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December 30, 2005

4,3,2,1 ... 2,0,0,6

Start the year with a MAJOR BANG: "Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Dirty Bomb." Click the link, then click the "Engage" button for the card trick; "Activate" for the quiz; and "Perform" for the video. We hope the show's as good as the Web site. Thanks for the tip, Clayton.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: Anybody know how the card trick works?

PPS: The plague of the three "P"s is upon us. Thank you, Dell. Blogging will resume when our persistent 'puter problems are resolved.

Posted by jherman at 11:26 AM

DEJA VU

Twelve months later ... Oliphant's New Year cartoon still applies.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Posted by jherman at 1:02 AM

December 28, 2005

WHAT MEANS GENOCIDE?

"I just read the incredible Fisk materials," William Osborne writes. "His observations, and the ways he states them, are stunning. As he so clearly demonstrates, journalistic euphemisms to mask atrocities have become a part of our 'culture.' Orwellian.

"And I very much appreciate Doug Ireland's postscript comments in WHAT'S GOIN' ON?, since he brings to the fore a very important issue. He says that the word 'genocide' has 'a very precise meaning.' Unfortunately, that is not true. It is only within the last century that humanity has even begun to address genocide. Our thinking about it is still very confused."

Osborne continues:

Most dictionaries define genocide in very simplistic and absolutist terms. The American Heritage Dictionary, for example, says that genocide is "The systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group."

Such definitions beg obvious questions. What would define "planned"? How planned were the events in Rwanda? What does "entire" mean? In the Balkans, Moslems were exterminated only in areas where it was deemed a necessary part of ethnic cleansing. Was it not genocide because the murder took place only within specific cities and regions? In Sebrenica 8000 Moslem men and boys were mass murdered. Was it not genocide because the women and girls were spared?

And how do we define national, racial, political, and ethnic groups in a world where these delineations are often very fluid? What percentage of a specific group do you have to murder before it becomes genocide? And how wide does the geography of mass murder have to be before it becomes genocide? Isn't there also such a thing as cultural genocide -- the systematic and violent destruction of a people's identity? How would that be defined? What role does cultural genocide play in helping us to define, prove, and punish physical genocide?

These considerations illustrate that our definitions of genocide are still vague and confused. We have not developed laws that define the many manifestations and degrees of genocide, much less codes that would define the necessary proofs and levels of punishment. Humanity is gradually developing an understanding that it needs a World Court, and this will require new bodies of law. Our vague definitions of genocide will need to be clarified by philosophers and legal theorists.

Naturally, many of our leaders will want to set the bar for the definition of genocide so high and narrow that they will be able to wriggle underneath it. This will be especially true for our Generals. We should not be fooled by that Four Star ruse.

We are arming and training a large Shia/Kurdish majority to fight a dirty, ethnic civil war against a disempowered and deeply hated Sunni minority. History illustrates that over the next 15 years this could lead to a systematic, mass destruction of a large portion of Iraq's Sunni population and their culture. As I've previously estimated, depending on how events evolve, the potential ranges from 500,000 to 1.8 million people through death or exile.

This could be avoided, but if it happens, should those who caused the civil war and who armed its participants be held responsible for some form of genocide? We already know that the invasion was illegal. What about its consequences?

In fact, earlier this month, the BBC broadcast Newsnight staged a war crimes trial about the U.S.-British coalition's conduct in the "war on terror," though not specificaly about the war in Iraq. Read the transcript. (Broadbanders: Don't miss the video.)

Postscript: "J., I was pushing and praising Fisk years ago when no one on this side of the pond knew who he was. I devoted an entire column to him in the Voice back in the late '80s, and regularly cited and promoted him. Finally, the Iraq war gave him the broader recognition Stateside he so richly deserves. [See FISK ON JOURNALISTAS. -- JH] Haven't yet read his "War for Civilization" but it's on my list of reads when I have the time (I never have enough reading time, given the inhuman quantities of media I have to absorb for my work)." -- D.

PPS: The top story on the front page of The New York Times, "G.I.'s to Increase U.S. Supervision of Iraqi Police" (dateline Baghdad, Dec. 29, 2005), addresses the issues we have been discussing. "Here's an excerpt," William Osborne notes, "with the usual double talk":

The increase is seen as a way to exert firmer control over the commando units, which are suspected of carrying out widespread atrocities against civilians in Sunni Arab neighborhoods. Human rights groups here say the units may be guilty of murdering and torturing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Sunni Arab men of military age.

The conduct of the commandos has become a source of intense friction between the Shiite-led Iraqi government and American officials, who say the reports of the atrocities are jeopardizing the campaign to persuade Sunnis
to stop supporting the insurgency.

The plan to increase the number of American advisers is a significant departure from the overall American strategy of giving the Iraqis the lead role in fighting the insurgency. Indeed, the allegations of atrocities arose only after Americans began to give the Iraqi units more freedom to act on their own.

Even as he talked about the increase in advisers, the officer confirmed details of a shift to fewer American troops covering more Iraqi ground.

"In other words, the article presents talk of more U.S. supervision when, actually, general American participation is being reduced. Is this not what I have described -- setting up a potential genocide while distancing ourselves and covering our tracks? It worked against the Mayans in Central America, and it will probably work in Iraq."

See this from Der Spiegel Online:

Guatemala, 1981-1983

In the history of Guatemala's bloody 36 years of civil war from 1960 to 1996, the early 80s stand out as a period of particular viciousness. In what became known as "The Silent Holocaust," the Guatemalan army methodically worked its way through the country's Mayan communities, killing men, women and children. A total of 200,000 people died during the war, many thousands of them Mayan victims of genocide.

Posted by jherman at 9:41 AM

FISK ON THE JOURNALISTAS

"Fisk scolds U.S. journalists" is the way Romenesko sums up "Telling it like it isn't," an op-ed tongue-lashing in yesterday's Los Angeles Times (which was fairly mild for Fisk). Now have a look at some excerpts from his book, "The Great War for Civilization," where the journalistas come in for some really heavy-duty spanking -- no punches pulled (which is more typical of him) and not limited to American scribes. Here Fisk speaks about the media's mistreatment of the Palestinians:

[W]ho are those people? In the taboo-ridden world of Western journalism, every effort continues to be made not only to dehumanise them but to de-culture them, de-nation them, to dis-identify them. A long article by David Margolick in Vanity Fair explains Israel's policy of "targeted killing" -- the murder of Palestinians chosen by the Israelis as "security" threats -- although Margolick never mentions the word "murder." Some of Israel's "targeted killing" operations, he says, are "dazzling." Yet nowhere in the article is it explained where the Palestinians come from, why they are occupied -- or why Jewish colonies are being built on their land. In the Mail on Sunday, Stewart Steven writes that "there is no language known as Palestinian. There is no distinct Palestinian culture. There is no specific Palestinian dress. Palestinians are indistinguishable from other Arabs." Jerusalem, he adds, "was never visited by Mohamed." Palestinians speak Arabic but with a distinctive Palestinian accent. There is a Palestinian culture of poetry and prose and -- among women -- of national dress. ... It could equally be said that there is no language known as American, that American culture is of English origin, that there is no specific American dress, that Americans are indistinguishable from other Westerners. Legend, not the Koran, has it that Mohamed visited Jerusalem. Perhaps he did not. But Christians do not deny the holy nature of the Vatican or Canterbury Cathedral just because Christ never visited Italy or England.

Far more disturbing and vicious paradigms of this contempt for Palestinians regularly appear in Western newspapers. In the Irish Times, for example, Mark Steyn felt able to describe the eminently decent Hanan Ashrawi as one of a number of "bespoke terror apologists." A visit to the West Bank in 2003, Steyn wrote, "creeped me out." It was "a wholly diseased environment," a "culture that glorifies depravity," which led the author to conclude that "nothing good grows in toxic soil."

Once the identity of Palestinians has been removed, once their lands are subject to "dispute" rather than "occupation," once Arafat allowed the Americans and Israelis to relegate Jerusalem, settlements and the "right of return" to "final status" negotiations -- and thus not to be mentioned in the meantime, for to do so would "threaten" peace -- the mere hint of Palestinian resistance can be defined as "terrorism." Inside this society there is a sickness -- "disease," "depravity," toxic soil." Buried in Palestinian hearts -- in secret -- must remain their sense of unresolved anger, frustration and resentment at a multitude of injustices.

Fisk goes on for pages about the misuse of language and the lies it spawns. Here he talks about the inequality of descriptions when comparing Israeli and Palestinian killings. His comments bear on the meaning of "genocide," which is especially appropriate in view of the postscript from Doug Ireland, objecting to William Osborne's deployment of the word in yesterday's post, WHAT'S GOIN' ON? Ireland contended it was "sloppy use of language" because "the word has a very precise meaning, and is, unfortunately, much over-used by anti-imperialists of a certain stripe." But listen to Fisk:

So when does a bloodbath become an atrocity? When does an atrocity become a massacre? How big does a massacre have to be before it qualifies as genocide? How many dead before a genocide becomes a holocaust? Old questions become new questions at each killing field. The Israeli journalist Arie Caspi wrote a scathing article ... which caught the hypocritical response to the Jenin killings [in April 2002] with painful accuracy:

Okay, so there wasn't a massacre. Israel only shot some children, brought a house crashing down on an old man, rained cement blocks on an invalid who couldn't get out in time, used locals as a human shield against bombs, and prevented aid from getting to the sick and wounded. That's really not a massacre, and there's really no need for a commission of enquiry ... whether run by ourselves or sent by the goyim.

