Category: Current Affairs

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Out of Compliance

Now here are some folks who know how to sling effective lingo: Our friends at Combined Joint Task Force Seven. They will not falter. They will not fail. And furthermore:

"CJTF-7 conducts offensive operations to defeat remaining noncompliant forces and neutralize destabilizing influences in the Area of Operations (AO) to create a secure environment in direct support
of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Concurrently, conducts stability operations which support the establishment of government and economic development to set the conditions for a transfer of operations to designated follow on military or civilian authorities."

"Remaining noncompliant forces." Beautiful.

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‘Two-Bit Thug’

I feel kind of bad about it, but I can’t make myself watch or listen much to the Bush people running the Iraq excursion. Partly it’s anger about the unapologetic lying, disingenuous self-justification, and
relentless absolutist spin — good vs. evil, democracy vs. tyranny, clean, well-mannered Americans and chosen friends vs. the malodorous of the world — that characterizes our leaders’ approach to their mission. And partly, there’s something about these guys, from the president on down, that’s just creepy and ugly when they’re being challenged in any way.
The latest exhibit for both parts of my unease comes an unblinking, tight-jawed Harvard MBA named Dan Senor, who’s the mouthpiece for the Amercan president of Iraq, Paul Bremer. Senor’s bio, on the White House site, gives no clue what expertise in Iraqi affairs got him into the first U.S. civilian team sent to Iraq last April. But,
the guy can spout the evil-doer rhetoric with the best of them. The New York Times quotes his summing up of this Sadr fellow, the Shiite demagogue who’s managed to raise some genuinely troubling resistance to the occupiers.

“Mr. Bremer’s spokesman, Dan Senor, described Mr. Sadr at a news conference as a ‘two-bit thug’ despised by the majority of Iraqis and said he and his forces would be destroyed.”

Of course, the thug line is just part of the administration’s script. The president himself used it earlier this week (twice, actually — here and here;
and a quick search on the not-too-reliable whitehouse.gov site indicates Bush and his people have used “thug” or “thugs” on 81 public occasions in the last 14 months. But you know, even if you consider Sadr and his guys the scum of the Earth, doesn’t it seem a little intemperate to make statements like this in public again and again? Doesn’t it seem a little bit like emotion has gotten the better of the Iraq excursion team? I mean, what would be lost by turning it down a notch and using a less loaded but very clear word like, for instance, “enemy”?
I like the irony in Senor pointing out that Sadr is despised by the majority of his countrymen. If you go by the 2000 election results, that’s something he and George Bush have in common.

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West Bank? Or Vietnam?

A year ago, I thought the question about Iraq was whether it would be another Vietnam (the quagmire scenario; the immediate answer was no) or a new version of the West Bank (the everlasting rebellion against the occupier; the first carbombing of American troops while the “major combat” was going on last year made me think about that parallel). But events today show we might have the worst of both worlds.

The West Bank part: A widespread nationalist-religious uprising. OK, I’m getting the “uprising” part from The New York Times in its story on what’s happening on the streets. But superficially, at least, this looks like it could be the beginning of an Iraqi intifada
— a challenge to the occupation’s overwhelming military force using small arms, weight of numbers and rage. Of course, what made the Palestinian uprising the phenomenon it was (and has been) is its longevity. So we won’t know whether we do have a real intifada on our hands for awhile.

The Vietnam part: I think this quote from Paul Bremer (as reported on the Washington Post site) is precious, a great window into the illusions of the true believers who launched the war:

“For the past 11 months, Iraq has been on the path to democracy and freedom — freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press. Those freedoms must be exercised peacefully. This
morning, a group of people in Najaf have crossed the line and moved to violence. . . . This will not be tolerated by the coalition, this will not be tolerated by the Iraqi people, and this will not be tolerated by
the Iraqi security forces.”

