One-Way Street

Elegant Graffiti

Boyd Tonkin of The Independent finds a terrific metaphor for Arab writing: the Moorish citadel in Granada, its interior covered with ornamental poetry in Arabic. Tonkin calls it "Europe's most elegant graffiti," and like graffiti, its florid craftsmanship is illegible to the public at large. It is a crime of writing. Arab writing has long flouted the law; now it is being asked to exculpate real and imagined crimes.

Despite Arab governments' support for literature across the region, writers are still jailed. Western news feeds are full of tales of repression, like the arrest and conviction of an Egyptian blogger who writes under the name Kareem Amer (presumably, he was imprisoned under his real name). He was convicted of insulting President Hosni Mubarak and an Egyptian university in his blog. Interestingly, insulting the university carried the stiffer penalty. Religious militants lurk everywhere, ready to harass anyone who writes a single heterodox line.

When despotic Arab governments aren't throwing writers into jail, they're handing out lavish awards. Two major literary prizes have recently been established: the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, commonly known as the "Arab Booker," and the Sheikh Zayed Awards, which are part of the emirate of Abu Dhabi's determined attempt to create a new Granada on the Persian Gulf.  All cultural awards are promotional to one degree or another, and these awards are no exceptions. These awards have raised the profile of Arab writing internationally, but equally important, they provide official endorsement of the novel as a genre, something the novel hasn't always enjoyed in a culture that has long considered the novel an irredeemably Western form of writing. Unlike lyric poetry, which is closer to the Muslim tradition of oracular verse, the novel is prosaic and secular, two qualities still regarded with suspicion in a region plagued by bureaucratic disinformation and a religious fundamentalism that has replaced secular dissent as the most popular form of resistance against tyranny.

After describing the daunting obstacles Arab writers continue to face, Tonkin argues we need to pay attention to the new Arab writing. By beginning his discussion of Arabic writing in Granada, the site of a European victory in the clash of civilizations, Tonkin suggests that translated Arabic literature is important because of "the perpetually rocky relationship between the Arab and European worlds" in which "[i]mperial bureaucrats, soldiers and scholars on one side; radical nationalists, pious militants and oil-rich oligarchs on the other – all have had their various axes to grind, and to wield." These crimes will be exculpated by a writing that is itself outside the law. Arab literature is the new "elegant graffiti," both illegal and admired, cryptic yet expressive, collective but inscribed where it isn't welcome.

Fitna

Get ready for more mob violence in the Middle East.  Geert Wilders, a right-wing member of the Dutch Parliament, will soon have the world premier of his film Fitna, and tempers are rising in anticipation. Wilders' film is short but incendiary, a paranoid broadside again Islam and everything associated with it. After filmmaker Theo van Gogh was stabbed to death by a militant Islamist and mobs across Islamic world went berserk over some Danish cartoons, the Dutch government is frantically trying to contain the potential damage. The government persuaded Dutch television not to broadcast the film, but some Internet site will post it. From there, no doubt, it will go viral in the right wing-nut margins of the Internet. Otherwise, the domestic front looks ready; Dutch Muslim groups have been cooperating by urging Muslims not to let Wilders get under their skin. A loner jihadist may do something rash, but that's a more or less constant risk anyway.

Beyond the Netherlands the situation isn't so secure. Last month the Cairo International Film Festival for Children held the Dutch animated short Where Is Winky's Horse? hostage until the Dutch government apologized and did some symbolic slapping around of a certain right-wing parliamentarian. But l'affair de Winky may not be the last word from the Islamic World. Protests have already started in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where, you would think, they would have more important things to worry about. Judging from the Danish cartoon episode, the current penalty for graven images of the Prophet created in a small European country seems to be 50 deaths, and that has a lot of people concerned.

Fitna may be a waste of bandwidth, but you can insert your standard defense of freedom of speech here. The film's release is yet another example of the mutual misunderstanding between Islam and the West. No one believes Wilders' film will be the last provocative episode, but one can hope that the reaction will be relatively subdued, and Wilders' hateful bluster will end up little more than a 20-second segment on the BBC World News.  After all, the long tail of sectarian hysteria has to start diminishing some time, right?

Film Genres and the Iraq War

Now that the Iraq War has lasted longer than the American involvement in World War II, we can hardly wait to start making movies about our current misadventure. However, so far films about the Iraq War haven't assumed a shape of their own. They have neither the linear, confident narratives of American films about World War II, nor the elegiac sense of Vietnam war films, with their nostalgic period music and operatic spectacles.  The Iraq War films also don't evince the historical fissure and loss of the Vietnam War films. The historical framework of the Iraq War, like the war itself, is still under construction.

A clue about how we're starting to remember the war can be seen in the genres into which the conflict has been stuffed.  Paul Haggis's In the Valley of Elah is a crime procedural. The film tells the story of an Iraq war veteran who goes AWOL from his base in New Mexico, only to turn up in the desert, charred and dismembered. His father, a retired Army sergeant, undertakes the investigation into the mystery of his son's disappearance and death. The film has some contemporary touches, such as the cell phone camera images that provide the initial clues to the soldier's disappearance, but for the most part it stays within the traditional bounds of its genre.

The Kingdom is a can-do thriller that's not explicitly about the Iraq War, but its rhetorical mode is a direct recasting of it. The documentary visual style establishes the particularities of the setting while blurring the narrative's historical specificity and the film's clear debt to the macho histrionics of the Rambo series. Less brooding than Elah, the film is hardly any more confident in a positive ending to its intervention. Four F.B.I. agents collect evidence and extract some vengeance--the two sides of torture. But all is not well at the end: just before the main terrorist goes to collect his virgins in heaven, he issues a threat that promises to renew the violence against America.  This isn't quite the upside-down flag image that concludes Elah, but in the context of its ironclad generic rules, the note of irresolution is unsettling. Either there's going to be a movie sequel (The Enclave?) or a sequel in the form of an invasion of Iran. There a dual temporality in the film: the band of terrorists is vanquished, but the threat of terrorism is deathless.

If films, like poetry in the words of Frances Bacon, "give some show of satisfaction to the mind, wherein the nature of things doth seem to deny it," then Elah and Kingdom allow their audiences to recollect the Iraq War according to a narrative form that's consoling only in its coherence. The generic rules of these films set up a peripeteia, as the basic structure of their narratives and as the master narrative of the war itself. Peripeteia works by establishing a set of expectations that turn out to be false. We get an ending, but not the one we'd been led to believe we'd receive. The uncertainty of the endings of these films is indicative of the entire history of the war they depict. The issue isn't simply we don't know how the war will turn out. We already know it's not going to turn out well. Rather, we get a reversal that defies our initial expectations, as well as a disturbing temporality in which any foe we may conquer won't vanquish the enduring threat against the nation. In short, shock and awe has turned out to be the permanent war.