The insanity gripping Israel seems to have moved beyond our morals ... many Israelis believe that as long as we do not practice systematic mass murder, our place in heaven is secure. Every time some Palestinian or Scandinavian fool yells "Holocaust!," we respond in an angry huff: This is a holocaust? So a few people were killed, 200, 300, some very young, some very old. Does anyone see gas chambers or crematoria?

These are not idle questions. Nor cynical. ... [I]f at least two dozen Palestinian dead in Jenin was not a massacre, how should we describe the four Israelis dead at the Adora settlement? Well, the official Israeli army spokesman, Major Avner Foxman, said of the Adora killings: "For me, now I know what a massacre is. This is a massacre." The Canadian National Post referred to the Palestinian assault as being "barbarous," a word never used about the killing of Palestinian civilians. I don't like the mathematics here. Four dead Israelis,including two armed settlers, is a massacre. I'll accept this. But twenty-four Palestinian civilians killed, including a nurse and a paraplegic, is not a massacre. (I am obviously leaving aside the thirty or so armed Palestinians who were also killed in Jenin.) What does this mean? What does it tell us about journalism, about my profession? Does the definition of a bloodbath now depend on the religion or the race of the civilian dead to be qualified as a massacre? No, I didn't call the Jenin killings a massacre. But I should have done.

Yet our responsibility does not end there. How many of our circumlocutions open the way to these attacks? How many journalists encouraged the Israelis -- by their reporting or by their wilfully given, foolish advice -- to undertake these brutal assaults on the Palestinians. On 31 March 2002 -- just three days before the assault on Jenin -- Tom Friedman wrote in The New York Times that "Israel needs to deliver a military blow that clearly shows terror will not pay." Well, thanks, Tom, I said to myself when I read this piece of lethal journalism a few days later. The Israelis certainly followed Friedman's advice."

Fisk goes on like that for page after angry page. It is harrowing and bracing, both. It is why his book runs to more than a thousand pages and why it is worth the sacrifice of every tree felled to publish it. Having made it this far, you may be interested to read an interview with Fisk, where he lets it all hang out, and a dispassionately admiring review of the book -- actually, a profile of Fisk as much as a review -- by Phillip Knightley, author of "The First Casualty," which explains the high value we place on Knightley's opinion.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Posted by jherman at 8:59 AM

December 27, 2005

WHAT'S GOIN' ON?

There's much to be said about John Gray's essay, "The Mirage of Empire," in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. Gray's comments are focused on the themes of two books under review -- Robert D. Kaplan's "Imperial Grunts" and Michael Mandelbaum's "The Case for Goliath" -- and to some extent are constrained by them. Nevertheless, we were struck by contradictions between Gray's views and ours, largely about U.S. strategy in Iraq.

This left us dumbfounded because, as we've said before, Gray is our fave philosophe. More important, he possesses a scholarly authority that we're in no position to challenge. (Gray is School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and the author of "False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism," "Liberalism (Concepts in Social Thought)," "Two Faces of Liberalism," "Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals," "Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern" and, his latest, "Heresies.")

So we passed the buck to our in-house scholar, William Osborne, who summed up his response to Gray in a nutshell: "He does not seem to understand how the new world order works." Osborne, a temperamentally shy, but not intellectually bashful, ex-patriate American composer, feminist, musicologist, cultural commentator, music critic, social critic and activist, backed up his conclusion with closely argued ideas that refute Gray point by point. Here's the debate:

John Gray: No doubt modish theories that understand warfare as an exercise in managerial efficiency contributed to the debacle [in Iraq.] However, if America is facing strategic defeat in Iraq the reason is not that its forces there are insufficiently numerous. It is that their operations have never served any political goal that could be realized.

William Osborne: The Pentagon's understanding of war is not "managerial efficiency" (a relic of the old industrial forms of large-scale war that are not relevant in the post-cold-war world). The principle forces now opposing global capitalism are ethnic and sectarian. These are the forces the Pentagon knows it must now exploit and where necessary destroy. The military strategy in Iraq is the creation of long-term, genocidal sectarian chaos to wear down opposition to the U.S. More specifically, the political goal is civil war resulting in genocide that will quell Sunni resistance. The U.S. understands this will take 15 years -- similar to the long-term forms of destruction it spawned to subdue Latin America for the last 80 years. Our government also knows that it must disassociate itself from this potentially genocidal civil war by claiming it is no longer in control of events. In addition, the Iraqi Kurds will be given a great deal of autonomy. Turkey's opposition to Kurdish autonomy will be quelled by allowing Turkey into the European Union. Gray underestimates the slyness and criminal brutality of the U.S.'s strategic genius.

Gray: In effect America's military adventures are paid for with borrowed money -- notably that lent by China, whose purchases of American government debt have become crucial in underpinning the U.S. economy. This dependency on China cannot easily be squared with the idea that the US is acting as the world's unpaid global enforcer. It is America's foreign creditors who fund this role, and if they come to perceive U.S. foreign policy as dangerously threatening or irrational they are in a position to raise its costs to the point where they become prohibitive.

Osborne: I think this understanding of global capitalism is too simple. Global economics is not based on the creditor-consumer models used by individuals or corporations. By pumping billions in interest payments into China, and by strengthening its economy with lopsided trade balances, a new industrial base and market is created that will further strengthen the power of global capitalism. (And as an added benefit, it also greatly weakens Western labor unions.) In other words, those who print money (or create it as an electronic balance) work according to entirely different economic laws and principles than normal creditors and borrowers. China alone will never be in a position to raise the cost of debt since control of the global economy is not solely in its hands. It might demand higher debt payments, but global capitalism defines the very meaning of money itself. Producing high debt almost always strengthens the power of global capitalism. It doesn't matter whether the debt is in Brazil, America, or anywhere else as long capital expansion can be maintained.

Gray: However, it is far from clear that this exercise in geopolitics can succeed. Because of the anarchy that prevails in much of the country, multinational companies are unable to operate in Iraq. Oil production has failed to reach the levels it achieved under Saddam, and if oil facilities elsewhere in the Gulf come under persistent attack it may not be possible to ensure their security. The underlying political reality in the region is pervasive hostility to American power. As a result of its oil dependency America has committed itself to a neoimperial strategy of military intervention that can only aggravate that enmity. It is doubtful whether the U.S. has the capacity to sustain the indefinite period of war that could result, and more than doubtful that the task is worth attempting.

Osborne: The U.S. knows what it is doing. Its economic hegemony is won by long-term strategic wars of slow destruction and not quick tactical victories. It will reduce troops to a low level in Iraq and keep them out of harm's way in the large bases it has built while the 15-year-long genocidal war it has set in motion breaks the will of the resistance. The U.S. understands very well that 15 years is a short time in terms of global strategies. (The Iran-Iraq War and the 10-year embargo were also part of this long-term strategy which taken together makes it roughly a 30-year plan.) Even if the U.S. withdraws completely, the Iraq Civil War will continue and eventually allow for American hegemony. And the "enmity" toward the U.S. that Gray speaks of is also largely irrelevant. When you can thoroughly weaken people by spawning massive destruction, it hardly matters whether you are liked or not. As Latin America illustrates, it is U.S. power that rules, not U.S. popularity.

Gray: As a result of the Bush administration's intervention in Iraq the dissolution of America's global hegemony that is an integral part of the process of globalization has been accelerated, perhaps by a generation. The United States will continue to be pivotal, but it cannot expect its interests or its values to be accepted as paramount. We are moving into a world in which peace will depend on concerted action by several great powers. In these circumstances a revival of realist thinking is overdue. Global security is not served by launching messianic campaigns to export democracy. Nor is it advanced by pursuing a mirage of empire, which even now is melting away.

Osborne: This war was never a messianic campaign to export democracy. (Nor was replacing the freely elected Allende with the mass-murdering dictator Pinochet; nor was the mass-murdering dictatorship we created in Argentina; nor the U.S.- trained and -funded mass-murdering death squads in Central America; nor the U.S.- backed, mass-murdering regime in East Timor.)

The democratization of Iraq is a propaganda lie from the same folks who said the war was about WMD. The purpose of the invasion was to set in motion a 15-year-long genocidal civil war that will destroy Iraq and allow the U.S. to dominate what is left -- the oil and strategic position of the country. As I said, this is actually the second part of a 30-year strategy that also employed the Iran-Iraq War (in which the U.S. supplied arms to both sides and which led to over a million deaths) and the 10-year embargo, which the U.N. estimates caused about half a million deaths.

But Gray is correct when he says that America will indeed become less and less relevant as global capitalism evolves. Global capitalism is a trans-national order that will ultimately suppress most forms of nationalism. We should also remember that in order to survive, global capitalism must always expand into new sources of capital -- either technological or material. This expansion, both technological and material, will always require war. If long-term peace does come, global capitalism will collapse. For that reason we will never have long-term peace without the creation, acceptance, and implementation of a more advanced economic system. So far, such a system has not even been conceived.