A rough breakdown on the wishful or out-of-touch thoughts here:

–“Iraq has been on the path to democracy and freedom.” Yes, we shocked and awed and brought in the heavy artillery and chased Saddam out and picked a committee of acceptable Iraqis to be the Founding Fathers (with a mom or two thrown in) of the new reality. That’s how you build democracy — you have an alien army unencumbered by knowledge of the complexity of the situation its dealing with, it smashes down the existing tyranny, then commands democracy to flourish, just like that.

–“Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press.” Yes, compared to what Mr. Saddam allowed. But still subject to the best judgment of the people now in charge and the commissioner of Major
League Baseball.

–“This morning, a group of people in Najaf have crossed the line. …” Yes — it’s only a few isolated malcontents and miscreants and their evildoer pals who are behind all the trouble.

–“This will not be tolerated by the coalition …” Check. The president’s mad. Rummy’s mad. Bremer’s mad. The generals are mad. They’re stamping their feet. They won’t stand for this sort of behavior. And they’ve got the tanks and helicopters to show they mean business.

–“This will not be tolerated by the Iraqi people…” Aren’t those Iraqi people running around raising hell in the streets? They seem to be tolerating this. But yeah, they’re malcontents and miscreants and evildoers. We must be talking about the rest of the Iraqis — the same ones we consulted before we launched this whole adventure. All two or three dozen of them.

–“And this will not be tolerated by the Iraqi security forces.” First — what does “security” mean? And if it means what you think it means, then why are they called “security forces”?

I think Bremer’s statement illustrates the emerging Vietnam nature of the war in Iraq. Just as in South Vietnam, we seem to have talked ourselves into believing that great values, great intentions, and great
military resources are a shortcut to winning hearts and minds of an unknown populace to a great ideal (and coincidentally, our strategic ends). In the meantime, don’t let any contradictory evidence get in the
way of the vision: the apparent lack of consensus among the population about the future, the evident disdain among many for our presence, the extraordinary difficulty of fitting all Iraq’s competing interests and desires inside the pre-fab democracy we think we can set up.

What we’re doing in Iraq adds up to a fatal kind of arrogance. A terrible misuse of our power. A pointless sequel to our September 11th tragedy.

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News to Me …

By way of Coudal Partners: A story in Editor and Publisher that mentions in passing that The Onion‘s
response to the 2001 terrorist attacks was submitted for a Pulitzer
Prize (good for The Onion) and actually got some serious consideration
(good for the judges, or at least some of them). Can’t find a link to
the front page with its “Holy Fucking Shit” headline, but here’s one of
the issue’s best pieces, “God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule.”

“I tried to put it in the simplest possible terms for you people, so
you’d get it straight, because I thought it was pretty important,” said
God, called Yahweh and Allah respectively in the Judaic and Muslim
traditions. “I guess I figured I’d left no real room for confusion
after putting it in a four-word sentence with one-syllable words, on
the tablets I gave to Moses. How much more clear can I get?”

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Why Kids Should Read

From a recent decision of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal on a copyright dispute involving characters in the Spawn comic franchise (via The Trademark Blog):

“The description of a character in prose leaves much to the imagination, even when the description is detailed — as in Dashiel Hammett’s description of Sam Spade’s physical appearance in the first paragraph of The Maltese Falcon: ‘Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down — from high flat temples — in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.’ Even after all this, one hardly knows what Sam Spade looked like. But everyone knows what Humphrey Bogart looked like. A reader of unillustrated fiction completes the work in his mind; the reader of a comic book or the viewer of a movie is passive. That is why kids lose a lot when they don’t read fiction, even when the movies and television that they watch are aesthetically superior.”

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Spalding 3 …

The Times has posted its obituary, too:

“Almost always seated behind a simple desk, with a glass of water, a microphone and some notes, Mr. Gray practiced the art of storytelling with a quiet mania, alternating between conspiratorial whispers and antic screams as he roamed through topics large and small.

“This talent was perhaps never better displayed than in “Swimming to Cambodia,” his 1984 monologue in which his experiences filming a small role in the movie “The Killing Fields” became a jumping-off point for exploring the history and culture of war in Southeast Asia. The piece was itself turned into a noted film, directed by Jonathan Demme, in 1987.”

