Don't Let The Children See...Anything

As the world outside the boundaries of Texas often calls them, the above pictures are of "sculptures." If you're in Texas and happen to be a school teacher, don't take your class to the Dallas Museum of Art, because you'll forever sully their tender eyes with Aristide Malliol's pornographic 'Flora' to the left above, and Auguste Rodin's shocking 'The Shade,' the bare-assed bronze guy to the right. Who knows? They might even see a male torso from a 330 B.C. Greek funerary with...wait, I can hardly bear to say it: genitalia. And maybe you'll be fired, like Sydney McGee was, who had taught elementary school for 28 years. One of the children in her fifth-grade class told her parents she'd seen something naughty:

She [McGee] later received a memorandum in which the principal, Nancy Lawson, wrote: “During a study trip that you planned for fifth graders, students were exposed to nude statues and other nude art representations.”

I hadn't planned on doing a "Kulturkampf" piece on this lovely Sunday morning. I simply wanted to post some beautiful artwork, and used what I thought to be a thoroughly unprovocative search term: "Rodin." One of the first images returned didn't look at all like a Rodin sculpture, so I clicked on it, and found the NY Times story through a blog post which had attached the Malliol photo. Good morning, America. Hello, all you kiddies in Texas, and behold. Feast your eyes on the pornographies above, and fill your filthy, teeming little minds full of dirty thoughts and questions.

If anyone from the Dallas Museum of Art management happens to blunder in here, someone out here cares, and recognizes what you're up against. You're peein' into the wind, cow-pokes, and I want to help you. I will consider taking one or both of these offensive sculptures off of your hands, and might host them for a modest fee in a more private setting. I think the Malliol could fit nicely in our master bedroom suite. I assure you, no one but family and special guests would see it there. As for the Rodin, we could hide it in our discreetly fenced backyard. I've already built a patio for it, and, if we can agree to terms, would build a small pavilion to protect it from the elements and from prying eyes. My contact info is &#@%texasupthe^**@fellationation.com.

The Love Song Of H. Norman Schwarzkopf

Ok. Really, that's all I've got, just the perfect alignment of the words with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the poem by T.S. Eliot.

H. Norman Schwarzkopf was the commanding general of the US and Coalition ground forces in the first war with Iraq. He was likeable, quotable in a quaint old media way. It's not well known that his father was the military governor of post-WWII Germany, and immediately after that, became most powerful man in Iran, where he was sent to fix the deleterious effects of a democratic election in 1953. Senior promptly re-installed the Shah, who reigned to protect Western interests until his overthrow in 1979. That background was not bespoke on The Tonight Show. Whereas The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was one of the greatest works of poet-scholarship ever written in this language, and there are no connections whatsoever to the Schwartzkopfs but through their convenient syllables, and their imperious history.

Growing up, Norman Schwarzkopf didn't see his distant father much at all, and his mother was an unhappy alcoholic. After she became an embarrassment in Washington, he lived with her in Argentina where she was packed off to, and then lived with her in Alaska soon before she drank herself to death. The foreign services of his father were remembered well, or maybe he made others remember his markers, because Stormin' Norman was promoted up through the ranks in a relatively undistinguished career as if by frictionless cold fusion. After he became a functional hero for punishing Saddam, far more famous than his father was, he wrote a best-selling book and ebulliently went onto the Tonight Show With Jay Leno, where he might as well have quoted Eliot: "Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter / I am no prophet - and here's no great matter."

H. Norman Schwarzkopf was no stranger to the undercurrents of stifled sufferings, and seemed to know that behind him in production rooms women would come and go, speaking of Michaelangelo. As all the cameras and the Moulin Rouge called, he seemed to be thinking, "I am old, I am old, shall I wear my trousers rolled." General Schwarzkopf was holding back untold amounts of pain for a long time, and knew the sham of a cheap, hollow victory against a hopelessly overmatched opponent. He heard the voices in their dying falls and retired to Florida. There was another door in this country to which he wanted no key, there was a veil past which he couldn't see. Good move. I hope he fishes on the peaceful sidelines in healing quietude.

The Strangest Bedfellows

Imagine you're the acting head of the Department of Justice, and you had that title because your boss has been in an Intensive Care Unit struggling for his life for six days. You get a phone call late at night, and the caller tells you that the White House Counsel is on his way with the Chief of Staff to your boss's hospital bed with a paper to sign authorizing the continuation of a progamme you strenuously disagree with. Just before his hospitalization, you and your boss had decided the Vice President had been going way too far with his wiretapping/surveillance, and decided not to renew your support for it. Your entire department is willing to resign over the issue.

You immediately think the White House is trying to pull a fast one, so you call your security detail, you call the FBI Director and tell him to get armed agents to the room, and you get dressed. Your men pick you up, put on the lights and sirens, and race to the ICU of George Washington hospital, to the bedside of your boss. You sprint up the stairs, get there, and stand between the bed he's lying on and the window of his private room. You say hello in hushed tones to him and his wife, tell them why you're there, and you wait.

Moments later, the White House Counsel and Chief of Staff arrive, carrying a piece of paper and a pen for your boss to sign it with. Your boss, known for being a hawkish conservative and despised by the "Left," tells them to stuff it and that due to his illness, you're the Attorney General. At that moment, four FBI agents arrive, and they have orders to let no one be removed from the room involuntarily. The Counsel and the Chief of Staff are startled by the agents. They purse their lips, look at you, turn, and leave without saying another word.

Is this an episode of "24," of "Lost," a re-run of the "X-Files?" No. It all happened in 2004 over warrantless wiretapping. After a decent interval, you leave the hospital room and your cell phone rings. The Chief of Staff is livid, and demands a meeting with you in the White House. Immediately. You tell him you will not meet without a witness present. Later, in the light of day, you bring your witness, and you meet. They pressure you to sign the paper. You refuse, and soon resign your position.

The Bush Administration has been using domestic surveillance to listen not just to Al-Qaeda. It listens to all its political opponents. It records all the communications of Congress and its staffers that it can. That's a big reason why it's so difficult to get Congressional votes against its agendas. Alberto Gonzales was the White House Counsel in the story above. James Comey was the Deputy Attorney General who rushed to the hospital bed. Andrew Card was the White House Chief of Staff. John Ashcroft was the Attorney General fighting for his life. The security and FBI agents were some poor bastards rousted out of an evening. After Comey resigned, Alberto Gonzales took his place as head of the Justice Department. I should not have to connect the dots for you about what has been happening with surveillance since then.

The aftermath of this story is that Ashcroft resigned for health reasons and hasn't been heard from since. James Comey gave testimony to Congress about the events above this week. All phone calls of Congressional representatives that can be recorded and transcribed, are. Almost all phone conversations which pass through Western networks are being word-spotted, sifted, and graded. Up to and including yours and mine. This isn't paranoia. It's my business, and it's how new speech technology and the old paranoia of power works. In every situation where surveillance was legal, it has been applied to everything it could be. That's what criminals do when they're in power, and want to hang onto it.

Keep talking. Talk about whatever you want without fear, but be sure to throw in extra stuff about pulsating cabbages and the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Become the surveilled. By doing so, you're jamming a paranoid power structure, making it spend more on its meaningless watching and twitching, and it'll just fall faster.

And big kudos to James Comey, personal friend of Patrick Fitzgerald, for his principled stand, his resignation, and his testimony in front of Congress. I'll even throw in a big hug to that bashful choir-singer John Ashcroft for raising his head off his pillow and telling the White House to f%#& off.

