Mubarak's thugs remind us that neocons & repressive dictators speak the same language: violence.

In the wake of Mubarak's announcement to the Egyptian people that he will resign from office at the end of his current presidential term (they have "terms"?!), we are reminded of Max Weber's famous observation in Economy and Society: "legal coercion by violence is the monopoly of the state."

We citizens of the modern bourgeois, cosmopolitan West ignore this relationship between violence and the state at our peril. A hundred years after the First World War, the fundamental premise of statehood remains unaltered: it is a form of social organization in whose name the use of violence is accorded legitimacy. It's through this lens that I've begun to view the recent eruptions of violence in Cairo, Alexandria and elsewhere in Egypt.

Weeks of remarkably peaceful anti-Mubarak protests culminated yesterday in the collegial, civilized march of a million (or, anyway, a whole hell of a lot of) demonstrators. This was the moment Mubarak chose to make his LBJ-like announcement. And, within moments of his television address, he gave the signal to his police thugs, to paid-off petty criminals (the same criminals who'd previously been given free reign to loot stores, etc., all to increase the public's sense of chaos and instability), and to camel-riding mercenaries—apparently summoned from the tourism industry(!)—to confront the anti-Mubarak throng.

 The result? Violence and chaos. But this time, instead of operating behind the scenes, to cultivate an atmosphere of unease—a strategy that had failed—the incitement happened right in front of the television cameras of the international press. Some of the supposed Mubarak-lovers riding camels onto the scene! As blatant a coordinated provocation as can be imagined.

My first reaction to this orchestrated provocation from the obviously phony "pro-Mubarak protesters" was: How could Mubarak be so ham-fisted? I quickly realized that, of course, there was nothing ham-fisted about it: Its obviousness is the whole point.

Paying off petty criminals and/or plainclothes policemen to loot stores was a genuine attempt to generate a sense of chaos, undifferentiated violence, economic uncertainty, and a yearning for the 'law and order' among the civilian population (this yearning being Mubarak's—or any repressive dictator's—political trump card).

By contrast, the coordinated "pro-Mubarak" incitement of violence represents a deliberate and ostentatious flexing of the state's muscle: an example of 'legitimate' state violence. The message to the protesting masses is simple: "Okay, you've extracted the best concession you're gonna get from us; now go home."

There is a separate message simultaneously being beamed to the heavy-weights in the Egyptian business community (and members of the middle class whose livelihood depends upon the smooth functioning of the latter), which is: "You still need us to keep the order." In this sense, the contrast between the ruling regime's highly uncharacteristic use of restraint over the past week and the volatility of recent developments is being used as an illustration of what happens when the state does not maintain the order with its iron fist.

The army plays an interesting role in this process. Its restraint, over the past week, has served as a way in which to preserve its popularity with the Egyptian public. Now, when Mubarak's thugs have been dispatched to the scene—by the busload, apparently—in order to spill some blood, the Egyptian army's restraint and 'impartiality' takes on a particularly sinister quality.

And so, when we witness the pro-Mubarak stance of some prominent neoconservatives, we should not see it as a sudden, surprising neoconservative embrace of Realpolitik—a posture that these same figures so often claim to despise (take their supposed belief in 'democracy-building' in Iraq, for example).

Instead, the neoconservatives are showing a tendency that has consistently been at the very heart of their system of values: the neocons, just like Mubarak, just like Ahmadinejad, believe in violence.

The neocons, like these repressive dictators, are suspicious of messy, unpredictable things like political and religious liberty, the rule of law, intellectualism, political discourse, and democratic deliberation. Although the neocons might occasionally speak the language of democracy, in fact they they understand only the language of violence.

See also: Slavoj Žižek on the cynicism and hypocrisy in the attitudes of many Westerners toward democratic revolutions in the Middle East.

"How completely isolated a world the German people live in..."

I'd like to share with you an excerpt from William Shirer's famous book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Shirer, a newspaper reporter who lived in Berlin throughout the 1930s and into the early years of World War II, recounts how startled he had been at the ease with which German propaganda managed to fool an ever-more gullible German public. What follows is Shirer's description of the headlines of German newspapers during August, 1939, during the final days leading up to Germany's wholly unprovoked invasion of Poland:

In Berlin [...] a foreign observer could watch the way the press, under Goebbels' expert direction, was swindling the gullible German people. For six years, since the Nazi "co-ordination" of the daily newspapers, which had meant the destruction of a free press, the citizens had been cut off from the truth of what was going on in the world. For a time the Swiss German-language newspapers from Zurich and Basel could be purchased at the leading newsstands in Germany and these presented objective news. But in recent years their sale in the Reich had been either prohibited or limited to a few copies. For Germans who could read English or French, there were occasionally a few copies of the London and Paris journals available, though not enough to reach more than a handful of persons.

"How completely isolated a world the German people live in," I noted in my diary on August 10, 1939. "A glance at the newspapers yesterday and today reminds you of it." I had returned to Germany from a brief leave in Washington, New York and Paris, and coming up in the train from my home in Switzerland ten days before I had bought a batch of Berlin and Rhineland newspapers. They quickly propelled one back to the cockeyed world of Nazism, which was as unlike the world I had just left as if it had been on another planet. I noted further on August 10, after I had arrived in Berlin:

Whereas all the rest of the world considers that the peace is about to be broken by Germany, that it is Germany that is threatening to attack Poland... here in Germany, in the world the local newspapers create, the very reverse is maintained ... What the Nazi papers are proclaiming is this: that it is Poland which is disturbing the peace of Europe; Poland which is threatening Germany with armed invasion...

"Poland, Look Out!" warns the B.Z. [cft note: Berliner Arbeiterzeitung] headline, adding: Answer to Poland, the Runner-Amok [Amokläuffer] against Peace and Right in Europe!"

Or the headline in Der Fuehrer, daily paper of Karlsruhe, which I bought on the train: "Warsaw Threatens Bombardment of Danzig—Unbelievable Agitation of the Polish Archmadness [Polnischen Groessenwahsn]!"

You ask: But the German people can't possibly believe these lies? Then you talk to them. So many do.

By Saturday, August 26, the date originally set by Hitler for the attack on Poland, Goebbels' press campaign had reached its climax. I noted in my diary some of the headlines.

The B.Z.: "Complete Chaos in Poland—German Families Flee—Polish Soldiers Push to the Edge of the German Border!" The 12-Uhr Blatt: "This Playing With Fire Going Too Far—Three German Passenger Planes Shot At by Poles—In Corridor Many German Farmhouses in Flames!"

On my way to Broadcast House at midnight I picked up the Sunday edition (August 27) of the Voelkischer Beobachter. Across the whole top of the front page were inch-high headlines:

WHOLE OF POLAND IN WAR FEVER! 1,5000,000 MEN MOBILIZED! UNINTERRUPTED TROOP TRANSPORT TOWARD THE FRONTIER! CHAOS IN UPPER SILESIA!

There was no mention, of course, of any German mobilization, though, as we have seen, Germany had been mobilized for a fortnight.

The truth is a beautiful thing, even when it stings a bit. Do you suppose that the great William Shirer was spinning in his grave during the whole Weapons of Mass Destruction deception/embarrassment, which was aided and abetted by our American—putatively free, democratic—press?

I think it's fair to say that Shirer, like many in America's longstanding tradition of democratic patriots and truth-tellers, would be disappointed. He expected better of our elected leaders. We, unfortunately, have seen far too much arrogance and corruption among our leaders and their corporate handlers to reasonably hold the same expectation. But we can work hard to rebuild a genuine American republic in which future generations might reasonably expect it, just as Shirer did.

Hyperlink: David David Petraeus Petraeus

The blog PhuckPolitics.com makes an elegant observation: at present, General David Petraeus is serving a public relations function on behalf of the Obama Administration's Afghanistan strategy that bears an uncanny resemblance to the public relations function he once served on behalf of the Bush Administration's Iraq strategy.

Read Obama’s Afghanistan full court press.

"War Is Hell!":The perfecters of chest-beating and their epigones.

