On the Legality Question of the Iraq War

Since the BBC is one of my primary sources for world news, I have been following with mild interest (which seems to be significantly more than that of American media) the proceedings of an inquiry into the initiation of the "Bush War" in Iraq. The head of the inquiry is Sir John Chilcot, who, prior to its first meeting, released a public statement emphasizing the objectivity of the procedures to be taken. Since both those procedures and the findings are likely to have a significant impact on both the current Prime Minister and his immediate predecessor, taking that emphasis seriously may be challenging; but I, for one, hope that Chilcot can make good on his intentions.

This morning's BBC News story dealt with the testimony of Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the United Kingdom's ambassador to the United Nations in 2003 when the United States' proposal to invade Iraq was being debated. Greenstock chose some interesting language to describe the ultimate conclusion to those debates:

I regarded our participation in the military action against Iraq in March 2003 as legal but of questionable legitimacy in that it did not have the democratically observable backing of a great majority of member states or even perhaps of a majority of people inside the UK.

There was a failure to establish legitimacy although I think we successfully established legality in the UN....to the degree, at least, that we were never challenged in the UN or International Court of Justice for those actions.

This strikes me as diplomatic language at its most evasive: The military action was legal because its legality was never challenged. What this proposition overlooks is that the United States can probably block any attempted action by the International Court of Justice, just as it has yet to accept the authority of the International Criminal Court. Simply put, American policy has put the United States beyond the limits of any court-based procedure that would resolve this particular question of legality. Since any challenge to legality would have to involve either the United States itself or specific Americans (such as the former President) as defendants, the United States has basically protected itself with a major barrier to such a challenge ever being resolved.

The current Administration seems content to leave that barrier in place. Barack Obama began his Administration with eloquent language of putting the past behind us, which basically meant that there would be no steps towards prosecution of anyone involved with our initiating the war in Iraq. His Attorney General took a few initiative steps of his own, but it would appear that his boss is keeping him on a tight leash. Similarly, there is no sign that the United States will change its position on refusing to recognize the authority of any international legal authority; so the barrier will remain secure. Perhaps Obama is banking on his personal appeal concealing that barrier in a smoke screen. This would certainly be effective politics, but would it be consistent with either our domestic model of proper judicial procedure or our need to respect justice as an international concept?

No Change Where it is Needed

Blackwater left such a black mark on the reputation of the United States that even its owner, Erik Prince had to acknowledge it. Unfortunately, that acknowledgement did not go much further than a rebranding effort, which did little more than change the name from "Blackwater" to "Xe." Admittedly, this dispensed with the "black" metaphor, replacing it with utter confusion. I suppose the message was that what you don't know can't hurt you.

Fortunately, name-changing was not enough to throw Jeremy Scahill off the scent of his investigations, which have involved nefarious practices by the organization (whatever its name may be) and questionable relations with the United States Government, regardless of who is President. That's right, Xe is apparently off limits when it comes to that "change we can believe in" litany. Here is how Scahill has reported the current state of play in his latest story for The Nation:

Just days before two former Blackwater employees alleged in sworn statements filed in federal court that the company's owner, Erik Prince, "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," the Obama administration extended a contract with Blackwater for more than $20 million for "security services" in Iraq, according to federal contract data obtained by The Nation. The State Department contract is scheduled to run through September 3. In May, the State Department announced it was not renewing Blackwater's Iraq contract, and the Iraqi government has refused to issue the company an operating license.

"They are still there, but we are transitioning them out," a State Department official told The Nation. According to the State Department, the $20 million represents an increase on an aviation contract that predates the Obama administration.
Despite its scandal-plagued track record, Blackwater (which has rebranded itself as Xe) continues to have a presence in Iraq, trains Afghan forces on US contracts and provides government-funded training for military and law enforcement inside the United States. The company is also actively bidding on other government contracts, including in Afghanistan, where the number of private contractors is swelling. According to federal contracting records reviewed by The Nation, since President Barack Obama took office in January the State Department has contracted with Blackwater for more than $174 million in "security services" alone in Iraq and Afghanistan and tens of millions more in "aviation services." Much of this money stems from existing contracts from the Bush era that have been continued by the Obama administration. While Obama certainly inherited a mess when it came to Blackwater's entrenchment in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has continued the widespread use of armed private contractors in both countries. Blackwater's role may be slowly shrinking, but its work is continuing through companies such as DynCorp and Triple Canopy.

Can we really anticipate change down the line, or will the status quo rule again? The full text of Scahill's account is as long as it is disconcerting. I doubt that the Obama Administration will be doing much to help us awaken from this particular nightmare.

Two Voices Speaking Truth to Power

Much has been made of the extent to which Harold Pinter dedicated his final years to outspoken condemnation of the follies of the Bush Administration with the mindless consent of the United Kingdom. The obituary by Alastair Jamieson for the London Telegraph provides one of the better summaries of the aggressive way in which Pinter could use his bully pulpit to speak truth to power:

In 2002 he described the Bush administration in the United States as "a bloodthirsty wild animal", adding: "Bombs are its only vocabulary." He said: "Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture of their government but seem to be helpless".

He has called President Bush as "mass-murdering" and former prime minister Tony Blair as a "deluded idiot".

In accepting the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry, on 18 March 2005, he said: "I believe Wilfred Owen would share our contempt, our revulsion, our nausea and our shame at both the language and the actions of the American and British governments".

I do not know if Pinter cited any of Owen's texts in his acceptance speech. However, reading that last sentence reminded me of the epigraph passage from Owen that Benjamin Britten placed on the title page of his War Requiem:

My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity…
All a poet can do today is warn.

Pinter tried to shift his role from one who warns to one who could change, and it remains to be seen if his words and actions have made a difference.

Meanwhile, lest we dwell too much on the Pinter obituaries, we should remember that Eartha Kitt, whose death was also reported yesterday, spoke truth to power in her own way during the nightmare of our engagement in Vietnam. BBC NEWS made it a point to recognize this aspect of her life in their obituary:

In the late sixties, however, Kitt's career encountered a substantial setback after she made her anti-Vietnam war views explicit during a White House luncheon.

The CIA put together a dossier on her and she became professionally exiled from the US. She worked abroad for 11 years, where her reputation remained unscathed, but returned triumphantly to New York in 1974 to star in a Broadway spectacle of Timbuktu!

There is little similarity between the respective career paths of Pinter and Kitt, but each had and took the opportunity to speak truth to power. It seems appropriate to remember them together and a time when the checks on power are still being strained.

America the Jingo

Was President George W. Bush's address to the troops upon his arrival in Afghanistan just another one of his faith-based formulas or a citation from our national anthem, delivered with the same ideological intimidation with which fundamentalist preachers invoke Scripture? I am referring to the following quotation in this morning's Financial Times, taken from the Reuters' wire:

I am confident we will succeed in Afghanistan because our cause is just.

This is the sort of passage that rings true to those who know more of "The Star-Spangled Banner" than its first stanza. The more relevant passage is the following:

Then conquer we must
For our cause it is just
And this be our motto,
"In God is our trust!"

This is the sort of patriotism best captured by Ambrose Bierce in his Devil's Dictionary:

PATRIOTISM, n. Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any one ambitious to illuminate his name.

In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.

Facing the press, rather than the troops, Bush was a little less formulaic but no better informed:

But Bush said much progress had been made in Afghanistan since U.S. and Afghan forces toppled the Taliban in 2001 for sheltering al Qaeda leaders behind the Sept. 11 attacks and said dozens of roads, schools and hospitals had been built.

But an Afghan reporter challenged Bush, saying the United States had failed to make good on promises to bring security.

