudena's dream we the previous week where Regina/Toypurnia appears to her is a sure sign that Almudena is on the Grim Reaper's short list. She goes off to consult with Búfala Blanca and asks her to put her in touch with Toypurnia's spirit. Búfala Blanca gives her a peace pipe packed with some killer weed so powerful that one puff and Yumalai is communicating with the spirit. Or, in this case, with Toypurnia's spirit, who for some reason appears to her in Regina mode, i.e., with Spanish clothing. We don't get to hear the conversation. But afterward, Yumalai tells Búfala Blanca that Toypurnia told her Almudena had to go. Búfala Blanca warns Yumalai from trying to interfere with destiny. But I'm guessing she plans to, anyway.

In the last scene of the week, Almudena and Mangle are kneeling at Esmeralda's grave, and Almudena passes out at the end. Mangle was dressed all in black with a black headpiece, looking as creepy as I've seen her so far. It's particularly morbid since we know that Mangle is aware that Esmeralda is really alive. Her main purpose for being there seems to be to convince Diego that she has a human soul. But without major drugs to help her, that's going to be a tough sell. In fact, her love potion from the native witch-woman made Diego black out. But even that couldn't get him to fall for her seductions. Mangle and Olmos deserve each other. The only thing new she has going for her is that Diego is almost convinced that Esmeralda is really dead, although he knows the body in the grave isn't hers.

Renzo the Useless, Ana Camila (Sor Suplicios) and Kamba (with his demon in tow) are hiding out with the Gitano tribe. Renzo fortunately shares the same remarkable recuperative powers of most everyone else on the show, and his near-fatal gunshot wound in the chest was pretty much healed by the end of the week. Now he can go get himself in trouble somewhere else. Right now, he's sitting around mooning over Camila, while Laisha stands around and steams, probably plotting the best way to land Camila in el Comandante's torture chamber.

Anabolena Meza as Sara Kalí/Mercedes Mayorga de Aragón (Photo: Telemundo)

And, in political developments this week, Padre Tomás Villarte makes plans with his secret pro-democracy league, the Cofradía (Brotherhood), for the arrival of the Queen and the evil Duque Jacobo. They apparently trust the current Queen to do the right thing about Sara Kalí. So they plan to get her to talk to them aware from el Duque to tell her about Sara Kalí and el Duque's plot against the crown.

María Pía tried to escape to distant parts to get away from el Gobernador Fernando. But he caught up to her and kidnapped her. She finally persuaded him to take her back to town. Then Alejandro catches them and has a sword-fight with Fernando and gets him on the ground and is ready to put him out of his misery. Then María Pía intercedes, declaring her love for Fernando. Too bad. Because Fernando is too much of a villain to get rehabilitated in the end, it seems to me.

To conclude, here's Zorro in one of his earlier incarnations:

Tags: zorro, zorro telenovela

Zorro developments through May 25, Capítulos 60-73

2007-06-03T21:15:00.000-07:00

There's a new witch in town - Selenia may be even cooler than Yumalai

Since my last weekly summary of the Zorro telenovela, I've been on vacation. I've been keeping up and catching up through the Telemundo Web site, with tapes of the episodes and especially through the Caray Caray blog, which provides details summaries of each episode in English. I've been watching the episodes from May 29 in real time, there being no May 28 episode due to the Miss Universo contest. I'm not at all sure about my episode count. But I'm sticking with my own, for now. Only the DVD release will reveal the truth on the episode count.

A large part of the plot those three weeks has turned around the dual deaths and resurrections of Esmeralda and Sara Kalí. In Sara Kalí's case, she wound up captured by Pizarro and kept in an isolated house with Agapito, the town surgeon/dentist/undertaker. Agapito concocted a Romeo-and-Juliet potion that made her appear dead, and Pizarro was convinced. Agapito buried her and then dug her up and revived her, though he barely got her out in time.

Esmeralda's "death" was accomplished by a funeral which el Comandante Montero set up with the body he bought from an impoverished fisherman. They had a funeral, whose high point was Almudena's denouncing Montero in front of the wedding party.

I'm not quite sure where they're going with the resurrection theme, but they're beating us over the head with it, so I'm assuming it's going somewhere. Sara Kalí was "dead" and "buried" in the El Callao prison for 20 years or so. Now she's had another "death" and "resurrection", and is hiding out in a leper colony. This all will presumably make her an empathetic queen if she ever claims the throne. Or maybe it will make her vindictive and savage,who knows? I'm pretty skeptical of the whole benign monarchy business, at least the 19th version. But let's assume the best for now.

Esmeralda is doing her "death" and "burial" in the dungeon and her "death" and "burial" in the graveyard all at once. Hopefully not requiring 20 years to resolve. One of the more intriguing scenes from this period is a dream of Diego's which picks up the Dracula motif. Diego walks into a room where Esmeralda's body is lying dead on a table. Her skin is still flawless. Not surprising given her genetic heritage from Sara Kalí, whose skin was still in remarkably good shape despite being deprived of sunlight for 20 years, what with the dungeon and the iron mask and all. Actually, the hair genes must be pretty strong, too. Because after weeks in the dungeon and even a couple of torture sessions, Esmeralda's skin and hair both are remarkably beautiful.

But I digress. Diego walks over to Esmeralda's body and kisses her. When he straigtens up and looks at her, she opens her eyes. Even though I knew it was just a dream, I couldn't help but thinking they were about to go all Dark Shadows on us and that Esmeralda was going to plunge her fangs into Diego's neck. But Diego woke up before that happened.

Esmeralda returns from the dead

So we have seen a kind of resurrection of Esmeralda already: a dreamy, sexy, Dracula-esque version. Maybe after this one is over, they could do a follow-up novela where Diego/Zorro becomes a vampire. But we'll have to wait to see on that one.

The most intriguing new character is a witch named Selenia, apparently modeled on Marie Laveau, who appears in Isabel Allende's Zorro novel. Selenia is more of a witch for the aristocracy, though, not the steamy-dancing-in-the-swamps type. She came over from Spain. Olmos thinks she cursed his mother and made him be born with his hunchback. But it hasn't stopped him from going to her for a love potion to snag Mariángel - who the folks at Caray Caray have nicknamed "Mangle".

Selenia agrees to do it, for a hefty fee. But he has to get some of her tears for the potion, which promises to be tricky. She also warns him that Mangle will be a nightmare for him, that Mangle will make him cry "tears of blood". Yow!

Selenia shows up at the local tavern one night and belts back some stiff liquor. Witches, it seems, have a high tolerance for alcohol because it doesn't phase her. She's come there to entice el Gobernador Fernando into asking for her help.

Of course, he wants her help with María Pia, with whom he has recurring scenes that generally cover the same ground: I love you I can't live without you, save me, yadda, yadda. María Pia begs him to leave her alone, which he never does. So at she's plotting to get away from him some way.

And you thought the witches on Charmed were something!

