I'M CONFUSED

Diplo-speak is very hard to figure (see the post on Syria).

TIMOTHY GARTEN ASH ON IRAQ

In the Guardian: "America on Probation" (via The War in Context). From the end:

There's a lot of talk these days about America's new empire. But the biggest danger is not American imperialism; it's American inconstancy. On the very day victory is declared, President Bush turns the spotlight back to tax cuts. His political adviser Karl Rove is presumably telling him that he'll never win the election on foreign policy.

And so Iraq fades from the screens. Like a wounded giant, America struck out after the September 11 attacks - first at al-Qaida in Aghanistan, then at Iraq. But soon, true to form, the wounded giant retreats to his distant home, muttering "It's the economy, stupid". The neoconservative ideologues of democratic imperialism, to whom we pay so much attention in Europe, are sidelined.

America has never been the Great Satan. It has sometimes been the Great Gatsby: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness..."

One of Britain's jobs as America's best friend, but a task also for all the Europeans gathered at the Acropolis yesterday, is to keep reminding Tom and Daisy that they now have promises to keep.

Only after these questions have been answered about American involvement in Iraq will it really be prudent to draw the lines in our moral and prudential calculations.

DISAPPEARING BUSH AND SKOWCROFT [oops!] ARTICLE

Thank God for paper and ink. Read this post, and accompanying article, at The Memory Hole (link via cursor). Time magazine used to have an article in the March 2 1998 edition entitled "Why we didn't remove Saddam," and written by Bush, Sr. and Brent Skowcroft. Now the electronic evidence of such an article has been erased from their website. Go ahead: try searching for it at Time's site, which you can access at this link. Creepy.

It's not that there's anything particularly troubling in the article itself, except for Bush and Skowcroft's unwaivering sense that invasion and occupation of Iraq would have been a bad idea:

We were disappointed that Saddam's defeat did not break his hold on power, as many of our Arab allies had predicted and we had come to expect. President Bush repeatedly declared that the fate of Saddam Hussein was up to the Iraqi people. Occasionally, he indicated that removal of Saddam would be welcome, but for very practical reasons there was never a promise to aid an uprising. While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome.
[. . .]
The Gulf War had far greater significance to the emerging post-cold war world than simply reversing Iraqi aggression and restoring Kuwait. Its magnitude and significance impelled us from the outset to extend our strategic vision beyond the crisis to the kind of precedent we should lay down for the future. From an American foreign-policymaking perspective, we sought to respond in a manner which would win broad domestic support and which could be applied universally to other crises. In international terms, we tried to establish a model for the use of force. First and foremost was the principle that aggression cannot pay. If we dealt properly with Iraq, that should go a long way toward dissuading future would-be aggressors. We also believed that the U.S. should not go it alone, that a multilateral approach was better. This was, in part, a practical matter. Mounting an effective military counter to Iraq's invasion required the backing and bases of Saudi Arabia and other Arab states.

I'm not saying that Bush I was right and Bush II is wrong; I'm not decided on any of this, although as I've made clear, I'm not sure that this war was a good idea, and I'm not sure about the first Gulf War either. There are a lot of things I need to know about both to be clear on either. But go read the rest of the article, at any rate. The fact that Time-Warner doesn't want you to should be reason enough to do so.

Needless to say, this episode in Time's apparent retrospective self-censorship highlights one of the dangers of a world of total digital information storage, but also the sheer difficulty of annihilating information (if that's what Time wanted to do) in an age of easy access to the internet. I also found the article on Infotrac through SUNY-Oswego's library. I hope that there is also a paper copy somewhere within reach. . .

UPDATE: They seem to be having major web-related problems with their articles database over at Time.com, so perhaps there really is nothing sinister here at all. Who knows. The archives search on their site is all screwed up; I just tried several searches and still couldn't find the article. Perhaps the searches just target a description of the article, which would be very silly since the content of that description may not match up with whatever keywords you're looking for (including title and authors). But the fact that the article disappeared from the digital table of contents from the original issue in which it appeared (see the article at memory hole again) is weird. Digital glitch and crappy database or corporate self-censorhip? You decide.