”I respectfully disagree with you,” Bush replied. ”I just cited the progress. It’s undeniable. I never said the Taliban was eliminated, I said they were removed from power. They are lethal and they are tough.”

Still, if Bush could not grasp the cultural significance of yesterday's episode in Iraq, one cannot expect him to engage in reality-based discourse over the current dire conditions in Afghanistan.

The Power of the Iraqi Press

Having just acknowledged the reaction of Iraqi journalist Ahmed Rushdi to the "Hard Lessons" report, I feel some obligation now to recognize another reporter, Muntadar al-Zeidi, a correspondent for Al-Baghdadiya television. Al-Zeidi had the opportunity to speak truth directly to the power of George W. Bush when the President gave a press conference as part of his visit to Iraq. According to the Associated Press, as rendered in a report on Al Jazeera English, he chose a unique and culturally significant way to do so:

George Bush, the US president, has had a pair of shoes hurled at him at a press conference during his last surprise visit to Iraq before leaving office in January.

An Iraqi reporter called Bush "a dog" and shouted out "this is the end" at Sunday's news conference in Baghdad, before hurling his shoes at the US leader.

Bush, who had been giving a joint press statement with Nuri Al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, ducked behind a podium as the shoes narrowly missed his head.

He was reported to be unhurt after the attack by Muntadar al-Zeidi, a correspondent for Al-Baghdadiya television, the Associated Press news agency reported.

The outgoing US leader had just told reporters that while the war in Iraq was not over "it is decisively on its way to being won," when al-Zeidi got to his feet and hurled abuse - and his footwear - at the US president.

Sign of contempt

In Iraqi culture, throwing shoes at someone is a sign of contempt.

The incident will serve as a vivid reminder of the widespread opposition to the US-led invasion of, and subsequent war in, Iraq - the conflict which has come to define Bush's presidency.

Bush shrugged off the incident and quipped: "All I can report is that it's a size 10."

Most likely Bush did not grasp the cultural significance of the act. The rest of us can appreciate that the power of the press in Iraq appears to be stronger here than it has been within our mainstream media over the last eight years.

C Students don't Learn Hard Lessons

With less than six weeks before the Inauguration, it is beginning to feel as if every day brings us a new irony to ponder, most of those ironies being centered on President George W. Bush. Today's irony stems from his decision to make his final visit to Iraq while, thanks to The New York Times, the rest of the world is focusing on a draft copy of "Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience." For those not yet aware of this document, Al Jazeera English has reported on it in the direct language it deserves:

The US-led force's $100bn effort to rebuild Iraq has failed amid bureaucratic quarrels, ignorance of Iraqi society and violence in the country, the New York Times has quoted a federal report as saying.

The newspaper said on its website on Saturday that it had obtained a draft copy of Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience, which is circulating among senior officials.

The report was compiled by the Office of the Special Inspector-General for Iraq Reconstruction, which is led by Stuart Bowen Jr, a Republican lawyer.

Where Al Jazeera could pursue this story beyond the Times was with their own resources for gathering reactions to the report within Iraq itself. Thus, given the bottom line that $117 billion had been spent on this reconstruction effort by the middle of this year, Al Jazeera was able to field the following reaction from Iraqi journalist Ahmed Rushdi:

When you are talking about 117 billion dollars, you are talking about stolen money, misused money, and poor planning. But the Americans and the Iraqis said that these monies were being spent on security.

I think Americans and some Iraqis have got very rich [off the funds] and they decided to get rid of all ther documents which would show that something was wrong, particularly in Paul Bremer's administration.

We must make a rule on how to charge these people with crimes.

It is that last sentence that gets to me the most, since it reflects on a sentence that had earned Bush his thirteenth Chutzpah of the Week award:

I'd like to be a president [known] as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace.

What kind of peace is it that can sustain without due process of law? The answer is simple enough: It is a peace that depends on totalitarian authority. The "enforced peace" of Saddam Hussein has been replaced by a kleptocratic anarchy, under which peace is not even a distant dream. Was Bush's declaration one of self-deception, as I suggested in presenting his Chutzpah award; or was it calculated ideological posturing to provide cover for those "Americans and some Iraqis [who] have got very rich?" In the absence of due process of law, as much in this country as in Iraq, we may never know the answer to this question; and that is the real irony behind a war that began on false pretenses and now continues as outright thievery under equally false pretenses.

Bush Hits Fourteen!

Tim Dickinson may be using the pages of Rolling Stone to document the "sweeping array of 'midnight regulations,'" through which President George W. Bush may continue to do damage even while his days in the White House are numbered; but I shall keep my attention on how he is using these days to accumulate a "surge" of Chutzpah of the Week awards. Having easily accumulated the baker's dozen, he has advanced his count once again; but, believe it or not, he has invoked the blogosphere for this one. Having just credited Stephanie Condon for reporting on how the new Administration may be putting our representative governmental processes in jeopardy, I have to thank her for reporting on the absolutely delicious irony behind our current President's fourteenth award:

President Bush, in recognition of Human Rights Day, met with bloggers from Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, and Venezuela at the White House and via video teleconference to discuss blogging in favor of democratic change.

The administration has supported pro-democracy new media efforts through programs like the Broadcasting Board of Governors, an independent group responsible for all U.S. government and government-sponsored, non-military, international broadcasting. The BBG collects reports from citizen journalists with cell phones, and it sends out news reports via text messaging and targeted e-mails, encouraging citizens in countries with oppressive censorship to "join the information revolution," according to the White House. Bush increased funding for BBG from $441 million in 2001 to $670 million in 2008.

The State Department has also taken to promoting democracy via the Internet with a Democracy Video Challenge, a contest to produce a short video that completes the phrase "Democracy is..." Seven winners from six different regions of the world will be announced in June 2009, and their films will be shown in New York, Washington, and Hollywood.

I suppose we should be thankful that Bush bothered to recognize Human Rights Day at all (this one being the 60th anniversary of the ratification of the Declaration for which it is named); but the irony of a Head of State who has done so much to undermine his country's Constitutional foundations now honoring those in other countries using their blogs to establish similar foundations is, as I said, "absolutely delicious!" Mind you, this fourteenth award is, in many ways, a corollary to number thirteen, which was triggered by these words:

I'd like to be a president [known] as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace.

Those words were, of course, his retrospective view of our military "adventures" in Iraq; so we should not be surprised that Iraq is not among the countries listed in the first paragraph in the above quote. We have to go to other sources to learn about the courage of Iraqi bloggers and the perspectives they offer on what Bush seems to want his legacy to be.

Then we have the video contest. Since this is a State Department activity, I would guess that American contributors need not apply, although there are definitely American videos on the DemocracyChallenge channel on YouTube. However, as I write this the entry with the highest rating and the highest number of views (705) comes from Iran and presents the text of the "first charter of human rights," as formulated by Cyrus the Great, founder of the First Persian Empire (who, among other things, helped those Jews in exile "by the waters of Babylon" return to their homeland, thus earning a place in the Old Testament). At the very least this video reminds us of the fact that Human Rights Day involves far more than an American President who chose to write off Iran as part of an "axis of evil." The video does not choose sides between the United States and Iran. It just reminds us of what really matters. I wonder if President Bush took the time (all of one and a half minutes) to watch it and, if so, how he ended up "reading" it.

