How does someone become a columnist for a major newspaper? I know nothing about it, and I'm just wondering. Discounting cases of nepotism and connections, can I assume people move up through the ranks as reporters (although not necessarily for the same paper) and become columnists when they run out of steam? Can I assume that if a paper has an ideological bent, the anointed columnists have to fit into that, and if it doesn't, the paper looks for a wide variety of voices? (The Los Angeles Times comes to mind -- a once virulently Republican newspaper that has shifted over a few decades to become...well...mushy. It doesn't seem open-minded to me as much as confused. It's hard to figure out the slant of a newspaper that has Norah Vincent and Robert Scheer on its editorial page. But, to be honest, sometimes that's a good thing. Because they don't know what they're looking for, they end up, with the great courage of ignorance, publishing some astounding stories that no other paper touches. The first story I saw in a mainstream paper on civilian casualties in Afghanistan, for instance, was in the LAT.)

I started wondering about how columnists are chosen yesterday after reading Paul Krugman's column on the deceptive sales campaign for the war, which is, by New York Times standards, wonderful, and by Paul Krugman's standards, mediocre.

When Krugman's writing about taxes and jobs, he's doing something nobody in America can do one-tenth as well. He brings to the subject depth, detail, passion, and an astonishing ability to untangle webs of deceit. He's a Godsend.

But it's really hard to see the same qualities in his writing on foreign affairs. When it comes to commentary on international issues, the NYT is usually so bad that I'm grateful just to hear someone say the obvious: that if the administration didn't lie about the WMDs that were supposedly the cause of this war, they at least didn't tell the whole truth, and that there ought to be a price to pay for that kind of mendacity. (Compare the Times' most celebrated foreign affairs columnist, Thomas Friedman, on the same subject: "As far as I'm concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war." Or his sick and scary column today, urging Bush to take lessons in governance from Saddam Hussein.) I'm amazed to hear anyone even bring up the way Bush sabotaged sending a peacekeeping force to Ivory Coast -- a story I don't think the New York Times even bothered to cover. (Krugman must read the rival.)

But as refreshing as that is, Krugman isn't bringing any depth of knowledge to the topic. I could have written yesterday's column, as could the majority of people on the blogroll to the right. All it required was an ability to read the newspapers and tell the truth. Blogs wouldn't exist (or at least no one would read them) unless there was an unmet need for people who can dig around in a few news sources and tell the truth -- but shouldn't we expect more from a paper that has the enormous resources of the New York Times? Where is the columnist who can do internationally what Krugman does domestically -- write with knowledge, experience, and fire?

The weird thing is, the Times is sitting on at least one potential columnist who could probably be the foreign affairs equivalent of Paul Krugman. I recently read Chris Hedges' War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning -- an intriguing and beautifully written book by a veteran NYT war correspondent on both the mayhem and dehumanization of war and why people are seduced by it. This is Hedges, with a bit of his own "resume":

I have been in ambushes on desolate stretches of Central American roads, locked in unnerving firefights in the marshes in southern Iraq, imprisoned in the Sudan, beaten by Saudi military police, deported from Libya and Iran, captured and held for a week by Iraqi Republican Guards, strafed by Russian Mig-21s in central Bosnia, shot at by Serb snipers and shelled with deafening rounds of artillery in Sarajevo that threw out thousands of deadly bits of iron fragments.

Here, before going on to write about culture in the former Yugoslavia, is Hedges describing a phenomenon we're also experiencing in this country:

Art takes on a whole new significance in wartime. War and the nationalist myth that fuels it are the purveyors of low culture -- folklore, quasi-historical dramas, kitsch, sentimental doggerel, and theater and film that portray the glory of soldiers in past wars or current wars dying nobly for the homeland. This is why so little of what moves us during wartime has any currency once war is over. The songs, books, poems, and films that arouse us in war are awkward and embarrassing when the conflict ends, useful only to summon up the nostalgia of war's comradeship.

States at war silence their own authentic and humane culture. When this destruction is well advanced they find the lack of critical and moral restraint useful in the campaign to exterminate the culture of their opponents. By destroying authentic culture -- that which allows us to question and examine ourselves and our society -- the state erodes the moral fabric.

And here is Hedges describing his experience in Gulf War I -- again, sadly relevant:

Television reporters happily disseminated the spoon-fed images that served the propaganda effort of the military and the state. These images did little to convey the reality of war. Pool reporters, those guided around in groups by the military, wrote about "our boys" eating packaged army food, practicing for chemical weapons attacks, and bathing out of buckets in the desert. It was war as spectacle, war as entertainment. The images and stories were designed to make us feeel good aout our nation, about ourselves. The Iraqi families and soldiers being blown to bits by huge iron fragmentation bombs just over the border in Iraq were faceless and nameless phantoms.

The notion that the press was used in the war is incorrect. The press wanted to be used. It saw itself as part of the war effort.

Hedges has a knowledge of war -- and of the seductions and deceits that surround war -- that would make him a valuable commentator. Moreover, he has an understanding of human rights issues that no columnist in the country that I know of has. He's also a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School (a personal prejudice -- I'd like to see someone other than Cal Thomas writing about spiritual issues) and a reader (you'd think they'd all be readers, but one of the things that grabbed me in Hedges' book was his knowledge, and obvious love, of literature, ancient to contemporary -- a rare passion in a modern political writer). I can't think of very many people whose perspective on international affairs I'd rather hear on a regular basis.

Chris Hedges has retired from war reporting (he told Bill Moyers last month that even if the New York Times asked him to go to Iraq as a reporter, he would not go), but he still works for the NYT, contributing to the "Private Lives" column -- profiles of interesting New Yorkers. He's done some fascinating profiles -- some of which touch on political issues -- from liberal theologians, to peace activists, to yesterday's story about George Rupp, the head of the International Rescue Committee. And maybe that's what Chris Hedges has chosen to do at the moment. But given the limitations of the New York Times foreign affairs commentary, it seems like a waste of a gifted writer with an experience of war and a concern for ethical and human rights issues that is desperately needed.

Letters

"Where is the columnist who can do internationally what Krugman does domestically -- write with knowledge, experience, and fire? "

He's either a conservative whacko, or a damn radical.  I don't think the Times' management would allow such a person.  In the case of the Islamic Middle East, a few hours sitting down with the Encyclopedia Britannica (which I did a few days ago), reading the history of the Middle East since World War I (sic) would make the basics of the on-going conflict glaringly obvious, show just why so many people there hate us, and cure the common cold...well, maybe not that.

But there's not much mystery there.  Problem is, on the Middle East your columnist would have to write a more educated version of the following bit, from a Usenet article I recently wrote:

"Between World War I and World War II, most borders in the region were drawn by the West and Russia, and all were drawn under Western and Russian influence...Thereafter the politics of the region was shaped by the Cold War, which was plenty hot in the Middle East, and the oil industry.  I don't know much of the Cold War history, but generally the West and especially the USA allied itself with Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States, while the Soviets allied themselves with Egypt and Syria.  The Iraqi and Afghan governments changed and changed again as the US and the Soviets played their global chess game.  Some Middle Eastern states (notably Saudi Arabia) were able to play the two superpowers against each other, parlaying their oil into real wealth, but there never was any doubt that all successes ultimately were the result of persuading foreign powers -- none of the major states in the area had power independent of the superpowers.

"So since the fall of the Ottoman empire, Middle Eastern history has been shaped by the West, the Russians, and the Soviet Union.  Of course they feel powerless.  They were powerless for three generations.  The Palestinians in particular were uprooted by the Israelis and ended up on the losing side of the Cold War.

"It is completely consistent with this that many Arabs have decided that peaceful methods will win them nothing and are willing to send young men and women to bitter deaths."

And this:

"Do you therefore account the taking of all their freedoms at the end of World War I as nothing? Is it only Westerners who may rationally want freedom?  The most basic of freedoms -- the simple right to choose how they lived -- was taken from the Middle East when the Ottoman Empire was defeated.  The West followed that humiliating defeat with many others, of which the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and this second sack of Baghdad have been the most recent. These were a proud people with a proud martial history -- how could they not hate us?  To me, their reasons have become obvious.  And, by the same token, I think I know what we might do about that hatred."

Which is nothing that could be seen on the editorial pages of the NYTimes without evoking a firestorm of controversy.  The remarks about the Palestinians, though they are plainly true, would play very poorly with many New York Jews, who are after all a major portion of their paying readership.  But that's almost a side issue; the plain facts of the history put the West and the USA in such a poor light that they would be met with intense criticism.

