December 2002 Notebook | |||
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Tuesday, December 31, 2002The following year-end lists come from the New York Times (Dec. 29, 2002): John Pareles:
Singles and EP's: Missy Elliott: "Work It" (Elektra); Yeah Yeah Yeahs: "Yeah Yeah Yeahs" (EP, Touch and Go); Avril Lavigne: "Sk8er Boi" (Arista); Tweet: "Oops (Oh My)" (Elektra); Tom Petty: "The Last D.J." (Warner Brothers) Neil Strauss:
Singles: Missy Elliott: "Work It" (Elektra); Eminem: "Lose Yourself" (Shady/Interscope); Ladytron: "Seventeen" (Emperor Norton); Justin Timberlake: "Cry Me a River" (Jive); LCD Soundsystem: "Losing My Edge/Beat Connection" (DFA). Ben Ratliff:
Kelefa Sanneh:
Singles: Angie Stone: "Wish I Didn't Miss You" (J); Lil Flip: "The Way We Ball" (Sucka Free/Loud/Columbia); The Strokes: "Someday" (RCA); Cam'ron: "Oh Boy" (Rock-A-Fella/Island Def Jam); JC Chasez: "Blowin' Me Up (With Her Love)" (Fox Music/Jive). Monday, December 30, 2002Reading an article on new airport security procedures this morning, I'm reminded that I haven't flown since sometime before Sept. 11, 2001, and that I have absolutely no desire to ever fly again. If my view is at all common (admittedly, not many of my views are) this is bad news for our beleaguered airline/aircraft industries, which in my home town has already paid several thousands of jobs as part of the cost of antiterrorist paranoia. Given that the hijacking count of the last 15-months has been zero, we'll never know if these measures make any difference. But the thinking seems to be that Americans will tolerate any intrusion into their lives if it promises to make them safer. This is, of course, the soft sell for the expansion of the police state. Thinking about Ellen Willis's defense of militant leftism, I thought of several definitions to help sort out her lineage:
As far as I know, Willis doesn't follow any of these doctrines -- although in reading her it entered my mind that maybe her ideal of the "radical democratic left" were the idealistic mercenaries who joined the Spanish Republican forces to fight against Franco and Fascism. I doubt this too -- although it does seem to be Christopher Hitchens' inspiration for his romantic embrace of the Kurds. The reason I doubt this is that what made Orwell, Hitchens, David Horowitz, and so many other impassioned leftists so unreliable is that their leftism was rooted not in their own experience but in their romantic views of other peoples' struggles. Presumably, Willis's feminism is more securely rooted. Music: Trying in particular to catch up with Year 2002 stragglers, where my A-list has now passed the sixty mark. This is leading me to be even more stingy with grades, with the result that my upper B+ is beginning to look pretty damn good.
Saturday, December 28, 2002Got a link today where Dissent polled some notable leftish intellectuals on a set of Iraq-related questions. They didn't ask me, but I thought I'd jot down my own views before checking what their panel had to say: The Questions
No. If so, under what circumstances? Unilateral US war against Iraq might be justified if Iraq militarily attacked the domestic United States. Multilateral (under the UN) war might be justified if Iraq militarily attacked other countries or if Iraq was committing genocide against its own people. (The most glaring examples of the latter in the last 20-30 years were in Cambodia and Rwanda. Note that the US did not intervene in either case.) In any case, war should only be a last resort, after all efforts at peaceful resolution have failed. And should this be a war for disarmament or for "regime change"? If a war is justified according to the criteria above, the regime responsible for provoking a war response should be dismantled, and its principals should be brought to face international criminal charges. So, yes, regime change.
Yes. Iraq's past belligerence makes it reasonable for the rest of the world, through the UN, to insist on being able to inspect Iraq in order to be ascertain whether Iraq is re-arming itself. On the other hand, the UN should assure that when Iraq submits to inspections no other nation will be permitted to attack Iraq. (Note that inspections expose any weaknesses in Iraq's defense-by-deterence, thereby compromising its security.) Would you support the threat or the use of force to impose and sustain such a system? No, not force. Economic sanctions may be appropriate, especially in a case like Iraq which has an established record of military aggression. But once Iraq complies with inspections and monitoring such economic sanctions should be suspended, and Iraq's defense ensured.