When Nations Lose Their Love For War, Or: How To Evolve For Dummies

You will know from my prior posts that I once loved war. When I was eight, I was riding in the back seat of her Subaru when my new step-brother Lance's girlfriend, Meredith, asked me, "Why do you like war so much?" I answered, "War decides the fates of nations and everyone who lives in them." The front seat fell silent for a long time.

I played war against older boys and men, some of whom were officers at War Colleges, through the most sophisticated means then available to me, the board games provided by Avalon Hill or Strategic Simulations, Inc.. Until I began to think about girls in a different way ("Love is a continuation of war by different means," to capsize von Clausewitz), this intellectual heat-sink was my whole-hearted passion. Later, I dabbled in playing the sublimated combats of football, enjoyed computer simulations like Air Warrior, and still watched a lot of war movies. I went to see "Saving Private Ryan" on opening night, and would do so again. War is inherently fascinating, it's a cliff-hanger, and preparing for it is an excellent idea if you, on collective or personal levels, want to survive. Because for a million years, humans, particularly males but females as well, have been uniquely selected for violence.

Paradoxically, our brand of hyper-competitive violence, the one which our DNA strand allowed to spawn, blossom, and turn upon itself, has immense survival value. All the primates have it, but ours is powerfully amplified, and it's what got us here against far more physically gifted enemies. When you look into the close-set eyes of a well-fed wolf, for example, you'll see a magnificent, highly intelligent predator which can run through deep snow in packs for days to bring down its prey. We couldn't do that. If a respectful chill doesn't run through you when those eyes lock onto yours, you've been insulated from too much.

Today, we don't think of predators as enemies, but as dying breeds. Which they are, and they deserve not to be expunged but saved as fellow travelers. They can relate, and if we could converse with them, we'd have one hell of an ancient talk. But let me make myself perfectly clear: these predators were once our mortal enemies, pure and simple. Wolves were more than playful competitors for food. We were locked in a desperate struggle with them and other predators for dominance, food, and species survival. They hated us for our freedoms, ate us far more often than we ate them, and saw us as a source of meat. Which we were.

It must have seemed unlikely many times, but we won the Wolf Wars, and it was they and our other tormentors who were imprisoned and driven to the brink of extinction. We should have great sympathy for them, because we were at that brink ourselves at least once before. We almost checked out as a race, as DNA evidence shows, and we died down to a mere band of individuals. That band was the one which adapted, and some shards of its adaptation must have been fierce and harsh indeed. All of us came from them. We left the forest and the trees starving and bare-handed in search of anything we could eat, stretching our palates so far and wide we've started taking subscriptions to Food and Wine Magazine.

The capacity to organize into collective forms of protective violence saved the human race in wars against predators like lions and tigers and bears, oh my, all of whom were once well above us on the food chain. Where tigers still roamed in unguarded situations, surprising numbers of us were recently meat; upwards of 50,000 people a year were eaten by tigers in India as recently as a half-century ago. But as a race, we long ago refused to accept our status as "meat." When collective organization didn't save us from such a fate, we were motivated to diligently acquire technical solutions, the means to overcome or at least shore up our weaknesses. We made tools which could hit at distances, extending beyond the reach of tooth and claw in order to project the force required to stave off wolves, lions, tigers and bears, to enhance our own ability to eat or tame the largest mammals, and to elevate our status as a predator worthy of respect and fear. Our minds wished for arrows, missiles, and spears, and as if by magic, like the satellites which traverse the orbits of the skies, our nimble hands extruded them.

As we organized ourselves into tribes, races, and nations, while we trained our wounded, wished solutions on our tormentors, we began to use these tools on each other, too, more and more. We didn't stop until the tools reached counterproductive levels of overkill. And here we are, hostage to our solutions. Hollywood apocalyptic fantasies can finally come true, with terrorists nuking Key West as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis flee it in the movie "True Lies," as the predators we once feared are captive in zoos and clinging to a marginal-species existence, and as Republican presidential candidate (Mitt Romney) got the biggest cheers in the debates the other night when he said, "I would double the number of inmates at Guantanamo."

Americans still naively believe, perhaps more than any other people, in the application of death-dealing technologies as palliatives for achieving peace. Probably because of prior successes in shared experience, that belief is sealed into the permeable pores of our mythology like a poison gas, the protective wrapper of which was ripped off when we gained the status of Sole Superpower. As Bill Murray said in the movie 'Stripes,' to inspire his fellow post-Vietnam Army classmates in boot camp: "Hey! We're Americans, and we've been kickin' ass for over 200 years. We're 10 and 1!"

Yeah. I've been to places, have talked to remnants of families dwelling in cities and nations which have been on the receiving end of overkill. They didn't like it. They and their nations lost the love for war, growing bitterly opposed to it in all forms. On my first day in Germany, a thirtyish father with two small children in a stroller poked me painfully and repeatedly in my chest, demanding, "What is your explanation for Dresden? Take your missiles home!" A few years later, in Japan, a teenager asked me, "Why did your country drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima, and then Nagasaki, when you had already won the war? Nagasaki was full of Christians, like you."

I have met German women who were gang-raped by Russian soldiers, and slept as refugees on torn-off house doors in freezing train stations. Men in Japan told me how they, as starving boys, allowed themselves to be gladly stacked like cordwood into train baggage racks; on the racks, they would go a full day's suffocating ride away to pick up the weekly rice ration for their families. I've met angry old veterans who were machine-gunned by .50 caliber bullets which disabled them for the rest of their lives, I can't forget the people with melted faces and arms, the ordinary blokes and hausfraus who still cried over being blown up in their homes and losing their loved ones in the rubble. And once, in a jail in Yugoslavia, I was mere kilometres away from where twenty-five or fifty thousand men, women, and children were executed and buried in mass graves. No one really knows who died or how many in that or other places, and no one told me a better reason for those murderd bodes than to point to vendettas which reach back to the thirteenth century. It didn't seem to work for them, either.

They tried to tell me the madness. The survivors know how terrible and senseless these violent solutions were, and for a time at least, their children and their nations have lost their love for war, as I believe the United States is about to do.

America is going to be utterly defeated in Iraq, and it's not going to be like Vietnam. The die-hards will again cry, "We were stabbed in the back!" Stabbed by those among us who doubted, didn't execute well enough, supported terrorists, or voted anti-war. Stabbed in the back by the public again, like they think happened with Vietnam. For the record, it wasn't the public, but the military which planted the knife then and there. They ceased to believe in victory. In Iraq it was announced this week that voluneeter troops can no longer have MySpace pages, or use YouTube. MySpace is how they communicate with their families and friends. YouTube is how they get news and share it. America is going to have difficulty processing the loss, but the Overkill Machine will have, in conjunction with the governments which built it, entirely have brought the stabbed back upon itself. People don't put up with this. And we know it's not only the living who are killed in war.

This will be different from Vietnam. Vietnam was a wasteful war fought over flawed ideology and theory, but having no appreciable oil reservers, it wasn't an Energy War. When we pull out of Iraq, we will have lost privileged access to resources which power the engines of the the high consumption upon which our way of life is based. The blame-storming will make Vietnam's wrenching, frustrating, insecurity-inducing debacle look like the aftermath of a game of Stratego in comparison. Back then there were some tremors of a required change in lifestyle, but our culture preferred tp reach for more violence to bully and quell them. This is different. When it comes to oil, this war is for keeps. That's why the daily and nightly attacks on the Green Zone in Baghdad are being censored and not reaching us, why the car-bombing of the last open market there cannot be photographed or written about in the press. Its' too painful to admit. It's the whole mythology of twentieth century America we're losing in Iraq and Afghanistan, we're losing a way of life, and that is not unacceptable.

