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Sunday, March 30, 2003
The Nuke 'Em Gambit :: Herman Kahn Redux Depleted Uranium :: We're halfway there. Limerick Break :: The Law Does Not Care About Trifles)* There once was a lawyer named Tex Who was sadly deficient in sex. When arraigned for exposure He remarked with composure De minimus non curat rex.* Thinking the unthinkable :: I can recall a time when "thinking the unthinkable" meant unleashing nuclear weapons, and Herman Kahn shocked a good many sensitive souls by describing nuclear and post-nuclear scenarios. I suspect the unthinkable is uppermost in the thoughts of a good many war strategists these days. Even moreso now a couple of weeks in and no quick end in sight. Last year about this time, troglo-con columnist Paul Greenberg wrote in praise of "radioactive therapy": H-bombs and A-bombs that we're not about to use against terrorists and their enablers won't deter them. But suppose this country had a supply of nuclear weapons that could be used against targets big, little and in-between. Think low-yield nukes that could blow up a mountain and all the terrorists in its tunnels without endangering our troops or the civilian population centers all around. That's a more credible threat. To deter, a weapon must not only be fearsome but its use plausible. To put it in philosophical terms, why not nuke the bastards? Why should American lives be sacrificed in land battles if this terrorist cancer could be treated with a little radioactive therapy? Let the word go forth that the United States has a commander-in-chief now, and that acts of terror against the United States, its cities and its people are no longer going to be treated as felonies and misdemeanors assigned to some district attorney's office in New York. Instead they will be considered acts of war. And they will be countered by whatever new weapons it takes. After Sept. 11, America has come awake, and the old, unexamined restraints on our power, and on our strategic imagination, need to be reconsidered.The best news is that people in authority are thinking about the unthinkable. Which is the best way to avoid having to do the unthinkable. Greenberg ------------- I suspect the longer the conflict lasts, the more likely the use of radioactive therapy. And the antiwar folks have to accept the bleak truth that there will be no pullback. If Bush pulled back now, it would be political suicide, so there is no option. (Pioneer blogger Dave Winer clearly has no grasp of political reality) On the other hand, it may be over a week from now. I don't have any expertise in these matters (does Rummy et al.?), and there's an old saying, One swallow doesn't make a summer. One parting unthinkable:: There's been some discussion about the possibility of a terrorist nuke. Would our use of radioactive therapy provoke a response in kind? And if it came as a covert attack, who would we nuke then? But I suspect sharper minds than my own have played these scenarios, ran the numbers, can quote acceptable losses until I'm blue in the face. Mark Worden more from instacrank soon, meanwhile & disconcerting thoughts The last time I recall being prowar :: The good war. Korea? No, I was draft age and not eager to join a UN police action. Grenada, 1983? You're kidding. Panama, 1989? That was a military intervention/drug bust. Bad precedent. All to arrest one man, another elder Bush buddie, Myrtle. Desert Storm? That was a UN military action to save the asses of some oil sheiks, no? Overheard:: Science seizes our imagination :: It was a dark and starry night. Venus was high in the sky, shining brightly. The man said to his companion, "It's a good thing we've learned from science and history that Venus is a star, otherwise we might think it's a supernatural phenomenon and be filled with fear and awe." His companion replied, "A planet." "What,?" he said. "Venus," she said, "is a planet, not a star." Duh Stirring Rhetoric of War From Inteldump, this yearning for a better prowar rhetoric :: Here's a taste of what I'd like to see, from the famous speech that Winston Churchill gave on 4 June 1940: We shall go on to the end. Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, We shall fight in the fields, and in the streets, We shall fight in the hills; We shall never surrender. My E-mailed response:: I admire your writing and analysis of the recent events in Iraq. Very impressive. And wonderful stuff, the Churchill speeches. But I think you are asking the impossible. That kind of rhetoric from Bush would sound ridiculous. In this war the US is the aggressor. (Yes, I know all the justifications, and I know some of the halftruths and perhaps a few of the outright lies.) In this war, the US is the superpower. The fact is, for most of us, the sacrifices are minimal. The ballgames go on, the soaps go on, prices go up, but we are asked to make no sacrifices -- in fact our leader promises us guns and butter. The price of gas goes up, and that sounds fishy because there's no oil shortage, is there? But we don't stop driving, and we don't cut back on production of SUVs. This was one of the interesting things about the Vietnam war -- then too life went on, and the war took place at an aesthetic distance. But it struck closer to home because of the draft -- every month new faces were snatched up and sent to boot camp and then to Southeast Asia. And every month some came home in a body bag, and the best justification the leadership could offer was the "domino theory." (I think some other pundit just opined that this war would end in a heartbeat if we had to start making serious sacrifices. But then, who knows? That's just an opinion,and I have one and you have one, and so it goes.....) In WWII the threat to the British was tangible -- France was collapsing, and all the rest were being overrun. Bombs and rockets were hitting targets in Great Britain, and it was clear that an German invasion was not far off. It was important to rally people because the threat was imminent. We face no such threat today, although a number of people have struggled to make us feel threatened, with orange alerts and duct tape maneuvers. I just had a disconcerting thought: The Churchillian rehetoric, or something like it, is probably being used by the Iraqis as we speak. Another disconcerting thought: The most outrageous acts of terrorism in the US have been the acts of a couple of disgruntled Americans (both veterans, as I recall) using fertilizer, and a bunch of Saudis (and some other Arabs - no Iraqis as I recall) carrying boxcutters. Yet Bush and his cohorts have managed to convince about half the population that Saddam Hussein orchestrated 9/11. And if we succeed with a regime change in Iraq, the story goes, our troubles will be over. We can get on with our lives (which most of us are doing anyhow). Meanwhile the most patriotic thing you can do is consume, buy stuff. Now that's a stirring message. Now I don't think there's any question that we can crush Iraq. The real question