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NeoCon's Piracy
NeoCon's Piracy 12/30/03; 19:46:04 by PB [DRAFT]
- Intro:
- Somewhere in Walden (74, Princeton 1971) Henry Thoreau, says:
There is no odor so bad as which arises from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with a conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life... He goes on, it's worth following, if you ever get the chance.
- I thought I might try to say something about situation in Iraq. It's difficult, for the past month things there have been changing so fast its nearly impossible to get a handle on it. The brain trust that started this war are either hiding in their offices, or like Rumsfeld and Wolfwitz are becoming more hectoring, as their logic becomes thinner, their forsight proves itself coming through a glass darkly, their options narrow, and their triumph, its glory, fades away.
- Comparisoms to Vietnam:
- Socio-anthro compare (M. McCarthy):
- After I finished reading through Mary McCarthy's book of essays on Vietnam the other week. I was struck by a particular type of similarity between these two events. McCarthy was in Vietnam and an odd juncture of the proceedings - Feburary of 1967 - a time when the troop level was ramping up to 450,000, yet a full year before The Tet offensive would strip away the beaded curtain. The process she saw was still in the hands of the resolute, engaged in straitforward. Business carried out by sincere Americans. An archtyped desire to arrive and toss out what was there, to replace it with democracy. And not only democracy, but American democracy and American values. Our enterprise itself serving as the primary object lesson. A need almost desperate to be seen as good and altrustic:
American Officers in the field can become very sentimental when they think of the good that they are doing and the hard row they have to hoe withe the natives who have been brainwashed by the vietcong The cognitive dissonance invoked by "the problems of sucess" that a surly and ungrateful population throw back at them. A population that voices support for the rebels or for their own path against all assistance sense and reason. Pacified area that are not peaceful. [F]requently all you will see...are the charts and graphics that some ardent colonel or brisk bureacrat is demonstrating to you with a pointer and the mimeographed handout that you take away with you together with a supplement on Viet Cong Terror. On paper and in chart form it all looks comendable especially if you are able to ignore the sounds of bombing from B-52's that are shaking the windows and making the charts rattle. The briefing officer is enthusiastic as he points out the progress that has been made, when for example the activities organized under AID were reorganized under OCO....the official rubs his hands with pleasure: "first we organized it vertically. Now we've organized it horizontally.
- No amount of painted, rebuilt schools, or New Life Hamlets ever seemed to make any difference. A gradually ramping sterness of conduct in the field, a tendency to wave aside death and injury caused to bystanders as 'collateral causulties of war" placed the Viet hearts and minds further from reach. The briefings become ever more byzantine. Incomprehension of the indifference to the extention of superior way, indifference to our needs. An indifference painful to and resented by those charged with overcoming it.
- Mapping Compare:
- If one decides the 'Saddam loyalsts' or Sunni Baathist's are the Viet minh, and together with ex Army and Fedeyeen remainders form a Viet Cong, who then are the NVA regulars, and who are the Kurds with their decidely non Iraqi nationalism, who the Shite theocrat nationalists? And who are the sugardaddys bank rolling it all. Neither Turkey, Syria, nor Iran want to see a Kurdistan come into being, less so than they want to see Iraq-America in their midst. A weak anachaic Iraq without the US army would suit them fine especially if Kurdish energies could be drawn into that vortex. Towards this end their state intelligence agencies are undoubtedly bent. None of them; though, are China or the Soviet Union of the 1960s. Armies of these states could conceivably march into Bagdad to restore lost order in some not so distant future, like so many General Maudes and Allenbys in reverse.
