Dispatch from the Unserious Empire

On the White House's chess game with the military, I've really got to hand it to them. Their "credible partner" position is a well-constructed ruse for buying some time.

Upside, the position calls out the elephant in the room, i.e., Hamid Karzai's highly in-credible government. It waits to see the outcome of the predicted-here November run-off election between him and former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah. Does anyone seriously think Karzai, having fixed 30% of the votes in the prior election, isn't going to run the same play again? When he wins, the White House can pen the Pentagon and coup d'etat Republicans in by saying, "Look, you've got a fine plan for nation-building there, but you yourselves have said it requires a credible partner to work. Which we unfortunately don't have. What's military theory say have to say about this new situation?"

Downside is, the White House's position is a lawlerly, even pharisaical ploy unlikely to achieve much else. It was just a political punt, and puts off the hard decisions of reallocation. Or as history will call it, withdrawal, defeat, ignomy. Worse, if the challenger is somehow elected, Afghanistan will remain a country with a puppet government everyone hates, one which will continue to generate a major insurgency. Unlikely as it may be, the military could point to an Abdullah Outcome and say, "Look, here's your credible partner. Ante up."

Wheels within wheels, but the net-net is we're still left with a war and an exceptionalist mindset which are together responsible for not having universal health care domestically, for an increasingly patronage-based economy, and for generating motivation for well-deserved vengeance on US civilians across much of the world.

For a more professional take, check out Frontline’s interview with former Col. Andrew Bacevich, author of the bestseller 'The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.' The interviewer and Bacevich discuss the short tours of duty Marines have in Afghanistan and how that's contrary to basic principles of counterinsurgency doctrine. They have this exchange:

Bacevich: “A serious imperial country is a country that is willing to send its young men, and now young women, to these far-off places and leave them there indefinitely. That's not what I would hope we would do. But if indeed you're serious about fixing a place like Afghanistan, that's the level of commitment that probably would be required.”

Interviewer: “We're a reluctant empire?”

Bacevich: “We're not a reluctant empire. We're an unserious empire."

For all their sins, China, Russia, Holland, Spain, England, these weren't fly-by-night operations. America has been, turning on its partners as soon as the price in Rome got right. As T. Boone Pickens bitterly complained, the Iraqis are going to let Chinese companies drill in the most desirable oil fields left on earth; I remain fervently against the Iraq invasion and detest oil companies, that's sheer lunacy. Every person killed and maimed in the effort to bring Iraq and its resources into the United States' orbit is mocked.

Bacevich points out in his book that the failure is systemic, and can't simply be hung on the NeoCons, who are far from the only Americans who believe in preemptively managing history with illusion. Military service, once civic function, has transformed into an economic enterprise, one directly and indirectly employing a large fraction of Americans. I and my partners were once again asked to be in the pay of that effort today, times have been tough, and it has given us reason for personal pause.

A Solution for Afghanistan: Changing the Mission to Observe and Contain

Obama appears to be re-considering his earlier Afghanistan strategy and is bridling at the military's public blackmailing for yet more troops. The politician in him is rearing, nostrils flared and smelling quagmire. As a statesman, Obama seems smart enough to know he's dealing with a buffer zone, one which should be pragmatically set within a framework of limited goals. Unfortunately, he was sold a much wider bill of goods by self-serving interests, military and commercial, which won't pick up the tab for failure.

Those interests are not used to hearing "No," which is why Obama was stupid enough to start down a full-blown nation-building counter-insurgency path; and so, too, have many others before him. Perhaps it's a combination of natural human optimism, the allure of scientific rationalism, and the colossal rocky boulliabaise of cock-up which is Afghanistan, long known as "the Graveyard of Empire." A remaining Everest and K2 of foreign policy circles, it must inspire military planners and wonks to sharpen up their models and say, "I shall tread triumphant where all others have failed, I shall gain my rightful place on Meet the Press."

So many others. England, for its part, apparently suffers from some pathologically driven need to occupy Kabul and Kandahar at least once every century, then leave in disgust and frustration, erecting some cryptic statue to their loss. The Dr. Watson of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's imagination was a wounded survivor of the quite factual Battle of Maiwan, having been carried out of the massacre by his orderly. It's all right there in the opening of 'A Study in Scarlet,' and perhaps the British public supported this last occupation on a purely sentimental basis. The bother of conquering and holding the region goes all the way back to Alexander the Great, who was nearly killed in the Swat Valley after taking a dart in the shoulder. He executed trusted Macedonian lieutenants and soldiers when they mutinied following a victory they felt was too precarious and far from home. In terms relative to megalomania, it was a markedly low point in his career.

The stated military logic, tenuous as it may have been, for occupying Afghanistan was to deny the takfiri jihad (al Qaeda) a base of operations. If we don't occupy, the argument went, we allow a vacuum to exist which draws in terrorists, who then have a safe haven in which to train and mount another 9/11-style event. Deriding the presumption and ridiculousness of this reasoning would be satisfying but illusory. It's worth noting that even at the highest levels, the systems which produce good strategic decision-making in this country have failed or have been completely blocked. Allow me to explain why.

By flipping it on its head, the flaw in the military's opening logic above is easily exposed and solved: if you allow Afghanistan to become a vacuum, and terrorists move in and make bases, all you have to do is watch them with your expensive satellites and predator drones, then move your special forces up close enough to observe and confirm bad guy status while coordinating with local security forces, and eliminate the terrorist threats. This solution is so obvious and executable precisely because the stability of Afghanistan has absolutely no correlation with the security of the United States; it doesn't matter if we risk destabilizing it with bombing strikes on varying numbers of its citizens who we believe plan to attack us.

An Observe and Contain mission can be run in Afghanistan and the borderlands of Pakistan so long as security agreements are maintained with its governments. Withdrawing ground troops from the region will strengthen diplomatic goodwill, reduce domestic taxpayer burden, and enhance the security footing of the United States. President Obama is showing multiple signs of questioning America's overall foreign policy course, and is hopefully on the verge of making the choice not to escalate troop levels in Afghanistan, but to draw them down.

Memorial Day: Post Traumatic Growth Disorder

Three or four times a day I see a story and think, "I should blog about that." Writing requires a measure of solitude, however, and what most hovers around me is usually cacophony. So instead of posts, little mental Post-It notes get written which then stick on each other, pile up and fade into the past. But one of those post-its boomeranged back from a week and a half ago, with personal connection, starting with a soldier going postal on a base in Iraq:

The 44-year-old signals specialist from the 54th Engineering Battalion, based in Bamberg, Germany, was charged with five counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault for Monday's shooting, which killed two military doctors and three soldiers, at a combat stress clinic at Camp Liberty, in Iraq.