Legacy Chutzpah

It was only two weeks ago that I wrote, "President George W. Bush apparently has no intention of letting his lame duck status interfere with his capacity for building up a collection of Chutzpah of the Week award;" and now, with only a one-week interval to allow for an award to go to Henry Kissinger (an opportunity so irresistible that I grabbed it at the beginning of last week), Bush is back to push his count up from an even dozen to a baker's dozen. This time the occasion was a conversation with his sister, Dorothy Bush Koch, recorded for the oral-history organization StoryCorps for the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and reported for ABC News by Jennifer Parker. Like his tenth award, number thirteen is based on his growing attention to his own legacy; but, while number ten was awarded for trying to make a bad joke about that legacy, this one is grounded in the sheer magnitude of self-deception.

The best way to appreciate this magnitude is through his own words, and Parker has given us an excellent batch to sample. First and foremost is his own view of conditions in Iraq:

I'd like to be a president [known] as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace.

The absurdity of this particular instance of self-deception not only justifies the award but may be sufficient for the Arab world to consider at least temporarily adopting the noun chutzpah in their working vocabulary! However, the self-deception is hardly limited to foreign affairs:

I think the No Child Left Behind Act is one of the significant achievements of my administration because we said loud and clear to educators, parents and children that we expect the best for every child, that we believe every child can learn, and that in return for Federal money we expect there to be an accountability system in place to determine whether every child is learning to read, write, and add and subtract. … The promise of No Child Left Behind has been fulfilled.

From here his sense of self-accomplishment gets even broader, saying he wanted to be known as a President

… that focused on individuals rather than process; that rallied people to serve their neighbor; that led an effort to help relieve HIV/AIDS and malaria on places like the continent of Africa; that helped elderly people get prescription drugs and Medicare as a part of the basic package; that came to Washington, D.C., with a set of political statements and worked as hard as I possibly could to do what I told the American people I would do.

Finally, we have a concluding "meditation" on his view of faith:

I've been in the Bible every day since I've been the president, and I have been affected by peoples' prayers a lot. I have found that faith is comforting, faith is strengthening, faith has been important.

I would advise politicians, however, to be careful about faith in the public arena.

In other words, politicians should not be judgmental people based upon their faith. They should recognize -- as least I have recognized I am a lowly sinner seeking redemption, and therefore have been very careful about saying [accept] my faith or you're bad. In other words, if you don't accept what I believe, you're a bad person. And the greatness of America -- it really is -- is that you can worship or not worship and be equally American. And it doesn't matter how you choose to worship; you're equally American. And it's very important for any President to jealously protect, guard, and strengthen that freedom.

What runs through all of these texts is the invocation of simplistic formulas that substitute for serious reflection and thus lead to the distorted view of reality that has been the real legacy of the last eight years. Whether or not that sense of reality will be recovered during the coming Administration remains to be seen, but the pride that Bush seems to take in his capacity for distortion could not provide a better reason for his thirteenth Chutzpah of the Week award.

Mission Accomplished?

The path to an agreement with the government of Iraq over the continued presence of United States military forces has been long and hard. Now that the fundamental disagreements between Iraq and the United States appear to have been resolved, there are now contentious disagreements arising in the ratification debate taking place in the Iraqi parliament. According to Ahmed Rasheed's report for Reuters, filed from Baghdad, those disagreements may ultimately be resolved by the very democratic process that we claimed we were bringing to Iraq:

Iraq's parliament was likely to approve on Wednesday a pact that sets a date for U.S. military forces to withdraw, but could make the agreement dependent on a public referendum next year, lawmakers said.

The security deal, which would see the last U.S. soldier leave at the end of 2011, more than eight years after the ouster of dictator Saddam Hussein, was due to be put to a vote but continued to be subject to dogged last minute haggling.

The apparent agreement to hold a referendum is seen as a concession by Kurdish and Shi'ite blocs to Sunni Arab deputies who have said they would back the security pact if it was put to a nationwide vote. It has already been approved by the cabinet and signed with Washington.

If the proposal for a referendum is approved by parliament, the security pact would be passed, said Abdul-Kareem Al-Samaraie, a deputy from the main Sunni group, the Accordance Front, which had demanded the popular vote.

"There will be an initial approval of the security pact until we hold the referendum in 2009. It will be valid until then. If the result (of the referendum) is a 'No', it will be canceled," he said.

A senior lawmaker from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Dawa party said he had no problem with that and a Kurdish lawmaker, whose group is a partner in Maliki's Shi'ite-led coalition, concurred. A government spokesman said the proposal had not been finalized but appeared to do "no harm."

Given that the economic crisis has become the highest-priority problem of the incoming Administration, this will give Barack Obama some well-needed breathing space before having to confront his campaign promises about withdrawing from Iraq. If the agreement is voted down by referendum, then he simply has to accept Iraq's own wishes for a withdrawal; and, if the agreement is approved, then there will be at least some evidence that our continued presence over there is desired. Either way, this story makes an interesting contrast to that comment of Patricia Williams that I cited yesterday to the effect that the Bush Administration has never been particularly serious about government itself. The timing is such that George W. Bush will leave office at the time of a rather significant lesson in what it means to take government seriously, and that lesson will be coming from Iraq. Could there have been a more ironic conclusion to the eight-year mess we have endured?

Where Milton Fumbled

I found last night's Great Seduction post by Andrew Keen, entitled "The End of Quack Economics," to provide a nice complement to my observations yesterday about the faith-based nature of "Chicago school" economic ideology. Keen is all but dancing around the funeral pyre of that ideology:

One of the few benefits of the global financial meltdown and its consequent government activism is the return of the economics of sanity. Paul Krugman's Nobel prize is excellent news. So is the rehabilitation of Keynes and the resurrection of Gordon Brown.

If Keynesian economics is back in vogue, then it's Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and the laissez-faire Vienna School who are suddenly out of fashion. Yes, the free market Gods have failed.

I particularly liked that last touch about "the free market Gods," which I took as an affirmation that it was faith-based thinking that got us into this mess, just as it had gotten us into the mess in Iraq, not to mention our entire approach to the Global War on Terror.

Regardless of where the vogue happens to be (remembering, as always, those words from The Money Game, by the "other" Adam Smith: "The crowd is always wrong"), I figured that, having just hammered Friedman and (at least by association) Hayek, it was time for me to refresh my memory of John Maynard Keynes; so I turned to the chapter, "The Mandarin Revolution," in John Kenneth Galbraith's The Age of Uncertainty. From Galbraith I was reminded that Keynes' first interest as a student at Eton was mathematics; and it was only at King's College at Cambridge that he fell in with economists. Thus it would be fair to say that his respect for mathematics was as great as any that could be found at the University of Chicago. This led me to wonder what it was about Keynes' path that led to a departure from that Vienna School thinking that would later be embraced in Chicago.

One hint came from a passage that I had marked in my copy of Galbraith concerned with Keynes' activities after the First World War:

Mostly in those years Keynes wrote. Good writing in economics is suspect—and with justification. It can persuade people. It also requires clear thought. No one can express well what he does not understand. So clear writing is perceived as a threat, something deeply damaging to the numerous scholars who shelter mediocrity of mind behind obscurity of prose. Keynes was a superb writer when he chose to try. This added appreciably to the suspicion with which he was regarded.

This passage may be read as a loosely-veiled attack on the cultural influence of Vienna Circle positivism on the Vienna School economic theorists. The fundamental precept of positivism is that pure mathematics (and, consequently, the modeling of logical deduction by pure mathematics) can speak for itself without the mediation of prose, which will always be vulnerable to going "off message" by virtue of less logical devices, such as rhetoric. (Consider, as a historical context, Plato's opinion of the rhetoric teacher Gorgias.) Good writing is therefore suspect because it distracts from those mathematical models wherein "all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" resides. Keynes, himself, was therefore also suspect for turning away from the "direct communication" of the mathematics at his command in the interest of a communication that would serve the needs of readers who were not experts at interpreting the pure mathematics and logic behind the results they supported. At the risk of being overly reductive, Keynes held to the personal conviction that people matter more than mathematics and became a thorn in the side of those theorists who agonized over why people would not willingly do what the models told them was best for them.