Let's revisit our discussion of David Brooks's editorial in yesterday's New York Times, which Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald places alongside numerous previous instances in which this neoconservative, who usually plays 'good-cop', metamorphoses into a "grizzled warrior." As Greenwald illustrates, yesterday's transformation finds the usually ostensibly mild-mannered Brooks

perform[ing] a chest-beating war dance over Afghanistan of the type he and his tough guy comrades perfected in the run-up to the Iraq War.  It's filled with self-glorifying "war-is-hell" neocon platitudes that make the speaker feel tough and strong.  No more hiding like cowards in our bases.  It's time to send "small groups of American men and women [] outside the wire in dangerous places."  Those opposing escalation are succumbing to the "illusion of the easy path."  Chomping on a cigar in his war room, he roars:  "all out or all in."  The central question: will we "surrender the place to the Taliban?," etc. etc.

Indeed, in his remarkable piece of propaganda Brooks's appraisal of the political and military situation is selective and slanted in its relationship with facts and irresponsible and, frankly, comical in its use of rhetoric. But, as I pointed out yesterday, what's truly sinister and galling is the piece's attempt to bend recent history to its own political ends. I mean, basically, it conflates statements of unambiguous fact with statements evincing a heterodox conception of political and military historiography. To call it heterodox is maybe too nice: It is nothing less than a neoconservative wet dream of blood-lust, self-righteousness, pedantry and calls to the cause of freedom and destiny!!!, pitting the United States (unambiguously good, honorable, honest, free, saintly) against...

Well, let's pause there. Against who, exactly? Who is it that we are fighting, and what is it that makes our enemies so damned evil, Dave Brooks?

Since 1979, we have been involved in a long, complex conflict against Islamic extremism. We’ve fought this ideology in many ways in many places, and we shouldn’t pretend we understand how this conflict will evolve. But we should understand that the conflict is unavoidable and that when extremism pushes, it’s in our long-term interests to push back — and that eventually, if we do so, extremism will wither..*

We've been, for 30 years now!, engaged in a "long" conflict (i.e.: we're already knee-deep in this conflict, so giving up now would mean that the brave sacrifices of those who have gone before us will have been in vain!, a dishonor done to their memories!!!), a "complex" conflict (i.e.: a chess-like series of highly technical maneuvers, tactics, strategies, intelligence-gathering measures by way of "data-mining," spying, "harsh interrogations," computers and machines and all sorts of stealth, jargony technical and technological and academic and bookish stuff that you could never hope to understand in a million years, so just back off and leave it to us experts).

And the conflict has been with "Islamic extremism." But, wait, I thought it was a conflict with Al Quaeda? Or, wait: no!, it's a War On Terror, right? Or was it the Taliban in Afghanistan? Or was it in Pakistan? Or was it against Osama bin Laden? Or, wait: against Saddam Hussein? Or wait, what about Omar Kadafi? Or...uh...what about those mean-looking dudes in Iran? Hold on! I think I'm sensing a pattern here..... Don't tell me!

Okay: the idea of a "long, complex conflict against Islamic extremism" is so inexcusably hamfisted, willfully ignorant, so transparently calculated to render as ambiguous as possible the identity of our putative enemy, American aims in the putative conflict, its theater of action, and its putative moral authority, and moreover it's so classically, paradigmatically Orwellian (remember how the government kept switching the war enemy between Eurasia and Eastasia?: the point is that the more ambiguous the nature of the enemy/terms of conflict, the more potentially sinister, totalitarian and just plain dangerous it becomes for people like Brooks to issue absurd calls to arms in the name of empty, cynical and dishonest conceptions of quote-patriotism-unquote!!!).

I leave you with a side-by-side comparison of my own which I hope will illustrate in no uncertain terms why it's so very dangerous when asshole pseudo-intellectuals like David Brooks write like chest-thumping, fist-pounding neanderthals, particularly when they are saying War Is Hell, But We Americans Had Better Tough It Out To Preserve Our Honor And To Protect Our Way Of Live Against A Threat Posed By AN IDEOLOGY THAT'S INCOMPATIBLE WITH OUR OWN, This Is, If You're A Decent Honest Non-Terrorist American!!!!

Here's Brooks, giving it his best, really throwing the full strength of of his will into his appeal, the purity -- uncontaminated by 'foreign, un-American ideologies' -- of his thick-skinned, ideologically correct moral righteousness, his steadfast refusal to fall victim to the illusions of weaker men!!!!:

Always there is the illusion of the easy path. Always there is the illusion, which gripped Donald Rumsfeld and now grips many Democrats, that you can fight a counterinsurgency war with a light footprint, with cruise missiles, with special forces operations and unmanned drones. Always there is the illusion, deep in the bones of the Pentagon’s Old Guard, that you can fight a force like the Taliban by keeping your troops mostly in bases, and then sending them out in well-armored convoys to kill bad guys.

[...]

We have tried to fight the Afghan war the easy way, and it hasn’t worked. Switching now to the McChrystal strategy is a difficult choice, and President Obama is right to take his time. But Obama was also right a few months ago when he declared, “This will not be quick, nor easy. But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. ... This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”

I can just hear the John Phillip Sousa march emanating from the speaker system of Brook's swanky corner office in The New York Times building. But the United States has not monopolized the use of careless bombast in attempts to justify not just warfare but ideological warfare, The same holds for ideological warfare in which the homeland's Weltanschauung or way of life or values or blood is cast as incompatible with another.

Who else was fond of saying, This planet ain't big enough for the both of us! and, It will take a long, possibly thousand-year struggle, but we must always be willing to attack in the most unrelenting and steadfast way, including the use of 'extraordinary measures, which will require a decisive break from the old, outdated philosophies, practices and values of the old, feeble-minded military hierarchy...?

I know who! A propagandist, political leader and military leader all rolled into one, who had the following to say to the German generals at a meeting in early March, 1941, before their glorious, hard-willed march into Russia and, as we all know, their eventual doom:

The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. All officers will have to rid themselves of obsolete ideologies. I know that the necessity for such means of waging war is beyond the the comprehension of you generals but...I insist absolutely that my orders be executed without contradiction. The commissars are the bearers of ideologies directly opposed to National Socialism. Therefore the commissars will be liquidated. German soldiers guilty of breaking international law...will be excused. Russia has not participated in the Hague Convention and therefore has no rights under it.  [Adolf Hitler, as quoted in William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich]

Phew! I don't need to point out all of the parallels explicitly, do I? And the last couple of quoted sentences provide illuminating comparisons with not only Brooks's article but with the justifications used by Bush and Cheney, et al. for their (once-) secret approval of the use of torture in various "national security"-related interrogations.

Finally, just to really make everyone even more sick to their stomachs, let us consider what one Heinrich Himmler had to say to his S.S. generals on October 4, 1943:

...I also want to talk to you quite frankly on a very grave matter. Among yourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly, and yet we will never speak of it publicly...

I mean...the extermination of the Jewish race....Most of you must know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time -- apart from exceptions caused by human weakness -- to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written...  [quoted in William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich]

Of course I'm not comparing Brooks to these two dudes. Like I said, I'd happily have a beer with Dave Brooks, should the opportunity arise. He's a decent fellow, etc.

I mean merely to illustrate that the coupling of elegant/pretentious ideological certitudes -- and grand abstract principles generally -- with windy, high-minded rhetoric and fist-pounding putatively patriotic fervor is dangerous. Especially when this combination is used to advocate long, violent, multi-front wars against an enemy whose identity is ambiguous, whose goals are completely abstract and easily doctored both in the framing of present and future debates but in rewriting our collective/cultural consciousness retrospectively. The latter is at the heart of any decent definition of Orwellian governance.

Last of all, don't let Brooks and his friends get away with convincing the American population that we must violate our own values, principles and ethics in order to stave off an enemy with which we are supposedly engaged in a never-ending existential conflict. That's the worst kind of bullying in the world: It doesn't make sense, it isn't an argument but a exercise in rhetorical and symbolic power, and we must fight back against it.

I know, I sound like Bono or something, but this stuff is just so unbelievably sleazy and unjust....

__________________

* All quoted passages that appear in bold typeface were chosen for emphasis by the present blogger.

David Brooks: Polite, bespectacled, unrepentant war propagandist again flashes his bloodthirsty fangs.

I'm glad I'm not the only one noticing a pattern here.

By way of an item posted today on the blog PhuckPolitics.com, Crib From This is happy to find itself in the position of bringing to the reader's attention this week's (perhaps this month's) required reading: a piece -- unrelenting in its honesty and buttressed powerfully by a torrent of damning quotations -- exposé of the sophistic, tendentious, arrogant, and mendacious tactics and rhetoric of David Brooks.

