Long Pauses

Tag: Region: Iraq

  • I Think I’m in Love

    Jim Webb during his first hearing with the Armed Services Committee:

    I also want to say something about my longtime friend, Senator McCain’s comments when he was talking about the consequences of pulling out of Iraq and in your statement, Secretary Gates, you list some of these as an emboldened and strengthened Iran, a base of operations for jihadist networks in the heart of the Middle East, an undermining of the credibility of the United States.

    In many ways, quite frankly, those have been the results of the invasion and occupation. There’s really nothing that’s occurred since the invasion and occupation that was not predictable and in fact, most of it was predicted. It was predicted in many cases by people with long backgrounds in national security…and in many cases there were people who saw their military careers destroyed and who were personally demeaned by people who opposed them on the issues, including members of this administration. And they are people in my judgement, who will be remembered in history as having had a moral conscience.

  • One of Those Political Posts

    A few days ago I watched the episode of The West Wing in which President Bartlet is inaugurated for his second term in office, and it reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about in years. On January 20, 2001, I was at a hotel in Pigeon Forge, TN, attending a retreat with other men from my church. I remember the date because that morning, during one of the small-group sessions, someone interrupted to turn on a TV. We all watched as Bush took the oath of office. Several men in the room began to pray. Others smiled and offered “Hallelujah”s. I muttered under my breath, “Thank God. Finally an end to eight years of peace and prosperity,” and my friend poked me in the ribs. I was the “liberal” of our group. He’d learned to expect and even appreciate my snark.

    In the years since, I’ve come to feel increasingly alienated from evangelical culture, and politics is an important reason. I used to write about this a lot more on Long Pauses, but I grew tired of my own voice and my own hypocrisies. Too much finger-pointing. Plus, the results of the 2004 election broke my heart. I’ve felt more than a bit defeated and hopelessly cynical ever since. It didn’t help when, a few months ago, I ran into one of those old friends and noticed the “W: Still the President” sticker on the back window of his car. I just don’t get it.

    Bush was elected on the promise of restoring “honor and dignity” to the White House, which, let’s face it, wasn’t an unappealing idea. I was as disgusted as anyone by Clinton’s personal behavior, by the 24-hour media shitstorm, and by the very real political fallout. So I wasn’t all surprised when Bush’s call to do away with the lying and the scandals that had disgraced the last few years of Clinton’s second term struck a chord with most evangelicals I know, particularly because that call was coming from someone who spoke their language, who had a bona-fide Christian testimony, and who promised to protect the “sanctity of human life.” (That Bush had an unimpressive pre-Presidency track record when it came to eliminating scandal was a point I soon gave up arguing with friends who supported him.)

    I’ve always had a begrudging respect for the political skills of the Bush administration. They play the game so well. They say they’re fiscal conservatives, then, with a Republican Congress in their back pocket, they explode the size of the federal government and deficit. “Support me on my big issues,” he seems to have promised House and Senate leaders, “and I won’t even threaten to veto a spending bill.” And he hasn’t. Not surprisingly, the amount of pork has more than tripled under his watch.

    Congress was more than willing to return the favor when Bush asked them for the right to declare war. With one eye on their home states and the upcoming midterm elections, they grabbed his cooked intelligence with both hands, hoisted it up onto the stump, and sounded a few more cheers for fear-mongering. “Mushroom cloud, you say? Mushroom cloud! We must do something! And do it today!” To hell with his campaign promise to never “nation-build.” Bush and his boys wanted this war, wanted to reshape the Middle East, wanted to re-engage America’s permanent war economy, and, boy, if you got in their way — if you questioned their motives or diverted from the War on Terror narrative they were writing — boy, you were fucked.

    Even though today’s announcement had been predicted for most of the week, I was still stunned when the indictments were read. I had to watch for five or ten minutes before I could accept what was happening. I’m not crazy. What a sad and pathetic week in the life of a sad and pathetic presidency.

  • Speculate Away

    So I assume you’ve all heard that several former American hostages are claiming that the president-elect of Iran was one of their captors in 1979. Well my wife, who is a forensic artist, got a call today from a booking agent at Fox News, who invited her to appear as a talking head on one of their live shows, using her expertise to prove or disprove the claims.

    Isn’t that a riot? After considering it for an hour or two, she politely declined their offer. We looked at the then/now photos and decided that the only claim she could honestly make is, “There is nothing in these photos that would confirm without a doubt that these are not photos of the same man.” But we figured that the nuances of any sentence that employed a double-negative construction would be lost in the white noise of cable news. Isn’t it amazing, though, that a news producer would think a Google search and a pre-interview phone call would be enough to establish someone as a credible source?

    Reminds me of a clip I saw on the Daily Show a week or two ago. During their coverage of the Michael Jackson trial (I think), the host of a show on Fox News discovered that some story was about to break but he had no details. He then turned to the other members of his panel and said, “Well, we don’t know what’s happening exactly, but it must be big. Speculate away!” As Jon Stewart says, cable news has now officially become a bunch of guys with a camera, talking.

    I don’t know what I’m more proud of: that Jo was asked or that she declined the offer.

  • Just a Question

    Every day, it seems, the NY Times online leads with a headline like, “Suicide Attack Kills at Least 22 in Iraqi City of Kirkuk.” Many of us who opposed the war did so, in part, because we feared that destabilizing Iraq would provoke a civil war that would prove a humanitarian crisis worse than even Saddam’s regime. I wonder how American sentiment toward our role in Iraq would change if we admitted that the civil war has already begun?

  • Confidence Man

    A new poll reveals that 70 percent of Americans now believe that any gains we’ve made in Iraq have come at an “unacceptable” cost, and 56 percent now believe the conflict was “not worth fighting.” Poll numbers are poll numbers, of course, but these seem significant if only because they suggest an interesting trend. A real majority now question the validity of the policy that most clearly defines the Bush administration. (And if Bush can call his margin of victory a “mandate,” then I can call 56 percent a “real majority.”)

    Also headlining the front page of The Washington Post website are breaking reports of 22 dead in an attack on a U.S. base, Dana Milbank’s coverage of Bush’s elusive tactics at yesterday’s press conference, and a report of Bush’s confidence in his Iraq policy. What interests me is the juxtaposition of stories — the images of death and destruction jutted up against Bush’s “confidence.” Reminds me of another president.

    Back in January, after reading Jeffrey Alexander’s The Meanings of Social Life, I predicted to a co-worker that the 2004 election would be a repeat of ’72, when Nixon won re-election with 60% of the popular vote despite the Watergate scandal. From my response to Alexander’s book:

    In November 1972, just four months after the Watergate break-in, 84% of voters claimed that the scandal did not influence their decision on election night. Two years later, the event had taken on such symbolic significance that Nixon was forced to resign. “Watergate could not, as the French might say, tell itself. It had to be told by society; it was, to use Durkeim’s famous phrase, a social fact. It was the context of Watergate that had changed, not so much the raw empirical data themselves” (156). In his thoughtful analysis, Alexander explains how Watergate, as a symbol, came to transcend the world of petty politics and to touch upon fundamental moral concerns, thus polluting the executive office with the counterdemocratic code. This process was greatly influenced by the ritualizing experience of the televised hearings and by the release of Nixon’s taped conversations. “By his words and recorded actions,” Alexander writes, “he had polluted the very tenets that the entire Watergate process had revivified: the sacredness of truth and the image of America as an inclusive, tolerant community” (169).

    As an example of how the Watergate context had changed, Alexander reminds us of Nixon’s infamous line, “I am not a crook.” In ’72 those words would have comforted Americans and reinforced their sacred faith in the presidency; by ’74, after the tapes and after the hearings, Nixon’s utterance of the word “crook” only reminded voters of their growing suspicions. Nixon had lost control of his rhetoric.

    I was mostly joking when I mentioned all of this to my co-worker a year ago, but I’m starting to wonder if there might be some truth to it. In the last month, Bush has given America’s highest civilian honor to George Tenet, the man who most on the right scapegoated for his “slam dunk” on Iraq intelligence. He’s nominated a petty criminal for the nation’s top security position. And he’s repeatedly emphasized his support of Donald Rumsfeld. I think we’re reaching a point when Bush’s statement of “confidence” will be read quite differently from how it’s intended.

  • Still Big News

    On July 8 I posted a link to what I thought was a pretty big story: America’s decision in April to pull out of Falluja, thus creating a safe haven for terrorist and insurgents. (Follow this link to read the full article.) Yesterday, after weeks of bloody fighting in Najaf, The Times ran another piece on Falluja, and I’m at a lost to explain why it wasn’t front page news. In all of the sound a fury of the Sunday morning spin fests, shouldn’t someone have been talking about this?