Zorro/Diego has fully regained his memory and is carrying on a constant series of attacks and provocations against el Comandante Montero. In a swordfight, he carved a "Z" onto Montero's chest. None of this Walt Disney, carve-the-Z only in their clothes business for the Telemundo Zorro.

Alejandro's bigamous arrangement has had its crisis moments. Yumalai went back to the tribe to consult with Búfala Blanca for a while. But she came back, much the relief of Almudena and the joy of Alejandro. Almudena has become emotionally dependent on Yumalai and Yumalai has come to love her. But during the week of May 25, Almudena had a pretty but ominous dream, in which Toypurnia/Regina appeared to her in Regina clothing and told her that death was nothing to be afraid of, and that Regina herself would come to lead Almudena over the river when the time came. Almudena has been alternatively fainting and bed-ridden ever since the supposed death of Esmeralda.

One of the quirkier moments was a scene in which Alejandro is sitting at a chess board, apparently playing chess with himself. This was just before he confessed to Dolores that he had slept with Yumalai the night of his wedding to Almudena.

Renzo, handsome but generally useless, got caught with Sor Suplicios and Camba the escaped African slave by a group of slave traders who planeed to sell them all. Suplicios got raped by the slave-traders, but the three of them managed to escape. Suplicios now has a civilian name, Ana Camila, which she revealed to Renzo. There's major chemistry between her and Renzo now. Camba is still tagging along, still not speaking a word of Spanish, and his demon takes over ever now and then.

The demonology in this series is a bit mysterious. But I guess that part of the idea of using invisible demons as plot devices. This one apparently bounces from one person to the other. So when Aaron the Exorcist drove it out of Suplicios/Camila, poor Camba caught it. As if he didn't have problems enough already. But when he's in full possession mode, his eyes get all white and his face thoroughly insane-looking, which is a cool touch. The demon took over in time to stop a slave-hunter from raping Camila after they had escaped, but not soon enough to stop the hapless Renzo from getting shot. Exactly why a demon would want to interfere with a slave trader is unclear; wouldn't they be on the same side?

The Marquesa's not a witch, but she's a pretty tough cookie

The political plot is also moving forward, though fairly slowly. Unseating the Spanish Queen can take some time. And the Marquesa Carmen Santillana de Roquette is back on the scene, not only helping her friends the De la Vegas but also helping Sara Kalí to take her rightful throne as Queen of Spain. We also see the current Queen talking to the evil Duke Jacobo, who so far is the biggest villain of them all. But we see that the current Queen has her suspiciosn about Jacobo, too. She insists on making that New World trip and Jacobo has been stalling. El Comandante Montero is one of Jacobo's allies. It figures.

(All the photos this week are my screenshots)

Tags: zorro, zorro telenovela

Remembering the Six-Day War

2007-06-03T11:33:00.000-07:00

June 5 (Tuesday) will be the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War between Israel and Egypt, Jordan and Syria. It was that war that left Israel occupying the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with consequences that are far from being at an end. As David Remnick writes in The Seventh Day: Why the Six-Day War is still being fought New Yorker 05/28/07:

The Israeli victory changed the country in nearly every aspect. The response, both within the country and among Jews abroad, ranged from the joyful to the distinctly messianic — a messianism that helped lead to the occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Sinai, and the Golan Heights, and the establishment of one settlement after another. It was a war that Israelis regarded as existential in importance––defeat could well have meant the end of the state after less than twenty years––and yet winning had Pyrrhic consequences. Out of it came forty years of occupation, widespread illegal settlements, the intensification of Palestinian nationalism, terrorism, counterattacks, checkpoints, failed negotiations, uprisings, and ever-deepening distrust. What greater paradox of history: a war that must be won, a victory that results in consuming misery and instability.

A number of retrospectives are coming out. Here are some others that I've come across:

First A victor - then 40 years of stalemate by Matthew Kalman San Francisco Chronicle 06/03/07. This article mentions something that is not well understood in the current politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

Israel's policies have produced some disastrous errors, among them the decision to nurture a religious Islamic group called Hamas in the mid-1980s asa counterweight to Fatah and the PLO.

Remaking the world in six days by Michael Oren, author of Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East Los Angeles Times 06/03/07

Mideast Timeline compiled by Chronicle Librarian Lois JermynSan Francisco Chronicle 06/03/07

Peace package may require piece-by-piece assembly by Anna Badkhen San Francisco Chronicle 06/03/07

Israel's wasted victory: Six days of war followed by 40 years of misery. How can it ever end? The Economist 05/24/07

Forty years on The Economist 05/24/07

Looking at the Middle East, Four Decades after the Six-Day War: Israel's Pyrrhic Victory by Christoph Schult Spiegel International Online 06/01/07

The six-day war, forty years on by Hazem Saghieh OpenDemocracy.net 05/18/07

Seis Días y 40 años sin salida de Juan Miguel Muñoz El País 02.06.07

The war's seventh day by Michael Ben-Yair, Israeli Attorney General 1993-96 Ha'aretz 03/03/2002

The 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War by Daphna Berman Ha'aretz 06/01/2007

It's not the war, stupid - it's the occupation by Shmuel Rosner Ha'aretz 06/01/2007

The 'gold mine' on the border by Amir Oren Ha'aretz 06/01/2007

The battle for Jerusalem is in our hands by Anshel Pfeffer Ha'aretz 05/31/2007

Surprising conversations by Ze'ev Schiff Ha'aretz 06/01/2007

War put Israel on communal map for a proud American Jewry by Ben Harris, Jewish Telegraph Agency 06/01/07

Tags: israel, six day war

G-8 summit: There's a riot going on...

2007-06-02T18:11:00.000-07:00

Sounds like there was quite a rumble at the G-8 protests on Saturday. Here's a minute-long video from El Mundo: Violentos enfrentamientos en la marcha contra el G-8 06/02/07. The formal meeting doesn't start until June 6.

This article reports 146 police injured on the first day, 25 seriously: El primer día de protestas contra la cumbre del G-8 en Alemania deja 146 policías heridos El Mundo/EFE 06/02/07. No word included on how many demonstrators may have been injured.Der Spiegel has more photos: Rostock: Steine, Stinkefinger, brennende Autos.

And they're reporting more than 300 or more police injured: Randale in Rostock - 300 verletzte Polizisten. These initial reports are blaming "Autonomen", or "autonomous" groups - anarchists, more-or-less. It's worth noting that in this article, reporting prior to the riot, that the German police union was criticizing US demands on security measures, particularly the notion that protesters should be completely out of sight of the G-8 participants: Polizeigewerkschaft kritisiert US-Sicherheitsvorgaben Der Spiegel 02.06.07. Bush doesn't want to see the demonstrators, hear them, or think about them. The police union chairperson said, "Es ist mir eine Herzensangelegenheit, dass Menschen demonstrieren dürfen, dass der Protest deutlich sichtbar ist. Das ist wichtig für unsere Demokratie." ("It is my heart's desire that people be allowed to demonstrate, [and] that the protest is clearly visible. That is important for our democracy.")