Written by Glenn Greenwald, the piece, which appears in Salon.com, calls to our attention Brooks's repeated tendency suddenly to launch into a tough-guy routine whenever, according to his Realpolitik-style calculations, he senses the need to bully his readers his into supporting whatever military adventure it is that week serve the interests of his underlying, fanatical neoconservative interests.

But wait! you protest. David Brooks as nothing more than an arrogant neoconservative hack? David Brooks as a low-rent Joseph Goebbels?? But he's so polite. And those glasses he wears make him seem like a thoughtful person, an intellectual. Not an ideologue!

Well, shit, I'm not saying I wouldn't have a beer with the guy. But, you know, there are a lot of people with whom I'd be happy to have a beer. That doesn't mean that I'd entrust them with their own freaking column in The New York Times.

Greenwald, having noticed that Brooks is now bringing his tough guy game to the deadly, chaotic and increasingly unpopular American intervention in Afghanistan, reminds us that "Brooks was writing all the same things in late 2002 and early 2003 about Iraq -- though, back then, he did so from the pages of Rupert Murdoch and Bill Kristol's The Weekly Standard." Lest we forget all of the now-inconvenient statements that Brooks would prefer we forget about, Greenwald has come to our rescue:

In today's New York Times, the grizzled warrior David Brooks performs a chest-beating war dance over Afghanistan of the type he and his tough guy comrades perfected in the run-up to the Iraq War.  It's filled with self-glorifying "war-is-hell" neocon platitudes that make the speaker feel tough and strong.  No more hiding like cowards in our bases.  It's time to send "small groups of American men and women [] outside the wire in dangerous places."  Those opposing escalation are succumbing to the "illusion of the easy path."  Chomping on a cigar in his war room, he roars:  "all out or all in."  The central question: will we "surrender the place to the Taliban?," etc. etc.

When I went back to read some of that this morning, I was -- as always -- struck by how extreme and noxious it all was:  the snide, hubristic superiority combined with absolute wrongness about everything.  What people like David Brooks were saying back then was so severe -- so severely wrong, pompous, blind, warmongering and, as it turns out, destructive -- that no matter how many times one reviews the record of the leading opinion-makers of that era, one will never be inured to how poisonous they are.

All of this would be a fascinating study for historians if the people responsible were figures of the past.  But they're not.  They're the opposite.  The same people shaping our debates now are the same ones who did all of that, and they haven't changed at all.  They're doing the same things now that they did then.  When you go read what they said back then, that's what makes it so remarkable and noteworthy.  David Brooks got promoted within our establishment commentariat to The New York Times after (one might say:  because of) the ignorant bile and amoral idiocy he continuously spewed while at The Weekly Standard.  According to National Journal's recently convened "panel of Congressional and Political Insiders," Brooks is now the commentator who "who most help[s] to shape their own opinion or worldview" -- second only to Tom "Suck On This" Friedman.  Charles Krauthammer came in third.  Ponder that for a minute.


Just read some of what Brooks wrote about Iraq.  It's absolutely astounding that someone with this record doesn't refrain from prancing around as a war expert for the rest of their lives.  In fact, in a society where honor and integrity were valued just a minimal amount, a record like this would likely cause any decent and honorable person, wallowing in shame, to seriously contemplate throwing themselves off a bridge:

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, February 6, 2003:

I MADE THE MISTAKE of watching French news the night of Colin Powell's presentation before the Security Council. . . . Then they brought on a single "expert" to analyze Powell's presentation. This fellow, who looked to be about 25 and quite pleased with himself, was completely dismissive. The Powell presentation was a mere TV show, he sniffed. It's impossible to trust any of the intelligence data Powell presented because the CIA is notorious for lying and manipulation. The presenter showed a photograph of a weapons plant, and then the same site after it had been sanitized and the soil scraped. The expert was unimpressed: The Americans could simply have lied about the dates when the pictures were taken. Maybe the clean site is actually the earlier picture, he said.

That was depressing enough. Then there were a series of interviews with French politicians of the left and right. They were worse. At least the TV expert had acknowledged that Powell did present some evidence, even if he thought it was fabricated. The politicians responded to Powell's address as if it had never taken place. They simply ignored what Powell said and repeated that there is no evidence that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and that, in any case, the inspection system is effective.
This was not a response. It was simple obliviousness, a powerful unwillingness to confront the question honestly. This made the politicians seem impervious to argument, reason, evidence, or anything else. Maybe in the bowels of the French elite there are people rethinking their nation's position, but there was no hint of it on the evening news.

Which made me think that maybe we are being ethnocentric. As good, naive Americans, we think that if only we can show the world the seriousness of the threat Saddam poses, then they will embrace our response. In our good, innocent way, we assume that in persuading our allies we are confronted with a problem of understanding.

But suppose we are confronted with a problem of courage? Perhaps the French and the Germans are simply not brave enough to confront Saddam. . . .

Or suppose we are confronted with a problem of character? Perhaps the French and the Germans understand the risk Saddam poses to the world order. Perhaps they know that they are in danger as much as anybody. They simply would rather see American men and women--rather than French and German men and women--dying to preserve their safety. . . . Far better, from this cynical perspective, to signal that you will not take on the terrorists--so as to earn their good will amidst the uncertain times ahead.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, March 7, 2003:

I do suspect that the decision to pursue this confrontational course emerges from Bush's own nature. He is a man of his word. He expects others to be that way too. It is indisputably true that Saddam has not disarmed. If people are going to vote against a resolution saying Saddam has not disarmed then they are liars. Bush wants them to do it in public, where history can easily judge them. Needless to say, neither the French nor the Russians nor the Chinese believe that honesty has anything to do with diplomacy. They see the process through an entirely different lens.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, January 29, 2003:

This was speech as autobiography. President Bush once again revealed his character, and demonstrated why so many Americans, whether they agree with this or that policy proposal, basically trust him and feel he shares their values. Most Americans will not follow the details of this or that line in the address. But they will go about their day on Wednesday knowing that whatever comes in the next few months, they have a good leader at the helm.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, February 21, 2003:

I mentioned that I barely know Paul Wolfowitz, which is true. But I do admire him enormously, not only because he is both a genuine scholar and an effective policy practitioner, not only because he has been right on most of the major issues during his career, but because he is now the focus of world anti-Semitism. He carries the burden of their hatred, which emanates not only from the Arab world and France, but from some people in our own country, which I had so long underestimated.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, November 11, 2002:

In dealing with Saddam, then, we are not dealing with a normal thug or bully . . . The Baathist ideology requires continual conflict and bloodshed. . . . The CIA and the State Department might think otherwise, but we are not all game theorists. Human beings are not all rational actors carefully calculating their interests. Certain people--many people, in fact--are driven by goals, ideals, and beliefs. Saddam Hussein has taken such awful risks throughout his career not because he "miscalculated," as the game theorists assert, but because he was chasing his vision. He was following the dictates of the Baathist ideology, which calls for warfare, bloodshed, revolution, and conflict, on and on, against one and all, until the end of time.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, September 30, 2002:

EITHER SADDAM HUSSEIN will remain in power or he will be deposed. President Bush has suggested deposing him, but as the debate over that proposal has evolved, an interesting pattern has emerged. The people in the peace camp attack President Bush's plan, but they are unwilling to face the implications of their own. Almost nobody in the peace camp will stand up and say that Saddam Hussein is not a fundamental problem for the world. Almost nobody in that camp is willing even to describe what the world will look like if the peace camp's advice is taken and Saddam is permitted to remain in power in Baghdad, working away on his biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs . . .


You begin to realize that they are not arguing about Iraq. They are not arguing at all. They are just repeating the hatreds they cultivated in the 1960s, and during the Reagan years, and during the Florida imbroglio after the last presidential election. They are playing culture war, and they are disguising their eruptions as position-taking on Iraq, a country about which they haven't even taken the trouble to inform themselves. . . . For most in the peace camp, there is only the fog. The debate is dominated by people who don't seem to know about Iraq and don't care. Their positions are not influenced by the facts of world affairs.

David Brooks, Weekly Standard, March 17, 2003:

So now we stand at an epochal moment. The debate is over. The case has gone to the jury, and the jury is history. Events will soon reveal who was right, Bush or Chirac. . . . But there are two nations whose destinies hang in the balance. The first, of course, is Iraq. Will Iraqis enjoy freedom, more of the same tyranny, or a new kind of tyranny? The second is the United States. If the effort to oust Saddam fails, we will be back in the 1970s. We will live in a nation crippled by self-doubt. If we succeed, we will be a nation infused with confidence. We will have done a great thing for the world, and other great things will await.