I believe it shows extraordinary wrecklessness and contempt for international law and for all people throughout the world.
There already is a war, so the need for an antiwar movement is manifest. I consider myself part of that antiwar movement.
The long-term goal should be to promote fairness, opportunity, and prosperity for citizens of Iraq and elsewhere, and to establish that US foreign policy is consistent with the normal aspirations of people throughout the world. The reason for this is that Americans and Iraqis live in the same world, use the same air and water, and both benefit from peace and prosperity. But this would, needless to say, require a profound reorientation of American foreign policy. A worthy shorter-term goal would be to defuse the widespread view that the US is responsible for injustices against Arab and Muslim peoples, of which the two prime examples are the Israeli occupation of majority-Palestinian territories and the antihumanitarian sanctions against Iraq. This means that the short-term goal of US policy towards Iraq should be to move as quickly as possible towards lifting the sanctions and normalizing relations.
Still, just answering these questions does not get to the heart of the issue. In particular, what my answers above suggest is that I would've supported the UN mandated 1991 war to expel Iraq from Kuwait. In fact, I did not support that war, and the reasons are still valid now:
In retrospect, the 1991 war did have one significant benefit: it thoroughly crippled Iraq's ability to wage war on or intimidate its neighbors. However, it did so at the price of inflicting horrible damage on the Iraqi people and their economy. And the US judgment that the suffering of the Iraqi people would lead to "regime change" has proven to be utter folly. On the other hand, the war revived the US war machine (which had started to cut back following the collapse of its raison d'etre, the Soviet Union, but which now looms larger and more horrifying than ever). And it led to an escalating domestic political conflict where each party strives to outdo the other in belligerence toward Iraq. And it greatly led to the widespread feeling among Arabs and Muslims that the US is responsible for their oppression and economic straits -- a feeling that can emerge as terrorism, but which is significant even when it doesn't. But there are differences between 1991 and now that further change the equation. In particular, Iraq is no longer fearsome; their past aggression has cearly led to defeat and disaster, and this is both debilitating and humbling. There is no reason for them to think that they can overcome their problems by rebuilding their military; rather, their only path out of their disaster is through international cooperation, which includes effective disarmament and inspections, but does not require regime change. In fact, continuity of government is now the only alternative to chaos, occupation, and painstaking reconstruction, something the US has shown no stomach for at any time in the last 40-50 years. This latter point is worth reflecting on. Although the US has shown little concern about inflicting casualties on others, its eagerness to sacrifice our own blood has steadily waned since the unlimited carnage of WWII. Even in Vietnam, where lower-class draftees were squandered, there was a strict accounting of the losses. The Russians, in turn, seemed to lose their taste for attrition in Afghanistan, the point of not just withdrawing but of abandoning their whole imperial stance. Even in Israel, by far the most militaristic society in the world today, there is significant wariness of the costs entailed by their occupation of neighboring Arab lands. I think this is all part of two longterm trends: that armed forces that occupy foreign lands see little sense or value in occupation and oppression, and that those subject to such occupation will desperately inflict enough damage to sour (if not necessarily repel) their occupiers. Those in Washington who advocate escalating their war against Iraq may well be confident in their ability to destroy and rout Saddam Hussein, but it's hard to give any credence to their fantasies about a pro-western democracy springing forth in its place, and no reason whatsoever to trust them to clean up their mess. So one simple way to encapsulate opposition to the US war on Iraq is to invoke the cliche, "if you can't afford to pay the time, don't do the crime." As for the comments, a special raspberry to Ellen Willis, who argues that the antiwar movement against the US/Vietnam war undermined the "radical democratic left" by turning into an "apolitical moral crusade." It sounds like her crowd won't make that mistake again; indeed, once they seize power their first task will be to purify American power from its present corruption and put it to good use righting the wrongs in the world. If forced to choose between the leftists and the pacifists, I'd take the pacifists any day. For one thing they have principles that one can practice immediately and build on in everyday life, while the anti-pacifist left can only struggle for power, becoming what they first hated and losing their bearings. Movie: Gangs of New York. The first thing you're struck by here is how intimately bloody the 1846 gang warfare was; the last thing you're struck by is how insignificant gang warfare had become with the mechanization of warfare even by 1862. The closing image, which shows the skyscrapers of New York growing over the graves of the gangsters featured here, could suggest that New York grew out of such struggles, but more likely just underscores how irrelevant the gangs actually were. A- Here's a 20-year-old rock 'n' roll lyric that has been stuck in my mind for weeks, months, years:
