untethered

I don’t speak your blasted language.
—Col. John Norton-Griffiths

I have to break my self-imposed deafness regarding all things political and silence regarding the blog to ask, if anyone’s left out there, regarding this renegade Obama campaign anti-Clinton ad parodying the old “1984” Apple Computer commercial: how on earth is this an “attack ad”?*
Is it merely because of the imagery, throwing the hammer at the mere representation of Hillary on the screen (it’s been a long time, but is that a Hooters girl tossing the hammer?)? Or is it enough to engage in the deliberately fanciful and humorous comparison of Hillary to Big Brother to qualify one as this season’s Lee Atwater?

I had the impression that an “attack ad” made clearly false claims or insinuations, engaged in guilt-by-association, or contained scurrilous assaults on personal behavior; I think the definition is being stretched here to include the merely irreverent (and I don’t share the disdain for attack ads myself; it’s all on the electorate in the end, and if the American public hasn’t yet attained the political sophistication to penalize the insubstantial or scandal-mongering with pointed ignorance or ridicule then we do indeed deserve the “leaders” we get–as for the rest of the world, perhaps we owe them an apology).

But is this what we can expect of the coming race, this sideshow of brittle sensibilities? It’s probably only a matter of time before Obama revels in his moment of affected outrage because someone has indulged in the temerity of questioning whether his much-hyped personal history of racial struggle isn’t just a bit disingenuous. Both campaigns already have the apparatus in place to convert to useful energy anything, such as the moment’s so-called attack ad, that can be portrayed as an unfair or bigoted assault.
Both sides are coiled to strike at the first rhetorical duck to step out of line, and with the presence and unspoken collusion of Fox News and the usual suspects of right-wing radio, they will likely have several opportunities. Our only recourse against a political campaign that dodges the glaring stage lights of real scrutiny by grappling in the mosh pit of phony outrage is through ridicule. Let’s nip this thing in the bud. Mock early, and often. I’m looking at you, Daily Show. Once more unto the breach.

As for the ad in question, it makes a powerful statement about a longtime political insider who operated ruthlessly behind the scenes before gaining the junior senate seat for the state of New York to use as nothing more than a springboard to executive power while doing absolutely nothing to turn back the assault on civil liberties of the Bush Administration and cheering on its appalling foreign policy until it became no longer politically beneficial, and who is currently joining in the enthusiasm for an attack on Iran (some sixties hippie you turned out to be!), and whose own campaign is currently stifling debate and the political process by threatening donors away from competing candidates with all the subtlety of a snarling Rottweiler defending a side of beef, as it seeks to hoard as much of the available odds- and favor-chasing campaign cash as it can before anything as disorderly as a political debate breaks out (all of this probably a tad more significant than a satirical ad getting carried away with an extreme metaphor).

Add to this the disturbing lack of scrutiny she recieves by many due to her sex and longtime service as a feminist talisman, the fact that so much establishment money has migrated so quickly to her candidacy, the cult-like reverence for her exhibited by the habitual first name only denotation by fawning abjects, and the overall sense of entitlement to power she exudes (and a pair of disembodied eyes that always seem to follow you, even from photographs, chilling every male right down to his inherently misogynistic soul), and I’d say whoever made the offending ad deftly addresses the creeping unease which many of us feel toward this woman who is propelled along on a sort of reverse groundswell of corporate and politically elitist support. Many of us, liberal and conservative alike, get the feeling that Hillary has been selected for us and is now being foisted upon us.
Furthermore, say what you will about either Obama or Clinton, they are clearly of two distinct generations, and our current ruling elders seem to have guided us to a very precarious station in the nation’s progress. I don’t know what precisely is behind all of the attention the rogue spot is getting, perhaps simply that it strikes a chord with media types who can’t help but feel a bit cowed by the Hillary Machine, but its resonant note is sounding over and over again as the piece is being repeatedly shown on television news programs. If the Clinton campaign had a hand in bringing the spot to the public’s attention by seeking to generate outrage over it they need to learn when to keep their powder dry.