Theater of Punishment

Now that the flayed bodies of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay have faded from view, we're now turning our attention to the invisible masses of incarcerated bodies in American prisons--2.2 million of them now. The Boston Globe's Christopher Shea writes about how the broken American penal system is gaining an increasingly larger share of public policy debates, spurred by the bad conscience that comes from the sheer scale of the problem: currently there are seven times the number of inmates in prison than in the early 1970's, when American cities were thought to be in an irreversible slide into decrepitude and criminality.

Shea begins his article with a Foucaldian analogy: "What if America launched a new New Deal and no one noticed? And what if, instead of lifting the unemployed out of poverty, this multibillion-dollar project steadily drove poor communities further and further out of the American mainstream?" He points out that the prison system is contiguous with society as a whole, although he limits his discussion to the problem of recidivism. Society's disciplinary function, in effect, has become inefficient. The arbitrariness of power has become too transparent, separating out poor minorities from society for as long as possible while reintegrating the more economically successful back into society. The crack gap is the most infamous example of this imbalance: a white guy snorting cocaine habit is far less likely to be locked up for long periods of time than a black guy with a crack pipe. Also, America is dumping 700,000 prisoners a year back into society with few resources devoted to making sure they're functioning, productive members of society.

Shea argues that prison reform will become a major topic in the public sphere very soon as a series of new books are released documenting the inadequacy of our penal system. However, with a new spate of vengeance films in current release and unresolved debates about how the US should protect itself from terrorist attacks--not to mention a crime rate creeping back up--indicate that Americans still aren't in a mood to grant much clemency.  After all, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay are still in operation.

The incipient prison reform movement may have less to do with genuine concern for the unfortunate than a consequence of a long economic expansion finally running out of gas. Citing Foucault's Discipline and Punish is irresistible in this context, and Foucault points out that prison reform is most likely to occur in affluent times, when criminality tends to turn toward crimes against property, causing in turn a broad harshening of penalties. Rather than just simply throwing every crack head burglar in jail for the rest of his life, as we're essentially doing now, reformers wanted not to soften the law but to lessen (or sometimes merely to hide) the arbitrariness of justice. Foucault himself was a member of the Groupe d'information sur les Prisons (GIP), a prison reform group, but that didn't prevent him from being suspicious of prison reform movements in general, which he regarded as agents in the redistribution of power.

The whole idea of prison reform appeared when Europe replaced its theaters of punishment (burning witches at the stake, for instance) with the penal system, with its combination of optimistic rhetoric and panoptic technologies of surveillance. But in the last few years it seems like we've reverted back to a theater of punishment. What were Abu Ghraib and the Fox series 24 about other than the flaying of bodies in the name of American power? Maybe we're ready for something a little more decorous, something more consistent with our ideas of liberty. Or maybe power has become so diffuse, so disconnected from democratic practices, that when the time comes for us to decide what to do about our dysfunctional and unfair prison system we'll find ourselves as helpless and powerless as the people in jail.

Sprezzatura

My son and I are home with stomach flu, so I'm unable to process anything more complicated than Word Girl. Here are some links picking up on stuff I've been writing about recently:

Steven Clemons says we're not going to attack Iran, despite the current buzz in Washington that indicates we are. Bush is gun shy, for once, and he's dispatched Condi to find a third way between an aerial attack and "appeasement." Meanwhile, Cheney is plotting to force Bush's hand into an attack. Clemons' article is a rare account of Bush actually learning from his mistakes.

I'd rather see Stephen Greenblatt write more directly on Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, but he invokes the Renaissance concept of sprezzatura (nonchalance) in a highly personal reflection on sports, writing, and his own entry into college, complete with a sly contrast to Kaavya Viswanathan's more mercenary approach to making one's way through Harvard.

Salman Rushdie, with uncharacteristic brevity, crashed the National Book Critics Circle symposium on the future of book reviews and proclaimed, "I think it's rather unfortunate that some of the coverage tries to pitch print reviewing against the new media. I think they complement each other very well." By the way, the NBCC event shows that the newspapers v. blogs debate remains stuck in place.

Why didn't this collection stay home? It could have gone in the new Renzo Piano addition to the Art Institute of Chicago.

Marketing a War with Iran

I'm back from a weekend in still drought-ridden Wisconsin. Now that we're past Labor Day I can look forward to a Cubs meltdown and the Bears fumbling and stumbling their way through another season. I'm also looking forward to the marketing campaigns for the next generation of iPods and the next generation of interventionist disaster: a war with Iran.

According to the blog Informed Comment Global Affairs, a spin off of Juan Cole's important blog Informed Comment, this week the Bush administration will begin its marketing campaign for an attack on Iran. Barnett Rubin reports that a friend "who has excellent connections in Washington and whose information has often been prescient" that a source in "one of the leading neo-conservative institutions" has been told

They [the source's institution] have "instructions" (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don't think they'll ever get majority support for this--they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is "plenty."

The third hand account, complete with a comma splice, warrants skepticism. Rubin has some other circumstantial evidence of new preparations for a war with Iran, but he's skeptical about the reports as well. After all, there have been alarmist reports about an impending attack on Iran before. (I heard about one that was supposed to occur just before the November 2006 elections, and another that was to take place last spring.) Besides, the war talk could be a bluff designed to increase pressure on the Iranian government to discontinue its nuclear weapons program. Rubin writes,

I hesitated before posting this. I don't want to spread alarmist rumors. I don't want to lessen the pressure on the Ahmadinejad government in Tehran. But there are too many signs of another irresponsible military adventure from the Cheney-Bush administration for me just to dismiss these reports.

It seems hard to believe that the Bush administration honestly believes it has the political capital to launch an attack on Iran. It's even more difficult to believe that the administration believes it has the troops to invade Iran if the Air Force bombing campaign doesn't work. (From what I've read, the Air Force has assured Cheney that they can destroy Iran's nuclear capability with precise bombing--the generals refused Cheney's request for a nuclear bombing option--but the Army and the Marines are dubious about the plan, since they're the ones who will have to clean up the Air Force's mess.) The American military will start running out of ground troops this spring, and public patience with combat in the Middle East has already run out. Finally, the whole marketing campaign metaphor should have been discredited after the Iraq war. Maybe Fox and the rest of the conservative press will finally do a public service and refuse to sign up for this particular campaign.

The Partisan Videos

Edward Said used to tell the story of the time he was speaking at a conference in the Middle Eat when he was interrupted by a man in the audience who accused him of being too Western and insufficiently Muslim. Said shot back, "Yeah, but you're wearing a suit and tie."