    Both of the cities, Falluja and Ramadi, and much of Anbar Province, are now controlled by fundamentalist militias, with American troops confined mainly to heavily protected forts on the desert’s edge. What little influence the Americans have is asserted through wary forays in armored vehicles, and by laser-guided bombs that obliterate enemy safe houses identified by scouts who penetrate militant ranks. Even bombing raids appear to strengthen the fundamentalists, who blame the Americans for scores of civilian deaths.

    American efforts to build a government structure around former Baath Party stalwarts – officials of Saddam Hussein’s army, police force and bureaucracy who were willing to work with the United States – have collapsed. Instead, the former Hussein loyalists, under threat of beheadings, kidnappings and humiliation, have mostly resigned or defected to the fundamentalists, or been killed. Enforcers for the old government, including former Republican Guard officers, have put themselves in the service of fundamentalist clerics they once tortured at Abu Ghraib.

    UPDATE: Paul Krugman is covering this topic today.

  • Mr. Bush Comes to Town

    Speaking approximately fifteen miles from my home yesterday, President Bush said:

    Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go into Iraq. . . . We removed a declared enemy of America, who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them. . . . I had a choice to make: Either take the word of a madman or defend America. Given that choice, I will defend America every time.

    Then, repeating (again and again) what has apparently become his campaign mantra, he added, “The American People are safer.”

    It’s interesting to see how Bush’s rhetoric has evolved. While admitting — finally — that WMD have not been found, he continues to litter his speech with allusions to them, though they’ve now morphed into “weapons of mass murder,” and — in a turn of phrase that would have made Monicagate-era Clinton proud — they are now modified with the nebulous term, “capability.” I wish someone would ask him what “capability” means, exactly. It seems a fairly significant question.

    It’s also interesting to see how the year-long build-up to war has been reduced by his speech to a choice between trusting Saddam and declaring war on him. Forgotten are the voices of a majority in the United Nations and the millions of protesters, who resisted this false dichotomy. Forgotten are the alternative methods of defending America founded on multilateral diplomacy and the investment of resources in homeland security and the war on Al Qaeda. It’s all just a little bit maddening.

    I didn’t have the energy to comment on the link that I posted on Thursday, but it does seem to me to be a significant (and largely unreported) story. I’ve been critical of the war since late-2002, when it became obvious that Bush would have his “show of force” regardless of what happened at the UN or in Baghdad, but I’ve tried to avoid the pessimism that marks so much of the anti-war crowd. I want Iraq to be a better, more just nation for our intervention there. The fact that Falluja, a city of 250,000 people, is now a “safe haven” for those building bombs and blowing up our soldiers and Iraqi civilians seems to call into question Bush’s claim that we are safer for his efforts. Is this his proud legacy?

  • Catchin’ Spears

    I’m guessing that it’ll go something like this:

    Press: “Scott, how has the president responded to the 9/11 commission’s finding that there is ‘no credible evidence’ that Hussein’s government collaborated with al Qaeda?”

    McClellan: “You will need to ask the president. I don’t pretend to speak for his personal ‘response’ to any event.”

    Press: “Well then let me clarify. Does the president agree with the 9/11 commission’s finding that there is ‘no credible evidence’ that Hussein’s government collaborated with al Qaeda?”

    McClellan: “The president has the utmost respect for the members of the 9/11 commission, who have worked tirelessly and with great integrity at a very difficult moment in our country’s history. The commission members are very much on the front line of America’s war on terror.”

    Press: “But does the president agree with their finding that there is ‘no credible evidence’ that Hussein’s government collaborated with al Qaeda? His recent statements — along with those of the vice president — directly contradict the commission’s findings.”

    McClellan: “I think the president’s position on this issue has been made clear time and time again. Any other questions?”

  • Looking Back

    Yesterday, while unboxing another box — it’s a maddening, on-going process — I found the “Peace on Earth, No War on Iraq” sign that I carried in a protest during the rush to war, and it occurred to me that I am genuinely proud of that act. Proud like I’m proud of very few things in my life. It’s difficult to explain, but I know that it was absolutely the right thing to do. I guess that’s why I’m taking some comfort from quotes like these, all taken from traditionally conservative commentators:

    From Tucker Carlson:

    “I think it’s a total nightmare and disaster, and I’m ashamed that I went against my own instincts in supporting it,” he said. “It’s something I’ll never do again. Never. I got convinced by a friend of mine who’s smarter than I am, and I shouldn’t have done that. No. I want things to work out, but I’m enraged by it, actually.”

    Mr. Carlson—never really a card-carrying member of the vast right-wing conspiracy—said he had broken off from the hawkish neoconservatives who flogged the war from the get-go. “I’m getting more paleo every day,” he said, referring to the so-called paleoconservatives.

    From Thomas L. Friedman:

    “Hey, Friedman, why are you bringing politics into this all of a sudden? You’re the guy who always said that producing a decent outcome in Iraq was of such overriding importance to the country that it had to be kept above politics.”

    Yes, that’s true. I still believe that. My mistake was thinking that the Bush team believed it, too. I thought the administration would have to do the right things in Iraq — from prewar planning and putting in enough troops to dismissing the secretary of defense for incompetence — because surely this was the most important thing for the president and the country. But I was wrong.

    From George Will:

    Americans must not flinch from absorbing the photographs of what some Americans did in that prison. And they should not flinch from this fact: That pornography is, almost inevitably, part of what empire looks like. It does not always look like that, and does not only look like that. But empire is always about domination. Domination for self-defense, perhaps. Domination for the good of the dominated, arguably. But domination.

  • Because You Lied

    Because you lied to me, Dick. Remember? The White House sent its managers to Congress before the vote, and they briefed the House and Senate Intelligence committees on the dire threat of Saddam. The reconstituted nuclear program. The mushroom clouds that would be appearing over New York and Washington in a few years. The lie you were telling the American people in general terms, you told us with specific, impressive-sounding statistics and authoritative reports — that legendary ‘bad intelligence.’ It was on that basis and that basis alone — the basis of imminent threat to America from weapons of mass destruction — that my colleagues and I voted to give your boss the authority to invade. Now we know better.

    I accept my share of responsibility for the thousands who have since died and are still dying in an elective war that had nothing to do with the war on terrorism but which you and your fellow extremists at the Project for a New American Century had been lusting after since 1992, a war you wanted so badly you lied to Congress and the American people to get it, you dark and terrible man. I was not cynical enough. I know I must make amends for my mistake. But first, come November, the American people must fix another mistake.

    Andrew Christie imagines what he would tell Dick Cheney if he were in Kerry’s shoes. I just wish that Kerry would say something. His “we need a broader international coalition and more troops” line is already wearing thin. With Spain and Honduras pulling out and other leaders feeling growing pressure to follow suit, such a coalition will be damn near impossible. And I doubt that it would make much of a difference in Iraq anyway.

    I’ll be voting the “Anybody but Bush” ticket in November, but I’m still waiting for Kerry to give me a reason to do so enthusiastically.

  • God Save the Queen

    A friend just sent me this link from the National Catholic Reporter. Joan Chittister, like so many of us, watched Condoleezza Rice’s testimony with great interest, hoping to learn more about our government’s pre-9/11 knowledge of al-Qaeda. Instead, she was stunned by “the amount of self-congratulation spent on the fact of the testimony itself.” Chittister has made of the hearings an opportunity to reflect on the value of a monarchy in the 21st century, and I love her for it:

    As Americans, we are inclined to be a bit insular. Probably because we live on one of the largest islands in the world. Bounded on the east and the west by oceans and on the north and south by nations far smaller than we, the geography may have affected the boundaries of our minds, as well. We see ourselves as the center of the globe, the biggest, the best, the latest, the smartest, the most advanced, the most powerful, the most right, the paragon of all paragons in all things.

    We forget that unlike cell phones in Europe, which will work anywhere on the globe, ours don’t work outside the United States. We fail to understand that our videos can’t play too many places but on U.S. soil. We don’t even advert to the situation facing other coalition troops in Iraq. “I’ve been in the United States for six weeks,” one Brit told me, “and I have not heard a word on U.S. TV about the British soldiers in Iraq though our boys are being killed there, too, and news about U.S. engagement plays on European television daily.”

    We are a world unto ourselves. We forget, in other words, that rather than purporting to lead the human race in all things good, it may be time to join it. And government accountability may be as good a place as any to start. Most of all, at least in the Condoleezza Rice event, perhaps we have forgotten our P’s and Q’s. Or rather, their P’s and Q’s. “PQ’s” is British shorthand for “Parliamentary Questions.” In England, the Prime Minister himself goes to the House of Commons every Wednesday at noon to answer questions from members of parliament about any facet of government policy.