It seems another common misconception we have foisted upon ourselves, that our political process is increasingly fouled by personal attacks (as many have pointed out, the personal invective has been much worse in the past), when in fact the greater problem is that the process is diluted by so much insubstantial chatter. In fact, the clip the ad’s author used of Hillary Clinton blathering about having a “conversation” with the electorate was pretty damned apt, if you ask me. This language, my God.
The feminization of our culture is a given consequence of the sexual revolution and I don’t intend to fight it other than obliquely by championing common sense and rigor over kitsch and sentiment, but Hillary Clinton’s oeuvre of platitude, euphemism, and thinly veiled female (and other group) resentment shows that a powerful and effective new language has entered the family of totalitarian tongues. Big Sister may prove much more effective than Big Brother in the end, and when she’s so very eager to please the aggressive militarism of AIPAC while increasing the size of the state at home and can be counted on to do whatever she can to accelerate our continuing slide into a racial and sexual spoils system, perhaps the 1984 analogy is as pointed as it is farcical.

Are we so afraid of intellectual strife and complexity that we just want someone to stroke our collective head and tell us she’ll be our great all-protecting Big Mother, or that he’ll flash his winning smile and “transcend” right out of existence the age-old problem of race?
Sorry, stupid question.
So if the candidates are going to waste our time pretending to be engaging the nation in kindly chats or attempting to turn the national political narrative into the equivalent of a black-white buddy movie, I say let the hammers fly.

(Now I have to go back to sharpening my survivalist skills and writing my Kaczynski-esque manifesto)

*The day after posting this I realized that I should perhaps seek out a definition of attack ad, and found this on Wikipedia:

In political campaigns, an attack ad is an advertisement whose message is meant as an attack against another candidate or political party. Attack ads often form part of negative campaigning or smear campaigns, and in large or well-financed campaigns, may be disseminated via mass media.
An attack ad will generally criticize an opponent’s political platform, usually by pointing out its faults and contrasting them against its own platform.

So the YouTube spot qualifies by this broad definition of any criticism offered of one’s political opponent, but hardly qualifies as a “smear.” Clinton supporters no doubt view it as negative, but this merely points out the problem with the whole overbroad “attack ad” concept. I’ve always thought that offering a critique of your opponent’s plan and contrasting it with your own is not only valid but a necessary part of a political campaign.

The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
—George W. Bush, Inaugural Address, 2005

…we will not stop at this point, but will pursue the evil force into its own lands, invade its western heartland, and struggle to overcome it until all the world shouts the name of the Prophet and the teachings of Islam spread throughout the world. Only then will Muslims achieve their fundamental goal, and there will be no more “persecution” and all religion will be exclusively for Allah.
—Hasan al-Banna, quoted in To Be a Muslim (Fathi Yakan)

A world-wide socialist army of the revolutionary proletariat is alone capable of putting an end to this oppression and enslavement of the masses.
—Lenin

We want to glorify war, the only cure for the world.
—F.T. Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto

We have met the enemy, and he is us.
—Pogo

Every revolutionary is a frustrated tyrant.

It is the light in the world’s darkness. Its absence is the very definition of tyranny and oppression. It is the sacred duty of those who possess it that they bring it to those who do not, by warfare if necessary. It cannot be fully realized until it exists everywhere; its existence everywhere is inevitable. The world is divided between those who thrive in the light of its revelation and those who wallow in the darkness of their ignorance. It is man’s only assurance of freedom from oppression, ignorance, and want; it is to be his final liberation from bondage. Every society preceding it is inferior; there is no progression beyond it. It is the end destination of humanity.
It is the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam; it is George W. Bush’s interpretation of democracy.

The similarities in rhetoric between America’s neoconservatives and Islam’s global jihadists reveal them as two recent manifestations of a constant human impulse toward such dangerously expansive and messianic movements. These movements derive from and manipulate the individual’s ineradicable need to be part of a vital and ascendant group, and his attendant fear of other such groups displacing his own, so ingrained by centuries of evolutionary pressures that we do not recognize it. Human nature has for eons expressed this aspect through kin and tribe in the struggle for survival in a hostile world. The marriage of ideology to this powerful and primordial impulse is a relatively recent and deadly development in human history.

