The Brunch Table

I think this interview with military historian Chalmers Johnson is exceptional. He basically argues that, at the end of World War II, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were left in superior but “unstable” positions relative to the traditional imperial powers of Europe and Asia. We both then proceeded to squander this temporary advantage through a series of unwise foreign and domestic policy decisions that, collectively, produced the resource-sapping Cold War:

“It’s not at all clear that we’ve won the Cold War. Probably, we and the U.S.S.R. lost it, but they lost it first and harder because they were always poorer than we were.”

This inspired me to go looking for other stuff on Johnson, which led me to a second, equally good article of his. Here, he elaborates on the same idea, arguing that we face a stark choice similar to that of the postwar British Empire. Heavily damaged by the Nazi invasion, Britain no longer had the resources to maintain military control over its colonies. It could either impose tyranny at home and extract the missing wealth from its own citizens–or it could voluntarily give up the empire, accept a reduction in its global influence, and use the dividends of peace to rebuild itself.

He quotes Hannah Arendt:

“On the whole [the British Empire] was a failure because of the dichotomy between the nation-state’s legal principles and the methods needed to oppress other people permanently. This failure was neither necessary nor due to ignorance or incompetence. British imperialists knew very well that ‘administrative massacres’ could keep India in bondage, but they also knew that public opinion at home would not stand for such measures. Imperialism could have been a success if the nation-state had been willing to pay the price, to commit suicide and transform itself into a tyranny. It is one of the glories of Europe, and especially of Great Britain, that she preferred to liquidate the empire.”

From a Guardian report on the strange and terrible career of Lt. Col. Jim Channon–Vietnam veteran, devout New Age Californian, and the man credited with the concept of torturing prisoners with loud music:

I tracked down a former Special Forces psychic spy to Hawaii. Glenn Wheaton, retired sergeant first class, was a big man with a tight crop of red hair and a Vietnam-vet-style handlebar moustache. He told me how in the mid-1980s Special Forces undertook a secret initiative, codenamed Project Jedi, to create super soldiers – soldiers with super powers. One such power was the ability to walk into a room and instantly be aware of every detail; that was level one.

Level two, he said, was intuition – making correct decisions. “Somebody runs up to you and says, ‘There’s a fork in the road. Do we turn left or do we turn right?’ And you go” – Glenn snapped his fingers – “We go right!”

“What was the level above that?” I asked.

“Invisibility,” said Glenn. “After a while we adapted it to just finding a way of not being seen.”

“What was the level above invisibility?” I asked.

“Uh,” said Glenn. He paused for a moment. “We had a master sergeant who could stop the heart of a goat … just by wanting the goat’s heart to stop. He did it at least once.”

“Where did this happen?” I asked.

“Down in Fort Bragg,” he said, “at a place called Goat Lab.”

I’ve sat out the entire four years of the Interregnum without passing on, much less generating, a single politically-motivated net petition, no matter how well-intentioned. Finally, I’ve found something that’s made me break with my principles.

It’s the Guardian’s Operation Clark County. It’s for non-U.S.-citizens only. Upon signing in, you’ll be given the postal address of a randomly-selected voter in Clark County, OH. You’re asked to send them an earnest plea to, er, support the candidate of your choice.

“In the spirit of the Declaration of Independence’s pledge to show ‘a decent respect to the opinions of mankind’, we have come up with a unique way for non-Americans to express your views on the policies and candidates in this election to some of the people best placed to decide its outcome. It’s not quite a vote, but it’s a chance to influence how a very important vote will be cast. Or, at the very least, make a new penpal…Be courteous. Remember that it’s unusual to receive a lobbying letter from someone in another country. Think about how you would respond if you received a letter from Ohio urging you to vote for Tony Blair – or Michael Howard…”

Holy shit. Thirty percent of Cleveland now below poverty line.

“‘One well-stocked 7-Eleven could knock out thirty Iraqi stores; a Wal-Mart could take over the country.’”

Here’s a sad article, by Naomi Klein, about the deluded CPA economists who expected to play John Galt in Iraq–designing a “model free market” for cities without a country, lacking reliable electricity and sewage.

Reminds me of the George Orwell line about economists needing an explanatory footnote for the concept of “hunger.”