Russell had been relieved of his weapon a week earlier, after making some "inappropriate remarks," his fellow soldier said, and he'd been referred to the stress clinic for counseling. But each day, the counselors "sent him back to his base," where Russell complained the doctors were refusing to take his symptoms seriously or give him the medication he thought he needed.

On Monday, the soldier says Russell was being transported back and forth to the mental health clinic by his staff sergeant escort.

After yet another argument at the clinic, he and his escort had just returned to Russell's brigade headquarters. That's when he "assaulted his escort, stole his weapon," and held him at briefly at gunpoint. Russell snatched away the keys for the vehicle, and drove back to the treatment center, where he allegedly opened fire.

The overpowered escort rushed inside to alert his command, and the battalion's physician's assistant immediately called over to the clinic, but it was too late. The call went through "just in time to hear the gun shots."

These "stress clinics" were supposed to be part of the answer, with hundreds of thousands of troops reporting symptoms of post traumatic stress, and the more severe post-traumatic stress disorder.

The clinic Sgt. Russell attacked had denied him medications he repeatedly asked for, and the new treatment he instead received is the brainchild of my wife's ex-fiancee, Major Thomas Jarrett. Shortly before a desperate, enraged vet shot up his clinic, he had this to say to a USA Today reporter:

Jarrett tells soldiers he is "fed up of hearing about" post-traumatic stress. He said he wants to talk of growing from trauma and becoming stronger because of it.

"Thriving through your combat experience" is Jarrett's mantra. All in-theatre personnel are urged to view a 90-minute video of his rap, and those who exhibit signs of PTSD will sometimes be discharged to Camp Victory to attend his "Warrior Resiliency and Thriving" class. That a positivist "Post Traumatic Growth" schtick has been enthusiastically adopted by the military should surprise no one; at this point, sending soldiers into reserve just because they're burned out by years of hunting Haji would mean calling the war off. As to the consequences, only 24 US soldiers committed suicide in the month of January, a militarily acceptable loss rate. Yet something of crucial significance is being obscured in the hokum, and bears a disquieting psychological parallel with a previous catastrophic American failure.

Can it be so bad, really? In a different way, yes it can. When soldiers in the Roman legions broke down and wouldn't fight, their comrades were gathered to watch them beaten to death. When German soldiers on the Eastern Front in World War Two went AWOL ( or eventually, lost their weapons or ate too much food), they were executed. The US military isn't there yet, but in denying unpleasant facts and routinely giving its current and former soldiers the shaft, it has moved decisively in that direction. The Af-Pak war is heating up and troops are going on their 3rd and 4th combat tours. Neither legions nor SS units were asked to do the same, and war's intensity now is much higher, its operations more sustained. Including night operations, historically very rare and now routine. The psychological toll may be worse than anyone wants to admit, and Sgt. Russell represents far more than an unfortunate incident.

Following WWII, clinical psychiatrists analyzed personnel data amassed with the goal of learning how to better maintain combat effectiveness. Study results were unexpectedly and dramatically clear: all sane soldiers broke down if their combat exposure was longer than 90 days. Correlation between combat and acute breakdown was unpredictable, even curvilinear at first, but the correlation gradually tightened over time to almost 1:1. After 90 days of combat exposure, 98% of soldiers experienced incapacitating breakdown accompanied by lasting psychic distress. The 2% still functioning were psychopaths suffering from full-blown insanity, which combat progressively accentuates.

For the otherwise sane soldiers who came to the end of their ropes, the term "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder" was coined. Based upon the data, the psychiatrists concluded that warfare had surpassed the ability of human beings to endure it. This insight in hand, the Pentagon soon set out to find a pharmacological means of adapting humans to industrial combat. (For a powerful overview of combat's psychological effects and the US military's generally futile attempts to ameliorate them, see Richard A. Gabriel's 'No More Heroes: Madness and Psychiatry in War.')

When I was a small boy, about 5 years old, I remember meeting a man named Sonny Seeley at a camp picnic. He was commonly referred to as Uncle Seeley, though not any known uncle of mine. He was not a common visitor, and seemed from some far-off branch of the family. As they prepared foods indoors, I heard my grandmother and Aunt Sophie talk about what beautiful letters he had written them during the war, but how when he got home he hardly ever said another thing, what a shame; my impression is his letters were from North Africa. As he sat in the aluminum folding lawn chair in the pleasant sun he didn't venture much, and would stammer what was to me an uninterpretable tremulo when someone came up to greet him or ask a question. His whole body was trembling badly enough to not be able to speak intelligibly. He shook when he sat, his knees shook when he walked all skinny and gangly, like a stick puppet over-tensioned, hunched, unable to un-slack, even 20 years and more after whatever he'd been through.

My grandfather and his brothers hosted that picnic, which may well have been on Memorial Day, and were all in that war in one service or another. They sent their wives to bring Uncle Seeley a plate of hot-buttered steamed clams, rolls and potato salad. They plied him with beer cans glistening from the cooler. While he struggled out his thank-yous and precariously worked to hold his paper plate level, I, being young and relatively free of good judgment, asked him why he was shaking. "Shell-shock," someone said in a deep hushed voice above me. "Go play with the Lawn Darts." Lawn Darts were not yet illegal and would arc meaningfully through the air, proving gravity, stabilized by colorful plastic fins. I don't remember ever seeing Uncle Seeley again, and hope he was able to find some measure of relief.

One of my wife's oldest friends, a social worker in Manhattan, once described Thomas Jarrett as "about the least empathetic person I've ever met, and I meet a lot of people." Jarrett's schtick is a bastardized version of some positivist themes of Albert Ellis, an influential psychotherapist he interned with for one summer in the late 1990s. His application for further work with Ellis was rejected, so he never finished his PhD. He never served in combat, and strongly implies that he did. Jarrett's one more fraud in a Fraud War, passing out candy-coated delusions.

Denial is one survival mechanism for when a truth is too painful to face; delusion is another, for when you're not interested in the truth at all. For when it's hanging by the teeth it embedded in your ass. When you stride about in front of grunts who have made fun of the dead and dish warmed-over dianetics, delusion is your friend. Admittedly, denial and delusion are endemic qualities, possibly even necessary to military life, and often aren't obvious. We're set up that way. Truth is harsh, believing in nonsense comes almost as naturally as the urge to spread it. There's more truth to be found in 5 minutes of myths and fables than an hour of nightly news. Speaking of parallels, folk still commonly blame or take credit for protests at home halting the war in Vietnam, a "stabbed in the back" variant. On the contrary, that war stopped because soldiers were increasingly turning weapons on their superiors, mutiny was in the air and there weren't enough combat-ready units left to conduct field operations. Nearing the end, everybody there was just going through the motions.