For the demonstrators to initiate violence at these things is pointless, especially if the police themselves are demanding greater freedom for peaceful demonstrators. I haven't seen any credible reports yet on provocateurs in this case. But given everything we know about how the Cheney-Bush administration handles things, the chances of them sending in provocateurs is something around 100%, I would guess.

Tags: g-8 summit

Leni Riefenstahl

2007-06-02T16:37:00.000-07:00

Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's ideal German woman

I see that the New York Review of Books currently has pulled out from behind subscription the article by Susan Sontag from its 02/06/1975 issue on the infamous Leni Riefenstahl, Fascinating Fascism. If you're under the misimpression than the nasty old pro-Nazi propagandist somehow repented her enthusiastic support for her Führer later in life, check out Sontag's article.

Of course, Riefenstahl lived for some three decades beyond that. But she defended her noxious role in the Third Reich until the end.

Sontag gave this description of Riefenstahl's best-known work, Triumph des Willens:

Although Triumph of the Will has no narrative voice it does open with a written text that heralds the rally as the redemptive culmination of German history. But this opening commentary is the least original of the ways in which the film is tendentious. Triumph of the Will represents an already achieved and radical transformation of reality: history become theater. In her book published in 1935, Riefenstahl had told the truth. The Nuremberg Rally "was planned not only as a spectacular mass meeting—but as a spectacular propaganda film…. The ceremonies and precise plans of the parades, marches, processions, the architecture of the halls and stadium were designed for the convenience of the cameras." How the Party convention was staged was determined by the decision to produce Triumph of the Will. The event, instead of being an end in itself, served as the set of a film which was then to assume the character of an authentic documentary. Anyone who defends Riefenstahl's films as documentaries, if documentary is to be distinguished from propaganda, is being ingenuous. In Triumph of the Will, the document (the image) is no longer simply the record of reality; "reality"has been constructed to serve the image.

The current (06/14/07) issue features another article about Riefenstahl, Fascinating Narcissism by Ian Buruma, which opens with this paragraph:

That Leni Riefenstahl was rather a monster is not really in dispute. And if it ever was, two new biographies provide enough information to nail her. Bad behavior began early. Steven Bach, in his excellent Leni, tells the story of Walter Lubovski, a Jewish boy in Berlin who fell madly in love with Riefenstahl after meeting her at a skating rink. In a fit of teenage cruelty, Leni and her girlfriends tormented the boy so badly that he slashed his wrists at the summer cottage of Riefenstahl's family. To stop her father from discovering what had happened, she shoved the bleeding boy under the sofa. He survived and ended up in a mental institution before escaping to America, where he went blind. All Riefenstahl had to say when she heard was: "He never forgot me as long as he lived."

He also gives us this little anecdote: "The Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards once turned up in an SS uniform while Leni was photographing Mick Jagger." Yuck! And, yuck!

I have to admit that I'm neither enough of a film buff, nor familiar enough with film criticism (much less aesthetic philosophy, Good Lord, who is?), nor informed enough about Riefensthal's work (though I've seen several of her films) to make any confident judgment about the nuances of "fascist" art in the context Sontag and Buruma discuss them. The main value of Sontag's piece for me is her factual debunking of Riefenstahl's lying defenses of her enthusiastic collaboration with Hitler and the Nazis.

Buruma also gives us some similar analysis. Here was the slimy woman's reaction to first seeing her Führer speak:

I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. It seemed as if the earth's surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth.

In general, I tend to think all that talk about Hitler's hypnotic powers over his listeners is about 99% horse-poop. But that's a broader issue. But the fact that Riefenstahl would express her support this way is a notable fact in itself, whether it was an "honest" impression or not.

Buruma writes about Triumph des Willens:

Although she denied it, we know from various witnesses, quoted in the biographies, that several scenes were reconstructed after the rally in a Berlin studio. We also know that far from being ordered to make the film, Riefenstahl longed to make it, indeed lobbied for it. As with Speer's architectural plans, Hitler took a personal interest in the project. He was the ultimate producer of his own spectacle (the title was his choice). As a result, whatever Riefenstahl wanted, she got. Triumph of the Will was made with the resources of a major Hollywood production: thirty-six cameramen, nine aerial photographers, a lighting crew of seventeen, and two still photographers, one of whom shot nothing but pictures of Riefenstahl herself. She was the only filmmaker in Nazi Germany who answered directly to the Führer and not to Goebbels's propaganda ministry.

This became very irritating to Goebbels, especially when Riefenstahl treated her budgets as though she had a direct line to the national treasury, which in effect she did. His exasperation was later used as evidence by Riefenstahl that he hated her because she wouldn't sleep with him. But no matter. Many great filmmakers go over budget, and annoying Goebbels was no sin. Triumph of the Will is a stunning achievement. She used all the editing techniques and camera work learned from Arnold Fanck, but also came up with ideas of her own: cameras held by men on roller skates or installed in an elevator behind Hitler's podium, the brilliant cross-cutting between crowds and performers, the extraordinary choreography of a cast of thousands. The problem is that her genius, in this film, is purely technical, applied to an unworthy subject.

Buruma partially challenges Sontag's arguments about Riefenstahl's "fascist" art. But he basically argues that she exhibited technical brilliance in some aspects - something that seems to be generally conceded, especially on her filming of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin - but that artistically it's pretty dull:

Perhaps the Faustian bargain she struck with Hitler was her only shot at immortality. Even if we leave aside her personal views and sensibilities, her talents were a perfect match for Hitler's grand project of turning his murderous vision into a mass spectacle [in Triumph des Willens], a kind of musical of death. But it was too kitschy, in the sense of false and misplaced emotion, to be great art. In Riefenstahl, Hitler had found his perfect technician.

And he writes:

The problem with Riefenstahl, and the main reason for her limitations as an artist, is that she was not just an erotic frigidaire, but an emotional one too. Her lack of human understanding, or any feeling for human beings apart from pure aesthetics, does not matter so much in a film like Olympia. It matters hugely in a feature film about love, rejection, and intrigue. Tiefland, which took Riefenstahl more than a decade to finish, and was finally released in 1954, is exactly what [Steven] Bach says it is, "a kitsch curiosity, as nearly unwatchable as any film ever released by a world-class director."

The theme of a child of nature (Riefenstahl), persecuted by the wicked denizens of decadent civilization, is familiar. The sight of Riefenstahl doing a pastiche of flamenco dancing surrounded by Spanish-looking extras is beyond camp; it is plainly embarrassing. That the extras were in fact Gypsies plucked by Riefenstahl from a camp in Salzburg, where they were imprisoned before being sent to Auschwitz, added to her monstrous reputation. She lied about them too, claiming that they all happily survived the war. Most didn't. But the film fails artistically, not because it is fascist, but because it is clumsily staged like a bad silent movie, with histrionic gestures (echoing Riefenstahl's expressionist dancing days) making up for plausible human emotions. It was as though nothing had changed since the 1920s.