“In December the union representing oil workers was negotiating with the Oil Ministry for a salary increase. Getting nowhere, the workers offered the ministry a simple choice: increase their paltry salaries or they would all join the armed resistance. They received a substantial raise…Workers fear job loss as a death sentence, and managers, in turn, fear their workers, a fact that makes privatization distinctly more complicated than the neocons foresaw.

“Bremer has failed these young men, and everywhere that he has failed, Moqtada al Sadr has cannily set out to succeed. In Shia slums from Baghdad to Basra, a network of Sadr Centers coordinate a kind of shadow reconstruction…the astronomical rise of the brand of religious fundamentalism that al Sadr represents is another kind of blowback from Bremer’s shock therapy: if the reconstruction had provided jobs, security, and services to Iraqis, al Sadr would have been deprived of both his mission and many of his newfound followers.

“…Hamid Jassim Khamis, the manager of the largest soft-drink bottling plant in the region, told me he can’t find any investors, even though he landed the exclusive rights to produce Pepsi in central Iraq. ‘A lot of people have approached us to invest in the factory, but people are really hesitating now.’ Khamis said he couldn’t blame them; in five months he has survived an attempted assassination, a carjacking, two bombs planted at the entrance of his factory, and the kidnapping of his son.”

This has already been on Slashdot, but I couldn’t help it:

“And so the “secret unlock code” during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at OOOOOOOO.”

It does say that they finally got around to changing their password in 1977.

According to RTmark’s website, they illegally arrested my favorite art professor from CMU last week. If I get the story right, he called the cops to his house for a plain medical emergency, but when they saw his science-lab performance props, they got spooked and believed they were at the scene of a chemical-weapons accident. And then they called Homeland…well, just watch the video.

I can buy the initial arrest being just scared people making an honest mistake (I mean, an Ebay screwup during the 2001 anthrax murders sent the Pittsburgh cops to my house in search of a “suspicious” He-Man doll from New Jersey)…but the escalation to federal criminal investigation is pretty damn shady, considering that the guy’s been a respected activist and organizer for decades.

I really, really hope this is just a big, elaborate prank.

(new mail)

No, it’s not.

So I finally found a picture of the new flag we gave Iraq. Josh Parsons, who rates the flags of the world by design sense, would probably grade it above ours–it wouldn’t look out of place in Star Trek movie–but that’s besides the point.

First off, the old Iraqi flag predates Saddam’s rule, and so replacing it announces some awfully sinister intentions. And second, the new flag has a crescent on it–an Ottoman symbol, not an Arabian one. Whoops.

I was going through some old files, and I found the political column I used to write for the school newspaper in college. A lot of them are a little silly now…except that a couple bits are really creepy. I will excerpt here…

Sep ’98, “Whose Good Is It Anyway?”

Today’s DEA can commit civil-rights violations (such as the confiscation of property, imprisonment without trial, and searches and arrests without a warrant) in broad daylight that used to have to be performed covertly, and a Good Samaritan law would only reinforce their highly questionable authority. For those of you who don�t feel personally threatened by the War on Drugs, this only one example of the potential abuses a such a law could lead to. What if the well-cultivated fear of “terrorism” filling the newspapers today evolved into a full-blown witch hunt a few years down the road?

Good thing that didn’t happen, I guess.

Oct ’98, “Two Birds, 75 Cruise Missiles”

Was the Afghan target a real terrorist base? Or was it a regular army training camp? Was the alleged Sudanese chemical-weapons factory only a pharmaceutical plant? Were the chemical byproducts that our intelligence agents cited as proof of evildoing actually traces of an innocuous antiseptic?

I actually said “evildoing.” Okay, and here’s the big one.

Jan ’99, “Bombing Baghdad”

I realized that I didn’t know very much at all about the people we were killing some ten thousand miles away. The next day, our local paper (the Herald-Dispatch of Huntington, West Virginia) crowed that “Iraq is Desperate,” running a gleeful tally of the destruction caused by the latest bombardment that listed military and civilian targets alike. And I wondered if that had been the purpose of the attack–to provoke desperation in a country that may or may not have the capability to strike back at us on our own soil.

I’ve got the full text here if you want to read on:

(more…)

Putain, c’est la guerre!