Such movements take on the rhetoric of revolution when pursuing power and the methods of totalitarianism once they attain it. The revolution seeks out predominance; the totalitarian system defends it. They are the same phenomenon in different developmental stages. But neither can long survive stasis. For a movement to stand still is to die, and always to the benefit of mankind.
If enemies and threats do not exist abroad they must be created at home; the ideal enemy for instilling the fear and fervor necessary to fill the ranks and maintain order is a competing movement of comparable size and vitality, with a complementary opposing ideology. Moderation, legality, temperance, the rights of nations; these are the true threats to an ideological movement, the very antitheses of revolution and totalitarianism. This is why the radical Left assails liberalism and liberal institutions; this is why radical neoconservatism despises conservative “isolationism” and international law alike. The revolutionary and the totalitarian are the yin and yang of humanity’s restless, destructive, and fearful nature, of man’s innate aggression and paranoia. The impulse toward aggressive revolutionary/totalitarian movements is the dark underside of man’s creative sociability.

For any revolutionary movement ideological content is really secondary to its irrational, emotional appeal to the individual’s inborn yearning for plenty and security; its particular language is malleable over time, often fantastic and delusional. The formal similarities of the great ideological movements reveal them as merely separate instances and vehicles channeling this same primordial need. These appeal to the individual through the promise of group vitality, to be realized by expansion through conquest and conversion; to security from the domination of or absorption by foreign groups with the same needs; in the claim to moral supremacy and the primacy of individual rights as defined and ordered by the movement, in opposition to the group rights of other nations, hence the disdain for international law and concepts such as just war; in the celebration of war and the elevation of heroism to a place of god-like transcendance; finally in the promised messianic end goal of a heaven on earth, an end to history and strife, achieved and enjoyed by the true believers and their progeny.

These movements start out as revolutionary and, if successful in gaining power, invariably end in domestic repression and expansionist aggression. Having defined itself as singularly just any opposition anywhere is percieved as inherently evil; the movement becomes antinomian, authoritarian, and global. The mere existence of alternatives is deemed a threat to its existence. This finds its expression most elegantly and ironically in the disastrous formula, uttered by a fittingly anonymous provocateur: no one is free when others are oppressed. Let this be revolutionary totalitarianism’s sardonic epitaph, and soon.

What makes these movements dangerous is this need for momentum, satisfied by continual expansion; these movements are largely expansion and momentum, fundamental individual behavior aggregated to form naturally hostile groups that instinctively assault one another in a world they see as a chaotic, continual threat. They must conquer, render subservient, or assimilate all other groups until no competitors remain.
Of course, this can never be achieved, as apostate sects will always form, and as the realities of race, kin, and geography intrude and trump the false and temporary bonds of ideology. Movements are thwarted, they dissipate, they are absorbed into others. But the impulse goes on, endlessly recombining, reforming, metamorphosing. New cells form within host movements and split off; boundaries can be fuzzy; language is sometimes freely traded. The jihadist movement as currently constituted began in the thirties and flowered in the revolutionary fervor of the sixties, borrowing freely the rhetoric of the Western Left; many of the jihadist authors of that period sound positively Marxist.

Still it’s important to see the content of ideology and messianic religio-political movements as mass, self-applied delusion; as essentially group self-deceit. Witness the average neocon: he can’t see the true nature of his movement for the visceral appeal of his half-formed ideas.

But interests, largely defined by the availability of resources, are still the true determinant of war and peace.

Nations and ethnicities remain engaged in the same age-old struggle over resources and room. Take for instance the progress of Russia through the years; from the czars through Stalin and now in its post-Soviet phase, its core geostrategic interests have not changed, and its actions are determined more by its relative strength than by any ideological gloss. Likewise us. Only the slogans change.

The delusion requires the specter of a hostile and uncivilized world as a constant and imminent threat. For the Islamist the world is divided into the infidel dar-al-Harb (house of war), and the Muslim dar-al-Islam (house of submission); for the celebrants of a new American global order there is the “free”, i.e. Westernized, world, and the unwashed, benighted remainder. These world-views are now squared off against one another over the last great source of the world economy’s lifeblood, oil.