This point applies to many other world conflicts; the fact of the matter, as far as I can tell, is that by just about any fairly compassionate ethical reference, much foreign policy and the global order we have has a result of generations of policies (and not only Western policies) is cruel, destructive, and foolish, much of it has been so for a very long time, and the NY Times can hardly say so, even as a matter of opinion.

It occurs to me that Noam Chomsky -- who I don't know if I agree with -- has been saying such things for a very long time. -- Randolph

Once around the blogs

• Mac Diva has an interesting perspective on Winnie Mandela.
  
  
• Barry has a thought-provoking follow-up to Bean's post on whether men can be feminists -- Can Men Be Victims of Sexism?
  
  
• (Via Matt Yglesias) TAPPED asks why we're giving reconstruction contracts to companies the bin Laden family owns a stake in.
  
  
• For someone who writes a lot about politics, I'm pretty unideological. But I could sign on to Julia's manifesto.
  
  
• And I'll sign on to Jim Capozzola's prayer, too. Although with a lot of anger that prayer is all we've got in this case.
  

As an update to my post yesterday on women in Iraq, I wanted to take note of two criticisms that I thought made important points. The first comes from Atrios' comment section:

I'm a bit confused here, because I thought I did see women among the groups of Iraqi's photographed in the south and even in Baghdad; granted it was a limited number but as others have noted that may well be as a result of the inevitable post-war chaos. There were 400 people at that meeting; I had heard reported on the BBC that women would be represented, but I've been disappointed by the fairly meaningless coverage thus far of what went on at the meeting.

Jeanne is certainly right to raise the question. As with so much else about Iraq after Saddam, we just don't know yet what they'll make of their future.

In view of that, I'd like to make a suggestion for those of who opposed the war to think about. Can we separate, to some extent, our on-going skepticism of the Bush doctrine and thus the negative uses to which this war is likely to be put, from a reflexive pessimism I sometimes sense, about the possibility of any positive outcome for Iraqis as a result of Saddam's removal. Can we not agree that it would be better for all of us and for the Iraqis and even for the rest of the Middle East if, in spite of all the other likely mistakes this administration will doubtless make, and all their posturing through which we'll have to live, if somehow, the Iraqi's can pull this off, i.e., keep Iraq together, forge some kind of democratic federalism that gives the Kurds their autonomy, and the Shias theirs if that is what they want, and secures the fundamental human rights of all Iraqi's. Yes, a tall order. But not an impossibility. And the faster that happens, the faster Iraqis will be able to reject us as occupiers. Isn't there a role for the left in all of this, to at least try to see that the Iraqis get the chance to define a decent future for themselves, (and BTW, democratic principles, including respect for the rights of minorities, aren't necessarily inconsistent with a non-fundamentalist Islamicism)?

I hesitated to leave this post. I know we're all suffering from nerve endings rubbed raw by the disgusting triumphalism of the right, so please, no one take this as some kind of holier than thou critique of anyone. But I have Iraqi friends living in London, most of whom were skeptical of the war, dislike Bush, understand what's dangerous for the world about this administration, but who, realists all, and more knowledgable about Iraqi possibilities than any of us, nonetheless feel real hope for Iraq's future. -- Leah A

First, I noticed women in the pictures from the south, too. Not many, but some. If there were women in Baghdad, they must have been pretty rare, because I watched a couple of hours of CNN that day, and combed through many news sources, including looking through a number of newspapers' slide show collections of photos, and didn't see a single woman.

But overall, I think Leah raises a good point. I didn't mean to suggest that the future would be bad for Iraqi women. If I had to make a prediction (something I'm very hesitant to do), my guess would be that it will be a mixed bag. I think it's extremely unlikely -- although not entirely impossible -- that the human rights situation in Iraq will ever return to the horrors that existed under Saddam. And obviously that benefits women as well as men. I also think it's quite likely that women will lose at least some of the rights they had -- and it isn't impossible to imagine ways in which they could end up much worse off than they were. My problem is that I see us ready to celebrate a "success" in Iraq that doesn't include women, and I won't celebrate that. If, in a few years, Iraq looks a lot like Saudi Arabia, or Iran, or even Pakistan, something will have gone seriously wrong -- and I'm not sure a lot of men in power see it that way, because women's lives aren't important to them. Maybe if more people realize now that that would be nothing to celebrate, it will be less likely to happen. Maybe.

But the bigger question is, is there any "role for the left," as Leah puts it, "to see that Iraqis get the chance to define a decent future for themselves?"

A reader offered a suggestion:

I didn't notice a great deal of women celebrating out in the streets of Kurdish controlled Northern Iraq either. Crazy huh? The only time they seem to be visible is when someone has died or is ill. On the upside -- I didn't see any women looters! :-)

When I left Iraq (having grown up there) 27 years ago, women had major rolls outside the home. I knew women doctors, engineers and journalists. During the Iran war, women would have doubtlessly carried out the work tasks of their absent menfolk, as was the case in Britain in the second world war.

Women are still not on a level footing with the men, but their plight is less worrying than most other counties in the region, however, now would be a great opportunity to move women's rights forward and I suspect that the new American Administrator to Iraq's central zone (including Baghdad), Barbara Bodine, may well have quite am impact on that. Perhaps we should lobby her? -- Unsigned

I must admit, it's really hard for me to dredge up much enthusiasm for holding this administration accountable for the future of Iraq. That doesn't mean I don't think it should be done, but at this point I have so little faith in their ability to get anything right, to even attempt to do anything that isn't greedy and cruel, that lobbying them seems like an enormous waste of time and energy.

A year ago, I would have readily agreed that our role was to make sure that as much attention was devoted to building as to smashing. A year ago, one of my favorite columnists was Thomas Friedman, who repeated pointed out the need to invest in Afghanistan. But after seeing what has happened in Afghanistan -- along with all the other signs of greed and inattention to human needs -- it is simply delusional to continue dreaming that if we just keep pointing out why building is more important than smashing, this administration will see the light. Friedman's columns are increasingly delusional, and I rarely bother reading him any more.

Somewhere, buried under a lot of callused emotions, I still believe that our role is to advocate -- for human rights, for women's rights, for transparency in all the deals going on. I just don't expect to have any impact whatsoever. Of course, I agree Leah's hope that Iraqis will be able to create a workable democracy for themselves, whatever form that takes (including an Islamic republic -- I don't think that's necessarily a contradiction in terms -- as long as it respects the rights of women and religious minorities.) But I think that anything Iraqis accomplish will come in spite of, not because of, the Bush administration. We can keep pushing for transparency, and supporting real democracy in Iraq, but the best thing the American left can do to support Iraqi aspirations is to send Bush back to Texas (and Bechtel back to San Francisco).

You know, I'm really beginning to hope Bush just made up everything about banned weapons. A lying president I can live with, but when I think of the alternatives....

Soldiers also found two mobile laboratories that contained equipment for mixing chemicals, but they appeared to have been ransacked by looters, Martin said.

"Ransacked by looters." That doesn't sound good to me.

It doesn't sound great to me, either. Steve Bates has more.

A long and rambling post about women and war that's been ambling around my brain for a long time without ever settling comfortably into any known essay structure, even by the loose standards of blogs, but which perhaps can be defined as a small stab at a still developing genre -- the quiet and hesitant rant

One of the things that struck me watching the crowds tearing down the statues of Saddam Hussein was that I didn't see any women. Another thing that struck me was that no one commented on this -- as if streets without women were entirely normal. Pardon my stereotypically feminist response, but to me a world wiped clean of women is a little disturbing. It seems to say, "Here is the future of Iraq. And people of your gender aren't in it." I don't want to be a party-pooper, but it seems that about 65% of Iraq didn't get its invitation to the party.

I hope that's not the future of Iraq.

It's not just what it says about Iraq that makes me uncomfortable. I don't like what it tells me about my own country either. At some point in my life, I'd like to live in a country where people looked at a place devoid of women and noticed that there was something strange about that, and where I didn't feel like I was committing a faux pas by bringing it up. I'd like at least one talking head to stop and comment, "Did anyone notice there are no women? Doesn't that seem eerie?"

Where were the women? To me, that was the first sign that there was more chaos than joy. If it's a party, women will be there. But if women are staying away, I thought, maybe they are reading it as a far more dangerous and threatening situation than what the American press was suggesting. Maybe the women of Iraq know something that Wolf Blitzer doesn't. The lawlessness that followed tells me that if that was their reading, Iraqi women are pretty smart, in a way that potential victims have to be if they're going to survive.