Look at that last paragraph.  He proclaimed that "events will soon reveal who was right, Bush or Chirac."  On the eve of the war he cheered on, as he celebrated the fact that "the debate is over" and war was imminent and inevitable, he identically vowed:  "Events will show who was right, George W. Bush or Jacques Chirac."  Soon we would know.

Did Brooks ever tell his readers what we found out about that? [...]

You get one guess as to the the answer to this question. Seriously, though: read the whole piece. It gives you that creepy Orwellian feeling that you get when you notice that the people with power and influence in our country are lying to us not only about the present, but they are lying most of all about the past.

Is it mere coincidence that the same militaristic and neoconservative goons who are lying to us about the past and -- as Greenwald points out -- unwilling to hold themselves to an ethical standard that demands telling the truth to the best of your ability at all times, is it any surprise that these are the same ideologues that espouse the trashing of the American public school system and the transfer of that system into the hands of private, for-profit businesses? Or that they are the same people who want to trash public television and who have removed any and all former laws against the consolidation of media?

It's really regrettable, but Greenwald has a damn good point when he asks: what does this stuff say about us as a society?

By nature, the present blogger tends to eschew defeatism as much as possible. He endeavors always to channel his outrage into some kind of rational thinking or reflection or -- in very rare instances -- action. He does this because dwelling on how screwed-up the world is can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Having said that, he also knows that he must nonetheless always continue to learn as much as he can about how screwed up the world is, because if he doesn't, that just makes him one of the hundreds of thousands of starving-artist-types who don't recognize that they're consigned to being culturally-bourgeois-as-hell hypocrites and that it's better simply to recognize this fact: the fact that pretty much anyone reading and I daresay writing a blog is by definition among an exceedingly lucky subsection of the world population which -- for all of its good intentions -- lives off of the past and present and -- in the case of our parents' generation -- future misery, death, misfortune and hopelessness of millions of others.

This poses an existential problem that we won't go into right now because frankly I need to eat lunch, and I'm sure that I'm sort of at low blood-sugar and am probably rambling incoherently.

But anyway, re: my cognizance of current deplorable political realities, I'm happy to say that I commented on the dark aspects of David Brooks previously, only in that case, I was main concerned with his views and writing on domestic policy/politics.

In an item posted approximately a year ago, Crib From This took to task the New York Times columnist and former Weekly Standard mainstay David Brooks for the mendacity, hypocrisy and tendentiousness of his putatively startled and dismayed response to the ascendancy of Sarah Palin, and the brand of hillbilly-resentment-populism espoused by the voters within the Republican Party whom she enthralled. To revisit these remarks briefly:

The subtext of [Brooks's] commentary is [...] that the GOP is being taken over by the pro-Sarah Palin 'grassroots' and all but ditched by its traditional (rich, suburban, etc.) base.

The columnist, conveniently, has failed to mention his own frequent and cloying forays into GOP-styled populism. In other words, Brooks could be said to deserve at least some of the blame for ushering in the party's new era. True, he is no Rush Limbaugh and has never sought actively to recruit the rural, anti-cosmopolitan, anti-elite, anti-intellectual, racist cadre, whose seeming ascendancy he now bemoans.

In contrast to the inbred hooliganism of Limbaugh/Hannity, Brooks -- to appropriate a device that appears in the concluding paragraphs of one of his recent columns -- commits a sin of omission. Until recent weeks -- around the time of the McCain/Palin rallies in which the GOP 'salt of the earth'-faithful screamed death threats intended for Obama, passed around an 'Obama'-labeled stuffed monkey toy and other racist knick-knacks, and called Obama a "terrorist," a "socialist," a "Muslim," and someone who "doesn't love this country the way you and I do" (oh wait, that last one was said repeatedly by Sarah Palin herself) -- I have never once seen Brooks point out that the GOP's cultivation of a mean-spirited, anti-intellectual, anti-urban, anti-elitism sentiment was beginning to lead down a slippery slope, which everyone could see in plain sight. Nope. Despite his supposed 'moderate' conservatism, not a single column inch. No, it took the advent of angry, racist mobs, televised and YouTubed for all to see, for David Brooks to level with his readers and finally admit that Palin was a cynical selection, condescending to the voters and dangerous for the country and to the office of the presidency. What gives, David?

To be fair, let's remember that for the last decade, Brooks has probably been too distracted to sound a note of caution regarding the GOP's ongoing brain drain and its inevitable consequences. Over the two terms of Bush/Cheney, Brooks has had a lot of neoconservative and neoliberal agenda-pushing to get through -- often by stealth, which eats up even more of a busy columnist's day. After all, the man's schedule was already so taxing as to include things like

• disseminating neoconservative and neoliberal ideology by masking it as snarky-but-lovable pop-sociology;
  
• applauding middle America for its unrefined taste (in more than one book whose title includes the word 'paradise'); [...]
• being sure to time his fully formed policy stances in such a way as to perpetuate the illusion that careful deliberation and the measured weighing-of-options precedes their articulation;
  
• kissing the asses of Catholic people;
  
• in effect if not by design, playing 'good cop' to William's (both Kristol and Bennett) 'bad cop' in the pushing of neoconservative foreign policy adventures and the continued scorched-earth defunding of the domestic public sector;
  
• lamenting the disappearance of 1950's middle-brow reading culture, and other (pre-Palin) instances of the shameless peddling of cheap nostalgia;
  
• and panegyrizing George W. Bush's "self-confident" and "committed," leadership of the Iraq War -- as recently as July 2007, while enthusing over Bush's "unconquerable faith in the rightness of his Big Idea."

Jeez, David: you've managed to express what all of us feel deep down in our hearts, but what none of us could find the words to say: the rightness of Bush's Big Idea! So that's wherein lies George W. Bush's secret; how he pulls off being such a great and beloved president!

Brooks never had a negative word to say about Bush's neo-McCarthyist electoral strategy. Nor did he bother to wince along with the rest of us thinking human beings as we watched Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their crack squad of war criminals falsify intelligence, engage in character assassination of any/all figures of opposition, and censor dissent in the run-up to the Iraq War.

But no matter. Brooks appears recently to have updated his appraisal of George W. Bush, right about the time (early October, 2008) at which he felt compelled finally to come out and admit that Sarah Palin is BAD NEWS.

Now, the present blogger must have been in an exceedingly generous mood when he made the preceding observations. That probably had something to do with Barack Obama's fresh victory in the presidential election, which -- despite the fact that I hate having to be reminded of how ineffectual, wooden, bought-off and ruthlessly supportive of sinister neoliberal policy agendae, Democratic politicians are when they actually hold positions of power -- I maintain to have been a result that is preferable by far than handing keys to the White House to John "Decrepit Tough Guy" McCain.

Anyway, I put it to anyone who has stayed with this post all the way to the bottom: Which neoconservative political operative is more harmful to this country? The shrill and disingenuous William Kristol? Or the polite, bespectacled and occasionally shrill David Brooks?

Cadre of Iraq War propagandists/architects renames itself.Project for a New American Century = The Foreign Policy Initiative

I pass this along because it's essential to know who's who. Knowing who's behind the thinking (and the fundraising) of an ostensibly "brand new" Washington DC think tank is even more useful than knowing which evil international corporations with major image problems have changed names. In the case of the latter, a somewhat recent example that comes to mind is that of Clear Channel, which spawned Live Nation, which is attempting to conduct a merger with Ticketmaster.

Now the cadre of cynical propagandists who posed as "experts" recommending the invasion of Iraq, a group that once went under the name of Project for a New American Century, has reconstituted itself as The Foreign Policy Initiative. According to an item in The Huffington Post, which was posted on March 31, 2009:

Today in Washington D.C., neoconservatives William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and Dan Senor will officially launch their new war incubator -- The Foreign Policy Initiative -- with a half-day conference on "the path to success in Afghanistan" (never mind the fact that Kagan and Kristol declared that "the endgame seems to be in sight in Afghanistan" almost seven years ago). Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and Kagan, Carnegie Endowment fellow and Washington Post columnist, have long histories of advocating policies that rely heavily on the United States exerting its influence throughout the world by using military force.

[...]

