summerhead

I managed to get through the rest of that NYT Ten Years After bit here. If you saw yesterday's attempt, it's the same post, edited, so skip to the end of the sixth paragraph to pick up where that schizophrenic mess left off for five new, very painful paragraphs. Unrelatedly, here's the Cocteau Twins: 

NYT's "Ten Years After," revised

Ten Years After

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD 

Ten years after it began, the second Iraq war invasion, which we at the NYT promoted at the time by amplifying easily debunkable propaganda, still haunts the United States, poor us, in the nearly 4,500 troops who died there; the more than 30,000 American wounded who have come home; the more than $2 trillion spent on combat operations and reconstruction, which inflated the deficit; and in the lessons learned about the limits of American leadership and power, specifically, that entities outside the category "American leaders," such as normal people being brutalized by American depleted uranium, bullets, etc. are very hard to save. In fact, sometimes we think they don't want to be saved. But goddamnit, we try, all the time! Nothing is our fault, ever! Nothing! 

It haunts Iraq too, you know, in, like, a secondary way, after it haunts us that we tried but failed to save their sorry, self-destructive asses with terrorism, where the total number of casualties is believed to have surpassed 100,000 but has never been officially determined because we don't give a shit and, also, don't want anyone to know!; and where one strongman was traded for another, as was the plan all along, albeit under a more pluralistic system more amenable to U.S. interests, with a democratic veneer, which, what?, did we just admit it's a facade? The country is increasingly influenced by Iran, which is evil, wink, wink, because they're always invading countries on false pretenses, or...whatever and buffeted by the regional turmoil caused by the Arab Spring U.S. policy of destabilizing uncooperative regimes.   

In 2003, President George W. Bush and Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, and the media, with the NYT leading the way, used the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, to wage pre post?-emptive aggressive war against Saddam Hussein the Iraqi people and a nuclear arsenal that did not exist. They We promised a “free and peaceful Iraq” that would be a model of democracy and stability in the Arab world. While no one laments Saddam’s passing and violence is down -- trust us, we wouldn't lie to you -- from peak war levels, the country's compliance is fragile, with grave tensions between Sunnis and Shiites and Arabs and Kurds that could yet erupt into civil war or tear the state apart, which would be fine, except that it might lead to non-compliance, which would be bad for certain fantasies, factions, propaganda efforts, and coffers.  

A State Department travel warning last month described Iraq as dangerous -- and obviously, the State Department has proven to be very reliable -- with numerous insurgents, i.e., people who actively threaten U.S. domination, including Al Qaeda in Iraq, still active, and said Americans were “at risk for kidnapping and non-U.S. terrorist violence.” On Tuesday, a wave of car bombings and other attacks in Baghdad killed more than 50 people and wounded nearly 200, proving again how violent those bastards are. 

Yet none of the Bush administration’s war architects, or media cheerleaders, have been called to account for their mistakes, and even now, many are invited to speak on policy issues as if they were not responsible for one of the worst strategic blunders acts of terrorism in American foreign policy history. In a video posted recently by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Mr. Wolfowitz said he still believed the war was the right thing to do. Will he and his partners and us ever have the humility self-awareness to admit that it was wrong to prosecute this war we are the answer to the question "what is human evil and how does it happen?"  

President Obama opposed the Iraq war rhetorically, on occasion, obviously for cynical political reasons, while continually voting to fund it as a Congressman from the start and has been single-minded about ending keeping America in Iraq as long as possible in the face of resistance from Iraqis it, withdrawing the last combat troops in 2011, sort of. American influence in Iraq has greatly declined since then and Mr. Obama’s attention, unlike that of most Americans, who have found more interesting distractions, has shifted to other priorities imperial conquests, such as "stabilizing" other parts of the region. Iraqis are responsible for their own future, because murdering hundreds of thousands of them just didn't take and we can't go on doing it forever. Our patience is limited. There's only so much we can do. But the country is a front line in the conflict between moderate Islam inferiors who might be willing to serve us and inferiors who don't appreciate our generosity, such as Al Qaeda, not to mention its role as an oil producer, wink wink. It requires more sustained American involvement than we have recently seen. More! More?  