Postscript: Speaking of cowboy art, Gray quotes Kaplan as saying, "Just as the stirring poetry and novels of Rudyard Kipling celebrated the work of British imperialism in subduing the Pushtuns and Afridis of India's Northwest Frontier, a Kipling contemporary, the American artist Frederic Remington, in his bronze sculptures and oil paintings, would do likewise for the conquest of the Wild West."

Gray: This reference to the Wild West is not an insignificant detail. It is central to Kaplan's picture of American Empire. He writes: "'Welcome to Injun Country' was the refrain I heard from troops from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq. ... The War on Terrorism was really about taming the frontier."

Osborne: Genocide has always been a discretely practiced part of the American ideal.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

PPS: A blast from Doug Ireland --

Brother Jan,

I have lots of problems with some of John Gray's thinking and writing, and not only in his piece for the New York Review of Each Other's Books. But your man Osborne displays what I think is a widespread disease on the left of the left, i.e., sloppy use of language, in this case the word "genocide." The word has a very precise meaning, and is, unfortunately, much over-used by anti-imperialists of a certain stripe, and inaccurately so, as in multiple instance's in Osborne's comments. (I feel the same way about the words "fascism" and "fascist," "Nazi," etc., which are also terribly overused, and imprecisely so, on the left.)

Also, Osborne mis-speaks when he writes of a " U.S.-backed, mass-murdering regime in East Timor." It was the Indonesian regime in Djakarta that directed the slaughter in East Timor, not an East Timorese regime. Imprecisions of this sort drive me crazy, and weaken what ought to be a powerful, radical, anti-imperialist critique.

By the by, one point I do agree with Gray on, and that is his prediction that, eventually, the American empire will become so over-extended that it can no longer sustain its adventures. It may take a little longer than both Gray and Osborne suggest, but history teaches us that all empires eventually implode for that reason, and ours will be no different. Whether you and I will be around to see this happen to the American imperium is something I have my doubts about.

Regards as ever,

Doug

FYI: I'm not referring to Osborne in my parenthetical on "fascism," which I didn't notice him use in his comments on Gray -- it's just one of my pet peeves. I always refer people to the superb historian Robert Paxton's last book, which came out in '04, "The Anatomy of Facism." It's the summing up of all he's learned in his lifetime of work on the subject, and largely supplants the earlier classic texts of Franz Mehring and Ernst Nolte on the matter. If you haven't read it, I heartily recommend it to you. Paxton, you know, is credited with single-handedly reviving the history of French collaboration with the Nazis during the occupation -- and is so credited by the froggies themselves!! As you know, it was a taboo subject in France for decades, a taboo which Paxton's books broke, opening the way for others. That's quite an achievement. Paxton is widely respected and honored in France nowadays for that reason.

The question of collaboration has been a preoccupation of mine ever since, as a kid of 14, I read (in English translation) Andrew Schwarz-Bart's magnificent novel, "The Last of the Just" ("Le Dernier des Justes"), which had an influence in shaping my values system that has never left me. And I've done a great deal of reading on the French collaboration over the last decades, it's a subject I know rather well, becaue it's a case study with many lessons. What I learned from Schwarz-Bart is that the varying degrees of collaboration -- passive as well as active -- all still boil down to collaboration. And it's a problem that is posed every single day -- to what degree does one collaborate, actively or passively, with an evil system and evil ideologists? Or, as we used to say in the '60s, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." Or, as Goethe wrote in Young Werther, "Every step one takes costs the lives of a thousand poor little worms...."

Posted by jherman at 9:29 AM

December 26, 2005

TWO LI'L FOOTNOTES

As a follow-up to "Mr. Cheney's Imperial Presidency," the lead editorial in last Friday's Times, may we add two li'l footnotes?

1) "This so-called ill treatment and torture in detention centers, stories of which were spread everywhere ... were not, as some assumed, inflicted methodically, but were excesses committed by individual prison guards, their deputies, and men who laid violent hands on the detainees."
--Rudolf Hoess, SS commandant, Auschwitz, quoted in Testimony at Nuremberg, April 15, 1946

2) "You know, the Germans say you have a 'fingertip feel' -- Fingerspitzengefühl -- you know how a place smells, how it feels. A strategist who doesn't have that innate sense about the area he's working is going to get us in trouble."
-- Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, quoted in "American Viceroy," Dec. 19, 2005, in The New Yorker. (See OUTRAGE: THE 11 O'CLOCK NUMBER.)

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Posted by jherman at 11:05 AM

December 22, 2005

HALLMARK TIME

We don't know why we were targeted. These cowboy-artist homilies turned up, unbidden, in our e-mail inbox. Maybe it's just a Hallmark time of year. Love the rocks (y' gotta click to see 'em), but as an artist friend of ours says: "YeeeeeeeeeeHaaaaaaaaaw!! Thass gotta be somatha gol dangest, inspirationalest, Walter Brennanest, somabitchinest muthafuckin', hep me Jeezus words spoken in tongues, ah ever done heard. S'cuse me, I gotta go down to da river." Or as another friend of ours, a critic, says: "Happy whatever the fuck it is." We'll be back when we're back.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Posted by jherman at 10:07 AM

December 20, 2005

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT

We've been banging on about the American strategy to democratize Salvadorize Iraq, as though the coming SUNNI GENOCIDE is a revelation because a "U.S. regime secretly bent on mass murder" has proxies doing the dirty work. But all of this has been hidden in plain sight for so long -- in the mainstream media and elsewhere -- that we're shocked by our own naiveté.

Way back in 1967, an artist friend of ours, Norman O. Mustill, commented on the reality of mass murder in Southeast Asia (pre-Pol Pot) with a collage, left, that leaves no doubt about who was responsible during the Vietnam War. The geography has changed since then. The issues have changed. The players at the very top have changed. But so much has not, including a crucial U.S. military death-squad advisor whose work is never done. (Collage © 1967 by Norman O. Mustill, from FLYPAPER. Courtesy Beach Books, Texts & Documents.)

Long story short: Have a look at Max Fuller's roundup of media reports, "Death-squad style massacres: For Iraq, 'The Salvador Option' Becomes Reality," which cites chapter and verse (URLs included). Published last June, it "examines evidence that the 'Salvador Option' for Iraq has been ongoing for some time and attempts to say what such an option will mean." Among other things:

It pays particular attention to the role of the Special Police Commandos, considering both the background of their US liaisons and their deployment in Iraq. The article also looks at the evidence for death-squad style massacres in Iraq and draws attention to the almost complete absence of investigation.

The roundup begins with key articles:

• A Newsweek report of Jan. 8, 2005, which said that U.S.-backed counter-insurgency techniques used in El Salvador (including mass murder, torture and other atrocities), were about to be applied in Iraq -- a claim denied by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, although, as Fuller points out, "the Salvador Option was already well underway";

• Peter Maass's "The Way of the Commandos," a vivid, 8,000-word piece published in The New York Times Magazine on May 1, 2005, which offers stunning details about "Iraq's most fearsome counterinsurgency force" at the time, the Special Police Commandos led by Gen. Adnan Thabit, center, and his relationship with James Steele, right, a specially assigned U.S. military advisor who "honed his tactics leading a Special Forces mission in El Salvador during that country's brutal civil war in the 1980s" and in similar operations earlier in Vietnam. It also details the commando relationship with Steven Casteel, a former top official of the U.S. Justice Dept.'s Drug Enforcement Administration "who spent much of his professional life immersed in the drug wars of Latin America," where he collaborated with the paramilitary death squads in Colombia.

Those are only two of nearly three dozen articles Fuller cites. Other reports not included in his roundup are worth reading as well, such as:

• Washington Post reporter David Ignatius's "'Our Guys Stayed and Fought'" (Feb. 25, 2005), which begins: "Let's call it the 'Adnan and Jim Strategy.'"

• [London] Independent reporter A.K. Gupta's "Unraveling Iraq's Secret Militias" (April 5, 2005), itself a telling summary of reports from Agence France-Presse, the Boston Globe, Knight Ridder, the Christian Science Monitor, Stars and Stripes, The Guardian, The Times of London, and elsewhere.

• David Corn's "From Iran-Contra to Iraq" (May 7, 2005) in The Nation, which recaps the Maass article and describes what Maass does not get into -- how Steele was discredited for lying about his participation in clandestine arms shipments to the Contras, which were exposed in the Congressional Iran-Contra investigation; how he fiinally admitted he had discussed these shipments with top American officials (Donald Gregg, the national security advisor to then-vice president George H.W. Bush, and Edwin G. Corr, then the U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador); and how, despite minor obstacles, Steele's career sailed right along.

• Kim Sengupta's "Iraq's dirty war of wolves in police clothing," reprinted in The New Zealand Herald from The Independent (Nov. 21, 2005), which describes the Wolf Brigade as vying with Adnan's commandos "for the title of most feared" thugs and, like The New York Times last week, talks about "tortured prisoners huddled in dungeons, death-squad victims with their hands tied behind their backs, often mutilated with knives and electric drills," and "families searching for relations who have been 'disappeared.'"