    More than that, the Leader of the Opposition can question or rebut the Prime Minister’s answers on the spot. No talk of “separation of powers,” no refuge-taking behind the veil of “presidential privilege.”

    Whenever I watch footage of those Wednesday afternoon shouting matches, I imagine an American president in the prime minister’s shoes. To be precise, I imagine George W. Bush in the prime minister’s shoes, but I’m all for bi-partisan bitch-slapping. The impeachment hearings certainly would have been more interesting (and perhaps seeing educated adults arguing breathlessly about the meaning of “is” would have helped reveal how absurd it all was). I disagree with many of Tony Blair’s policy decisions, but I can’t fault his intelligence or his articulateness. He handles his accusers with great aplomb and with nary a stutter or mispronunciation. And the political discourse at large benefits for it. Dubya has given fewer press conferences than any modern president, and I think we all know why. I wonder if any ideas have “popped” into his head since Tuesday night. (By the way, don’t you love the way he phrased that line, ascribing the action verb to the idea rather than to himself, as if it were his job to merely stand there waiting for inspiration? Apparently thinking is just too much work.)

  • Writing in the First Person

    My brain is turning soft. It’s not that I’ve forgotten to update my 2004 film viewing and reading lists; it’s that I have, for all intents and purposes, abandoned my intellectual life. I don’t have the energy for it. Or the time. Or — and this is the big one — the attention span. And it’s starting to wear me down.

    I imagine that, if I were to pick up any book about the mourning process, it would confirm what I strongly suspect: that I’m in some classic first stage (denial, maybe?); that my conscious and subconscious are pitted in a fierce battle for control. As usual, the conscious mind thinks it’s winning — and by all appearances it is doing so — but here’s the thing: I don’t have a short attention span. I’m the guy who starts a book and finishes it the same day. I’m the guy who spends his free time watching ridiculously slow films about Danish farmers and street vendors and agnostic ministers. But I’ve suddenly become the guy who can’t sit still, who can’t even make it through a one-hour TV show, who must be doing at all times. And so something must be wrong.

    Here are some of the ways that I’ve encountered death lately:

    • Last week I listened to “The Few Who Stayed: Defying Genocide in Rwanda” from American Radio Works. Making sense of the murder of 800,000 people in the spring of 1994 is about as easy as trying to understand why news from Sudan is buried in today’s editorial page.
    • My wife, a forensic artist, has begun work on a new case — reconstructing the face of an unidentified man found floating in a nearby river. Because of the case, I often open my email to find emotionally-detached, clinical discussions of the “business” of forensic anthropology — not to mention the requisite photos. My wife’s work, by the way, will be featured in a two-part series by a local TV news crew, who are thrilled to have such a hot exclusive for sweeps. They will, no doubt, describe her as CSI: Knoxville.
    • Names of the Dead. When I scan the daily headlines at the Times, I always take a second or two to read the names and the ages and the hometowns of the American soldiers who have died.
    • And, of course, I think daily of my mother- and father-in-law, who were killed in January, and of my wife, who was made an orphan at too young an age.

    Strangely, the names of the dead in Iraq have the strongest emotional pull on me right now — partly because they remind me of my aunt and uncle who are still mourning their son’s death in Grenada twenty years ago, partly because they remind me of how disastrously misguided America’s foreign policy is right now, and partly because, now that we’re in Iraq, I don’t know how we’ll get out. History is not on our side.

    The tragedy of Africa is too great to even contemplate, so, like most comfortable Americans, I don’t. Even during my weekly ESL class, when I sit across a table from refugees, I distance myself from their past, from what they’ve seen and what I cannot even imagine. Surely things like that don’t really happen. Not in 2004. Not when a Christian nation like America exercises such a powerful influence on the world. I refuse to acknowledge it.

    But I’m refusing to acknowledge a lot these days. I posted this last August for a friend whose father had died unexpectedly. It’s from Anne Lamott’s essay, “Ladders,” from Traveling Mercies.

    Don’t get me wrong: grief sucks; it really does. Unfortunately, though, avoiding it robs us of life, of the now, of a sense of living spirit. Mostly I have tried to avoid it by staying very busy, working too hard, trying to achieve as much as possible. You can often avoid the pain by trying to fix other people; shopping helps in a pinch, as does romantic obsession. Martyrdom can’t be beat. While too much exercise works for many people, it doesn’t work for me, but I have found that a stack of magazines can be numbing and even mood altering.

    But the bad news is that whatever you use to keep the pain at bay robs you of the flecks and nuggets of gold that feeling grief will give you. A fixation can keep you nicely defined and give you the illusion that your life has not fallen apart. But since your life may indeed have fallen apart, the illusion won’t hold up forever, and if you are lucky and brave, you will be willing to bear disillusion. You begin to cry and writhe and yell and then to keep on crying; and then, finally, grief ends up giving you the two best things: softness and illumination.

    I hope she’s right.

  • Stuck in the Long, Hard Slog

    How many thousands of hours will future historians devote to parsing through the events of this week? Yesterday, barely 48 hours after the downing of an American helicopter in Fallujah, six — and only six — members of the Senate showed up to approve the White House’s request for $87.5 billion, thus guaranteeing our long-term commitment of lives and resources to the future occupation of Iraq. The other 94 Senators, an homogeneous mix of Republicans and Democrats, skipped the vote so as to avoid putting their names in the official record. It’s an interesting strategy. Now they can’t be accused of abandoning our troops or of pouring billions into a useless cause.

    And you know what? I can’t say that I blame them.

    I’ve made a deliberate choice in recent weeks to keep quiet on these issues, partly because I’m tired, but mostly because I just don’t know where to stand. I protested the war last winter because, like so many by my side, I could see this coming. Hell, even Bush, Sr. saw it coming. From his memoirs:

    Trying to eliminate Saddam… would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible… we would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq… there was no viable ‘exit strategy’ we could see, violating another of our principles… Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.

    But then we started dropping bombs and killing thousands of people and dismantling what remained of Iraq’s infrastructure, and everything changed. Regardless of his political motives, I gained some respect for President Bush in recent weeks when he threatened to veto any changes to the appropriations bill that would turn our $20 billion “gift” into a “loan.” We owe the people of Iraq at least that much. But, of course, then I wonder how much of our gift will actually make it to the people of Iraq, and how much will simply be funneled into the pockets of American contractors (who might or might not have direct, personal connections to the administration). But, then again, even if the money does go to those contractors, who’s to say that they aren’t, in fact, the most qualified people to do the job and that the Iraqi people won’t benefit in the long run?

    And now you see why I’ve been so quiet.

    I wish I could join the knee-jerkers on my end of the spectrum who are turning up the “bring our boys home” rhetoric. Ray McGovern makes the most convincing argument that I’ve read yet. “Whether or not U.S. policymakers can admit at this point that they were ‘terribly wrong,’” he writes, “they need to transfer real authority to the United Nations without delay and support the U.N. in overseeing a rapid return to Iraqi sovereignty.”

    But, many protest, we can’t just withdraw! Sure we can, and better now than ten years from now, as in the case of Vietnam. If it is true that we are not in Iraq to control the oil or to establish military bases with which to dominate that strategic area, we can certainly withdraw. As in Vietnam, the war is unwinnable… hear that? Unwinnable!

    If the U.S. withdraws, would there be civil war in Iraq? One cannot dismiss this possibility lightly given the history of Iraq. But it is at least as likely that a regional-federal model of government that would include substantial autonomy for the Kurds in the north, the Sunnis in the center, and the Shiites in the south (something foreshadowed by the composition of the existing Council) could begin to function in relatively short order with help from the U.N. While some degree of inter-ethnic violence could be expected, chances are good that this model would still allow a representative national government to function.

    We won’t know if we don’t try. Besides, there is no viable alternative.

    McGovern, the 27-year CIA veteran and advisor to Bush, Sr., certainly understands the issue better than I. (That he directs the Servant Leadership School is another reason that I’m heeding his warning.) And with each day, as the death toll grows (23 already in November), I grow increasingly disheartened. When I heard of the helicopter tragedy on Sunday, my first thoughts were of my own family, who just last week marked the twenty year anniversary of the death of my cousin, who piloted a Black Hawk into (but not out of) Grenada. On November 2, 2023, sixteen other families will mark similar anniversaries and will still be mourning, as ours is.

    But wish as I might, I can’t yet join the knee-jerkers, and I’m not sure why, exactly. Except that I don’t want it all to have been for nothing.