Those proposing the forcible democratization of the Middle East as the central strategy of the “global war on terror” have been allowed to advance an absurd argument: on one hand they warn of an “existential challenge” to the West, citing Islam’s well-documented doctrinal intolerance and violence, as well as its inherent hostility to modernity, and the intolerance of Muslim populations; on the other, they propose the answer to this is the forcible introduction of democratic elections. The same Muslim backwardness they chronicle reveals both the deceptiveness of their stated goals and the irrationality of their designs. But democracy is the only sanctioned evangel left to modern America, so it is in its name that our modern crusaders seek to conquer the world. The predictable result of such madness is what we are now witnessing. But notice that the delusional fervor of the hardcore isn’t lessened by these horrific results, but redoubled. For the true believing ideologue, there can be no retreat.

The ruse of democracy promotion complements global jihadism perfectly. There is no better way to lend credence to the Islamist’s talk of a “war on Islam”, than to pursue neoconservative designs of conquest and democratic reform in the Middle East, which in fact is a de facto war on Islam; many neoconservatives have chronicled the Muslim world’s inherent rigidity, intolerance and hostility to liberal democratic institutions at length, only to turn about and embrace (at least ostensibly) the forcible introduction of democracy there. The jihadists couldn’t have conjured up a more effective specter for their purposes of rallying Muslims to global jihad.

The new American imperialists are hopelessly ignorant not only of human nature but of the broader world beyond the West, and many of them likely are influenced by hostility toward Arabs, Muslims, and sympathy toward Israel, but the war in Iraq is still about the oil. All of the attendant forces that swept us up into war, understandable fear and anger following 9/11, American Likudniks looking to improve Israel’s position, anti-Saddam liberal interventionists; without the tremendous untapped oil wealth (and most of the public still doesn’t realize the size and significance of still undocumented Iraqi oil reserves, which may in the end rival Saudi Arabia’s) there, you can rest assured that Dick Cheney and his minions wouldn’t have pulled out all the stops (and pulled resources away from the pursuit of al Qaeda) to whip up the hysteria that was the buildup to the Iraq war. The cause, securing a vital resource, was older than war itself, but the call would use the heady language of the “existential threat”, the glorious crusade, and martial glory.

Oil will be the fuel of civilization for as far as we can see into the future, and it will increasingly come from lands with a defecit of creativity and liberty, and a surfeit of religious, nationalist, and ideological fervor. This is why the Iraq war was really Dick Cheney’s disastrous gambit to secure our energy future, disguised as World War III. It would have been far more wise, and cost-effective, to merely accept and adapt to the new realities of the global energy situation, and let the oil market work (yet another hypocrisy, our current leaders’ false faith in “markets”). But then, no one in the current administration has ever successfully run any commercial enterprise, Cheney and Rumsfeld’s stints selling their government contacts to the private sector notwithstanding. It should not surprise us that they haven’t learned the realities of cost, risk, and benefit while on the job in the White House.

But many still believe the rhetoric and buy into the delusion. The Soviets maintained the ruse of worldwide communist revolution until it became farce, while bankrupting themselves financing an untenable global empire (pursuing the same geostrategic goals that concerned them both before and after the rise and fall of the Soviet Union) with a more untenable economic system, and while we chase the apparition of Islamic global hegemony, we are far more likely to be surpassed by good old fashioned Asian ingenuity and industry. The future still belongs to the productive and creative, as it once belonged to us, an “isolationist” nation not yet intoxicated on the elixir of ideology and vainglory; one that another totalitarian revolutionary once derided as a “nation of merchants”, not very long before the repurcussions of his delusions came down upon his own nation’s head. Time for us to stop chasing dragons, and realize we are being overtaken by one.

Where have I been? What have I been up to? I could concoct a story, and believe me, it would be a hell of a story. But I’m tired. I can’t think straight.
Can’t think straight. How apt an expression. Thoughts refuse to proceed in orderly straight lines but curl back and founder in the murky sea from which they emerged, or they spiral off in little curlicue patterns, useless. Others merely float away in woeful silence on some invisible flux, like astronauts cut adrift in space.