Yet we'll have to face it. Defeats have much to teach. I'm hopeful that America as a country can rise to the challenge defeat poses, and that after it, we'll engage in a great spiritual growth. Victory has a joyous momentum which the Greeks knew naturally bred hubris and led to tragedy. When you gain mastery over something, gain adulation, and become too good at it, if you don't get corrupted and distracted, you'll eventually just get bored. In our cores as humans, it has been more the process of mastery we have reveled in than its end points, and our most delicious joys have not been found in the mutations of murder, but in charting, as a race, a course to the new and right directions which have never rested on rewards. At this point of violent overkill, many are the nations which have lost their love for war, and which are ready for moving on to the kind of the species-wide, collective maturation needed to deal with that capacity for overkill before it extinguishes us.

There are worse things than losing wars and sluffing off the failed facades of imperial ambitions. Go visit Italy, Spain, Holland, England, Japan and Germany to see what I mean. I will be proudest of my nation and its people when they're finally forced to search their souls, to search inside them for what is good and what must be newly done. I'm confident we will find a compass down inside there which will point us in the right direction. The chasm between here and there is still wide, and much heartache and futher conflict lies between, but the chasm between an outdated mythology and a more humble, productive process can be crossed.

When we find the compass, it will point us on a course away from the Energy Wars, to a new American Way of Life which doesn't think in terms of the Age of Oil. In that journey, I hope, lies the transformative answers to blunting the problems of Overkill, rounding off the reflexive need for dominant hierarchies, and addressing the urges we evolved which led to both. I know it's a lot to hope for. My hope doesn't matter, it's neither here nor there, but the time grows nigh when someone had better write and publish "How To Evolve For Dummies." I don't want no more Hiroshimas, no Dresdens, no more Nagasakis. We need to evolve, and I really want to read it.

The Rise And Fall Of Great Powers

By Paul Kennedy:

"Although the United States is at present still in a class of its own economically and perhaps even militarily, it cannot avoid confronting the two great tests which challenge the longevity of every major power that occupies the 'number one' position in world affairs: whether, in the military/strategical realms, it can preserve a reasonable balance between the nation's perceived defense requirements and the means it possesses to maintain those commitments' and whether, as an intimately related point, it can preserve the technological and economic bases of its power from relative erosion in the face of the ever-shifting patterns of global production.

This test of American abilities will be the greater because it, like imperial Spain around 1600 or the British Empire around 1900, is the inheritor of a vast array of strategical commitments which had been made decades earlier, when the nation's political, economic, and military capacity to influence world affairs seemed so much more assured.

In consequence, the United States runs the risk, so familiar to historians of the rise and fall of previous Great Powers, of what might roughly be called 'imperial overstretch:' that is to say, decision makers in Washington must face the awkward and enduring fact that the sum of the United States' global interests and obligations is nowadays far larger than the country's power to defend them all simultaneously."

Cry, The Beloved Wolfowitz

The World Bank Investigating Comittee has released its report on the improprieties of its President, Paul Wolfowitz, who will face a hearing tomorrow sure to feature a litany of abuse if not his outright dismissal. His betrayals of the World Bank may be unsavory and receiving media coverage now, but these are symbolic in comparison to the colossal, empire-ending blunders he made prior to this story. Those still remain shrouded behind the Bullshit Curtain.

Wolfowitz was the academic architect of the Neocons, a group which, by the mid-1990s, had dubbed itself "the Vulcans" to denote their desire to use US military might to attack and reform unfriendly oil-producing Mideast nations. Wolfowitz is a figure of special historical significance because, as the Vulcans gained momentum, he sponsored a shady, transnational Mideast felon convicted of bank fraud named Ahmad Chalabi to play a leadership role in the future pacification and conflagration of Iraq.

Unfortunately, as is now known, Chalabi was an Iranian agent who was devastatingly effective in promoting that nation's interests against the US and Israel. It was Iran's hope to bait the US into invading Iraq to remove or handicap its enemies and biggest local threats: Saddam Hussein, his ruling Baath Party, national sectarian Shiites not under the control of the Islamic Revolution of Iran (SCIRI), and the ethnic Sunnis who make up 20% of Iraq's population. Wolfowitz delivered Chalabi, and Chalabi delivered us. CIA staff who tried to out Chalabi were thwarted by Neocons given carte blanche by Dick Cheney, and these agents included Bob Baer, Milt Bearden, Vince Cannistaro and many others off the record. As Cannistaro says, "Chalabi was working for Iran, and Iran took us to breakfast, lunch, and dinner."

There is a huge difference in scale at work tomorrow. On the one hand, they're talking about when he gave his girlfriend and new co-worker a huge raise at the World Bank. On the other, their investigating committee's statements may as well read as an indictment of the sins of Wolfowitz against the United States and the world:

"Mr. Wolfowitz placed his own personal interests in opposition to the interests of the institution," the report found. "In so doing, he undermined the legal safeguards the institution had in place to protect itself from the harm it has unfortunately now come to experience."

The report reserved its sharpest judgment for the public struggle Wolfowitz has waged to save his job in recent weeks, criticizing the bank's probe in the press.

"It has turned an internal governance matter into an ugly public relations campaign," the report said, asserting that in unleashing "public attacks," Wolfowitz "denigrates the very institution he was selected to lead."

As the Guardian reported today:

Sounding more like a cast member of the Sopranos than an international leader, in testimony by one key witness Mr Wolfowitz declares: "If they fu#& with me or [my girlfriend] Shaha, I have enough on them to fu#& them too."

Cry, the beloved Wolfowitzes? Cry, the beloved countries.

Why We (Really) Fight: Mythbusting, Pt. V Redux

(Update: I'm re-posting this today because the announcement just went out that the respective ambassadors of the United States and Iran will be following up on their recent meeting again, this time officially, over the next few weeks to discuss how Iran can help in the stabilization of Iraq. The old post below discusses the basics of what drives American and Western foreign policy. While the upcoming talks are a back-down humiliation for the Bush Administration, they're a big win for BushCo because they're not just "talks." They're the start of a long negotiation which will likely include many components like money, markets, and opportunities. Dick Cheney personally did business with Iran when he was CEO at Halliburton, even though it was expressly banned by law. Profits are more important than laws.

US policy makers do not care if other governments or their people are sacrificing children to molten idols of Moloch and worship in Temples to Baal if there's relatively risk-free bucks to be made. Money will be put on the table with Iran early, and it will involve uranium enrichment and who helps them build nuclear power plants. One big US objective will be to kick the Russians out of their contracts to build the plant at Bushehr. Similar to the deal BushCo struck with India. If that's a trade Iran is willing to make, and they're willing to pay in oil or cash along with making some political concessions, they'll get a deal. I strongly suspect that Mssr. Cheney is already working this angle hard, and that it's behind his recent presence in the Mid-East. And yes, I suspect it even though he just stood on the deck of an aircraft carrier and reminded the mullahs he can bomb them whenever he chooses. If we're dealing with "totalitarians," Cheney is behind it, and there's going to be money involved.)

You've almost undoubtedly heard the logic from a friend or a relative: "Saddam was a bad man, and we had to go take him out." Relatives, well....I figure I'm stuck with them, and if they've put up with me for so long, I can pretty well put up with them. It saddens me more when I hear this kind of thing from a friend, because it means they're spouting ignorance, and ignorance in friends tends to concern me. Sadly, it means I'll probably have to speak carefully and be patient while reality sneaks up behind them and whaps them like a thug with a blackjack just behind their ear. You should be able to save a friend from such a fate.