'PNAC=MISSION ACCOMPLISHED': Kristol and Kagan -- with support from Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld -- co-founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in the late 1990s with the mission "to shape circumstances before crises emerge, and to meet threats before they become dire." Military force was always an option, and often the preferred one. Indeed, the group led the charge to get President Clinton to sign the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, and it served as a key lobby for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But with neoconservatism now all but dead and its principles soundly rejected in the 2006 and 2008 elections, the face of PNAC 2.0 -- The Foreign Policy Initiative -- is less bellicose. Indeed, as Duss recently noted, "this new very innocuous sounding Foreign Policy Institute" indicates that neoconservatives "understand that they have something of an image problem," adding that it is "encouraging" that they "have some relation to reality." Yet there is no reason to believe there will be much of an ideological shift from its its predecessor, as its main founders -- especially Kristol -- are still deeply wedded to neoconservatism. Indeed, Michael Goldfarb, PNAC alum and editor of The Weekly Standard, wrote on Twitter yesterday: "PNAC=Mission Accomplished; New mission begins tomorrow morning with the launch of FPI."

[...]

Despite the failures of neoconservatism, FPI's mission statement contains the neo-neocon buzz words: military engagement in the world, "rogue regimes," "rogue states," "spread...freedom," "strong military" (with a "defense budget" to back it up), "fascism," "communism," and "pre-9/11 tactics." Discussing FPI with Duss last week, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow asked, "Why is it that people who are catastrophically wrong about big important things like foreign policy and war never, like, flunk out of that as a subject? "There seems to be this special dispensation in American foreign policy that, as long as you are wrong on the side of more military force, then all is forgiven," Duss replied. He added that "the way it works in Washington, if you're arguing for more military intervention which necessitates more military expenditures, you're always going to find someone to fund your think-tank."

O.K., now, the thing is, I'm not really interested in things that Rachel Maddow has to say, and I have no idea who Matt Duss is. But the basic reporting here is sound, and as such, I pass it along to the reader. What with the creeping demise of actual journalism of any kind, one has to take bits of information as one finds them and simply resist the temptation to accept half-baked interpretations of it. Fewer actual reporters and dwindling budgets for overseas bureaus mean that formerly reputable news-reporting organizations are becoming, to an increasing extent, news-interpreting organizations, the task of thinking critically and reflectively becomes maybe more difficult. I don't know... Maybe it doesn't!

And also: I don't think it's bad for people -- even trigger-happy would-be Cold Warriors -- to formulate and express their ideas. I don't even think it's bad for them to, uh, strategize. I do think, however, that it's important to bear in mind the hypocrisy of Kristol in particular, who has been among the lunatics who have deployed the opportunistic and deeply ludicrous slogan Defund The Left! as a way of inveighing against ideas too bothersome to argue on their merits. The phrase attempted to popularize the specious notion that, for example, 'the media' and 'the academy' are spheres of American life that, perniciously, are pervaded by left-wingers, atheists, Marxists (strange, considering that Kristol's dad was, after all, a Trotskyist) and terrorist-coddlers.

I call this hypocrisy, because...well, in effect, Kristol is inviting his political opponents to have a gander at just which -- ahem -- 'disinterested' entities are footing the bill for his and Bob Kagan's singular brand of 'scholarship' and emm, 'journalism'. Or is 'advocacy' maybe a better word?

In the wake of the Iranian elections, it should be unsurprising that this exact same group of people -- whom we might call The "Bomb Iran" contingent -- has expressed a newfound concern for The Iranian People. An empathic bunch.

Continuing the Iran discussion.

The following is a response that the Blogger had attempted to post in response to the most recent comment from "DMA" in an ongoing conversation on the Iran protests and its political ramifications domestically and internationally, and other matters about which neither party has expertise or insight.

Do you mean the first "I" in "situation"?

Anyway, let's take a step back from the goings-on in Iran and consider the political positioning that is going on domestically: the GOP is -- as is to be expected -- attempting to capitalize on our visceral reaction to the repugnance of the absurdly titled "Supreme Leader" and regime. Particularly before the SL's Friday speech, which threatened the protesters with violent government retribution, the line was: "Well, Obama needs to stand up more for the people," etc.

Now, this is a familiar dynamic: Obama's initial expressed reaction, as you and I discussed previously, was in fact pitch-perfect. Not because it somehow eschewed expressing solidarity with the protesters' cause, but because it honored their cause, in its independence, the fact that it is rooted within Iranian society and not imposed (or 'rigged') by external ideological forces and because a more robust reaction would have ham-fistedly undermined the expressed purpose and function of his massively successful Cairo speech. Which, by the way, almost certainly had a galvanizing effect on the Iranians' perceptions of their own capacity for self-assertion and self-governance from within.

The Republicans, by contrast, wanted to come across as "heroes" of freedom and democracy, replicating -- as is to be expected -- the tenor and rhetoric of the Cold War and applying it to a situation to which it is inapplicable. Specifically, the posture that McCain would advocate that the president adopt is to in essence underestimate and misconstrue the very autonomy that the protesters are expressing in their demand for political and social emancipation. McCain's and Company's is the old-fashioned, patting-ourselves-on-the-back version of international policy, in which we appropriate the courage and hard work of movements in other countries -- even educated ones like Iran -- and decide that it's suddenly all about the United States. That the United States should somehow be in the spotlight, in essence, playing the tough guy and speaking on behalf of those who know perfectly well how to speak for themselves. The GOP, as always, embodies the seediest combination of paternalism, braggadocio, myopia and ignorance of historicity.

Part of your post, DMA, reminds me of why the Republicans are so willing to display these traits, flaws and all:

I saw in the paper today the Supreme Allah-Prophet Douchebag Over-Religious Cocksucking Bearded Motherfucking Shi'ite Jizz-Guzzling Leader said something threatening a crackdown on the protests.

I'm not singling DMA out, because this formulation could as easily have been my own -- well, minus the weird anti-Islam slurs and probably without the knock against beards, which I find to be a perfectly acceptable and at times exceedingly tasteful fashion as regards facial hair...

Anyway, the point is that Americans are right to experience seething rage against something or someone on the international scene who is perpetrating injustice. However, when we are in John Wayne mode, we're not always doing our best thinking. And I don't mean this in the way it might seem: I'm not suggesting that it is problematic for us to feel pangs of moral indignation. Quite the opposite: I think that the kind of thinking that this reaction beclouds is precisely our moral thinking.

In what ways? For one thing, we'll often end up feeling moral outrage vicariously and as though on behalf of a foreign population. In other words, we'll start seething so much against the foreign despot that we forget entirely about the REAL cause for celebration, which is the courage of the protesters. In essence, we let our hatred for the despot occlude the actual stars of the show altogether. This is more than simply hazy moral thinking. This kind of myopia in American discourse lies at the root of the most appalling and immoral actions our government has perpetrated in its interactions with the international world.

For example: think about Iraq. We had to make Saddam Hussein into our enemy. That he was an enemy to his own people was pure afterthought (and anyway, implicates the USA for having installed him and armed him in the first place). Anybody who thinks otherwise should ask himself: how many Americans have died in Iraq since the beginning of the war? I bet you have a rough estimate in your head. For the record, it turns out that the current number is 4,316, each and every one a tragedy. Now, ask yourself: how many Iraqis have died in the war? Admit it: you have no idea. I sure don't. In contradistinction to its familiarity with the American death toll figure, even Google News is apparently stumped by the Iraqi death toll question. Still think the Iraq War is all about the Iraqi people? To point out that most Iraqis are better off now than under Saddam is a spineless and patronizing evasion of the question.

Now, having said all of this, I think that after Friday's demagogic speech on the part of the "SL," it's probably a brand new situation that is poised to get really ugly really quickly. If the logic of the punditocracy is sound (a big if), the whole idea of negotiating over the nuclear program is basically off the table now, one way or the other, and, according to this thinking, Obama is apparently already transitioning to his, as it were, liberation theology mode, wherein celebrating the cause of the protesters and exposing as much as possible the thug-like brutality of the authoritarian regime are the orders of the day. Could be interesting.

An atheist denunciation of Sam Harris.PART TWOHarris bends over backwards to justify torture & is an apologist for neoconservative militarism.

Sam Harris. Aw, shucks. What a nice, friendly, moderate, liberal, young man.