This people-based approached would later receive an ironic endorsement through Public Television. In many ways the ideological dispute between the Chicago School and Keynesianism was embodied in a personal rivalry between Friedman and Galbraith. That rivalry came to a head when the televised version of The Age of Uncertainty was being produced. Each "episode" corresponded to a chapter in Galbraith's book but also included an "epilogue," during which Galbraith interviewed a leading economic theorist about the "lesson of the week." Rather like the evil fairy Carabosse in the Sleeping Beauty ballet, Friedman was mightily offended at having been passed by for any of these weekly epilogues and, rather than forcing Galbraith into deep slumber through a poisoned spindle, enlisted his free-market allies to support his own ten-episode television series, entitled, aptly enough, Free to Choose.

For all of the power of that supporting positivist ideology, Friedman launched his series with a gesture that was purely rhetorical. This was because Galbraith had chosen to conclude his argument with a visit to Singapore as a model example of how successful a controlled economy could be. This apparently inspired Friedman to begin his series in Hong Kong, where his first episode, "The Power of the Market," amounted to an apotheosis of the sweatshop mentality, the perfect example of what, during Ronald Reagan's campaign against Jimmy Carter, came to be called the rising tide that would lift all boats. The extent to which those sweatshop workers had been reduced to less-than-human objects (or, to invoke Hayek's metaphor, serfs) mattered little compared to the power of free markets to promote growth.

The Hayek reference serves to magnify the irony. The basic argument of The Road to Serfdom was that excessive regulatory control, shown in the best possible light in Galbraith's analysis of Singapore, would turn us all into a new generation of serfs. What we have seen instead is that free-market thinking has been the ideological standard of the War Against the Poor; and its victims now suffer the serfdom of those Hong Kong sweatshop workers with little hope of rising from the muck. Nevertheless, it would be premature to declare, as Keen did, that "the free market Gods have failed." If they are truly out of the picture (which I find unlikely), then, at best, they are in hibernation, rather like those desert toads that bury themselves underground in suspended animation, only to spring back to life with the first drops of the spring rains (whence come the next rising tides). Even under Keynesianism there will be those coming up with new strategies to "keep the poor in their place" by providing them with new and freshly paved roads to serfdom!

Words to Remember

In his post last night to The Beat on the Web site for The Nation, John Nichols extracted a few remarks from the debate made by those who voted against the bailout. I feel it a good idea to reproduce those remarks; so we can remember them for what they said and who said them:

• Texas Democrat Lloyd Doggett: "Like the Iraq War and the Patriot Act, this bill is fueled by fear and haste."
• Texas Republican John Culberson: "This legislation is giving us a choice between bankrupting our children and bankrupting a few of these big financial institutions on Wall Street that made bad decisions."
• California Democrat Joe Baca, Chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus: "There's nothing in here that guarantees new jobs, nothing that guarantees salary increases. And that's a huge problem."

There we have three members of the House, each representing different interests but each trying to serve those who voted him into office and will have to make that decision again in November. If President George W. Bush was not aware of what these three Congressmen said during debate before speaking to the nation this morning, then his staff was negligent if providing him with an account of why his "solution" was voted down yesterday. If he was aware, then it is clear from what he said this morning that he chose to ignore those remarks. I suppose he can. After all, he does not have to worry about keeping his seat in the House of Representatives! Perhaps he does not care how any of the positions up for election in November will be decided. That should be sufficient reason for the Congress to discard all input from the White House, summon their own economic experts, and start from scratch to build a new solution plan that will see to the needs of those most in need, so to speak. Meanwhile, the President can go back to his faith-based convictions that God will take care of those who believe in Him; perhaps he will find out just what God has in mind for him!

Still No Agreement

Last June negotiations with Iraq over extending the "agreement that would legally extend the U.S. imperial occupation of Iraq" (as Truthdig puts it so nicely) had hit a major speed bump over the lack of any "clear mechanisms that obligate the occupying American military forces to fully withdraw from Iraq" in the words of the Dreyfuss Blog for The Nation. At that time progress with the White House was going so badly that the Iraqi parliament decided to communicate with the Congress directly through a hand-delivered letter; and, as we know, the White House eventually managed to get over the speed bump, perhaps by virtue of having the upper hand in linguistic legerdemain. At that time many of us probably figured that the renewal of our agreement with Iraq was a done deal; but, as Truthdig informed us this morning, that was not the case. As Steven Lee Meyers and Sam Dagher reported for The New York Times, at least one obstacle remains:

The major remaining point of contention involves immunity, with the United States maintaining that American troops and military contractors should have the same protections they have in other countries where they are based and Iraq insisting that they be subject to the country’s criminal justice system for any crime committed outside of a military operation, the officials said.

Given that the Bush Administration is still hanging tough on refusing to recognize the authority of the International Criminal Court, this should not surprise anyone.

When we take these two obstacles together we have a narrative about how, as a matter of policy, the current Executive Branch has no respect for any authority other than its own. Indeed, "recognize" may be the mot juste, since it appears that the way in which the Executive Branch deals with any attempted manifestation of authority, whether in the other branches of our Government or in another country, is to let it, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, "pass unnoticed." Thus, whatever Iraq may be doing by way of developing its own a legislative branch composed of duly elected representatives and a responsible judiciary system, the Bush Administration is determined to cloak itself with immunity to anything these arms of government may do that is unpleasant (or worse).

There is obviously a limit to how long the Iraqi government can hang tough on its responsibilities to its population. There is nothing to prevent Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki from informing the United States that there is no further need for an agreement and that it is now time for all Americans in Iraq to leave. My guess is that the White House has any number of representatives willing to state officially to the Prime Minister, "Who's gonna make us leave? You and what army?" I for one would prefer to defer thinking about the consequences, if that is the move our Government chooses to make!

It's not about Policies (stupid)!

One of my neighbors, who seems to follow my writings about music and politics with equal interest, recently sent me electronic mail that included the following observation:

The democrats have to learn to present issues to voters not as abstractions, but in terms that most voters can understand.

I found myself thinking about this while reading the print version of a report that Paul Moss prepared for BBC Radio 4 concerned with Sarah Palin's cross-party appeal to white women. Here is how that report basically began:

I had travelled to Barrington, out in Cook County, Illinois, to meet some of America's "football moms" - the army of women who turn out every weekend across America, to cheer on their sporting sons and daughters.

They are loyal, they are dedicated. And now, many of them are also big fans of Sarah Palin.

"She says it like it is," I was told, a common description of the young governor from Alaska. "She's hard-working, and I think she has strong moral values."

Mrs Palin's large family formed the basis of many compliments from the "football moms".

"She's doing great things, supporting her church and supporting her family. Five children is a lot in this day and age."

Here is how it ended:

"What's critical, as far as Democrats are concerned, is that they stay focused on issues," says Lisa Madigan, attorney general for Illinois.

The war in Iraq, energy policy - these are the areas she believes will expose Mrs Palin as lacking sufficient knowledge for the job.

"It is really impossible to believe," Ms Madigan says, "that at the end of the day, Hillary [Clinton] voters or independent voters are going to look to Sarah Palin as somebody they believe in."

But it is not so impossible to believe, if you listen to the football moms of Barrington High. I asked Mrs Palin's supporters there if there were any specific policies of hers they admire. None could name a single one, but that did not seem to dampen their admiration.