Every thought that attempts to assert itself is instantly engaged by its contradiction; they grapple in a death embrace and are sucked into a vortex of wasted energy. I attempt concentration, but my mind drifts into pointless reverie no matter how hard I try; a mind with a mind of its own. My intellect is beyond repair. Weeds are growing up amongst its rusting parts. Cobwebs adorn its engine compartment.

Doubt is the tyrant of the realm of my mind. His operatives are everywhere; he is everywhere. A truly effective tyranny is one that a population foists upon itself and deems enlightenment. This is how I too have kept myself in line all of these years. I have been oh so proud of my doubt and skepticism. Of my remove. Here, even now, this conceit reveals itself. But egoism is evasion. The anti-social person is the highest order of megalomaniac; he doesn’t even deign to find others worthy of influencing.
To what end my remove? To no end; no end is the end. Those who remove themselves from the fray secretly believe they will live forever. They are misers, hoarding what they think is eternity.

I am exhausted, in the truest sense of the word. Spent. And how little there was to give. What paltry production.
But what about the war? What about immigration? The presidential race? For the love of God man, what about Anna Nicole? Britney’s depilation? The world revolves.
I don’t care anymore; I have used up my supply of concern. My tank battalions are stranded in the desert; there is no fuel, the war is lost.
What does it matter, the concerns of the world? What sort of man toils in that arena, the world-stage? What sort of vanity is this, to want to influence the world? My world is that which is before me.
My self-fulfilling conceit is that there is nothing true and real beyond my senses. And she, who I have never known, who I will never know, who I’ve passed without a word countless times while staring down at my feet, at myself; she who has appeared in thousands of immortal guises, nearly all lost to memory but still existing somewhere (where do they go?) in the muddle that is my history, she is not there, and never will be.

No doubt there will be better analysis offered elsewhere of the curious example of double-speak and logical dysfunction displayed in Douglas Feith’s op-ed in today’s Washington Post, but this stands out for sheer nerve:

In evaluating our policy toward Iraq after Sept. 11, 2001, my office realized that CIA analysts were suppressing some of their information. They excluded reports conflicting with their favored theory: that the secular Iraqi Baathist regime would not cooperate with al-Qaeda jihadists. (We now face a strategic alliance of jihadists and former Baathists in Iraq.)

Feith wants you to believe that the present Ba’athist/jihadist alliance in Iraq, created entirely by the invasion, confirms his previous, wholly inaccurate (some would say deliberately misleading) assertion of such an alliance, a proposition directly counter to the CIA’s “favored theory” (“favored theory” being an attempt at dissembling what someone with a clear conscience would call duly vetted intelligence).

Feith tries to disparage an accurate appraisal by calling it “theory” and mischaracterizing it as an assertion that Arab nationalists would never ally themselves with their jihadist enemies (this no doubt a clumsy attempt to grease his exit, using would not when in fact the intelligence conclusion was, more relevantly, that they were not).
But the invasion has only proven what we already knew: that when faced with a common enemy Arab nationalists and jihadists, among other regional players, will cooperate. We also know, by the same example of the Soveit occupation of Afghanistan, that in the absence of such a threat they will quickly resume internecine hostilities.

Feith is not merely trying to save his skin with this distortion; his arguments belie a perverse satisfaction and sense of opportunity realized by the persistent movement Feith represents. Now that they have clumsily created a reality of the illusion they fabricated, they use it to argue for a continuing presence in Iraq and even a wider war. It is in this context that we should also view the current narrative drive to generate outrage at the Iranian provocation of the U.S. in Iraq; something that might be more accurately characterized as Iranian reaction to U.S. provocation.

He further seeks to cover the tracks of his office’s incompetence and lack of integrity by describing the proper rejection of compromised intelligence as “suppressing” information. By an illusory standard implied here, every shred of information offered warrants equal consideration, and being right counts for nothing, as the “suppressed” information Feith pines for has since been proven, to put it gently, hogwash.
There’s no small hint of irony in this language; by promoting unsupported allegation and outright fraud over the objections of intelligence analysts and citing it as reliable intelligence Feith, not the intelligence community, effectively suppressed analysis.