Yankee dollar talk To the dictators of the world In fact it's giving orders An' they can't afford to miss a word I'm so bored with the U...S...A... But what can I do? We heard the news that Joe Strummer has died. The Clash was the greatest debut album in rock history -- perhaps the greatest rock album ever. London Calling was, if not better, easily one of the ten best rock albums ever. They expanded like supernovae through their fourth album, the 3LP Sandinista, where they started to diffuse into clouds of matter to seed new solar systems. After they split up, Mick Jones kept the slick funk they were evolving towards, while Strummer kept the gruff. Neither amounted to much without the other, but I thought that Strummer's LP side on the Permanent Record soundtrack was good enough to launch a second life. Never heard that Mescaleros album, and don't have any idea why Strummer never seemed to put together a solo career, or another band. I guess we'll never know -- although the prospect of someone piecing together a post-Clash Strummer anthology doesn't seem altogether pointless. But for a brief peak the Clash was the brightest rock group of all time. Movie: Bloody Sunday. Ireland, 1972. The remarkable thing about this movie is that is creates an uncanny realism, admittedly at the expense of every other virtue you might hope for in a movie -- plot, character, even the ability to see what's going on. I found it excruciating to watch, especially having no particular interest in or sympathy for any side of the conflict. But even if you look at it through the eyes of the British soldiers, you'd get an idea of just how unpredictably events turn when you're caught between orders to smash the protest and caught in the inevitable chaos that ensues. No grade. (I'm just happy to have survived.) Music: Trying to catch up with the year-end hopefules, which include such likelies as MC Paul Barman, Captain D & the Molemen, Clipse, Common, Donnas, Steve Earle, Röyskopp, Roots, Silkworm, and the Vandermark 5. A new CG also touts Daniel Bedingfield, Kimya Dawson, Pretenders, and Justin Timberlake (none of which have made much of an impression yet) and the Mountain Goats (haven't heard 'em).
Friday, December 20, 2002I somehow managed to wrangle an invitation to the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll, which I had voted in several times during the 1970s, and I think once after I wrote that "Jazz for Dummies" piece. My "comeback" as a rock critic was vouchsafed by Michael Tatum accepting a couple of short reviews and a year-end list to be published by Static MultiMedia. Ballots are due Jan. 6, but my album ballot is pretty well set:
Coming up with a songs list is harder, and I'm not sure that I'll even wind up submitting one. Here are some ideas:
PS [2003-01-02]: This is the ballot I cast. The best new album that I've evaluated since originally writing this was the Roots, Phrenology, which I have in the lower reaches of top-20. While there are certainly A- records pending, I don't see any of them cracking the top-10 list. As for singles, I cut back from my original scratch list. Since I put the scratch list together I hadn't thought of anything new, and I was pretty much grasping for straws even there. Although I don't have a theoretical problem with a separate singles ballot, my own listening habits don't encourage thinking along those lines -- I don't listen to radio, don't watch music videos, and I've never been much good at singling out cuts (let alone remembering their names). These are just album cuts that stand out, from albums that didn't make the top-10 -- although the latter, this time at least, are more distinguished by their continuity than by their peaks. The Trent Lott story is interesting in several ways. The minor point is that once again it shows that the media's sense of news is to only report on what powerful people say, rather than digging into what they actually do. (Perhaps that point should be major, but it's so well worn by now that it shouldn't be necessary to repeat it.) Another minor point is that Strom Thurmond himself has managed to get away scott-free despite being a major public scumbag for over fifty years now, but the vaunted "teflon" that Ronald Reagan was so famous for, and so many other Republicans have gotten away with, sure doesn't seem to work for Lott. Perhaps this is because Mississippi itself is so fixed in the American mind as the most passionate and mindless bastion of white racism, segregation, poverty, and ass-backwards ignorance, that no politician as conservative as Lott can be expected to free himself from its grip. But