  • Bring ‘Em On

    When Bush landed on the aircraft carrier in that flight suit, I immediately thought, “From now on, just do Bush in the flight suit. Every single time.”
    — Will Ferrell, on life after Saturday Night Live

    Can you just imagine how funny that would be? George W. Bush addressing the United Nations in his flight suit. George W. Bush debating Howard Dean in his flight suit. George W. Bush sitting at his Oval Office desk trying to find Waldo in his flight suit. He really is Too Stupid to be President.

  • I Just Don’t Know

    I’ve been meaning to mention this one for a few days now. Last Friday, Nicholas Kristof’s editorial in the Times, “Freedom’s in 2nd Place?” raised some questions that need to be raised right about now, especially given the growing disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kristof and his wife, both from immigrant families, recently visited their ancestral homes, the former in Ukraine, the latter in China. For Kristof, the juxtaposition was remarkable.

    Since 1989, when the Soviet Union opened fire on Communism and China opened fire on its citizens, China’s economy has tripled in size — and Ukraine’s has shrunk by half. Even in Russia, according to Izvestia, 40 percent of the people can’t afford toothpaste; in Karapchiv, many can’t afford toilet paper and make do with newspapers (which to me seems sacrilegious). Meanwhile, prospering China has become a global center for cosmetic surgery.

    I was as outraged as anyone that Chinese troops massacred hundreds of protesters to destroy the Tiananmen democracy movement. But China’s long economic boom has cut child mortality rates so much since 1990 that an additional 195,000 children under the age of 5 survive each year. Does this mean that the Chinese are better off for having had their students shot? No, of course not. But it does mean that authoritarian orderliness is sometimes more conducive to economic growth than democratic chaos.

    With another bombing today in Iraq, and with growing numbers of American casualties, those occasional soundbites from Iraqi civilians who claim that life was actually better under Saddam — that they at least had clean water and electricity under his dictatorship — are becoming louder and more difficult to ignore. Can Kristof’s conclusion about “authoritarian orderliness” and “democratic chaos” be applied to Iraq, despite the drastically different social, political, historical, religious, and economic conditions in Ukraine/China and the Middle East? I’m beginning to think, with great regret, that it can.

    None of this should come as a big surprise, of course. Many of us who protested the war did so not because we are anti-American (insert witty Toby Keith quip here), but because we are students of history, because we are willing to learn from the British Empire’s and Soviet Union’s mistakes. The $64,000 question is: Given current conditions, what the hell do we do about it? Some are already arguing that we should admit defeat and cut our losses. I’m not so sure.

    A dear friend of mine is now in parts unknown, doing the type of work that must be done if this war ever really will lead to greater peace and safety in the world. This is the last note I received from him:

    I consider it a privilege to be able to serve the people of Iraq. Please pray that they will find true shalom in the coming months and years.

    Quite an antidote to the cynicism, eh? Here’s what I want to see. I want President Bush to stand before a nationally televised audience, and I want him to commit a trillion (with a T) dollars to Iraq’s economic recovery. Oh yeah, and he should tell those military families who stood united behind him in February and March that their sons and daughters, mothers and fathers will be serving mandatory one-year deployments, because that is what it will take to do the right thing here. Then, I want him to humbly seek the guidance of the United Nations, and I want him to hand over administrative authority to a multilateral coalition. And then I want Bush and Congress to pay for the whole damn thing with a radically progressive tax restructuring. Because, you know what? War is costly, peace will cost a helluva lot more, and America is the only country capable of footing the bill.

    Will it happen? Nope. None of it. But it’s the only thing resembling a solution that I can come up with.

  • F— Off, Old Europe

    The arrogance of this bunch is just staggering. Tell me — is there any legitimate justification for our continued snubbing of the U.N.? I mean, other than a general, “nobody’s gonna tell me what to do” stupidity?

    “The administration is not willing to confront going to the Security Council and saying, ‘We really need to make Iraq an international operation,’ ” said an administration official. “You can make a case that it would be better to do that, but right now the situation in Iraq is not that dire.”

    I really wish Bush would just come out and tell the truth: “Of course we knew there weren’t any WMD. Of course we knew that democracy in Iraq was a pipedream. Don’t you get it yet? We want 100,000+ heavily-armed American troops stationed smack dab in the center of the Middle East. And for as long as (is politically) possible. It’s the only way we can show ’em who’s boss.”

    Another Really Short Take. After more than a year of waiting, I was finally able to see Sokurov’s Russian Ark today. What a beautiful, beautiful film. I knew that I would be impressed by the craft of it all, but I hadn’t expected to be greeted by such a compelling narrative. The last twenty minutes are the best cinema I’ve seen all year. So much history and tragedy and nostalgia and sorrow — and all from a ballroom dance sequence, a steadicam shot through a sea of self-conscious extras, and Sergei Dreiden’s remarkable face. I doubt I’ll see a better film in 2003.

  • Theology of Empire

    This weekend I received the latest issue of Sojourners, in which editor-in-chief Jim Wallis discusses the neocon move toward empire and the bad theology that Bush uses to promote it. The article isn’t available online yet — all the more reason to subscribe — so here’s a quick preview:

    The much-touted Religious Right is now a declining political factor in American life. The New York Times’ Bill Keller recently observed, “Bombastic evangelical power brokers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson have aged into irrelevance, and now exist mainly as ludicrous foils.” The real theological problem in America today is no longer the Religious Right but the nationalistic religion of the Bush administration — one that confuses the identity of the nation with the church, and God’s purposes with the mission of American empire.

    America’s foreign policy is more than pre-emptive, it is theologically presumptuous: not only unilateral, but dangerously messianic; not just arrogant, but bordering on the idolatrous and blasphemous. George Bush’s personal faith has prompted a profound self-confidence in his “mission” to fight the “axis of evil,” his “call” to be commander-in-chief in the war against terrorism, and his definition of America’s “responsibility” to “defend the . . . hopes of all mankind.” This is a dangerous mix of bad foreign policy and bad theology.

    But the answer to bad theology is not secularism; it is, rather, good theology. It is not always wrong to invoke the name of God and the claims of religion in the public life of a nation, as some secularists say. Where would we be without the prophetic moral leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., Desmond Tutu, and Oscar Romero?

    Wallis’s piece doesn’t offer any particularly revelatory insights into Bush’s agenda, but it’s a great read because it synthesizes so much material and reexamines it through his (Wallis’s) humble perspective. And on a day that I discovered this, it seemed that a little humility was in order.

    A couple of fun factoids from the same issue:

    • CEO pay at the 37 largest defense contractors increased 79 percent from 2001 to 2002. The average defense industry CEO in 2002 made $11.3 million — 577 times as much as the average U.S. army private on the ground in Iraq.
    • In 1999 the average wait for public housing in Miami was 9 months; in 2002 it is 84 months.

  • Vigorous Democracy

    I don’t know whether suddenly I’m hearing more talk about democracy because I’m listening better, or prompting it. But if the clearest essential for a vigorous democracy is a citizenry that cares, I’d rather think that my conversations are signs of a nation rousing itself in defense of democratic traditions and institutions.
    — Margaret Krome

    I’ve been thinking the same thing lately, though that might be more a reflection of the company I keep than anything like a national trend. During Clinton’s first campaign, I was a typical 20 year old undergrad — a kid who considered himself a “registered apathetic.” (I used those exact words to describe my political leanings then.) Over the next decade I became increasingly aware politically, and increasingly interested. And then came Bush/Gore . . .

    George W. Bush has turned me into a political animal, and I’m not the only one. Everywhere I go now, I find myself stepping into political discussions. Wars, dead soldiers, and budget deficits will do that to a country, I guess. Hopefully, history is a good indicator here. Johnson’s an interesting example. So’s Bush 41. And instead of announcing the golden age of neo-conservative hegemony that many had predicted, Newt’s Contract with America in ’94 helped to set the stage for Clinton’s landslide re-election. I’m beginning to think that Dubya’s club-’em-and-smirk-while-you-do-it agenda might just be inspiring the same kind of counter-movement across the left-of-center. Hell, if he keeps it up, Bush might just lose the center, too. Surely Margaret Krome and I aren’t the only people who are noticing this.

  • The Precision of Words

    Anyone who caught the Blair/Bush press conference a few days ago might sympathize with Philip Roth. Those two leaders, now joined at the hip politically, make for such an interesting juxtaposition — one a well-read academic and well-spoken debater; the other a shoot-from the hip, “just like one of us,” rambling wreck. After watching his companion casually slip the word “compunction” into an off-the-cuff remark, Bush got that wild-eyed look again and began spewing stuff like:

    As I understand, there’s been a lot of speculation over in Great Britain, we got a little bit of it here, about whether or not the — whether or not the actions were based upon valid information.