On rare occasion I've blurted out, "You actually believe our government cares whether or not Saddam Hussein was a bad man? Cool! You must have a trust fund you didn't tell me about. Dinner's on you tonight, thanks, buddy!" Amongst friends, foes, strangers or no, indulging in Non-Delusional Honesty Incidents (or as we call them here at the ABH offices, N-DHI's) regarding our misadventures in the Mid-East have helped keep my social calendar to a manageable level of engagment, and silence, changes of topic, various looks of confusion, indigestion, disappointment, steely rejection, and seething rage can ensue. I've lost friends, too. But all those things are delightful experiences in comparison to living under a Cone of Complete Bullshit (or COC-B).

Here's the AgitPop Foreign Policy Guide, quick and dirty: "Furren" countries are judged not on any moral basis, not ever, despite the pundit classes' well-paid protestations to the contrary. They're judged solely on their willingness and ability to mold themselves in America's image and provide enough stability for corporations to make money. So here's a handy barometer I use:

If there's a McDonald's in a country, it is either with The Program, or they're trying hard to get with it. No McDonald's? No KFCs? No Baskin Robbins, not even a measly Dunkin' Donuts? They're Bad Guys, and you're in Injun country. America's terminology is governed by the McDonald's distinction, because it's a useful measure of whether or not the multinational corporations who run the US government can safely make money in a particular country. If there are a few McDonald's fast food restaurants in Absurdistan, the proper word to characterize its ruler is "authoritarian," or "friendly." If there is no McDonald's, or only one, that country is still run by a "totalitarian regime." August Pinochet: authoritian. Saddam Hussein: totalitarian. One you can make money off of, no problemo, the other is really tricky. See? Rock-solid simple analysis. The best you can do to fleece totalitarians is sell them weapons, a risky and often clandestine exercise.

Afghanistan was invaded not because it had anything to do with 9/11, but because the Taliban had previously negotiated over proposed pipelines, to be junctioned in Kandahar, in bad faith. It also became apparent the Golden Arches were never going to spread their smiling shadows over its craggy landscape. Same basic thing with Saddam Hussein. Refusing the Blessings of the Big Mac is proof positive that a leader is refusing reason, is dangerously totalitarian, and is impossible for our franchises to do business with. Thus the need for "regime change." And what about Iran? Ah, Iran is far, far worse:

Iran has invested its oil wealth in universal education, healthcare, infrastructure bringing clean water and electricity to more than 98 percent of its people, and economic progress. Military spending is a paltry $91 per capita compared to more than $1,500 per capita in the United States and Israel. The social and economic achievements of the revolutionary regime in Iran in the past 25 years look quite progressive in reducing poverty and social inequalities, and as the society liberalises toward a more secular democratic regime, even better progress can be expected in the future. Compared to rising inequality in the United States and Israel, ranked numbers one and two for social inequality among developed nations, the Iranians look pretty damn good.

That, of course, is the problem. If Iran, rather like Venezuela, becomes a regional leader and examplar of social democracy, it becomes a threat to the corporatist and militarist elites that dominate the political classes of Washington and Tel Aviv and exploit the mineral and oil wealth of underdeveloped nations.

Education and successful economic development are a bigger threat than any weaponry if you are a corporatist kleptocrat. And that is why Iran must be bombed, like Iraq and like Lebanon. It has succeeded, and must be bombed back to failure.

The level of distribution, ingredients, preparation, quality, uniformity, and broadcast control required to sell a Big Mac in Mumbai is enormous. By nature, it has to be systemic. This is so axiomatic it has attained the status of an orthodoxy we don't even think about. To us in the West, it's invisible. Whereas, for many Muslims in other countries, they know a McDonald's system will not respect the core dictates of their religion, nor their lives, having witnessed the agents of that system at work in Iraq. Prior to Iraq, McDonald's could buy them off gradually, but now that game is done. Bombing the Iranians won't help bring anyone into line, either. The whole Muslim world has seen with its own eyes that 99% of the Iraq War has been about taking its resources, and they're not about to buy into the American Dream. There won't be a lot of new takers for what we're selling, either, because now they're all "totalitarians."

(So I'm not predicting McDonald's and Starbucks are going to start popping up in Tehran anytime soon. But talking with your enemies is better than the other alternatives. Thanks for Uncle $cam over at American Samizdat for permission to reprint his catch of a Dkos diary.)

Myth-Busting, Pt. VII: There's No Anti-War Movement

"Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad."
Euripides, via MacBeth, 2,447 years ago

"Cindy Sheehan is a clown. There is no real anti-war movement. No serious politician, with anything to do with anything, would show his face at an anti-war rally..."
Karl Rove, September 18th, 2005

Yet an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 antiwar protestors stormed the streets of D.C. on Saturday, September 24th, 2005. I was sad to not be in attendance. As country singer Steve Earle noted during a performance at the mall that day, "Not only is there an antiwar movement, the desire to pull out of Iraq is slowly becoming mainstream."

Publicly Traded Media did its best to downplay the numbers of protestors and its coverage of them in D.C. that day, like it wasn't news and the participants were Protesta Non Grata. We learned our lesson on the homefront in Vietnam, and all that. Well, actually, no.

There's the old form of protest of marching in the streets, but there are also 60 million bloggers in the world, the vast majority of which are strongly against Dumb Wars. Totally normal people like me, Bruce at the River Blog, Hope at Deep Confusion, Naj at IranFacts, and tens of millions of others voicing their disgust over what's happening . It's hard to know how many people read all those blogs, but one thing is sure: a lot more thought and discussion is going on in them than in Publicly Traded Media, and it's a very important form of protest. A self-organizing, evolving, momentum-building form of protest. So whether or not people are marching in the streets bearing signs, baring breasts, and burning effigies, which they have been doing by the millions across the world, the real battle for the media is going on over the Internet.

Earlier today, I linked to an ABC News page which contained the video of Barack Obama's interview with a scurrilous, tough-talking little turn-ass named George Twerpanopolous. The ABC News web page wouldn't allow me to outline text and press "Ctrl-C" to copy it, so I had to go dig it of the source html. Those pathetic bastards. They're trying to squelch bloggers, and they had a section on the page soliciting comments with the link title of "See What Others Are Saying." As of 12PM Pacific time, there were a grand total of three comments. As of 10PM Pacific time, there are a grand total of 20 comments. In the words of Chris Farley, "Well, whoop-dee-frickin' Doo!" In the blogsphere, there were probably millions of comments on Obama's interview today. Will Main Stream Media be able to co-opt the blogsphere and bring commenters into their arms, gaining their attention and trust? Anything's possible. Meanwhile, guess who's winning right now?

The Unreal Anti-War Movement has taped a big "Kick Me" sign on the back of Karl Rove's suit, and the kicks are starting to hurt. "Serious politicians" like Arlen Specter will be lining up for free kicks since someone in the White House sent Murray Waas the Un-Dead E-mails, i.e., the ones Karl stupidly thought he had permanently deleted; he's about to learn the meaning of that old country song, "Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goal Posts of Life."

There is a real anti-war movement in America. It's just moving in new ways people in the White House are Press Corps are too insulated and ignorant to understand.

It's All Part Of My Neo-Con Fantasy

L. Paul Bremer, part of the Axis of Ineptitude, somehow got to write an exculpatory, self-serving, ass-kissing editorial in the neo-con-trolled Washington Post. There's a reason I refer to that infiltrated propoganda tool as the "WaPoo," and I refuse to read it or to pay for the publication until the blogsphere spits something good out of it, of which there is admittedly some. Besides the cant and propaganda, I hear they have a fairly nice entertainment section. As part of my education, I had to read issues of the Pravda (to get a decent grade) while the Soviet Republic was eating itself from the inside out. Reading the WaPoo is disturbingly similar, as commenter "peterp" notes over in the comments at Sic Semper Tyrannis:

Today it's Bremer, tomorrow it will be Liz Cheney, the day after Ken Pollock or Fred Kagan -- or, who knows, maybe even Paul Wolfowitz.

