Ooops.

Well, I hate to judge before all the facts are in, but it's beginning to look like General Ripper exceeded his authority.

Air Force General Buck Turgidson

Like everyone else, I've been a bit more distracted by the blood-bauble on the Israel-Lebanon border than I ought to be given the currently-dessicating Leviathan in Iraq, the beast stripped bare by the mauraders in its own belly, with the United States holding a bloody harpoon, whistling innocently, looking the other way. Who? Me?

But what Israel has been doing for three weeks, we've been doing for three years in Iraq, with predictable (to all but the Washington clairvoyants, whose crystal balls show on endless loop footage of the liberating Americans marching down the Champs Elysées to the cheering adoration of Parisians) consequences. It occurs to me that many of the Soviet practices we currently employ in our "interrogations" weren't cribbed directly from the Soviets, but rather from Israel who cribbed them from the Soviets. That's only a hunch, but . . . In any case, the linked article above notes that the Human Rights First report indicates hundreds of accusations of abuse (read: torture) and at least 35 prisoner deaths in our camapagin against, get this, terror.

For nothing.

Since I stopped posting on the Fray at Slate, I’ve largely avoided writing about Hitchens. His political transformation was no mystery; it wasn’t even a transformation. Having neither the Chomskian capacity for indefatigable footnotery nor the intellect, humor, and moral stature of Said (who, I will say it now, was one of the great men of the last century), he never held any position of note among anti-imperialist intellectuals. He was a dyspeptic hatchet-man who explained Orwell by misunderstanding him and who did a variety of riverdance on the reputation of Mother Teresa, a Catholic who confounded the Hitchensian atheism by performing a very solid PR service for The Holy Roman Apostolic and Catholic Church: Subcontinent Division. If he consciously styled himself after Orwell, it was only in the manner that a heterosexual undergraduate story-writer models himself after Hemmingway: admiring of stiff drink and pugilism; lacking the essential characteristic of genius that made those faults (the undergraduate does not recognize them as faults) forgivable. That is one of the great adolescent fantasies in any case, that excess is a part of genius, when in truth genius simply excuses excess because it’s so much more valuable.

What, then, is left to write about Hitchens? That he’s a drunk? That he’s increasingly incoherent, both in person and in prose? That he tethered his lagging career to the Mack Truck of America only to find himself caught and dragged along when he probably wished to unhitch (pardon me) and roll away? That he’s abandoned his friends and allies one by one? There are only so many jokes to make, and the descent into bathos requires a more heroic starting point to be interesting.

Still, here is Hitchens writing again about the uranium deal in Niger that did not take place, or did take place, or might have taken place. I find it very sad, not because Hitchens was a great man, nor even a very smart one, but because he has always been so perfectly ordinary a man and writer and it’s very sad to see an ordinary man caught up in something so clearly beyond his scope or ken and ruined by it. It matters to precisely no one at this point whether what Hitchens writes about the subject is true. The subject itself is irrelevant. It has no bearing on the failed dream of an obedient and prosperous Iraq; it has no bearing on the rightness or wrongness of the war, even in retrospect. Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame, and yellowcake uranium in Niger are bit players in a larger drama, whose outlines Hitchens can’t see for his own reflection. Tens of thousands—perhaps over a hundred thousand—have died in Iraq because of the United States. For what?

For nothing.

Isolation

I once read that Condoleeze Rice made a career of being wrong to all the right people. That's a bit paraphrastic, but there was a ring of aphorism to the original as well. To be fair, there were many decades in this country where many a respectable politico-academic career was made through a concerted effort at overestimating the strength, durability, and danger of the Soviet Union. Condi was never even an exemplar of such. So far as I can tell, she mouthed Sovietology of the most mainstream sort--wrong, but not spectacularly so--and did so as a pretty, compliant black woman: precisely the sort of useful racial prop popular with both American political parties. Much has been made in both the mainstream press and the quasi-oppositional Democratic blog-media about Rice's (in)famous loyalty to the dauphin, but I defy anyone to say they can't imagine her performing precisely the same role of globe-trotting ring-kisser under a Bill Clinton or, hell, under an Al Gore. She seems to possess no political ideology of her own, and it seems fatuous in the extreme to believe that she would be any less capable of mouthing obsequiences in line with the nominal Democratic "policy" positions than those current. Of course, in the Israelo-Palestinian-Lebanese trifecta, all this is more or less irrelevant, since the United States government speaks, in the much-repeated and little-signifying phrase, "with one voice." And that is the voice of Israel.