And what of those “excluded reports”? Intelligence delivered to policymakers in Feith’s office by the charlatan Ahmad Chalabi, which they in turn fed into the intelligence system to extract, by considerable effort, the same distorted picture of Iraq they now claim was the result of “failed intelligence.” If not for the bloodshed it would be almost charmingly picaresque.
Why we would even humor such people, let alone spare them the widespread disgrace they deserve as they find comfortable sinecures in academia and elsewhere, while continuing to elect those who take them seriously, is beyond me.

Fool me once, shame on, shame on you, eh, fool me, uh–can’t get fooled again.
–George W. Bush

The newest trend in conventional wisdom regarding Iraq, going as unexamined by the major media as every previous stage of denial masquerading as incontrovertible fact regarding this war, reads something like this: Iraq is certain to descend into greater chaos and potential genocide, become a terrorist haven, spark a regional war, and elevate Iran to a position of dominance in the Middle East if we leave now. This cannot be allowed to happen.

Forget that the case has by no means been made that this worst-case scenario will come to pass. That is irrelevant. The question is now, as it was before the war, of whether or not we have the right; the right to escalate the war in Iraq against the wishes of its people and government, or the right to expand the war by attacking Iran.

When the fabrications that were the flimsy justification for the invasion of Iraq were made plain to all by the stunning lack of WMD ( vindicating the assertions of the IAEA), and by the copious documentation of Dick Cheney’s manipulation of the intelligence reporting process until the CIA coughed up the disgrace that is the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, the nation faced a crisis. The war was revealed as unwarranted and unjustified.

Had we been paying attention to all the lofty talk about how the consent of the governed validate its leadership in a democracy being offered as the basis for supplanting Middle East dictatorships with democracies, indeed, if the neocon’s who offer these arguments actually took them seriously, we, and they, would be forced to acknowledge that a democratic people therefore have a responsibility for the leaders they elect and the actions those leaders take. This one’s on us, always was.

But when the veil fell from the Administration’s connivance, we chose to avert our eyes. The other, ancillary justifications offered for deposing Saddam were all furtively moved up a spot. Like the disgraced subject of a Soviet show trial, the WMD/terrorist threat was erased from the offical history. It was never primarily about WMD became the line (and besides, everyone thought he had them, straight-faced). Such a blatant lie requires the complicity of its intended audience.
Why did we play along?
Holding our leaders accountable would have entailed acknowledging the thing for what it was: a national disgrace and a crime. Because there’s no entity more powerful than the United States, there is no one to hold its leadership accountable other than the sovereign American people.
When we took a pass we disgraced ourselves and damaged our republic in ways we won’t know for years to come.

By refusing to accept the consequences inherent in holding the White House accountable for the crime it committed against Iraq, not to mention against the American people, we leapt from a moral precipice. We were the world’s last line of defense against a criminal gang that had gained control of the most awesome military power the world has ever seen, and we deserted our post. The crisis passed with nary a whimper of protest from the vast majority of the public and the major media because at the moment the war had not yet revealed itself as the military and strategic failure that it is. Murderous aggression we can abide; losing, on the other hand, not so much. We should hang our heads in shame.

Now the vice president and his minions at Fox News, those in his ever loyal right-wing radio regiment, and of course the risibly oblivious-to-the-death (of others) war bloggers, have declared it is incumbent upon those who advocate a withdrawal to lay out what they would do to prevent the complete catastrophe that the vice president’s actions now make inevitable. They can’t see the absurdity of their argument for the audacity of their words.

I suppose it’s too much asking that this at least be accompanied by the acknowledgment that this greater cataclysm would be a direct result of the war, and therefore those who lied repeatedly to provoke the war before executing it with fatal negligence should be held responsible. That this isn’t the starting point of any debate on the now exigent question, what to do now, demonstrates how perverted public debate has become by party politics and our curious and durable pathology of triumphalism.
Our inability to acknowledge that we can do wrong as a nation now protects those who do wrong to the nation.
That this perversion of debate is allowed reveals a deeper, more fundamental crisis that goes beyond politics to the very condition of modern American society. We have to ask why we are letting them get away with it.