"She's interesting, she's hard-working," I was told. "I think she's going to do a great job."

Thus, one way to interpret Moss' conclusion is that Madigan (and other powerful Democrats) need to take my neighbor's observation more seriously.

Think about it. In preparing this report Moss chose (presumably intentionally) to go right into the heart of Obama country, Cook County, Illinois. There he encountered a vox populi, at least among women, supportive of Palin for "doing great things." Unfortunately, those "great things" had nothing to do with leading the United States out of any of its current problems, whether those problems involve the economy (Bill Clinton's old trump card), the war in Iraq, or the energy crisis (not to mention an energy policy that may well be fomenting a hunger crisis). No, the "great things" Palin is doing are "supporting her church and supporting her family;" and that is what matters to those "football moms." Moss stressed this observation in his conclusion: None of those football moms could name a specific Palin policy that they admired. (Tina Fey nailed this point on Saturday Night Live, but making fun of football moms is not a good way to win their votes!) Meanwhile, out on the campaign trail, we have Barack Obama speaking nobly and effectively about failed economic policy; but, even if that failure has a severe impact on the ability to support a family, even when he speaks in the plainest of language, his points just do not register, even in his own state.

Thus, I am not entirely sure that I agree with my neighbor. It is not just a matter of speaking to the electorate in terms they can understand. It may have more to do with speaking to voters in those terms they value the most and wish to hear the most, rather than in terms (no matter how straightforward) of working together to solve serious problems. I have tried to argue that the latter is the Obama strategy; and it may be the most effective strategy for elevating the concept of "change we can believe in" above the level of hollow rhetoric. However, the former is the strategy of Karl Rove, which has now been passed on to a disciple who has been calling the shots (more effectively than many of us would like to believe) for the Republican campaign. This strategy turned out to be very effective in the last two elections, where the polls kept showing that the numbers for the two candidates were very close. Thus, I suspect I have to revise my previous assertion that differentiation would "matter significantly where both political parties are concerned," to the proposition that differentiation will be vital to Obama if he is to recover his standing in the polls by a substantially wide margin and parlay that standing to victory in the Electoral College.

Reagan's Ghost

Sarah Palin should have paid more attention to her Bible studies. I am thinking about the part where the Israelites had the chutzpah to carry the Ark of the Covenant into battle. God punished them for trying to invoke the vessel of his sacred text as if it were some kind of "weapon of mass destruction" by subjecting them to a punishing defeat in which the Ark itself was lost (at least until Indiana Jones came along). While the analogy is not a very strict one, I pointed out in my analysis of Palin's Convention speech that she tried to present herself as the "vessel" of a sacred text of Ronald Reagan: "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" As I wrote, this was just not the time for the Republicans to invite anyone to look back on the last eight years of Presidential Administration:

Would any Republican run seriously today on the proposition that things are better now than they were in November of 2000? How would those who are still victims of 9/11 answer? What about those who suffered consequences of the more inept decisions arising from our adventurism in the name of the Global War on Terror? What about those who will not even vote, those in countries on every continent who used to view the United States as a governmental model?

According to Associated Press Writers Brett J. Blackledge and Eileen Sullivan, there are now two reports that are trying to confront at least some of these issues, one from the bipartisan Partnership for a Secure America and the other by the staffs of Democrats on the House Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs committees. Here is their summary of the bipartisan report:

The independent report focuses narrowly on weapons of mass destruction.

The report and supporting studies describe the failure of international cooperation to prevent terrorists from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, which they call a major problem. Many countries continue to ignore a United Nations mandate to prevent the spread of weapons; the ability of many countries to monitor potential bioterrorism is "essentially nonexistent," and dangerous chemical weapons stockpiles remain in some countries, including Russia and Libya, the report said.

Russia has been a significant player in U.S. efforts to secure nuclear weapons and to eliminate inventories of chemical weapons in the former Soviet region. That cooperation could be jeopardized as the two countries face off over the Russian invasion of Georgia and concerns about a U.S. missile defense base in Poland, [9/11 Commission leader Lee] Hamilton said.

Bush on Monday Bush on [sic] canceled a civilian nuclear cooperation deal with Russia.

"The things we do to penalize Russia will make it more difficult for us to deal with Russia on other matters," Hamilton said.

The Democrats' report covers more ground but also deals with specifics:

Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, had harsher criticism of the Bush administration's efforts. Their report, written by the staffs of the House Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs committees, found little or no progress across the board on national security initiatives.

"The Bush administration has not delivered on a myriad of critical homeland and national security mandates," the Democrats' report states. That report was being released Tuesday.

"The administration has just failed to act in so many ways," said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss. "Let's say that we've been fortunate that we have not been attacked" since 2001, said Thompson, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee.

…

House Democrats also blasted Bush policy in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia as damaging to national security. U.S. efforts to combat terrorists in Pakistan have suffered because of "unyielding support for a military dictator"; Iraq has drained resources from the fight in Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia continues to serve "as a major source of terrorist activity," the Democrats' report states.

Blackledge and Sullivan also covered the White House reaction to this material. If their coverage is representative, then the language of that reaction is depressingly vague, almost as if we are still living in that world of faith-based reasoning that stakes everything on the confrontation of evil by good. While the Bible may tell our would-be leaders all they need to know about how to prevail in such a confrontation, a more dispassionate sense of reality requires a less simplistic view of the world, which, as I suggested yesterday, would be better informed by the proper study of history than by the invocation of sacred texts!

AT&T Yahoo! Polls Palin

Watching the BBC World Service television news yesterday afternoon gave the impression that the delegates at the Republican National Convention were far more interested in hearing from their nominee for Vice President than they were in hearing their "official" standard bearer. This made for an interesting contrast with the Democratic National Convention, where, for quite some time, it seemed as if the most important speech would be the one delivered by Hillary Clinton (followed, in importance, by the speech given by her husband). This should be a lesson in premature judgment. Even the preparations for Barack Obama's acceptance speech turned out to be grounds for criticism. However, once he started to speak, there was no doubt about who was leading the fight to reclaim the White House; and there was a performance whose merits were acknowledged even by his opponent. So, as I have tried to argue in evaluating the situation in Iraq, pundits would do well to refrain from reviewing the opera before the fat lady has even come on the stage!

Nevertheless, now that the text of Sarah Palin's speech is a matter of public record, it is probably worth asking whether it was worth the fuss, both in terms of content and in terms of that excuse for a "poll" that AT&T Yahoo! has decided to conduct again. What the "official story" does not provide, however, is an account of who actually authored that content. Speechwriters are rarely called out by name. We know they are there. West Wing junkies probably even think they have some idea of how they work. However, in this case Associated Press writers Tom Raum and Liz Sidoti saw fit to credit the source of the text, because they felt it was relevant to their account of how the Democrats reacted to it:

The Obama campaign had less than a warm greeting, saying Palin's speech was "written by George Bush's speechwriter and sounds exactly like the same divisive, partisan attacks we've heard from George Bush for the last eight years." The speech was written by Matthew Scully, who met Palin for the first time last week.

For all my carping about whether Associated Press has decided to substitute "writing" for "reporting," I think that Raum and Sidoti were justified in including this paragraph in their story. As I tried to argue previously, the most important thing about Hillary's Convention speech was how personal it was; and, if that personalization was a product of a skilled delivery of the well-honed craft of one or more crack speechwriters, then that "question of attribution" is still secondary. Whether or not this was a case of George Burns' "faked sincerity" was less important than how well that speech "played from the heart," so to speak. One could almost say that Hillary set the bar for Obama's own speech; and Obama demonstrated that he could play from the heart just as powerfully, even when digging into the nuts and bolts of the agenda he wanted to bring to the White House. Alas, the same cannot be said of Palin's performance.