comes, what then? (Crush Syria. Crush Iran. Crush Korea, crush 'em all. Sounds almost like White Man's Burden.) You don't know the answer to that one, and I sure don't, and I'm not sure anyone else does. But let me ask you this, do you seriously believe that we'll all be safer in the world when we do crush Iraq? Will we have saved the Iraqis for democracy? (And don't I recall a kafkaesque justification in Vietnam, where it was averred that the only way to save a village was to destroy it?) It does take our minds off the way criminally corrupt CEOs manipulated our economy over the past few years. Not to mention other domestic problems, but that's another story. Mark Worden Instacrank War Gadget roundup from Gizmodo :: Is this war a tech bonanza or what? Editorial Arab News: Of the Iraqi taxi driver suicide bomber: Davy Crockett is a hero to the Americans. Every citizen remembers the Alamo. Can Washington therefore appreciate that the Iraqi in the taxi is going to be a hero as well, when his name and his self-sacrifice become known, and that he will be a hero not just in Iraq but throughout the Arab world ? If they can imagine this, maybe the Bush White House will go the extra intellectual mile and understand that the guy in the taxi in Iraq was no more laying down his life for his president in Baghdad than the guy in the raccoon hat was dying for his president in Texas. Both men chose to die because they loved and wanted to defend their homeland. An attack against one Texan or one Iraqi was an attack against all Texans and all Iraqis. But America of course cannot ascribe to its enemies the noble and decent motives it is happy to honor among its own heroes. For Washington, there can be no equivalence between Iraqis and Americans. Yet consider this: One of them has a warmongering, bloodthirsty president, elevated to his position in a sham election, who is happy to slaughter innocents to promote his world vision. The other has Saddam Hussein. ArabNews Editorial Losing the peace:: At the same time, Operation Iraqi Freedom has been exposed as a gruesome travesty. An old-fashioned colonial war, built on lies, greed and geopolitical fantasies, it has nothing to do with 'disarming' Iraq or 'liberating' the Iraqi people. Iraq is a threat to no one. No connection has been found between Iraq and the terrorist attacks of September 11, and no evidence has been provided that Iraq has continued to manufacture chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and might pass them on to terrorist groups. All this is malicious propaganda to mask the real war aims which are what they have been since 1991: to affirm America's global supremacy in a strategically vital, oil-rich part of the world, and to protect Israel's regional supremacy and its monopoly of weapons of mass destruction. Patrick Seale We are all Palestinians Now:: One of the most extraordinary developments of the war so far is how the resistance of the Iraqi population against a foreign invasion has galvanized this sentiment of anger in the Arab world. "We are all Palestinians now," as a Bedouin taxi driver puts it. One of the first things anyone mentions in Jordan - be it a Jordanian, an Egyptian, a Lebanese or a Somali refugee - is their happiness about the way the Iraqi people are resisting the "invaders" (never qualified as "liberators"). Their intuition also tells them that every extra day in this war is further humiliation to the Pentagon - especially because the real war, and not the US version, is being followed by the whole Arab world, in Arabic, through Arab satellite channels. The 'Palestinization' of Iraq By Pepe Escobar Elsewhere a similar sentiment :: We are all Iraqis now The unexpectedly stiff resistance mounted by Iraqi troops has rolled back decades of Arab humiliation, says distinguished Egyptian journalist Hani Shukrallah More ::"Yet for the Arabs, as galling and bitter as the sense of injured dignity has been and continues to be, it has also been disabling, creating a situation and mindset in which their choices seemed to be limited to either suicidal vengeance or abject and bitter hopelessness. It remains to be seen whether the war in Iraq will put the Arab masses on a new trajectory, one in which they fight to win, rather than just to die while maintaining some sense of their basic human dignity. But whatever the course of the war in the coming days or weeks, for the moment the Arab masses have two things going for them: They are not mice, and they are not alone." --Hani Shukrallah is managing editor of the Cairo-based Al-Ahram Weekly Saturday, March 29, 2003
Manufactured Consent 2003 :: from Herman & Chomsky The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news "filters," fall under the following headings: (1) the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; (3) the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and "experts" funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; (4) "flak" as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) "anticommunism" as a national religion and control mechanism. These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the premises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns. Free at last:: '. . . Edward Gibbon reminds us in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that Rome slid almost imperceptibly from republican self-governance to imperial rule because Augustus sensed that "people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom." ' Jim Sleeper, WaPo Too Much in Love with Apocalypse Now :: This juvenile, boastful spirit was epitomised last week by the US navy’s Vice-Admiral Timothy Keating, aboard the USS Constellation. Vice-Admiral Keating waved his arms about and told his ship’s company, ‘It’s hammer time!’ to the accompaniment of Queen’s ‘We will rock you’ played at maximum decibels. Adult cultures think war deserves reflection and seriousness of purpose. This war seems to have been imagined and designed by spiritual teenagers. Will the next begin to the obscene rattle and boom of gangsta rap? I do not know, but there was an ugly hubris about the bombardment of Baghdad which followed soon afterwards. --Peter Hitchens Speaking of Drama :: The CNN effect. Since the advent of global, instantaneous news coverage, war has become an endeavour the public can follow in real time. Despite Pentagon controls on information and White House spin, information is getting back to the American people and allowing them to form opinions of the war very quickly. The American people have been conditioned by Gulf War I, Kosovo and Afghanistan to expect instant positive results and no negative results from warfare. This time around, as President Bush warned, things may be different. However, the public's not used to that, and thus every setback (e.g. the taking of American POWs) results in a blow to public morale. Historically, our military has always suffered a few initial setbacks in war as it adjusted to the realities of this particular theater. Iraq is no different. --IntelDump |