This exchange continues to be played out, this time in the realm of the propaganda video. The Washington Post's Philip Kennicott has an excellent analysis of the latest videos from the insurgent groups in Iraq. He reports, "the advance of professionalism continues, now to the level of tone, drama and pacing."

Kennicott examines the latest video from the Islamic State of Iraq. The subject of the video is the recent capture of three American soldiers. The video is as slick and manipulative as anything on Fox News. Its makers demonstrate not only a command of basic Western propaganda techniques, but also of Western literary history, specifically, the figure of the European partisan. Kennicott explains,

Partisans, in the literature of war, are connected with the land, which gives them authenticity. They may be on the run, but their lives have been refined to a more simple existence, apart from the comforts and corruption of the organized enemy. Hemingway's vision of the Spanish Civil War was in part an idyll of resistance, as were many Soviet novels of the Russian Revolution and the Second World War, which became patriotic pastorals, celebrating the close-to-the-land status and integrity of Bolshevik heroes.

The video is disturbing because it seems so close to something we might see on American television. Americans complain that Middle Eastern Muslims refuse to modernize, but then we're alarmed when they master some aspect of our technology. 

The current Manichean rhetoric surrounding the War on Terror is deeply ideological--on both sides--in that it obscures the history of cooperation, exchange, and cross-fertilization that have accompanied periods of strife between Christians and Muslims. The insurgents' video is a grimly ironic manifestation of this history, but it we can also see it as a reminder that even the most hardened and isolated extremists are watching American media very closely and picking up pointers. The video suggests that Islamic extremism can't sustain itself without borrowing cultural tropes from the West. For our part, we're saddened, of course, by the death of the American soldiers depicted in the Islamic State of Iraq video, but we should remember that the video is only a small part of the dialog between Islam and the West. 

Allegorizing Spider-Man

Gee, for a movie that nobody likes Spider-Man 3 is getting talked about a lot. Why can't we just ignore it and wait for the next summer blockbuster? Kelly Nestruck at the Guardian Unlimited film blog has a suggestion.  He argues that Spider-Man is an allegory of the Bush administration. He takes us back to Spider-Man 2, which was released during the presidential election of 2004 with a Cheneyesque tagline  "with great power comes great responsibility." (Oh, no, wait--that's the exact opposite of Cheneyesque.) The correspondence between the film's tagline and Bush's reelection campaign was endorsed by no less than the sloganeer  David Frum, who pronounced Spider-Man 2  as "the great pro-Bush movie of the summer." According the Frum, the allegory goes something like this: ridiculed nerd becomes reluctant superhero, gets blamed for the crimes of his arch-enemy, the Qaeda-like Dr. Octopus, eventually triumphs, thus setting the stage for another sequel. It sounds convincing, except I don't think George Bush is Peter Parker/Spider-Man. He's somebody else.

Nestruck updates the allegory first by noting that the "great responsibility" tagline has been dropped from the third installment in the series. He goes on to draw some isolated correspondences between Spider-Man 3 and the current predicament of the United States as a troubled superpower bogged down in Iraq. He accepts Frum's premise that Spider-Man is a stand in for Bush, but I don't think that's the case. In fact, I think the Spider-Man series is actually anti-Bush in that the films reflect and resolve the deep ambivalence many Americans have felt about Bush since the Iraq War started to turn sour in 2004.

I think films rarely have specific partisan political messages, however encoded, as Frum and Nestruck propose. Popular culture films generally have a kind of utopian dimension in which they celebrate the renewal of the social order by ridding itself from, among other things, unworthy leadership. What's striking about Spider-Man is its origin in a completely random and unmotivated act. Peter Parker is accidentally bitten by a spider and thereafter assumes, fitfully, superhero powers. However, there's nothing about Peter Parker as a person that would single him out is somebody who can carry the burden of responsibility. He's just an ordinary guy--but not ordinary and accidental in the way Bush was.

Random meanings attaching themselves arbitrarily to certain symbols occurs throughout the Spider-Man series, but it's especially intense in Spider-Man 3. Take, for instance, the super blob that hurls itself through space and smacks into Peter Parker for no good reason at all. We're told that the blob is supposed to intensify the essential characteristic of whoever it attaches itself to, but the ensuing effects on Peter Parker are a kind of random grab bag of comic elements that don't add up to a coherent personality. Even an apparently unified character like the Sandman becomes more incoherent as the story goes on. The Sandman continues to grow according to some unknown principle of evil mutation. Why does he become bloated and not, say, change shape, as sand tends to do in nature? The villains themselves just keep coming, like so many IED's. One major villain, the suggestively named Venom, makes his appearance at a relatively late stage in the narrative, a violation of classical Hollywood storytelling technique.

Throughout Spider-Man 3 major signifiers appear out of nowhere at random points in the narrative, then unfold their meanings according to some inscrutable design. The film alternates between mawkishness and brutal violence. One moment somebody is crying, the next moment somebody's head is getting snapped off. Just as it doesn't really matter which villain appears when, it doesn't matter which a motion is expressed at any given point in time. What matters is that the enemies are vanquished and all of those feelings we normally associate with wartime are expressed, even if the feelings don't go anywhere.

What's surprising about 3 is that it doesn't really offer any other comforts other than extreme familiarity. By its third installment, Spider-Man's allegorical message has clarified even as it becomes less formally coherent.  It's a story of endless beginnings, an obsessive return to the moment evil first appears so that our own mutant, wounded hero can leave behind his mundane and deeply unsatisfactory life as Peter Parker. More significantly, as Spider-Man Peter doesn't have to take orders from the callous, fast-talking, and empty newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson.  I think this guy is the real allegorical correlate to George W. Bush. The utopian longing expressed by the film is the desire to forget this narrowminded manipulator and join the fight ourselves against an endlessly re-occurring evil. And the evil just keeps on coming: Spider-Man 4 is already in the works. As one of its producers recently said, "I'm going to keep making those films until somebody stops me."

Iago at Number One Observatory Circle

I remember the first time I saw Bill Clinton interviewed after his successor came to power. I was struck by the contrast between Clinton's energetic yet thoughtful responses and the inarticulate buffoon who currently occupies the office of president. Allegedly a prolific reader--he even read Camus' The Stranger--it's hard to think of a single instance in which an utterance or act by Bush that reflects his reading. Clinton, for all his wonkiness, is a serious student of literature. Stephen Greenblatt tells a story of meeting Bill Clinton after a poetry evening at the White House.

I joined the line of people waiting to shake the President's hand. When my turn came, a strange impulse came over me. This was a moment when rumors of the Lewinsky affair were circulating, but before the whole thing had blown up into the grotesque national circus that it soon became. "Mr. President," I said, sticking out my hand, "don't you think that Macbeth is a great play about an immensely ambitious man who feels compelled to do things that he knows are politically and morally disastrous?" Clinton looked at me for a moment, still holding my hand, and said, "I think Macbeth is a great play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object."

