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Ah, interesting, horrifying. Every summer on the summer in the run-up to major elections…

WASHINGTON — Israel carried out a major military exercise earlier this month that American officials say appeared to be a rehearsal for a potential bombing attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Several American officials said the Israeli exercise appeared to be an effort to develop the military’s capacity to carry out long-range strikes and to demonstrate the seriousness with which Israel views Iran’s nuclear program.

More than 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighters participated in the
maneuvers, which were carried out over the eastern Mediterranean and
over Greece during the first week of June, American officials said.

The
exercise also included Israeli helicopters that could be used to rescue
downed pilots. The helicopters and refueling tankers flew more than 900
miles, which is about the same distance between Israel and Iran’s
uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, American officials said.

The following paragraph is from an essay by WJT Mitchell in The Life and Death of Images, a new collection of essays published here by the Tate itself, in the US by Cornell.

Although the Abu Ghraib image is generally reproduced as a singular, isolated, iconic form, it implies an address to and relation to other that is a central feature of the tortured and dying imago dei in Christian iconography. We know that the torturers are not far away, and we know from the pornographic images that they were having a good time, giving the ‘thumbs-up’ sign to the camera as they gloated over their victims. But this, too, is a central feature of the photographs, which, like the canonical scenes of the passion of Christ, incorporate the torturers as an essential part of their iconography. Did Lynndie Englund know that a frequent motif in scenes of the mocking of Christ is the leading of him on a leash? Certainly not. These tableaux are not to be taken as expressions of the intentions of the torturers, but symptoms of the ‘system behind the system’ that brought them into the world.

I’m interested in the last line. That is, I’m interestedly resistant to the last line. What do you think? I’m not going to show the images again - they’ve been shown enough, and those are human beings that we’re seeing, the purpose of the photos was to humiliate, and that’s that. But, remembering back, are they “symptoms of the ’system behind the system’ that brought them into the world”? And what does that have to do with traditional Christian iconography?

I am nervous about a quasi-Jungianism that’s slipping back into the game. I guess I don’t believe in any “system behind the system,” at least not one that looks like the one Mitchell seems to be leaning on here. But then again, I’m definitely not an intentionalist either, in the Hirsch / Michaels mode…

I’ll put it this way. Unless the complex history of Christian representation is bracketed as “what I, and I alone because of my training, can find in this image,” I am not sure what the top of the paragraph is up to, especially given what happens at its end.

What does it matter? We dance over the particularities of the thing. We lose sight of the beam in our own eye, the suffering human being in the shot, as we paranoiacally speculate about the sprinkler systems that run under the image’s lawn.

From the NYT today:

The split on the gas tax is a relatively rare one for Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama, who agree on the broad outlines of policy in most areas. They have both called for the suspension of purchases for the national strategic petroleum stockpile, a supply of oil to protect the country against sudden supply disruptions; new taxes on oil companies; measures to curb global warming; and heavy federal spending on renewable energy sources. They have also called for a federal investigation of possible manipulation in oil markets.

Ha! You mean, like, this? 

Just to be clear, the wars and threats of future wars are not responsible for the entire run up in price, as there’s clearly an enormous increase in demand / plateauing of supply at foot that at the base of this. But the “war premium” ensured that the oilcos were receiving a nicely inflated price from 2002 on, despite the fact that the US economy was falling into recession. The “axis of evil” speech, which turned loose talk into an announcement of imminent action, was given on January 29, 2002. Look again at the graph… 

Nothing would have sucked more, for certain parties, than running the last stable years of oil supply down at $10 / barrel. 

One needn’t believe in direct conspiracy, only capitalist over-determination (that, on its side, looks like underdetermination…) Things happen because they can - fields of benefit fall into place, everyone’s happy and lobbying, and then you get this sort of thing. 

(saw it first at pas au dela)

We don’t grow beasts like Hitchens in the US. Filled to the brim with satanic figures we surely are, but they rarely have reams of poetry by heart. Ours slick and equivocate, but not with the likes of Yeats and Shakespeare on their forked tongues.