MORE: As Eric is kind enough to point out, I spelled Scowcroft's name wrong. OOPS! As a testimony to my less-than-stellar abilities here, I have left the original spelling in the original posts (this will also serve as a personal reminder for the future). Searches at Time, this time with the correct author, still didn't turn up the article.

MEMORIES, HAIKU, EXORCISM

Today, in my class on the constitution during wartime, I felt that we had a good discussion and that ultimately teaching makes sense; one student articulated an unlimited conception of presidential war power, another a conception of judicial enforcement of congressional war power, and many were in between and on other places in the war powers matrix. The discussion was heated, but respectful. The cases (Mitchell v. Laird, Holtzman, and Dellums) were interesting, subtle, and significant. A good way to end the week.

While I'm feeling good here: apparently my effort to rid myself of some civil liberties demons last weekend by imprisoning them behind numerically constructed syllabic bars bore some fruit elsewhere: recollection of those "bright college years" in Yale's Directed Study program (Josh Cherniss, link via Oxblog), and recollections of care packages and family holidays (Yale Pundit's "Haikus for Jews," no permalinks). If you're not Josh Chafetz, and these lines are not enough for you, see also the venerable presidential haiku site, which bills itself as the "worlds most trusted site for presidential haikus," and I am sure that is not false advertising. Via Diphthong.

BACK IN ACTION

The RNC has put me back on their e-mail list. HA! I've looked for the word "deficit" in both of the last two mailings (both focused on the tax cut), but, strangely, it does not appear. How about that.

THE PERILS OF ABSTRACTION

Today's Tagesspiegel notes the reaction of archeologists and Iraq-specialists to the looting of the Baghdad National Museum. The article is based mostly on an interview with Margarete van Ess from the German Archaeological Institute. A page on their website gives the same kind of message as the Tagesspiegel article: it's not clear what has been lost and experts should go to the region quickly to take stock of the situation.

The article does note that the Lions from Tell Harmal were beheaded, as were some of the statues from Hatra; the article notes also that journalists filming the aftermath of the looting were walking through shards of ancient pottery.

Some of the commentary on the looting seems to presume that items were primarily removed intact. John Derbyshire's NRO article for example, argues that the materials are not Iraqi cultural heritage anyway; they belong to humanity and hence we should be happy that they were taken out of a politically unstable (or, in Derbyshire's term, barbaric) region. Whatever. This story is depressing enough without people engaging in going-against-the-grain, self-promoting, cheap-shot editorials. Derbyshire has to ignore the actual destruction that took place for his argument to make any sense. At any rate, Derbyshire's argument shows the logical conclusion of one strand of the abstract argument that the "interests of humanity" are fulfilled by particular instances of cruelty and destruction. Kevin Drum is right to call Derbyshire's argument imperialist.

MORE OF HEIDI'S WORK

HERE's another work of Heidi's (with Steve). It was in the DeCordova Museum's "Lighten Up" exhibit a few years ago. Check out this one from Todd McKie: "It's OK, he's French." And for the legal-minded: Tom Otterness's brilliant bronze statue group, "The Trial Scene." It's a little hard to see what's going on here, but the defendant is a cat and the jury is composed of a rat, a dog, a mole (I think) and a bird. The prosecutor is a dog. There's a feather in the cat's mouth, too, I think.

ARIZONA POLITICS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF AZTEC CULTURE

If you're feeling enough courage to face the nastiness of anti-gay political arguments in one of the nation's fastest growing states (!!), read this column by Molly Ivins (link via Sisyphus Shrugged).

Ugly.

One claim caught my eye in particular, though:

The author of these novel ideas concerning homosexuality was state Rep. Barbara Blewster, R-Dewey, who explained that throughout history, cultures that have embraced homosexuality have also embraced bestiality, human sacrifice and cannibalism. She pointed to the Aztec culture at the time of the Spanish conquest as an example. Blewster also said that history repeats itself and that the Ten Commandments are still relevant.