Greenblatt is taken aback by "the aptness, as well as the quickness, of this comment, so perceptively in touch with Macbeth's anguished brooding about the impulses that are driving him to seize power by murdering Scotland's legitimate ruler." Forever the English professor, Greenblatt submits the president to a pop quiz, and ever the star pupil, Clinton obligingly delivers 10 lines from Macbeth.

Greenblatt goes on the explicate Shakespeare's meditations on the ethics of power, but without drawing any explicit connections back to the current administration. Greenblatt observes that "in Shakespeare no character with a clear moral vision has a will to power and, conversely, no character with a strong desire to rule over others has an ethically adequate object." All the characters who lust for power have dubious motives (think of the Macbeths, Richard III, Goneril, Regan, Fortinbras, Henry V) and generally bring misery upon themselves and others. Shakespeare himself favored the characters who tip-toed around power: Richard II, Antony, Coriolanus, Lear. They generally come to bad ends as well.

Clinton's fall from grace was Shakespearean, but Clinton himself doesn't neatly correspond to a specific character in Shakespeare. The same could be said for Bush, albeit for different reasons. Bush is too shallow and one-dimensional a political figure to be called Shakespearean at all. King Lear is perhaps the closest analogy if one regards the play as a tragedy of delusion and ineptitude. Greenblatt doesn't discuss Iago, but Iago's "motiveless malignancy," as Coleridge described it, lacks an ethical object of any kind, let alone an adequate one. This describes Dick Cheney, who I'm convinced is a sociopath. (I also think he would have made an excellent Nazi.)  Cheney's role in the Bush administration--to Bush himself--is the same as Iago's role in relation to Othello. Cheney and Iago are anti-therapists; they disintegrate the personalities of those they serve, whispering outrageous falsities in the ears of those who have less power than they think they do. Through the subtlest of means, the anti-therapist reverses the self-image of the powerful man to the point of self-annihilation. Othello comes to assimilate Iago's relentless animal imagery. At the end of the play, Othello says as he plunges a knife into himself, "I took by the throat the circumcised dog,/And smote him, thus." One shudders to imagine what Cheney's ministrations will end up doing to Bush, not to mention the rest of us.

Crazy

One of the most interesting aspects of keeping a blog is watching a story as it develops over time. Last summer I noticed a distinct change in tone in the reporting and commentary about the Iraq War. As the weather got increasingly hot, commentary on the Iraq War turned gloomy and despairing as more and more writers came to the conclusion that, for all practical purposes, the war was lost. The tipping point, at least in my reading, was Thomas Friedman's August 4, 2006 NYT column "Time for Plan B," which opened, "It is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are baby-sitting a civil war."

Now that the winter has turned bitterly cold and snowy, the punditry is gloomily reading the tea leaves for another disheartening and potentially catastrophic development: a war with Iran. "Scary Movie 2," as Paul Krugman calls the scenario, is based on the premise that whenever George Bush says he isn't planning a war, you can be certain he is. As Karen DeYoung reported in yesterday's Washington Post, "Much as the Vietnam Syndrome dogged the foreign and military policies of a generation of U.S. presidents, the Iraq Syndrome has become an ever-present undercurrent in Washington. 'Everyone is reliving the whole thing again in everything we do,' said one administration official." Determined not to be taken in again, the press openly scoffed at the Pentagon's claims of Iranian meddling in Iraq presented in Monday's strange news conference in Baghdad. A New York Times editorial archly observed, "The extraordinary briefing in the Green Zone pointed a finger but it wavered." Fox News is once again being monitored for credulous reporting, and people are eying The Weekly Standard with renewed trepidation for clues about the demented state of the Neocons.

The origin of the current speculation about an impending war with Iran is Seymour Hersh's January 2005 New Yorker article "The Coming War" about Pentagon planning for an attack on Iran. Last fall there were rumors of an "October surprise" to save the Republican majority in Congress when it was reported that a second aircraft carrier was being dispatched to the Persian Gulf  by October 31. That the hurried deployment of the aircraft carrier turned out to be true has only fueled more connect-the-dots reporting on an impending US attack on Iran. Since Monday's Baghdad briefing The Nation has been sounding the alarm bells.  Tom Engelhardt purports to say aloud what everyone in the know is saying behind closed doors:

Is there anybody in official Washington--other than our President, Vice President, the Vice President's secretive imperial staff, assorted neocon supporters, and associated right-wing think tanks--who isn't sweating blood, popping pills, and wondering what in the world to do about our delusional leaders?

Engelhardt's breathless warnings about a "bloodcurdling scenario" about to play out in Iran could just be dismissed as another left-wing polemic, and despite his dark warnings about a possible nuclear attack on Iran, Hersh has already reported that that option is off the table. But The Nation was one of the few print media outlets that dared to challenge the assumptions about the build up to the Iraq War, and Engelhardt is only repeating two tropes that currently shape the discussion about Iran: One is the Iraq Syndrome, which could be summed up as "believe the worst when Bush and Cheney are involved." The second trope is the darkest of all: that Bush and Cheney are insane. Adjectives like  "kamikaze," "delusional," "beyond delusional," and plain old "crazy" are beginning are beginning to pop up. Cheney's now infamous CNN interview, which prompted Illinois Senator Dick Durbin to call Cheney delusional on the Senate floor, is exhibit one for the case that the Bush administration has lost its mind and is therefore capable of pulling the trigger on Iran. Administration equivocations on the evidence concerning Iranian IED's in Iraq haven't reassured anyone.

I've not yet seen anyone in the press declare we're going to attack Iran.  Circumstantial evidence of  an impending American attack continues to be documented, but watch for fretting about the metal state of Bush and Cheney in the media, especially toward the political center. One bellwether is Thomas Friedman, and he's still trying to appeal to reason, reminding us Iran "helped the U.S. defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan and replace it with a pro-U.S. elected alliance of moderate Muslims." But if a centrist figure like Friedman starts publishing Maureen Dowd-like columns entitled "Daffy Does Doom," watch for a consensus on the insanity of Bush and Cheney to emerge. At that point, it truly will be a scary movie.

Pamuk Calls Off German Tour

Orhan Pamuk has decided to cancel his publicity tour of Germany after the murder of Turkish-Armenian writer Hrank Dink. The man implicated in Dink's murder, Yasin Hayal, shouted out to journalists as he was being hauled off to court, "Orhan Pamuk, be smart! Be smart!"