Leni Riefenstahl: an awful, awful human being.

Tags: leni riefenstahl, susan sontag

The 2006 election

2007-06-01T16:39:00.000-07:00

I haven't inflicted any out-and-out political-science geekery on the readers in a while. So what better way to remedy that than linking to the lead article from the Spring 2007 Political Science Quarterly, Referendum: The 2006 Midterm Congressional Elections by Gary Jacobson?

As the title indicates, Jacobson is looking at the 2006 elections and the "message", if any, that voters were sending.

The primary source of the pro-Democratic tide in 2006 was public unhappiness with the Iraq War and its originator, George W. Bush. Figure 3 [p. 7 of the PDF document, p. 6 of the magazine] displays the trends in support for the war and approval of Bush’s job performance through October 2006. The two trends track one another closely and move in similar ways in response to events in Iraq. Cross-sectional analyses also find a close relationship between opinions on Bush and the war; respondents give consistent responses - approve of Bush and support the war, or disapprove of Bush and oppose the war - an average of 84 percent of the time in polls spanning this period. These opinions are far more tightly linked than they were for Bush’s predecessors in comparable situations - Harry Truman with the Korean War (60 percent consistent), and Lyndon Johnson with the VietnamWar (64 percent consistent). In any single survey, the direction of causality is ambiguous - prior attitudes toward Bush shape reactions to the war, assessments of the war shape evaluations of Bush - but there seems little doubt that growing disillusionment with the war has dragged down Bush’s approval ratings over time. (my emphasis)

He describes the Karl Rove's strategy of focusing on Terror in the 2006 election and demonizing Democrats as allies of The Terrorists. In later years, Republicans are likely to deny that they and their candidates ever did such a thing. It's important that the rest of us remember it:

Thus, during the summer, the administration orchestrated a coordinated, no-holds-barred counterattack against Democratic critics of Bush and the Iraq War. Taking advantage of the public’s attention to events commemorating the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Bush and his allies sought not only to reinforce the idea that the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism were one and the same, but also to elevate the conflict to the equivalent of World War II and the Cold War. The President drew cautionary parallels between Osama bin Laden’s anti-U.S. fulminations and Lenin’s What Is To Be Done and Hitler’s Mein Kampf, claiming the mantle of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as presidents who stood fast in the face of global threats. In addresses delivered around the same time, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld also variously quoted Roosevelt, took the fight against Nazism and fascism as precedent, and, more to the political point, charged that critics of the administration’s policies believed that "vicious extremists can be appeased" and that "retreat from Iraq would satisfy the appetite of the terrorists and get them to leave us alone".

The central message was that Islamic jihadists were as profound a threat to the existence of the United States as the Axis powers and the Soviet Union had once been. Democrats [the charge went], by questioning the wisdom of the Iraq War or the administration’s conduct of the fight against terrorism more generally, revealed themselves as appeasers who were blind to the terrorist threat and, if given control of Congress, would put the security of the United States at grave risk. As Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee put it, "The president’s effort to keep Americans safe will grind to a halt with Democrats in control ..." Later in the campaign, Bush told a Republican rally that "however they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: the terrorists win and American loses." The campaign was, in short, a concerted effort to use the specter of jihadist terrorism to frighten enough voters into voting Republican in 2006 to keep the Party in control of the House and Senate, replicating at the congressional level Bush’s successful strategy against John Kerry in 2004. (my emphasis)

He also gives a brief account of the Republican legislative agenda designed to put Democrats in the position of voting against bills that the administration would claim were essential in the fight against The Terrorists:

If anyone doubted the terrorism agenda’s electoral motivation, Republican leaders' comments after passage laid them to rest. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist: "Do [voters] want to be voting for a party that does unabashedly say, 'We’re going to have victory in this war on terrorism,' or a party that says, 'We’ve got to surrender?' House Speaker Dennis Hastert: Democrats "were so bent on protecting criminals ... they’re not allowing us to prosecute these people. The 130 most treacherous people probably in the world, and they want to ... release them out into the public eventually." (The Democrats who advocated surrender to terrorists or releasing them from custody naturally went unnamed, as they were wholly imaginary.)

In 2006, though, it wasn't enough to hold onto their Congressional majorities:

Moreover, surveys turned up little evidence that ordinary citizens were swayed by the administration’s rhetoric; it appears, at most, to have simply reinforced existing (highly partisan) views. In doing so, it may nonetheless have helped the Republican cause by reviving support among Republican voters who had been showing signs of disillusionment with the war and thus the President (see Figure 6 [p. 9 of the PDF document, p. 10 of the magazine]). Democrats and independents were a much harder sell; most of them had long since stopped believing what Bush and his allies were saying about the war and its justifications. The greatest obstacle to the administration’s attempt to change the subject, however, was the steady stream of bad news coming out of Iraq; during October, American battle deaths exceeded 100 for the first time since January 2005, and sectarian violence produced the highest Iraqi monthly civilian death toll recorded to that date.

This last point is important. I've argued before that the notion that says opposition to a war is a direct result of American casualties and basically nothing else, is a deeply flawed one. At best, it's misleading in the extreme. But Jacobson's observation about the news from Iraq keeping the issue on voters' minds focuses on a particular moment, and is a different matter than the argument that opposition to war is driven only by American casualties. He's saying that events near the time of the election kept the Iraq War much in the minds of the voters. He's not saying that they caused an upsurge in opposition to the war; that opposition had been long established, as he shows in other figures he cities.

Unfortunately, in his conclusion, Jacobson retreats to the safe position of High Broderism:

The consensus of postelection punditry that Democrats will succeed politically only if they pursue popular centrist policies, resisting any impulse toward a hard left turn, seems well founded. Among the mass public, self-described conservatives outnumber liberals by a wide margin, and moderates outnumber both. Elementary arithmetic makes it plain that Democrats will have to retain the support of the centrist, swing voters who were essential to their victory in 2006 if they are to have any chance of repeating it in 2008.

Tags: 2006 election, iraq war

A dark cloud for the Dark Lord?

2007-06-01T12:16:00.000-07:00

John Dean on the push by Fred Thompson and other rightwing Republicans for a pardon for Scooter Libby: The Bush Administration's Dilemma Regarding a Possible Libby Pardon - And How Outsiders Such as Fred Thompson Appear to Be Working on a Solution Findlaw.com 06/01/07.

Next Tuesday, June 5, the judge is expected to make a decision on whether to send Scooter to jail immediately or let him out on bail while he appeals his conviction.