Atrios recently pointed out this statement by Howard Dean: We don't know yet whether the Iraqis will be better off without Saddam Hussein. I like a man who can be both obvious and stunning in the same sentence. I've been waiting for someone to say that, especially after some smart people simply accepted the "things will be better" motif. I'd like to think so, too. And there's certainly a possibility that will happen. But when you look at the options, there aren't any really good ones, a few don't seem to offer much improvement, and at least one definitely falls into the category of worse than Saddam Hussein.

At this point I figure anyone who'd hazard a guess as to what Iraq will look like in a year, let alone a generation, is braver than I am. Looking at the options, I see a range from frightening to lousy but not quite as bad as some of the other possibilities, and I don't want to make any guesses about which ones will pan out.

But among the sad, and not unreasonable, speculations is this article (Via Alas, a blog) on what could easily be a loss of rights for women in post-Saddam Iraq. There was a similar article in yesterday's Los Angeles Times, about the fear of many Iraqi women that as horrible as Saddam Hussein was, the future may be, for them, no better, if not worse.

That seems counter-intuitive. Gender equality doesn't mean a lot when it's combined with contempt for human rights. What could be worse than beheadings, rape, torture and murder?

Not much, obviously, but that description is a bit misleading. Some of what you see in the State Department report is proof that Saddam was an equal opportunity criminal. But some requires a little reading between the lines. As proof of Saddam's brutal treatment of women, for instance, the State Department cites a 1990 change in the Iraqi Penal Code exempting men who kill women in so-called "honor killings" from prosecution. Since 1990, more than 4,000 Iraqi women have been victims of honor killings. It also cites an Amnesty International report describing beheadings of women accused of prostitution. But beheadings and unpunished honor killings are not exactly rare phenomena in the countries of some of our allies. I'm not raising an issue of hypocrisy as much as pointing out that such brutalization was part of an attempt to placate fanatics and tribal leaders. The same fanatics and tribal leaders we now get to try to figure out how to deal with. I doubt we'll be as placating, but I don't see the Bush administration really standing up for women's rights either. They didn't in Afghanistan, and they won't in Iraq. The temptation to give in on something not terribly important -- the lives of women -- will be enormous. Religious nuts can be a nuisance, and women's lives and health are expendable -- no matter what the creed of the nut you're placating.

One of Iraq's oddest "little secrets" -- which Nicholas Kristof wrote an interesting piece about last year -- was that Iraqi women were probably more free and better off than women in most Arab countries. Because of general economic growth in the '70s and '80s, combined with widespread literacy programs, and programs to educate women, improve health care, and get women into the workforce, Iraqi women are among the best educated and most professional in the region. Two things cut into that progress. One was Saddam's attempt to control fanatics by tossing them a bone -- women's rights. The second was sanctions. Besides its effect on the health of all Iraqis, the crushed economy under sanctions caused many women to lose jobs and abandon education. The drop out rates became much higher for girls than for boys.

Look at the realistic options for Iraq and try to imagine which ones would actually result in improvement of the lives of women.

The Women's E-news article quotes a number of women who put their faith in the State Department's pledges of concern for women's rights, but who fear that the Pentagon has greater clout. That would be this State Department and Pentagon:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Thursday that the United States would not tolerate Shiite rule in Baghdad. "If you're suggesting, how would we feel about an Iranian-type government with a few clerics running everything in the country, the answer is: That isn't going to happen," he said Thursday in an interview with Associated Press.

Pentagon planners are increasingly committed to Ahmad Chalabi, the secular Shiite leader of the Iraqi National Congress, as a means of countering the prospect of a theocratic government, despite new signs that Chalabi is not widely popular, according to administration sources.
In contrast, the State Department argues that the recent emotional Shiite commemorations of a martyred saint and the rise of religious leaders as the new local authorities are not a cause for long-term concern.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell even suggested Thursday that the United States could accept a new government with an Islamic identity.

"Why cannot an Islamic form of government that has as its basis the faith of Islam not also be democratic?" Powell asked, pointing to Turkey and Pakistan as Islamic countries that hold elections.

Iraq could serve as a model, he suggested.

I have to admit a few days ago, I was thinking in the same direction as Powell, although I wasn't thinking of Turkey and Pakistan, but Iran, and the idea that Iran may be closer to democracy than Iraq, and that democracy may have to develop after people live with a lousy choice for awhile and decide to eliminate it themselves.

Maybe a theocracy wouldn't be the worst possibility.

My brain wandered around in the dark and found its way back to the real world eventually. Democracy in Iran is a hope -- a fairly realistic one, I think, but one that hasn't proved itself yet. Theocracy might be a stage Iran had to pass through, but then again, it might turn out to be more tenacious than it currently looks. A theocracy in Iraq might, in fact, strengthen the theocracy in Iran.

And then there are the consequences for women, at least a generation of Iraqi women.

If I were an Iraqi woman, I wouldn't be terribly comfortable with Colin Powell's suggestion that we could live with a theocracy.

But American promises and alliances with Iraqi exiles don't look very promising either. Notice anything wrong with this picture?

Garner starts talks on Iraq future

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S.-led team in charge of Iraqi reconstruction has begun talks on the future of the country with Baghdad academics and community leaders saying it did not want to see fundamentalists come to power.

"You have a great pride, blood in your veins that comes from the birth of civilisation, the birth of government in Iraq," retired U.S. general Jay Garner, head of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, told about 60 men invited to the meeting on Thursday.

No women attended the talks.

At some point in my life, I'd like to live in a country where a sentence like that last one makes everyone very uncomfortable.

Kevin got to the LA Times a lot earlier than I did today, and has some good analysis of this disturbing article about how the Pentagon has so bungled the hunt for weapons in Iraq that they have "raised the threat of arms proliferation." His theory that the military was surprised by the speed with which Baghdad fell rings true to me. Although it certainly doesn't make me feel any safer.

Combined with earlier reports of the looted and still uninspected Iraqi nuclear facility, it's beginning to look like the best we can hope for is that either the Bushies were lying through their teeth about the WMDs, or intelligence was a mess ( not an unlikely possibility) and there was nothing there. Because the possibility that there were weapons, and now they're gone, and we have no idea where they went, is not a pleasant one.

Guest post by Donald Johnson
An open letter to the editors of the New York Times
I noticed a very clear demonstration of a common pattern in the Sunday New York Times -- leftwing opinions are mostly ghettoized (if that's a word) in the Arts section.  Frank Rich has written a scathing piece on the American government's responsibility for the looting in Iraq and Emily Nussbaum wrote a mostly sympathetic piece about the TV program MASH, pointing out that its extremely harsh criticism of the US government's lies would make some people very uncomfortable today.  (She says that some might find it "adolescent".)

The NYT also does short articles on particular people sometimes, written by various reporters.  Chris Hedges has done a few of these, and sometimes he picks a left-wing type to write about.  That appears in the Metro section.

In contrast, the "serious" political commentary in the Book Review, the editorial pages (where Frank Rich used to write until recently) and the Sunday Magazine section generally excludes such perspectives, except as something to be caricatured and dismissed.  So the Book Review carries a piece by Paul Berman, where leftwingers are portrayed as people who deny bin Laden's religious fanaticism and prefer to believe that al Qaeda members are motivated by legitimate grievances about American foreign policy.  In the 19 months since 9/11, I have not seen one single leftist in the Nation, the Progressive, Commondreams, Sojourners or Z Magazine who ever denied that bin Laden and al Qaeda are dangerous and murderous religious fanatics.  They do say that American foreign policy crimes and hypocritical policies contribute to an atmosphere where ordinary Arabs might come to sympathize with terrorists, but for Berman, it's more convenient to erect a strawman and attack that rather than confront what the left actually says.

And in the Sunday Magazine, we have a piece by Niall Ferguson which defends British imperialism and regrets that Americans don't have the stamina to establish an old-fashioned empire along the lines that Victorian England ran.  I wonder if the Indians and Irish and the Tasmanian aborigines feel the same regret. Perhaps they enjoyed famines and genocide.

It's not that there is no merit to anything that Berman says about the left -- the problem is that the NYT never lets the left speak for itself. Your readers, it seems, must be carefully shielded from firsthand exposure. I think the virtually all leftists would agree that even a corrupt Western democracy is vastly superior to Islamic fundamentalism, and that al Qaeda is a group of murderous fanatics who must be stopped. Most also think the US is guilty of various crimes, some of them on a massive scale.  The NYT refuses to accept that last proposition, so the left must be excluded from the pages where "serious" political commentary is offered and they must be portrayed as sentimental fools who can't face up to the fact that there are evil people in the world. The willingness to denounce the crimes of Islamic fundamentalism while whitewashing our own is dubbed "moral clarity" -- if you genuinely favor the principles of Western liberalism and want to hold the US to not terribly rigorous standards (don't support torture, don't target civilians with sanctions, etc...) then you must be a moral relativist who makes excuses for terrorists.