    We can debate that all day long until the truth shows up. And that’s what’s going to happen. And we based our decisions on good, sound intelligence, and the — our people are going to find out the truth. And the truth will say that this intelligence was good intelligence; there’s no doubt in my mind.

    I mention Roth because in his recent fiction he seems to have become preoccupied by the degradation, sensationalizing, and politicization of language. In The Human Stain, for instance, (soon to find larger public acclaim, by the way, when the film adaptation starring Nicole Kidman and Anthony Hopkins is released in the fall), the main character is undone by a single word, spoken innocently but exploded by an agenda. At one point, he returns to Athena college, the site of his tragedy, and overhears a conversation between two young professors, who are debating the Clinton/Lewinski scandal. Using the young intern as a personification of her generation’s intellectual vacancy, one says to the other:

    Their whole language is a summation of the stupidity of the last forty years. Closure. There’s one. My students cannot stay in that place where thinking must occur. Closure! They fix on the conventionalized narrative, with its beginning, middle, and end—every experience, no matter how ambiguous, no matter how knotty or mysterious , must lend itself to this normalizing, conventionalizing, anchorman cliché. Any kid who says “closure” I flunk. They want closure, there’s their closure.

    This passage caught my attention this morning as I was typing up notes because of three words: ambiguous, knotty, and mysterious. I worry when politicians denounce ambiguity, when they normalize and conventionalize concepts as mysterious as democracy and history. People die unnecessarily as a result. Families are destroyed and resources are wasted. Someone should flunk ’em.

  • Looking Back

    The latest polls are in, and Mr. Bush can’t be pleased. A quick run-down:

    • Bush’s overall approval rating has dropped to 59%, well below Bush 41’s numbers at this point twelve years ago.
    • 52% of those polled believe there has been an “unacceptable” level of U.S. casualties in Iraq.
    • 57% still consider the war with Iraq to have been worth the sacrifice, down from 70% ten weeks ago.
    • 50% said Bush intentionally exaggerated evidence suggesting Iraq had WMD.
    • 80% fear the United States will become bogged down in a long and costly peacekeeping mission in Iraq, up eight points in less than three weeks.

    The good news, as far as I’m concerned, is that, with the American population growing increasingly concerned over our military occupation, Bush will be less likely to instigate that conflict with Iran or Syria that I have been predicting would come some time in the weeks leading up to primary season. Also, with Dean’s campaign in much better shape than was Clinton’s in ’91, and with Congressional Democrats finally finding some backbone, things are looking better for 2004.

    What I find more interesting, though, are the comments from the “man on the street” that always accompany the findings of polls like this. In the linked article, Betty Stillwell, 71, says, “We were supposed to be in there and out. By now I thought they would have set up a government, and they haven’t done that yet. . . . I think the whole thing was poorly planned, no thought to the aftermath.” Similar sentiments were expressed by interviewees on the Friday edition of ABC Nightly News. One woman, the mother of a 20-year-old serviceman, said that she had stood confidently behind President Bush in February and March (as was her patriotic duty), but that she was surprised and saddened to discover, four months later, that her son was still in the desert, still at risk.

    Huh?

    I totally sympathize with this woman’s frustration (believe me), but to act as though the “untidiness” of post-war Iraq is a big surprise only proves your ignorance. Today I discovered one of the perks of writing a blog. Blogging acts as a record of sorts — a map of texts and happenings through which I can now plot the course of my changing passions and opinions. Or, in other, more self-congratulatory words, it’s like a big We Told You So. (I never said I wouldn’t be petty if it served my needs.) So for those two well-intentioned women (and others like them) who are surprised by how messy things have become, here’s a quick look back through Long Pauses:

    On a Saturday morning in February, millions of people stood up against this war. And just a few days earlier, I warned about what would happen if we made foreign policy decisions based on irrational fear rather than on historical analysis. That post echoes the comments I made on January 30 when, in response to the now much-discussed State of the Union, I wrote: “The histories of nations that have exercised imperial force under the guise of Providence should be telling to all but the most blindly ill-informed and arrogant.”

    On January 2nd there was Robert Scheer in The Nation, writing:

    we are mobilizing our massive forces against a weakened secular dictator 6,000 miles away who doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with a series of devastating terrorist attacks. What is happening here? Certainly not the construction of a coherent foreign policy aimed at increasing the security of the United States or our allies. This is an Administration that in two years has so mucked up our approach to the world that merely applying the demands of logic is made to appear unpatriotic.

    And speaking of those links between Iraq and Al-Quaeda. . . . I was writing about Bush’s rhetorical strategies nine months ago, two weeks into the life of this blog. Responding to his September 12 speech, I wrote:

    After being pressed for several weeks to provide evidence that links Iraq to Al-Quaeda, and after failing repeatedly to do so, the President has instead linked them rhetorically, which, to be honest, is all that he really needs to do in order to sway public opinion back to his favor. Suddenly Hussein has been transformed into a new Osama, a figurehead and weapons broker.

    And it was in the same speech that President Bush first began promising a future in which the people of Iraq would “join a democratic Afghanistan and a democratic Palestine, inspiring reforms throughout the Muslim world.” My response:

    Man, that would be nice, wouldn’t it? Again, I applaud his spoken motivations, but I just don’t see this administration or the American voters being willing to put forth the long term efforts necessary for such a radical change. Let me be clear here: I have complete faith in the abilities of our armed services, and I have no doubt that we could quickly destabilize Iraq and oust its leadership (though doing so will come at the cost of thousands of lives, some ours, most theirs). But what happens next? That’s the answer that I most wanted to hear yesterday and the one that I knew he would carefully sidestep.

    Downright prescient, eh?

    Now, finally, a majority of Americans are beginning to ask the questions that so many of us wanted answered nearly a year ago. These in my very first blog entry, for instance. Norman Mailer and George Kennan warned us. Reverend Fritz Rich warned us. Democratic Senator Robert Byrd and Republican Representative John Duncan warned us. Countless church leaders warned us. Chris Hedges warned us. And Shane Claiborne certainly warned us.

    In October Pete Stark stood on the floor of the House and asked a question that his less courageous peers only now have the balls to ask:

    What is most unconscionable is that there is not a shred of evidence to justify the certain loss of life. Do the generalized threats and half-truths of this administration give any one of us in Congress the confidence to tell a mother or father or family that the loss of their child or loved one was in the name of a just cause?

    I wonder how that mother interviewed by ABC last night would respond?

  • It Smells Like . . . Victory

    One of the most iconic and ironic lines in all of American film. Robert Duvall’s Lt. Col. Kilgore — a name straight out of Dickens — is framed in one of those low-angle, “Hollywood Hero” shots. Mortars explode around him, but he moves confidently, oblivious to or unshaken by (I’m not sure which) the danger and destruction that threatens to end him. Kilgore is an anachronism — an archetypal war hero stripped from a WWII service film and dropped into chaos. His attempts to impose discipline and order on the situation are both absurd and strangely fascinating. Ask anyone what they remember about Apocalypse Now and most will mention Kilgore. Most will even remember his most famous line.

    I was reminded of that scene today when I read The Progressive‘s recent interview with Martin Sheen, in which he discusses the potential of civil disobedience, the pitfalls of being an outspoken liberal, and the wellspring of his resilient faith. I was aware of Sheen’s activism, of course — it’s near impossible not to be when he is so often demonized by the conservative media — but I’d never heard him explain so rationally and passionately his motivations. Who knew that he would come off sounding like a modern Dorothy Day? Sheen’s answer to the final question is damn near inspiring:

    Q: Do you despair, or do you have hope?

    Sheen: No, no, I never despair, because George Bush is not running the universe. He may be running the United States, he may be running the military, he may be running even the world, but he is not running the universe, he is not running the human heart. A higher power is yet to be heard in this regard, and I’m not so sure that we haven’t already heard, we just haven’t been listening. I still believe in the nonviolent Jesus and the basic human goodness present in all of us.

    If all of the issues that I have worked on were depending on some measure of success, it would be a total failure. I don’t anticipate success. We’re not asked to be successful, we are only asked to be faithful. I couldn’t even tell you what success is.

  • Take Me With You, Alec

    I’m not even sure how to wrap my ahead around stuff like this. According to a recent poll, a third of the American public believes that we have already discovered WMD in Iraq. And nearly a fourth believes that Iraq actually used chemical and biological weapons during the war. As the article mentions, this is the same American public who believed — or, at least half of them believed, and half is way too many — that Iraqis were flying the planes on 9/11. Read this next line in that David Letterman dumb guy voice, the one he makes while curling up his top lip: “Saudi Arabia, huh? Never heard of it.”