The problem, which goes back to the Democrats' reaction, is that there was more of a sense of evident manipulation, rather than sincerity (real or fake). It was all about pushing the right buttons at the right time. To judge from the Raum-Sidoti account, all the buttons were pushed at the right time; and they all delivered the appropriate responses. In other words it was pretty much a run-of-the-mill convention speech, which is actually saying something for the content. After all, those buttons were basically rhetorical frosting on a cake that was little more than a resume delivered as a personal recitation. This is not to disapprove of the cake: It was probably as good a way as any to establish Palin, once and for all, as an accredited "known commodity;" it was just not the stuff of what many of us are thinking as we stare into the abyss of an uncertain future (while, I might add, Dick Cheney is busy digging away at that abyss to make it even deeper).

Indeed, notwithstanding what the Vice President may have been doing while Palin was delivering her address, Scully made at least one move that tipped the Republican hand in a way that reminded us of that abyss:

Politics isn't just a game of clashing parties and competing interests.

The right reason is to challenge the status quo, to serve the common good, and to leave this nation better than we found it.

This was nostalgia at its most counterproductive, looking back at when Ronald Reagan stood beside Jimmy Carter and asked the American electorate, "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" Reagan and his team knew the answer, and they knew they could win an election based on that answer. Would any Republican run seriously today on the proposition that things are better now than they were in November of 2000? How would those who are still victims of 9/11 answer? What about those who suffered consequences of the more inept decisions arising from our adventurism in the name of the Global War on Terror? What about those who will not even vote, those in countries on every continent who used to view the United States as a governmental model? That second quoted sentence is a time bomb, and it can only blow up in the face of the party whose Administration got us into the mess in which we are now mired.

Nevertheless, there remains the question of whether or not at AT&T Yahoo! poll has anything useful to say.

The first thing I noticed in the above snapshot, which I took immediately after casting my (negative) vote), is that far more people responded. My guess is that this had to do with how little was known about Palin. The number give no indication of audience size; but it may suggest that more people were prompted to form and voice an opinion on the basis of this one speech (as opposed to the extensive coverage given to previous Obama speeches). Again, there was very little middle ground; and this is probably a good thing, since I continue to feel that differentiation is going to matter significantly where both political parties are concerned. If Palin's difference is currently larger than Obama's was, then that may have more to do with novelty than with content (or it may be a sign that, as BBC News has suggested, the Democrats have more work set out for them than they had anticipated). How important will this speech be in the longer run of the entire campaign? At the very least we should put that question aside until the final scene of this week's opera!

Strife as Economic Incentive

Once again I find myself turning to SPIEGEL ONLINE for a timely extended discussion of a complex global problem. The problem in this case (given that there are so many these days) is the current standoff between Georgia and Russia and the question of whether or not the Cold War is "heating up" again, "a proposition devoutly to be wished" by many strident American (Republican?) voices. However, I am less interested in the skillful analytical work that Ralf Beste, Susanne Koelbl and Dirk Kurbjuweit have applied to all of this complexity. Rather, I want to call attention to one paragraph, which is actually highly incidental to their analysis, that calls attention to a piece of context that probably should not be ignored:

Currently, the entire world is sending its emissaries to the Caucasus, transforming Tbilisi into the global capital of international politics. Over the past two weeks, prices at the five-star hotels of Tbilisi have soared, and yet these luxury establishments are still nearly fully booked.

At a time when it seems as if the entire world is suffering an economic crisis (much of which, unfortunately, can be traced back to greed-based poor decisions originating in the United States), here is an (albeit small) economic sector that is doing well: the hotel sector of the travel business (and probably at least one small set of airline routes). This has less to do with whether or not the beneficiary is in the luxury sector than it has to do with the role of crisis as economic stimulus. I am a product of history teachers who believed that it was the Second World War, rather than the New Deal, that pulled the United States out of the Great Depression, basically because the War created an unprecedented demand for manufacturing that revived our key industrial operations in a way that the New Deal never could. However, are we to conclude that war (or at least the threat of war, which is, for all intents and purposes, what the Cold War was) is the only effective way to stimulate a deeply depressed economy?

One answer may be to consider an economic system as if it were a metabolic system, somewhat in the spirit of the approach that James Grier Miller took in his book, Living Systems. (Miller actually viewed "The Society" as a living system in Chapter 11 of his book and addressed economics in terms of regulating production within that system.) Thus, if stress "is an unavoidable effect of living" (as is stated in the Britannica Online Encyclopedia) to which the body responds "with a combination of psychic and physiological defenses," then economic systems, if they are to survive, must have their own "defenses," which have more to do with (not necessarily rational) agent behavior than with psychology or physiology. Put another way, the worst thing that can happen to an economy is that it achieves a state of equilibrium, because, in the spirit of Isaiah Berlin's approach to the history of ideas, that "state," by its very name, is fundamentally static; and the only time a "living system" achieves stasis is in death! Thus, it is the forces that "stress" an economy (such as social crisis) that ultimately keep the economy "alive" and functioning in the best interests of all, rather than languishing in a condition of depression, which, while not strictly static, is not particularly dynamic.

Berlin's arguments against stasis grew out of his critical analysis of utopianism and his conclusion that any utopia must necessarily be static. Thus, if stress keeps the body going (as long as it is at a level that can be managed by the body's copying skills), then social crisis may, indeed, be the most effective economic stimulus. The only problem with this theory is that, in the wrong hands, it may be applied as an excuse for inducing crisis as an economic solution. Sadly, this may explain the motives behind Tom Hayden's analysis of the current Georgian crisis as a product of neoconservative thinking trying, once again, to gain the upper hand. Having bankrupted the American economy with excessive an ineffective spending in the name of the "War on Terror," the agents responsible for this folly would now attempt damage control by seeking economic incentives through a revival of the Cold War. Once again we seem to be experiencing an attempt to repeat history without, as I have previously called it, "any Marxian overtones of farce" (unless one has a really sick sense of farce)!

Dangerous Knowledge

It is now a little more than a year since Book TV ran a broadcast of Dennis Ross talking about his book Statecraft. Since then I have posted periodically on the many ways in which our current Administration has, almost systematically, gone against the grain of the rather straightforward lessons of this book. Whether these have been actions of defiance or ignorance is left as an exercise for the reader; but I was amused to note that my most recent post, "Getting into the Iran Mess," was written exactly one year after I first cited Ross' work.

My thoughts turned to Ross again this morning while reading Joe Conason's latest column, "A Cut-and-Paste Foreign Policy," on Truthdig. This time, however, I was less concerned with whether or not the present occupant of the White House and his would-be successor John McCain were disregarding Ross' fundamental principles of statecraft out of defiance or ignorance. Rather, I began to realize the extent to which Vladimir Putin seems to not only understand but also embrace those principles. Consider Conason's final observation:

There can be no doubt that Vladimir Putin’s Russia poses a challenge to the West, and to the next administration. It can be argued that Russian ambitions must be checked now to discourage Moscow’s bullying imperialism. It can also be argued that bringing the former Soviet republics into NATO only provokes the Russians into resisting encirclement by their Cold War enemies, and that we must engage Russia to cope with existential threats like nuclear proliferation and Islamist extremism. What can no longer be sanely argued is that reflexive ideology and confrontational bluster will secure our future.