Dean points out that in the Watergate trials "the March 1, 1974 indictment of Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman and Chuck Colson (who pled guilty, rather than risk a trial) charged each of them with a conspiracy to obstruct justice by offering to provide clemency to those involved in the Watergate break-in." Dean:

If Libby had been acting on his own behalf, a pardon would present no problem; Bush and Cheney could feel it was the humanitarian thing to do, given his long service to the government. However, no one I know believes Libby was acting simply for himself, nor does the evidence suggest it.

Dean observes that if Scooter was covering for Dark Lord Cheney, it would be obstruction of justice for Cheney to request Bush to pardon his boy Scooter:

No wonder then, that Special Counsel Fitzgerald remarked during the Libby trial that there was "a cloud" over the Vice President.

Come Tuesday, that cloud could get much darker for Cheney.

Tags: dick cheney, john dean, scooter libby

What we've come to

2007-06-01T08:40:00.000-07:00

The pro-torture fans of the Christian Republican White People's Party see a (they don't call it "Jewish" in public) media conspiracy to minimize torture by "Al Qaida". Why, some of them are demanding in outrage, do the Liberal Media not more prominently report the "torture manuals" that the US recently discovered in Iraq? Glenn Greenwald has more details in Al-Qaida does it, too Salon 06/01/07.

Leaving aside the question of whether the manuals found were directly connected to the Al Qaida run by Osama bin Laden, John Cole has an appropriate response, to which Greenwald links, Dear Newsbusters and the MRC Balloon Juice blog 05/31/07:

It isn't news because they are terrorists, you [Cheney]ing simpletons. Yesterday, my cat scratched himself then s*** in a box. The media didn’t report that, either.

After the Abu Ghuraib perversion-and-torture scandal broke, defenders of torture defended it on the grounds that at least it wasn't as bad as what Saddam did. Now it's down to, Hey, we're no worse than Al Qaida!

I think that qualifies as "lowering the bar". Lowering it so far that it's buried.

Tags: torture

Bush on Syria

2007-05-31T16:43:00.000-07:00

Robert Fisk writes about Bush's position on relations with Syria in The scar of Hariri's murder will never heal in Lebanon Independent 06/01/07 (posted 05/31/07), which mainly deals with the UN Security Council's decision to investigate the assassination of the former Lebanese Rafik Hariri:

Clearly, George Bush will be pleased because he has long ago lined up President Bashar al-Assad of Syria in his sights. Not long ago, receiving Lebanese visitors in the White House - and this a 100 per cent accurate quotation from the horse's mouth, so to speak - Bush announced that he was "going to hang Bashar by the balls". The problem, of course, is that Mr Bush is in no position to do that. Indeed, it is the army of Iraqi insurgents who appear to have Washington by the balls and it is Mr Bush who may need President Assad's help to relieve this terrible pressure. For at the end of the day, Syria and Iran are the two countries which the US needs so it can extract itself from Iraq. (my emphasis)

Tags: bush, syria

Sleaze

2007-05-31T16:32:00.000-07:00

This is the kind of thing that should make a person the target of a censure motion in the Senate (DeMint rips war ‘wimps’ by James Rosen The State/McClatchey 05/30/07):

Sen. Jim DeMint on Tuesday blamed Democratic "wimps" in Congress for American casualties in Iraq, and cited Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for special censure.

During a luncheon speech to 100 constituents in Spartanburg, DeMint also took issue with the now widespread belief that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, saying the executed Iraqi dictator had "stockpiles of chemical weapons" that still exist.

DeMint devoted most of his comments to the current immigration debate in the Senate. But he spoke about the war when a woman in the audience stood and asked him how long U.S. troops will remain in Iraq.

"Al-Qaida knows that we’ve got a lot of wimps in Congress," DeMint said. "I believe a lot of the casualties can be laid at the feet of all the talk in Congress about how we’ve got to get out, we’ve got to cut and run."

Asked later who he had targeted in his comments, DeMint replied:

"To a large degree, the Democratic party and those who basically declared defeat like Harry Reid."

Rosen notes that DeMint has apparently achieved a dubious "first" in the Iraq War debate:

While Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials have accused war critics of giving comfort to the enemy, DeMint's comments are believed to be the first time a supporter of the president’s war policies has directly blamed critics for American casualties.

He said he thinks al-Qaida strategists in Iraq "feel that if they continue to do harm to American soldiers, they will eventually win in Congress and the funding will be cut off. That's the clearest signal the Democrats have sent."

These people see things through such an ideological fog that they think the whole world is running according to their culture-war dogmas. Worse than pathetic.

I saw this link via Steve Soto of The Left Coaster (Grab A Rifle DeMint 05/31/07), who notes that DeMint "was draft age during the Vietnam War but went to college instead, and who has military age children".

Tags: iraq war, jim demint

While I was away...

2007-05-31T16:18:00.000-07:00

... Gareth Porter wrote on Sunni Resistance Receptive to Sadr Alliance Inter Press Service 05/23/07, concerning Muqtada al-Sadr's (aka, "Mookie") proposal for a Sunni-Shi'a alliance against the Americans. Porter writes:

The talks with Sunni resistance leaders have been coordinated with a series of other moves by Sadr since early February. Although many members of Sadr's Mahdi Army have been involved in sectarian killings and intimidation of Sunnis in Baghdad, Sadr has taken what appears to be a decisive step to break with those in his movement who have been linked to sectarian violence. Over the past three months, he has expelled at least 600 men from the Mahdi Army who were accused of murder and other violations of Sadr's policy, according to Raghavan.

The massive demonstration against the occupation mounted in Najaf by Sadr's organisation on Apr. 9, which Iraqi and foreign observers estimated at tens or even hundreds of thousands of people, was apparently timed to coincide with his initiative in opening talks with the Sunnis.

The demonstration not only showed that Sadr could mobilise crowds comparable to the largest ever seen in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, but also made clear Sadr's commitment to transcending sectarian interests. The demonstrators carried Iraqi flags instead of pictures of Sadr or other Shiite symbols. It also included a small contingent of members of the Sunni-based Islamic Party of Iraq.

Sadr's decision in mid-April to pull his representatives out of the al-Maliki government also appears to have been aimed in part at clearing the way for an agreement with the Sunni insurgents. Leaders of those organisations have said they would not accept the U.S.-sponsored government in any peace negotiations with the United States.

Tags: gareth porter, iraq war

Russia talk

2007-05-31T15:47:00.000-07:00

The Russians' test of a new rocket that is designed to be a counter-measure to the Star Wars "missile defense system" that doesn't even work yet is attracting attentions:U.S. "imperialism" means new arms race: Putin By Oleg Shchedrov Reuters 05/31/07; Putin culpa a EE UU de iniciar una nueva carrera de armamentos El País/Reuters 31.05.2007; "Wir haben sie gewarnt" Süddeutsche Zeitung/Reuters 31.05.07; Putin Defends Tests as Response in 'Arms Race' by Anna Smolchenko The Moscow Times 06/01/07.

Smolchenko reports:

President Vladimir Putin on Thursday said the country's recent tests of new missiles were aimed at maintaining "global peace," defending them as an appropriate response to an increasing U.S. military presence in Europe.