Vietnam produced more PTSD victims than any other war in American history, both in total number and frequency, despite the Pentagon's emphasis on instilling the desire to kill into recruits, based again on data from WWII and Korean War which indicated only a small fraction of combat troops actually tried to shoot an individual enemy. In their inevitable post-war analyses, the Pentagon fingered low morale of draftees as the primary fault, resolving to go into their future conflicts strictly with volunteers, ones who remain annoyingly human to this day. To quote Richard Gabriel:

"...war exacts a terrible cost in human emotions quite apart from the usual costs calculated in terms of dollars, dead, and wounded. It is a cost every soldier will pay if he is exposed long enough to the horrors of the battlefield. Weakness or cowardice has nothing to do with the probability that a soldier will collapse under the strain of battle. It is not man that is too weak; it is the conduct of war that imposes too great a strain for the sane to endure."

People think soldiers who break down under the strains of ongoing sleep deprivation, constant threat of ambush, seeing friends get blown apart and killing civilians are weak, defective, or somehow exceptions to the rule. They are the rule, it is a well-measured rule, one denoting a reality which does not mesh well with a politically cynical, inherently paranoid "Long War." If indeed we are in a Long War, rather than squander hard power and soldier well-being as if they were limitless, flushing them down strategically harmless hell-holes, the American people would be better served by leaders who recognize that sending troops on combat patrols and driving over IEDs for years straight dulls their effectiveness. Eight years of tactical Action-Jackson approach has served no military purpose but that of potential enemies, who gauge our exhaustion and impending poverty with glee. Modern war serves money, and Iraq and Afghanistan have so far done horribly even at that.

That's one skeptic's opinion. This is not: what's done abroad comes back home, and there is no such thing as "thriving through your combat experience." That's either craven or self-delusional bullshit conceived to advance one individual's career. Which it has, and which my wife foresaw. When she heard some years ago that Jarrett was going back into the military as a counselor, she immediately expressed a hunch he was going to damage a lot of people. The kind of damage that, she thought, might provoke one of his patients to kill him.

Naturally, when she told me about the news coverage of an ex's half-baked treatment scheme, I remembered the 20-year veteran sergeant who snapped and went looking for the ludicrous son of a bitch who told him to grin and bear it, killing 5 mental health staffers in the process. I thought of Uncle Seeley shaking, of grunts sent to Tony Robbins seminars, and of new-fangled fates worse than death.

Happy Anniversary, Iran

Thirty years ago today the Iranian people threw a US Proxy Playboy-Thug out of their country, assuring their entry into an elite club: "Nations Which Must Forever Remain On the Hit List Until They Are Dead Dead Dead."

Mohammad Khatami, a moderate former President, has stepped back up to run again. Oddly, he was President until Iran's first election after, umm, when was that? Oh, yeah. The election came after America invaded Afghanistan, then Iraq. So Iranians reacted to aggression right next to them on two sides by electing the tough-talking and wily Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former mayor of Tehran.

Now an olive branch has been extended by the Obama Administration. Yes, I know, the nature of that branch can be quibbled over. Still, you have to admit that whatever it is, it's something other than putting gigantic blinking neon "F%!# You" signs on 5 or 10 or 20 aircraft carriers and trolling them up and down the coast 24 hours a day for 6 years. And because he would like to stay elected, Ahmadinejad says Iran is ready for talks with the US. A little confidence, reason, and de-escalation might go a long way.

(In power calculus terms, of course, this means Israel has little choice but to send in commandos with prominent "I Heart the Ayatollah" tattoos on their chests and backs to take over Georgetown University for a week and a half.)

Cheney Telegraphs Nuclear Or Biological Attack With Skillful Cheer

Today Dick Cheney granted an interview to Politico, of all places. From this we know his wheelchair was not rolled into a pool of starving piranhas, that his Pumphead heart still beats and he has embarked on an internet-savvy PR campaign. We learn he owns an Amazon Kindle, that he's planning a book which will reveal how torturing people kept American soil from being attacked by external terrorists for 7 years. With the help of his earth-daughter Liz, his cloaking device worked pretty well throughout the session, so he managed to come off as remarkably life-like...at times even achieving a disarming quality. Until one examines the synthetic output:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.

Can't we hold this anarchist in jail, or something? He provides more specific detail of the horrific event:

Cheney said “the ultimate threat to the country” is “a 9/11-type event where the terrorists are armed with something much more dangerous than an airline ticket and a box cutter – a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind” that is deployed in the middle of an American city.

“That’s the one that would involve the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, and the one you have to spend a hell of a lot of time guarding against,” he said. “I think there’s a high probability of such an attempt."

Indeed. To approach the shock levels which followed 9/11, the loss of life from an attack would have to be at least an order of magnitude higher. So here's a red-blinking dot to connect, or not. Cheney's skillful Politico messaging was imparted just as a global threat warning was being issued by the State Department on Monday, February 2nd. A similar warning was issued to embassies and military installations on September 7th, 2001, and then updated on September 10th, 2001.

This "entity" is legion, they are in the business of threat-mongering, and where none sufficient could be conflated, they created one. That's a proven practice in their individual and collective histories as related in "To Russia, With Hate." Given the fixes necessary to feed their dreary highs, one should not disallow the proactive arming of a threat if it serves their continuing interests. Therefore, the Entities personified by Dick Cheney can be suspected as Public Enemy #1, and the threats they always pose are as serious as the mushroom clouds they're fixated upon. This is their business, this is their livelihood, and if you climb into their unhinged calculating heads you may hear questions such as these: "What's the acceptable loss, and where would it have greatest effect on funding?"

Perhaps there are such things as coincidences, the timing of the World Caution notice is mere prudence, and hopefully I'm even more paranoid than Cheney and nothing he chimed on with will happen if we stop torturing people from the third world whose uncle stole someone's goat 60 years ago and got turned in for a vendetta. Just as cheerfully I hope, probably forlornly, that Team Obama is closely monitoring the whereabouts and communications of Cheney and his associates. The most prudent thing to do would be to dispense with trials and proceed to glib denials and unfortunate accidents.

Obama To Sign Order Shutting Guantanamo, Halting Military Tribunals

Now that title felt good to write! A sanctioned White House leak states:

The Associated Press has learned that President Barack Obama plans to sign an executive order Thursday to close the detention center within a year and halt military trials of terror suspects held there. The executive order was one of three expected imminently on how to interrogate and prosecute al-Qaida, Taliban or other foreign fighters believed to threaten the United States.

A senior Obama aide said the president would sign the order on Thursday, fulfilling his campaign promise to shut down a facility that critics around the world say violates domestic and international detainee rights. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity because the event has not yet been announced.