Reading the Washington Post op-ed page these days is like reading Pravda in the twilight years of Communism. It's an endless series of communiques from leading members of the Politburo -- all insisting that nothing has changed and the party is still the vanguard of history. Meanwhile the crops are rotting in the fields, the factories are turning out crap that nobody wants to buy and the workers are all drunk on vodka. But the propaganda machine keeps cranking away.

Which is appropriate, since telling fairy tales is the only core competency of ideologues.

But, peterp, let's not allow neo-cons to give fairy tales a bad name. Let's focus on the bright, moral side of fairy tales. Like, you know, "The Three Little Pigs." Like "Cinderella." And let's not forget "Their Asses Are Grasses, And We're Lawnmowers."

Obama Takes Up Leadership On Iraq

By pressing to put "benchmarks" down into legislation and by scrapping the "timetable for withdrawal" demand. The Bushies do not negotiate, as Obama realizes, and as long as breath is left in the blow-hard lungs of a few crucial bodies, they will never admit to withdrawal. They may start to withdraw, but they won't admit to it because it'd tattoo them with the "loser" label. Meantime, what they will do is agree to benchmarks, because if you're a Bushite, benchmarks are a way to buy some time, have no immediate cost, and may get Congress off your sore butt for a couple of weeks. (As the Bush Administration knows so well, "Denial" is too a river in Egypt! And they'll smash all you unpatriotic al-Qaeda-supportin' girle-men in the mouth if'n ya say sumpin' else.)

With the benchmark issue, Obama grabbed the mantle of leadership away from Hillary, which is coming right after beating her in individual donations by a 2:1 margin (100,000 contributors vs. 50,000), and probably taking the lead in current donations by a 25% or better margin. In taking this stand, he also seems to recognize the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is of multiple minds about Iraq, and about the ability to maintain a dollar-based "Sole Superpower" front. Benchmarks are an excellent wedge with which to separate the policy elites who still want to grip the Mid-east tightly from those who have come to the conclusion it's time to leave and invest our money into more productive activities. For the foreign policy dead-enders, separation means isolation. And those lightly granted benchmarks will come back to haunt BushCo like a nest of tarantulas, because we all know Iraq...ain't...coming...back.

While some of his erstwhile supporters are disturbed by Obama speaking to the Israel Lobby and making reassuring noises, and by his talk of making a larger, more "boots" oriented Army, these are the necessary and responsible steps to taking power, not to mention securing the lives of his family. I wish we didn't live in this kind of country, but we do, and Obama is being very smart. It doesn't mean he's going to revoke the things he's worked his adult life for, those being greater income equality, job creation, community activism, youth training, strong churches, and Constitutional law. It just means he knows what it takes to get there. As far as not leaving Israel to the wolves and about a larger Army devoted less to expensive gadgetry, these are solid positions. Strangely, I agree with them.

Back during his campaign, his staff called Clinton "Secretariat" for his thoroughbred abilities and winning ways. They knew if they just put him into the right settings, he'd run away from the competition. I'm not sure what nicknames Obama's staff may have for him, but "Muhammad Ali," after the greatest prize fighter of all time, may be one of them. He's awful hard to hit, and he hits awful hard. His stint on ABC News with George Twerpanopolous this morning was a showcase for a uniquely gifted leader. "Politics" is often fake, but its contests are real, and its masters are real. I would suggest a listen to what Obama had to say, and video of the interview in full is available at this link. Here's just one excerpt:

"What I don't do when I'm campaigning is to try to press a lot of hot buttons and use a lot of cheap applause buttons, because I want people to get a sense of how I think about this process," said Obama. "I think that one of the problems with political speeches is that we all know what folks want to hear. We know who the conventional, stereotypical enemies are on any given issue, and we have a tendency, I think, to play up to that. And I actually think that we're in this moment in history right now where honesty, admitting complexity is a good thing."

Sound to you like somebody who can lead this or any other country effectively? Sound like a man with a plan whom the times demand? This man just might be able to save our ass. Give him some money, because this old country is running out of time.

The End Of Bachelorhood

When you're ready to love somebody fully, you lift your feet off the ground. You know they're made of clay, and so are hers, but you decide to stop caring so you can both rise up into sweet vulnerability, security, and trust. I read something like the piece below to my wife soon after I met her, and not much later, I read another iteration from a napkin at the wedding of two friends just before they said their vows. The napkin and the lines went missing and were jumbled up in my mind. For five or ten years. Back where they started, they were about commitment-phobic, globe-trotting, gun-shy bachelors like me who were still hoping to find the right woman. I was lucky, and finally found her, or she found me. Both my feet are still off the ground, and here's my attempt to reassemble the lines I once wrote:

Perhaps you've heard the distant
conversations which went on,
describing "the trouble with Tom."
Good women all, and in many interstices
I tried to suspend my disbeliefs.

Yet their faces failed to float beside me
along the neon lights and dark cornices.
I must admit I thought of settling
for a someone reached by loving,
in her way, and tightening my arms.

But I held out for a Hepburn, an Audrey
or a Katherine, against odds for a woman
to seize the rudder on my African Queen,
to slap mosquitoes past corporate boundaries
and rendevous with me in evening gratitudes.

Long abiding for your exegesis,
I express thee now unblamed.
We will spend our days in understanding,
unlocking ignorant eons and restraints.
Before the heavens, thou wert made.

Come to breakfast with me,
and make whole thy apparitions.
We were sent my dear to steal the purple
woven silks shipped rich from Jaffa,
and your face is already here.

CNN Culture Jammers At It Again

The spirit of Ted Turner lives on in his CNN captioneers. 'Tis a headline devotly to be wished, but it was Tony Blair, poodle plenipotentiary, who resigned yesterday in his trademark manically earnest, halting cadence. I blew my prediction of how long Blair could last in office. I thought he'd be gone by last November, after parliament staged its coup in September. Close but no cigar. Instead, Blair copped a plea agreement which allowed him to stay in office until now in return for a decorously smooth hand-over to Gordon Brown. I listened to the BBC broadcast of his farewell speech, and here is my transcript:

"Some may deem. It a mistake! Afghanistan...and Iraq. The truth is. You can't go on. Forever! Ten years. Is long enough. To have led. This country. Although I'm sure. I could rule. Much longer!"

I half expected him to launch into a suicide-inducing version of "I Did It My Way." Blair's speaking style is gratingly similar to the one employed by the captain of the Starship Enterprise, James T. Kirk. I miss London very much, but not enough to have subjected myself to a daily diet of that over the last decade.

To paraphrase a Queen Mother, "Plug your ears, and think of England."

The Return Of Containment

"The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander must make is to establish...the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature."

--Clausewitz--

Translation: fight stupid wars, and pretty soon you'll leave broken monuments. Von Clausewitz would've chortled schnapps out of his nose at the Bush Doctrine. Attacking and occupying Iraq grossly conflated a minor but thorny enemy into an empire-ending emetic. It was a full-court embarkation onto a fool's parade of twisted alien natures and wars which can't be won. It's time to cut the losses and reach back to strategies which proved successful.