    Several analysts said they were troubled by the lack of knowledge about the Sept. 11 hijackers, shown in the January survey conducted for Knight Ridder newspapers. Only 17 percent correctly said that none of the hijackers was Iraqi.

    “That really bothers me, because it shows a lack of understanding about other countries – that maybe many Americans don’t know one Arab from another,” said Sam Popkin, a polling expert at the University of California-San Diego who has advised Democratic candidates. “Maybe because Saudis are seen as rich and friendly, people have a hard time dealing with them as hijackers.”

    No wonder Toby Keith and that “Have You Forgotten” guy are still leading us all to war. If I lived in terrified ignorance, I’d probably want to drop some bombs, too. (By the way, the AP has now officially put the estimated civilian death toll in Iraq at over 3,240, which means, of course, that our Christian democracy is now responsible for nearly 500 more civilian deaths than the 9/11 hijackers.)

  • Give ‘Em Hell, Bill

    A few days ago I read John Nichols’s report from the Take Back America conference, where Bill Moyers delivered a rousing speech “that legal scholar Jamie Raskin described as one of the most ‘amazing and spellbinding’ addresses he had ever heard.” Naturally I was anxious to read it for myself, and now a full transcript is finally available online. In just under 6,000 words, Moyers outlines the history of America’s Populist and Progressive movements, unearths the historical precedents for the Grover Norquist / Karl Rove School of Realpolitik, and issues a challenge to left-leaning politicians and voters alike: “This is your story – the progressive story of America,” he concludes. “Pass it on.”

    It really is a fantastic speech — much too long for me to adequately comment on it here. I do want to snip this one paragraph, though, which reminded me of something I had written just a few days ago.

    In “Sin and Society,” written in 1907, [Edward A. Ross] told readers that the sins “blackening the face of our time” were of a new variety, and not yet recognized as such. “The man who picks pockets with a railway rebate, murders with an adulterant instead of a bludgeon, burglarizes with a ‘rake-off’ instead of a jimmy, cheats with a company instead of a deck of cards, or scuttles his town instead of his ship, does not feel on his brow the brand of a malefactor.” In other words upstanding individuals could plot corporate crimes and sleep the sleep of the just without the sting of social stigma or the pangs of conscience. Like Kenneth Lay, they could even be invited into the White House to write their own regulations.

    And a not-so-random snippet from “The Trouble with ‘Being Left in This Country’: Tony Kushner’s Progressive Theology” (a work in progress, all rights reserved):

    In A Bright Room Called Day, Kushner’s first major play, he dissects one of those “moments,” revisiting the final days of the Weimar Republic, when, with its competing factions divided by petty politics and by interference from the Cominterm in Moscow, the German Left stood idly by as the National Socialist Workers’ Party swept to power. In case the parallels between Weimar Berlin and Reagan-era Washington, D.C. were too obscure for that first audience who saw Bright Room in 1985 — or for any audience since, for that matter — Kushner also places on stage with his German characters a contemporary American Jewish woman. Zillah Katz — “BoHo/East Village New Wave with Anarcho-Punk tendencies” — is like a living embodiment of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt. A polemicist and provocateur, she repeatedly interrupts the relatively naturalistic drama in order to comment on the action, and she does so in an explicitly didactic fashion. At her most outrageous, Zillah screams at the audience: “REAGAN EQUALS HITLER! RESIST! DON’T FORGET, WEIMAR HAD A CONSTITUTION TOO!” And in an image that could serve as an epigraph for Kushner’s next play, Angels in America, she adds: “Don’t put too much stock in a good night’s sleep. During times of reactionary backlash, the only people sleeping soundly are the guys who’re giving the rest of us bad dreams.”

    “Sleep the sleep of the just” is my favorite line from Moyers’s speech. That strange metaphor — the idea that sleeping soundly somehow demonstrates moral rightness — has shown up in a few odd places lately, most notably in the frequent reports that President Bush is sleeping well despite (or, perhaps, because of) the war. Well thank God for small blessings, eh?

  • Red Five Standing By

    I subscribe to the Pop Culture Association & American Culture Association listserv, which typically fills my in-box only with announcements of calls for papers and research queries. But occasionally someone’s dander will rise and an interesting discussion will follow. This week, several participants have been debating the merits of the various Cultural Studies textbooks, and from that debate has blossomed a chat about the practical impact of myth and heroes on American politics. I was only skimming the messages until I discovered this note, written by John Shelton Lawrence, co-author of The Myth of the American Superhero (2002):

    I would challenge people to think about President Bush’s donning of the flight suit today, engaging in flight, appearing with his flight helmet on deck of the Abraham Lincoln and place it in the context of the film Independence Day. Is the president being scripted to match the plot of a superheroic action president in the film? The question seems worth exploring.

    If you’re at all intrigued by this question, Dr. Lawrence has posted an interesting article on his Web server. “Post 9/11: Who Can Save the Day?” is an anecdotal but historically sensitive discussion of the “relationships between U.S. foreign policy makers and some important popular artifacts.” He takes on, in short order: Teddy Roosevelt and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, FDR and William Randolph Hearst, Clinton’s and Dole’s celebration of Independence Day, and Dubya’s affinity for Rambo. The last section, as you might have guessed, is the most relevant today. After describing the administration’s push for the American Services Members Protection Act, Lawrence concludes with this fun little anecdote (and by “fun” I mean horrifying):

    In February 2002 the president’s pleasure in superheroic fantasy and his eagerness to use it in conveying his own political values was revealed in an incident with Germany’s leading news magazine, Der Spiegel. To accompany a “Masters of the Universe” article on the Bush administration’s crusade against evil, Spiegel created a satirical cover depicting each national security player in the role of a zealous destroyer from American popular culture. George W. Bush, surrounded by his advisers, received a muscular Rambo body holding an automatic weapon and ammunition belts.

    Daniel Coats, U.S. Ambassador to Germany, visited Der Spiegel‘s editorial offices — not to protest the caricature or the article’s viewpoint about reckless unilateralism — but to report that “the President was flattered,” whereupon he ordered thirty-three poster-size renditions of the cover for the White House. Each policy maker on the cover reportedly wanted a copy.

    [insert loud guffaw, deep sigh, profane tirade, or sarcastic insult — whichever best suits you.]

  • The Agenda

    At the risk of sounding like a broken record, let me begin by saying that, within the strange confines of my personal experience, many of the “Regular Joes” who support President Bush and his agenda seem to do so because he is pro-life and because he evidences publicly the recognizable signs of a “committed walk with God.” Within this community — this large, evangelical sub-culture — voting Republican is a “moral” act, a single gesture by which evangelicals hope to restore America to its Christian foundations (whatever that means — and, of course, it doesn’t mean anything, which is the beauty of empty, historically-blind rhetoric, but that’s another rant entirely).

    So with that out of the way — along with the obligatory acknowledgement that there are, of course, notable exceptions to my rule — I want to dig into William Grieder’s recent piece for The Nation, “Rolling Back the 20th Century,” which does a nice job, I think, of summarizing the Neoconservative agenda. The thesis of his argument, as implied by the title of the article, is that, since Reagan’s election in 1980, the Right has moved slowly but steadily toward a dismantling of New Deal America with the ultimate goal of returning us to the “lost Eden” of the McKinley Era. This is the line that really grabbed by attention:

    Many opponents and critics (myself included) have found the right’s historic vision so improbable that we tend to guffaw and misjudge the political potency of what it has put together. We might ask ourselves: If these ideas are so self-evidently cockeyed and reactionary, why do they keep advancing?

    If you’re a regular reader of Long Pauses, then you know that I’m plagued by the word “praxis” — the symbiotic relationship of theory and action. I was reminded of it again last night as I finished reading Radical Chic, Tom Wolfe’s 1970 account of a fund-raising party held at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Bernstein in honor of the Black Panthers. At one point, the trio of Bernstein, Otto Preminger, and Barbara Walters (!) assail Don Cox with pointed questions concerning the risks of violent revolution, and the leather-clad, afro-ed Panther is able only to regurgitate the Maoist jargon of “petty bourgeois oppression” and “individual freedoms.” He isn’t very convincing.