To be fair, there are some borderline leftist criticisms on the op-ed pages of the NYT, but they stay within certain limits.  Krugman is as harsh a critic of Bush's domestic policy as anyone could imagine, but foreign policy is not his specialty.  Kristof occasionally mentions, almost in passing, that the US sometimes supports monsters.  And Bob Herbert, who usually does a great job writing columns about domestic injustice, did point out that Bush's war might have been fought for sleazy economic reasons.  But they won't go that final step and hold the US accountable for possible violations of human rights overseas. That seems to be beyond the pale. Leftists who hold such positions are to be kept outside the pages of the Times and can only be mentioned in order to ridicule them.

So to the extent that anyone can expect to see a leftwing view of American foreign policy in the NYT, you have to go to the Arts section, and even here only Frank Rich is actually talking about real events;  the Nussbaum article is political criticism one step removed from actual events, where she discusses the kind of sitcom that would be acceptable today rather than the events which might call for a critique. The editorial pages, the Book Review, and the Sunday Magazine, where you might expect that freewheeling debate which the NYT supposedly favors, carefully excludes people to the left of the NYT editors.

This isn't censorship, of course, because the NYT has the right to its bias. But you pretend not to have a bias.   Your approved writers often refer to this overwhelming leftist din of "anti-American" voices that dominate the debate and yet there's barely a whisper of leftist opinion on American foreign policy that ever makes it into the NYT.  Except, of course, for the Arts section, where sympathy for a leftist critique is expressed in an article about an old television show.

Attack Sets Arms Depot in Iraq Afire

A fire that U.S. military officers blamed on an Iraqi guerrilla attack set off a chain of fierce explosions at a U.S.-controlled munitions dump today, sending rockets, missiles and other ordnance shrieking into residential neighborhoods in this southern Baghdad suburb. A number of civilians were killed or wounded, fanning anti-American sentiments that have been smoldering for days.

This doesn't seem like the wisest time to close the U.S. military's only center devoted to peacekeeping.

Human Rights Watch reports than in Northern Iraq, particularly in the oil-rich cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, the "peace" is proving "more lethal than the war." Ethnic tensions in the area, which a real concern before the war began, are part of it, as the victims of ethnic cleansing seek revenge. The Turks may not have invaded, as they threatened to do if the Kurds took control of Kirkuk, but it has to be disturbing that they are attempting to arm ethnic Turkmens in the city.

The New York Times has an interesting article about a program at Bellevue Hospital for torture survivors. One of the saddest parts is how increased federal surveillance and the threat of indefinite detention for some asylum-seekers is making life harder for people who have already suffered in ways that most of us can't even imagine.

Well worth your time

• Bean, Pandagon, and Wampum on trying to explain race and gender issues to those not directly effected by them.
  
  
• The American Sentimentalist on improving the effectiveness of blogs.
  
  
• The Road To Surfdom on why it's time for those who supported the war to admit they were wrong.
  
  
• Acts of Conscience on the humanitarian situation in Iraq.

Maybe they should change the name of the country to Oil Coast
This series of headlines says a lot, I think, about this administration's priorities:

April 7:
Fighting in western Ivory Coast

An Ivory Coast rebel group has accused President Laurent Gbagbo of "playing with fire" by breaking the terms of a French-brokered ceasefire.

April 14:
Cote d'Ivoire: Liberian Fighters Attack Civilians

According to recent Human Rights Watch research, both government and rebel forces in western Cote d'Ivoire are responsible for massacres of civilians, rape, reprisal killings and systematic looting. Liberian combatants fighting on both sides are committing many of the abuses.

"Liberian fighters are playing a major role in this war, and civilians are paying the price," said Peter Takirambudde, executive director of Human Rights Watch's Africa division. "We've seen this pattern before in West Africa. The Security Council needs to act now to prevent any further deterioration in Cote d'Ivoire."

April 15: Ivory Coast Government, Rebels Clash

Each side accused the other for Monday's attack in the village of Bin-Houye, in the western borderlands near Liberia. Army spokesman Lt. Col. N'Goran Aka said about 500 rebels attacked government troops, while rebel spokesman Antoine Beugre said the rebels were defending themselves from soldiers.

Later, Beugre released another statement claiming government forces had subsequently bombed Zouan-Hounien, 12 miles north of Bin-Houye, killing three people and injuring 14 others - all civilians.

April 18:
Ivory Coast rebels allege army attack

Ivory Coast's rebels accused the army yesterday of killing 11 people in a helicopter raid on a marketplace just as rebel ministers took office in a new government aimed at ending seven months of civil war. Aid workers said they knew of at least one death and were treating 50 people, including several children, who were wounded in the air attack on the western town of Vavoua.

''They all tell the same story. They did not hear the helicopters coming and they were caught out at the market by the fire,'' said Andre-Jean Pocheron of the French-based humanitarian body Medecins du Monde. (Doctors of the World).

''They are all terrified,'' he said by phone from Seguela, 45 miles north of Vavoua, which lies in a cocoa-growing western region of the world's top producer.

The rebels said 10 civilians and one rebel were killed in the raid Wednesday. Former colonial power France, which brokered a deal to end the war in the West African country, condemned what it called an ''unjustifiable attack that threatens the peace process.''

April 21:
Ivory Coast Refugees Tell of Surge in Killings

Weary and frightened villagers straggling from the bush in western Ivory Coast tell of dozens of killings and wanton abuses after a surge of fighting that has soured hopes of peace. The involvement of warring Liberian tribes, inured to atrocities by years of bloodshed, has made the rebel conflict in this corner of the West African country even more savage and tangled than elsewhere.

It is hard to get a precise toll for recent deaths from the accounts of those limping into the French-protected town of Duekoue -- two women shot by the road here, five people killed there, another nine at a cocoa farmer's camp in the bush.

"They killed 20 people last Wednesday. They just came and killed them. Women, old people, they killed them," said planter Cesar Zrho from a village north of Duekoue on Sunday.

I've never been much of an Instapundit reader, let alone debunker, but I got curious today about what war supporters might be saying now that the statue-toppling, fun part of the war is pretty much over, and the messier occupation has begun. I wondered how you spin

• clerics (and "thugs") filling the power vacuum,
  
  
• the development of a klepto-economy,
  
  
• the proliferation of weapons among an angry and frightened population,
  
  
• the re-Baathification of Mosul and other places,
  
  
• signs of ethnic cleansing in Kirkuk
  
  
• chants of "America's no better than Saddam,"
  
  
• not to mention those pesky MIA WMDs and creepy signs of imperialism.

I honestly wondered if anyone looks at the papers these days and says to himself, "Gosh, things are going well in Iraq." Maybe there's a silver lining in the cloud that I don't see?

No, apparently the key is to avoid looking at the cloud. The only mention of Iraq yesterday was what appears to be a call to do a repeat performance in Zimbabwe. So far today, there's been a single post gloating over the fact that volunteers from other Arab coutries appear to have been killed in Iraq.

It's an interesting strategy: If I don't look, there's no problem, and everybody will forget about it and move on. Might work. Might not.

In the post below, I mentioned the Foreign Policy In Focus article on models for governing and rebuilding Iraq. Among the models is Afghanistan, which is actually one of the more promising possibilities.

Under the Afghan model, after a brief military occupation, perhaps lasting 90 days, a UN Assistance Mission, like the one established in Afghanistan, would be mandated by the UN Security Council to steer Iraq toward democracy and to coordinate humanitarian and relief activities. A UN approach has been widely endorsed internationally by members of the U.S.-led military coalition Britain and Australia, as well as by the EU, Russian, China, Japan, and the Arab League.

Along with the establishment of a UN Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI), the UN would convene a conference to select an interim Iraqi government. Similar to the Bonn Conference held shortly after the fall of the Taliban, such a gathering would assemble important internal and external opposition figures and groups. The meeting would exclude all political figures perceived to have been tainted by the Saddam Hussein regime. UNAMI would assist the nascent Iraqi administration in governing the country and coordinating the work of UN agencies and NGOs, who would be responsible for the bulk of relief and recovery duties. Control over the Iraqi oil industry would be placed under the jurisdiction of the Iraqi interim government, with the UN and the U.S. jointly retaining an authoritative advisory role. After an interim period of up to two years, during which a Constitution would be drafted through an open and consensual process, UN-monitored elections would be held to choose a broadly democratic government.