(Update) Some in the blogsphere are displeased Gitmo didn't get closed right away, but at least the war crimes trials were suspended today. The real problem is figuring out what to do with the inmates, with legal complexities ranging from merely bewildering to impossible. For example, one Canadian is accused of killing a US sergeant with a grenade in Afghanistan 7 years ago. The accused was 15 at the time. Can he really be tried in a US civilian court? As an adult? What justice could a "jury of peers" dispense? Would love to hear any case precedents for that one. Probably best to send him back to Toronto and let them figure it out.

Regardless of guilt, the US would be wise to offer each of the inmates $250,000 or more in exchange for agreement not to sue for damages arising from torture and wrongful imprisonment. Then give them a plane ride home. Many Americans would argue that doing so would let a lot of guilty people go, including Kaleid Sheik Mohammed (who would like nothing better than execution) and five other alleged 9/11 plotters. Too bad, game over.

America lost when it tortured these men, and torture invalidated both their confessions and their guilt. To put that in perspective, most anyone who comes through here, including myself, would confess to being a Sylvania light bulb, 60 watts, after about 20 seconds of waterboarding a.k.a. drowning. I've drowned a.k.a. died, it's not pretty, and these people went through far, far more than that.

For over 7 years, they were in a place scientifically designed to elicit human misery, their keepers inclined to extract revenge. Not surprisingly, the few sane ones left recently tried to starve themselves to death, as a final protest, and feeding tubes denied the privilege. If we let these people go without agreement or closure, guilty or innocent, imagine the flight paths their grievances will take. There are crimes to be punished here, oh yes. And the orders to torture may well prove to be the instruments of it coming to that.

Palestine, Gaza, And Long Shadows

In modern times it's hard to unpack all the info-maelstroms, it's easy to get snagged by electronic histrionics. They strobe-blind and strand us from seeing our natural backgrounds of time, connection and depth. The Media excel at casting, destroying, discovering, and re-casting Molochs of irrationality, erecting false yet powerful narrative arcs which demand our mental fealties. The falsities control us on the cheap, leaving collateral damages of knowledge, context, and common sense.

Israel's invasion of Gaza, for example, is utterly devoid of a context which should be completely obvious, even to Westerners, and some will soon be provided below. First, it's wise to admit my approach to thinking about politics and conflict was already unorthodox by inclination, and was kicked even further towards a "long shadows" framework by once being horribly, frighteningly wrong.

In Yugoslavia in the 1980s, I failed to see a devolution into chaos and genocide as it was happening right in front of my eyes. I cheerfully walked and stayed in places where little old women and pre-schoolers would die by sniper fire for hurrying groceries across a street, where pits would be dug to dispose of massacres, where a war against civilians (focused on Islamic Bosniaks) would soon ensue. The war consisted of ethnic cleansing, siege, mass rape, execution and torture, where it was lucky to starve in concentration camps. Rather than predict reality, however, I reported future prospects in line with official perceptions, and pronounced the area ripe for Western expansion.

All the calling cards of chaos were there for me to see: the empty shelves, rationing, black markets, Soviet-style surveillance, sharp ethnic and religious divisions, the eroding commons, growing inequities and casual police corruption. Rather than think for myself, I chose to believe what an optimistic media told me. Here's the kicker: even if my ignorance of the area's history had been corrected, I would still have denied, and vehemently, that an imminent war of atrocity would be caused by conflicts which took place more than 400 years earlier.

There's nothing like knowing that even if you'd done the homework, you still would've failed the exam. The lesson of not being equal to that test has never left me. It has urged me to be more clinical in appraisal, more mindful of past echoes, to scrutinize first-hand observations over distant theories. It forever shook my faith in the blithe premises of unchaperoned diversity, and taught me that context, however complex, is reality's keystone.

Now, then: let's go back to Israel, Palestine, and Gaza. All the way back to Zephaniah chapter 2, verse 5:

For Gaza shall be forsaken, and Ashkelon a desolation: they shall drive out Ashdod at the noon day, and Ekron shall be rooted up.

Woe unto the inhabitants of the sea coast, the nation of the Cherethites! the word of the LORD is against you; O Canaan, the land of the Philistines, I will even destroy thee, that there shall be no inhabitant.

The scripture above was written circa 630 B.C. by one of the most obscure prophets of the Old Testament. "Philistines" is a Hebrew term derived from the root p-l-sh, or פלש‎, which means to invade, divide, or overwhelm. Referring to that same people, the Romans used the word to rename Israel as "Palestina," a final insult to the Jews after their million-corpse rebellion was put down late in Hadrian's reign, 135 A.D. As for the Philistines, no one knows where they came from originally. The available evidence indicates they were ethnically distinct Caucasian refugees or prisoners, (likely from one of the Aegean islands, maybe Mycenae) sent by an Egyptian pharaoh to the southwest coast of Palestine some 14 centuries ago. They were a sea people, remarkably skilled mariners, iron-smiths, and merchants.

At that time, and until its name was changed to Judeah post-Exodus, "Canaan" was the name for all the lands east of the River Jordan to the sea, which had been a province of Egypt dating to 2000 B.C. Beautiful purple fabrics, prized above all others, were made in Canaan with dyes coaxed from an indigenous murex snail. The dye was called Knaa, and the Phoenicians (Greek for "purple people") became famous for shipping the fabric all over the known world from Jaffa (Haifa). It signified royalty.

Many peoples existed in the land other than Philistines and Judeans, most of which are even more lost to history than the Hittites. The Old Testament remains the only document to list the tribes and clans apparently displaced following the Exodus (see Genesis 10: 15-19). Today's Palestinians and Israelis are the survivors of those ancient disputes, in which one can imagine a violent churning of migrations, innovations, and assimilations. The southwest coast of Canaan which the Philistines first seized is now known as the Gaza Strip.

Gaza ("strong point") was named for the most formidable of its five city-states, and the Philistines gained their pejorative stature after gaining them by Egyptian mandate. They became wealthy, built up and pushed further out into Hebrew-held lands. And so it came to pass that the Hebrews developed a special hatred for the Philistines--and they must by no means have been alone in reviling the strange and powerful usurpers of choice coast-line. In the Bible, conflict between them seems to be a constant, and several hundred Old Testament scriptures are devoted to heaping scorn on Philistines over and above the other unwanted occupants of Canaan. The stories of Samson and Delilah, Saul, Samuel, and David all feature Philistines as villains, and when David slew Goliath to become King of Judah, he slew one of their champions.