Here he is with his latest and perhaps worst piece to date:

I was having an oppressively normal morning a few months ago, flicking through the banality of quotidian e-mail traffic, when I idly clicked on a message from a friend headed “Seen This?” The attached item turned out to be a very well-written story by
Teresa Watanabe of the Los Angeles Times. It described thedeath, in Mosul, Iraq, of a young soldier from Irvine, California, named Mark Jennings Daily, and the unusual degree of emotion that his community was undergoing as a consequence. The emotion derived from a very moving statement that the boy had left behind, stating his reasons for having become a volunteer and bravely facing the prospect that his
words might have to be read posthumously. In a way, the story was almost too perfect: this handsome lad had been born on the Fourth ofJuly, was a registered Democrat and self-described agnostic, a U.C.L.A. honors graduate, and during his college days had fairly decided reservations about the war in Iraq. I read on, and actually printed the story out, and was turning a page when I saw the following:

“Somewhere along the way, he changed his mind. His family says there
was no epiphany. Writings by author and columnist Christopher Hitchens
on the moral case for war deeply influenced him … “

Did you notice that the moments of ethical adding up that happen in the piece, the places where Hitchens “solves” the problem of his own complicity with this horrible thing (the war, the death of this kid), involve the deployment of literature. Literature that serves here as a cloud of easy equivalence, as permission to say mistily what you couldn’t possibly say without the screen of metaphor and allusion.

For the piece relies upon the equation: Hitchens is to Iraq what Yeats is to the Easter Rising and Orwell is to Barcelona. But of course Iraq is not the Easter Rising, nor is it Barcelona, unless perhaps you’re seeing it from the other side of the lines.

From the NYT tonight:

SHABAK VALLEY, Afghanistan — In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy.

Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team’s ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations — in one case spotting a land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe — has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results

One wonders about what it’s like to receive that phone call or email or whatever way the initial pitch comes, what it’s like to systematically forget all the horrifying mistakes your discipline has made in this or other parallel directions, and say, sure, yes, I’d like to hear some more about this opportunity. Yes, sure, I’d like the informational packet. What is the pay like? And so on. It’s the same sort of doublethinking self-deception, I imagine, that gets otherwise sane and reasonable people to agree to appear as talking heads on cable news shows… 

It is worth remembering that, however things look on the surface, we Americans will always be the insurgents, never the occupiers. The IEDs will always be ours, the sniping - we invented that.

Whatever it looks like on the screen, we will always be irregulars, we will always land on the asymmetrical side of things. Our torture rooms are never those of the prison-bricked Central Intelligence office or the PVC camp - they are always in the back room, upstairs and to the back, with the rough hewn chair and the single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.

We will always be “just kids,” and the wars will always be fought between one backyard and the drainage pond at the corner. Someone’s golden retriever will always run across the field of battle at the critical moment. We will lock and load and empty our magazines before our mothers call us in for microwaved dinners.

In Totem and Taboo, Freud fabulates the origination of the incest taboo in a story that is also (of course) a story of the origins of civilization and the social contract that initiates it. There is a big bad father, and then there are sons. The sons - they can’t get what they want sexually or in any other way - dad has a monopoly over the women. So the sons kill dad (Freud wonders if it was “some advance in culture, like the use of a new weapon,” that allowed the sons to win - I think we can all agree that it wasn’t so much a “weapon” as a set of tactics, namely guerrilla warfare, the sort of thing that would later manifest itself, as we all learn in school, at Lexington and Concord against the Redcoats…) But once dad is dead, there is a problem - a problem whose solution takes the shape of the incest prohibition and, well, civilization itself:

[T]he incest prohibition had [...] a strong practical foundation. Sexual need does not unite men; it separates them. Though the brothers had joined forces in order to overcome the father, each was the other’s rival among the women. Each one wanted to have them all to himself like the father, and in the fight of each against the other the new organization would have perished. For there was no longer any one stronger than all the rest who could have successfully assumed the role of the father. Thus there was nothing left for the brothers, if they wanted to live together, but to erect the incest prohibition – perhaps after many difficult experiences – through which they all equally renounced the women whom they desired, and on account of whom they had removed the father in the first place. Thus they saved the organization which had made them strong and which could be based upon the homo-sexual feelings and activities which probably manifested themselves among them during the time of their banishment.