the major point is that Lott has finally stumbled on a definition of racism that even his fellow Republicans cannot abide. But it also is the first attempt by the Republicans to start to tidy up their own past -- a past that since Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act in 1964 has been drenched in racism. While Goldwater may have thought that he had some principles behind his stupid vote, it delivered five southern states to his presidential campaign, and led Strom Thurmond to switch parties. Ever since then the growth of the Republican party, leading to their slim control of Congress, has been built on racism -- most overtly in coaxing racist Democrats like Phil Gramm, Jesse Helms, and Richard Shelby to follow Thurmond in switching parties. (Trent Lott, as the hand-picked successor to the notorious Democrat Congressman William Colmer, followed this pattern to a tee.) But the Republican party growth was equally built on attracting white urban Democrats fleeing from increasingly black central cities to segregated suburbs -- and there is was mostly done through code, harping on crime and welfare. (Significantly, many of those ex-urbanites were Catholic, so the Republicans' newfound anti-abortion stance was tailored to appeal to northern Catholics as well as Southern Baptists.) But the net effect of this "southern strategy" was that the Republican party was effectively taken over by southerners: most pointedly when Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott took over party leadership of Congress. The accession of Texas governor G.W. Bush to President would seem to cap the story, but as the Republican party becomes more doggedly Dixiecrat, the Democrat party is making corresponding gains in the North, and has even started to make gains in Southern states like Florida and North Carolina. This is largely because the old policies of segregation and racial discrimination have been totally discredited -- something that the mere success of even a handful of individual blacks (including the Republican's own crown jewel, Colin Powell) prooves. To understand this, you have to realize that the Republican Party's success has largely been based on sleight-of-hand. At bottom, their economic policy is little more than to shamelessly favor the rich getting richer, while doing everything in their power to make government useless as a safety net for the poor, and somehow trick the middle class into subsidizing their pet military projects. The percentage of the populace who benefit from this strategy is miniscule (maybe 3%), while the percentage who are harmed in one way or another is huge. In a democracy, this should be a completely untenable political program, but the Republicans have been able to get away with it by controlling the media, by concentrating on single-issue constituencies (anti-abortion, guns), by cozying up to repressive religious groups, by panicking people over crime (which somehow appeases racism without being tainted by it), and by flaunting America's military might and world power (often to the point of war mongering). But whereas the Republicans in the 1990s put forward these programs with a pronounced Southern accent, Karl Rove's great innovation is to wrap them up in a self-deluding feel-good facade of liberal rhetoric -- the notion that America is eternally innocent and intrinsically valorous, which in turn requires a pretty damn short memory. Where Trent Lott erred was in dredging up that past and even worse asserting that the past was better than the present. But that can't possibly be so, at least to people who believe that the U.S. under Bush is just about perfect now. Music:
Saturday, December 14, 2002I want to go back to the Liberal Hawks again. What I'd like to do is to try to construct a better argument in favor of the U.S. invading Iraq in order to depose Saddam Hussein. This is, of course, a bit difficult to do, because I don't actually believe that such an argument is valid, but I can always explain why later. First, the argument:
Still, I find this argument highly suspect. I think this argument breaks down in several areas:
Spent some time padding out the "hyped" section of the 2002 Year End List, scraping off the year-end picks from Rolling Stone and Spin, few of which really seem all that promising. Last night I heard some fragments from Shania Twain, Missy Elliott, Mr. Lif, Clipse, MC Paul Barman, maybe some others. Elliott seems the most promising, but I bought Twain because it was $6 less. But Barman may be the one I look forward to most -- it was slammed in a Pitchfork review that tried to prove its case by quoting extensively, almost all of which I found amusing if not quite hysterical. The New York Times Magazine has a piece by George Packer called "The Liberal Quandry Over Iraq". This piece focuses on five Iraq war hawks with liberal (or in one case leftist radical) self-identities: David Rieff, Leon Wieseltier, Michael Walzer, Paul Berman, and Christopher Hitchens. For me, this is mostly an excuse to hang some comments onto quotes (in crimson) from Packer. However, let me preface these comments with a couple of points:
Here's how I break down the liberal internal debate.