There are still other reports. One by Wall Street Journal reporter Greg Jaffe, from last February, talks about the proliferation of shadowy "pop-up militias," as Gupta describes it, noting their links to Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, "who heads the mammoth U.S. effort to create Iraq’s myriad security forces." Petraeus calls Adnan's thugs “a horse to back” -- which he has, by financing their "vehicles, ammunition, radios and more weapons.”

The Pentagon itself stated a year ago -- in the December 25 issue of the Advisor, an official Pentagon publication -- that “Special Police Commandos have been deployed all over Iraq to hunt down insurgents and" -- this makes it sound civilized -- "to help provide security for the [then-]upcoming Jan. 30 elections."

Last January, as Newsweek reported, Rumsfeld said "the idea of a Salvador option was 'nonsense' and denied that U.S. Special Forces were going into Syria. But when asked whether such a policy was under consideration, he replied, 'Why would I even talk about something like that?'" Why, indeed. Eleven months later, the U.S. regime still doesn't want to talk about Iraqi death squads and even less about the mass graves that are being found.

The Orwellian ironies are so strong, so much a part of the American political landscape and have been for so long, not merely since 9/11, that we take them for granted. Yup, the American strategy to democratize Salvadorize Iraq and distance ourselves from the death squads makes us proud to be red-white-and-blue citizens. All hail the twin engines of misrule in the "land of the free and the home of the brave."

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: "I've been through quite a few of the articles listed by Max Fuller and the ones you've listed. In all of them, one main observation is missing -- the fact that the ultimate effect of large scale death-squad activity is almost always genocidal.

"So many people are killed outright, and so many additional people die due to the secondary results of mass murder, that genocide is inevitable. No one has reached the obvious conclusion that 15 years from now a huge number of Iraqi Sunnis probably will have been killed or exiled -- probably somewhere between 500,000 to 1.8 million. [See 4th paragraph. -- JH]

"Another missing observation is that this sort of death-squad activity combined with invasion has a very clear precedent in the German invasion of Eastern Europe and Russia. Military police commandos followed right behind the frontline troops and rounded up Jews, communist leaders and partisans. They functioned as death squads. Even their tactics were very similar to what we are seeing in Iraq. And they were often people who worked as proxies for the Germans.

"In modern warfare, this sort of genocidal death-squad activity is an inherent part of any invasion and occupation. I think this point needs to be stressed."

-- William Osborne

PPS: The top story on the front page of The New York Times, "G.I.'s to Increase U.S. Supervision of Iraqi Police" (dateline Baghdad, Dec. 29, 2005), addresses the issues we have been discussing. "Here's an excerpt," Osborne notes, "with the usual double talk":

The increase is seen as a way to exert firmer control over the commando units, which are suspected of carrying out widespread atrocities against civilians in Sunni Arab neighborhoods. Human rights groups here say the units may be guilty of murdering and torturing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Sunni Arab men of military age.

The conduct of the commandos has become a source of intense friction between the Shiite-led Iraqi government and American officials, who say the reports of the atrocities are jeopardizing the campaign to persuade Sunnis
to stop supporting the insurgency.

The plan to increase the number of American advisers is a significant departure from the overall American strategy of giving the Iraqis the lead role in fighting the insurgency. Indeed, the allegations of atrocities arose only after Americans began to give the Iraqi units more freedom to act on their own.

Even as he talked about the increase in advisers, the officer confirmed details of a shift to fewer American troops covering more Iraqi ground.

"In other words, the article presents talk of more U.S. supervision when, actually, general American participation is being reduced. Is this not what I have described -- setting up a potential genocide while distancing ourselves and covering our tracks? It worked against the Mayans in Central America, and it will probably work in Iraq."

See this from Der Spiegel Online:

Guatemala, 1981-1983

In the history of Guatemala's bloody 36 years of civil war from 1960 to 1996, the early 80s stand out as a period of particular viciousness. In what became known as "The Silent Holocaust," the Guatemalan army methodically worked its way through the country's Mayan communities, killing men, women and children. A total of 200,000 people died during the war, many thousands of them Mayan victims of genocide.

Posted by jherman at 10:52 AM

December 19, 2005

NOTICE TAKEN

Byron Calame, the public editor of The New York Times, says his interest was piqued. His column on Sunday was headlined "The Book Review: Who Critiques Whom -- and Why?" He wrote: "When The New York Times Book Review published its list of "100 Notable Books of the Year" earlier this month, calculations from several readers and bloggers soon turned up in my in-box."

We didn't send him our Dec. 3 item TIMES BOOK FAVES AND A BIG NON-FAVE. Maybe someone else did. Or maybe he noticed it here on ArtsJournal, or via a link on Romenesko, or maybe he noticed our Dec. 11 follow-up item CREDIT WHERE DUE, AND BONES TO PICK.

Calame said nothing, however, about what piqued our interest most: the big Robert Fisk non-fave, which Publishers Weekly liked as much as we did. ("Unflinching, provocative, brilliantly written -- a work of major importance for today’s world," PW said.) Fisk's exclusion from the NYTBR 100 Notable Books of the Year for 2005 was not Calame's concern because, as he wrote, "Of course, much of the judgment about the books falls into the realm of opinion -- and beyond the public editor's mandate." We're not crazy about the "of course." But fair enough.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: Several letters about the 100 Notable Books, Robert Fisk's "The Great War for Civilisation," and Geoffrey Wheatcroft's review of it, have since been published in the Book Review (in the issue of Dec. 25, 2005).

Posted by jherman at 10:25 AM

December 18, 2005

MORE 'GANDA

Here's the 'ganda machine at work, visually speaking, in the photo from the Roosevelt Room at the White House, where the TV cameras were called in to televise an unusual live radio address by the Bullshitter-in-Chief. Although it is cropped, below, as used by The New York Times on its Web site (and downplayed in a secondary position), the full shot appeared huge above the fold on the front page of The Times print edition.

Needless to say, the photo shows Teddy "Rough Rider" Roosevelt in the background and the "Tough Talker" in the foreground. You don't think the Bullshitter's placement was accidental, do you? His handlers no doubt wanted to borrow TR's glamour, and that photo is one way of doing it, although all it really does for us is re-inforce the imperial image of U.S. power and show how tin-eared the Bullshitter's handlers can be. Hasn't he been trying to soft-pedal imperial ambitions in Iraq?

(Sidenote: We've mentioned ROUGH RIDERS AND TOUGH TALKERS before, when Tucker Carlson paid tribute to The Weekly Standard's neoconnery and the bottomless war-mongering of its editor, William Kristol.)

The Times story itself, headlined "Bush Says He Ordered Domestic Spying," notes the Bullshitter's "public confirmation ... of one of the country's most secret intelligence programs." It also makes a striking historical comparison:

His admission was reminiscent of Dwight Eisenhower's in 1960 that he had authorized U-2 flights over the Soviet Union after Francis Gary Powers was shot down on a reconnaissance mission. At the time, President Eisenhower declared that "no one wants another Pearl Harbor," an argument Mr. Bush echoed on Saturday in defending his program as a critical component of antiterrorism efforts.

Not mentioned is that Eisenhower at first denied the U-2 flights, which proved to be the worst diplomatic blunder of his presidency. He only made his admission after the Soviets paraded Powers in front of cameras, along with the wreckage of his U-2. But never mind. Who wants another Pearl Harbor? We don't.

Typically:

In his statement on Saturday, Mr. Bush did not address the main question directed at him by some members of Congress on Friday: why he felt it necessary to circumvent the system established under current law, which allows the president to seek emergency warrants, in secret, from the court that oversees intelligence operations. His critics said that under that law, the administration could have obtained the same information.

In fact, as The Times reiterated in today's lead editorial:

The intelligence agency already had the capacity to read your mail and your e-mail and listen to your telephone conversations. All it had to do was obtain a warrant from a special court created for this purpose. The burden of proof for obtaining a warrant was relaxed a bit after 9/11, but even before the attacks the court hardly ever rejected requests.

So, the editorial bluntly asserts, the Bullshitter's justification for the illegal domestic spy program -- that officials "sometimes need to start monitoring large batches of telephone numbers" before the special courts can act -- "is nonsense."

As to his "hotly insisting he was working within the Constitution and the law, and denouncing The Times for disclosing the program's existence," the editorial concludes, "this White House has cried wolf so many times on the urgency of national security threats that it has lost all credibility. But we have learned the hard way that Mr. Bush's team cannot be trusted to find the boundaries of the law, much less respect them."

Or as noted in a reader's shorthand in the postscript to VICTORY-IN-IRAQ DAY: "So what's next, ARBEIT MACHT FREI?"

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Posted by jherman at 11:50 AM

December 16, 2005

VICTORY-IN-IRAQ DAY

Now for a toastie postie about the size of the lie, brought to our attention by a tireless conscript:

The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, because the vast masses of a nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad.

The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them more easy victims of a big lie than a small one, because they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell big ones.

Such a form of lying would never enter their heads. They would never credit others with the possibility of such great impudence as the complete reversal of facts. Even explanations would long leave them in doubt and hesitation, and any trifling reason would dispose them to accept a thing as true.