What can we say? If only this were true when it comes to us. The happy - if only ever moderately happy - structuralization of dad’s brutality, the construction upon the solid foundation of a repressed but ever present fraterphilia as well as the (sure!) very dark joke that deaddad gets to play on them in the end as far as access to women goes (”You thought you’d have all, but instead you’ll have none, because you are too many…”) The revolution ends in a socialism of castration - the only consolation arrives via the fact that it you (pl.) that deny yourself the women, rather than that fat bastard of a father, in our case, King George III, later aka LeninoStalin, et al.

No. What happened here is something entirely other. We killed dad, yes, but rather than simply constructing a totem and going on our self-chastening way, we decided (is that the word?) to reenact differently, more viscerally - for real. With our own sons, or especially the sons of others - even as we strike them down, we imagine, time and again, that it is the hand of filial revolt that we raise when we raise to strike. We will always be the bad son, the prodigal returned to fuck dad up right good when we asks what we’ve done with the money, even if there is no beard on those we strike, even if they still are on mom’s tit as we decapitate and worse, in our eyes, fucked up with the drug of repetition without difference, they are bearded and old, they have stolen our mom-sisters from the tent bed, they are sandy with their mature denial of our rights even as infants. We are Issac as Abraham striking down Issac - the call to hold off never comes, because you need a father’s ear to hear it, and we are only sons…

The Child is the father of the Man. Yes, but the natural piety in question, the binding of now to back then, incessantly takes the shape of sprinting in surplus stuff across the backyard, carrying the guns borrowed from our fathers’ (father’s) collection, a children’s crusade, an insurgency of kids, shooting blanks, catching ourselves on film, all in the end for AP credit.

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Krugman today in the NY Times:

Mr. Schumer, who heads the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, insists that the large financial contributions that hedge funds make to his party aren’t influencing him. Well, I can’t read his mind, but from the outside his position looks remarkably like money-driven politics as usual. And that’s not acceptable. 

Look, the worst thing that could happen to Democrats is for voters to conclude that there’s no real difference between the parties, that when you replace Republicans with Democrats, all you do is replace sweet deals for Halliburton with sweet deals for hedge funds. The hedge fund loophole is a test — and it’s one that Mr. Schumer is failing.

Yep. But it’s not just hedge funds. How about this cheery exchange between the frontrunners of the peace party:

Senator Barack Obama found himself on the defensive again yesterday about his views on foreign policy, this time over a comment he made about the use of nuclear weapons in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

During an interview with The Associated Press, Mr. Obama, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, initially ruled out using nuclear weapons in the region as part of the effort to defeat terrorism and root out Osama bin Laden.

“I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance,” he said, pausing before he added, “involving civilians.”

But then he quickly said: “Let me scratch that. There’s been no discussion of nuclear weapons. That’s not on the table.”

Later in an interview on Capitol Hill, Mr. Obama, of Illinois, sought to clarify the remark about nuclear weapons, saying he was asked whether he would “use nuclear weapons to pursue Al Qaeda.”

“I said no one is talking about nuclear weapons,” Mr. Obama said. “I found it was a little bit of an off-the-wall question.”

His remarks about removing nuclear weapons as an option in the region drew fresh attacks from Democratic rivals who had already questioned his foreign policy experience.

American officials have generally been deliberately ambiguous about their nuclear strike policies.

Speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who is also seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, declined to say whether she agreed with Mr. Obama’s initial statement.

“I’m not going to answer hypotheticals,” Mrs. Clinton said.

