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Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Continuing along as I dig through my old notebooks for jazz reviews. Here's my post from April 11, 2003, noting what turned out to be the high point of American triumphalism for the entire Iraq misadventure:

There was a period back in the Afghanistan war when the Northern Alliance started reeling off a quick series of victories -- not so much that they were defeating the Taliban in confrontations as that the Taliban was high-tailing it out of the cities, allowing Herat, Kabul, and Kandahar to fall in quick succession. The hawks then made haste to trumpet their victory and to dump on anyone who had doubted the US in this war. Back then, I referred to those few weeks as "the feel good days of the war." Well, we had something like that in Iraq, too, except that use of the plural now seems unwarranted. So mark it on your calendar, Wednesday, April 9, 2003, was the feel good day of the Iraq war. The collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime has proceeded apace, but there seems to be much less to feel good about. One big thing was the killing of the bigwig shia collaborators that the US started to promote, combined with the unwillingness of other shia bigwigs to collaborate. One of the problems with this is that it suggests that the US, as always, is looking for religious leaders to control the people -- which in turn threatens to roll back the one thing Saddam had going for his regime, which was that it was strongly secular. The fact is, you want to introduce something resembling liberal democracy in Iraq, you have to promote secularism. (Of course, given the contempt that Bush has for liberal democracy in the US, it's hard to believe that he really wants that.)

Bigger still is the whole looting thing, as well as mob reprisals against Baath leaders, which threaten to turn into the much predicted Iraqi-on-Iraqi warfare. The looting itself basically means that what infrastructure the US somehow managed not to destroy will be taken down by Iraqi mobs. The likelihood that those mobs are anything other than just isolated hoodlums is small, but collectively the damage that they inflict is likely to be huge. And given how unlikely it is that the US, its allies, and the rest of the world who were so blatantly disregarded in this whole affair, are to actually pay for anything resembling real reconstruction, this is just digging an ever deeper hole. While right now, given that their is still armed (if not necessarily organized) resistance to the US, it's hard to see how the US could keep order even if it wants to (which is to say the least a mixed proposition), but failure to do so is already setting the US up as responsible for the looting, and adding to the already huge responsibility that the US bears for the current and future misery of the Iraqi people. And when the US does start to enforce order, what is bound to happen? More dead Iraqis. And who's responsible for that? The US. If this had just happened out of the blue, I might be a bit sympathetic, but this is exactly what we had predicted as the inevitable given the US course of action.

So happy last Wednesday. That's very likely to be the last one for a long time now.

Also found this letter from April 15, 2003, also on the looting of Baghdad:

The more I read about how archaeologists and other scholars warned the US military about the very real risks that invasion and occupation posed to the libraries and museums of Iraq, the more clear it is why those warnings were ignored: they came from people who disapproved of the war. One of the major problems with this war was that it wasn't something, like Pearl Harbor or even 9/11, that happened and panicked the US into action; it was a program that was concocted inside the government and hard-sold to the public. And one of the most telling effects of the hard-sell is that the people who were selling it, so convinced were they that it was the right thing to do, put blinders on themselves to any argument, no matter how reasoned, not to proceed with their program. And since warnings about dire consequences were reasons not to do it, they were ignored. This is, I think, what happens when someone falls so in love with their ideas that they are unwilling to subject them to critical analysis. And when they crack the whip so hard to force their dreams on a world that turned out to be very skeptical. It is worth noting that this simplistic hard-sell approach to what are often very complex problems has become endemic in US political discourse, and that it has largely driven open, consensus-building discussions underground. It has also led to a preoccupation with winning arguments over solving problems, and the especially insidious tactic of winning arguments by "creating facts on the ground." The libraries and museums of Baghdad are the tragic results of this deterioration of political discourse, and by no means the only ones. The Bush Administration seems to have realized that the only way they could proceed with their war would be to discount or ignore its probable consequences, just as they realized that they would have to lie about why they wanted this war. And now that they've succeeded, it will take all of the arrogance and blindness they can summon to deny what they have wrought. Unless we can manage to break out of their psychology, we're bound for a lot more tragedy.