FOR WAR
No doubt. Although it's hard to make a case that he is as irrationally cruel and dangerous as, say, Idi Amin or Pol Pot -- to pick a couple of universally recognized tyrants who were so unstable as to practically beg for merciful intervention. Indeed, cruel and dangerous political leaders are a too frequent problem, and there should be a universally recognized procedure for identifying and opposing them. But it shouldn't be easy to make the case that opposition should take the form of an inverventionist war, with inevitable destruction far beyond anyone's intents, even if the balance sheet looks good.
The phrase "weapons of mass destruction" has been used so repetitively that it's bred the acronym WMD, but by combining chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons under one term we're creating a false equivalency between them. Nuclear weapons are indeed worthy of the phrase, as any assessment of post-WWII Hiroshima and Nagasaki proves. Chemical and biological weapons could more accurately be called "weapons of criminal irresponsibility". What makes them so irresponsible is that they cannot be reliably targeted, so their effect is not limited to a particular locale and time, as is the case with bullets or explosive bombs. (Mines are a special case, being indeterminate in time, which is a major reason why most countries are working toward banning their use -- as they have previously worked to ban the use of chemical and biological weapons.) The usual reason for developing such weapons is to provide defense through deterrence -- to make potential enemies shy away from aggression. Iraq has in fact much to fear from its neighbors, including longstanding disputes Turkey, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Israel. It is also the case that Saddam's Sunni-dominated regime is threatened by its sizable Kurdish and Shiite populations, and that there are foreign countries (most clearly, Iran and the U.S.) who have tried to foment rebellion to destabilize Iraq. So it is not surprising that Saddam sees a strong military and police organization as essential to the survival of his regime, nor that he has chosen to flaunt his power to intimidate his potential enemies. However, it is also clear that after the debacle of the 1991 war his ability to intimidate other countries has been lost. In this situation it is not at all clear or reasonable that he should continue to work on any so-called WMD, because at this point his principal foreign enemy, the U.S., would not be cowled by any sort of WMD deterrence, and would in fact use such developments to rationalize bombardment, invasion, and the destruction of his regime. So the fact that Saddam has used chemical weapons prior to 1991 is irrelevant to this point (although it does testify that Saddam is cruel and dangerous), and the assertion that Saddam "has never stopped trying to develop them" is unproven and flies in the face of logic.
Tyranny is one thing, sanctions another. Iraqis suffered under tyranny long before the imposition of sanctions. This suffering included: arrest for any form of political threat to the regime; restrictions on travel, speech, assembly, practice of religion; conscription into military service; pervasive fear and loss of privacy. On the other hand, the suffering caused by the sanctions includes: shortages of food; inability to get medical supplies or services; shortages of all manner of consumer goods; and most likely a general worsening of the tyranny. The suffering due to the sanctions is hardly a cause for war: it could be relieved by unilaterally lifting the sanctions, or through negotiation in exchange for other concessions. This is not being done because the U.S., for what appears to be domestic political reasons, has insisted on the one thing that Saddam will not negotiate away, which is his regime.
This depends a lot on what democracy would actually mean in Iraq. There are two key aspects to democratic systems, of which majoritarian rule is the less important one; what is most critical is that democracies be set up to protect and support minority rights. Nowhere is this clearer than in Iraq, which is split between three major groups each with longstanding antipathies and each with affinities outside the rather arbitrary boundaries that Britain imposed on Iraq. To make Iraq work as a democracy will require a period of civility that is hard to even imagine right now. That democracy would be developed in the context of what fanatics on both sides of the Christian/Islam divide view as a "clash of civilizations", with imperialism and the anticommunist "cold war" as unforgotten backdrops, makes this all the more problematical. Stable democracies have almost never been cut from whole cloth, and the liberal intellectuals' gap between theory and reality is exceptionally wide here. That does not mean that in the long run the theory is false, but it does suggest that the undoubted long run gains will automatically fall out of war and occupation is a lot of very wishful thinking.