The U.S. would retain a military presence, not exceeding 20,000 soldiers, during the interim period before democratic elections were held and a national army was rebuilt. The U.S. troops would be supplemented by a UN-mandated peacekeeping force similar to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. The primary U.S. role under this model would be to secure vital resources such as the oil fields, to avert the breakup of the country along ethnic lines, and to prevent regional states from interfering in Iraqi internal affairs. Like in Afghanistan, U.S. influence over the newly established government and the reconstruction process would be strong but integrated into a multilateral framework and orchestrated from behind the scenes.

One of the main difficulties of this model is that Iraq isn't Afghanistan. On the up side, it's much more educated, urbanized, and resource-rich. On the down side, it is already proving to be far more hostile to American presence.

But the greater danger of this approach is that it's likely to be half-hearted and incomplete, as it has been in Afghanistan itself, where a lack of international attention, a refusal to adequately staff the security force, and a confusion of efforts, has crippled relief and rebuilding. An anecdote at the end of this New York Times article says it all:

Most aid agencies, and many Afghans around the country, would like foreign troops to disarm the private militias, reduce continuing robbery and extortion, and curb the power of the warlords, Mr. O'Brien said.

But the military teams are concentrating on small-scale projects -- building schools, or even just providing desks and latrines for them -- while the larger issues of disarmament and peacekeeping are left unfinished, he said.

Rafael Robillard, the director of a coordinating body of international aid agencies in Kabul, summed up the frustration of many aid workers. "I was talking to one civil affairs guy, and we were looking at a kindergarten the American military was building, and the soldier turned to me and said, "Why aren't you guys doing anything about disarmament?" I could not believe it. The military is building kindergartens, and they are asking me, a civilian aid worker, to do disarmament! The world is upside down."

Pentagon Sending a Team of Exiles to Help Run Iraq
Fascinating. The Pentagon is sending 150 Iraqi exiles to Baghdad to be the second rung of the government. The first rung, of course, is American. One disturbing and telling detail -- only seven of the exiles agreed to have their names revealed because "Most of these people believe that if they are seen as agents of America, they will be killed." Gee, there's a vote of confidence in the popularity of American rule. Weren't they supposed to be greated with flowers, or something?

UPDATE: Foreign Policy In Focus has a useful article this month -- Who Will Govern Iraq? -- exploring the strengths and weaknesses of various possibilities that could play out in Iraq, including the "Iraqi Exile Model."

UPDATE: Matt Yglesias definitely has the best comment on the exile situation.

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights meets for six-weeks every year. Theoretically, it exists to put pressure on countries with grave human rights abuses. This year, according to both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, it failed miserably. That's not surprising, considering that the commission was chaired by Libya, and included such stout upholders of human rights as Algeria, Zimbabwe, Cuba, and China. Candidates for next year's commission are, if anything, even worse.

Countries with bad human rights records shouldn't be on the commission, let alone be allowed to chair it. They're using it to make sure gross human rights violations don't get investigated and condemned.

As Human Rights Watch has noted, the strongest tool the commission has is its ability to name and shame. That power doesn't exist when the commission is in the hands of abusers. They don't name, and they have no shame.

And yet, reading HRW's report, I can't help wondering if the primary beneficiary of this nasty situation is not the Bush administration, which clearly doesn't want a UN Human Rights Commission with real moral stature. HRW criticized the role the US played in this year's session on several issues -- failing to co-sponsor a resolution comdemning Russian abuses in Chechnya, failing to sponsor a resolution critical of China, resisting human rights monitoring in Iraq, opposing a call for accountability for human rights abuses in Afghanistan, insisting that opposition to execution of juveniles be dropped from a resolution on children's rights, and fighting (unsuccessfully) to prevent the commission from calling for ratification of the International Criminal Court. The US has a big voice, and it can make an important contribution when it condemns human rights violations. But it can't do so while simultaneously taking justice into its own hands and claiming exemptions from international law. For a gang that simply wants to make its own rules, the best situation is one in which nobody takes the cops seriously.

For Bush, Libya is the ideal human rights cop -- the one nobody will take seriously.

Nice speeches are fine, but major powers need to stop being "indifferent" to the decline of the Human Rights Commission. Unfortunately, that isn't going to happen until we have an administration with a real interest in human rights.

CNN got Pentagon approval for the military talking heads covering the war?

Slipping through the cracks, though, is what [Eason] Jordan subsequently told Howard Kurtz, and it was equally troubling. It came out at the end of an appearance last week on "Reliable Sources," a CNN show that monitors media behavior.

Kurtz, who juggles two hats while covering media for the Washington Post and drawing a paycheck from CNN as regular host of "Reliable Sources," asked Jordan about government criticism of retired military men who had second-guessed aspects of U.S. invasion strategy during initial TV coverage of the war.

The essence of Jordan's reply to Kurtz was that he didn't understand the fuss because he had received clearance in advance. According to a CNN transcript of the program, he said: "I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said, for instance, at CNN, 'Here are the generals we're thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war.' And we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was important."

Important in what respect? CNN viewers were not about to learn, for time had run out. "OK, we've got to leave it there," said Kurtz.

Which was unfortunate, because Jordan had just revealed that he had asked the Pentagon, in effect, to vet and approve ex-military men that CNN hoped to use as analysts. That is getting cozy.

Such spit-and-polish multitudes were the backbone of coverage on all of the networks when the war was hot, and among the few who didn't always fall in line with the Pentagon was retired Gen. Wesley Clark, the top military pundit on CNN. Clark was anything but a Pentagon patsy, pulling no punches on the air after combat began.

Based on Jordan's own words, nonetheless, the news chief had asked the Pentagon to sign off on personnel assigned to a key element of CNN's war coverage, the equivalent of consulting with the White House in advance about political or policy experts it planned to use on the air. And he regarded the Pentagon's endorsement as "important."

Not the best way to inspire confidence in the media's independence.

You mean there are people who still have confidence in the media's independence?

This story hurts: Among the places looted in Baghdad was a home for abandoned children -- stripped of beds, chairs, tables, books, even electrical sockets and door frames. And children. Half the children in the home have disappeared, and while some may have run away, a spokesman for UNICEF thinks at least some may have been kidnapped by gangs. A few of the children have been found, and some of the girls seem to have been abused.

And, God help us, there are plenty of toys and playthings for them all over Baghdad.

There's an amazing and disturbing story in today's Washington Post.

A couple of weeks ago the Los Angeles Times reported that Iraqi warehouses at the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center were unguarded for several days. There was a great deal of looting at the center, although whether anyone made off with material that could be used for weapons was, at the time, still unknown. Seals meant to detect tampering, however, were broken (although they may have been broken by unwitting US Marines, who didn't realize they were dealing with a sanctioned and well-inspected site.)

Flash forward a few weeks, and, according to the Post, the Bush administration still hasn't sent inspectors to the site to assess whether any materials were stolen. The International Atomic Energy Agency -- which has authority over the site -- wants to get back in immediately to find out if anything has disappeared, but that would mean Bush and Company would have to co-operate with an international agency.

Cooperate? Nah. Too complicated. Just let a lot of radioactive material that terrorists would love to get their hands on go floating around Iraq for awhile before making its way across borders. There's no hurry in dealing with this. We'll get around to it.

Julia has a story to tell. An old story, but it has a certain resonance.

Go read Tbogg: A lovely letter from lovely Zurich on changing European attitudes toward Americans.

(And yes, the link is bloggered. You'll have to scroll down. Out, out damn Blogspot! God, I hope this turns out to be as good as it sounds.)

Here is a revealing coda to the post I wrote a couple of days ago about the difficulty of keeping up free and nuanced thought in George Bush's infantilized America.

After the fall of Baghdad, Gary Kamiya wrote an extremely thoughtful and honest essay that captured the mixed feelings of many people who opposed the war -- the joy at seeing the fall of a truly evil man, the fear that it may not turn out to be the "liberation" people expect, and the odder, darker fear that it could turn out to be an unambiguous good for the Iraqi people, encouraging policies that will not be good for the world as a whole. I didn't agree with it completely. I'm far more pessimistic about the "liberation" than Gary Kamiya is, and I never entertained the slightest desire for things to go badly during the war (although I had a near certainty they would begin to go badly when it was "over" -- which has proved true.) But it was a good and interesting essay. If nothing else, its honesty was refreshing. How much honesty do you see from day to day in political writing?