To a contemporary Israeli with even a cursory knowledge of tradition, Palestinians are synonymous with Philistines, the Gazans most of all, and ancient Canaan is geographically synonymous with the outer borders of modern Israel. As a policy, revenge and cleansing of them and the other cattle-people ("goyim") are deeply embedded in Israeli tradition, and more. It's repeatedly spelled out in sacred text as the will and commandment of god. as it is in Deuteronomy 7, verse 1:

When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou;

Fast forward to last November, stop, and note: it's handy to keep deep background in mind while you debate whether to fire up your Bullshit Detector. Our media now tells us that Gaza's Hamas Party broke a cease-fire with Israel, easy enough to believe. But rewind two years, stop. Hamas won a democratic election held in 2006 at the behest of the Bush Administration. The US, Canada, and the EU froze Palestinian government accounts and withheld all payments. Israel then blockaded the Gaza Strip, where 2.5 million people are crammed into a hundred square kilometers, and the industrial output and trade promptly shrank by 95%. The only food Gazans get is from humanitarian aid, and Israel supplies the electricity (not!). All manner of subterfuge, spy-craft, and force have been applied to throw Hamas out, and have failed.

Israel broke the cease-fire on November 4th, 2008 when its forces killed a Palestinian in Gaza. Some people there responded with a single mortar barrage towards Israeli positions, no casualties. Israel then killed six Gazans, to which Hamas responded with its "advanced" Qassam rockets. This fits the pattern. 79% of Israel-Palestine conflict pauses were interrupted when a Palestinian was killed. 8% of pauses were interrupted by Palestinian attacks, with the remainder unclear because 13% were interrupted by both sides on the same date. Of the 25 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than a week, Israel broke 24, or 96%. Israel attacked and killed Palestinians every time after 14 periods of nonviolence lasting longer than 9 days (data source: Israeli Consulate, New York).

The picture above is of a Qassam rocket impact on a road. It didn't even leave a pot-hole. Rewind 2638 years, Deuteronomy 7, verses 2-3, stop:

And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them:

Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.

The shadows are long and often ugly, but the sun also rises on the naked and the dead. On Jew and on Muslim. Israel has finally lost a PR battle for narrative arc in the West, as we have seen the pictures and video unravel on the InterNews. When the next Gazan school is bombed, the next family lies in a house entombed, Hamas will gain strength. It's not enough for Israel to stop now, the ship embarked and is cruising for a distant boycott. To survive another 20 or 30 years, Israelis have to pull their heads out from where they are so deeply stuck: from the dream of a Zion that never was, and from the Bible's ass.

Counter Culture

Graffiti artist Banksy depicts a street worker power-washing cave art.

Those Who Study History Are Condemned To Know It

And speaking of Henry Kissinger, he floated a paper ("Seizing Arab Oil") under the nom de plume "Miles Ignotus" (Unknown Soldier) in Harper's back in 1975 about America solving its oil problems by invading Saudi Arabia and seizing its infrastructure. It may not have been his idea originally, since James Schlesinger (Richard Nixon's SecDef) advocated the same thing in 1973, and tried to rev up the sullen British on a joint operation which included Kuwait and Abu Dhabi. Britain responded by making another James Bond movie, but the Gift Zwerg (from german, lit "poison dwarf") never gave up on the idea.

James Akins was the US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1973-75, when he was dismissed for telling Kissinger to perform an unnatural act. He returned to lobby against the planned war, and later personally filed a winning suit against AIPAC which went to the US Supreme Court in 1998.

Akins remarked at the imminent start of the Iraq invasion in 2003, "It's the Kissinger Plan! I thought it'd been killed, but it's back."

Imperial Pretensions Buckle Under Borrowing

By Aziz Huq

Do empires end with a bang, a whimper, or the sibilant hiss of financial deflation?

We may be about to find out. Right now, in the midst of the financial whirlwind, it's been hard in the United States to see much past the moment. Yet the ongoing economic meltdown has raised a range of non-financial issues of great importance for our future. Uncertainty and anxiety about the prospects for global financial markets -- given the present liquidity crunch -- have left little space for serious consideration of issues of American global power and influence.

So let's start with the economic meltdown at hand -- but not end there -- and try to offer a modest initial assessment of how the crumbling U.S. economy might change America's global stance.

The rest.

The Russians Are Conspiracy Theorists, Too

And they would know a thing or two about conspiracies. Vladimir Putin accused the Bush Administration of provoking the Georgia Conflict to help John McCain win the presidential election:

"The suspicion arises that someone in the United States especially created this conflict with the aim of making the situation more tense and creating a competitive advantage for one of the candidates fighting for the post of US President.”

Mr Putin said that his defence officials had told him that Americans were operating in the conflict zone in Georgia during the fighting.

He added: “It should be admitted that they would do so only following direct orders from their leaders. Therefore, they were acting in implementing those orders, doing as they were ordered, and the only one who can give such orders is their leader.”

A White House flack responded, of course, by calling Putin a Conspiracy Theorist, adding that his intelligence apparatus must be as bad as the CIA:

“To suggest that the United States orchestrated this on behalf of a political candidate – it sounds not rational.

Those claims first and foremost are patently false, but it also sounds like his defence officials who said they believed this to be true are giving him really bad advice.”

Yep, no 21st century political party would ever use an international crisis to try and wag the d-- I mean win an election. Not like they used to do during the olden days. Despite that fact, I had thought of, heard co-workers speculate, and read of that possibility almost every day, so it's good to know we're not the only ones to think of it. At least one world leader is on the same wavelength. Kinda sad when the Enemy of the Month seems more with it than your own.

Pakistan Minus Musharraf = Al-Qaedistan

The sourced rumors seem to be that Musharraf is set to quit. (WaPo, Reuters, AFP) His spokesman came out with a denial this morning, but resignation seems to be the direction it's going. (Via MikeVotes)

What's surprising is how long Musharraf has been able to hold on as America's advocate and ride herd on internally conflicting sets of stakeholders. As a measure of what "conflicting" means, he survived 6 known assassination attempts and uncounted plots. He finally ran out of magic, and sometime earlier this year Pakistan simply ceased to play its role as a payrolled ally in the Global War on Terror.

Even with an exceptional talent like Musharraf, Pakistan's value against al-Qaeda has always been precarious, and latent support for that movement is about to be expressed with much greater openness. Musharraf could feel the incoming tide, and was just buying time; he already was estate-shopping on the Chesapeake Bay last year. The reasons Pakistan implicitly supported AQ are quite simple: Pakistan exists because it won a war of self-determination, it is an Islamic-moderate nation, and, after a Mid-east fashion, it is a democracy.

Members of its intelligence service (the ISI) have long worked with al-Qaeda (the Islamic Foreign Legion), and while they maintain cordial relations with counterparts in Saudi Arabian services and the CIA, there is an emotional component missing in the latter relationships. The ISI is practiced at playing multiple ends against the middle, as their only enemy of real concern is India. But when the ISI sees al-Qaeda, they see people like they once were, people who are fighting for self-determination, who are trying to overthrow oppressive regimes and replace them with more equitable systems. They believe that if AQ succeeds, particularly against the Arabian regimes, that good will have been achieved.