Any implications that a "democratic Iraq" might have for anywhere else in the world depend critically on just how that democracy is implemented and how successful it is. I think this is much too uncertain to make any sort of generalization from. Indeed, the most likely implementation of a democratic Iraq would in the short term at least be a chaotic mess with rising crime and a stagnant economy (Russia is a good example) that if anything would reinforce the Saudi's commitment to authoritarianism. The more interesting question here is why the interest in "repressive Saudi Arabia", and if there is some legitimate need to reproach Saudi Arabia, why not deal with that problem directly instead of through the highly volatile prism of Iraq. The conservative pragmatists will have a lot of trouble with this, not least of all because what they like about Saudi Arabia (beyond the cheap oil and the massive investments that help prop up western economies) is that they are repressive.
This is absolute fantasy. The stalemate exists because the Israeli right-wing refuses to back away from its settlements on lands it seized in its 1967 war against its Arab neighbors and from its self-conception which denies citizenship and human rights to the non-Jewish peoples of those lands. (This is not to claim that the Arab countries were wholly innocent in the 1967 war, nor am I denying that the political tactics of some Palestinian groups during the occupation have been criminal, but the decision whether or not to break the stalemate is completely in the hands of the Israelis.)
Why Iraq? Why not Palestine, which is so desperate for relief from Israel that they'd welcome help from the U.S., and this would be one of the very few places in the Arab world where the U.S. could waltz in without producing more rancor than already exists. Moreover, the existing political leadership in Palestine is already committed to liberal and secular principles. They also have real potential for the sort of economic development that builds stable capitalist civil societies, whereas Kuwait (say, to pick another easier example than Iraq) would at best develop into an oil-financed welfare state.
So what? Al Qaeda has reached an analysis of what's wrong with the world, and what should be done about it, that commits them to being criminals for as long as they exist. Which is and will be a problem that needs to be addressed on its own terms. But like all dedicated groups they will wither away over time, unless they are replenished by other people arriving at similar analyses and conclusions. The question here what effect the invasion and occupation (and maybe even reconstruction) of Iraq will have on Al Qaeda's ranks and objectives. It's hard to imagine a scenario where it will not make Al Qaeda more potent. One consideration here is that many terrorists cite other people's atrocities as rationale for their actions.
AGAINST WAR
Depends on what you mean by working. Containment, which presumably means the sanctions, the inspections process up to 1998, the patrolling of the "no fly" zones, and the frequent bombardment of anything which looked suspicious or opportune, has manifestly failed to buckle or seriously weaken Saddam's regime (except in the quasi-independent Kurdish zone), regardless of the amount of suffering that this containment has inflicted on the Iraqi people. What appears to have been successful is the elimination of Iraq's ability to threaten its neighbors, both through disarmament overseen by weapons inspectors and general attrition of the armed forces. On the other hand, the single most significant contributor to the weakening of Iraq was the devastating military defeat it suffered in 1991 when it was dislodged from Kuwait. This should have been sealed with a process of inspections and disarmament complemented by otherwise normal commercial relations -- which was most nations' interpretation of the terms at the end of the 1991 war -- but the U.S. largely on its own decided to propagate this containment strategy, which has kept Iraq isolated and under foreign attack for over a decade now.
First of all, we shouldn't start wars, regardless of the provocation or the international scorecard. The only place for war is as a last resort to stop an aggressor that will stop at nothing less. Although Iraq has acted aggressively against Iran and Kuwait before 1991, I'm not aware of any evidence that they have continued to do so since their massive defeat in 1991. The U.S. effectively conceded in 1991 that it would allow Saddam's regime to retain power -- this was in any event stipulated by the U.N. resolution which authorized the U.S. to act and spelled out the limits of international support for such action.