Of course it didn't take long for the right-wingers, from O'Reilly to Limbaugh, to pick out bits of Kamiya's subtle piece to tar him as a "fanatic" who had "no place in the public arena." Bill O'Reilly accusing the always thoughtful Gary Kamiya of being a "fanatic." The last time I felt the moral universe tip this far on its side was when I heard Brit Hume mocking the journalistic ethics of Walter Cronkite. (Fox seems to have a talent for tilting the moral universe, doesn't it?)

I got a couple of e-mails the other day saying, Hey, toughen up! They have a simple message, and we need an equally simple message to counteract their effect. From the stand-point of practical politics, I suppose that's true. And yet it seems to me that one of the most perverse aspects of this administration and those who march behind it is their attempt to corral thought, and the best way to fight that off is with not just subtle and nuanced thought, but quirky, crazy, careening, brave, and intensely personal thought -- all the wonderful, human, messy stuff that make no sense to this crowd.

A human mind at work is a thing of beauty, a dangerous thing, an inspiring thing.

I have nothing against the people who write clever slogans, but in his subtle and personal way, I think Gary Kamiya is fighting the harder and more important battle.

One of the many things I love about Nina Simone
When I was a freshman in college, the non-academic employees went out on strike and I worked with a group of students supporting them. One morning I was sent over with breakfast donuts for maids walking a picket line in front of a dorm. "Walking" is a bit of a misnomer, as is "line." There were only three women, and most of the time they sat on a cement planter and drank coffee out of the most enormous thermos I ever saw in my life. It looked like a weapon -- a plaid missile. Out of nowhere, one of the women started asking me questions that at first seemed rude and suspicious. The gist of the questions seemed to be "Who the hell are you, girl? What do you have to do with us?" But eventually I realized the questions weren't suspicious at all. The woman just had a brusque way about her -- and maybe a little mistrust of self-righteous, liberal students -- that made her scary at first. She asked me a lot of questions about my family and my plans (I told her I was thinking of dropping out of school; she told me I wasn't going to do anything of the kind), and I answered them honestly. When you come from a background like mine, and you find yourself answering questions without worrying about how the answer will be perceived, you can trust you've found a good person, without entirely knowing how you know that.

She told me she had a son a few years older than I was and that he was in prison. That surprised me. Not that she had a son in prison. I knew quite a few people who had kids or brothers or sisters in prison. One of my best friends from junior high was married to a guy who was convicted of murder when she was sixteen and hugely pregnant. I just never heard anybody admit that to a stranger so matter-of-factly. When I was a kid, it was the kind of thing you heard about from a third party, and never mentioned in front of the family of the kid doing time. (I didn't even know about my friend's husband until I heard another friend making fun of her getting dressed all fine to go up and visit him. I just noticed she'd stop talking about him, and figured he'd skipped out on her.) I remember being so pulled in by the way the woman on the picket line talked about her son -- not making excuses for him, but obviously not the least bit embarrassed by him either. I didn't think anybody I knew could manage that moral balance, and it seemed to me to define the meaning of love.

As we were talking, a truck turned into the dorm driveway and the three women jumped up and grabbed their signs. The woman I had just been talking to, the one with the intimidating edge who, little by little, I had grown to like, started screaming epithets in a deep, terrible voice, and I saw the driver hunch down in his seat like he was trying not to be seen.

A voice to shame a truck driver. Honestly, at eighteen, I'd never seen anything that cool in my life. I was impressed.

Over the years I've said a number of times, only half kidding, that that woman had the voice of God. Okay, maybe God wouldn't call anybody a "scab" (and a few worse things), but nevertheless, there was something holy in that woman's voice. There was a goodness in it, if you got to know it, it stemmed from justice, it didn't give evil an inch to play with, but it got under the skin of strong men, filling them with the knowledge that they're doing the wrong thing, and better get straight.

Holy.

Nina Simone had that voice, too. I'm listening to one of her most powerful songs -- "Sinnerman." It's about as uncompromising and Old Testament as popular music ever gets.

Oh, sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna run to?
All on them day.
It's not just the lyrics. There's something chilly and stern in Nina Simone's voice. Righteous. A call to justice without mercy. Put a face on it, and it would be a Byzantine Jesus, which, in many of her portraits, Nina Simone resembled. You hear that coldness most clearly in her more political songs, like "Mississippi Goddam," (where she prods an audience to embarrassed laughter, and then admonishes, "...and I mean every word of it") or in the cold fury of "Pirate Jenny." This is what real moral clarity sounds like. And in "Sinnerman," even more clearly than in her political songs, Miss Simone insists there's no exit. Evil has consequences. That's just the way it is, child, no point in glossing over it.

But the song switches point of view in the second verse.

Well, I run to the rock. Please hide me.
I run to the rock. Please hide me.
I run to the rock. Please hide me, lord.
All on them day.

But the rock cried out, "I can't hide you."
The rock cried out, "I can't hide you.
The rock cried out, "I ain't gonna hide you, gal,
All on them day."

The lyrics are pleading, but the singer's voice isn't. A lesser singer -- and a more ingratiating woman -- would wrap it in compassion for the sinner. But Nina takes sin seriously, and understands its tenacity and its abiding faith in its own resources. The voice remains weirdly composed, convinced there's a way out, until finally, all avenues exhausted, the "sinner" returns to God.

But the Lord said, "Go to the devil."
The Lord said, "Go to the devil."
He said, "Go to the devil."
All on them day.
That verse stuns me every time -- and I've been listening to the song since I was in high school. The way she hangs on to the word "said," hisses the 's,' and snarls "Go to the devil" -- does it sound strange if I say there's something liberating in that bitterness? I went to Catholic school in the sixties, mostly post-Vatican II, a little after the era of the infamous ruler-wielding nuns. I had Kumbaya-singing nuns. Nuns with an absolute faith in big, open-hearted, loving, forgiving Jesus, and not much time for an angry, righteous God hissing, "Go to the devil." I adore those nuns to this day, and that gentle Christianity remains the core of what I have faith in, but from Nina Simone I learned that righteous and unmovable anger is a part of morality as well. My peasant Irish Catholicism has a history of ranging from moral mush to moral rigor mortis without ever making the acquaintance of moral authority. I love Nina Simone because no one ever sang with such moral authority.

Weirdly, I've always thought of "Sinnerman" as a political song, maybe because the first time I heard it was on The Best of Nina Simone, the first album I bought by her, when I was about 16. The tracks have been rearranged and added to on the CD, but on my old vinyl copy, "Sinnerman" immediately follows "Mississippi Goddam," and I've always heard them as related songs, so that the sinner trying to hide from the consequences of his sin is not, in my mind, some guy getting drunk on Saturday night, but the segregationists of the preceding song -- life-crushing bastards -- because that same theme of the consequences of sin that can't be escaped pervades "Mississippi Goddam."

Lord have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don't belong here
I don't belong there
I've even stopped believing in prayer.

In "Mississippi Goddam," the woman longing for justice stops believing in prayer, and in "Sinnerman," the sinner calls out repulsively, hypocritically, "Don't you see me prayin', don't you see me down here prayin'?" (which prompts God's soul-lifting "go to the devil.") The two songs fit together in so many ways, upholding the value of righteous anger, grabbing prayer back from the hypocrites and returning it to those demanding justice. All of Nina Simone's justice-demanding songs have something prayerful in them, and something essential. I wish there were far more to come from her divine -- literally divine -- voice.

UPDATE: Monkey Media Report has a nice tribute to fellow North Carolinian Nina Simone, and Interesting Monstah has a whole slew of posts, as well as a place to listen to many of Miss Simone's gospel songs, including "Sinnerman."

Silver Rights has a fine tribute to the glorious Nina Simone, who passed away yesterday.

I think I may be burning out on this blogging thing. I began to realize why yesterday when I read Jeff Cooper's post on his own lack of inspiration, even though Jeff's reason isn't exactly mine. He's frustrated with the lack of reasonable discourse in the blog world, and seems to wonder if there's a place in it for a voice as calm and open-minded as his own. (Obviously, those are not words he uses to describe himself, but they are the qualities I most appreciate -- and the ones that make Cooped Up a refuge.) The blogosphere's beginning to seem more like a place for people to scream in each other's faces than to learn from each other.