I recently had a conversation with my sister (see one of her works here) about a professor at SMFA named Eulogio Guzman, who argues that our view of Aztec human sacrifice is more a product of specific Spanish colonial requests for portrayals of human sacrifice than actual Aztec practice. The argument is that the visual depictions of the Aztecs that we have are a product of what the Spanish wanted to see and what they actually requested from the artists that they got to produce works representing Aztec religious practice.

I've looked for some work in this direction online, but haven't found much yet. An interesting thesis. I doubt that Rep. Blewster would really care, though.

JAZZ IS DEAD

See this sad story on the BBC. (No, it's not a link to Adorno-inspired criticism, but a reference to this story.)

SOLUM ON JUDICIAL SELECTION

In the middle of the continuing drama of the Democrats' high-profile fight with Bush and his party over judicial nominations, Legal Theory blog tries to bring some clarity to the overall situation. Read the latest in a series (internally linked) here.

For Solum, there are two basic solutions to the judicial selection controversy: what he calls "moderation" (meaning the selection of politically moderate judges) and "neoformalism" (the selection of judges who have "judicial virtues"). Solum is interested in the predictable long-term consequences of the selection of either type of appellate judges, and his argument has a strong normative component.

Take a look at his argument. I'm still interested in the question primarily from the side of political incentives of members of Congress, the kinds of rules necessary to produce a normatively desirable and practical nominations process, and the analogy with bureaucratic design, although I agree with Solum that normative orientation is imperative. And I would want to specify in more detail what kinds of judiciary we'll get with either of Solum's categories.

If you want to read one of the best political science papers I've read in the past few years that bears on this subject, go to Perry and Powe's The Two Parties' Constitutions, presented at APSA last year. Particularly if you're intrigued by Solum's concept of the "political center" on the court and how that would play itself out in political life, you should think about this paper's claim that the political positions that party actors would tolerate as "the center" on the courts does not match up well with what "the center" means in legal culture terms.

GARNER AGAIN

Name of Blog (via Sisyphus Shrugged) claims that Garner's quote (Bush could have won in Vietnam) shows that Garner is either an "absolute idiot or a shameless shameless sycophant," and then makes a Christian mythology reference that I only thought about after I was safe in bed and 2 miles away from a computer last night--actually, my thought was "Bush walks on water, too" plus the warning from Egon Bahr on Sloterdijk and Safranski's TV show that "American trees don't reach heaven [den Himmel], either".

But Garner is also producing a line that has at least three sources: 1) the arguments made about Vietnam itself by many hawks and military types, during the conflict itself, 2) the arguments made by contemporary Republicans like Lott in praise of GWB's resoluteness, or faith, or something, and 3) the institutional self-confidence of a career bureaucrat. 3) is probably the most interesting. In and of itself, it's not a bad thing to have bureaucrats who believe in the ultimate rightness of what they're doing. Otherwise administration would be wholly inefficient and pointless. The problem is that the mistakes in Vietnam were probably produced, in part, by that sense of rightness. What's needed is a political check on the internal self-evidence of the rightness of bureaucratic power. And we are certainly entitled to wonder whether or not Garner's stance here will indicate a blindness that could be embarrassing, dangerous, and counterproductive to what democratic or humanitarian supporters of Bush have hoped would emerge from this conflict.

DUERRENMATT

My fiction / literature / non-policy / non-historical reading over the past few years has been concentrated on a few authors: Chuck Pahlanuik, Richard Dooling, Elmore Leonard (thanks, John!), John Le Carre, and Friedrich Duerrenmatt. The library here had its annual sale over the past few days and in addition to some ex-library copies of some good stuff for real cheap, including Hurst's study of the lumber industry in Wisconsin, I found a copy of Duerrenmatt's Herkules und der Stall des Augias. I also cleaned out the Duerrenmatt section of the Second Story Books warehouse in Rockville, MD, the last time I was in DC.