In the latest sign of cooling relations with the United States, Putin suggested that Washington's actions were provoking an arms race.

"Bear in mind, it wasn't us who initiated the new round," Putin said, adding quietly, "of the arms race." ...

"This is extremely important for maintaining global peace," he said in response to a Greek reporter's questions about the strained state of Russian-U.S. relations. In a clear reference to the United States, Putin also criticized behavior characterized by "imperialism and dictate" in a repeat of statements he made in recent months.

The state energy heavyweight Gazprom will continue to attract attention, too, particularly while energy prices remain high: EU, Russia must adhere to legal energy supply framework: Piebalgs EU Business 31.05.2007; How the Russians plan to invade Britain by Craig Murray Daily Mail 05/27/07; Russia, Energy Security and Alternative Energy by Craig Murray, blog post 05/27/07; Why Russians Love Gazprom by Jason Bush and Anthony Blanco Business Week 07/26/07

In his blog post, Murray writes:

... I have little sympathy for the view that George Bush is the only bad man in the World, and that any World leader whose interests differ from Bush's, eg Putin, is therefore a good leader. In fact, I would view it as a fruitless and difficult exercise to view which of the two is more sinister. I do not give a second's credence to the view that the attack on Iraq was wrong, but on Chechnya OK. Or that it was dreadfully wrong for Bush to support the despotism of President Karimov of Uzbekistan, but it's OK now that Putin is doing it.

In fact I rather despair of the many on the Left who seem to accept Bush and Blair's risible "With us or against us" logic, and conclude that any opponent of Bush is a good person. Anyone who believes that the Russian oligarchs are not just as evil and machinating as Dick Cheney, has switched off his critical faculties.

And finally the fact that the neo-cons have identified energy security as a problem, does not mean it is not a problem. What the neo-cons have got wrong is the solution, which is not endless wars of resource annexation, but profound measures of energy conservation and re-orientation, and a massive drive to develop carbon friendly alternative energy sources.

Now, there's nothing especially objectionable about what Murray says here. But if we're entering a new, long-term nuclear arms race with the Russians, and if Gazprom is being held up as the Russian bogeyman by Dick Cheney types looking for excuses for a new Cold War, it's worth getting in the habit now of looking closely at the claims being made.

In the case of this statement, just who exactly holds "the view that George Bush is the only bad man in the World, and that any World leader whose interests differ from Bush's, eg Putin, is therefore a good leader"? I would also oppose such a view, if there is anyone who actually thinks that.

At the same time, we don't have to assume that the Bush and Blair governments are being honest with us in their evaluation of threats. We've had a wealth of experience to show what such an assumption is a dubious process.

I'm also not aware of any contemporary parallel to the orthodox Communist Parties of the decades of the Soviet Union, who had an ideological orientation and international political ties that pushed them to defend whatever political line of the day came out of the Kremlin.

But even if there were, it still makes total sense to take a critical look at what the Russian government and Gazprom are actually doing and saying, so far as we can get that from the available news resources. And to not approach claims of threats from neo-Cold Warriors by giving them the benefit of the doubt from the start.

Murray's rather sensationally-titled Daily Mail piece lays out the significance of Russian energy sources for Europe:

Europe currently gets a quarter of its energy from natural gas, and this is predicted to increase to 30 per cent by 2016.

Already Europe is heavily dependent for this on Russia – which means on Gazprom. Some EU states such as Slovakia and Bulgaria get all their gas from Russia, while Germany gets 43 per cent and France takes 27 per cent.

Both those figures will increase dramatically as Gazprom’s new Baltic Sea pipeline comes on line and as Western Europe’s natural gas reserves dwindle fast, especially Britain’s.

Unlike oil, natural gas is transported in fixed pipelines, so there is little opportunity for short-term switching of suppliers.

Already highly dependent on Russia, the EU is now moving into a position where inside ten years any interruption of Gazprom supplies, particularly in winter, would be devastating.

The distinction he makes between oil and gas delivery is an important economic point. The world oil spot market has made the particular source of oil less important than it once was, though of course some countries have better quality oil than others.

So, as a hypothetical example, if Venezuela stopped selling oil to the United States, that wouldn't mean that the US oil supply would be reduced by the amount that Venezuela currently supplies.It means that someone else would get Venezuela's direct supply and the oil that someone else currently gets would wind up in the US. That's a gross oversimplication, but that's the concept behind his reference.

There's not the same kind of spot market for natural gas.

The more hopeful side of this is that trade interconnections can reduce the potential for conflict. In the rightwing narrative of the end of the Cold War, the role that increased business interactions played in the 1970s and 1980s is downplayed or ignored altogether. The Murray quote above emphasizes the Europeans consumers fixed dependence of Russian supplies. The flip side of it is that Gazprom can't replace its European customers from one day to the next.

Now, I know that it's only in the imaginations of economists that business and consumers make perfectly rational decisions based on full knowledge of the alternatives. But with Europe this dependent on Russian natural gas, European leaders are more will think a bit more carefully than would otherwise be the case before taking actions that the Russians might legitimately interpret as threatening. And with Russia making big money off their European customer, Russian leaders will also be more conscious that they have a lot to lose from provoking unnecessary tensions.

Given the prospects for most people of a new Cold War and nuclear arms race, that sounds like a good thing to me.

Murray's article explains the reasons for worry over Gazprom and its clout. He also reports on how Gazprom dominates Russian TV and print news:

The company is also key to Putin’s harsh internal control. Kuprianov often appears on the nation’s TV screens, which is easily explained. A year after taking power, Putin decided to stamp out independent media in Russia.

When the only independent national TV channel was closed down in 2001, it was Gazprom Media which took it over and turned it into a propaganda arm of the Kremlin.

Gazprom went on to buy up Russia’s two large independent national newspapers. The last significant remaining one, Kommersant, was bought personally last November by the sinister Uzbek oligarch Alisher Usmanov, chairman of Gazprominvest Holdings.

The Editor-in-Chief was immediately sacked while the defence correspondent, Igor Safronov, mysteriously fell to his death from a window three months later.

Gazprom now controls awhole raft of formerly independent media outlets encompassing TV, radio and newspapers, all faithfully echoing the Kremlin line.

This bit from the Bush/Blanco article is also interesting:

While Gazprom makes headlines for its exploits abroad—45% of the gas consumed in Germany now comes from the Russian giant—the great bulk of Siberian gas always has been burned at home at prices heavily regulated by the state. Long after the Soviet Union was dismantled and the old gas ministry evolved into Gazprom, the Kremlin continued to curry favor with the masses by setting gas prices well below market rates.

It wasn't until Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin in 2000 that Moscow began raising domestic gas rates in hopes of discouraging consumption in those places where gas was available and freeing more of it for export. Prices are still only one-fifth of rates in Western Europe and certainly no spur to conservation.