This is certainly true if you concede that any casualties would in fact be terrible. But that is not the normal sense of the terms as used by military strategists -- although it should be noted that in the U.S., and indeed in many armies throughout the world, that the willingness to sustain large numbers of casualties has progressively weakened since the bloodbaths of WWII. But while the U.S. undoubtedly has the ability to start a war in Iraq which could produce thousands or even millions of casualties, Saddam has no known capability to attack far beyond his borders, and is probably powerless even to defend Iraq against U.S. attack. So unless one is squeamish or principled, this in itself may not be much of an argument against war.
I don't see how a regional war could break out, unless the U.S. gets extremely sloppy and extends the war into Iran -- which continues to be the target of U.S. opprobrium -- or the regime of a country like Saudi Arabia collapses in turmoil over its role in supporting the U.S.-led war. Neither of these seem very likely, although the logic that has thus far driven the Bush regime to pursue an invasion of Iraq offers little comfort that such scenarios are impossible. The other possible scenario is that if Iraq attempts to defend itself by lashing out at Israel (as Iraq did in 1991), Israel could take it upon itself to retaliate severely, perhaps even with nuclear weapons, which could lead to unimaginable turmoil. But while it is very unlikely that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would lead quickly to a broader regional war, an invasion and subsequent occupation will certainly increase the amount and fervor of anti-American feeling throughout the Arab and Muslim world, and this will very probably be reflected in increased incidence of anti-American terrorism. Moreover, a lengthy occupation will be increasingly untenable, and the alternative of a premature withdrawal may very well leave Iraq in more dangerous shape than it currently is in.
Historically, democracies have risen when people were ready to take power from their previous rulers. It is not clear that the Iraqi people are not ready for this, but it is likely that there will be many bumps on the way to forming a stable democracy. In particular, it seems unlikely that enough Iraqis are tolerant enough of their minorities, and it seems very likely that many Iraqis will prefer strongman order to democratic chaos. (The early failure of Weimar democracy being a classic case in point.) But the more serious problem here and throughout the liberals' touting of democracy is that the powers-that-be have proven to be staunchly opposed to anything resembling democracy in Iraq. The 1991 decision to leave Saddam in power was in many ways predicated on the belief that a weakened despot would be better for neighboring countries like Saudi Arabia, Syria, Kuwait, and Turkey than any whiff of democracy. The U.S. as well has never promoted democracy in the Arab world when theocracy and/or militarism was available as an alternative.
This argument is remarkably understated. Bush's domestic program can be roughly summed up as: 1) vastly increase the role of the military and police state; 2) bankrupt government to undermine any form of social welfare spending; 3) make welfare the function of private sector churches and charities; 4) strip the government of mineral resources and anything else not irretrievably nailed down. Bush's foreign policy is mostly a matter of flaunting U.S. military power while excepting the U.S. from any sort of responsible. Given this record, what it suggests for Iraq is little short of apalling. The notion that the real U.S. goal here is to seize control of Iraq's enormous oil reserves cannot be discounted.
Bush has stated many times that he has no interest in nation building. While the liberal pro-war argument assumes that the U.S. will be generous enough to rebuild Iraq, there is no evidence that Bush will fulfill any of those promises. Indeed, he has already welshed on Afghanistan, taking the position that America's job is to do the bombing, and that the allies can clean up the mess and rebuild the nation.