She added: “I think that presidents should be very careful at all times in discussing the use or non-use of nuclear weapons. Presidents, since the Cold War, have used nuclear deterrence to keep the peace. And I don’t believe that any president should make any blanket statements with respect to the use or non-use of nuclear weapons.”

Wow. Glad I don’t have to be ambivalent about casting my vote demward this time around. Back in 2000, it was welfare reform at the like that pushed me over the line. But now that we’re only talking about the use of nuclear weapons in response to, what, a car bomb in Times Square, I feel much more comfortable.

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Not really a big fan of the Onion, or really of any of the many permutations of fake news to emerge in the last few years. But this piece is very well done - close to perfect, actually.

CHAPEL HILL, NC—A field study released Monday by the University of North Carolina School of Public Health suggests that Iraqi citizens experience sadness and a sense of loss when relatives, spouses, and even friends perish, emotions that have until recently been identified almost exclusively with Westerners..

[...]

Iraqis have often been observed weeping and wailing in apparent
anguish, but the study offers evidence indicating this may not be
exclusively an outward expression of anger or a desire for revenge. It
also provocatively suggests that this grief can possess an
American-like personal quality, and is not simply a tribal lamentation
ritual.

I honestly do believe that many (most?) Americans do have a bit of trouble picturing people from other nations, especially non-English speaking nations, as human in the full sense of the word. Not trying to be silly or mean in saying this - I believe it’s a strange sort of cultural dysfunction. Partly it has to do with the isolation / insularity of the place. It’s hard to get anywhere from most of the country where another language is dominant (Mexico for some along the southern border, and Quebec for us in the northeast.) Only about 25% of Americans even have a passport - I’d love to find the number of us who die never having left the US. (When my wife’s grandfather was driving her to college, they stopped at Niagara Falls. He was in his 70s - and would die two years later - and had never visited another country. Faced with the very easy prospect of driving or walking across the Rainbow Bridge to the Canadian side of the Falls, he decided not to. A bit too scary and strange to leave - why bother now, at this point, etc…)

It’s no excuse, really, none at all, for condoning what has been condoned. But it is a factor…

(via Ghost in the Wire)

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This is a) persuasive and b) terrifying.

Look, I’ll admit that I’ve been a terrible Iraq War resister to date. A few marches, a lot of shouting at the television, and tons of bad conscience. I’m sure that my poor performance has something to do with the ambiguity of the situation that’s run from start to finish. This doesn’t excuse anything, but it is, I’m sure, the reason why I’ve been so horrible on this front. But… Venezuela is not ambiguous. If Bush invades / organizes another coup / pulls something else unexpected out of his sleeve, I hope that I have the wherewithall to do more than grumble and search for alternative news sources on the internet. The crime in this case would having nothing to do with closing television stations, although that is obviously what we”d be told, and everything to do with being a democratically elected socialist bent on the nationalization of natural resources.

Let’s hope not. But we’re heading into electoral season insanity, when all bets are off on what sort of endruns the current administration might attempt either to bring the base back into the fold or to strike a final, desperate blow on the way out against the forces of collectivism…

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Finally got around to reading the (rather fantastic) piece on 24 that was in the New Yorker back in February. There’s a lot to clip out of it, but let’s start with this paragraph:

Bob Cochran, who created the show with Surnow, admitted, “Most terrorism experts will tell you that the ‘ticking time bomb’ situation never occurs in real life, or very rarely. But on our show it happens every week.” According to Darius Rejali, a professor of political science at Reed College and the author of the forthcoming book “Torture and Democracy,” the conceit of the ticking time bomb first appeared in Jean Lartéguy’s 1960 novel “Les Centurions,” written during the brutal French occupation of Algeria. The book’s hero, after beating a female Arab dissident into submission, uncovers an imminent plot to explode bombs all over Algeria and must race against the clock to stop it. Rejali, who has examined the available records of the conflict, told me that the story has no basis in fact. In his view, the story line of “Les Centurions” provided French liberals a more palatable rationale for torture than the racist explanations supplied by others (such as the notion that the Algerians, inherently simpleminded, understood only brute force). Lartéguy’s scenario exploited an insecurity shared by many liberal societies—that their enlightened legal systems had made them vulnerable to security threats.