Earlier in April I pulled out a terrific quote from Gerald Colby's Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, pointing out that back in the 1950s Rockefeller advocated an accelerated arms race in an attempt to bankrupt the Soviet Union. Rockefeller certainly knew a thing or two about the advantages businessmen with deep pockets have, and this alone pretty much explains the next 35 years of the Cold War. I also posted a note comparing America's experiences in Vietnam and Iraq, where I wrote:

The biggest difference between Vietnam and Iraq is that in Vietnam we were defending a fraud, whereas now we're attacking a phantom. The latter, of course, is easier: it's much easier to demonize Saddam Hussein than it was to make Ngo Dinh Diem, trained and deployed and propped up by the CIA, look like a patriot. . . . What they do have in common is the inevitable resistance of people against foreign occupiers, and the contempt that U.S. leaders have both for dealing honestly with their own citizens and for the people of the other countries that they try to bully and, in fits of rage, to destroy.

Back in summer 2003 before it all turned to shit, someone "in the Bush administration" coined the saying, "anyone can go to Baghdad; real men go to Tehran." Sen. Sam Brownback took the bait and introduced a bill to "destabilize" Iran. (Not that we didn't count him as a "real man" before -- you could tell from the way he treated women.) The Wichita Eagle explained: "Using the same philosophy that drove the war in Iraq, the Kansas senator is leading a drive for new leadership for its eastern neighbor." This prompted me to write a letter (June 23, 2003), again explaining the obvious:

Poor Senator Brownback. I hate to pick on someone so obviously suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder, but his Iran Democracy Act is nothing more than a rerun of the same mistakes that we made with Iraq. When Congress voted to make regime change in Iraq national policy, they started us down the road to the still smoldering war there. That road was paved with lies and fantasies, and anyone who's taken the time to notice has been struck by the growing chasm between reality and the hawks' expectations. But obviously Brownback hasn't noticed anything: he's off stalking bigger, more dangerous game.

The basic fact is that over the last fifty years the U.S. has done nothing at all right by Iran. We say we want to promote democracy in Iran today, but in the early '50s the CIA overthrew the democratically elected Mossadegh government, immediately resulting in U.S. oil companies getting control of most of Iran's oil. The U.S. then installed the megalomaniacal Shah Pahlevi, sold him arms, and trained his vicious security police; the Shah eventually became so unpopular that every segment of the Iranian people revolted against him, a tumultuous revolution that was in the end dominated by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Then the U.S. and its oil sheikh allies in the Persian Gulf encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Iran, a horrendously bloody eight-year war leaving perhaps a million Iranian casualties. So what in this history makes Brownback think that Iran needs any more U.S. help?

The only people in Iran likely to benefit from a deluge of American propaganda are the ayatollahs, who are certain to use this to reinforce the case that only they can protect Iran from evil foreigners and the misguided citizens who inadvertently provide aid and comfort to the enemy. But then that's the same line used by Sharon in Israel and by Bush here: sabre-rattling is, after all, a time-tested recipe for keeping despots in power despite their incompetence. Maybe Brownback feels his own career needs a little sabre-rattling as well? (After all, while Wichita's economy has been collapsing, he's spent most of his time railing against cloning.) But if by chance he really does want to do something to undermine the ayatollahs in Iran, here's what he should do: support international programs to promote women's rights in Iran and throughout the world, including birth control and abortion. That is, after all, where the ayatollahs are most vulnerable. Too bad the same thing can be said about Brownback.

From November 12, 1963:

Quote from John McCain: "We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight . . ." Come on! We lost the will to fight because we lost the fucking war. Throughout history, that's about the only thing that has ever stifled the will to fight. He goes on, ". . . because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal." Not sure what he thinks the "nature of the war" was, but the following clause suggests that we could have won if only we had used nuclear weapons. Was there anything else we didn't use in Vietnam? In Vietnam we destroyed villages in order to save them. Is McCain saying that our failure in Vietnam was that we didn't kill them all?