Pamuk has particular reason to be wary of  venomous Turks in Germany.  After all, Germany is where his character Ka was murdered in Snow. Ka's fate has to be vivid in Pamuk's mind right now: Ka returned to Turkey as the conscience of his country, only to get entangled in its religious and nationalist politics. When he returned to Germany he was murdered by unknown assailants, but the narrative leaves little doubt the conflicts in a remote corner of Turkey have followed him home.

To an American audience, the latest threats against Pamuk would seem yet another example of Islamic terrorism targeting a high-profile Muslim who is sympathetic to the West.  Since this is Turkey, however, the situation is little more complicated.  It should be noted that the two great crimes Turkey has been accused of in modern times -- the Armenian genocide, a reference to which landed Pamuk in hot water when he talked about it couple of years ago, and the persecution of the Kurds -- were not perpetrated by Islamic fundamentalism, but rather its antagonist: the secular, militaristic government that wanted to modernize the country along European lines.  In this sense, then, Pamuk is getting caught up in the historical conflicts that he depicted in My Name Is Red.  This novel is set at the historical moment in which the Islamic world first confronted the West from a position of disadvantage.  The result was a lethal battle over representations. The battle is now over representations of the Armenian genocide and the nature of the secular Turkish state, and once again the battle is lethal.

The great eighth-century Muslim intellectual Abu Hanita wrote, "Difference of opinion in the community is a token of divine mercy." In fact, the sixteenth-century French natural scientist Pierre Belon observed, "the Turks force nobody to live according to the Turkish way." In 1492, when Spain expelled its Jews, Istanbul was home to a large and flourishing Jewish population. The respect for difference and dissent existed throughout Turkey and much of the Muslim world before its encounter with European modernity. Pamuk has been among our keenest observers of the ongoing encounter between modernity and Islam, symbolized by his favorite city, Istanbul. It's ironic that he would be safer there than in modern, liberal Germany,  where old Ottoman wounds continue to fester.

Zizek and Baghdad Bob

This was such an obvious subject for him, it's a wonder that took him so long to get around to it. In the New York Times Slavoj Zizek talks about the wacky Iraqi information minister, Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, known to chortling American military officers as Baghdad Bob. Zizek briefly trots out one of his favorite philosophical riffs, repeated in The Parallex View: the excessive desires of utterly clownish characters drive them to reveal hidden truths. Zizek even throws in a Marx Brothers quote (“Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words?”) to make his point, as he is wont to do. From there Zizek proceeds to his next point in his idiosyncratic fashion, which tends to rely more on juxtaposition than rhetorical rigor--a method that can be stimulating, once you get used to it. At the same time, obeying some obscure Lacanian prohibition, he refuses to circle back to fill in the gaps, leaving a promising point frustratingly incomplete.

Anyway, in one particularly memorable outburst al-Sahhaf responded to a reporter who pointed out that American troops already controlled Baghdad by declaring, "They are not in control of anything — they don’t even control themselves!" Zizek argues that Baghdad Bob had inadvertently stumbled upon the truth of the American misadventure in Iraq: an out of control administration had exchanged an authoritarian regime for a totalitarian one. More adroit Cold War presidents used to be able to keep authoritarian regimes on a leash so they could bark menacingly at totalitarian Communist regimes. Now we have a totalitarian theocracy in Iraq, or at least the groundwork for one. The problem, Zizek suggests, is that the US isn't acting like the Roman Empire/global cop (the metaphors get confused) we're supposed to be. We're zooming around the world in Bradley Fighting Vehicles, carrying our own confused parochial notions about right and wrong. We're no longer able to assert a global order. Baghdad Bob was right after all: we still don't control Baghdad, and we can't resist the temptation to throw more troops into the maelstrom. We can't even take much pleasure in seeing Saddam Hussein swinging from the gallows.

Cellphone Films and Saddam's Hanging

Besides draining our military power and international prestige, the Iraq War promises to change the way we represent wars. At least one gripping film has come out of the war, Deborah Scranton's The War Tapes, but literary production, so far, has been slight, both here and in the Arab world. A nascent genre, the cellphone cinema, promises to confound our voyeuristic desires by showing the Iraq War's mayhem and chaos in grainy immediacy. The video of Saddam Hussein's hasty execution by hanging has landed an Iraqi security guard in jail as more film clips of the hanging make their way west. The Iraqi TV footage initially available to US media was eerily effective in conveying the impending horror of the execution. If you want to see the entire gruesome execution, shot from a cellphone camera well positioned to capture the grimacing, and dead, face of Saddam, Slate provides the footage. Will this footage be the counterpart to the statue of Saddam toppling over during the first heady days of the war, when we were still under the illusion we could win it? Or do we watch it stupefied, no longer able to make sense of anything we see or hear about the war? Certainly the quality of the images deteriorate along with our strategic position in the war.

Where Is the Iraq War Literature?

The Iraq Study Group Report may be selling well--it's number 40 on Amazon's best seller list--and the New York Times best seller lists are full of incrimination lit, but so far we haven't seen any novels about the Iraq War. It's not because the war is too fresh: it's already lasted longer than US involvement in World War II. Still, it's only a matter of time as far as the American novel is concerned. I'm sure there's a future Norman Mailer taking notes inside his Humvee someplace in Anbar province.

But what about Arab literature, with its long and distinguished history of recording wartime events? As Nazim Muhanna notes, the 33-day Lebanon war inspired an outburst of drama and poetry, but Iraq seems to have Arab writers flummoxed. In an excellent article in Asharq Alawsat Muhanna tries to find out why. The reasons are practical, political, and aesthetic.  At a practical level, it's too dangerous right now. People who have escaped Iraq are too removed from events to convey them realistically, but people still there are too busy dodging car bombs to sit down and write. At a political level, the Iraq War is something new. It defies the occupier versus the people paradigm with which Arab intellectuals are familiar. Arabs are having the same difficulties sorting out who's murdering who as Americans are. The Syrian poet Abid Ismail laments,

Indeed, with the exception of Iraqi writers, no one seems to care [about the Iraq War]! You find yourself trapped in a lose-lose situation; if you condemn the war [the resistance], you will be accused by the majority of Iraqis as advocating the oppressor, and if you support the war, you will be supporting the occupation! The Iraqi issue is obscure – unlike the situation in Lebanon. In Lebanon there is no dictator that the US sought to remove, and the identity of resistance in Lebanon is clearer than it is in Iraq.

There's also the problem of the immediacy of the suffering of ordinary Iraqis. The suffering is unfolding in real time with no end in sight. Muhanna calls the strife "a rolling fireball that only becomes fiercer as it rolls." Arabs intellectuals are as stupefied by the horror as everyone else. The magnitude of the suffering precludes, for the time being, the kind of narratives one used to see in Latin American novels that feature ordinary people adjusting to a newly brutalized existence while the deposed dictators stumble around their villas, cast off like impotent lovers.