Gazprom says it loses money on domestic sales, although most outside analysts doubt this claim. What's not in dispute is that the company makes healthy profits selling abroad. Last August the connection between the two markets became evident in an unlikely fashion in out-of-the-way Kalyazin.

In attendance at a large town meeting were not only Gazprom representatives but also Ulrich Hartmann, chairman of the parent of Germany's largest gas supplier, E.ON Ruhrgas, a major Gazprom customer and joint-venture partner. Hartmann's presence in the provincial Russian town signaled Kalyazin's role as a showcase for new energy-saving technologies, which Ruhrgas hopes Gazprom will adopt more generally.

"The more Gazprom can economize on gas," Kalyazin Mayor Ilyin explains, "the more gas it will be able to export, including to Ruhrgas and to Germany." (my emphpasis)

The fact that Gazprom sells natural gas for lower prices domestically is one of the big complaints of Western critics. That's why it's noteworthy to see Business Week reporting that "most outside analysts" believe that Gazprom also makes a profit on domestic sales.

The complaint is almost the opposite of a complaint about "dumping", in which a country sells exports at a price below it's production costs to undercut competitors. In this case, Gazprom is criticized for making too much profit in its sales abroad. That's not to say there's nothing to the complaint. But we need to see such claims in the clear light of day, not through some 20-year-old Cold War lens.

Tags: craig murray, gazprom, russia

Class politics

2007-05-31T09:12:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Al Gore's new book The Assault on Reason (2007). I'll do a fuller review of it later after I've actually read the whole thing.

But, as impressed as I am with Gore in general, even I was actually stunned to see how drastic his diagnosis is of the current dilemma of American democracy. And this is certainly not the usual politician's book. Even though Gore knows that every single word is likely to be picked over by both the Republican noise machine and the exotic group we call our "press corps", he's taking a philosophical approach that is by no means a simple stringing together of familiar phrases.

The book's third chapter is on "The Politics of Wealth", in which he addresses class issues in a way American politicians rarely do these days.And he also discusses how the tension between democracy and capitalism - yes, he talks about it that explicitly - was handled during the early decades of the Republic. And he refers to his predessor as Tennessee Senator and Presidential candidate who won the elections but had the elections stolent from him by the economic royalists (yes, he uses that FDR term, too):

Lincoln's transcendent victory for the freedom of the human spirit [winning the Civil War] saved the Republic. But in order to win the war, Lincoln was forced to rely on corporations that produced munitions, transported troops by rail, and focused the industrial strength of the North against the largely agrarian economy of the South. In the process, Lincoln removed many constraints that had kept the power of corporations in check during the first seven decades of the Republic.

Thomas Jefferson had expressed concern about what he saw as the encroaching danger in 1821 — more than a decade after he left the presidency: "Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence. The engine of consolidation will be the Federal judiciary; the twoother branches the corrupting and corrupted instruments."

Echoing Jefferson, President Andrew Jackson warned against the dangers of too much corporate power, saying that it raised the question of "whether the people of the United States are to govern through representatives chosen by their unbiased suffrages, or whether the money and power of a great corporation are to be secretly exerted to influence their judgment and control their decisions." (my emphasis)

I also like the fact that he doesn't try to idolize Lincoln. What he states about Lincoln's facilitating the closer connection of state and business power is true. And it's something Lincoln himself recognized.

Gore quotes this passage from a letter of Lincoln's in late 1864. One that I predict you will not hear quoted by any of the 2008 GOP Presidential candidates:

We may congratulate ourselves that this cruel war is nearing its end. ... But I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the future of our country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and a era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggragated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war. God grant that my suspicions will prove groundless.

Gore doesn't quote the following passage from Lincoln, at least not in the part I've read so far. But here's a passage from Lincoln's first State of the Union address on 12/3/1861 that's even less likely to appear in a Republican candidate's speech today:

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them. (my emphasis)

Yikes! That would still be enough to make the hair of any good Republican plutocrat stand on end.

Tags: al gore, abraham lincoln, andrew jackson

Boo endorses goddess worship

2007-05-31T06:44:00.000-07:00

In his new book, Al Gore talks about how superficial television news in the US has become. He mentions, for instance, the missing-white-girls cable obsession, stories which are sensational but whose outcomes are likely to have "any appreciable impact on the fate of the Republic."

He gives other examples, like the "runaway bride" story in Georgia, or the Michael Jackson and Robert Blake trials.

But he notes an important exception: ""And of course we can't forget Britney and KFed...". Certainly not! (And he must have meant it as an exception to the frivolity plague.)

Illustrating Gore's observation, the world media has understandably paid great attention to Boo's new message on her Web site: "Había tocada fondo" El Mundo (Spain) 30.05.07; Britney Spears says she "hit rock bottom" in rehab Reuters 05/29/07.

Naturally, the Establishment, being as it is still far away from understanding the deeper significance of Britney's radical postmodern vision, missed the most critical point in her message, which deals mostly with his recent personal trials, throughout which the press and her Yankee critics conitinued to ruthlessly persecute her.

But the last paragraph contains the critical portion:

It is so weird how stories are told. There is your side, my side, and the truth. Somebody has to figure it out. I guess we will never really understand or figure out life completely. That's God's job. I can't wait to meet him ... or her. (my emphasis)

This will probably set off a new round of attacks on her from the Christian fundis. They've never forgiven her for the fact that back when she auditioned at Jive records, she used "Jesus Loves Me" as an audition song.

Tags: britney, britney spears, goddess worship

Star Wars, starry dreams

2007-05-29T20:37:00.000-07:00

RS-24 missile (Photo: GlobalSecurity.org)

While we're all waiting breathlessly to hear the fate of Paris Hilton and her looming jail sentence ... the Russians claim they've successfully tested a rocket that is designed to avoid the Star Wars anti-missile shield: Russland testet neue Super-Rakete Der Spiegel Online 29.05.07; RS-24 / SS-X-29? GlobalSecurity.org 05/29/07; New Missile Successfully Test-Fired by Simon Saradzhyan Moscow Times 05/30/07 [The Moscow Times is owned by the state energy firm Gasprom].

That means that even though the Star Wars system still doesn't work, the Russians claim they have come up with an effective counter-measure in the case that after we sink more tens of billions of dollars into the thing, it actually gets to the point it might intercept an ICBM or two. According to the Russian government claim quoted by the Moscow Times, "The multiwarhead missile will be able to overcome any missile defense shield and will serve as the main land component of the country's strategic nuclear triad until the middle of this century, the statement said."

Which has always been the basic problem with the Star Wars concept. The shield, to the extent it's even technically feasible - something yet to be demonstrated in the real world - would be incredibly expensive, while counter-measures are not only technologically less challenging, but also cheaper. Cheaper by several orders of magnitude, in all liklihood.

And, of course, the whole thing means a spiraling nuclear arms race and more uncertainty, not less.

Somebody remind me again, just why is this supposed to be a good idea?