A comparison of Pahlanuik and Duerrenmatt is instructive, for me at least. Both are very funny. You also get the sense that for both (and for Leonard and Dooling, for that matter), comedy is not an idle choice. For Pahlanuik, it's the dark comedy of the continual failure to resolve the problems of nihilism. But Pahlanuik's characters inhabit what you might call a world of ideas -- however much those ideas are made concrete with respect to the details of the contemporary antiques market in Lullaby, or the facticity of homemade explosives in Fight Club, his narrator is stuck with the general problem of meaning but without any attempt to come to terms with the particular nature of twentieth-century politics and how the problems of meaning arise out of their context. In Lullaby you get the Law; in Fight Club you get the Police. Of course the people who act as agents of the Law or the Police are Americans, but they really don't rise much above the level of the caricature that results from the lack of a felt need to take account of any particular historical events.

Rather than being concerned mostly with the psychological reserves that are necessary to make sense of postmodern life (what I take to be one of Pahlanuik's main themes), Duerrenmatt is concerned with actually employing a reinterpretation of mythical tropes and stories that in some unspecified, fragmentary way can aid in developing the psychological reserves necessary to make sense of postmodern life, or post-WWII life, or however you want to describe the fact that we live in a hypercommercial society after the totalitarian century. This last sentence may seem like a non-sequitur, but I am only describing my own reading habits.

Duerrenmatt is serious in a way that Pahlanuik is not, because for Duerrenmatt there is an overwhelming sense of the need to come to grips with the phenomenon of responsibility. It may be a responsibility that rests on a slender existential reed, but its seriousness also exerts an attraction that is undeniable. There is something particularly Swiss about Duerrenmatt's work, of course; its themes include Swiss neutrality in the face of the Nazis, the guilt of the Swiss banking system, the self-understandings of Swiss democracy. Duerrenmatt places the story of Herkules and the stables in a thinly disguised Swiss mountain village (and the comic thread that runs through the story is that this village is covered in mountains of manure). That said, you should still read Duerrenmatt even if you've never been to Switzerland. I haven't, except on the train and in the airport. Start with Romulus the Great, Duerrenmatt's play about the final Roman emperor and his seemingly irresponsible focus on the fertility of his chickens. Maybe it's Duerrenmatt's willingness to engage political subjects in a specific fashion that makes him ultimately more human than the (probably) theologically-minded Pahlanuik.

NOTE: See this site on the Hercules play, in english, by translator Alexander Gross. Gross's essay is also worth a read.

GERMANS CAN BE VERY WEIRD

The Tagesspiegel article on the crowded events schedule in Berlin the last weekend in May (see this morning's post here) set me to thinking about the vast cultural divide between Germans and Americans. No, I'm not referring to Lederhosen or beer or protections for workers or environmentalism or socialism or Heinrich Heine or Heinrich Mann. I'm referring to the Kelly family, that loveable, cute-as-a-Calvin-Klein-ad group of travelling musician siblings that hundreds of thousands of Germans have gone nuts for but I doubt most people on this side of the Atlantic have heard of.

The Kelly family plays to sold-out crowds throughout the Germanophone world, and their albums are among the best selling in German history. Here's their home page. The language is odd because it's translated from the German version.

The Kelly family is apparently an actual family living on a boat in the Netherlands, or they used to live on a boat, or something, and in Spain, and in other places. "Father Dan" and his wife, Barbara Ann (both now passed on), were originally from the U.S. but moved to Europe in the 1960s and became street musicians. By the 1970s, the parents and kids in the family (six, I think) were a travelling music act. By the 1990s they were playing to thousands across Europe.

Their music evokes Irish music traditions, and I think that their appeal springs partly from the echt and rooted feelings associated with Eire. Plus, the Kellys have managed to market their story as one of family triumph over adversity; it's a sort of Horatio Algier tale for German music fans, I think. I know some Germans who have just eaten up the story of early family poverty but dedication to music, the death of the parents and the possible demise of the band, but the collective childrens' determination to make sure that the "show goes on," and all that.

And, perhaps most importantly, they're schlocky. Always a plus unter den Deutschen, for some weird reason that I have yet to pin down and that I'm sure will haunt me to the grave.