Finally, the Iraq War is still an emerging narrative. The fleeting Arab-Israeli conflicts may inspire a "literature of occasions," as Syrian novelist Fawwaz Haddad disdainfully calls the quick literary output these incidents usually produce, but Iraq is still far from closure. The fear is that this war won't be a neat Flags of Our Fathers, but rather an interminable Thirty Years War where everyone comes to an exhausted and ignoble end, Arabs and Americans alike.

Same as the Old Boss

Maybe my perspective on these matters is a bit skewed--after all, I live in Oak Park, IL, where people have Impeach Bush bumper stickers on their baby strollers--but I thought the November elections were a sign that some sort of communicative rationality was being restored to American political discourse. But the spirit of bipartisanship in Washington lasted for two beats of Dick Cheney's heart--about an hour. The opportunity for a free and realistic discussion about Iraq seems to have passed. We'll never agree on a face-saving explanation for our withdrawal from Iraq while it's in flames. ("Now that the Iraqi Olympic team can compete without fear of getting shot by Saddam Hussein's son Uzi or whatever his name was, it was all worth it as far as I'm concerned.") Bush is busy dismissing every reasonable proposal to get American troops out of the way of the Iraqi civil war--which, by the way, doesn't even seem orderly enough to be a civil war. Call it anarchy aspiring to the condition of a civil war.

In the past week or so a distinct tone of despair has emerged in the punditry. Fred Kaplan is predicting that the Iraq Study Group's "blue-ribbon salvage job" will fail as soon as it's made public. Thomas Freidman, an early if qualified supporter of the war, is wagging his finger at Bush, declaring the US has to either get out now or invade Iraq all over again. Yesterday at Salon Tim Grieve worked himself into such a frenzy cranking out posts denouncing the war that I notice he's been replaced today. I worry that Grieve has been hospitalized. As for the hard-core conservatives, I don't read them, but I hear that Ann Colter is running away from the Iraq war as fast as her nicotine-charred lungs will allow. Rush Limbaugh seems to be keeping close to his Dittohead posse these days. William Kristol continues to publish advice meant for Bush, but the president isn't listening to him, either.

Now Beirut is threatening to become the new Baghdad. As David Ignatius says, "That's how bad it is right now in the Middle East -- when the Palestinian morass is regarded as a bright spot." With the American people clamoring for change, the White House will be serving Red Hat Box Mascarpone Cake on Christmas.

The Last Laugh

First the garbagemen, now the comedians: Walid Hassan, an Iraqi comedian and star of the popular television show Caricature, was found in West Baghdad with five bullets in his head. A Shiite, Hassan was last seen alive being driven away in a black car. His body was discovered a few hours later in a Sunni neighborhood. Hassan had one of the most popular television shows in Iraq but earned only about $400 a month. Nevertheless, he was able to save $5,000 to buy his family some land so they would have a place to live in case he was killed. Since the beginning of the war, 133 reporters, cameramen and other media workers have been killed in Iraq, most of them Iraqi.

Iraq: File Under Can't Do

As election day approaches and politicians consider abandoning what few convictions they have, Vanity Fair pays a visit to the neoconservatives who advocated invading Iraq. The armchair warriors agree that invading Iraq was a good idea, but alas, there were some screw ups "at the center" and not with the well-intentioned citizens in the think tanks. Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute gallantly blames the women: "Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes." Richard Perle growls, "I'm getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, 'Go design the campaign to do that.' I had no responsibility for that."

Who did have responsibility? None of the neoconservatives, even those who worked directly with the president. David Frum, he of the "Axis of Evil" phrase and other pieces of presidential bluster, just shakes his head and laments, "the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything." Kenneth Adelman pinpoints the problem most precisely: the whole Iraq invasion idea was misfiled.

The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can't execute it, it's useless, just useless. I guess that's what I would have said: that Bush's arguments are absolutely right, but you know what, you just have to put them in the drawer marked can't do. And that's very different from let's go.

Isn't a feasibility study a necessary step in developing a plan? Shouldn't men of such world-changing visions maybe put a little effort into working out the details?

Perhaps the best display of dishing out blame while absolving oneself from any wrongdoing comes from Michael Rubin, who worked on the Coalition Provisional Authority. Even though he was in position to make sure some of the details of the occupation were worked out properly, the problem was Bush didn't back up his rhetoric with action. Rubin throws out perhaps the damning charge in the article: He claims Bush betrayed the Iraqi reformers in a way "not much different from what his father did on February 15, 1991, when he called the Iraqi people to rise up, and then had second thoughts and didn't do anything once they did."

Staying the Course

So the White House has reprogrammed the remote control device Bush was seen wearing during the 2004 presidential debates (now shrunken, like the iPod) to give a little electrical shock every time the phrase "stay the course" pops into the presidential head. Now Bush talks blandly about "timetables" in Iraq, implying some sort of draw down of American troops in the near future, a plan long advocated by Democrats and others exasperated by Bush's deluded stubbornness. Freed from the constraints of the metaphor he's used to characterize his Iraq strategy, you would think he'd use this morning's press conference to showcase some genuine changes in strategy. Or not.

Newsweek's Cover(s)

ThinkProgress notices that this week Newsweek varies its cover by region. When the leading topic of the week is the National Intelligence Estimate and its conclusion, which everyone already suspected, that Iraq has become a breeding ground of hardened terrorists, in the USA we get distractive pablum about Annie Leibowitz, a photographer of the famous and the vapid. The rest of the world gets a real news story entitled "Losing Afghanistan." It's as if Karl Rove called up the editor of Newsweek and cut a deal.

Mohammed's Head

The Berlin Opera has canceled its production of Mozart's Idomeneo because of fears that a scene will offend Muslims. In the scene the title character chortles over four severed heads meant to represent all organized religions. The Berlin Opera production specifies the heads as the Mohammed, Jesus Christ, the Buddha and the Greek god Poseidon. Berliners are up in arms over the decision by the opera's director, Kirsten Harms, to cancel the production. In some ways, the decision is understandable. An opera is a major cultural institution that's especially vulnerable to terrorist attack. It's not possible place an entire opera company and its audience under police protection.

The odd figure here isn't Mohammed's head but Poseiden's. The libretto doesn't refer to Islam or any other religion in the scene. Any four heads will do, but why Poseiden's? Would the Berlin opera dare to depict a figure from Judaism in such a way? It would seem that a sensible compromise would have been substituting Mohammed's head with, say, Zoroaster's. As one of the oldest religions in the world, Zoroastrians will be more likely to act like grownups. Besides, considering the declining numbers of Zoroastrians, they could probably use the publicity.