Tags: missile defense, star wars

Maximilian I, Kaiser von Mexiko

2007-05-29T12:44:00.000-07:00

The March/April issue of Austrian Information, published by the Austrian Embassy Press and Information Service in the US, has a sketch of the unlucky career of Maximilian I von Mexiko, shown in the protrait above on the way to his execution in 1867: Maximilian I of Mexico: The Vestiges of the Habsburgs in Mexico and the Southwest by Peter Pabisch.

Napoleon III of France took advantage of the US Civil War, in which the Confederate revolt seriously weakened the United States against potential European enemies, to install the Habsburg Archduke Maximilian as Emperor (Kaiser in German) of Mexico.

Things didn't work out very well.

The Peter Pabisch article recounts an intriguing but apparently entirely frivolous "mystery" about the late Kaiser:

The historical record shows that Ferdinand Maximilian was executed by Benito Juárez and the rightful Mexican government. To further add to the mystery surrounding his final days, a recent account by Johann Georg Lughofer claims that Maximilian was not killed, but because the bullets were blank, he survived, fled to San Salvador under a pseudonym and enjoyed a long life. His freemason “brother,” Benito Juárez, was supposed to have made his escape possible. There is, however, no serious proof to verify this amazing story. [Johann Georg Lughofer, “Des Kaisers neues Leben. Der Fall Maximilian von Mexiko.” Vienna: Carl Ueberreuter, 2002.]

Tags: maximilian I

Russia, Germany, the EU and the US

2007-05-29T11:45:00.000-07:00

Bush and his soulmate "Pooty-Poot", Dear Leader's reported fond nickname for the Russian leader Vladimir Putin

The Iraq War is understandably consuming a great deal of political, Congressional and media interest and is the central national political issue in the United States right now.

But bad things are also happening in terms of Russia's relations to the West. Putin's regime, which always had an authoritarian streak, had cooperated to a surprising extent with the Bush administration's "global war on terrorism". The Russian government muted its objections to the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia) entering the NATO military alliance. It also accepted the establishment of extensive US military bases in countries formerly parts of the Soviet Union.

Part of the motivation was its own "terrorism" problem, especially with Chechnya. And the Western democracies did cooperate by muting criticism of the Putin government's brutal military policies toward the rebel Muslim Republic, which is still part of the Russian Federation.

But more recently, Putin has taken a harder line against internal dissent and press freedom. The German-language press has been using the word "Gleichschaltung" to describe Putin's establishment of authoritarian control of the press, in large part by having the Russian state oil company Gasprom buy various media outlets. Although Gleichschaltung isn't a specific "Nazi" word, it is the name that the Hitler government used in the early months to suppress the independent press, labor unions and other institutions of the kind we now call "civil society" organizations.

And the Putin government is putting down its foot on a number of issues. Through Gasprom, it has played hardball with energy sales, resulting in a confrontation with Ukraine earlier this year. Ukraine is now potentially on the edge of an actual civil war, with the pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko pitted against the pro-Russian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych . The secret police are reportedly supporting the prime minister, while the armed forces and regular police are lining up with the president. On Saturday, Zushchenko sent troops to threaten the capital city of Kiev, a crisis defused for the moment when he and the prime minister agreed to a September 30 date for elections. This event merited a whole paragraph at the Los Angeles Times Web site. Yushchenko's "pro-Western" position means more specifically he wants to bring Ukraine into the European Union and even NATO. Putin's government opposes such developments.

Relations with the United States are so poor at the moment that Putin didn't even bother to hang around for the customary farewell photo when Condi-Condi paid him a visit recently. See US takes a harder line with Russia by Howard LaFranchi The Christian Science Monitor 05/10/07. The official US position, as summarized bz La Franchi, goes: "The White House is getting tough with Russia, concerned with what it perceives as Vladimir Putin's retreat from democracy and a willingness to use petropolitics to reassert regional dominance."

Since the Bush administrationrepresents the energy industry invested with state power, as James Galbraith memorably described it, Russia's willingness to take a harder line in "petropolitics" is undoubtedly upsetting to them. But the Cheney-Bush outlook is essentially nationalistic and even xenophobic, an outlook that inevitably sees threats and enemies everywhere and never lacks urgent reasons for expanding the military establishment and its lucrative spinoffs for Halliburton and other big players in the military contracting business.

Appropriately for the Dark Lord, it is Cheney who explicitly articulated the "darker vision" of Russia not long ago, as La Franchi explains:

The tone of Bush administration policy since 2001 was set by Bush's famous comment that he had looked into Putin's soul and was pleased with what he saw. But it appears that the administration has taken a second look, and likes less well what it's seeing now.

The darker vision was outlined by Vice President Dick Cheney in a speech last week in Vilnius, Lithuania, in which he said that a regressing Russia has "a choice to make" between "a return to democratic reform" and "greater respect among fellow nations" or more "unfair and improper" restrictions on Russians' rights.

Deliberately making his point at a democracy conference in a former Soviet satellite attended by the presidents of several other former Soviet dependents, Mr. Cheney also said Russia is using its vast energy holdings "as tools of intimidation or blackmail" on its neighbors.

Somehow, LaFranchi doesn't get around to mentioning that the US plans to deploy Star Wars anti-missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic, moves clearly aimed at escalating military pressure against Russia. The Russians are obviously aware of the shortcoming of the Star Wars system, i.e., that the [Cheney]ing thing doesn't work. The latest test was also a flub (Officials abort anti-missile test Ontario [CA]Daily Bulletin/AP 05/26/07).

German Chancellor Angela Merkel had a more successful visit to Russia this month in her capacity in the EU's rotating presidency. Her Grand Coalition government is trying to strike a position somewhere between the hostile stance of the Cheney-Bush government and the previously warm relations between Germany and Russia under Gerhard Schröder's red-green government. Her visit was more successful than Condi-Condi's, although that's obviously not saying much.

Angie did scold Putin publicly about his restricting demonstrations around her visit. Not a very clever idea. Putin replied by referring to Germany's recent zeal in restricting protest during the G-8 summit.

The EU is currently blocked from negotiating a comprehensive trade treaty with Russia because Poland as an EU member has the authority to veto any such formal negotiation. Poland's beef is literally beef: the Putin government is limiting Polish meat exports to Russia.

Putin got a friendlier reception in Austria. The Austrian government was happy to proceed with various business deals

The big question for Americans and the West: do we want to have a new Cold War with Russia over Polish beef exports? Over stationing useless Star Wars weapons in Poland and the Czech Republic as further corporate welfare to the companies that profit from the worthless things? Over Russian energy prices disputes with Ukraine?

Failing impeachment, we have to assume that Cheney and Bush will be in power for the next year and a half. They can still do a lot of damage during that time. Congress and the public need to think about how much of their messes we are willing to assume the burden of cleaning up. Better to limit the damage beforehand.

Tags: germany, russia