NOTE: for Farrellblogger's take on the Kellys, see the fine post here. It's been a while since I've lived in Germany, but as I recall the music scene in Berlin (over a decade ago--my God, I'm getting old), Henry's post is on the mark. I don't want to be too cranky with respect to German popular music tastes: schlock is one of those things that it's often easier to identify cross-culturally, and with the hyper-current nature of the American popular music culture market, we're trained from a very early age not just to dismiss last week's fad, but to despise and ridicule it as well. We're also trained to search for what is "edgy" in music, I think. But I do think that the Germans have a special burden here. After all, we have the Germans to thank that David Hasselhoff didn't just fade away gracefully, but quietly, like most other eighties TV stars.

MORE: Mrs. T over at 6th International has a few barbs for the Kelly Family as well, and discussion of the German love of Irish vacations to boot.

THIS I DID NOT KNOW

. . .Ten thousand plus U.S. tax returns processed in India this year. Makes sense, I guess; I'm always tempted to ask the friendly customer service folks of large corporations where they are based. I've heard that there are pretty strict rules about avoiding an answer to that question, though, so I haven't indulged my curiosity too often. (And since my tax returns were processed in Mahar Hall, SUNY-Oswego campus, between midnight and 2:00 a.m. on the 15th -- of that I'm reasonably certain! -- I've had no such curiosity on the tax front.)

Imagined conversation:

"Hey, I like your turban!"

"Thanks. It's the biggest turban in India."

"Get out!"

"No, really. I'm in the Times of India today."

"Cool."

"This thing weighs 40 kg."

"You must have a strong neck."

"You betcha."

spring, on the deck, somewhere.

FULL CIRCLE

AAAAAAHHH!

Tom Delay, again! He says it, too!! (Or said it last year.)

AAAHHH!

UNREST IN THE RANKS

The German SPD is going through some tough times. Even though they managed, with the Greens, to keep control of the federal government last fall (partly by playing to anti-American sentiment), they've lost big in several regional elections since then. Now there is unrest in the ranks as well. Schroeder's government reform plans have met with criticism from unions and from the left wing of his party. As today's Tagesspiegel notes, a dissenting faction in the party has gotten itself organized. They even have a glitzy new website, www.mitgliederbegehren.de. (It looks a lot like the official SPD page, which you can see here.)

The Tagesspiegel article is filled with a lot of insider baseball on the subject matter; the basic point is that the SPD leadership is spooked by the dissenting members, one of whom has publicly pledged to resign his Bundestag seat if they are not successful in challenging Schroeder's reforms. Things will come to a head on June 1st in a special party meeting at which Schroeder's leadership of the party will be subject to vote. The Tagesspiegel argues that Schroeder's agreement to hold the meeting is a sure sign that he's worried about containing the dissent in his own ranks.

You might want to rethink your plans to enjoy the end of May in Berlin, though, as this article notes. There's a big church meeting, a big soccer tournament, "Children's Day" festivities, a Kelly Family concert (more on them later), and the SPD meeting. Ah, life in the big city.

GARNER ON VIETNAM

Here is the quote on Vietnam, from the New York Times in a profile on Garner:

"It took too long," he said. "We should have taken the war north instead of waiting in the south. Just like here. If President Bush had been president, we would have won."

This is not an encouraging sign from the man whom Bush has entrusted to direct what is probably the most important non-military foreign policy initiative in the post Cold War period. To be fair, there is a lot to say about the article as a whole; Garner is willing to criticize the strategic hamlet program (thank God! Thank God!). Still, if what Garner has learned from Vietnam (and after) is that it was a lack of strong leadership that led to the failures in Vietnam, I'm afraid that I don't have a heck of a lot of confidence in what sorts of leadership decisions he's likely to make in his current position.

Bush could have won the Vietnam war? Give me a whopping break.

A while back I made the (easy) prediction that the Vietnam war would be reappropriated in new ways; I hadn't quite expected Garner's argument, though. I'm not sure if I should be more depressed and alarmed than I was when I wrote those lines.

AND MORE: Garner's quote hasn't really attracted much attention, although WaPo's "In the Loop" made it their "quote of the day" yesterday.