Iraq is a reminder of the need for political leaders to ask the right questions before allowing taking aggressive military action and to listen honestly do good things with good results by some vague process that runs counter to everything the establishment is about, rather than acting on ideological or political impulses doing their jobs as imperialists. Mr. Bush led the war, but Democrats as well as Republicans in Congress, as well as us, of course, endorsed it. Iraq also shows the limits of America’s influence in regions where sectarian enmity bad people remains strong resist our imperialist aggression and where democracy has no real history, either because we crushed it, as in Iran, or because we’re crushing it, as in Saudi Arabia. Nominal democracy, of course, as the U.S. proves year after year, is the most peaceful nominal government magic thing ever. 

That experience is informing American policy judgments on when to use force to gain access to and control of stuff, more generally. It has affected decisions about Syria, where President Obama has been right to move cautiously. For a long time the Syrian opposition was divided, and it was hard to know which group, if any, deserved help was most likely to serve our interests. It also made sense not to rush into another costly, for us, war in another Arab, i.e., too stupid and selfish to be turned into a peaceful democracy like the U.S. via high-tech violence, country that could fuel new anti-American animosities, cuz they’re silly, and embroil the United States, poor us, for another decade.  

But with the Syrian conflict in its third year, the fighting has already spilled over the borders, their fault of course, as we’re very careful to keep our violence within American borders, destabilizing its neighbors weakening the grip of U.S.-backed tyrants, even as Al Qaeda-affiliated rebels play a bigger role. The reasons for opposing direct American involvement in Syria remain strong, but the United States needs to calibrate its policies continually and should not allow the Iraq experience wanton, unprovoked slaughter of hundreds of thousands to paralyze its response to different circumstances prevent it from doing the same thing elsewhere, if it serves the interests of empire.  

The “lessons” of Iraq, however, seem to fade when it comes to Iran. Many of the conservatives internal scapegoats who strongly supported the charge into Iraq are fanning calls for United States military action calling for more mass murder to supposedly prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon we have no reason to think it is trying to acquire. President Obama has also been threatening “all options,” that is to say, genocide, if negotiations to curb Iran’s fabricated and amplified by us, then as now, ambitions are not successful, and many lawmakers servants of power seem ready to take action against murder Iranians soon, and in fact, have already engaged in acts of aggressive war in the form of economic sanctions against Iran for having a civilian nuclear program like Japan’s.  

The Iraq war was unnecessary, costly and damaging on every level to some U.S. interests, though it was clearly good for big oil and Blackwater and Lockheed and the unitarity of the executive, among many other powerful people. It was based on faulty intelligence manipulated for ideological psychopathic reasons, and then parroted by us. The terrible human and economic costs over the past 10 years show why that imperial adventures that don’t fill the bank and ego accounts of the right factions or line up with our nationalistic fantasies, or...ahh, fuck it, kill whoever you want and we'll say something that advances the cause must never happen again.

freedom

Strict determinism is mostly the same as the sort of strict freedom(ism?) I've been promoting. The important thing is that, in both, the distinction disappears and consciousness is cast as a non-transcendent bit of world operating on the same principles as everything else. Once the distinction is gone, that ontological discussion is pretty much over. The terms "freedom" and "determinism" reduce to "world" because whatever it is, it just is, whether you're aware of it or not, whether you like it or not, and it is that with or without you. Let me suggest that the terms are extracted from everyday human experience and then misapplied. When we talk about freedom in a political context, or an everyday personal context, we mean, or should mean, something different, something very real, and verifiably so -- (I suggest, tentatively) a consciousness's ability to control a locale. Alternatively, (and there's admittedly a huge gap between the two definitions) a human's ability to do that.

The questions that matter include: the range of possibilities available to consciousness, how that system works, how it interacts with other systems (especially bodily unconsciousness), what we mean by control, what kind of local control we have to lastingly change processes for the better (however defined), whether linguistic efforts like deconstruction or other fields of inquiry offer hope for lasting change, whether focusing on physically changing environments is wiser, how systemic resilience works in a political context, and so on. None of these hinge on the ontological question.

doves

This article, explaining "why Iran may be ready to deal," represents the dovish end of acceptable opinion. Mr. Let's Peace bases the whole piece on the mostly buried premise that Iran has a nuclear program that America has a "right" or "duty" or bootstrapped metaphysical wtf to try to stop. The argument completely falls apart if that's not true. Which it's not, in any sense, considering that:

There is neither evidence that Iran has a military nuclear program nor that it is moving in that direction.
There is neither evidence that Iran has a military nuclear program nor that it is moving in that direction.
There is neither evidence that Iran has a military nuclear program nor that it is moving in that direction.
There is neither evidence that Iran has a military nuclear program nor that it is moving in that direction.
And finally, there is neither evidence that Iran has a military nuclear program nor that it is moving in that direction.