Something therefore always remains and sticks from the most imprudent of lies, a fact which all bodies and individuals concerned in the art of lying in this world know only too well, and therefore they stop at nothing to achieve this end.

-- Adolf Hitler in "Mein Kampf"

Postscript: Adolf certainly stopped at nothing. His 'ganda machine was second to none, like his war 'ganda. Slogans were a specialité de maison:

The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.

These days the technique, not lost on Rover Boy, floats the Bullshitter's boat. Our self-righteous Ship of State, with the war prez on the poop deck, grandly steams along.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: A reader writes: "So what's next, ARBEIT MACHT FREI?"

Another writes: "This reminds me of a conversation I had recently with a friend of mine. I contended that, as a people, Americans are the most propagandized citizenry in the history of the planet. As bad as the Nazis lied, they didn't go nearly as far as the current administration. If we could somehow bring old Josef Goebels forward in time to late 2005 America, I think his response to the U.S. government propaganda machine would be the German equivalent of 'You are shitting me! You can really get away with this?'"

From another: "Do you think there is a permanent (undercover?) government that belies any apparent changes in administrations? Do we as a nation stand for anything humanitarian and life affirming? Does a nation even exist? Is it the embodiment of the constitution and the laws?"

And another: "Similar thoughts have been much on my mind. Ultimately these slogans represent a primitive but clever form of cultural conditioning and as such are a crude form of aesthetics -- the aesthetics of war."

Posted by jherman at 12:53 PM

December 15, 2005

'GANDA MACHINE GEARS UP

We have led a country to civil war in order to permanently weaken it. We have largely destroyed its cultural patrimony to erase its identity and autonomy. We have set up a potential genocide against our opponents. And now we step aside and claim we can't control what will happen. Pinter was so dead-on when he said in his Nobel speech, "You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good."

Right on cue the U.S. propaganda machine gears up for stage two. They have planted the gangrene in Iraq (Pinter again) and now are stepping aside with the claim that they can't control what happens. See this morning's news analysis, "A Path Forward, With Many Ifs," about the Bullshitter-in-Chief's strategy for "complete victory":

[I]n four recent speeches and an accompanying strategy document he has made his case, some of his aides concede, just as his ability to control events in Iraq may be about to erode.

American officials fully expect that for months after the Iraqi election on Thursday the American ambassador in Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, will remain the critical behind-the-scenes power in the creation of a factious coalition to run the country.

Leaving that paradox unexplained (eroding control while pulling the strings) the "analysis" moves right along:

[I]t is the longer term -- the next year -- that worries many of Mr. Bush's advisers and the United States military. Amid insurgent attacks and warnings of civil war, the government may take months to form, and many officials wonder whether that lag will distract the Iraqis from leaping the hurdles that Mr. Bush wants them to clear before he will begin withdrawing American forces next year.

Besides,

One senior White House official, insisting on anonymity because he is not authorized to talk about Iraq, said last week that in meetings "we've talked about the possibility that the new Iraqi government will see no advantage in putting its security forces out on the street quickly" if they think the result will be the departure of American firepower.

Although, of course:

Some officials have the opposite fear, that a new Iraqi government will ask the Americans to leave too quickly.

All agree, however, that over the next year the American ability to shape the Iraqi battleground will gradually decline.

Smooth stuff. Sometimes the gears of the 'ganda machine can sound like a cat's purr.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: By the way, we're not the only ones writing about the coming Sunni genocide. Have a look at Robert Parry's piece, "Bush in Iraq, Slouching toward Genocide," posted at Consortium News, his essential Web site. We hadn't seen the piece until this morning, but now that we have, we gotta say he was not just ahead of us, he laid out the argument better than us:

Despite pretty words about democracy and freedom, George W. Bush's "victory" plan in Iraq is starting to look increasingly like an invitation to genocide, the systematic destruction of the Sunni minority for resisting its US-induced transformation from the nation's ruling elite into second-class citizenship.

Parry noted, as we did, certain parallels between the infiltration of Iraqi government security forces by "death squads" operating against the Sunnis and the ones that operated in Central America in the 1980s under right-wing regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador. And he speaks with the authority of an investigative journalist who broke many Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek:

The way Parry sees it,

The next element in the equation will be how far the war against the Sunnis goes -- or put differently, how stubbornly the Sunnis resist. For his part, Bush reiterated that he will only be satisfied with "complete victory," which suggests he is resolved to break the back of the Sunni resistance at whatever cost.

All we can say is, "Ditto."

Posted by jherman at 10:50 AM

December 14, 2005

OUTRAGE: THE 11 O'CLOCK NUMBER

Revelations of Iraqi torture centers continue. As John Burns reports, the Wolf Brigade of Shiite commandos have hung Sunnis from roof hooks, extracted their fingernails, applied electric shocks to their genitals and burned their bodies with lighted cigarettes. This has outraged American military officers and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad. So we are told this morning on the front page of The New York Times.

How does that outrage square with the idea, posted here last week, of a "coming genocide of the Sunnis" to be conducted by "proxies for a U.S. regime secretly bent on mass murder"? Note this from the Washington Post on Monday: "Shiite political leaders say the U.S. military frequently visits the facilities and suggest that American authorities would know about any abuse."

Well of course they knew, and of course they're outraged. The principle job for the U.S. regime now is to create the appearance of non-involvement and even a show of resistance, especially with Iraqi elections coming up tomorrow.

But it's theater -- and the 11 o'clock number is "Khalilzad's mission in Iraq," which Jon Lee Anderson details in a lengthy profile in this week's issue of The New Yorker. Too bad the article, "American Viceroy," is not online. [It's posted now, as of 12/19. -- JH] Khalilzad is shown to be a master theatrician, a role player of consummate skill, and a backroom dealer par excellence.

Not to mention:

(1) he was central to shaping the original neocon policy of pre-emptive war;
(2) he is a disciple of Albert Wohlstetter, the University of Chicago military strategist who argued for U.S. world hegemony and paved Khalilzad's way to Washington, and who, not incidentally, introduced arch-neocon Richard Perle (chairman of Rummy's Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2003) to arch-operator Ahmad Chalabi (responsible for steering the U.S. to the bogus WMD intelligence);
(3) he is an intimate of Condi, Wolfie and Cheney, and -- not least -- is credited with putting things in order in Afghanistan (except for minor details like guessing wrong about the Taliban).

The guy's a piece of work.

Khalilzad called a news conference to denounce the torture centers and, as Burns reports, send a message that "the Americans, so long seen as patrons of the Shiites and Kurds ... are determined to protect Sunni interests, too." They will believe it at their peril.

Come back later. We'll be adding more to this item.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript One: The first rule of duplicity ... misdirection.

How come Kahlilzad, himself a Muslim, didn't exercise his outrage earlier? "For months," Anderson writes, "there had been reports that newly formed interior-ministry brigades were carrying out death-squad-style operations in and around Baghdad."

Commanding a paramilitary bureaucracy of 5,000 employees and contractors at the U.S. Embassy, Khalilzad is at "the true locus of power in Iraq," we're told. When a Sunni politician came to his office in the Green Zone and told him the Shiite militias "were a greater problem than the insurgency, Anderson describes how "Khalilzad raised his eyebrows with interest ... acknowledged that militias were a problem." But, hélas, he had another, more "immediate concern" (terrorists from Syria, who are actually a small fraction of the insurgents according to the U.S. military's own estimate).

Uh, did we say Kahlilzad's show of outrage was a well-planned, previously rehearsed piece of misdirection? When U.S. soldiers found the torture centers, "it was clear he had been prepared for the discovery and that he had worked out the steps of his response in advance," Anderson writes. "The story looked like a disaster for the Bush Administration. ... But Khalilzad wasn't unduly concerned; instead he tried to spin the discovery as a good thing, because it would send a mesage to the Sunni community that the Americans were intervening on their behalf."

Mirabile dictu. Just what Burns reported today, almost verbatim. (Anderson's piece appeared on Monday.) Is it too obvious to point out, again, that the American military's concern -- and Kahlilzad's outrage -- came a tad late? "Zal makes it look like his suggestions are in the Iraqi interest," Anderson quotes an Iraqi consultant to a senior politician. "All the major players like him," and he "knows how to play his Muslim card."

He's also "very good about getting on the phone and threatening people," according to an international official who recalled watching Kahlilzad play the "bad cop" in a good cop-bad cop negotiation. "He was comfortable with that kind of use of power."

Postscript Two: The second rule of duplicity ... see nothing.

The Wolf Brigade "was armed and financed under an $11 billion American program to develop new Iraqi security forces," Burns reports. (Gee, why does this seem like Central America?)

The ambassador's statement that the American command had decided to embed officers with Interior Ministry units [for oversight] suggested that the practice of having American officers attached to commando units like the Wolf Brigade, common when they were established over the last year, had fallen away as the buildup of Iraqi forces accelerated.

Uh-huh. It just happened to fall away. Sargent Schultz wasn't around at all. I seeez nutzing!!!

Burns spills the beans (and good for him) at the end of his report. According to Sunni critics:

[U]niformed American officers and other Americans in plainclothes are an obtrusive presence in the Adnan Palace, the high-domed edifice in the Green Zone that was once a retreat for Saddam Hussein, and where most top Interior Ministry officials, including Mr. Jabr, the minister, now work.