The only way to guard against that fondness was to give them massive amounts of money. Now they see the milk has gone out of the cow, so they realize how tired they are of keeping the capricious, volatile idiots in the US happy, with the long subterfuge and denial of better selves that entailed. Indeed, many of the smartest ISI people already felt that way for quite some time, and although it is commonly accepted that the planning, staffing, and financing for 9/11 occurred in Afghanistan, it was happening in a far more powerful way in Islamabad.

The Unbearable Lameness Of Being A Neocon, Pt. I

Once upon a time, in a valley far, far away, I was an anti-communist, and for fun, I mapped Soviet advances through the world in tints of red. They completely controlled 8 other countries; 6 more they ruled by proxy; over 15 were solidly under their sphere of influence; a dozen or so were struggling against communist-funded insurgencies; 10 had signed mutual cooperation treaties, and a few, which I festooned with pink candy stripes, were teetering on the fence. I was among the last crop of prospective Cold Warriors, when the Soviet Union was at its largest and all foreign policy exercises were performed with red magnifying glasses, so we could cast a leviathan into something pythonically vast.

Every graph, every veracious view proved the pernicious, creeping ideology of the Enemy was jeunesse doree, about to break through and burrow like syphilis into our closest allies and dearest resources. Above all, it was impossible to argue with the maps, which responded to questions and had inexhaustible vocabularies of 3 words: you...are...losing. The maps were all-pervading, and if you asked your professors or classmates, "So...what are Malaysia's prospects," they would refer to the arbiter of all things geopolitical and it would say, "You are losing." You could ask the map any question at all, such as, Is Greece really still in the balance? "You are losing." Will I get an 'A' in this class? "You are losing." Was the movie 'Red Dawn' made by homosexual communist sympathizers? "You are losing."

Panic is a conventional wisdom. Few wiser heads dared predict or intuit how quickly and soon the Red Tide would recede, and given that, you'd think forgiving the people who came to be called Neocons would be easier. It is not, no, decidedly not. In no small part that's because they're still wonderfully positioned to screw up the world yet more, are collectively unrepentant and unreformed, and have always been transparent fools. No one seems to even understand what they are or where they came from, and although the stars of their uber-nationalist lunacies may be setting, they might not be, and are still high in the sky. Why were such twittering machines, these ungainly and vacuous intellectual monstrosities, ever allowed to ascend so far?

There's a story, of course. The far right, having shot itself in the foot, ever-desperate and facing irrelevance, searched for a magical narrative. Once they found it, they became the loudest voices in American anti-Soviet policy circles, drumbeating the idea that strong religions, whether Christian or Muslim or Jew, were the best way to thwart communist threats. Surprisingly, amongst much that was ludicrous, this was not. The Soviets were quick to compete with and suppress religions, being structures inimical to themselves wherever they went, so the idea had solid on-the-ground basis.

For example, the Catholic Church was playing a strong, probably indispensable role in Poland's Solidarity movement, eventually tempting the Vatican into a radical departure from tradition by naming its first Polish pope. Hence, it was understandable the US would embrace fundamentalist Muslims and Jews as anti-communist, pro-stability allies, particularly when newly vertiginous waves of Christian fundamentalism were swelling, and I rode their crests and troughs off the strongest American point-break.

Reagan was the embodiment of pro-religious foreign policy prescription, so his sympathizers engaged with the Iranian mullahs well prior to his election to strike deals: arms for the return of American government hostages, to be consummated after his victory, and access for selected companies. They found much to like, and each side immediately shared an intuitive understanding of the other, not perhaps as fondly as Republicans would get along and actively cooperate with al-Qaeda operatives and Muslim Brotherhood surrogates during their formation in Pakistan, but the mullahs and the Reaganites were deeply religious social radicals who had wandered long in their respective wildernesses, outcasts who were brought back in triumph by resounding activism and majorities.

Few in wider policy circles cared much about Iran beyond its oil, and it was always Jimmy Carter's misfortune to take the phrase "we will not negotiate with terrorists" seriously. The mullahs had been toughened by austere decades of Western repression, any human rights issues were not a concern, nor were the finer points of comparative religion. By contrast, Carter and the Democrats had probably set events in faster motion by regularly undermining Iran's Shah over human rights abuses. With the proxy overthrown, from a Reaganite viewpoint and from nearly everyone else's it was better to have unpredictable Khomeinist mullahs in charge of Iran than an unpredictable, democratic, Bambi-tastic government within easy reach of Russian weapons and aid. The mullah regime could be relied upon to quickly purge the communists, and Reagan policy was to leave it alone until further notice. As for the Shah, Beverly Hills had always suited him best.

Under Reagan, rapprochement with pious forms of islam was followed through on as policy all over the Mid-East, most aggressively under Bill Casey in the mid-1980s. The notion was seen as straightforward and sensible, and it was (so to speak) orthodox. It was pointless to argue against, and even if a far-right insurgency were not in the middle of joyously taking over a government, it's always hard to argue against the quick fix.

With monacle-wearing hindsight, it's easy to see predictable consequences of encouraging the rise of disparate theocracies in whereabouts considered absolutely critical to US interests. And it's easy to notice that the stage set of "Dances with Mullahs" is where the struggling Neocons and their simple-minded Kantian philosophical frameworks of aggression first responded to a casting call and won some parts in a major play, 'Morning in America.' It's where they learned their lines, fine-tuned their performances, and were richly rewarded. When the show closed down, they departed to work on another production, which I'll pick up on in Part Two. Say what you want about Neoconian acting quality, but those stage props, sheesh!--they're to die for.

Robert Frost's Beer-Filled Nauseous Wood

More than two dozen teens,
vandals who hosted a kegger
in Robert Frost's old house,
were ordered to take a class on his poetry.

Two roads diverged in a tedious wood.
"This is where Frost is relevant,"
said Jay Parini, his biographer,
rehearsing What Should Not Be Taken.

"You come to a path in the woods
where you can say, 'Shall I go to this party
and get drunk out of my mind?'
Everything in life is choices."

(Adapted from a CNN story. Teenagers broke into Robert Frost's former house and had a party, which turned destructive as the crowd swelled past 50. Though dead, it was easily the biggest, most rollicking party Frost had ever hosted at his home. Chairs were kindled and burned in the fireplace, windows were broken out, fire extinguishers decanted, much vomit and urine emitted. In fact, how about this as a best-seller: The Underage Drunken Vandals Guide to Historic Homes in New England. )

Torkham Choke Point: Pakistan To Stop Supporting US Operations In Afghanistan

Torkham is just 5 klicks east of the summit of the Khyber Pass, right on what masquerades as a border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Some clever chappie drew the Durand Line, more commonly known as the 'Zero Line,' on a map in 1893 as an attempt to keep the Khan's influence out of what was then British India. It never really worked. Jalalabad is to the west, Peshawar is to the east, and in between is al-Qaeda.