    But the Neocons are. I keep thinking of a line from Angels in America, when Joe, the mostly-closeted Mormon, Republican lawyer, asks Louis, his Jewish, progressive lover: “Do you want to be pure or do you want to be effective?” The Neocons seem to have discovered praxis in spades, though it’s praxis built upon grossly immoral theories of capital. Grieder summarizes the main points of that agenda, each of which is explained in much greater detail in the article:

    • Eliminate federal taxation of private capital, as the essential predicate for dismantling the progressive income tax.
    • Gradually phase out the pension-fund retirement system as we know it, starting with Social Security privatization but moving eventually to breaking up the other large pools of retirement savings, even huge public-employee funds, and converting them into individualized accounts.
    • Withdraw the federal government from a direct role in housing, healthcare, assistance to the poor and many other long-established social priorities, first by dispersing program management to local and state governments or private operators, then by steadily paring down the federal government’s financial commitment.
    • Restore churches, families and private education to a more influential role in the nation’s cultural life by giving them a significant new base of income — public money.
    • Strengthen the hand of business enterprise against burdensome regulatory obligations, especially environmental protection, by introducing voluntary goals and “market-driven” solutions.
    • Smash organized labor.

    Later in the piece, Grieder boils it down even further: “Dismantle the common assets of society, give people back their tax money and let everyone fend for himself.” It’s an oversimplification, obviously, but it’s also a frighteningly accurate summary of Bush’s domestic policy. I guess the question that plagues me is: How did this agenda become the guiding light for America’s evangelicals? How did a Church founded on Christ’s ministry become united behind a political ideology that elevates market forces over justice and mercy? Do we so completely lack imagination and understanding of history that we’ve concluded that this is the best we can do?

    Grieder concludes:

    I do not believe that most Americans want what the right wants. But I also think many cannot see the choices clearly or grasp the long-term implications for the country. This is a failure of left-liberal politics. Constructing an effective response requires a politics that goes right at the ideology, translates the meaning of Bush’s governing agenda, lays out the implications for society and argues unabashedly for a more positive, inclusive, forward-looking vision.

    Perhaps it could be modified slightly and still retain some of its weight:

    I do not believe that most Christians want what the right wants. But I also think many cannot see the choices clearly or grasp the long-term implications for the country. This is a failure of the evangelical church. Constructing an effective response requires a theology that goes right at the ideology, translates the meaning of Bush’s governing agenda, lays out the implications for society and argues unabashedly for a more graceful, just, and merciful vision.

    Just doing my part for the cause.

  • News from the Front

    Tonight, I listened to Shane Claiborne tell stories about Baghdad. He’s taller than I expected (6′ 3″, maybe) and skinnier and younger. I mean, I knew he was young, but after reading his diaries for the last few weeks I somehow expected him to carry the weight of his experience in his skin. He’s just a kid, though — a couple years younger than I am, in fact. Looks like that skater kid who annoys you at the mall. The one with the flared pants and chunky glasses who you avoid making eye contact with. Shane had the pants and the glasses, along with a light brace around his chest that restrained his left shoulder. The one he dislocated while riding at high speed through a militarized zone on the road from Baghdad to Amman. The one he dislocated while bombs fell in every direction. The one he dislocated while his friends’ skulls cracked open beside him.

    Shane is a local boy — a graduate of Maryville High School who went off to college in Philadelphia a few years ago and decided to stay. He and several friends committed to spending five years together in community, living Christ’s example in an inner-city neighborhood. After his talk tonight I told him that I was glad he was home safe, that I had prayed for him. Then I thanked him for being one of those voices that has brought me comfort in recent months, when I have felt so alienated from so much of American religion. With typical grace, he smiled and said, “That’s the struggle, isn’t it? At some point you have to stop complaining about the Church and start being the Church.” The Simple Way, they call it.

    Shane left for Baghdad a few weeks ago as part of a Christian Peacemaker Team, in cooperation with Voices in the Wilderness. He went, he told us, with two goals in mind: first, to comfort the people of Iraq, showing them the other face of America, and second, to document that experience so that it could be shared with everyone willing to listen. I was deeply discouraged to hear him confirm my worst suspicions. Whenever they fought to bring specific humanitarian crises to the attention of reporters, the international media would soon be on the scene, asking questions, conducting interviews. Shane’s one experience with the American media — a live interview on one of the morning news programs — was cut off soon after he began answering the first question: “How does it feel to be considered a traitor in your own country?” A quick sidenote: one of the crises that they experienced was the bombing of the Baghdad market. Shane visited the scene the next day, and tonight I held a small part of a civilian vehicle that was incinerated in the attack, immediately killing all of its passengers.

    He had plenty of stories to share, many of which are posted in his diaries. There’s the one about the thirteen year old girl whose birthday party he attended. She wished for “Peace” as bombs blasted the horizon, an image that I would dismiss as cheap sentimentality in a film, but not in life. There’s the one about the bombs that explode before impact, spraying uniformly sized cubes of shrapnel into homes and families — the cluster bombs that we promised we wouldn’t use this time. (Shane has photos of those cubes, scraped from the bloodied walls of apartments near his camp.) There’s the one about the well-spoken (in English, that is) Iraqi doctor who stitched Shane and his friends back together after their accident, refusing payment. He asked only that they tell the world that the Americans had bombed their smalltown hospital three days earlier.

    My favorite story was of an Iraqi Christian who Shane met during a worship service. I didn’t realize that there were so many Christians in Iraq — upwards of one million, he told us. After a service, this man and Shane were discussing the war, and the man asked, “Do Americans support this war?” “Some do, but there is growing opposition.” “And the church?” Shane said that his heart sunk when he heard that second question. “Well, most do not, but some parts of the Church do support the war.” “Not Christians,” the man said, startled. “Yes, Christians.”

    “But, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers.’”

    What I love about this story and about this man is that his mind could not reconcile such a gross contradiction. It was impossible for him to imagine a Christian Church that imagines disaster and that accepts Bush’s heresy of redemptive violence as so many segments of ours have. He is such a wonderful reminder of the catholicity of Christ’s church and of how powerful it is despite our best efforts to castrate it.

  • Kushner on Bush

    Tony Kushner on President Bush and military intervention in Iraq:

    It’s very hard for me to ever say that I think unilateral military action on the part of United States can be a great thing at this point. The idea of the United States armed forces going in and suppressing and controlling a population of any sort is so fraught with history. . . . The minute we start dropping bombs on anybody, everybody feels very good for five minutes. And there is a fantasy sense that we’re still the number one country on earth because we can go in there and kick this person, and we forget we’re talking about this completely decimated country that was annihilated [a few] years ago and has never rebuilt.
    — from an interview with Craig Lucas on January 20, 1993.

    Yep. 1993. He was talking about that President Bush. I’ve just begun working through Tony Kushner in Conversation, edited by Robert Vorlicky. Here’s another interesting tidbit. Turns out that the Reagan administration wasn’t all bad. Kushner describing a federal grant that helped to fund the writing of Angels in America:

    The application for it was very honest. I said I was going to write a play about gay men and Mormons and Roy Cohn, sent it in to the federal government under Reagan, and thought, this will come back immediately with no money attached. Then they gave us this huge check. . . . It was Washington money with an eagle stamped on the check. So I felt, when I was writing it, that it was taxpayers’ money, and I do think that had some impact on the play’s scope.

    I wonder if Jesse Helms — the homophobic, anti-NEA Helms of old; not the kinder, gentler, post-Bono, pro-AIDS relief Helms — ever found out.

  • Frontline

    I watched the address last night and got exactly what I expected. As an aside, I don’t understand why the President’s staff informs the media of what he will be saying hours before he says it. I guess it is just more time for the administration to disseminate its message.

    I watched a fantastic installment of Frontline last night called, The Long Road to War. The first half hour was devoted to a political biography of Saddam, the second segment dealt mostly with the ’91 Gulf War, and the final bit addressed the Clinton and Dubya years. I’m so glad I caught it because it helped fill in a lot of holes for me. It was also nice to get the story from a relatively objective source, which was then supplemented with original interviews with prominent Iraqi officials and neo-cons like William Kristol and Richard Perle, who offered a fascinating peek inside the Hawk mentality. Here’s a helpful chronology from Frontline’s Website.

    Some interesting facts (that were news to me):

    Saddam’s relationship with the CIA goes back to the early-60s, when he was an up and coming enforcer (torturer/killer) for the Bath Party. The CIA helped them overthrow the existing government, which was pro-Soviet, and Saddam slowly rose through the ranks until he deposed his mentor in 1979. To inaugurate his regime, Saddam, at a formal dinner, had several of his best friends removed from the room and executed. Video footage of the dinner (which was shown on Frontline) was also broadcast throughout Iraq to let the people know what kind of a leader they now had. An odd moment: you can see Saddam crying after he gives the orders. Even in the 1960s, by the way, Saddam had a separate library devoted to Stalin. Nice.