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Spalding 2 …

And here is the first New York Times story on the body. From the Associated Press:

“The city medical examiner confirmed through dental records and X-rays on Monday that it was Gray’s body. The cause of his death was still under investigation, said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner.

“Throughout his disappearance, his wife, Kathleen Russo, had held out scant hope that he might still be alive.

” ‘Everyone that looks like him from behind, I go up and check to make sure it’s not him,’ Russo said in a phone interview with The Associated Press about a week ago. ‘If someone calls and hangs up, I always do star-69. You’re always thinking, “maybe.” ‘ “

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Spalding Gray …

Missing since January and now found dead in the East River in New York City (no link yet, but The New York Times among others is reporting that on its Web site). A strange, sad fact is that no one I’ve mentioned this to in the office — and I’ve only talked to the Ford-Carter-Reagan babies so far — has any idea who he was.

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John Kerry and Me

John and I met in San Francisco last night while I was waiting to take the ferry over to Oakland. When I was walking up to the ferry dock, a phalanx of police motorcycles appeared, followed by a convoy of black Chevy Suburbans. Several dozen ferry passengers were being held back by cops, and they already knew why: John Kerry, on a California campaign swing, was in one of the Suburbans, and the ferry at the dock was reserved for a trip he was taking over to a rally Jerry Brown was hosting in the East Bay. Sure enough, Kerry got out of one of the vehicles, and as a Secret Service agent motioned to a guy near me to take his hands out of his pockets, he waved and walked down to the boat, which waited for some staffers and reporters before pulling out of its berth and heading for Oakland. Then our ferry came in. It was only after climbing aboard that I realized how heavy the security was. A couple of Coast Guard helicopters patrolled overhead; at least two Coast Guard Zodiacs, complete with .50-caliber machineguns mounted in the bows, monitored the route across the bay; and a larger cutter was standing by, too.

We passed Kerry’s boat en route, and when we arrived on the other side, the fleet of Suburbans, and a smaller group of Oakland motorcycle cops was waiting.

It turned out that our trip was delayed about five, maybe ten, minutes in getting under way. Even that little bit of a delay prompted a lot of grousing from some of the passengers: “I’m not voting for him now,” one younger guy muttered. “John Edwards just rides around on a bus. He doesn’t need all this bullshit just to travel around.” And as we got off our ferry, one of the crew said, “Oakland that way — your tax dollars over there” — gesturing toward Kerry’s boat, which was approaching.

It’s the bitch and moan of democracy.

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‘Men of Zeal … Without Understanding’

Some snippets from Olmstead v. United States, a 1928 Supreme Court case that considered whether unauthorized police wiretapping is a violation of the Fourth Amendment (“the right of the people to be secure …  against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated”) and the Fifth Amendment (“no person … shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself”). It arose from a bootlegging bust in Washington state in which federal prohibition agents had, in violation of a state law, secretly tapped phone lines to get evidence.

The majority, in a pedestrian and short-sighted opinion (by Chief Justice William Howard Taft) that the current administration would love, ruled, in essence, that it was fine for the agents to tap the lines and listen in because they hadn’t physically intruded on the suspects’ property when they did it.

Associate Justice Louis Brandeis wrote the most important of several dissents. He demonstrated the absurdity of the majority’s finding on the nature of wiretapping and added lessons on privacy, the need for individual protections against government power, and government’s responsibility to act within the law. The passage most apt for today’s America: one in which he warns of the danger of government pursuing “benificent” ends — making sure we’re all secure from terrorists, say — regardless of the means: “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”

A few passages from Brandeis’s Olmstead dissent:

“… The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone-the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect, that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment. And the use, as evidence in a criminal proceeding, of facts ascertained by such intrusion must be deemed a violation of the Fifth. …

“… Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. …

“Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means-to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal-would bring terrible retribution.”