The 50,000 US & NATO troops in Afghanistan need about 700,000 gallons of fuel per day to maintain operations. 500,000 of that goes through Torkham, where 36 tankers were blown up in a customs parking lot one night in March. The Afghan National Army has difficulty securing supply columns from attack once past the gate, and the efforts of Pakistan's forces have become increasingly token since recent elections which effectively deposed the US-bankrolled Musharraf. The Taliban was able to close the supply route for at least 8 days in April, prompting an increasing number of Predator drone missile strikes inside Pakistan. "Truckers wanted, must have a love for adventure."

Soon, Pakistan will conclude a new treaty with its tribes to heal enmities over past US support; losses through the Torkham line will likely steepen dramatically. Russia has been watching this devolving situation closely, and Vladimir Putin offered a supply line through Russia at the last NATO meeting, but certainly not for free. They didn't take him up on it (yet). US supplies going through Russia to fight al-Qaeda packs enough irony to prostrate intelligence services with howls of helpless laughter. The only people keeping straight faces are the grunts and the Bush Administration. Here's what the Pakis have to say about it:

Adm. Eric T. Olson, the commander of United States Special Operations Command, held a round-table discussion with a group of civilian Pakistani leaders to sound them out on the possibility of cross-border raids by American forces. He was told in no uncertain terms that from the Pakistani point of view it was a bad idea, said one of the participants.

Instead, Pakistani officials are trying to restore calm to their country, which was rattled by a record number of suicide attacks last year. Within days, they are expected to strike a peace accord with Pakistan’s own militants that makes no mention of stopping the infiltrations. In fact, Pakistani counterinsurgency operations have stopped during the new government’s negotiations with the militants.

“Pakistan will take care of its own problems, you take care of Afghanistan on your side,” said Owari Ghani, the governor of North-West Frontier Province, who is also President Pervez Musharraf’s representative in charge of the neighboring tribal areas.

Mr. Ghani, a key architect of the pending peace accord, believes along with many other Pakistani leaders that the United States is floundering in the war in Afghanistan. Pakistan, he said, should not be saddled with America’s mistakes, especially if a solution involved breaching Pakistan’s sovereignty, a delicate matter in a nation where sentiment against the Bush administration runs high.

“Pakistan is a sovereign state,” he said. “NATO is in Afghanistan; it’s time they did some soldiering.”

The Seizures Of Lebanon

Although it has been almost completely ignored by the media, Dick Cheney has been touring the Mid-East lately, and I don't think it's for the excellent chummus.

Just as Israel's prime minister Olmert sends diplomatic signals to Turkey that it wants their top diplomat to seek a settlement with Syria, Mr. Shadow President shows up in Tel Aviv. Then rumors start flying about Israeli super-spies in Tehran who have "the real goods" on Iranian weapons programs, Cheney pronounces our last NIE on it (saying there is no immediate threat) completely off-base, and Olmert is suddenly on the political brink again, this time over corruption charges. All coincidences.

Then, Lebanon's minority government put pressure on Hezbollah, the unseated majority party in that country, in effect attempting to disarm them. This is like Pee Wee Herman challenging George Forman to a boxing match. Hezbollah's leader in Lebanon, Hassan Nasrallah, held a press conference to say, "The decisions (of the government) are tantamount to a declaration of war and the start of a war...on behalf of the United States and Israel. We have the right to confront he who starts a war with us by defending our rights and our weapons."

Hours later, Hezbollah militiamen took over the streets of Beirut, sacking and burning whatever they wanted--TV stations, government offices. Lebanon's titular leaders huddled in their apartment compounds behind army and police contingents, probably emptying their safes before issuing calls to their troops to retreat, and calls to Al Qaeda to send in Sunni fighters. The last part is funny, because the US is lavishly financing Saad Hariri's Beirut-based Future Movement, it is Sunni, is known to have passed money and fighters into Iraq and Afghanistan, and is for all intents and purposes part of Al-Qaeda.

The net outcome of yesterday's donnybrook is that Hezbollah, the lever of Tehran, will probably win a much larger place in Lebanon's government. Somehow, one doubts that was the intended effect, but these are the circumstances we've been reduced to. And this is apparently the best Dick Cheney can do.

4,000 US Soldiers Killed

Wrapping up a nine-day overseas trip to Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney was asked, in an exclusive interview with ABC News, about the effect on the nation of today's grim milestone of at least 4,000 U.S. deaths over the five-year Iraq war:

"A lot of men and women sign up because sometimes they will see developments," Cheney said. "For example, 9/11 stimulated a lot of folks to volunteer for the military because they wanted to be involved in defending the country."

I took the liberty of expostulating further, to what he was really saying:

"Not only did we let them defend their country, we even paid them their monthly $1,600.04 checks. With free medical care on top of that. They wanted to get involved, so we got them involved. Even better, we added excitement to their joyless, pointless little lives, and I'm told by the experts that being blown up is the ultimate experience. You can't find that kind of stimulation working at a Walmart, can you? And for all the National Guard people who signed up to have a little fun a weekend a month, and are whining? well they got to come along for the ride, the privilege to serve their country for as many as three tours so far. This is the Long War, the Global War on Terror, and caveat emptor is latin for being American."

Cheney wasn't content to stop there. After the reporter brought up the unexpected burdens placed on military families, the Vice President reminded her that the biggest burden is carried by President Bush. Yeah. It must be terrible for him. Maybe one day a returning, highly-trained volunteer soldier will alleviate his suffering.

Information Warfare: Mid-East Has Its Intertubes Tied

It's worth wondering why the fiber optic cables to Iran, Egypt, and Dubai were cut. While making some sport of it in my first post, and the title of this one, it's also cause for serious concerns. Ones I didn't vent at first. Conspiracy theories? Uhn-uh. To think 5 cables got cut in a total of 6 places from ships dropping anchors, the only explanation offered thus far, is to buy a lifetime membership in the Ignorance Is Bliss Gated Community.

Under current US and Israeli war doctrines, knocking out the enemy's communications infrastructure is Priority One. Those undersea cables would be the first thing to go, because if you're making war, crippling them is risk-free, high-payoff. It not only seriously degrades the enemy's advanced communications, but it also gives you mastery of the public relations message to the world. Al-Jazeera can't transfer, upload, or air video over the internet in real time. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), not to mention the virulent nation itself, knows that it is first and foremost a propaganda machine. An awesomely effective one. (Remember, it's The Holocaust, and none other holocausts shalt come before it.)

Israel has to be the prime suspect in this gig, with the US a close second or an outright participant. Various other possibilities readily present themselves: countries wanting more censorship, Islamic extremists, a self-inflicted test, a psy-op...but each of these is also relatively easy to dismiss.