George F. Kennan was a time-and-motion foreign policy genius, and he was the promulgator of "Containment." In context, Containment was a long-term, non-violent way of defeating an inimical, hostile form of government, a way of lowering confrontational temperatures down into a non-military zone. Kennan would know about that. He was SecDef under Truman from 1947-48, a time when many in the U.S., England, and Germany, including George S. Patton and a chorus of ex-Nazis believed there was no good alternative but to invade and defeat Stalinist Russia. The lower the temperature, the more it favored us.

Kennan convinced Truman and the planners around him, with a series of well-reasoned articles, to buy enough time for flawed, inferior, murderous, centrally planned communist systems to fall. He knew we didn't need to attack them directly because they would consume and probably reform themselves. Kennan was probably the biggest anti-communist of all time, and I became his disciple in the early 80's because his doctrine of strong-point containment had the courage to express and exercise a simple confidence in democracy. He believed we would win out, and thus didn't need to attack Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, El Salvador, Grenada, Haiti, or other places. Kennan believed it would be better to out-invest Russia and China than to out-kill them. He made sense to me then, and he makes sense to me now. None of those wars needed to happen to defeat communism, and he encouraged not a single one of them. All the crucial battles between democracy and communism were about making people healthier and happier than the other guy did. Sometimes that was hard for both sides to understand.

Ian Shapiro, a Yale Professor and biographer of George F. Kennan, was on the local NPR show the other morning. He was talking lots of sense that morning, so I called in and slid past the producer with an inane, innocent question, something like "I'd like to invite Dr. Shapiro to speculate about when Containment will make a comeback." But when the producer patched me in, I asked Shapiro on the air with extravagant politeness: "How long until this goddamned %@%^*-t ends?"

"Soon, my friend," he said. "Very soon."

Thanks For The Melamine!

"May you live in interesting times." My handler taught me the Chinese for that in the mountains somewhere north of Shinhua. Instead, maybe I should've asked the Chinese phrase for, "Where is the nearest dialysis machine?"

Anyhow, melamine certainly is interesting. And it's coming to a meal near you. One your pets have eaten. One we've most likely ingested in any number of foods in the past 6-7 months. We and our pets live in the same houses and are served by the same loving, caring Global Corporate Entities.

Melamine's chemical formula is C3H6N6. Similar to cyanamide, basically it's a complex trimer cyanide molecule with three amino acids hanging on it. It is formed in the bodies of mammals after they have consumed and metabolized cryomazine, a pesticide. Plants can also metabolize cryomazine into melamine, and its industrial applications include polymer formation processes and adding it to resins as a fire retardant. So it's really not too surprising why Lord Cat was barfing up blood along with his Eukanuba, flirting with kidney failure, and generally looking like he was about to die. This last point about the fire retardant may not explain why so many people had difficulty incinerating their pets after their food killed them.

I'm supposed to know a thing or two about capitalism, supply chains, queing theory, profit, shareholder adoration, the use of yarrow sticks in corporate boardrooms, how to read the entrails of spread-sheets, and generally how to worship the Horned God of Optimization and the Fertility Goddess of Capacity Utilization. Many people who rely on the outmoded quaintnesses of common sense may ask me, "Why would North American pet food companies buy wheat gluten from China?" Simple: because it is cheaper to ship wheat grown in North American fields to China, have a NORINCO corporation process it into flour or wheat gluten, put it into bags, and ship it back across the ocean to pet food processing plants. Having melamine in the wheat actually helped it win contracts, because the extra amino acids made it look in tests not like a deadly compound, but like it was more protein-rich. A better product at a lower price. And the compound is very common in the Chinese food-producing system.

So, what has the FDA done? Well, 50,000 swine have been quarantined in Illinois. I haven't been eating much pork for awhile anyway. Also, the Chinese wheat gluten was actually simply wheat flour adulterated with melamine, not wheat gluten. It was sold to many fish and animal farms in the US and Canada. The FDA can't say to which farms owned by which corporations in which states. That's ok, though. I haven't been eating much farmed Salmon lately. Or bread with flour in it. Or waffles. Or fortune cookies. Plus, the FDA thinks melamine is not a "residue of concern" to begin with. Phew! Glad we got that concern over with. I'll tell Lord Cat to either keep chowing his pet food down or he'd better start catching some birds on the back lawn.

Finally, we've got nothing at all to worry about. Even if we had, the only thing that matters is that Big Business is able to make money, because that's what makes the world go 'round and engenders the competition which makes everything wonderful. The dance around the corporate May Pole is right around the corner. Do you know who the sacrifice is yet?

Fort Apaches On The Tigris

Since its announcement, I've been harping on the disastrous end the "Surge" will come to in Iraq. Its strategy hinges on creating secure gated communities, and is a close facsimilie of the more torture-driven, less firepower-dependent French/German "quadrillage" methods of counterinsurgency which served as models for our good General Petraeus.

Here comes the harp again. Hard as it is to believe, the Pentagon's execution of strategy in Iraq is getting worse. First, Petraeus and others now see "the Surge" extending into '08. Next, the whole logic underlying quadrillage as a "pacification network" has already failed, because the US is being forced to construct heavier blast shields and to up-gun garrisons in order to keep them alive. If pacification were making the desired headway, taking that step probably wouldn't be necessary. Garrisons are under frequent attack, even in Baghdad; one fort was breached recently by a truck bomb which reportedly killed 9 and seriously wounded 20 soldiers:

"There's two threats to the combat outpost . . . a huge truck bomb, and indirect fire," Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, who handles day-to-day military operations in Iraq, said in an interview at his Baghdad headquarters last week. In response, he said, U.S. troops are building more walls to shield themselves from mortars and rockets, while trying to track down insurgents firing on them.

To counter truck bombs, military engineers are gauging the structural soundness of the outposts and making sure they are well removed from traffic, Odierno said. Antitank weapons such as the bazooka-like AT-4 are also now required for soldiers on guard.

The Iraq Command is botching the fortification job itself and, disturbingly, is missing the greatest threat they face. A third threat: direct ground assault. Pat Lang over at Sic Semper Tyrannis points the finger of experience at General Odierno, noting that as forts go, they're generally improvisational, poorly located, and insecure; if the insurgents used truck bombs to breach a fort wall or gate, they could mount a ground assault and overwhelm the garrison. If they did this to a number of forts at once, it would be a nightmare.

Pat's point about breaching the garrison walls is true, and it's sad the general in question seems to have missed that possibility, but ground assaults may not even be needed to reach disaster status. The garrisons could simply be harrassed to death, for a number of reasons.

First, installing mini-garrisons into hostile neighborhoods with so few pacification carrots serves to negate the overwhelming advantage in firepower, and the considerable advantage in manoevre, factors our ground forces and tactics are designed around. Their fields of fire are reduced to the same as that of their enemies, a few hundred yards at best. It's M-16s vs. AK-47s all over again. Not good.

Second, putting professional, highly trained career soldiers into these forts as cannon fodder is nothing short of criminal. They're not even useful for "bait-and-destroy" missions, rather they encourage dispersion and steady forms of nuisance resistance. They are static targets waiting to either run out the clock, get wasted, get rescued, or get extracted. Or, as will be common, to go twitching mad. Can you imagine what it's like being stuck in one of these forts for months on end?

As an insurgent, all you'd have to do to generate wasteful responses from the garrisons and their rescue/reinforcement/air cover elements would be to get a few friends with light weapons, some surgical tubing, a dog food bowl, and catapult some molotov cocktails at it most every night. Or mortars. Or pot-shots. A recreational RPG. Or the occasional suicide bomber. The populace will back these nuisances up in the daytime with unfriendly stares, and anybody who in the gated community who lifts a finger to help the Americans would very quickly be taught not to.