If you, like me, are a lit-person who occasionally (or not so occasionally) drifts into self-doubt about the importance or potential importance of whatever it is that we do, this paragraph (and all the paragraphs and pieces and tv shows and guantanamos that emerge, in part, from the described text) should make you feel a bit better… and, of course, worse. Narrative, in short, matters. Very little happens that isn’t wrapped in narrative. And in this case, narrative temporality matters most of all. This is clear, usually. But sometimes one forgets….

And weird… Check this out….

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I was just looking around for something, and came across the transcript of Ari Fleischer’s White House press briefing from March 5, 2003. Obvious, old stuff, I know, and apropos of nothing in particular right at this minute, but horrifying, edifying reading nonetheless…

Here’s an exchange with Helen Thomas:

Q Ari, since there is an atmosphere of the imminence of war in this White House, and since we have no direct access to the President, will you state for the record, for the historical record, why he wants to bomb Iraqi people?

MR. FLEISCHER: Helen, I dispute the premise of your question, first of all. There’s regular — there’s regular access to the President. The President is asked questions all the time. And when the President –

Q He hasn’t had a press conference for months.

MR. FLEISCHER: And when 14 of your colleagues spend 36 minutes asking scores of questions to the President just two days ago –

Q Well, that’s not a news conference.

MR. FLEISCHER: — they asked the President a similar question, although they phrased it a little differently than you did. They asked the President why does he feel so strongly about the need to use force, if it comes to that, to disarm Saddam Hussein. And the answer from the President was that, given the fact that the world changed on September 11th, the threat to the American people was brought immediately to our home and to our shores and to our families, the President thinks it is in the interest of peace to make certain that Saddam Hussein does not have weapons of mass destruction which he can use against us, either by transferring them to terrorists or using them himself.

Q There is no imminent threat.

MR. FLEISCHER: This is where — Helen, if you were President you might view things differently. But you have your judgment and the President has others.

Q Why doesn’t he prove it? Why don’t you lay it out? When have they threatened in the last 12 years?

MR. FLEISCHER: They have attacked their neighbors. They have gassed their own people.

Q Twelve years ago.

MR. FLEISCHER: They have launched attacks.

Q With our support.

MR. FLEISCHER: And September 11th showed the United States is vulnerable to those who would attack us. And one of the best ways to protect the homeland is to go after the threats abroad.

Q You haven’t linked terrorism to Saddam Hussein, in terms of 9/11.

MR. FLEISCHER: It’s not — the threat is what took place on 9/11. You don’t have to make a direct linkage between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 to know that others who are planning can try to do it again, Saddam Hussein included.

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(Xposted to Long Sunday)

I’m sure soldiers, ever since there have been soldiers, have hooted adolescently in the throes of combat. What would we expect, that they’d go about their work gravely, constantly reminding themselves of the seriousness - the mortal seriousness - of the things that they do, the weapons that they discharge? That is undoubtedly too much to expect. The stupid talk and yells undoubtedly represent a release from the psychosis inspiring and inspired actions that they are committing.

It is not new, it is not groundbreaking, to think: “They sound like the subset of students that you see hooting and unawarely spewing stuff they heard in a movie somewhere. They always talk like this, yell like this. They likely feel most themselves when they most completely give themselves over to the canned material they have been served, night after night, for their entire lives.”

What we hear is not the organic, the militaristically gnomic, the earthy - it is the sitcomedic. MTV trashtalk, some Full Metal Jacketisms (Kubrick would have loved this, at least in a way) thrown in.

And, because you too have seen the same movies, at least a lot of them, you are able to try to reconstruct any possible reason, any scenario at all, in which the cars that speed in, crash, disgorge their occupants, who then are blown away by the Americans. The sniper was in a car? The insurgents, after a lengthy pause, get into their little cars and attempt, as an act of insane bravery perhaps, to speed past the marines’ position? Why?