The interesting thing about this incident is that there's no specific threat involved. We've now internalized the Islamic censor.At some point the conflict between Islamists' intolerance and Western free speech will come to a head. The non-Islamic world will have to make very specific demands for reform of Islam. To my knowledge, such a demand has never been made, let alone complied with.

Torture and Islamic Fascism

The compromise on torture forged yesterday between Senate Republicans and the White House eliminates only the most egregious parts of the administration's attempt to gut the Geneva Conventions. The American government won't trash Article 3 of the Conventions, but the guests at Guantanamo and the secret CIA detention centers will remain in a legal black hole. Now that McCain has signed off on eliminating habeas corpus for terrorist suspects, Democrats opposing the bill will face accusations of being soft on terrorism.

The use of torture has been widely discussed in the context of the November elections, but the debate should also be considered in the context of the controversy over Bush's use of the term "Islamic fascism." The first response is to recall that we managed to beat real fascism without resorting to torture, and in less time than the current war on terror.

Just as torture threatens to become the new normal in American foreign relations, the cynical use of the term "Islamic fascism" is gaining some credence. Martin Kramer has a well-informed blog post providing historical background for the controversy over "Islamic fascism," a term I've had some trouble with. Kramer points to a once well-known text on Middle Eastern studies by Manfred Halpren, a political science professor from Princeton and a refugee from Nazi Germany. Halpren describes the radical Islamists of the immediate post-war era in terms very similar to what we'd use to understand the fascists we see prancing around on the History Channel. Kramer asserts that Halpren's "rigorous treatment of Islamism stands up well, and his equating it with fascism was a serious proposition, made by someone who had seen fascism up close."

True enough, and Kramer makes a circumstantial case in defense of the Bush administration's use of "fascism" in the context of the war on terror. However, the most explicit instance he cites of the intellectual pedigree of "Islamic fascism" took place in a different historical context in which Nazism and Stalinism were the only models of totalitarian model available. One obvious difference is that the current brand of jihadists derive much of their rhetorical strength from religion, which has a history of repression and violence separate from the nationalist doctrines of twentieth-century fascism. Also, at a strategic level the conflation of the two is suspect. Invading Germany with heavy armor had the effect of eradicating fascism; invading Iraq with heavy armor has had the exact opposite effect.

Even if Hezbollah likes to flash the Nazi salute every so often, that doesn't mean the current struggle against jihadist terrorism is the same thing as the war against European fascism. Once should be careful of back-filling the administration's ill-considered and cynical pronouncements, especially considering its record of appalling distortions of complex and emotional issues. I still think the term "Islamic fascist" is bullshit as Harry G. Frankfurt defines the word. Unlike the liar, who knows the truth but avoids it, the bullshitter doesn't care about the truth. He just says whatever is in his interest to say; if it happens to be true, then great. Otherwise, bullshit floats free of truth claims or counterclaims. Islamic fascism doesn't describe the various and complex forces of anti-modern, anti-Western, and anti-American hostility welling up in the Islamic world. Rather, the term arises from a domestic political need that obfuscates rather than clarifies the struggle against jihadism.

America as the Serene Republic

David Ignatius reports on a conference in Washington run by conservatives looking for a kinder, gentler imperial model. They want to turn America into La Serenissima, Venice's serene republic, which ruled a vast empire largely through wily merchantilism. The conference's central questions invited speculation on a possible historical analogy between a post-Iraq America and 15th-century Venice:

How did the Venetians maintain their far-flung Mediterranean empire and also prosper as a free republic for over five centuries? Was their model of empire -- heavy on mercantile trading relationships, lighter on military intervention -- an example for the United States in the era of globalization? Did Venice practice a version of "Empire Lite" that America might emulate?

In Ignatius's report, no one questions the relation between a globalized economy and American empire, however conceived. In a "flat world," as Thomas Friedman likes to call our current condition, how valid is imperialism as a national model? Even if empire is still an operative idea in a decentralized global economic order, we're never going to get the chance to remake ourselves into a Venetian empire if we don't do something about our massive foreign debt, much of it owed to another rising empire, China. Furthermore, the chances are pretty slim that we'll give up our current imperial model, Rome, for the soft power of Venice. America as Rome with smart bombs is a model that's too enticing to our current ruling elite of screaming paranoiacs, well-heeled lobbists, and Darwinian corporate technocrats. Finally, I'm assuming someone at the conference gave some thought to the cause of Venice's imperial decline: the rise of the transatlantic trade, which was the dawn of a truly global economy.

Another point overlooked at the conference is another historical analogy between 15th-century Venice and 21st-century America. With global warming menacing our costal flood plains, we can simply rename them in accordance with our new imperial identity: How about "Venice on the Hudson" and "Venice on the bayou"? Gondola rides through the streets of Miami--how much fun would that be?

Ethics, Psychology and the Middle East

With less than a week to go to the fifth anniversary of 9/11, we're still trying to figure out that elusive thing: the terrorist mind. I don't know what we plan on doing once we figure it out, but a lot of effort has been spent in doing so. For some reason having to do with the general state of psychoanalysis, conventional psychological explanations have been very rare. Nevertheless, the need to assign psychological explanations is a powerful impulse in Western culture, especially as part of larger narrative of redemption. We've seen some flashes of plausible depictions of terrorist psychology in, for instance, Martin Amis's Muhammad Atta picking pubic hairs off a bar of soap, or John Updike's terrorist getting woozy at the sight of a bare female midriff.

Rabbi Eliyahu Shalem of Jerusalem, writing in The Free West blog, says we should drop psychologizing narratives and consider the current conflict in the Middle East (not the same thing as a discussion of terrorism, but hard to extricate from it) in terms of the common metanarrative he claims both Arabs and Israelis share: biblical stories. His blog entry was prompted by John Vinocur's op-ed piece, "Sex as a Flash Point in Clash of Civilizations," in which Vinocur suggests sexuality might play a much larger role in the formation of the terrorist mind than generally acknowledged. Shalem is having none of it, retorting "The psychological and sub-conscious do not play a real role in biblical or contemporary Middle Eastern narrative. Biblical thinking has no real place for the psyche or the subliminal." Biblical narratives, he argues, are moral and ethical rather than psychological. He goes on to assert that the only hope for peace is for all parties in the Middle East to recognize their common narrative tradition. Shalem concludes with a biblical lack of the subliminal, "I am afraid that if we allow for the psychological to enter the fray of Mid-East politics we will be lost. If we can deal with right and wrong, the ethical according to a principle of reasonableness we may find a solution."

Where in the Bible is the "principle of reasonableness"? Isn't reasonableness as the basis for conflict resolution a Western, non-biblical notion? Maybe instead of UN peacekeepers we could send Hassan Nasrallah a volume or two of Habermas. Alternatively, we could look to hermeneutic explanations that are neither crudely psychological nor simplistically allegorical, consider sexual repression of all kinds as a possible source of violence, and continue to refine our stories of madness and civilization.