    One interesting segment dealt with the feud between Saddam and Bush 41. All commentators, American and Iraqi alike, agreed that each man had disastrously misjudged the other. Bush made the regrettable mistake of making it personal — calling out Saddam by name — and in the process he did nothing but elevate Saddam’s status in the Middle East. Not only was Saddam taking on the United States, but he was now actually taking on the President himself. What a hero. Saddam, for his part, assumed that Bush would never actually attack him. After being supported by America throughout the 80s during his war with Iran and in his suppression of the Kurds, Saddam guessed that Bush would never risk American lives in the Iraqi desert.

    The big revelation for me was learning about the massive mistakes that we made at the end of the Gulf War (and that were strangely well-intentioned). After beating down the Iraqi army and destroying most of Saddam’s Republican Guard, our forces planned to eliminate what remained of enemy opposition. Powell, who was on the scene and who was disturbed by what he was seeing (on Frontline they showed footage of American helicopters gunning down retreating soldiers), Powell called Schwarzkopf and suggested that they call it off. Schwarzkopf passed the recommendation onto the White House, who went along with Powell. Rather than risk more American lives and needlessly kill more Iraqis, a truce was declared and Schwarzkopf was sent alone to sign off on Iraq’s terms of surrender. Here’s where it gets interesting.

    The Iraqis asked for permission to fly their helicopters. Knowing that we had destroyed most of their roads and bridges, Schwarzkopf agreed. Then, the Iraqis asked for permission to fly their armored helicopters. Again, Schwarzkopf agreed. Why did the Iraqis need those helicopters? Both in the North (the Kurds) and in Baghdad itself (Shia Muslims), opposition forces were rising up to depose Saddam — just as Bush had hoped! What did we do about it? Well, after allowing Saddam’s troops to use their armored helicopters, we just threw up our hands and said, “We did our job. Now it’s up the Iraqi people to deal with Saddam.” Tens of thousands of resistance forces were wiped out while our military looked on from a safe distance, forbidden to intervene.

    I’m really frustrated by the frequent comparisons of Saddam to Hitler — Saddam is contained, after all — but the footage of the crushed uprising was eerily similar to what I saw in The Pianist this weekend. Young men were dragged on the ground and shot point blank in the back of the head. Women and children had no choice but to put their belongings on their back and step in line. Everyone fought for bread and water. Bush didn’t act until several weeks later, when Saddam turned his attention to the Kurds. We set up and protected relief camps that were filled with Kurdish refugees, but by then the resistance had been quashed and Saddam was firmly in power again. Several interviewees said that, had America intervened, even for only a few days, Saddam would have been ousted by his own people.

    I also enjoyed the program because it dealt explicitly with the divide in the Republican party between what they called the Neo-Reaganites and the Practicalists. The divide has created an interesting tension in Dubya’s administration. On one side are folks like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, who have been pushing Bush toward war with Iraq since well before 9/11; on the other are Bush 41 and Powell, who warned the President months ago that he would never get support for war from the U.N. The Hawks versus the Diplomats. I was well aware of this divide, of course, but the show cast it in a new light. I have more sympathy for the Practical thinkers, especially for Powell, who has been dutifully fighting an honorable diplomatic battle that he has always known would never amount to more than ceremonial political maneuvering. But I have to admire (in a sick, sick way) the Machiavellian efficiency of the neo-cons, who exercise such remarkable control over affairs. That they’ve managed to do it under the flag of “Christian Providence” is just forehead-slapping.

    I have to admit that some of the administration’s attitudes toward Saddam make more sense to me now. I am so ready to see his reign brought to an end, and to think that that will happen without actual military force is, at best, idealistic, at worst, hopelessly naive. But I’m still horrified by the prospect of our looming war because I genuinely believe — and the Frontline special only reinforced this belief — that our administration honestly thinks that it will be stage one (or maybe stage two, after Afghanistan) in a military-supported, imperial quest to democratize the world. Talk about naive.

  • Rilke’s “The Man Watching”

    Less than an hour until President Bush’s national address, and I’m too tired, too frustrated, and too stunned to think. I know that there’s not much lower on the blog food chain than posting a poem without comment, but, well, a friend sent this to me today, and it’s been a source of welcomed comfort. And besides, great poetry speaks for itself.

    The Man Watching
    by Rainer Maria Rilke

    I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
    so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
    that a storm is coming,
    and I hear the far-off fields say things
    I can’t bear without a friend,
    I can’t love without a sister

    The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
    across the woods and across time,
    and the world looks as if it had no age:
    the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
    is seriousness and weight and eternity.

    What we choose to fight is so tiny!
    What fights us is so great!
    If only we would let ourselves be dominated
    as things do by some immense storm,
    we would become strong too, and not need names.

    When we win it’s with small things,
    and the triumph itself makes us small.
    What is extraordinary and eternal
    does not want to be bent by us.
    I mean the Angel who appeared
    to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
    when the wrestler’s sinews
    grew long like metal strings,
    he felt them under his fingers
    like chords of deep music.

    Whoever was beaten by this Angel
    (who often simply declined the fight)
    went away proud and strengthened
    and great from that harsh hand,
    that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
    Winning does not tempt that man.
    This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
    by constantly greater beings.

    Okay, one comment . . . I’ll never write a line this good:

    the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
    is seriousness and weight and eternity.

    Read it out loud. There is so much dramatic force in those three nouns. The stanza, up until that point, is almost romantic — filled with images of a storm and a mythical landscape. But then you hit the word “seriousness,” and the tone, even the tempo of the line changes. The light, fluid reading is brought to a halt, and we’re forced to confront those words, individually and in relation to one another: “seriousness and weight and eternity.”

    A perfect poem for today, I think.

  • A Bush Win?

    Mark Levine, an assistant professor in the History Department at UC – Irvine, has written a piece for Alternet that asks a simple but important question: How will the Left respond to a “Bush Wins” scenario? In other words, what will happen to the energies and coalitions formed around the anti-war movement this year when American forces depose Hussein quickly and with relatively few casualties — few enough, at least, to avoid swaying public opinion back home? What will happen when Bush successfully establishes something resembling (superficially, at least) a democratic-like regime in post-war Iraq? Remember that the general opinion of the American populace is that we have already achieved an overwhelming victory in Afghanistan — a victory against terrorism, a victory for democracy. Problem solved. Time to move on.

    The political Left, having established its most public position in decades, could be heading toward another in a series of significant embarrassments. With war now only days away (I assume), parts of the anti-war movement seem to be — and I say this with some hesitation — relishing the prospect of disaster. Today, Antiwar.com posted a link to this article, which promises “thousands of U.S. fatalities.” Surely the Left — which, you must admit, expresses its concerns in moral terms as often as the President does — can stake out its position on stronger grounds than, “Well, when thousands of Americans die, then, then the whole world will finally see how misguided Bush really is.” Surely the Left can hope for better than a bloody “I told you so.”

    Levine writes:

    the reality is that if the war is quick and a U.S.-occupation established effectively, progressive forces need to accept the removal of Hussein as a great opportunity to build democracy and justice in Iraq, whatever the actual motives of the Bush Administration. The social and political forces unleashed by the end of decades of Hussein’s murderous rule will not easily be penned in by a US-sponsored show-democracy; but whether these forces use a reopened public sphere or turn to violence to respond to the likely betrayal depends in good measure on how adroitly the world progressive community can lay fast but deep roots in Iraq.

    Levine argues that the Left should be working overtime now “to inoculate the American people against what the Carnegie Endowment for Peace has already labeled the ‘mirage’ of democracy that will likely be planted in Iraq after a short war.” Doing so is a tricky game, though, especially when American attention spans are busily occupied by American Idol and Anna Nicole. Harkening back to the finest hours of the New Left, Levine suggests that our greatest potential might lie in student movements. But he warns that the Left’s credibility also rests on its ability to refocus “on the larger world systems which have produced toxic conflicts such as Iraq, Sudan, Colombia and the Congo. In other words, taking steps toward a more holistic approach to peace and justice.” I hope I get to see it happen.

    But, of course, the Left continues to hold out hope for peaceful resolution, and the White House waffling of the last few days has offered occasional glimpses of promise. The best initiative for peace that I’ve found was offered this week by Sojourners – Christians for Justice and Peace. After meeting with Tony Blair and Clare Short, an ecumenical delegation of church leaders worked with Sojourners to draft a 6-point “Alternative to War for Defeating Saddam Hussein.” It seems remarkably pragmatic and just to me — a welcomed relief after months of naive anti-war sloganeering. Instead of annotating the proposal, I would encourage you to read it for yourself and pass it along.