Into justifying the use of torture against enemies in the American War On Terror? Then, allow me to introduce you to the Reader's Digest-league philosophical musings of one Sam Harris. The following quotations are taken from an article that first appeared in the Huffington Post back in the halcyon days of 2005. The title of this pièce de résistance is 'In Defense of Torture'.

Golly gee, Sam! responds the unsuspecting HuffPo junkie, as she wraps her Reader's Digest-quality mind around Harris's provocative titular gambit. But isn't torture a bad thing?

Turns out, it's not! Well, not always, anyways. You might not, says Harris, have considered a strange bit of highly technical, jargony whatsit known as the 'ticking-bomb' scenario. If this term of art -- familiar to experts in highly specialized fields of philosophy -- has you confused, don't worry. Uncle Sam's gonna lay it out plain, in old-fashioned, workin'-man's English:

Imagine that a known terrorist has planted a bomb in the heart of a nearby city. He now sits in your custody. Rather than conceal his guilt, he gloats about the forthcoming explosion and the magnitude of human suffering it will cause. Given this state of affairs—in particular, given that there is still time to prevent an imminent atrocity—it seems that subjecting this unpleasant fellow to torture may be justifiable. For those who make it their business to debate the ethics of torture this is known as the “ticking-bomb” case.

Ya see? So, now that we're equipped with the specialty knowledge required for rational discussion of the ethics of torture, we can begin to, as it were, unwrap some of the underlying presuppositions that we tolerant, middle-class, bleeding-heart liberal Americans bring to bear in approaching highly complex ethics of torture. What are these presuppositions....these variables, and in what manner might they becloud our usually adaptable, dynamic and context-sensitive sense of justice? Of right and -- as it were -- wrong?

Well, glad you asked. Turns out that

many variables influence our feelings about an act of physical violence. The philosopher Jonathan Glover points out that “in modern war, what is most shocking is a poor guide to what is most harmful.” To learn that one’s grandfather flew a bombing mission over Dresden in the Second World War is one thing; to hear that he killed five little girls and their mother with a shovel is another. We can be sure that he would have killed many more women and girls by dropping bombs from pristine heights, and they are likely to have died equally horrible deaths, but his culpability would not appear the same. There is much to be said about the disparity here, but the relevance to the ethics of torture should be obvious.

Yes, yes, Sam. Much to be said about the disparity, but no: let's waste no time pondering these disparities! I mean, we're talking about a 'ticking-bomb' here, right? No time to sit and chat! [To be read in the voice of T.V.'s Batman, as portrayed by Adam West:] Mustn't....waste time discussing....things to be said.....about....disparity........Only....time....to.....torture!

.....If you think that the equivalence between torture and collateral damage does not hold, because torture is up close and personal while stray bombs aren’t, you stand convicted of a failure of imagination on at least two counts: first, a moment’s reflection on the horrors that must have been visited upon innocent Afghanis and Iraqis by our bombs will reveal that they are on par with those of any dungeon. If our intuition about the wrongness of torture is born of an aversion to how people generally behave while being tortured, we should note that this particular infelicity could be circumvented pharmacologically, because paralytic drugs make it unnecessary for screaming ever to be heard or writhing seen. We could easily devise methods of torture that would render a torturer as blind to the plight of his victims as a bomber pilot is at thirty thousand feet. Consequently, our natural aversion to the sights and sounds of the dungeon provide no foothold for those who would argue against the use of torture.

Whew. I haven't learned so much since I took Torture 101, sophomore year of high school. Here is an objection: Harris is getting it backwards. The failure of imagination is his own: He confuses the aversion of we middle class Westerners to torture with our aversion to particular sets of aural and visual associations that the concept of torture brings to mind. After all, for 99 percent of inhabitants of the lazy, fat, TV-watching West, the 'conventional' military aerial bombing raid is every bit as unfamiliar to our lived experience as is torture. Therefore: if there is a basis upon which we shall formulate our ethical point of view as regards torture, it is not going to be our (non-existent) lived experience of how the monstrous, barbaric act is carried out. It is even less advisable that we formulate our view by way of comparison to another monstrous, barbaric act with which we also have no firsthand experience.

And anyone who is actually going to formulate his view of the ethics of torture v. the ethics of the aerial bombing raid without reflecting seriously upon his personal estrangement from the actual physical, lived circumstances of both is someone who lacks the imagination and empathy to defer to the firsthand testimony of others who have actually experienced these horrors. He is someone who is so myopic and solipsistic as to base his impressions of the outside world entirely on television shows crafted especially for fat uneducated rednecks: easy targets for indoctrination into ethical dispositions that would have seemed unthinkable and certainly un-American just a few years ago.

Shows like Fox's 24, which dramatizes during each episode at least one, if not two or three instances of Harris's 'ticking-bomb' scenario.

By the way, in real life, do you want to know how many times the 'ticking bomb' scenario has occurred? NEVER. Not once.

The creator of 24 -- a ultra-neoconservative whack-job called Joel Surnow -- knows that his award-winning show's portrayal of torture as useful, ethically sound, and consistent with American values in fact bears no relation to reality. And yet, he feels that his show is "patriotic."

Joel Surnow, creator of TV's 24: Doesn't he look like a guy who has chronic erectile dysfunction?

Patriotic, huh? Well, I think that Surnow is poisoning the well of civil discourse, imbuing people's commonsense notions of what it means to be a patriotic American citizen with an ideologically calibrated and exceedingly reckless fabrication that taps into the bloodlust, cultural resentment and aimlessness of wide swaths of an especially vulnerable (and, for a host of reasons, ticked-off [so to speak]) American population. Whatever vision Surnow wishes to advance of what it means to be an American is glaringly at odds with the vision shared by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry.

One thing that I find galling about this is: where the hell is the sex and violence on T.V. crowd? I mean, is it, like, the new thing among Conservative White Evangelical Christian parents to say: "Well, sex is still bad, but violence may now be okay in particular circumstances; as long as it takes the form of lots and lots of explicit, gruesome, agonizing dehumanizing torture"?

I mean, I'm a First-Amendment Fundamentalist and feel that censorship in any form functions to undermine the capacity of human beings to live in the real world. But, I feel tempted to drive a pickup truck out to some megachurch tomorrow and ask the hoards of Bible-thumping parents: do you really want to bring your kids up in an American society in which torture is seen as not only acceptable but patriotic?

My answer's no.

Look: anyone that knows me will tell you that despite my habit of chatting about politics ad nauseum, I'm not much of a going-out-into-the-streets-and-chanting-things-through-megaphones type. But if there's any issue I'm passionate about, it's this one. As far as I'm concerned, to so much as attempt to justify legalizing torture on the basis of its putative utility is itself INSANE. Like, for instance, this washed-up mockery of a law professor

Alan Dershowitz: One of O.J. Simpson's defense attorneys. The first time around.

-- you know, Alan Dershowitz, the guy who was among the lawyers that represented O. J. Simpson? -- has written articles and even appeared on television proposing a law that would make torture legal under certain circumstances. Which circumstances? Why, of course, the ticking-time bomb scenario. You know, the one that's never ONCE happened in real life? His proposed law would, however, require getting a warrant from a judge. Now, honestly, would you want to become a judge if you knew that it meant periodically signing off on waterboarding people? It's a good thing no sentient human could possibly give a shit what Dershowitz says.

Should the neoconservative tendency ever -- God forbid -- show signs of reemergence on the scale of the pre-Iraq War National Brainwashing Project, I think it will likely be entirely necessary for the quote-unquote 'secular Left', Left-leaning Catholics and the non-evangelical Protestant Left to join forces with anti-torture portions of the evangelical Christian community in order to block the truly chilling specter of legally sanctioned torture from coming into existence.

Anyway, back to Sam Harris. Our friendly atheist continues his tortured explanation of why torture should be okay with us (albeit only in the specific circumstances that, as we have discussed, have never once occurred):

To demonstrate just how abstract the torments of the tortured can be made to seem, we need only imagine an ideal “torture pill”—a drug that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instrument of their concealment. The action of the pill would be to produce transitory paralysis and transitory misery of a kind that no human being would willingly submit to a second time. Imagine how we torturers would feel if, after giving this pill to captive terrorists, each lay down for what appeared to be an hour’s nap only to arise and immediately confess everything he knows about the workings of his organization. Might we not be tempted to call it a “truth pill” in the end? No, there is no ethical difference to be found in how the suffering of the tortured or the collaterally damaged appears.