- Bad Faith, Perfididy
- Endgame vs The Game
- The Iraq adventure is moving into an endgame phase. It has all been rather quick. Not so much like the Vietnam comparisom is not apt but that this has played out like Vietnam on a hard amphetimine kick. Is the administration in the process of cutting and running? You bet they are! As fast as their little fingers can cut the cords and as fast as their little legs will carry them. Does this mean the Army can come home? No, it is only the political sails which are being furled, ahead of an electoral nor'easter. The grand noble leading edge of the adventure is being decommisioned. Now is the time to watch what is being kept and what let go. The administration does not speak with a single voice, not even when saying the same thing. The common cause of the neo and paleo conservatives came with many views and designs. These seem to be breaking up now as the war moves towards being a political liability for the administration that it was never truly expecteded to be. Behind the scenes piroutte and baricade idealogues, pragmatists, opportunists, and imperialists.
- The Neo Wilsonion democratics are the ideologues. Within them resides the notion of a trimphant and above all transcendantly good American exceptionalism, Packageable brandable deliverable. Moreover our well being and interest, demand that this outreach happen. It is a matter of course among this group that American interests come before the interests of all other living things. It is a article of faith that it is democracy they export, but they are really adherants of reasons of state for state action, a strange neo-platonism, and have little use, or actual desire for democracy. They approach Wilsonian idealism in a debased inverted form. They are plutocrats, oligarchs, or they are tools and useful fools who speak for these interests
- Opportunists of the Rhodesian model are the primary partners of this dance. The reference is to Charles Rhodes, the pan-african imperialist. His whole career vacilated between outruning the British government's restrictions of his lust for acquisition and gain, and returning to the shadow of its power for protection. These opportuned imperialists desire the perfect blend of private and public power. The United States, its reputation authority and its Army, as a division of Halliburton Inc.
- Traditional conservatives bring up the rear of this parade. They remain isolationist at heart, and move reactively to foreign evens. Their core groups's fundamental stance is paranoid. They see enemies, and see them as monolithic irrational objects. They see it as a hating evil, an evil that cannot be understood, but that they believe seeks to engulf them. They need such an ememy to have direction.
- Letting go. It is the power in the nexus of all these impulse that has impeded the need to switch to more practical approaches. Speeding up the transfer of sovereignity to the iraqi people, organizing elections, moving on creation of a document of state authority. Practically requested these this things begin to happen and happen soon, drafting of a formal constitution might need to wait until after an election produced a legimate Iraqi assembly. at the same time the infrastructure and physical needs of the iraqi people would be restuctured under a broader international effort. There was a dream in the way of this. The dream of the neoconservatives to create, to establish by fiat, by order, by closed counsel, by ideological sufficiency alone, the kind of free market paradise of limited government democracy they are so sure is faultlessly superior to all other social organization. To privatize by decree the industries and institutions of Iraq, nwith the able assistantence of Chalubi's national congress party. An interlocking protectorate of monopolies and privilege. It is the kind of government that they would have here, if they could find of a way of getting it by the American people.
- It was a particular irony when Presidenet Bush used the Philippines model to tout his plan for a New Iraq. Under Jose Rizal the Philippine people had a champion and plan for national sovereignity. An insurrection supporting this was crushed beneath as violent a campaign as existed in that era. When that ended the U.S. Government placed the Philippine people on a prompt 45 year road map towards a government for themselves.
- Censorship, restrictions and the filter
- One thing that came into play by the end of the summer
- Bob Edwards phone interview with Debrah Amos
- Bob Edwards intrv. Marvin Kalb on media in iraq
- Private security forces in the Middle East
- Merom, Gil. How Democracies lose small Wars. Cambridge: C.Univ.Pr. 1989
- Production Curve of War
- Consensus and the Process of Failure
- rise of the middle class
- Sources of power
- Press and broadcast media
- Dispute and difference between class and ideologies over purpose of the state
- Mancis, Peter. War and Democracy . Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2003
- Dewey, Lippman, and the 14 points
- Dewey, Lippman and the role of the people in a democracy
- National Security.
- Coda
The destruction of every arbitrary power, anywhere that can seperately secretly, and of its single choice disturb the peace of the world; or if it cannot be presently destroyed, at the least its reduction to virtual impotence. (W. Wilson "four ends speech" 4 July 1918 )
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