Vietnam was first and last a war about America's self-image as a world power. At first, it was about the US checking communist revolution and expansionism, which in the eyes of a great power was naturally attributed to the machinations of other great powers, e.g. the Soviet Union. In the end, it was about how the US might salvage, in the wake of defeat, its status as a world power, so that it might be able to check further communist revolutions and expansionism. In between, American politicians uttered a lot of hooey about freedom and helping the Vietnamese and so forth, but in cold hard fact that war was always about us.

The Iraq War, indeed the entire Global War on Terror, was about us too: specifically, America's self-conception of its superpowers. What bothered America's "leaders" about 9/11 had nothing to do with the death or destruction -- we willing suffer ten times as many gun deaths each year and far more damage in major hurricanes -- and everything to do with smacking down the impudence to test American power. After all, if we don't do so, today's loss will only be the first of many dominos to fall.

Tempted to quote the post from February 24, 2004, describing a Dick Cheney's fundraising appearance in Wichita, where he spent 30 minutes and raised $250k. The report noted that his security costs to the state of Kansas were $120k, not counting the disruptions from shutting down the airport and the main highway into town, nor his own travel costs and security detail. Sure makes it seem like public funding of elections would be more cost effective, not to mention that it would remove the aura of corruption that surrounds the entire process. Further down I reported:

U.S. Rep. Todd Tiahrt, the village idiot of Goddard KS, managed to get an op-ed piece into the Eagle today. One line in particular dropped my jaw: "Tax relief, according to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, helped pull the economy out of the Clinton recession." Just try to tear that sentence apart: "tax relief" refers to Bush's tax cuts, which were proposed when the economy was booming and the rationale was to reduce the surplus. "Clinton's recession" must have been a diabolical scheme: what other politician has ever managed to create a recession that only started once his successor was ensconced in office? But have we really pulled out of that recession? One thing you can count on is that the moment Greenspan thinks that we're out of the recession woods is that he'll raise interest rates. But has that happened? Not that I've noticed.

I wish my subsequent analysis had been smarter, but I gave too much credit to the "logic" of tax cuts as stimulus and didn't yet fully realize that giving rich people more money to "invest" only increased their appetites for asset bubbles and other predatory practices. In hindsight, we now that's pretty much all that happened in the "boom years" under Bush. (OK, I suppose you could add deficit war spending and a huge run up in oil prices due to shortages caused by those wars, but the former mostly moved money abroad to be burned up, and the latter just enriched the oil barons, again mostly abroad.)

On March 21, 2004, I assessed the Iraq War a year after Bush launched it. As I noted, "Bush is still marching blithely into the unknown, and he's dragging us with him." I couldn't offer a comprehensive analysis, but did jot down a list of bullet points, including "It is clear now that the US/UK case for going to war against Iraq was founded on [little more than] arrogance and ignorance, and presented as [nothing more than] a blatant list of lies." (I'm tempted today to edit out the bracketed words.) Another point:

The US occupation of Iraq has been remarkably incompetent. Planning for the occupation was somewhere between non-existent and delusional. The initial chaos that allowed extensive looting shattered any prospect that the US might be powerful enough to conduct an orderly transformation of Iraq's political economy. For political reasons, the US also chose not to do the obvious thing, which was to keep existing Iraqi governmental agencies intact and rule through them. Abolishing the army and police forces fed the resistance, while belatedly forcing the US to reconstruct its own Iraqi army and police forces. The resistance itself soon attained a sufficient level of activity to force the US occupiers to hide behind their security barricades, disconnecting from the people they allegedly came to liberate. By failing to hold elections, the US never made an effort to establish a legitimate Iraqi political presence.