Dick Cheney makes an argument that is a direct condemnation of his actions, yet he makes it confident of its effectiveness. He’s right, too; the ruse is working. Worse, this rhetorical assault is deployed not merely to, remarkably, put off the responsibility it implies, but to further his designs for the next strategic blunder, war with Iran.
It’s as if the sheer surrealism of its amorality and audacity render us incapable of recognizing the logical madness of it. Some say Dick Cheney should be in jail; no, like a deranged serial killer, he should be confined for the purposes of psychological study for the rest of his distinctly unnatural existence. This man is not evil, he is a marvel.

Apparently yes, accountability is too much to ask for, because too few near power are asking. Aside from their own complicity in the fiasco, the Democratic leadership remains more committed to attaining power than justice on behalf of a nation disgraced and betrayed, and are therefore content to pass non-binding resolutions against the “surge” and watch the Administration twist in the wind while what’s left of its supporters fall one by one, like the soldiers and Marines who continue to be fed into the mill.
Make no mistake: for the next two years, and perhaps well beyond, many more American boys will be sacrificed not just for the purpose of Dick Cheney’s delusional designs on the Middle East, but also for the Democrats’ designs on the White House. But it goes beyond Iraq. Content to milk the catastrophe for maximum benefit, not unlike the Bush Administration’s previous wringing of advantage from 9/11, the Democrats are now allowing the nation to drift sideways into an even greater mistake, an attack upon Iran.

Perhaps we can at least put the question back to the vice president, just once: the responsibility is on those who support the surge and an open ended commitment to the war to make the argument as to why ending this mistake is itself a greater mistake. Because if one was to rely on the evening news he wouldn’t know that, like the case for Iranian arming of militias, the case that withdrawal will be catastrophic has not been made.

This bears repeating: there is no consensus that Iran is actively involved in arming the Shi’ite militias. Britain, having had responsibility for much of the southern, Shi’ite region of Iraq and its border with Iran, is not convinced. Furthermore, the idea that Iran is arming their enemies among those who directly target American forces, the Ba’athist/nationalist insurgency and al Qaeda,remains highly unlikely.

We can be certain that Iran is positioning itself for our departure and greater influence in Iraq precisely because this is in its national security interests. It is in fact such a predictable outcome of deposing Saddam that it’s very difficult to believe that it was unexpected, even by this chronically inept Administration. Of course, they had sugar-plum visions of rose petals and parades, a quick end to combat and on to the next victim-er, liberation. Who do you suppose that would have been?

President Bush’s hypocrisy in toying with an alliance with Iran’s closest ally in Iraq, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, whose own militia, the Badr Brigade, has been every bit as brutal as al-Sadr’s gang, while at the same time declaring Iran’s interest in Iraq sinister should be all the evidence you need that he is, once again, leading the nation to war on false pretenses.
Al-Hakim’s favor in our eyes, by the way, may stem from his willingness to allow permanent military bases and more generous terms regarding the development of Iraq’s great untapped oil fields. One more thing you’ll never learn from the evening news is that one of the primary concerns of Iraqis and their neighbors is the likelihood of a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq. Many have called on president Bush to allay these fears by promising not to seek such a presence. He has not been forthcoming.

Lost still is the principle involved; we still make no effort to discern, much less respect, the wishes of the Iraqi people or their government. Those much bally-hooed elections that Cheney et al seem to think warranted the deaths of thousands and the irrevocable loss of American prestige, not to mention the possible extension of the terrorist threat into the next generation, have in fact given Iraq a democratically elected government that we continue to restrain from actually governing and whose sovereignty we refuse to recognize. Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki begged the U.S. today to refrain from making Iraq the battleground for its war with Iran.
His plea also points out the arrogance of one of the tertiary rationalizations for the war offered after the WMD ruse was exposed: that a major goal was to make Iraq “an ally in the war on terror.” Imagine, we crushed this nation to compel it to act as our proxy in war. Check out the balls on us.