Unlike the talk, no, the actions of the “insurgents” don’t fit into any plausible script, especially not the one posted at the end of the video.

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(Xposted to Long Sunday…)

It does seem a bit strange - a deviation from standard operating procedure - that Amazon threw an extremely caustic review from the Washington Post up under “editorial reviews” on the page listing Jimmy Carter’s (tremendously brave, from the title on) Palestine: Peace not Apartheid. Neither, if I recall correctly, does amazon usually cite newspaper reviews in this section nor do they allow reviews that run to such a great length above the fold. Go take a look… Here’s a snippet from the review.

This is a cynical book, its cynicism embedded in its bait-and-switch title. Much of the book consists of an argument against the barrier that Israel is building to separate Israelis from the Palestinians on the West Bank. The “imprisonment wall” is an early symptom of Israel’s descent into apartheid, according to Carter. But late in the book, he concedes that “the driving purpose for the forced separation of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa — not racism, but the acquisition of land.”

In other words, Carter’s title notwithstanding, Israel is not actually an apartheid state. True, some Israeli leaders have used the security fence as cover for a land-grab, but Carter does not acknowledge the actual raison d’etre for the fence: to prevent the murder of Jews. The security barrier is a desperate, deeply imperfect and, God willing, temporary attempt to stop Palestinian suicide bombers from detonating themselves amid crowds of Israeli civilians. And it works; many recent attempts to infiltrate bombers into Israel have failed, thanks to the barrier.

That the WP gave the review to Jeffrey Goldberg in the first place was a questionable decision. He is, in case you weren’t following the league tables, one of the runners up in the contest Judith Miller eventually won to see could deliver the most agitprop via “respected news sources” to the American people. (Here’s a Cockburn takedown from early 2003).

There’s an on-line petition to sign here.

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So, seriously, did Condi Rice wear camouflage to her hearing before the senate foreign relations committee yesterday?

Wish I could find even better pictures for you. The one on the cover of today’s FT makes it shockingly clear. But a camo-based print certainly is a strange choice, no? Attire parapraxis? Subliminal hint? Acting out? Bald, sticker-on-the-SUV stupidity?

I wonder if it has anything to do with this, which I heard on the radio on the way home from campus Wednesday…

White House press secretary Tony Snow said Bush will try to shore up support for the war by raising hopes for victory and spelling out the consequences of defeat. The White House has sought to frame the Iraq debate as a choice between Bush’s plan and abject failure.

Snow conceded that Bush has a challenge in convincing a war-weary public.

“The president will not shape policy according to public opinion, but he does understand that it’s important to bring the public back to this war and restore public confidence and support for the mission,” Snow said.

The public has heard several previous campaigns by Bush to defend his Iraq policies and show that he is changing with changing circumstances. Since the war’s start in March 2003, there have been at least seven public-relations offensives by Bush on the war, with some of these speech series timed to milestone events and others to dips in polls.

Now, this is very strange talk for an employee of Bush Co., even given the turns that the polls have taken of late. The one thing that it is both easy to forget and essential not to forget is the fact that through every episode of this prolonged debacle, the administration has taken extraordinary steps to tease and/or force public opinion toward support of its policy decisions. It has been incredibly successful in doing so. To the great shame of this country, each and every major action has had the support of a majority of Americans, from the war on down.

But now, with his base gone, and even the once comatosely compliant congressional republicans sniping away, we hear from the press secretary that public opinion is irrelevant, and while, sure, it’d be great if the voters came along on the next leg of the trip, there will be no Rovian / Luntzian mindfucking marketing campaign this time around.

One wonders what’s next. I guess this time we won’t get the elaborate doubletalking rollout that we’ve become accustomed to. But if anything’s more worrisome that the terrifying coupling of an administration that never stops selling and a public willing to buy just about anything, it’s the intimation that perhaps the White House has decided it has no more reason to sell…

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