By pressuring this style of occupation steadily, just heavily enough to keep forcing responses out of it, an adversary can provoke the whole logistical structure to grind itself to bits while it runs around trying to defend all the damned forts. An insurgency could win with comparatively little cost in casualties or equipment, knowing that the position of the garrisons are untenable.

The Iraqi insurgency need not scale up into squad or platoon-level concentrations to win by overwhelming specific garrisons in ground assaults. While losing forts like that would be a tremendously visible loss of prestige, the insurgency can also win by keeping its operations on the micro-logistical scale. By focusing on territorial coordination rather than direct ground assaults, they can overwhelm the support structure for the entire fort system. Possibly in the same amount of time. I would guess the probing, steadily escalating approach is what they'll stick with. If necessary, when the support system has tired and there's been plenty of time to probe, map, and measure weaknesses in response, then will come the breaches and the assaults.

Either way, the sheer asymmetry of expenditure by the two sides and results obtained for them eventually guarantees total US force exhaustion. And it's bigger than just Iraq. When you declare war on everybody, you've got to worry about everybody, and this is the role calling for a "Global War on Terror" has trapped our armed forces into. As for Surges, gated communities, quadrillage or GWOT, once we get kicked out of one fort, of one region, or one country, we've demonstrated our own defeat. Either some of those insecure forts must be abandoned, or they'll fall.

History Doesn't Repeat: It Rhymes

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider God fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing he has the Gods on his side.

--Aristotle--

Norah Jones: Sunrise, Sunrise

Another nice night with guests. Lord Running Boy met an older girl named Anja, older by a whole six months, whose super-smart parents hail from Rumania and Punjab and work for a D.C. think tank and Microsoft, respectively. There was screaming, running naked, Lillet on ice, eventual lasagna, and baths in the Jacuzzi tub. We didn't actually play any Norah Jones, we played Amy Winehouse and Regina Spektor, but if I'd thought of it, we would have played this song by Norah Jones, a simple song which might endure for quite some time:

Sunrise, Sunrise
Looks like morning in your eyes
But the clock's held 9:15 for hours

Sunrise, Sunrise
Couldn't tempt us if it tried
Cuz the afternoon's already come and gone

And I said
Hooo, hooo, hooo
Hooo, hooo, hooo
Hooo, hooo, hooo
To you!

Surprise, Surprise
Couldn't find it in your eyes
But I'm sure it's written all over my face

Surprise, Surprise
Never something I could hide
When I see we made it through another day

Then I say
Hooo, hooo, hooo
Hooo, hooo, hooo
Hooo, hooo, hooo
To you!

And now, the night
Will throw its cover down, mmm, on me again
Ooo, and if I'm right
It's the only way to bring me back

Hooo, hooo, hooo, hooo,,
Hooo, hooo, hooo, hooo,
Hooo, hooo, hooo, hooo
To you
Hooo, hooo, yeah, ye-ah
To you!

By The Way...JFK Assassination Solved Via Confession

And not just any confession. E. Howard Hunt's confession. Name ring a bell? He organized the Watergate break-in and later did three years in prison for it.

Hunt made his first son, Saint John Hunt, a cassette tape in 2004 and told him to play it after he died, and die he did on January 23rd of 2007. In accord with his father's wishes, his son got airplay on NPR last week. None of the major media or blogs have picked up this story. Why not? You tell me. I'd love to know. (Correction: There is a long story in the Rolling Stone's April issue. Along with lots of background and human interest angles, the article places Hunt dressed as a tramp at the Dealey Plaza the day of the assassination.)

Basically, Hunt said LBJ organized the assassination through the CIA, which JFK had managed to enrage in multiple ways. LBJ had much to gain, but others had motives of vengeance, patriotism, and pure hatred. Hunt says the scene was set up by Operation 40, some of whose members are pictured above in a nightclub on January 22nd, 1963 in Mexico City. This group was responsible for murder and mayhem all through South and Central America and the Caribbean on their mission against Communism. Hunt names Operation 40 agents Cord Meyer and David Atlee Phillips as planners, who in turn designated Frank Sturgis and David Sanchez Morales to carry out the operation. Cord Meyer was the CIA's Assistant Director of Special Plans, better known as the "dirty tricks department" and his beautiful, artistic, left-leaning wife was JFK's favorite mistress, possibly from before WWII until at least 1962. Her name was Mary Pinchot, and she had been criticized as a security risk during the 1950s McCarthy hearings.She was shot to death by an assailant in Washington, D.C. in 1964. All in all, it's a regular "motive, means, and opportunity" cornucopia.

These men have largely faded from modern memory, but they are part of the group JFK publicly denounced and left hanging in the wind after the disastrous Bay of Pigs regime-change invasion of Cuba. One of them, the man laughing at the camera, is David Sanchez Morales, an assassin whose successful record up until 1961 gained him promotion into a key role organizing the failed Cuban operation under David Atlee Phillips. When it comes to understanding power in the United States, there are two defining periods: before the Bay of Pigs, and after the Bay of Pigs.

A credible witness also places Morales in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. The man with his head tipped back and his hand on Morales' arm happens to be the last director of the CIA, Porter Goss. It would be nice to know who took this picture, particularly because the head of the table is vacant. Winfield Scott was station chief in Mexico City, but because CIA cables to him omitted basic information about Lee Harvey Oswald, it's doubtful he was at the head of the table. Or in the loop. Philips became CIA station chief of Mexico City later in the year, and was officer in charge when Lee Harvey Oswald visited Mexico City in September and October of 1963. The CIA has steadily disavowed all involvement with Oswald, but after being confronted with previously unreleased documents, retired agents have more recently admitted the highest-clearance office of the agency (the SAS, tasked with Cuban regime change) held a "keen interest" in Oswald.

Plenty of people will dismiss E. Howard Hunt as just an old man off his rocker, say that he had Alzeheimer's, an angle, an axe to grind. And maybe he did, but he was the real deal, and whatever motivation he may have had pales in comparison to what the guys in the picture had for fires in their bellies. As a group, they don't look too worried. More like the joke is on us, like they're a close team enjoying themselves in the "La Reforma" nightclub at a table of honor. And it's pretty likely that every one of them knew George Bush, because Zapata Offshore Oil Corporation supplied the landing boats for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and George H.W. Bush owned that corporation at the time. The CIA code name for the Bay of Pigs was also ZAPATA. At the very least, Bush the Elder was a covert bit player in Operation 40, was booked into the Sheraton Hotel in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963, and called the Dallas police on the fateful day, warning them that an assassin from Houston wanted to kill Kennedy. That phone call would serve as distraction and cover for the operation, and more importantly, as an alibi for the caller if necessary. But that's the topic for a follow-up post.

I bet there's a lot of unseen baggage and bodies hiding behind that one little picture of happy campers in Mexico, particularly associated with the Latin American men at the table. But the stuff that peeks out is ugly enough. Hunt's wife died in a plane crash at the height of Watergate immediately after he demanded, and apparently received, hush money from the Nixon White House. For good measure, Barry Seal, whose widow donated the photo to the public domain, is seated next to Porter Goss. In 1986, Seal came to a bad end, murdered in a halfway house in Baton Rouge after making a plea agreement for flying cocaine in from Columbia. The only question there in connection to the JFK case was why Seal was prosecuted in the first place. For some reason, he lost his cover and was thrown to the wolves. Seal was important enough to have a copy of this photo taken by someone else, and his widow felt it was important enough to put out on the internet.