Let's review the facts here. Bush has picked an ex-general to head an interim government in Iraq. This general believes, perhaps predictably, that the U.S. should just have invaded North Vietnam and that this would have meant victory for our side. He believes that the problem in Vietnam was faulty executive leadership. He believes that Bush could have won the Vietnam war by sending American troops into Hanoi, after more "shock and awe" than Rolling Thunder, apparently, and then. . .what? Turning over the government to the Vietnamese people in 90 days? Looking for secret caches of AK-47s? Installing offensive South Vietnamese kleptocrats as rulers of the whole country?

AAAAAAAAHHHH!

OFF THE DEEP END

Bad civil liberties haiku:

Private burning cross
political expression--
for Thomas a threat

Cohen’s F*ck the draft--
emotional politics
protected by Court

Free reply time rule
gets Supreme Court approval--
then Reagan kills it

Pasties and G-string—
Indiana councilmen
can require them

Sorry.

------------

MORE:

George Carlin’s words
rush into youthful ears—
FCC censures

Witnesses balk—
Frankfurter opinion
loses Court support

Get the porn home—
privacy protects you
from Georgia’s morals

-----------

MORE

silent cannons
now judges have courage--
habeas corpus

Court split over
peyote exception--
legislature acts

coal company
gets its takings ruling--
the law "goes too far"

OK, enough of that.

QANTARA

This site is fantastic and earns an immediate place on my blogroll. It's a joint venture of the Bundeszentrale fuer politische Bildung (German agency dedicated to civic education), the Goethe Institute, Deutsche Welle and the Institute for Foreign Relations. The idea is to provide some sort of dialogue between Germans and the Islamic world. The linked site is in English as well.

[Link from Dienstraum]

QUOTE OF THE DAY

From an interview in the Tagesspiegel with Ruediger Safranski and Peter Sloterdijk. The interview is a one-year retrospective look at their philosophical television show (the home page for which you can stare at here):

SAFRANSKI: Wir befinden uns in einer hysterisierten Erregungsgemeinschaft, in der die existenzielle Urteilskraft außer Kraft gesetzt ist. Niemand kann mehr zwischen dem wirklich Bedrohlichen und dem nicht Bedrohlichen unterscheiden. Wir wollen einen bescheidenen Beitrag zur Entwicklung existenzieller Urteilskraft beisteuern.

SLOTERDIJK: Die Stoiker haben dieses Problem diskutiert. Es geht um die Unterscheidung zwischen den Dingen, über die man sich nicht aufregen darf, weil sie nicht von uns abhängen, und den Dingen, über die man sich aufregen muss, weil sie von uns abhängen. Um das Deine kümmere dich, um das Nichtdeine nicht.

Safranski: We live in a kind of hysterical community formed by stimulation; existential judgment has been lost. Nobody can differentiate between that which is truly threatening and that which is not threatening anymore. [In our show] we want to provide a modest contribution to the development of existential judgment.

Sloterdijk: The Stoics discussed this problem. The question is the difference between things which we must not get upset about, because they don't depend on us, and the things that we must get upset about, because they depend on us. Concern yourself with what is yours, not with what is not yours.

The whole interview is worth a look. The immediate context for the above quote is Sloterdijk's "Civilization and its Discontents"-type argument that barbaric streaks lurk beneath the psychological tensions produced by modernity, and that it is hence easy for normal individuals to "put on a uniform to respond to false crises."

Die Zeit's Jan Ross wrote the show off as neo-sophistry before the first installment aired last spring. Could be (right now I'm watching the show for the first time). Probably it's a good idea never to refer to yourself as a philosopher because that's a recipe for ridiculousness and vanity: why would you bother to note, for the consumption and identification of others, that you have some connection with something called "philosophy"? Whatever. As a show that attempts, at least, to discuss important issues in an intelligent fashion, it's nonetheless welcome, but I'm still not sure that we wouldn't be better off unplugging the TV altogether and reading a book. Or something.

WHEN OWLS ATTACK

According to Findlaw, London police have advised residents to be on the lookout for an escaped European eagle owl named Jazz. Eagle owls have a six-foot wingspan and can bring down a small deer.