When I first heard the news of our latest victory, I was listening to the Chicago soundtrack:

He had strength and she had none. And yet we both reached for the gun Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes we both Oh yes we both…

It’s awful cynical of me, but it took maybe a minute or two for me to stop laughing.

I won’t believe they’re really dead till I see it on the Iraqometer.

While most of the accusations in the report are still under investigation, the report said a handful had been substantiated, including those against a federal prison doctor who was reprimanded after reportedly telling an inmate–

Hold on a sec. What’s so frightening about this next bit is, it sounds like the doctor just says this offhand. Like, he’s quietly scribbling some notes on his clipboard, and then he looks up:

–after reportedly telling an inmate during a physical examination that “if I was in charge, I would execute every one of you” because of “the crimes you all did.”

“Kennedy Kirk Krist.” One of Dick Cheney’s oil-magnate pals is actually named Kennedy Kirk Krist.

Dear Lord.

This morning, I talked to my stepbrother on the phone; he told me that “they” found an exploded North Korean missile in the Alaskan outback. I went to my window, but I didn’t hear the screams of any fighter jets taking off from L.A. Air Force Base (I bet they stencil that name in pink cursive script). So I calmly turned to Google to settle things.

By the way, if I understand right, any missile that exceeds the specs for “short-range” becomes a “long-range missile”–there’s no “medium” class. Iraq, for example, has long-range missiles that can travel all of 20 miles farther than the short-range limit. (That’s not far enough to reach Israel, in case anybody was wondering.) Anyway, back to the North Korean menace:

“The only test of a longer range missile occurred in August 1998, when the three-stage Taepo Dong 1 (TD-1) missile was launched in an attempt to place a small satellite in orbit. This effort was not successful due to a failure of the missile’s third stage…the missile cannot be considered operational without further testing…Even if the TD-1 were successfully tested in the future, it would have limited capability and could at best deliver a small payload as far as Alaska or Hawaii…Moreover, North Korea has not flight tested a reentry heat shield for a long-range missile, and would need to do so before it could use it to deliver a warhead.”

Of course, the Alaskan press takes this a bit more seriously.

Google News makes it much easier to find interesting news coverage from around the world, which is (unfortunately for us) often more comprehensive than the American coverage. For example, most U.S. news outlets only gave brief excerpts of Bush’s press conference last night; over in the U.K., The Guardian printed the full transcript. There were many good questions, and few satisfying answers. For example:

Question: … If all these nations, all of them our normal allies, have access to the same intelligence information, why is it that they are reluctant to think that the threat is so real, so imminent that we need to move to the brink of war now? …

Bush: … You asked about sharing of intelligence, and I appreciate that, because we do share a lot of intelligence with nations which may or may not agree with us in the security council as to how to deal with Saddam Hussein and his threats. We have got roughly 90 countries engaged in Operation Enduring Freedom, chasing down the terrorists.

We do communicate a lot, and we will continue to communicate a lot. We must communicate. We must share intelligence; we must share — we must cut off money together; we must smoke these al-Qaida types out one at a time. It’s in our national interest, as well, that we deal with Saddam Hussein.

But America is not alone in this sentiment. There are a lot of countries who fully understand the threat of Saddam Hussein. A lot of countries realise that the credibility of the security council is at stake — a lot of countries, like America, who hope that he would have disarmed, and a lot of countries which realise that it may require force — may require force — to disarm him.

He’s full of al-Qaeda non-sequiturs, but never actually answers the question, other than to say that there are “a lot of countries” that believe Iraq is a threat. (They must not be important ones, if the administration has been trying to entice the likes of Angola and Cameroon with promises of aid.) If the U.S. actions are in the right, why is it such a hard sell to the rest of the world?

Also: transcript analysis, and 13 questions that should’ve been asked.

In this interesting essay, John Perry Barlow examines the possibility that the U.S. government may be acting like “the Mother of All Rogue States, run by mad thugs in possession of 15,000 nuclear warheads they are willing to use” in order to scare the rest of the world into behaving.

I don’t care if you think that they’re naive, ignorant of the realpolitik, whatever–I still find myself in awe when I look at these pictures of people in cities all over the world coming together last weekend to voice the same opinion.