I feel some of that frustration. But my problem is not so much what I see going on around me, as what I feel going on inside. For awhile now, I've felt that there was something off-key in my writing. It's been developing a certainty, a cockiness even, that I don't really feel, and which doesn't resemble my normal writing voice. I'm not sure why that is. Part of it, I think, is a response to the ugliness of the age. I am, by nature, both optimistic and drawn to complexity and ambiguity. I see a hundred sides to every story. I've always been fascinated by people whose beliefs are very different from my own, and especially interested in why they're different, how they came to believe what they believe, and how those beliefs shape -- and, presumably, enrich -- their lives. But those are traits I'm not sure it's possible to keep up these days. Or, if it's possible, I'm not sure it's wise. At least not when you're dealing with politics. George Bush is the worst president we have had in my lifetime. The people he has surrounded himself with are the most callous and venal crowd we've seen since Reagan. Many of them, of course, are Reagan retreads -- but circumstances have given them far more power than they had the last time around. Anyone who isn't scared of these people is living in a dream world. Anyone who isn't appalled by them has simply stopped caring about ethics.

I'm sorry, but there's simply no way to defend these people without lying.

For a time, I actually tried to build a cozy little castle in that dream world. I focused on idealistic words, and allowed myself to believe that maybe they meant them. I let myself think that George Bush and I had the same basic values, but just disagreed about how to achieve them. I gave them the benefit of the doubt. I tried telling myself that even though they didn't do things the way I would, maybe their way could work, too. Maybe there was a value that I would come to recognize over time.

But after awhile it started to feel a lot like living with an abuser. You can only make so many excuses for the creep, before you finally give up and admit that trusting him and trying to see things his way isn't being open-minded, it's just being a doormat.

The problem is, once you pull a Nora and slam the door, you spend a lot of time yelling about what a jerk he is, and pointing to examples. Ibsen was wise to end with the slammed door -- the ranting and raving that follows is neither pretty nor enlightening. You've got to get it out of your system, but it's easy to get trapped in anger.

I don't like writing in anger.

It's not just the times, it's also the place. Jeff is right about the way so many bloggers seem locked into their positions, as if absorbing an opposing point of view were anathema, and I have the same frustration with the way people twist other people's points of view. And I have a feeling that aspect of blogs -- the knowledge that some people are reading what I write not in order to understand what I mean, but to find (or create) holes in my argument, or even that honest and intelligent readers will take one of my questions for an answer -- also influences my writing in negative ways. I'm more defensive than I was when I started doing this, less likely to play with an off-the-wall idea because I see at least some of the ways people could misinterpret or distort what I say. That shouldn't matter -- but being repeatedly misunderstood is frustrating, and it makes me more likely to focus on what I'm sure of, rather than what I'm wondering about and musing on.

I'm a writer, not a lawyer. I'm better at musing and questioning than I am at building unassailable arguments. Arguments, to be honest, bore me. I don't write to persuade, I write to figure things out myself, and readers, to me, are not people whose minds I want to change, but people I've invited along on the journey (and who sometimes have suggestions for a direction to go in that I hadn't thought of before.)

Yesterday, I started reading a quirky but fascinating book -- War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges who draws on his experience as a New York Times reporter in Latin America, the Balkans, and the Middle East, as well as the history of writing about war, to explore the myths of war, the myths it takes to create a war-intoxicated society, and what has to be destroyed in order to feed those myths. And the main thing that falls by the wayside is the ambiguity and complexity that are the essence of truth. And the hardest thing to do in a country wrapping itself in war myths is to avoid creating counter-myths and continue behaving like a thinking and feeling human being.

But sitting somewhere in the middle, taking a little from the left and a little from the right, trying to be "moderate" (yes, I'm back on that "extremism" debate again) doesn't help. Myth-making trying to pass itself off as thought just isn't worth taking seriously. You'll only lose heart if you try.

Hedges writes about a phenomenon he's experienced everywhere from Argentina to Bosnia -- people not caught up in the nationalist and triumphalist myths begin to lose faith in their own perceptions and memories. They begin to feel isolated. And I'm not sure, but I think that might be the value in blog writing for me at the moment. The blogosphere as a whole exists to promote myths and counter-myths. But if you tune that out, you can still find places where people are hanging on to humane values and coping the best they can with complexity. And when you find them, it makes you feel a little less isolated as you try to hang on to your own perceptions and awareness of complexity. But sometimes hanging on in the storm gets hard.

Sad, but true.

(Thanks to Lynn Gazis-Sax for the link.)

Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in
Aaagghh! I wasn't planning to post anything this weekend, but this editorial so epitomizes what bugs me about the New York Times that I have to comment, at least briefly.

On the one hand, they get it: the Bechtel contract -- which has a lot to do with connections and contributions -- is an outrage. But the question is, why is it an outrage? It isn't, as the Times suggests, that it sends the wrong message. They make it sound as if it were a little PR problem, when in fact the corporate cronyism revealed by that contract is the essence of this war. Advising an administration that exists for the sole purpose of enriching itself and its friends to be a little less obvious about how it goes about doing so is kind of missing the point. Equally, suggesting that it would be better if we shared the spoils of war with our allies -- the British and Australians -- wouldn't undercut the idea that this war had imperialist motives, it would reinforce it. Yes, it is especially greedy not to share the loot with the other thieves, but wouldn't it be better to say that you shouldn't steal in the first place?

Go read....

• The Yellow Doggerel Democrat on jury duty in Texas.
  
  
• Mac Diva on the digital divide.
  
  
• Seeing the Forest, Hullabaloo, Ruminate This, The Watch, and worldgonewrong on how to counter the right-wing message machine.
  
  
• Talk Left on prospects for a trial of Iraqi war crimes.
  
  
• Back In Iraq -- well, read everything over there, but especially What Now For Iraq?

When I turn on my computer, the Los Angeles Times page come on, and so, at 5 a.m., this is the first headline I read:

Bechtel Gets Iraq Contract

But it's Good Friday, and I'm just going to put that anger in a box for now. Maybe I'll come back to it after Easter.

Monkey Media Report has two related posts up -- on Syria and Hezbollah -- that are well worth your time if you're trying to make sense of all the saber-rattling in Syria's direction.

UPDATE: As a follow-up, there's an interesting op-ed in today's LA Times -- Avoid The Road To Damascus -- on why "Syria is not Iraq...and Americans should not allow themselves to be spun into thinking so." Of course, it should be added that Iraq isn't Iraq either -- at least not the Iraq that Bush and Company spun. All the more reason for staying ahead of the next con job.

Making Light is, in my opinion, the only indispensible blog at the moment. Teresa's posts on the loss of museums and libraries in Iraq have been breathtaking in their intelligence and heart. First, read this post about why the loss of records could be a boon to an ahistorical and secretive adminstration, then go to this one, which starts out being about the museum looting and ends up nailing the vertiginous history of the build-up to this war. Brilliant.

There were several developments today related to the looting of libraries and museums in Iraq:

• Curators assessing the damage say that some items from the National Museum may be recovered. Nothing remains of the National Library.
  
  
• Thirty art experts and archaelogists met to discuss the situation at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, and said that international art traffickers were behind the thefts. UNESCO's director general announced he would press the UN Security Council for an immediate ban on internation trade in Iraqi antiquities and called for a "heritage police" to protect the sites from further looting. A fund has been set up for buying back artifacts within Iraq. Offers of money have come from Qatar, France, Britain and Egypt, but not from the United States.
  
  Experts: Looters had keys to Iraqi antiquity vaults
  
  Experts to Send Team to Iraq in Wake of Museum Looting
  
  Experts Say Gangs Behind Some Iraqi Looting
  
  Art gangs 'looted' Iraqi museums
  
  Experts: Looters Had Keys to Iraqi Vaults
  
  Method to Madness in Museum Looting
  
  
• Three White House art advisors have resigned in protest over "the administration's total lack of sensitivity and forethought regarding the Iraq invasion and the loss of cultural treasures." Martin E. Sullivan, chair of the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property said that what happened was "foreseeable and preventable."
  
  
• The FBI announced that it will send agents to Iraq to investigate the thefts.
  
  
• And then an important blog contribution to the topic: Read Wampum on the mysterious (and somewhat larcenous) American Council for Cultural Policy and their desire to get Iraqi art out of Iraq and into the United States, why a moratorium on trade in Iraqi antiquities won't stop them, and how it may connect up with contributions to Republican Congressional candidates and the Republican Leadership Council. A fascinating and disturbing post.
  
  
• And follow that up with a run over to CalPundit for a look at the creepy argument that -- you are sitting down, right? -- the looting of Iraq's heritage was a gain for humanity.