All right. Instead of responding myself, why don't I just go ahead and quote George Orwell? The following is from 1984, in particular from The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, by Emmanuel Goldstein, a copy of which the novel's protagonist Winston Smith is given to read by O'Brien, an Inner Party member who initiates Smith to the "Brotherhood," a secret organization that plots to overthrow the Party. Read this excerpt -- which lays out candidly the function of torture in the totalitarian state -- and compare it with Harris's assertions:

In Newspeak there is no word for 'Science'. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance -- meaning, in effect, war and police espionage -- the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated. The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter. The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life.

The banality of evil, indeed. Of course, as we know, O'Brien turns out not to have in fact been a member of "The Brotherhood," but is in fact himself a scientist -- a psychologist -- working for the totalitarian regime. For Big Brother. He applies his expertise in precisely the manner elaborated in the above excerpt.

Harris is said to be pursuing a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. Hmmm.

I shall conclude with a voice of sanity, that of the legal scholar David Luban (Virginia Law Review, 9/15/05):

The only reasonable inference to draw from these recent efforts by the government to defend its actions is that the torture culture is still firmly in place, notwithstanding official condemnation of torture. Indeed, given that lawyers at the highest levels of government continue to loophole the laws against torture as energetically as ever, more than half a year after the Abu Ghraib revelations, the only reasonable inference to draw is that the United States government is currently engaging in brutal and humiliating interrogations. At most, torture has given way to CID. The persistence of interrogational brutality should surprise no one, because the liberal ideology of torture fully legitimizes it. The memos illustrate the ease with which arguments that pretend that torture can exist in liberal society, but only as an exception, quickly lead to erecting a torture culture, a network of institutions and practices that regularize the exception and make it standard operating procedure.

For this reason, the liberal ideology of torture, which assumes that torture can be neatly confined to exceptional ticking-bomb cases and surgically severed from cruelty and tyranny, represents a dangerous delusion. It becomes more dangerous still coupled with an endless war on terror, a permanent emergency in which the White House eagerly insists that its emergency powers rise above the limiting power of statutes and treaties. Claims to long-term emergency powers that entail the power to torture should send chills through liberals of the right as well as the left, and no one should still think that liberal torture has nothing to do with tyranny.

John McCain is a neocon. And he's advised by the neocons. To vote for John McCain is to beg for 12 continuous years of neoconservatism.

That's right, Ladies and Gentlemen. You know, at first, when John McCain said that he was the candidate of "CHANGE," I thought: That's great!! That way, no matter who wins the election in November, we'll have "CHANGE!" And isn't the need for "CHANGE" something we can all agree on?

Remember Bill Kristol? Yeah, that Bill Kristol; the guy whose tactics for pushing the United States into Iraq included intellectual dishonesty, the adopting of his trademarked self-righteous facial expression of moral superiority, the relentless running of misleading, highly speculative and tendentious and sometimes downright mendacious articles in his ultra-neocon publication The Weekly Standard in order to advance the perception in Washington that war with Iraq was inevitable? The hypocrite who will open his big, smug, wealthy-donor teat-suckling mouth and rattle off a series of just-received GOP talking points in a manner that masquerades as well-informed, individual expertise? The guy who's now, with other neocons, marching us toward a military confrontation with Iran?

The Bill Kristol who accepted millions of dollars in funding from shady ultraconservative organizations like the Bradley Foundation and the Olin Corporation in order to form think tanks like the Project for a New American Century (a.k.a. "PNAC," which also included Paul Wolfowitz, Randy Scheunemann, Robert Kagan, Richard Pearle, William Bennett, Gary Schmitt, Thomas Donnelly, and most of the other celebrity neocons you can think of), in which policy positions and propaganda points on how to push our country into war with Iraq and then Iran were laid out in detail?

You know, the guy featured herein:



(By the way, this must be among Stephen Colbert's greatest-ever moments.)

A vote for John McCain is a vote for Bill "Lies with a Straight Face" Kristol. That Bill Kristol. The William Kristol of The Weekly Standard who now has his own column in the formerly respectable New York Times. (Hope it doesn't seem like I'm worked up about this...)

That must be the "CHANGE" that McCain/Bush is talking about. McCain/Bush. Bush/McCain. La la dee da. McCain/Bush/Bush/Bush/McCain/Mcain. Neoconservatives, the ones who have fashioned our foreign policy for the past eight years, the ones who figured out how to trick us into invading Iraq -- even though most of us weren't tricked because. after all, we saw right through what they were doing. But of course, the thing is, well....we didn't have...uh...any power to stop them.

Nor would we, as it happens, have any power to stop the neocons like Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan and Randy Scheunemann (of whom, more in a moment) under a President McCain. Robert Kagan, by the way, is one of McCain's official foreign policy advisers, a man who would be certain to hold some kind of important position in a McCain administration [which would be indistinguishable, after all, from the Bush administration]. McCain, acting upon the advice of Kagan, will be sure to send us to Iran as quickly as you can say "Gone are our civil liberties, which will continue to be gone forever if you vote for John McCain."

Don't believe me about Kagan? Robert Kagan -- unlike Bill Kristol, toward whom any ad hominem is fair game as far as I'm concerned -- is an amiable enough bloke, but unfortunately, he's eager for us to go to war with Iran and...apparently...Russia. Here's just an introduction to the man and his plan. Remember, he's one among many of John Neocon McCain's neoconservative foreign policy advisers:



Like I said, not as unctuous or viscerally offensive as Kristol. But he's got war on his mind. He can taste it on his tongue. He can feel it in the ripples of fat that cascade up and down his chiny-chin-chin.

So, wait. George W. Bush's 'foreign policy', so to speak, was/is conducted by neocons, in whose number we must include, of course, Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan, Randy Scheunemann, Richard Pearle, et al. And don't forget Condi. But anyway, so...the "CHANGE" we'd experience under Neocon John McCain...This must be a species of "CHANGE" with which I'm as of yet unacquainted. Its exact nature is kind of elusive, isn't it? I mean, as "CHANGE" goes, McCain's version is kind of...um...static, isn't it?

Presumably, the "CHANGE" that McCain is talking about is......Is he just talking about the fact that, under a McCain administration, we'd live each and every day of our lives quaking with the fear that that cloying, screechy-voiced, sociopathic, book-burning bitch could become our president? That would, of course, represent a "CHANGE." I continue, as before, to find it difficult to believe that the GOP faithful really want that person to win.

Anyway. My vote goes, as before, to Barack Obama.

For more discussion of McCain's neoconservatism, and his ties with assorted neoconservatives, particularly Robert Kagan and Randy Scheunemann, see:

• The Atlantic Monthly's Andrew Sullivan on McCain's preexisting shady intelligence-gathering and fiscal dealings with hard-core neocon Randy Scheunemann--who is now McCain's Senior Foreign Policy Adviser--and McCain's and Scheunemann's longstanding desire to ignite a conflict between Georgia and Russia, with the United States intervening militarily on Georgia's behalf.
• A piece, featured on therealnews.com, on Randy Scheunemann, "John McCain’s Senior Foreign Policy Adviser, Lobbyist, and a former director of the neo conservative Project for a New American Century." Journalist Chip Berlet reports:

...Scheunemann would play a very major role in shaping McCain's foreign policy... We have in the past had Henry Kissinger and all kinds of other high-profile people, like Zbigniew Brzezinski [inaudible]. It's hard to predict if Scheunemann would play that role, but he wouldn't play that role in as pragmatic a way as Kissinger or Brzezinski played. I mean, we're talking about a very aggressive, pro-militarist, pro-interventionist neoconservative ideologue here who made Kissinger and Brzezinski seem almost like Buddhists in comparison.

...[Under Scheunemann, we can expect] an aggressive kind of foreign policy for the United States which claims the right to intervene diplomatically, and then militarily, in any struggle around the world by constructing that struggle as having an important national security issue involved, so that no matter where there is some kind of trouble, through this McCain foreign policy, controlled by Scheunemann one presumes, we're going to claim the right to intervene instantly, first with sanctions and then with tanks and jets and bombs, to suggest that people need to sort of get in line with our needs. And this is a very, obviously, arrogant foreign policy, and what it's going to do is to continue to separate the United States from the world diplomatic community, which has already grown quite unhappy with the kind of bullying that the United States feels comfortable with. And it'll only get worse in that sense, in terms of an aggressive militarism rooted in this neocon idea of exporting "global democracy," quote-unquote. (Check out the rest of the report.)