Presumably at this stage the war on terrorism is being fought by police agencies around the world, so there is little actual need for the military to participate beyond their work in Afghanistan to destroy Al Qaeda's training camps and to disperse their operatives. In a sense the U.S. has this huge military with little excuse for its continued existence, so to perpetuate itself there is a need to puff up a series of boogeymen ("rogue states", "axis of evil"). The fact is that the military is remarkably ineffective and inappropriate for combatting terrorism. On the other hand, the military's very clumsiness and aloofness makes it well suited for regenerating terrorism, both in terms of its direct destruction and its general example of the malfeasance of U.S. power. Neither of these lists strike me as very well constructed. In many ways the liberal anti-war argument is little more than the nagging doubt that their pro-war argument doesn't work. The pro-war argument is little more than a series of conceits -- that democracy is better than despotism, that democracy leads to liberalism, the U.S. is in this to promote liberalism throughout the benighted Arab world. Packer makes the point that many liberal hawks cut their talons in the Yugoslav wars, where they saw American air power as the only alternative to genocide on the ground. Indeed, the Yugoslav case does provide some support for the notion that external power diligently applied can stabilize a self-destructive region -- although it also provides testimony that it isn't necessarily the best solution. But pushing the Yugoslav analogy to cover Iraq is frought with troubles. For one thing, the Yugoslavs are Europeans, and their experience with imperialism comes from long dominance by the Ottomans, very different from Iraq's experience with Britain. Moreover, in Yugoslavia the U.S. was able to make relatively fair and honest decisions about who to support, including a willingness to support Muslims against Christians. When it comes to Iraq, the U.S. is full of poisonous prejudices; and while the U.S. previously had minimal involvement with Yugoslavia, the U.S. has been all over the Middle East and Persian Gulf for the last fifty years, making oil deals, propping up dictatorships, fighting against any whiff of socialism, and above all supporting Israel's occupation of Palestine. In Iraq itself the U.S. has been on all sides when it seemed convenient, using Iran to promote Kurdish insurrection in Iraq, using Iraq to attack and destabilize Iran. Arguably the worst thing the U.S. has done in the Arab world has been the containment policy against Iraq, which despite imposing great hardships on the Iraqi people has utterly failed to dislodge Saddam, and given the fact that the U.S. and its allies consciously chose to leave Saddam in power in 1991, this vicious policy appears to be little more than a cynical ploy in the run of American domestic politics. That this cruelty is condoned so blithely by the American populace is not something that the Arab populace can be expected to ignore. The ultimate problem that liberals have in being hawks is not merely that their ideas are ill conceived but that they depend on people who are not liberals to carry them out. The Kosovo bombing program, in particular, may have been dressed up with liberal ideals, but to a large extent it was just NATO's way of making work for itself. The same self-promotion is clearly at work in Iraq, but whereas Clinton could be counted on to provide a liberal shine to Kosovo, Bush's program to invade Iraq does not offer a shred of hope that anything positive might come out of it for the Iraqi people. It seems clear that Bush could care less; that for him this is just about the U.S.'s prerogatives as the last great world power, and that it would be nifty if he could strut into his reëlection campaign with Saddam's shrunken head on his spear. Music: Note also that I've kicked The Eminem Show up to A-. Once you get past the "gee I'm a superstar" conceit the first five songs are solid A, the closer is even better, and even the stupid and vile Obie Trice thing is outrageous in a cartoony way. The middle section is padded and stretched, and there are other flaws, but while Eminem's claims about how miserable teenagers look up to rap stars sound patronizing at first, more than that they sound pathetic, and like Eminem knows that it's pathetic, that that's what's touching about it. Haven't dropped Sleater-Kinney back to B+ yet, but I played it the other day and I'm hard pressed to name another album that I've rated A- that I enjoy less.
Sunday, December 08, 2002For simplicity of management, I've moved my Year 2002 (In Progress) music list back under the ocston umbrella. Last year's list had 35 records at actual year end, and has stalled out at 54 (since I haven't been updating it since June or so). This year's list has already hit 51, with a couple of pending items (Vandermark 5, Bennie Wallace, Alvin Youngblood Hart) likely, some records on the hyped list probable (Steve Earle? Public Enemy? Silkworm? David S. Ware?), and undoubtedly more things that I'm thus far unaware of. However, the reissues list is pretty short at this point. Maybe I'm catching up? But musicwise it looks like a pretty good year. Just heard that David Eyes has set up an "alumni directory for the former Santa Cruz Operation", reviving the lapsed ocston name. At this point it's mostly just a directory, with a limited ability to add a web page. My web page is here. So the concept thus far seems to be networking of past associates. It seems like the same sort of thing would be nice for rounding up ex-Contex employees. What makes the latter an interesting prospect is that it might have some potential for focusing on an open source project. Music:
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