General Thabit, founder of the Wolf Brigade, has an office along a corridor from Mr. Jabr's, and American officers shuttle back and forth on the floor.

The Shias have got the training, equipment and funding they need. It looks like this is the first stage of a coming genocide. Now it's time for an American "withdrawal" so the U.S. regime can claim innocence.

Postscript Three: The top story on the front page of The New York Times, "G.I.'s to Increase U.S. Supervision of Iraqi Police" (dateline Baghdad, Dec. 29, 2005), addresses the issues we have been discussing. "Here's an excerpt," William Osborne notes, "with the usual double talk":

The increase is seen as a way to exert firmer control over the commando units, which are suspected of carrying out widespread atrocities against civilians in Sunni Arab neighborhoods. Human rights groups here say the units may be guilty of murdering and torturing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Sunni Arab men of military age.

The conduct of the commandos has become a source of intense friction between the Shiite-led Iraqi government and American officials, who say the reports of the atrocities are jeopardizing the campaign to persuade Sunnis
to stop supporting the insurgency.

The plan to increase the number of American advisers is a significant departure from the overall American strategy of giving the Iraqis the lead role in fighting the insurgency. Indeed, the allegations of atrocities arose only after Americans began to give the Iraqi units more freedom to act on their own.

Even as he talked about the increase in advisers, the officer confirmed details of a shift to fewer American troops covering more Iraqi ground.

"In other words, the article presents talk of more U.S. supervision when, actually, general American participation is being reduced. Is this not what I have described -- setting up a potential genocide while distancing ourselves and covering our tracks? It worked against the Mayans in Central America, and it will probably work in Iraq."

See this from Der Spiegel Online:

Guatemala, 1981-1983

In the history of Guatemala's bloody 36 years of civil war from 1960 to 1996, the early 80s stand out as a period of particular viciousness. In what became known as "The Silent Holocaust," the Guatemalan army methodically worked its way through the country's Mayan communities, killing men, women and children. A total of 200,000 people died during the war, many thousands of them Mayan victims of genocide.

Posted by jherman at 9:07 AM

December 13, 2005

OUR MAN WATSON

We keep asking: "Isn't it time to drop religious faith from human belief?" We also keep answering: "The answer is self evident." (Check out SUPERNATURAL DUMMIES and GRAY'S ANATOMY.) So it tickled us to see Deborah Solomon's Q&A with Peter Watson this past Sunday.

Yes, it was a promo for his latest book, "Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud." But Watson offered no bullshit, less certainly than the usual maundering about religion that we see in newsprint. Some excerpts:

What do you think is the single worst idea in history?

Without question, ethical monotheism. The idea of one true god. The idea that our life and ethical conduct on earth determines how we will go in the next world. This has been responsible for most of the wars and bigotry in history.

But religion has also been responsible for investing countless lives with meaning and inner richness.

I lead a perfectly healthy, satisfactory life without being religious. And I think more people should try it.

It sounds as if you're starting your own church.

Not at all. I do not believe in the inner world. I think that the inner world comes from the exploration of the outer world -- reading, traveling, talking. I do not believe that meditation or cogitation leads to wisdom or peace or the truth.

Then I don't understand why you would want to write a history of ideas, since inner reflection and dreaminess surely count at least as much as scientific experiment in the formation of new ideas.

To paraphrase the English philosopher John Gray, it is more sensible to look out on the world from a zoo than from a monastery. Science, or looking out, is better than contemplation, or looking in.

We'll skip over Watson's disparagement of the novel as an art form, even though we're no big fan of Virginia Woolf either -- Solomon cites Woolf''s "rejection of the panoramic outward view in favor of inner sensibility" as an achievement -- to bring you a couple more gems:

You strike me as deeply unanalyzed. Have you ever considered seeing a psychiatrist?

I was a psychiatrist. I left because I thought Freud was rubbish. ... I thought Freudian therapy was a waste of time. I don't believe there is any such thing as the unconscious or the id.

In that case, where do you think ideas come from?

I don't think they come out of daydreaming.

But here's the kicker. We once tried to read Watson's previous book, "The Modern Mind," a great big tome subtitled "The Intellectual History of the 20th Century." Tried is the operative word. We couldn't get through it because it read so much like a textbook: Blah ... blah ... blah ... although it's useful as a reference tool. He must've been daydreaming when he wrote it. We hope this time he was fully awake.

Frankly, we have our doubts. The title alone makes us wonder whether the new one is just a retread with added prequel mileage. You'd think, given his interest in Gray, that something of Gray's style might have rubbed off on him. Watson has great material, but his writing (unlike his replies above) is so verbose. He prattles. Gray is just the opposite: tight, almost aphoristic. His hallmark is fascinating brevity filled with original ideas and striking observations.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: It so happens, Gray liked the damned book. And since he knows a helluva lot more than we do about intellectual history, it seems wise to let you know what he said about it.

Posted by jherman at 10:03 AM

December 12, 2005

NUMBERS ON PARADE

The report in today's Washington Post, "Abuse Cited In 2nd Jail Operated by Iraqi Ministry -- Official Says 12 Prisoners Subjected to 'Severe Torture,'" gives further warning of Sunni genocide. Oddly, the WashPost buried this graf very low in the story:

Investigators said they found 625 prisoners at the center but declined to give details about them. Most of the detainees found at the secret prison last month were Sunni Arabs who had been picked up by forces of the Shiite Muslim-dominated Interior Ministry.

The New York Times at least had that info where it belonged -- in the lede -- notwithstanding a headline that reads like the CDC found a case of bird flu.

And how about today's other piece of headline-making news? As CNN.com so aptly put it, "Bush: Iraqi democracy making progress; estimates 30,000 Iraqis killed." That's progress? When there are 300,000 killed, Iraq oughta be 10 times freer. Somebody stop him. The Bullshitter-in-Chief has morphed into the colonel in Vietnam who secured his place in military history by telling a reporter: "We had to destroy the village to save the village."

Posted by jherman at 2:26 PM

December 11, 2005

CREDIT WHERE DUE, AND BONES TO PICK

We have to hand it to them. Just in time to miss the cut-off date for choosing the 100 Notable Books of 2005, the editors of The New York Times Book Review have done themselves proud today with a front-page review of Robert Fisk's "The Great War for Civilisation," which offers notable, if grudging, admiration.

Written by the eminently fair-minded British historian Geoffrey Wheatcroft, author of "The Controversy of Zion" and other books, the review is lengthy and circumspect and, we might add (not that we take credit), has appeared soon after our swipe at the NYTBR for ignoring Fisk's work. (As was noted at the time, "For all we know, a forthcoming review is in the works.")

Wheatcroft's fair-mindedness notwithstanding, we do have some bones to pick with his judgments and taste. He begins, weirdly in our view, by making a claim hard to square with reality: "Even those of us who are not optimists by disposition have to admit that there are good reasons for being cheerful when we look around the world today." Really?

We got past that peculiar hurdle quickly enough to Wheatcroft's concession that, well, the picture in Africa is "often tragic" and not too "rosy" in Latin America, either. But most of all, it's the Middle East which is the singular exception to any reason for cheerfulness -- the "one region on earth," he writes, "that gives ground for the deepest gloom."

This segues into a reasonable summary of Fisk's career as a longtime hand in the Middle East, "one of the most controversial journalists of the age, winner of numerous prizes, much admired by some, including colleagues who respect his obsessive attention to detail and sheer physical courage, execrated by others because of what has been seen as his open hostility to Israel, America and the West."

And so to the meat of the matter -- Fisk's "Big Book (and how) and his testament," as Wheatcroft terms it -- which is where we started objecting. For instance, he points out that Fisk "lets it all hang out, diffuse and inchoate, made worse by a penchant for Fine Writing." We'll grant "diffuse" but not "inchoate." Yes, the book could have been shorter. (It's more than half a million words by Wheatcroft's count.) It could have been less spread out, less repetitive. But it is not shapeless or formless or rudimentary. And the examples of Fine Writing that Wheatcroft singles out not only don't make his point, they disprove it. (Later for that.)

Most important: "What Fisk's enemies will be scanning the book for is not so much stylistic lapses as the bias of which he is often accused," Wheatcroft writes, "and here I believe he can be defended, at least in terms of personal honor. Robert Fisk is not a crooked journalist like -- well, some sentences are better left unfinished, but quite a few names come to mind." Yet Fisk's "brand of reporting-with-attitude," the sort of "angry partisanship" that "could almost be Fisk's heraldic motto," does him no good with a fair-minded reviewer who concedes he "largely shares Fisk's broader outlook, if one can filter out the rage and exaggeration."

Reporting-with-attitude means Fisk "doesn't let us forget that he loathes Saddam Hussein, and is contemptuous of Yasir Arafat even as he sarcastically mentions his own anti-Israeli reputation," Wheatcroft points out. It means Fisk is more than willing to criticize what he calls "Israel's policy of state murder." It means that he heaps contempt upon "American journalists who report in so craven a fashion from the Middle East," not least The Times and Times writers, who are, Wheatcroft notes, "regularly pummeled."