In comments to my last post, commentor Moloch_Agonistes offers a critique:

Disagree. There are many things the U.S. could do to calm the various conflicts in which Israel is engaged. Most of them involve pulling one plug or another. I mean, honestly: do you really think there wouldn't be a permanent border on the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon in zero seconds flat if the principal patron insisted? That we haven't done it so far suggests that soi-disant "policy elites" don't see it as U.S. interest to calm these conflicts.

True, as they say, in theory, although I think it overestimates the capacity of Israel's enemies to make peace or accept a drawn border; the US could certainly force Israel to withdraw to whatever borders it saw fit, but that is no guarantee of a permanent boder. But one need only listen to Hillary Clinton snarling into the microphone at the latest pro-Israel rally to see that itjustain'tgonnahappen.

M_A calls that sort of thinking quiescent, and perhaps it is. I don't deny despairing over the most recent debacle. Still, I think we must recognize that the "defense" of Israel has metastasized into a total organizational imperative for the United States governing classes. So imperative, so internalized that our own emissaries sit dumbly by as the carnage continues, at great cost to our ongoing project in the region. Not a month ago, it was hard to imagine our cause or reputation could sink much lower in Iraq or our influence wane more in Iran, and yet here we are, standing by while Israel bombs the hell out of Lebanon. As I once wrote: If you don't wish to be called a crusader Zionist state, it's best not to act like one. It's naive to believe that our government is unaware of the terrible position our fifty-first state has forced on us: all across the Middle East, all across the world, the American-made and -funded Israeli military is televised wreaking havoc across Lebanon and Gaza. No matter what excuses belch from the White House, no matter what strutting nonsense the president sputters about letting Israel soften up Hezbollah, or whatever the hell, the scent of panic is in the air.

One part panic, one part paralysis. "It is time for a new Middle East," she said. "It is time to say to those that don't want a different kind of Middle East that we will prevail. They will not." That's a press-conference slogan usually delivered by the likes of a Tony Snow to the truly quiescent Washington press corps. Even at a meet-and-greet staged for media, it's not the sort of thing the Secretary of State is supposed to say while standing next to a supposedly junior partner in the middle of a war. Watching these buffoons is remeniscent of nothing so much as one of those old Isaac Asimov robot stories, wherein the imperative of this or that "Law of Robotics" comes into insoluble conflict with another, and the damned machine goes crazy, or else just shuts down. The solution, insofar as one exists, is not to try to convince the malfunctioning creature that one or other law or order is more important; that only drives it more haywire. The solution is to give it some other option: a way out. As regards our so-called foreign policy(ies) , I just can't see any reconciliation of our schizophrenic, always-at-odds-with-themselves attitudes and our self-imposed obligations. This is why I believe in advocacy for withdrawal as much as possible. It will be bitter and imperfect. It will leave a great deal of carnage and bloodshed in its wake. It will harm the standing of the United States, if you're into that sort of thing. It will diminish us as a global power--thankfully, in my view. It is the only way out, and, though I can't be optimistic, I will say this much: It won't damn anyone we haven't already damned.

Retreat

George W. Bush is surely a bad President, insofar as his spokesmanship for a set of military-financial interests is composed of a series of twanged non sequitors that have all but the moronic, rear-guard, Jesus-besotted lower third of the American populace--the sort whose very existence and continued practice of unimpeded childbearing argue strongly for a reinvigoration of the eugenic impulse which awaked even earlier in America than in sister-sinner Germany--running, positively dashing, for the sweet, sweet comfort of Democratic rule. His remaining supporters are the genetically dessicated bluebloods of the old conservative lines, the receding-jawlines and bad noses of America, the Krisols and Decters, whose skins are literally thin and whose inbred intellects now cry only "War, war!" as they push plastic Roman numerals about the Risk board while drinking tea with pinky in full extend, and, of course, the morons, already mentioned. George is one of the morons himself, though a particularly cruel and unsportsmanlike one, participating with escahtological glee in an End Times fantasy that an IQ-60 Hobbit-lover would find peurile.