Naj from Iran Facts finds the censorship angle ludicrous, since manual, ad hoc measures are fully effective in the eyes of her former government. It's highly doubtful Islamic extremists possess the coordination or inclination to carry out such an operation, nor with such a light touch. A self-inflicted test on infrastructure effects carries some appeal, yet it's a stretch to imagine exactly what multinational Mid-east body would've wanted to conduct one. An intelligence psy-op study is even more appealing, but it would almost have to be a rogue operation, one whose scale makes it unlikely; the Mid-East is an active war zone where the military takes precedence.

A telecommunications professional of long acquaintance briefly mused that the cables may be tapped; while technically possible, bouncing light signals out of thousands of underwater optic strands is arduous and, due to signal loss, obvious, compared to sniffing right on the server nodes. Still, surveillance can't be ruled out, with resulting service disruption playing nicely into multiple purposes.

While very bad, I don't think the internet vasectomy signals immediate war as an attack would've (probably) already happened. It would be difficult to imagine, even granting the past and current imperial wooden-headedness in the region, giving an enemy so much time to re-adjust. This incident reads more like a message of mastery, an ape beating its chest and thumbing its nose. Strategically, it's an excellent way to signal you're escalating the threat level up another notch. You can safely sit back, gleefully gauge the reaction, and send a witty note to make your point. As mentioned in the first post below, the countries in the region are about to break down the fence and stampede off the dollar farm, and giving them electric collar shocks is just about the only means of non-violent control either primary suspect has left.

Unfortunately, the move is openly aggressive, illustrates what a wider regional war would first look like, and gives the Mid-East abundant and well-founded reason to stock up on three things: paranoia, desire for payback, and making communications infrastructure and procedures more redundant and secure.

The "Tribal Belt"

My friend Still Life Living alerted me to analysts on NPR who kept referring, in the kind of catchy-code from which surges are spun, to a "tribal belt" in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Perhaps by that phrasing we are meant to believe that pesky tribes, though poorer than Africans, are the problem. (Oops. Pardon me. Hang on a sec while I spray my office with Rant-B-Gone.....ok, it seems to be helping. Aaaah. Blood flow, good. Air, check. Al-righty, then.)

It would probably be best to simply look at a few maps. This is the most volatile border in the world, territory where our past sins, unknown as they may be, are manifold; clicking on any of the maps shows closer views. The conflict locus:


The tribe probably targeted most by the "tribal belt" descriptor, which is but one of more than thirty others in 'Afghakistan:'


The Federally Administrated (Unaided, Uncontrolled) Tribal Areas:

Pakistan is unwilling to let the tribal areas inside its borders go because of a deep love for denuded, arid mountains, increasingly hostile refugees, dust, and a bracing climate. (All maps courtesy of the helpful Jesus del Norte.)

Ashura & The Shiite Passion Plays

Naj, a friend and Iranian ex-pat who runs Iran Facts (link at right margin), has written an enlightening summary of the Ashura festival in Iran, one which bears similarities to Christian passion plays held around the world. As celebrations re-enact the martyrdom of Jesus, so Ashura commemorates the martyrdom of Hussein, inspiration of the Shi'ite faith. Naj explains Ashura's significance, in particular the basis of the schism between Shi'ite and Sunni forms of Islam, as expressed in the street plays known as ta'ziyeh (lit. "compassion, mourning"):

As a dramatic form it has its origins in the Muharram procession commemorating Hussein's martyrdom and throughout its evolution the representation of the siege and carnage at Kerbela has remained its centerpoint. Ta'ziyeh has never lost its religious implications. Because early Shi'ites viewed Hussein's death as a sacred redemptive act, the performance of the Muharram ceremonies was believed to be an aid to salvation; later they also believed that participation, both by actors and spectators, in the Ta'ziyeh dramas would gain them Hussein's intercession on the day of the Last Judgment.

People, Sunnis much included, have criticized Shi'ism as medieval, gruesome, superstitious. Again, parallels between Shi'ite and Sunni conflicts are fairly comparable to those between Protestantism, expressive folk forms of Catholicism, and the body with claims originating authority over all things Christian. In the late 1700s, the Catholic Church banned passion plays in Europe, particularly Germany, as being too bloody, boisterous, and pagan-bordering. Oberammergau soon gained a passion play monopoly through a deal in which they changed their celebration's title, toned down the edgy displays, and charged for tickets, drawing about half a million visitors once a decade ever since (and for a one-time 350th anniversary in 1984). Outside Germany, the popularity of passion plays has spread, and are practiced in South and North America. Shi'ites are by no means alone in re-enactments of suffering, or in practices seen as beneath the dignity of other groups who supposedly share the same religion.

Demographically, Shi'ites are the fastest-growing segment of Islam and already significantly outnumber Sunnis, a fact which gives the lie to the deterministic 'Clash of Civilizations' logic. (Which goes, in short: other religions are quickly out-breeding Christianity, ergo the West must attack while the chances for success are still high. Thus the Iraq grab and the Iran end game.) Naj again provides a quick history check:

In the first years of the sixteenth century, when under the Safavid dynasty, Persia, which had always been a strong cultural power, again became a political power, Shi'ite Islam was established as the state religion and was used to unify the country, especially against the aggressive Ottomans and Uzbeks who were adherents of Sunnite Islam.

All anecdotal evidence indicates that religions exhibit a strong tendency to schism over time, not to unify. Judah was but one tribe of Israel, and ten went missing somewhere. Islam is technically an off-shoot of Judaism, and recognizes Christ as an important prophet. (How about "United" Methodists? Ha!) Islam is about to schism further, and of course the Bush Doctrine is based almost entirely on the opposite assumption. Wahabist philosophers may have correctly diagnosed and exploited the West's weaknesses, but they overlooked their own glaring problems: their chances of unifying Islam are extremely low in the absence of a Western Crusaders, encouraging a personal relationship with the Koran invites the attendant dangers of differing interpretations, and Iran is a bigger threat to al-Qaeda than the US ever will be.

'Foreign policy' means getting other countries to do what you want. If a capable diplomat keeps the principle of religious disunity mind, much can be quickly done with little more than travel vouchers and a free hand to first extricate a mired foot from the Mideast, then a leg, then maybe two. Not to mention greatly improve relations with Iran, which shouldn't be further driven into Russian or Chinese embraces; Iran should be engaged and helped in their goal to generate nuclear power, unravelling their biggest knot of anxiety: depleted oil fields.

A policy of de-escalation in rhetoric and force re-deployments will work immediate wonders, eroding support for mirror-image radicals who stir the embers of conflict. Iran may have old vendettas with the US and fully share in Islamic enmity for Israel, but it hates al-Qaeda, and in the equation of Realpolitik, it can be a policy anchor, a successful, eventually friendly counterbalance for non-violent containment.