We must finally accept the principle of war only as a last resort. This includes Iran which, despite the absurd comparisons to Nazi Germany, hasn’t invaded any of its neighboring nations, and hasn’t shown a particular ability or willingness to do so, President Ahmadinejad’s demagoguery notwithstanding.
For us to paint Iran’s involvement in Iraq as aggression, after having declared “regime change” our official policy toward Iran, after having declared it a member of the “axis of evil”, after engaging in covert actions on its territory–in short, after having declared a state of war with that nation and quite possibly having engaged in acts of war against it–goes beyond arrogance into madness.

Of course Iran is positioning itself to influence Iraq; of course it is inserting itself into Iraqi politics and society. The fact is Iran would be derelict if they did not. Our arrogance, again, blinds us. Of the many brutal actions of Saddam Hussein, perhaps the most brutal was his war on Iran, encouraged and assisted by us. Iran, not the U.S., is threatened by a belligerent or chaotic Iraq and always has been, and there’s no need to fix intelligence to make that argument.

The fact is Iranian activity in Iraq is just the sort of result of toppling Hussein that should have been accounted for–and probably was. Iranian involvement in Iraq was provoked by our, yes, illegal invasion of Iraq. Everything set in motion by that crime must be laid at the feet of those who committed it, not used as justification for the continuation or expansion of what, as the man said, is worse than a crime, a mistake. Nor should it be cause for more and greater mistakes. Enough.
Citing Iranian involvement in Iraq now as a casus belli is little different than declaring the resistance in Iraq as the reason for the continuing occupation; it is a twisted circular reasoning, citing the effects of an action as its cause.

Let’s not let them get away with it again.

To counter Rousset and his like—and keep “progressive” intellectuals in line—Communist parties exercised the moral lever of “anti-Fascism.” This had the appeal of familiarity. For many Europeans their first experience of political mobilization was in the anti-Fascist, Popular-Front leagues of the 1930s. For most people the Second World War was remembered as a victory over Fascism, and celebrated as such in France and Belgium especially in the post-war years. “Anti-Fascism” was a reassuring, ecumenical link to a simpler time.
—Tony Judt, Postwar, A History of Europe Since 1945

*Per MQ in the comments, I see this might be better titled: “Read: ‘Islamo-fascism’ ”

An obnoxious, industrial version of what sounds like Wagner, reverberating at ear stinging volume and smothered by an overwhelming, testicle vibrating bass, has me cringing and cupping my hands over my ears. Ballerinas with shaved heads wearing brown shirts and fetishistic black leather tutus are flitting toward me (somehow they manage to glide gracefully in their high boots), their jeté movements resembling a goose-step; they are chasing me around a massive stage shrouded in an oppressive, garish black-light. I’m dodging in and out of other dancers that are scattered about the stage standing stock-still in arabesque postures modified to angle their arms in a Nazi salute.

A bald man with ashen gray skin and wearing an oversized monocle startles me by appearing via a trapdoor at my feet; he’s shouting at me, silent under the din of the music which is now distorting like an old, straining movie soundtrack. He’s trying to feed me a line of dialogue, repeating it over and over with increasing impatience, but I can’t hear him. Reading his disembodied black lips I can make no sense of them, I suspect he’s not even forming words. Still, I’m certain what he’s saying is something terrible, intolerable, vital; shaking his head in disgust he disappears with a resounding clap of the trapdoor that echoes until it morphs into a metallic drum machine sound that becomes part of the music, driving it to a manic, unbearable tempo.

I break into a full run, trying to maintain a straight path, figuring I’ll eventually find my way offstage, but soon become aware that I’m passing the same dancers over and over again. I realize the stage is a globe that I’m repeatedly circumnavigating; now I can see its curvature. I’m getting sick, I’m looking for the trapdoor, for a crack in the floorboards, for any means of escape. I look down and see I’m wearing leotards and jackboots. The music reaches an abbreviated crescendo and stops; a split second of silence is abruptly terminated by a thunderclap of deafening applause…