What Wheatcroft objects to above all, however, is that this "ungovernable anger may do [Fisk's] heart credit, but it does not make for satisfactory history."

His book contains very many gruesome accounts of murder and mutilation, and page after page describing torture in almost salacious detail. This has an unintended effect. A reader who knew nothing about the subject -- the proverbial man from Mars -- might easily conclude from "The Great War for Civilisation" that the whole region is mad, bad and dangerous to know, which is presumably not what Fisk wants us to think. Nor does he much abet the argument by George W. Bush and Tony Blair that Islam is essentially a peaceful and gentle religion. Most of the Muslims met here seem cruel and crazy, exemplifying Shelley's line about "bloody faith, the foulest birth of time."

Well, the effect is unintended if you believe Wheatcroft's presumption -- which, having read the book, we don't. We're also totally mystified as to why he thinks Fisk would want to abet any argument by two political leaders whom he believes to be war criminals. And if "bloody faith" is not the cause of the gruesome murder and mutilation Wheatcroft would rather Fisk were less willing to describe, why then did he himself single out the Middle East as the "one region on earth that gives ground for the deepest gloom"?

He contends, furthermore, that Fisk's "relentless catalog of butchery also misses the point" because, "unless one is an unconditional pacifist, one must accept even the death of innocents." Wheatcroft tries to prove the point by comparing the violence in Iraq with that of World War II, which, while utterly deplorable, he says, did not mean the war was unjustified. "Likewise," he adds, "there is a distinction between the violent consequences of the present operation in Iraq, and the question of how far it was wise or virtuous in the first place."

So putting the slaughter aside, just what is the virtue and wisdom of the invasion of Iraq? Talk about missing the point!

Wheatcroft criticizes Fisk for damaging his own case because his "condemnations, and his tone of voice, are so sweeping." He explains, for example, that Fisk "became particularly unpopular four years ago because of what he wrote after the attacks in New York" by Al Qaeda:

This is not the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming hours and days. It is also about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and U.S. helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996. . . .

The real trouble was caused, though, by when he wrote that. "[A]lthough there is a great deal to be said in criticism of American policy in the Middle East," Wheatcroft explains, "Sept. 12, 2001, might not have been the best day to say it." Instead of noting Fisk's courage for saying it that day, not to mention his prescience, the review asserts that Fisk "still feels sorry for himself about the torrent of abuse he received." Perhaps Wheatcroft has personal knowledge of that. Maybe he read it somewhere. But it's not evident from the book.

Further -- and this Wheatcroft does base on his reading of the book -- he asserts that Fisk does not "allow for historical context." Yet adducing Fisk's tale of the 1953 coup in Iran, which installed the Shah, Wheatcroft is capable of being wondrously obtuse. He defends the coup plotters -- the C.I.A.'s Kermit Roosevelt and unnamed British agents -- by offering an anecdote. "As it happens, one of the conspirators is a neighbor of mine, a charming and courteous old gentleman" who joined MI16 after serving in the Royal Navy and who to this day, Wheatcroft wants us to know, "is impenitent about that power play in the cold war." Why not? Because the lovely old gent "and his fellow plotters didn't delude themselves that they were trying to bring good government to the Persian people." All we're missing is the Noel Coward music.

If this is the sort of preposterous historical context Wheatcroft prefers, give us Fisk's lack of it anytime. Especially when fair-minded Wheatcroft fesses up that "there is plenty" in the book "to make us think again about where the [Middle East] is heading and why." Actually, "some of Fisk's points are very telling," he writes. Such as? "Next time the president informs us of the noble and beneficent cause of democracy, read Fisk on Algeria, which did indeed have democratic elections, only they were unfortunately won by the wrong party in the form of the Islamic extremists."

So yes, Wheatcroft is willing to concede that, "at least in part, 'The Great War for Civilisation' is a stimulating and absorbing book." And well he should, since the dramatic conclusion of his review -- the best thing about it -- is not just rich in deeply ironic historical context; it is a direct steal from the book (see page 147). He cites what that problematical Arabist T.E. Lawrence had to say 75 years ago in words which have the sting of truth today more than ever.

We might as well give the full quote, precisely as Fisk gives it:

The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqés are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows . . . We are today not far from disaster. [The ellipsis is Fisk's]

You don't have to read America for England, Iraq for Mesopotamia, or Peter O'Toole for Lawrence of Arabia, to get the picture.

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands

Postscript: As to literary style, you be the judge. These are the two examples of Fine Writing that Wheatcroft disparages: "The night wind moved through the darkening trees, ruffling the robes of the Arab fighters around us." And: "I have woken in my bed to hear the blades of the palm trees outside slapping each other in the night, the rain smashing against the shutters."

He's also offended by these "tiresomely portentous sentences," because chapters begin with them: "Ben Greenberger doesn't trust the Arabs." And: "Roger Tartouche grins at visitors from beneath his steel French army helmet, head turned slightly to the left, his battledress buttoned up to the neck" -- on his gravestone, that is, our reviewer notes with disapproval.

It's a matter of taste. They're all Perfectly Fine to us.

PPS: Several letters about the 100 Notable Books, "The Great War for Civilisation," and Wheatcroft's review, have since been published in the Book Review (in the issue of Dec. 25, 2005).

Posted by jherman at 12:46 PM

December 10, 2005

HAVING A GRAND OL' TIME

Here he is folks, prick o' the litter! "We undermine the president's credibility at our nation's peril," Mr. Lieberman said. ("He is entirely correct," Mr. Cheney said.) And more from the GOP:

The Party Leader Speaks!

-- From a Conscript to the Tireless Staff of Thousands

Posted by jherman at 10:22 AM

December 8, 2005

THE SUNNI GENOCIDE

Now that Harold Pinter has given his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he has also provided us with cover to post what may be the most incredible item -- truly the hardest to believe -- we've ever put up. It's not only about genocide, which we've written about before, it's about "the coming genocide of the Sunnis in Iraq," to quote a friend of ours, which will be committed by American proxies for a U.S. regime secretly bent on mass murder. That is the contention of William Osborne, who messaged us in an e-mail earlier this week, before Pinter gave his speech.

Commenting on several of our items about Robert Fisk's new book, "The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East," Osborne wrote:

In many ways his book outlines the difference between the journalistic perspectives of Europe and America. But even Fisk has said little about a coming genocide against the Sunnis in Iraq. I've noticed that historically successful occupations almost always require genocide, and that it usually costs about 20 percent of the population at minimum. I had always reasoned that the United States did not understand this -- I doubt it is openly taught in the military schools -- and that in any case it would not be possible because U.S. citizens would not accept such behavior.

Now I see that the U.S. regime understands fully the necessity of genocide, and that its solution is to train and equip proxies to commit it. The Iraqi Shias are being trained and equipped for this purpose. The death squads, sanctions, and abuse will be slow and methodical, and the U.S. will claim innocence. Fifteen years from now, probably about a third of Iraq's Sunni population will be dead or exiled.

As hateful as we believe the Bullshitter-in-Chief and his cronies to be, we recoiled from Osborne's message. Could it be true? How had he drawn that conclusion? On what basis had he estimated such a cold-blooded calculation? The whole idea seemed so far beyond the pale -- yes, we have to say it, Satanic -- that even if it was plausible, it didn't seem reasonable. We asked him to elaborate.

But before we quote his reply, let's first quote from Pinter's acceptance speech:

The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

Almost word for word, that could have been Osborne answering our questions. He wrote:

For three years I have been so disturbed because I couldn't figure out what the U.S. was thinking with this seemingly incompetent invasion and occupation of Iraq. Now it is so obvious I feel like an idiot for not having seen it earlier. Our government often hides its true strategies, and places its criminal genius behind a facade of apparent incompetence.

As to the percentages he had come up with:

It's actually quite obvious. I first noticed this in reading Roman history. The Romans were quite matter-of-fact about it and used slavery as an additional genocidal technique. (During the early and middle Roman era there were no moral inhibitions to genocide. It was simply considered part of life.) I then noticed that similar ratios followed history all the way up to the German occupation of Poland.

To break the will of a people, about one in five has to be murdered in some form or another. Poland had 30 million people and 6 million were killed. [Most of them were Jewish Poles.] About the same ratios were apparent in Central America. The same pattern always shows up, and most recently in the Balkans -- though it was stopped before completed. Sometimes other factors can strongly affect the formula, such as ethnic and religious divisions within a country. Some countries also seem to have cultures that break a little easier than others. But the general formula holds true. Even the qualifying factors are predictable, even to the extent of being somewhat formulaic.

We're not finished with Osborne's elaboration. But let's quote again from Pinter's speech -- he gave it in a video broadcast -- which more than delivered what we'd asked for when the Nobel for literature was announced in mid-October. Referring to "the recent past" -- that is, "since the end of the Second World War" -- Pinter ripped U.S. foreign policy:

Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.

But my contention here is that the U.S. crimes in the same period have only been superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged, let alone recognised as crimes at all. I believe this must be addressed and that the truth has considerable bearing on where the world stands now. Although constrained, to a certain extent, by the existence of the Soviet Union, the United States' actions throughout the world made it clear that it had concluded it had carte blanche to do what it liked.