Police assured London residents that "it is unlikely that he would attempt to catch small children as he lives with children at home." I'm not quite sure I would be comforted by that statement.

Man, look at the size of that thing.

WHEN NAOMI KLEIN ATTACKS

Read Klein's article, in the Guardian (UK), on the reconstruction efforts in Iraq as "robbery" here. Probably lots of people talked about Klein's argument when it appeared in the Nation and I just missed it. It's pretty much vintage Klein: the neoliberals in Washington are happy about having bombed Iraq and are now getting a piece of some free-market lovin' from the Bush administration. Who knows? Perhaps the attempt to open up markets in the face of a recalcitrant global opposition to neo-liberalism was itself a factor in the decision for war.

It's an irrefutable thesis anyway. As much as I like No Logo for its trenchant critiques of advertising culture and its attempt to link the situation of part-time workers, postmodern culture, and sweatshops (even though I'm not entirely sure about the seamless web Klein weaves), and as much as I am attracted to Klein's criticisms of the evacuation of the public square and the replacement of the university with some version of a shopping mall, I can't go in for the larger ideological picture. It's too neat and tidy. Reminds me too much of that fantastic scene in True Stories where the revival-style preacher is singing "Puzzling Evidence" and evoking some connection between MasterCard and the Trilateral Commission. In other words, Klein's individual criticisms are worthwhile but the broad claims are overdrawn. I'm also amazed at the ease with which members of Congress can push for advantages for their big contributors in reconstruction efforts, though. There's something very creepy and wrong in the whole process, mostly because it emits the scent of war profiteering.

For a different take on Klein's argument go to the Frankfurter Allgemeine's discussion of her article, the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad, and controversies over a proposed statute in honor of Napoleon in Venice. According to the avowed neo-liberals at FAZ, the German papers have given the Americans a bad rap for their inaction in the face of looting at the National Museum, but the papers' response was predictable. "Of course the Americans are at fault." And, according to FAZ, combining the looting of the museum with Klein's conspiracy theory you can come full circle: the stolen goods will end up on the market, albeit a black one.

FAZ counsels its readers to recall the difference between professional state looters and the Iraqi "criminals" who went after the National Museum. The most famous of the former is probably Napoleon, who plundered Venice (which is one reason why there is so much Italian art in the Louvre). FAZ argues that even if the Americans turn out to be totally innocent with respect to the looting of the National Museum, Bush still won't get a break from the German press: then the explanation for American reluctance to loot will probably be cultural boorishness, as in:

Napoleon was a criminal? Yes, but at least he had taste.

WHEN PROPERTY OWNERS ATTACK?

From GELPI. Read about the amendments to Idaho's 1994 Regulatory Takings Act here (PDF File, 3-page analysis by Jon Barrett from Idaho Smart Growth). The amendments define regulatory takings under Idaho law quite broadly and will also require state and local agencies to prepare takings anaylses for a wide variety of zoning changes and permit and development denials. Property owners will be able to sue to invalidate regulations for which they have not received the requested takings analyses within the short time frames specified in the amendments. In addition, the amendments will limit the use of development moratoria.

I've never been to Idaho, so I have no idea what things look like on the ground there. Still, I would be wary of such laws to the extent that they seem designed to increase the cost of regulation. It's not clear to me (at least) where the resources for the analyses are supposed to come from, how expensive they will be, how often they will be requested, and what impact these laws will have on Idaho's regulatory regime. The bills note that there will be a "small fiscal impact" on local government. I guess we'll see precisely how small an impact.

I FEEL CALM

. . .when I look at this page. Or maybe stupefied. Via Defective Yeti.

GUN SUIT BAN PASSED HOUSE

. . .Remember Mark Foley's gun suit ban? It passed the House last week. Read this article from law.com' newswire. The article doesn't mention Foley by name, but it appears to be his bill, and right now I can't get on to the House's website to do the fact check.

As someone who thinks that constitutional argument outside of courts should be encouraged, I'm happy that Foley and his ilk are attempting to advance a constitutional argument, in the abstract at least. As someone who thinks that businesses should be held responsible for dangerous practices, I find the bill appalling. See the San Francisco Chronicle article here.