Three Strikes

At the height of our sweaty summer, a few commentators began to venture the thesis that the United States has lost the war in Iraq. Writing in the New Yorker Hendrik Hertzberg recently concluded that we've rolled "snake eyes" in the big Iraq gamble. Most famously, Thomas Friedman, in uncharacteristically caustic tones, finally gave up on the Iraq war, calling for a few face-saving measures before we pull out the troops.

Going into the fall, the question seems to be: are we winning, or have we already lost? The first issue we need to address, as John Lehman points out in an op-ed piece tellingly entitled "We're Not Winning This War," is determining which war we're talking about. He writes, "The Bush administration continues to muddle a national understanding of the conflict we are in by calling it the "war on terror," then countering, "This not a war against terror any more than World War II was a war against kamikazes." This is a standard complaint, but this time it's coming from the Secretary of the Navy under Reagan and a member of the 9/11 Commission. Lehman can't be shrugged off as an appeaser.

Lehman shows his conservative loyalty by giving the Bush administration a few kudos: "The Bush administration deserves much credit for the fact that, despite determined efforts to carry them out, there have been no successful Islamist attacks within the United States since Sept. 11, 2001." This is a highly debatable conclusion--no one can say for sure why we haven't been attacked--and the 9/11 Commission's report card gives the Bush administration dismal grades on most subjects, including and especially securing our ports and chemical plants.

However, Lehman goes on to say that we're losing the war on all three fronts:  the home front, the operational front and the strategic-political front. Despite Rumsfeld's assurance to the contrary, "our ability to deter enemies around the world is disintegrating." Threats are pressing on from everywhere; Iran is laughing at us, North Korea celebrates the Fourth of July by shooting off missiles, and China is building up its navy to fill in the gap left by our declining naval power in the Pacific.

In coolly dispassionate tones, Lehman concludes, "In reviewing progress on the three fronts of this war, even the most sanguine optimist cannot yet conclude that we are winning or that we can win without some significant changes of policy." This is a telling closing statement, since changing policy in regard to the war on terror and the war in Iraq is not something we can expect from this administration.

On the home front--the only front that any of us really care about--we will appear to be winning the war against the Islamic fanatics until one awful day we suddenly won't be.

What's an Islamic Fascist?

Two of the world's foremost megalomaniacs spouted off today, demonstrating yet again that no debate about the Middle East is entirely free of at least a tinge of madness. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad challenged George Bush to a televised debate on Iran's nuclear program. Ahmadinejad wondered aloud, "Isn't it time that international relations are founded on democracy and equal rights of the nations?" The White House, resisting snark, declined the invitation as a "diversion."

Then Donald Rumsfeld, displaying the venal rhetoric for which he's so famous, inveighed against critics of the Iraq war, which would be most of the American electorate, as suffering from "moral and intellectual confusion" in the fight against "Islmic fascism." He likened the calls for US troops to leave before the entire country blows up in a frenzy of revenge killings to the appeasement of Hitler.

Rumsfeld's remarks got me to thinking: What is an Islamic fascist, anyway? It's a term that gets thrown around a lot lately, but what does it mean? Is Ahmadinejad a fascist? Are the hapless Miami 7 who supposedly wanted to blow up the Sears Tower fascists? How are the forces arrayed against the US in the Middle East fascist in any meaningful and unified sense? It seems that "Islamic fascist" is one of those emotive terms designed to place artificial limits on debate before it even begins.

The Willies of the People

In the Kabuki drama that is the Beltway debate about Iraq right now, the Republicans are still trying to rally the nation around a war while disavowing any responsibility for how its been run--a trick that would be beyond the rhetorical skills of Bill Clinton. This morning George Bush said leaving Iraq would be a "disaster," thundering that America must fight for democracy in the Middle East so that Muslims can have a government that "responds to the will of the people." Nice sentiment, but the will of the people in the Middle East seems to be squarely behind Hezbollah these days. Meanwhile, on these shores, the will of the people is not only ignored, but misrepresented with alacrity.

Never mind a recent CNN poll shows 57% of Americans want a date for getting the hell out of Iraq. John McCain, who is wooing former Bushies eager to cleanse themselves of association with this administration, appeared on Meet the Press and proclaimed "most" Americans are against a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. Anyone who thinks differently is a Democrat.

In the runup to the '08 presidential race McCain is trying out the Bush-Cheney-Rove strategy of marginalization and demonization--a strategy that includes grousing about how war has become politicized. McCain should be careful, though, because it's a careworn strategy. Bush himself has been reduced to bartering with the American people: He admits a small piece of reality in return for unquestioned belief in the larger strategy. This morning he admitted Sadam had neither weapons of mass destruction nor any role in 9/11. Then his part of the bargain came. He proclaimed, "Those who heralded the decision not to give law enforcement the tools necessary to protect the American people just simply don't see the world the way we do," adding "They see maybe these kind of isolated incidents. These aren't isolated incidents; they're tied together. There is a global war going on." Bush went on to admit the whole enterprise is "straining the psyche of our country." To cheer us up he pointed out that things could be worse:

A failed Iraq in the heart of the Middle East will provide safe haven for terrorists and extremists. It will embolden those who are trying to thwart the ambitions of reformers. In this case, it would give the terrorists and extremists an additional tool besides safe haven, and that is revenues from oil sales.

Such as those Iran is currently dispersing throughout the region? In fact, Bush's description of the worst case scenario looks an awful lot like the situation in Iraq today.  Bush is going to have to give up a lot more reality before he can convince the majority of Americans to allow troops to stay in Iraq.

Two Hands Up for Democracy in Iraq

Today's New York Times has an interesting, but hardly surprising, article on the rising violence directed at American troops. However, toward the bottom of the article is this potential showstopper:

[S]ome outside experts who have recently visited the White House said Bush administration officials were beginning to plan for the possibility that Iraq’s democratically elected government might not survive.

“Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy,” said one military affairs expert who received an Iraq briefing at the White House last month and agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity.

“Everybody in the administration is being quite circumspect,” the expert said, “but you can sense their own concern that this is drifting away from democracy.”

What alternatives to democracy? For what outcome for the US troops currently stationed in Iraq? And if we give up on the goal of establishing a democracy in Iraq, what does that do for the Bush administration's argument that Iraq is the front on the war on terror? It'll be interesting to see if this debate is the first step in an exit strategy or the prelude to a new, even more fantastic spin on our adventure in Iraq.

Dispatches from the Middle East

Probably a billion words a day are created about the Lebanon strife; here are some you may have missed:<