Direct invasion of a sovereign state has never in fact been America's favoured method. In the main, it has preferred what it has described as "low intensity conflict." Low intensity conflict means that thousands of people die but slower than if you dropped a bomb on them in one fell swoop. It means that you infect the heart of the country, that you establish a malignant growth and watch the gangrene bloom. When the populace has been subdued -- or beaten to death -- the same thing -- and your own friends, the military and the great corporations, sit comfortably in power, you go before the camera and say that democracy has prevailed. This was a commonplace in U.S. foreign policy in the years to which I refer.

Again, before Pinter made his speech Osborne had written us:

Iraq is a special case in the genocide/occupation formula because the Sunnis, who ruled under Sadaam and who now embody the major part of the resistance, only represent about a third of the population -- somewhere around eight million people. The U.S. knew it could count on Shia support. In essence, this means that only one in five of the Sunnis need to be murdered -- somewhere around 1.8 million people. This will be a large task and will take a good 15 years, I would guess, since it has to be done secretly and through proxies, and include other forms of extermination such as disease, extreme poverty, exile, rape and cultural destruction.

Osborne noted parenthetically, "The looting of Iraq's museums and cultural sites was not incompetence. It was a carefully planned part of genocide which must also eradicate cultural identity. Hitler's treatment of, and plans for, Eastern Europe and Austria are classic cases of attempted cultural genocide. And like our actions, it would also have been secret if he had suceeded." Fisk addresses this question in his book. But we'll get to that later. Osborne continued:

The U.S. knew an invasion would be a walk-in, especially after the 10-year embargo, which was part of the overall plan (and which the U.N. estimates killed about half a million people.) And it knew it would need about five to eight years after the invasion to weaken the Sunnis and strengthen the Shias enough for the necessary preparations for genocide to be set in place. The genocide will not reach a high point until about 2010, I would say, though its first manifestations are already happening.

The U.S. knew it would not have oil revenues from Iraq until the genocide is mostly complete, contrary to rosy public statements about oil production in the immediate aftermath of "liberation," and this is part of the calculation. It will be at least 2020 before the money starts really pouring in, I would estimate. The U.S. knew it would need approximately 30 large bases to prepare the genocide and to hole up in until it is over. This has been a huge priority, and they are already mostly built.

In a follow-up, Osborne added:

In contrast to Wesley Clark's op-ed today in The New York Times, the U.S. government knows that in the Arab world nationalism trumps sectarian alliances. Iraq's Shias are very wary of the Iranian Shias and will not form a close alliance with them -- not to mention that the Iranians are not even Arabs. This is a very carefully weighed and accurate calculation on the part of our government. And as a backup, Iran is being portrayed as a rogue nuclear power in order to justify embargos and other acts of war if necessary. (An example of the lack of sectarian alliances is that the Sunnis of Iraq and Syria were always wary of each other, even though they even had the same Baathist party.)

When Mel Gibson is developing a TV miniseries about the Holocaust -- this was teased on the front page of The New York Times, no less -- genocide may safely be called the entertainment flavor of the month. (Little wonder the miniseries, to be made by Gibson's Con Arists Productions, has raised eyebrows. Con Artists, indeed.)

But genocide is being treated seriously by serious documentary filmmakers. Have a look at "Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre," a 30-minute film by Sigfrido Ranucci (posted at Truthout Multimedia), which shows in some ways how the Sunni genocide is evolving. "The images of indiscriminate mass death and its methods are clear -- pacification through extermination," Osborne notes. "Even if you only watch five minutes, it is clear."

Only yesterday, for another example, Democracy Now! posted a rebroadcast of "Massacre: The Story of East Timor," a 1991 radio documentary about the massacre of more than 200,000 East Timorese during a 1975 invasion by Indonesia, which makes use of "extensive documents that show the U.S. government knew in advance of the invasion and worked behind the scenes to hide it from public scrutiny." They show further that even a U.S. administration operating under a president who has since been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize -- Jimmy Carter -- "blocked declassification of a cable transcribing President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger's meeting with [Indonesia's dictator] Suharto on December 6, 1975, in which they explicitly approved of the invasion."

The U.S. was not alone then in its effort to hide the truth, nor is it now. The National Security Archive, an independent, non-governmental research institute, "handed over the documents to an East Timorese commission of inquiry into human rights abuses that occurred between 1975 and 1999," Democracy Now! reports. Last week, however, "East Timor President Xanana Gusmao gave the commission's report to the Timorese Parliament but wanted it withheld from the public." You would think the East Timorese government would want the world to know what happened. But coming from a politician, Gusmao's behavior shouldn't surprise anyone. As Pinter said in his speech about "the search for truth":

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

Pinter went on to detail the lies familiar to us all that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq: possession of WMD and the imminent threat of an attack ("We were assured that was true. It was not true."), ties to Al Qaeda and to 9/11 ("We were assured that was true. It was not true."), a threat to world security ("We were assured that was true. It was not true."). His simple refrain has the force of a sledge hammer.

"The truth is something entirely different," he continued. "The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it." And then he turned to "the tragedy of Nicaragua," offering it "as a potent example of America's view of its role in the world, both then and now."

Pinter recounted that tragedy, starting with the chilling details of a meeting he attended at the U.S. embassy in London in the late 1980s:

The United States Congress was about to decide whether to give more money to the Contras in their campaign against the state of Nicaragua. I was a member of a delegation speaking on behalf of Nicaragua but the most important member of this delegation was a Father John Metcalf. The leader of the US body was Raymond Seitz (then number two to the ambassador, later ambassador himself). Father Metcalf said: "Sir, I am in charge of a parish in the north of Nicaragua. My parishioners built a school, a health centre, a cultural centre. We have lived in peace. A few months ago a Contra force attacked the parish. They destroyed everything: the school, the health centre, the cultural centre. They raped nurses and teachers, slaughtered doctors, in the most brutal manner. They behaved like savages. Please demand that the US government withdraw its support from this shocking terrorist activity."

Raymond Seitz had a very good reputation as a rational, responsible and highly sophisticated man. He was greatly respected in diplomatic circles. He listened, paused and then spoke with some gravity. "Father," he said, "let me tell you something. In war, innocent people always suffer." There was a frozen silence. We stared at him. He did not flinch.

Innocent people, indeed, always suffer.

Finally somebody said: "But in this case 'innocent people' were the victims of a gruesome atrocity subsidised by your government, one among many. If Congress allows the Contras more money further atrocities of this kind will take place. Is this not the case? Is your government not therefore guilty of supporting acts of murder and destruction upon the citizens of a sovereign state?"

Seitz was imperturbable. "I don't agree that the facts as presented support your assertions," he said.

"I should remind you," Pinter continued, "that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: 'The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.'"

Read the speech for more of that account -- it is stunning -- including Pinter's mention of "six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world [who] were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA." (And see our recent item about that, Which Parade Was That?)

But why bring up Nicaragua now? For several reasons:

1) As Pinter notes, the "policy" of mass murder that was used to bring down the Sandinista government, which "took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead," did exactly what Osborne says will happen in Iraq on a much larger scale. It "finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people," Pinter said. "They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. 'Democracy' had prevailed."

2) It underscores the involvement of John Negroponte, indicating that his latest roles as the American proconsul in Iraq and now as U.S. intelligence czar, are hardly a coincidence when it comes to the cold calculation needed for genocide. We noted in previous items -- The Negroponte Games and The Mass Murder Factor -- that he was a key official "coordinating U.S. covert aid to the Contras who targeted civilians in Nicaragua and shoring up a CIA-backed death squad in Honduras." His expertise won't be wasted .

3) "This 'policy' was by no means restricted to Central America," to quote Pinter again. "It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened."

One way to erase history, to make things seem as if they never happened, is to wipe out the culture. And this is where the looting of Iraq's museums and the burning of its books comes in. Osborne says the failure of the American forces to prevent that immediately after the invasion was not the result of incompetence, but rather "a carefully planned part" of a genocidal policy, because genocide "must also eradicate cultural identity."

Robert Fisk, who was in Baghad during the looting and burning, witnessed first-hand what happened. We all saw the news accounts at the time, but his descriptions of the pillaging have a special poignance, always ending in the question: Why? "Never, in all my dreams of destruction, could I have imagined the day I would enter the Iraqi National Archaeological Museum to find its treasures defiled."

They lay across the floor in tens of thousands of pieces, the priceless antiquities of Iraq's history. The looters had gone from shelf to shelf, systematically pulling down the statues and pots and amphorae of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Medes, the Persians and the Greeks and hurling them on to the concrete floor. ... The Iraqis did it. They did it to their own history, destroying the evidence of their own nation's thousands of years of civilisation.

Not since the Taliban embarked on their orgy of destruction against the Buddhas of Bamiyan and the statues in the museum of Kabul -- perhaps not since the Second World War or earlier -- have so many archaeologicial treasures been wantonly and systematically smashed to pieces. ...

When I shone my torch over one far shelf, I drew in my breath. Every pot and jar -- "3500 BC," it said on one shelf corner -- had been bashed to pieces. Why? How could they do this? Why, when the city was already burning, when anarchy had been let loose -- and less than three months after U.S. archaeologists and Pentagon officials met to discuss the country's treasures and put the museum on a military database --