It all comes down to how accurately we understand "Russian ambitions" and what actions we can take (based, of course, on our "capital resources," both material and social) towards our own interests. When it comes to resources, our relation to Russia is no longer one of "My pop's bigger than your pop," based on the size of nuclear arsenals. We now face crises of shortages of both food and energy, which may ultimately lead to the recognition that the best government (whether on a national or global scale) is the one most likely to sustain life on this planet that involves more than living from hand to mouth. Putin is less a blustering militarist and more a cold-blooded chief executive determined to set achievable goals that can be brought about through well-executed plans. Put another way, he knows how to frame what he wants in terms of what he has; and he does it well enough to run up a good record of getting what he wants. Surprisingly enough, the execution of his plans often involves playing the game of statecraft by Ross' rules, just because he is in a position to play the game better than the others.

Meanwhile, in our hemisphere we cannot even agree on what we want our goals to be; so we fall back on the empty rhetoric of our political ideology, which may well be at least a predisposing cause of both the current food and energy problems. Without a better sense of goals, our actions cannot be planned, which is why we jump from one "campaign" (Iraq) to the next (Iran) without giving much thought to any of them, particularly when it comes to why they matter (the question we hear least about where the current crisis in Georgia is concerned). We are thus reduced to the pathological loser at a poker table in Las Vegas, so inept that our attempts at bluffing are transparent to all the other players.

I am reminded of a story about the Soviet Union and Iran. As I recall the story, Nikita Khrushchev once asked the Shah of Iran why there was such a strong American presence in his country; and the Shah replied that Iran needed protection against a possible Soviet invasion. Khrushchev replied, "The Soviet Union does not need to invade Iran. Iran is a rotten fruit. The Soviet Union can wait for it to drop from the tree." Does Putin see the United States as such a "rotten fruit?"

The Easy Target

The backlash against the attempt of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to arrest Omar al-Bashir on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity has begun. Whether today's mass protest in Sudan was an authentic "grass roots" movement or carefully orchestrated political theater, the event was as ironic as the decision of our State Department to comment on the ICC action. Consider the beginning of the report for Reuters from Khartoum by Opheera McDoom:

Thousands of protesters chanting "Down, Down USA!" rallied in Khartoum on Sunday after reports that the International Criminal Court (ICC) may seek the arrest of Sudan's president for alleged war crimes.

Consider, also, the text of an "official statement," which the protesters plan to deliver to the United Nations:

The ICC does just what the European Union, the United States of America and Israel tell it to do.

Finally, it terms of the source of the protest, consider this remark by Awad Ahmed, who happens to work for the Agriculture Ministry:

The Sudanese people are all rejecting this -- this is America targeting Sudan. We will not send Bashir. We would die first.

The irony, of course, is that the United States has still not ratified its membership in the ICC system and that its stridently proclaimed tough stand against ratification may have even been one of the provoking causes of the 9/11 attack. Even more ironic is that the don't-tell-us-what-to-do grounds for the Sudanese protest are precisely the basis for the American rejection of ICC membership. To further add to the irony, while the American rejection may have been motivated (at least in part) by a desire of our ruling class to protect one of its own (Henry Kissinger) from similar prosecution for war crimes (on the basis of charges that the government of Cambodia had expressed a desire to file), that same rejection may now protect the highest-ranking officials (including the one at whose desk the buck stops) from the same prosecution over their "adventurism" in Iraq.

Rather than dwelling on these ironies, however, we should appreciate the extent to which they demonstrate that the very concept of an international judiciary system is as fragile as our own government was in the decades immediately following the ratification of our Constitution. That fragility can be seen in a particularly brittle (and thus fragile) approach to international justice that the philosopher Bertrand Russell proposed about a century ago. With an almost intoxicated belief in the soundness of logical positivism, Russell recommended that the entire world form a single government, in which all judicial questions would be decided on the basis of an appropriate logical calculus. Even Immanuel Kant, who tried to formulate systems for explaining how we think and act, recognized that such judgments could never be reduced to purely objective terms; but, in Russell's History of Western Philosophy, there is at least a faint suggestion that Kant's results suffered from lack of sufficient scientific knowledge of the physical world (this in spite of the fact that he wrote this book after quantum physics had developed to a point of demonstrating the limits of such scientific knowledge and Kurt Gödel had demonstrated the limits of logical calculi).

It would be fair to say that, over the last one hundred years, our appreciation of the social world has improved considerably; but it would also be fair to say that appreciation does not always lead to understanding. Since the ratification of our Constitution, the United States has evolved a complex system through which grievances may be voiced, prosecuted, and judged; but the system over which George Washington presided is a pale shadow of the one upon which we now all depend for assurances of fair judgment. The fact that the members of the European Union have yet to agree on anything as general as their own constitution should warn us that an international judiciary system recognized as fair by all is an extremely difficult (if not impossible) goal. This is, by no means, meant to excuse the official Sudanese reaction to the ICC; but, if Sudan has decided that the Arab League would constitute a fairer venue for judgment, it may be in the best interests of the ICC to encourage Arab League involvement. This would be analogous to deferring judicial review by our Supreme Court until a case has been examined at the state (and perhaps local) level. If the victims in this case (those in or displaced from Darfur or representatives of the United Nations peace force) feel that the Arab League judgment was unfairly biased (say, because the victims were not Muslim), that would probably then be the time to appeal to the higher institution of the ICC.

An Inconvenient History of Democracy

In his latest piece for The Nation, Tom Hayden wants to introduce to a man he describes as "the New Dr. Strangelove:"

His name is David Kilcullen, an Australian academic and military veteran whom the Washington Post's Thomas Ricks once described as Gen. David Petraeus' "chief adviser" on the counterinsurgency doctrine underlying the surge in Iraq.

What makes this man a real-world embodiment of Stanley Kubrick's best-known fictitious creation? From Hayden's point of view, it all comes down to a

briefing given "in a private capacity" at the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies. It was an argument for appearing to get out of Iraq while staying in, expressed in the Kilkullen formula "Overt De-Escalation, Covert Disruption." Kilcullen argues that the American troop presence is so large that it's counter-productive, only inflaming Iraqi sensibilities. What is required is a combination of US combat troop withdrawals combined with "black" special operations to "hunt terrorists" plus "white" special operations forces training and embedded with the Iraqi security forces, turning tribes against tribes wherever possible. Covert warfare is the future: "over the long run, we need to go cheap, quiet, low-footprint." And, he might have added, off the television screen and front pages.

Here, then, is Hayden's assessment of both the man and his idea:

What Kilcullen means is a kind of deception-based warfare that is contradictory to democracy itself, with its instruments of critical media, congressional oversight, and public disclosure of the cost in blood, taxes and honor.

This is rhetoric guaranteed to stir righteous indignation in the hearts of (at least) those who bother to read Hayden's contributions to The Nation; but my own trivium-fed habits made be blink at least twice when I hit on that direct object construct, "contradictory to democracy itself." Just what, if anything, would that mean? Put another way, what is it in the historical tradition of democracy that is being contradicted?

When Jürgen Habermas decided to take a historical view of governance in the series of essays collected in English translation under the title Theory and Practice, he began with the "Politics" of Aristotle; but, to the extent that Aristotle theorized about what he observed, I suspect we might do better to begin with a broader historical perspective. I found one such perspective at the Web site Dēmos: Classical Athenian Democracy, which maintains a collection of articles edited by Christopher Blackwell. If we want to understand how Athenian democracy actually worked, a good place to start is with Blackwell's article, "Athenian Democracy: a brief overview" (listed on the Dēmos home page as "An Introduction to the Athenian Democracy"). The reason I feel this introductory piece is valuable is because it gives us a clear picture of who did (and therefore also who did not) participate in the Athenian democratic process.