• Michael I. Nimon on McCain and his Neocon approach to Georgia in Artvoice (Buffalo, NY)
• Philip Giraldi, "John McCain and the Neocon resurgence"
• Jacob Heilburn on the Neocon canonization of John McCain in The Huffington Post
• Alec Baldwin (yeah, that one) describes the neoconservatism of Sarah Palin in The Huffington Post

Bush & McCain are both Republicans: the party of lies, torture, warmongering, destruction of public infrastructure, widening gap between rich & poor.

John McCain and George W. Bush are members of the same political party.
(Let's all remind our friends, relatives, colleagues and coworkers.)

Dick Cheney is a charlatan, demagogue & crook:Who honestly doubts that our VP ordered the CIA to lie to us?

Remember the run-up to the Iraq War? Remember how it was -- much like today -- a depressing, infuriating time? Everywhere you turned, you found unwelcome reminders that a gang of sleazy assholes -- a.k.a., the Bush Administration -- were running the country, that they quite obviously were eager to invade Iraq, and that they would find a way to do so no matter what? We knew that they were lying to us: that was never in question. What is tantalizing, however, is the prospect that actual concrete evidence and testimony might pop up that would make the nature of these lies comprehensible to our credulous fellow citizens.

Journalist Ron Suskind wouldn't need to try very hard to convince me and most intelligent people I know that the White House -- and Dick Cheney, specifically -- ordered the CIA to forge a document in order to steer popular will in the direction of supporting the invasion of Iraq. Suskind's new book The Way of the World, trotted out a couple of days ago amidst a deftly-coordinated publicity blitz, claims precisely this.

Remember the infamous "top secret memo" -- this stuff is actually quite hilarious -- purportedly containing proof not only that 9/11-pilot, al-Qaeda terrorist Mohammed Atta was "trained by Saddam," but conveniently, in the same memo(!) that Saddam had purchased a uranium shipment from Niger -- or, as George W. Bush put it, in his greatest "I'm too dumb to be a liar!!!" moment -- "from Africa"?

Anyway, that memo was revealed to be a forgery within, like, two days of Bush's retarded speech. But the Administration and its neocon minions had garnered the necessary momentum to invade Iraq.

About this forged memo, Suskind reveals something totally believable to my ears, but also quite astonishing. Here's a reprint of a note he posted on the Web site The Huffington Post:

The Forged Iraqi Letter: What Just Happened?
Ron Suskind

What just happened? Evidence. A secret that has been judiciously kept for five years just spilled out. All of what follows is new, never reported in any way:

The Iraq Intelligence Chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush -- a man still carrying a $1 million reward for capture, the Jack of Diamonds in Bush's famous deck of wanted men -- has been America's secret source on Iraq. Starting in January of 2003, with Blair and Bush watching, his secret reports began to flow to officials on both sides of the Atlantic, saying that there were no WMD and that Hussein was acting so odd because of fear that the Iranians would find out he was a toothless tiger. The U.S. deep-sixed the intelligence report in February, "resettled" Habbush to a safe house in Jordan during the invasion and then paid him $5 million in what could only be considered hush money.

In the fall of 2003, after the world learned there were no WMD -- as Habbush had foretold -- the White House ordered the CIA to carry out a deception. The mission: create a handwritten letter, dated July, 2001, from Habbush to Saddam saying that Atta trained in Iraq before the attacks and the Saddam was buying yellow cake for Niger with help from a "small team from the al Qaeda organization." *

The mission was carried out, the letter was created, popped up in Baghdad, and roiled the global newcycles in December, 2003 (conning even venerable journalists like Tom Brokaw). The mission is a statutory violation of the charter of the CIA, and amendments added in 1991, prohibiting the CIA from conducting disinformation campaigns on U.S. soil.

So, here we go again: the administration is in full attack mode, calling me names, George Tenet is claiming he doesn't remember any such thing -- just like he couldn't remember "slam dunk" -- and reporters are scratching their heads. Everything in my book is on the record, with many sources. And so, we watch and wait....

Hear Suskind explain further on NPR's Fresh Air. When two of Suskind's sources, former CIA director George Tenet, whom we know already to be a blowhard, and CIA official Robert Richer chickened out on their previous testimony, Suskind followed up by sharing some of the transcripts of his interviews, which...ahem...say precisely what Suskind had portrayed them as saying. Suskind's introduction reveals just how weird and suspicious Richer's retraction is:

Rob Richer received a copy of The Way of the World on Monday night, August 4, the day before publication. On Tuesday, he said he had read key portions of the book and was comfortable with what they contained. Later that day, though, he issued the following the statement:

"I never received direction from George Tenet or anyone else in my chain of command to fabricate a document from Habbash as outlined in Mr Suskind's book."

A quick excerpt of the partial transcript:

Ron: The intent--the basic raison d'etre of this product is to get, is to create, here's a letter with what's in it. Okay, here's what we want on the letter, we want it to be released as essentially a representation of something Habbush says. That's all it says, that's the one paragraph. And then you pass it to whomever to do it. To get it done.

Rob: It probably passed through five or six people. George probably showed it to me, but then passed it probably to Jim Pavitt, the DDO, who then passed it down to his chief of staff who passed it to me. Cause that's how--you know, so I saw the original. I got a copy of it. But it was, there probably was--

Ron: Right. You saw the original with the White House stationery, but you didn't--down the ranks, then it creates other paper.

Rob: Yeah, no, exactly. But I couldn't tell you--again: I remember it happening, I remember a terrible brief kinda joking dialogue about it, but that was it.

. . .

Ron: Now this is from the Vice President's Office is how you remembered it--not from the president?

Rob: No, no, no. What I remember is George saying, 'we got this from'--basically, from what George said was 'downtown.'

Ron: Which is the White House?

Rob: Yes. But he did not--in my memory--never said president, vice president, or NSC. Okay? But now--he may have hinted--just by the way he said it, it would have--cause almost all that stuff came from one place only: Scooter Libby and the shop around the vice president.

Ron: Yeah, right.

Rob: But he didn't say that specifically. I would naturally--I would probably stand on my, basically, my reputation and say it came from the vice president.

Ron: Right, I'm with you, I'm with you. But there wasn't anything in the writing that you remember saying the vice president.

Rob: Nope.

Ron: It just had the White House stationery.

Rob: Exactly right.

Ron: That's fine, White House stationery's fine. Everything's from there. You know, that's the center point. But not OVP's Office. It's just the White House. It comes from the White House. That's plain and simple.

Rob: And you know, if you've ever seen the vice president's stationery, it's on the White House letterhead. It may have said OVP. I don't remember that, so I don't want to mislead you. . . .

If you want to dig into this stuff even more deeply, I direct you to a fantastic article by Salon.com's Joe Conason. Conason does a remarkably thorough job of verifying some of Suskind's claims while simultaneously providing loads of background and connecting of existing dots.

Here's a link to the original piece that broke the news of the existence of the memo, a piece that hangs hysterically and credulously on every fucking word of what was soon thereafter revealed to be a sloppily executed forgery. It's written by neocon hired gun Con Coughlin in UK's The Telegraph. Awfully strange isn't it, as Conason observes, that it should first have fallen into the hands of a neocon like Conason, and so soon after it was "discovered."

I agree entirely with this piece in the UK's Guardian on The White House's implausible deniability.

I find it howlingly hilarious to imagine people being shocked, positively shocked!! by the revelation that the White House told the CIA to lie to the American people. Anybody who was paying attention knew that the months preceding the invasion of Iraq saw the American moo-cow masses (I include myself in that number, although the nature of such campaigns suggest that they are not aimed to in any way convince me of anything!!) subjected to an unrelenting, blitzkrieg of a disinformation campaign.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I find these kinds of exposé stories to be plodding and dull in the extreme. But the idea that Suskind's findings could wake up the mooingest of moo cows to what you and I have long known to be true....well, that's tantalizing. It's not often that I find myself wanting to see someone -- even a political figure -- "taken down," his legacy discredited, his name shamed, his lies exposed. Unless, of course, that political figure is a Republican.

I can't say honestly that I wouldn't enjoy seeing that fat, fraudulent lying crook Dick Cheney go down in a great big ball of flames. It's pretty hard not to hate the motherfucker, isn't it?


* Emphasis mine.