But there is a dream afoot from which Leftopia must promptly awake. In this dream, America without George W. Bush would "do something" about "the situation" in the Middle East. That sometimes means that America would force State Numero 51 to put those F-16s back in the hangar; that sometimes means that America would "withdraw" from Iraq, or withdraw to an "over-the-horizon" force." And so in. In this dream, our problems are essentially the problems of "this administration," and they can be solved through political--that is to say electoral--means.

It won't happen. Not because Democrats are compromised, though they are. Not because Democrats are cowardly, though they are. Not because the mechanisms of American State are entirely divorced from the electoral process, though they are. Simply because it cannot be done. I don't engage in policy prescriptions when I write here for precisely that reason. There is no "policy solution." There was a brief window, now closed, when a continental industrial power like the U.S. could truly affect the direction of world events. The window is now closed. There is a storm outside. Raging. We have built a house that may withstand the winds, but we're entirely powerless to stop the storm. Best to keep the candles handy and huddle inside.

Yes. That is an argument for a kind of isolationism.

Libertarian Hell

Today, my car was towed. Outstanding parking tickets, easily forgotten. 2nd notices seem to get "lost in the mail" very easily. I'm sure that has nothing to do with the rapidly-compounding structure of late fees. Nothing at all.

Couldn't I appeal? Well, yes. But I would lose. I'm guilty. Of what? Of parking on the wrong side of the street on the bimonthly street-sweeping Wednesday.

I assure you, however, that in two years at the present address, I've never once seen a street sweeper, nor any evidence (or, more accurately, absence of evidence) of one passing. I am, in other words, going to pay several hundred dollars in ticketing and recovery charges for failing to move my car in order to provide the City of Pittsburgh the opportunity not to clean my street.

We're the government and we're here to help.

Little Eichmanns Everywhere

Digby notes a more-than-passing resemblance between Alan "My Enemies are Roaches" Dershowitz and Ward "A Technocratic Corps at the Very Heart of America's Global Financial Empire" Churchill. Dershowitz is more clever by half than Churchill, and so couches his argument in a language that will mostly befuddle the Los Angelenos reading his blood yelp; many, I'm afraid, will come away remembering only "[t]here is a vast difference — both moral and legal--between a 2-year-old who is killed by an enemy rocket and a 30-year-old civilian who has allowed his house to be used to store Katyusha rockets," nodding in bemused agreement, and thinking yes, yes, that may be true. Or: "There is also a difference between a civilian who merely favors or even votes for a terrorist group and one who provides financial or other material support for terrorism." A not-so-veiled reference to those damnable Palestinians with the temerity to vote for Hamas; those damnable Lebanese with the temerity to vote for Hezbollah. (Those damnable Americans with the temerity to vote for the GOP? Should some Iraqi national pop into the US and open fire in a shopping mall in Houston, where, pray tell, will the dead fall on the Dershowitzian "continuum"?)

Dershowitz argues for guilt by proximity. The "civilian who has allowed his house to be used to store Katyusha rockets" is a canard. Dershowitz is saying that any Lebanese who hasn't already fled southern Lebanon, and probably most of the poor fuckers who lived there in the first place, except perhaps infants and centarians, are guilty anyway, to some degree or other . . . well, let us leave it in the good Professor's words:

Every civilian death is a tragedy, but some are more tragic than others.

Every Jew killed in the Holocaust was a tragedy, but since some were really cheats and usureres . . . Dershowitzian logic, in other words, leads to a place mostly inhabited by the David Irvings and Fred Leuchters of the world. Pressed: "We don't deny the crime, just its magnitude!" How Dershowitz can now claim moral distinction from Hutton Gibson penning "Did Six Million Really Die" is an open question? The anser, I fear, is: He cannot.

Because upon close reading, it's clear that Dershowitz's true concern isn't really who lives or dies, but what modifier is appended to the names of the dead upon publication. This would allow readers to better judge between "complicity" and "innocence." One can imagine the reporting:

Southern Lebanon--Israeli airstrikes in South Lebanon today killed a 30-year-old civilian who has allowed his house to be used to store Katyusha rockets and at least ten civilians who merely favored or even voted for a terrorist group.

It will not change the calculus of war, but it will certainly swell the column inches.