First, Blackwell begins, as he should, with the semantics of that word "democracy:"

For the Athenians, “democracy” (demokratia, δημοκρατία ) gave Rule (kratos, κράτος ) to the Demos ( Δήμος ).

Thus, how Athenian democracy actually works depends on just who constituted that Δήμος. As Blackwell observes, this word has several different meanings, all of which are relevant. However, for purposes of this discussion, I would like to begin by focusing on the first definition he offers:

Demos is the Greek word for “village” or, as it is often translated, “deme.” The deme was the smallest administrative unit of the Athenian state, like a voting precinct or school district. Young men, who were 18 years old presented themselves to officials of their deme and, having proven that they were not slaves, that their parents were Athenian, and that they were 18 years old, were enrolled in the “Assembly List” (the pinax ekklesiastikos, πίναξ έκκλησιαστικός ) (see Dem. 44.35; Aristot. Ath. Pol. 42.1).

This tells us pretty much all we need to know about who was excluded from the process: all women, all males under the age of eighteen, all slaves, and all men whose parents were not Athenian. This raises an interesting question: Were those excluded from the process subject to its laws and judgments? After all, slaves were property; so it is probably the case that, in practice, a slave's owner was responsible for his/her behavior. (The operative analogy might be that, if a car runs over a man and kills him, the driver, not the car, is legally responsible for the homicide. Perhaps the best reason to see a production of William Shakespeare's Cymbeline is for the way this proposition is considered.) By similar reasoning, a woman was also property, first of her father and then of her husband; and children are also property of the father. That leaves the "adult foreigners." My guess (and it is no more than that) is that such a "foreigner" could only enter (or at least remain) in Athens under the "sponsorship" of an Athenian (just as Plato had been "sponsored" by Dion in Syracuse). Thus, it is likely that the "sponsor" would be responsible for the behavior of the "foreigner," just as the slave-owner was responsible for the behavior of the slave.

If my hypotheses are valid, then the foundation of Athenian democracy rests on a "language game" (right out of the playbook of Ludwig Wittgenstein) over the words "subject" (those who are entitled to take motivated actions legitimized by a framework of government in which they participate) and "object" (those whose actions are the responsibility of others). Consider, then, the hypothesis that the "Kilcullen formula" is one in which actions are taken beyond the scope of the responsibility of government. They could be the actions of foreigners (as in the model of the French Foreign Legion); or the model could subsume the introduction of a new class of slaves. Neither of those options would then be "contradictory to democracy itself," at least if we take classical Athens as our model! (Sorry, Tom!)

Yes, this borders on the outrageous (if it does not go over the line)! I probably would have dismissed it out of hand, had I not found myself returning all too frequently (most recently on Wednesday) to the proposition that the wealthiest institutions (perhaps public as well as private) are committing themselves to a War Against the Poor, whose ultimate goal is likely to be the creation of that new class of slaves! In other words, in trying to tease out a few subtle semantic details, I may have stumbled on the Mother of all Conspiracy Theories! As a rule I am not big on conspiracies; but, if Hayden's rhetoric may have been a bit sloppy about democracy, his argumentation over why we should be very afraid that someone like Kilcullen is "in the system" has a lot of convincing points. When we combine his rhetoric with a more historical view of the origins of democracy, we may well have even more reasons to be afraid. At the very least, it allows us to think about the War Against the Poor as more than a fight to "control all the marbles!"

VOX POPULI in Iraq?

While I have been invoking the vox populi vox dei principle ("the voice of the people is the voice of God") almost since I initiated this blog, a quick keyword search has revealed that I have applied it almost exclusively to the American populi, often focusing on the populi of cyberspace, again with an American bias. However, I have also held to the principle that vox populi is better embodied in the structures of representative government than it is in the far weaker structures of cyberspace. In this case I have tried to take a more global perspective on representative structures, most recently by writing about the Palestinian problem in terms of a conflict between de facto and de jure representatives. Today I find myself revisiting that conflict with respect to conditions in Iraq in terms of the extent to which the de jure Iraqi parliament provides de facto representation for the general Iraqi population.

The reason this question is important is that, as Robert Dreyfuss reported yesterday on his Dreyfuss Report blog for The Nation, the Iraqi parliament has executed the rather extraordinary action of communicating with our own representatives in Congress through a hand-delivered letter, signed by a majority of its members. Whether or not the letter consists of more than the single sentence that Dreyfuss documented, the fact remains that this one sentence packs quite a wallop:

The majority of Iraqi representatives strongly reject any military-security, economic, commercial, agricultural, investment or political agreement with the United States that is not linked to clear mechanisms that obligate the occupying American military forces to fully withdraw from Iraq.

Thus, if the Bush Administration is going to continue to tell the Congress that the United States must remain in Iraq as long as the Iraqis want them there, the Congress now has a pretty strong argument for withdrawal based on the duly-elected representatives of the Iraqi people, all in accord with those principles of democracy that our President wanted to sow in Iraq.

The implications of this single sentence, as Dreyfuss explores them, are fascinating:

Without a US-Iraq accord, the presence of American troops in Iraq has no legal basis after December 31, 2008. Currently, the US forces in Iraq are there under the authority of a United Nations Security Council resolution that expires on that date. Both the United States and the UN have ruled out renewing that authority for another year.

If Washington and Baghdad fail to work out a treaty that legalizes the occupation, it is conceivable that the Bush administration, in its last few weeks, could go back to the UN, hat in hand, and beg Moscow and Beijing to authorize an extension of the UN authority. But that would be embarassing in the extreme, and both Russia and China would probably extract some major concessions in exchange for not using their veto. That would be seen as a diplomatic fiasco for the United States. Worst case: either Russia or China veto the extension, throwing the occupation of Iraq into legal limbo. In that case, the Iraqi government would have no choice but to demand an immediate and total withdrawal.

To avoid that scenario, it's entirely possible that the Bush Administration, sometime this summer, will force the hapless regime of Prime Minister Maliki to submit to a US diktat on a US-Iraq accord. Even though Maliki is under tremendous pressure from nearly all Iraqi factions not to accept a humiliating, US-imposed treaty, he might decide that he has no choice. But if Maliki signs the accord, and ignores the opposition from parliament, he would instantly lose whatever remaining credibility he has left as an Iraqi leader. That would plunge Iraq into a devastating political crisis. It would probably revive the Sunni-led resistance and inflame the Shia-led, anti-American forces grouped around Muqtada al-Sadr. Violence, and American casualties, would spike on the eve of the US election. Not a pleasant scenario.

If, on the other hand, Maliki submits the treaty -- whose content is still not known -- to the parliament, it's very likely that both Sunni and Shia nationalists and some pro-Iranian parties will overwhelmingly reject it. That will nullify the accord, forcing the United States back to the UN.

Of course one of the reasons that I have invoked the vox populi principle in the United States is that the Executive Branch of our government has made it a point to disregard flagrantly that vox, which is why yesterday I wrote about the traumatic extent to which the Administration has disconnected itself from both the populi and the social system they constitute. So, if the Administration is going to disregard the vox populi of those who elected it, it is hard to believe that they will show any greater respect to the Iraqi vox. Meanwhile, the timing could not be better. The Presidential candidates can debate about what they are going to do as of January 20, 2009; but, to invoke the metaphor raised by Colin Powell, the deadline means that this matter has to be resolved by the bulls who went into the Pottery Barn shop in the first place. It cannot be left at the doorstep of the White House for the next occupant as if it were an abandoned child.

Nevertheless, I find it hard to get my hopes up about anything these days. I have learned not to underestimate the skill of the Bush Administration in weaseling out of awkward situations. We cannot start thinking about ringing the curtain down on this opera when the fat lady has not yet even come on stage!