IS SYRIA NEXT?

This is the big Iraq war-related question at Le Monde (see here), the Sueddeutsche Zeitung (see here), and the Neue Zuercher Zeitung (see here). Way at the bottom of the detailed and interesting Le Monde article, you get Dominique de Villepin's reaction, which is essentially to argue that the U.S. has chosen the wrong time to go after Syria because international attention needs to remain focused on the challenges of postwar Iraq. The Sueddeutsche's piece is shorter: it references this Washington Times piece about possible Iraqi weapons experts in Syria (the search for which the Times of India ridicules, see the previous post). The NZZ adds the reaction of Amr Mussa, the General Secretary of the Arab League, who warns that what he considers to be Washington's unfounded claims about Syrian aid to top Iraqis could further destabilize the region.

INDIA COCKS A SNOOK AT WASHINGTON

Quote of the day, from this article in Dawn:

On India's part, Defence Minister George Fernandes continued to cock a snook at Washington, telling reporters in Kolkota that Washington's claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) had been proved wrong, because US forces had found no such weapons.

I'm not really sure what "cocking a snook" means (any help, Chris?), but it sounds bad.

The article, at any rate, was Dawn's attempt to play up recent tension between India and the U.S. As I noted in a discussion of the Indian papers' descriptions of the Pakistani foreign minister's trip to Washington (see here as well), you really can't trust reports from either side of the Line of Control with respect to the international fortunes of the other side.

Although there is no mention of increased tension between India and the U.S. in the Times of India, Monday's lead article on their website mocks the U.S.'s efforts to hunt for Iraqi WMD capabilites, which ToI seems to think is a wild goose chase. Here are a few of the biting paragraphs in the article "U.S. Hunts for Dr. Germ and Mrs. Anthrax":

WASHINGTON: Saddam Hussain and secular Iraq may take pride in being home to the most emancipated women in the Arab world, but the United States is not impressed. Amid universal opprobrium over lack of evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Washington is looking for two Iraqi women scientists believed to be central to Baghad's bio-warfare programme.

They go by the fearful monikers of Mrs Anthrax and Dr Germ.

Mrs Anthrax, also known as "Chemical Sally" in western circles, is Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, the lone woman seen in several video clips of Saddam Hussain meeting with his Revolutionary Command Council. Sitting demurely next to the Iraqi dictator's feared son Qusay in a room full of men, Dr Ammash is now believed to be on the lam, having possibly escaped to Syria.

The United States has counted her among the 55 most wanted Iraqis, and she features as a "five of hearts" in the deck of cards Washington has issued in its hunt.

. . .At the height of the US bombing of Baghdad, video clips released by the Iraqi government often showed the camera panning past Ammash, usually dressed in military uniform and covered with a headscarf. The clips alarmed Washington, which believed that it was a message from Baghdad that Iraq was ready to use bio-weapons on Coalition forces.

A more mundane explanation, now that the American panic has proved to unfounded, is that she is the lone woman in the Iraqi high command, which contrary to US propaganda, was a diverse group with Sunnis, Shias, Kurds, Christians and other minorities.

This snook cocking doesn't make itself onto Monday's editorial page at ToI, though. Instead there is an article on the dangers of childbirth in India (the article claims that maternal mortality levels are 40 times higher in India than in Japan), an editorial castigating China for its handling of SARS, and a melancholic obituary for the Concorde.

I LOVE THIS WEBSITE

Kadri Gopalnath is brilliant. If you ever run across any of his carnatic music recordings, you should buy them and listen to them immediately. I'm not so sure about his fusion stuff -- haven't heard enough of it, and it's not my style anyway -- but I have this CD of him playing south Indian classical music and it's just beautiful.

And, as you can find out both from his liner notes and from what seems to be his website, he's a swell guy. Here's a quote from the rollover text you see at the main page when you point to the "profile" section:

His very sweet and charming personality has won him innumerable friends all over.

CAN YOU SAY THAT ABOUT YOURSELF? With a straight face, I mean.