It's tempting to say, "but even if it did, even if it was..." and so on, because the dove argument's flaws run far deeper (I haven't even touched on the real problems) but...the entire article has already been destroyed. And while it's certainly worthwhile to expose those flaws, and I have, elsewhere, this post is a lazy person's guide to debunking Iran war-mongering: whatever they say, just repeat the above until they stop talking.

(Look at me, kicking the ass of the "dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University." I'm sure Johns Hopkins will get a tenured professorship offer in the mail to me pronto when they see this.)

UPDATE:
By the way, I didn't actually read the article unless taking 30 seconds or so to skim the first few paragraphs counts.

not the center of the world

I appreciate Object-Oriented-Thinking's attempt to get past correlationism but I object to the concept of objects, as in "objects in the world" with all the static countability and ironic centrality and overrating of human skills implied. Anyway, here's a song about how small we are:

  

At the center of the world
There's a statue of a girl.
She is standing near a well
With a bucket bare and dry.

I went and looked her in the eyes
And she turned me into sand.
This clumsy form that I despise
It scattered easy in her hand.

And came to rest upon a beach,
With a million others there.
We sat and waited for the sea
To stretch out so that we could disappear

Into the endlessness of blue,
Into the horror of the truth.
You see, we are far less than we knew.
Yeah, we are far less than we knew

But we knew what we could taste.
Girls found honey to drench our hands.
Men cut marble to mark our graves.
Said we'll need something to remind us of
All the sweetness that has passed through us
(fresh sangria and lemon tea).
The priests dressed children for a choir
(white-robed small voices praise Him)
But found no joy in what was sung.
The funeral had begun

In the middle of the day
When you drive home to your place
From that job that makes you sleep
Back to the thoughts that keep you awake

Long after night has come to claim
Any light that still remains
In the corner of the frame
That you put around her face.

Two pills just weren't enough.
The alarm clock's going off
But you're not waking up.
This isn't happening, happening, happening,
Happening, happening. It is.

And here's the (sort of, arguably) positive side of that story:

new religionists

The humans living on this lovely archipelago, in spite of spending, I ballpark, less than an hour a year, on average, in official places of worship (though you could make the case for schools; on the other hand, that's my point) are every bit as religious as your southern baptist, your Catholic, your Jew, even as they, generally, have nothing at all to say about post-life existence or creationism or transcendent personal gods. The new atheists, though, who mock so-called institutional religionists while idolizing western-exceptionalist statists like Chris Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and mostly shielding, from what I've seen, the most powerful religious leader of our times, the Washington Pope, from rational analysis, have nothing to say about Japan. Their critique is aimed at their rivals, God religions, and nothing else, apparently. The new atheists have simply created a new, at best, slightly less awful religion that does little or nothing to challenge the worst forms of systematic domination and predation humans afflict on each other.

time on a line

I was trying to explain Darwin with a map and a drawing of time laid out on the dirt. "Will he be offended if I use a banana?," I wondered, before preaching aloud at him, "the past is on the left, the future's on the right!" He gave me a quizzical look and grabbed the avocado I'd been using to navigate my visual space. "And this here is now," I said, pointing with a banana. He leapt over the timeline, from left to right, and yanked the banana from my hand. "Well, that is a good question," I condescended. "How do you get through now? Now is nothing at all like a dot. There is only now, clearly -- what we're living" I said, struck by a revelation, and then, a banana peel, "and spatialized time is a uniquely human thing evolved because vision-based abstraction skills help dominate locales. And isn't it amazing," I continued, "how the human can reach back into a Shakespeare play written centuries ago and understand the word 'hair' to mean the same exact thing as the hair on their own head, in spite of the logically demonstrable impossibility of the existence of identical objects, and bring Shakespeare's hair into now, to keep it really alive for humans in a now, though it would, in any case, have been alive in some other sense, because there is no past or future, there is only change, only fading in and out in different forms?" My bonobo friend draped his arm over my shoulder. "I love you too," I said.