On March 12, 2004, I wrote a fair amount about the 1953 CIA coup in Iran -- the subject of Stephen Kinzer's All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror -- and concluded with this note on the leading Democratic candidate to challenge Bush in 2004 (although it would have been equally valid for virtually any possible Democratic nominee, especially the then-junior senator from New York):

The great worry that we have about Kerry as the next Democratic US President is that he is so wed to the past verities of US imperial foreign policy that he will -- like Clinton, Carter, Johnson, and Kennedy before him -- continue the same vicious policies, albeit just a shade less maniacally than G.W. Bush. That continuity has always happened because the rhetoric has always favored the tough guys -- the badass Republicans. (Reality is another thing: although Reagan based much of his 1980 campaign on attacking Carter for giving away the Canal Zone, when Bush finally did invade Panama he didn't make a move to reclaim the Canal Zone. Reagan's charges were merely that Carter was soft; Bush's non-action just shows us that Carter made a concession that realistically had to be made, and that no amount of obtuseness could reverse.) It seems obvious that Bush has finally proven just how bankrupt those policies are, but Kerry seems to feel that the real problem is not Bush's arrogance or ignorance, but his incompetence. After all, incompetence has long been the Achilles heel of Republican foreign policy, but if that's all you attack them for, you can never break out of their rhetorical straightjacket. It's clear that Kerry hasn't: instead of attacking the very idea of a "war on terrorism" he attacks Bush's bungling execution of it. Sure, there's lots to attack there, but if the very project is intrinsically flawed -- and it is -- no amount of competence can fix it. Only a new worldview can do that.

From April 24, 2004, following a note on Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, which identifies Bush and Ashcroft as not that far removed from the religious conceits of the book's killers:

One of my more/less constant themes has been how we've become prisoners of our rhetoric. What I've tried to do above is to sketch out the conceptual model of how this has happened. We live in a world where we as individuals are profoundly powerless, even in the cases where we are mostly free to direct our own personal lives. Such freedom usually depends on the tacit accepteance of powerlessness: people are free to mind their own business, because it doesn't make any real difference to others, least of all the elites (who are at most relatively powerful, by virtue of their ability to manipulate symbols that are broadly acquiesced to -- religion, patriotism, material wealth, ideologies like capitalism, abstract concepts like freedom and democracy, tyranny and terrorism, mere character traits like toughness, resolve, fortitude). And such freedom is for most people quite satisfying, as is the sense of belonging to a well-ordered society. But some people are unsatisfied with the status quo: they want to test the limits of their freedom, they start to question the ordering of society. Most such people were driven to want to change the world by perceived wrongs done them. But some are driven more by an exaggerated sense of their own self-importance: Ron and Dan Lafferty, believing that they were chosen by God to do his work, are simple and pathetic examples.

Where George W. Bush differs from the Laffertys is not so much in his self-conception as in his support network. Bush is a rare example of a self-possessed activist, a fanatic, raised to a position of extraordinary political power. Yet his possession of that power -- one built on the wealth of his political backers, on the cadres of the Republican party, on the institutional power of the U.S. presidency, on the symbols of American military might -- in no way changes the fact that he dwells within the limits of his personal universe. He can't see beyond those limits, which leaves him mostly at the mercy of his own mental baggage -- a world haunted by a God who metes out violence, and by a Karl Rove who vouchsafes that it is politically safe. With his support network, and with our acquiescence (or more likely out powerlessness), his mental paroxysms have can have immense impact. Never in American history has such a dangerous person been put into such a dangerous position.

At present, Donald Trump is vying for precisely this claim. And while he strikes one as a far less devout person, the entitlement he feels by virtue of his class, wealth, and celebrity (not to mention race and sex) seems to elevate him beyond any shred of self-doubt -- a common trait of mad would-be emperors throughout history.