Some of the men in the picture above, like Porter Goss, and some of the unpictured plotters are or were very old friends of the family currently running this country, a family well-known for its volcanic hatred of the Kennedys. Hunt doesn't mention that name explicitly, but their pater familias was in it up to his eyeballs. What's it all mean for us? Directly or indirectly, Operation 40 handed down the keys of power to the Commander Guy we've got today. Hunt's audio confession is available at the Wikipedia page linked above and here.

The Arts: You Are My Sweetest Downfall (Samson)

It was my pleasure to send Lord Wife and her delightful Mom, along with a former intermountain Rock Star and his semi-savior to a concert last Wednesday, where this song may have been played. Sung by Regina Spektor, while I baby-sat. They all came back later and were happy, and here are the lyrics to the song they may have heard. Its lyrics mean Regina has read the Bible, and there's no stopping her now:

You are my sweetest downfall
I loved you first, I loved you first
Beneath the sheets of paper lies my truth
I have to go, I have to go
Your hair was long when we first met

Samson went back to bed
Not much hair left on his head
He ate a slice of wonder bread and went right back to bed
And history books forgot about us and the bible didnt mention us
The bible didnt mention us, not even once

You are my sweetest downfall
I loved you first , I loved you first
Beneath the stars came falling on our heads
But they're just old light
They're just old light
Your hair was long when we first met

Samson came to my bed
Told me that my hair was red
Told me I was beautiful and came into my bed
I cut his hair myself one night
A pair of dull scissors and the yellow light
He told me that I'd done alright
and kissed me till the morning light the morning light
and he kissed me till the morning light

Samson went back to bed
Not much hair left on his head
Ate a slice of wonder bread
and went right back to bed
We couldn't break the columns down
No, we couldn't destroy a single one
and the history books forgot about us
and the bible didnt mention us
not even once

You are my sweetest downfall
I loved you first

Machiavelli Never Warned Me About E-Mail

Karl Rove, devoted student of Machiavelli and Goebbels, never got any tips from them on how to erase e-mails. If it had existed at the time, both of his mentors would've gotten in big trouble for their behind-the-back deceptions. Fortunately, they gave no cautionary advice on it, and Karl's e-mail habit got his tail into a real wringer. The Senate just subpoeaned US Attorney Gonzales for Rove's email. Looks like he will be spending some time in front of the Senate under oath.

For anyone reading this blog 15 years from now, Karl Rove is a central character in the disasters which led to the decline of the United States as a power, to its bankruptcy, and to the loss of traditional Constitutional freedoms. He's also the guy who said the things quoted below, which will clue you in to pretty much how all that bad stuff happened:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

I Think We're Not Alone Now

A widow, a pregnant single-mom-to-be and former Marine who did a tour in Iraq posted her thoughts onto the SanFran Craigslist. She wanted her mourning to be broadcast far and wide, for her hurt to register somewhere, for it to mean something to somebody out here in the void. Her husband's tour was extended for an extra month and now his dead body is being shipped back to her. She's pissed, she's right, and she's facing one hell of a fight, with ugly consequences for the rest of her and her baby's lives. No matter where we go in our system, we'll always see her face laboring in a Walmart, trying to knit the ends together again. I don't know who she is, her name or what to do, except to amplify what she said and hope it'll come back to her in some good way. As for us, we've had time a-plenty to strip away the denials of the entity our nation has become. Here is what this woman said:

I'm having the worst damn week of my whole damn life so I'm going to write this while I'm pissed off enough to do it right.

I am SICK of all this bullshit people are writing about the Iraq war. I am abso-fucking-lutely sick to death of it. What the fuck do most of you know about it? You watch it on TV and read the commentaries in the newspaper or Newsweek or whatever god damn yuppie news rag you subscribe to and think you're all such fucking experts that you can scream at each other like five year old about whether you're right or not. Let me tell you something: unless you've been there, you don't know a god damn thing about it. It you haven't been shot at in that fucking hell hole, SHUT THE FUCK UP!

How do I dare say this to you moronic war supporters who are "Supporting our Troops" and waving the flag and all that happy horse shit? I'll tell you why. I'm a Marine and I served my tour in Iraq. My husband, also a Marine, served several. I left the service six months ago because I got pregnant while he was home on leave and three days ago I get a visit from two men in uniform who hand me a letter and tell me my husband died in that fucking festering sand-pit. He should have been home a month ago but they extended his tour and now he's coming home in a box.

You fuckers and that god-damn lying sack of shit they call a president are the reason my husband will never see his baby and my kid will never meet his dad.

And you know what the most fucked up thing about this Iraq shit is? They don't want us there. They're not happy we came and they want us out NOW. We fucked up their lives even worse than they already were and they're pissed off. We didn't help them and we're not helping them now. That's what our soldiers are dying for.

Oh while I'm good and worked up, the government doesn't even have the decency to help out the soldiers whos lives they ruined. If you really believe the military and the government had no idea the veterans' hospitals were so fucked up, you are a god-damn retard. They don't care about us. We're disposable. We're numbers on a page and they'd rather forget we exist so they don't have to be reminded about the families and lives they ruined while they're sipping their cocktails at another fund raiser dinner. If they were really concerned about supporting the troops, they'd bring them home so their families wouldn't have to cry at a graveside and explain to their children why mommy or daddy isn't coming home. Because you can't explain it. We're not fighting for our country, we're not fighting for the good of Iraq's people, we're fighting for Bush's personal agenda. Patriotism my ass. You know what? My dad served in Vietnam and NOTHING HAS CHANGED.

So I'm pissed. I'm beyond pissed. And I'm going to go to my husband funeral and recieve that flag and hang it up on the wall for my baby to see when he's older. But I'm not going to tell him that his father died for the stupidty of the American government. I'm going to tell him that his father was a hero and the best man I ever met and that he loved his country enough to die for it, because that's all true and nothing will be solved by telling my son that his father was sent to die by people who didn't care about him at all.

Fuck you, war supporters, George W. Bush, and all the god damn mother fuckers who made the war possible. I hope you burn in hell.

(It's not long now until the anger spills over. Big Hat Tip to Deep Confusion for finding and posting the above.)

Israeli PM Olmert About To Resign

The Winograd Commission, a government-appointed investigation of the catastrophic Israeli attack on Lebanon last year, has just hung an anchor around Ehud Olmert's neck, and he's about to get thrown overboard. While not entirely responsible for the worst defeat in Israel's modern history, Olmert didn't exactly add value or cut the losses while the formerly most admired Army in the world was being defeated by the Lebanese Hezbollah militia, and he carries the title of Prime Minister. He and his new 6% approval rating are still hanging tough and refusing to resign, but he'll probably be gone in a matter of days. If anyone reading this happens to be in Israel or plans to be there, it would be good idea to keep tabs on Olmert's whereabouts so you can stay a mile, or preferably two, away from him. If he doesn't resign, crossfires and car-bombs are distinct possibilities. He falls under the domestic "Something Has To Be Done" category, which if the name Yitzak Rabin rings a bell, well...the standing-near-him-thing, not so good right now.

His successor will probably be Tzipi Livni, Israel's Minister of Foreign Affairs (pictured above). This is good. She is a right-wing dove who talks with Arabs, a go-between of consummate skill, and she held secret talks with Fatah and the Third Way (the Palestinian Moe and Curly parties) a couple of months ago. And she's a realist. During the invasion of Lebanon, or what is now being called the Second Lebanon War, she was pushing with everything she had to pull the troops back after the first few days. I don't know if any post about Israel can be filed under 'Progressive Politics,' but there's a first time for everything, and I'm going to try it. The effects of Israel's defeat in Lebanon may have taken longer to come to fruition than I'd hoped, but the fruits may be sweeter.