From April 15, 2004, in response to Sharon's plan to unilaterally withdraw Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip (something flacks like Dennis Ross praised as a step toward peace):

But most importantly, Sharon's plan is unilateral: it in no way depends on agreement with any Palestinians; it doesn't acknowledge the Palestinians; it doesn't provide any framework for Palestine to go about the business of rebuilding and healing. The future status of Gaza is what? It is effectively separated from Israel, separated from the West Bank, separated from the Palestinian Authority, but in no way does it become an independent entity. In its assassinations of Sheikh Yassin and many others, Israel has shown that it has no qualms about firing at will. Will this in any way change? Without recognition and agreement, without a plan and process to turn Gaza into a viable, self-sustaining territory, Gaza will continue to be a security threat to Israel, and Israel will continue to treat Gaza as a mob-infested shooting gallery. All that Israel's removal of its outposts there does is to remove the weak spots in the containment and isolation, the strangulation, of Gaza. This is an eery reminder of the myth that Israel propagated to explain the refugee flight of 1947-49: that the Arabs had told the Palestinians to leave Israeli territory so that when the Arabs marched through an anihilated the Israelis, they wouldn't be caught in the crossfire. This is hard to conceive of, but the presence of Israeli settlers in Gaza has at least been one significant inhibition against Israel attacking Gaza with genocidal weapons.

In the months that followed, Israel made great sport out of flying at supersonic speeds over Gaza, rattling houses with sonic booms -- a practice they only gave up when nearby Israeli towns complained. In the years that followed, Israel launched one major military assault after another on Gaza, as well as hundreds of more limited bombing runs and cannon fire. Meanwhile, Gaza was bottled up, its borders frequently sealed, while the economy atrophied.

Found this forgotten item on May 13, 2004, reminding us that US confusion over and participation in Syria's civil war goes back well before Arab Spring:

The news got burried under the other scandals, but Bush picked another war this week, when the U.S. announced that it was unilaterally imposing a wide range of sanctions on Syria, including freezing Syrian assets held in U.S. banks. The reason given was inadequate vigilance by Syria in terms of preventing "foreign fighters" from infiltrating Iraq. (I still bet that more than 95% of the foreign fighters in Iraq come from the U.S./U.K.) But it is a clear escalation of the rhetoric of demonization that the U.S. lays in advance of hotter wars. There are prominent neocons who make no secret about their desire to take the war to Syria, so this is a victory for them. It also aids Sharon in that it is one more excuse (as if he needed any) to ignore the requirement that Israel withdraw from Syrian lands occupied since 1967. Cooperation between Bush and Israel over Syria was demonstrated most clearly when the U.S. applauded after Israel bombed Syria last summer, in alleged retalliation for a suicide bombing that had nothing whatsoever to do with Syria. . . .

Like all acts of war, sanctions are a failure of diplomacy. As the U.S. occupation of Iraq has soured, the U.S. finds itself driven to ever more desperate acts, and those acts can only serve to isolate, embitter, and impoverish us further.

I've run across several obituaries in the notebook so far, most memorably for my cousin Bob Burns and our friend Bob Ashley. On June 6, 2004, I wrote this one about people I didn't know personally:

A great man died yesterday: Steve Lacy pioneered and exemplified the avant-garde in jazz -- in particular, the notion that the new music doesn't evolve from the leading edge so much as it transcends all of the music that came before it. He was the first postmodernist in jazz, and he explored the music (Monk above all) and developed it in novel ways over 45 years of superb records. Ronald Reagan also died yesterday: he was a sack of shit who in his "what, me worry?" way destroyed far more than Lacy built. To describe Reagan as the intellectual forefather of George W. Bush is just sarcasm; for both ideas were nothing more than excuses for wielding power not just to vanquish the weak or to favor the strong but to bask in its own glory. Ideas, of course, did flower up around Reagan, as they do around Bush -- really bad ideas.

At the time my take on the Reagan administration was that they were responsible for [making] fraud the biggest growth industry in the U.S. By the end of Reagan's second term almost every department of the U.S. government was awash in corruption scandals: despite all of the talk, the administration's most evident real program was to steal everything in sight. But ultimately the talk did matter. At the time there was much talk about a "Reagan Revolution" -- oblivious to the fact that the only right-wing revolutions in memory led to the triumph of the Fascists and Nazis, to WWII and the Holocaust. Those are big boots to goosestep in, and it's taken a while to fill them.

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