The marines have killed four more Iraqis in Mosul. Apparently part of the reason for the tension in the city is "American decisions to fly large American flags from their vehicles and repeatedly have fighter jets buzz the city after Tuesday's shooting."

Flags? I thought we were being extremely careful at least not to look like we were taking over.

This is outrageous! Save the Children made their first trip into Iraq since the war began on April 5th, and began assessing both the humanitarian needs and the safety situation for their workers. (The main need right now is not food, but medicine and, especially, water.) They immediately ran into roadblocks from the military and the State Department, who are curtailing their work because of "safety concerns." But -- this is the truly outrageous part -- since April 9, U.S. forces, breaching the Geneva Conventions, have repeatedly refused permission to land to a Save the Children plane carrying medical supplies. With all the looting of hospitals going on in Iraq, the medicines are pretty desperately needed.

The NGOs want to get in and are willing to deal with the lack of security. Why are we stopping them?

(Today's link via Brooke Biggs, who notes that while medicine can't get in, something this administration places a lot more value on is having no trouble getting through.)

Spunky heroines and innocent children whose plight touches the hearts of cynics and assures them that they are still good. We seem to be cribbing our myths from the Victorians these days -- which is probably appropriate: the combination of brutal imperialism and sticky sentimentality worked for the Brits, why shouldn't it work for us?

Joan Walsh has a piece up at Salon on Ali Ismail Abbas, the Iraqi boy who lost his parents, siblings, and both arms in an American missile strike, noting that the American media barely mentioned him when he was just a victim, but now that the military has airlifted him to Kuwait for medical treatment, and he can stand as a symbol of American goodness, the media is all over the story.

And the way the media is exploiting the story isn't pretty.

Atrios picked up on a CNN interview with Ali's doctor that is not only despicable, but emblematic of the values of George Bush's America:

KYRA PHILLIPS: Doctor -- what has he been saying to you, Doctor? Is he asking anything of you? Is he thanking you? Is he wanting to know about family? Tell us what this little boy has been saying to you.

AL-NAJADA: Actually, today he was in good condition after the operation and started speaking with a journalist and answering all their questions. The thing which he was -- they asking about -- the journalists, especially the broadcasting, what the message he wants to reflect from the war. He said, first of all, thank you for the attention they're giving to him, but he hopes nobody from the children in the war they will suffer like what he suffer.

PHILLIPS: Does he understand why...

AL-NAJADA: Kyra.

PHILLIPS: Doctor, does he understand why this war took place? Has he talked about Operation Iraqi Freedom and the meaning? Does he understand it?

AL-NAJADA: Actually, we don't discuss this issue with him because he is -- the burn cases, and the type of injury, he's in very bad psychological trauma.

This is Sally Field imperialism -- not only do we bomb you, take over your country and exploit your resources, but when we do, you must like us, really, really like us. The epitome of self-centeredness -- no matter what trauma you face, the important thing is that you understand how we feel, and what we want. Baby boomer imperialism, brought to you by our second baby boomer president.

We make very strange imperialists -- we want both oil and love. Well, maybe -- let's give it the best reading -- that's a sign that imperialism doesn't come naturally to us. It's not in our nature. We won't be good at it. Maybe it's a sign that we should go back to being a democracy.

Rebecca Reynolds is a grad student working on a research project on blogs, journalism, and civic participation. She's interviewing bloggers, but she'd also like to contact readers to find out how they use blogs, in comparison to traditional media. If you'd be willing to answer a few questions (via e-mail), you can contact Rebecca at rbreynol@mailbox.syr.edu.

Natasha, over at The Watch has what strikes me as a wonderful idea: a "virtual march" -- does anyone have connections at MoveOn? -- supporting the troops. Not some meaningless, right-wing-type support for the troops with nothing concrete behind it, but real support. Don't let the Republicans get away with cutting VA health care money and education funding for the children of people in the military. I'm in. Anybody else?

Don't miss Jake Tapper's piece in today's Salon on the MIA WMDs. It's worth sitting through the ads for.

The article makes three important points. First that no banned weapons have been found in Iraq. (You knew that, but with all the "smoking guns," appearing in the media, and then disappearing without a trace of smoke, sometimes it's hard to keep it in mind.) Second, that unless outsiders -- and that probably means the UN -- are brought into the process soon, no one is going to believe us if we claim to find something later on -- except for those benighted souls who would believe Bush if he said the Martians were invading.

But Tapper's third point makes me wonder if the first two even matter. As he points out, the press has seized upon every hole in the ground and trace of Raid as a hint of important news about chemical and biological weapons (nobody's even pretending to believe there are nuclear weapons anymore.) But somehow the fact that the stories haven't panned out disappears without a trace. The Pentagon never makes any false claims about these "hints," and yet bit by bit, people are being left with the impression that discoveries have been made that, in fact, haven't.

Does that pattern bear a striking resemblance to the way millions of Americans came to believe in non-existent Iraqi hijackers?

I have a suspicion -- perhaps paranoia, perhaps it will be gone tomorrow -- that in a few months no one will have found any banned weapons in Iraq, or even claimed to have found any, but it won't matter, because millions of Americans will be quite sure that they did.

There was a time when I would have given anything to see this headline:

Bush Calls on U.N. to Lift Sanctions on Iraq

I just never expected to see it followed by a paragraph like this:

President Bush today called on the United Nations to quickly lift its decade-long economic sanctions against Iraq, allowing the country to freely sell oil to help pay for its reconstruction.

This is what now passes for a concern with human rights and a desire to ease human suffering. The Iraqis are free to be exploited and ripped off. God forgive us all.

Read CalPundit on the strangeness of conservatives claiming to be the ones who care about human rights, and then Hesiod on the case of the disappearing conservative compassion for suffering Iraqis.

I have to admit, this one of those things that drive me crazy. How in the world did we fall so far down the rabbit hole that Rumsfeld and Cheney can pass themselves off as human rights advocates and warriors for the oppressed?

Nathan Newman makes a good case for one possible explanation, or at least a piece of the explanation: in recent decades the left has failed to build solidarity with resistance movements in dictatorial countries, and in doing so has failed to support real alternatives to war. (As Kevin points out, various human rights groups -- not conservatives -- have publicized the abuses and advocated for changed policies. But those groups, while filled with liberals, don't identify themselves as leftist groups.) The need to do so isn't just a matter of altering perceptions of liberals and human rights, it's important because we don't want to leave oppressed people having to make a choice between "Bush's rightwing capitalist militarism" and the policies of their authoritarian leaders. That's not a choice human beings should have to make.

Go over to Nathan's site to take a first step by signing the letter condemning recent human rights abuses in Cuba.

I seem to just be serving as the Tim Dunlop Appreciation Society today (see the post below), but he's got a great survey and analysis of articles on the Mosul shootings that everybody should read.

Last week, the New York Times ran an article about censorship of war photos, focusing on a genuine ethical dilemma: On the one hand, people need to see war as it is; on the other hand, many war photos depict scenes that are far too disturbing to toss at unprepared people as they flip on the TV or skim their morning papers.

What the Times article didn't mention is that the source of much of the censorship is not an understandable squeamishness, but flat-out political correctness. On the day newspapers reported the rescue of Jessica Lynch, the Oregonian ran a front page photo of an Iraqi man crying over the coffins of his wife, parents, children, and brothers -- all killed in an American bombing raid. Anyone who has seen some of the pictures of the horror that has come from this war would consider it a restrained photo, but an effective one nonetheless. It may not expose viewers to the most brutal and gruesome aspects of war, but the man's face at least evokes some of the tragedy.

There are a lot of people who don't want to know anything about tragedy. Although a few people called to thank the editors for publishing the photo, more than 50 complained, some of them canceling their subscriptions.

A sample of the response:

"I found the picture on today's Oregonian to be a great attempt to give sympathy and support to a merciless enemy. Certainly the story of civilian casualties needs to be told, but not as the main focal point of a daily newspaper. How about celebrating the return of one of our own?

Although the Oregonian's visuals editor stands by the decision to run the photo, other editors argue that it was a bad choice, and that pictures of Jessica Lynch's happy family would have been "more accurate."

Apparently they believe that the media have not given us enough of the warm and cozy side of this war, or maybe they have a sense that readers never tire of "good news" and spunky heroines. Americans -- in those editors' view -- are weak and stupid people; show them anything that contradicts what they've been told, and they get confused. Keep it simple.

We want to choose the news the way we choose movies -- You know, I'm really in the mood for a comedy tonight -- and we even want to determine ahead of time what the plot is going to be.

But anyone who's ever written a story knows that they rarely ended up with much of a resemblance to the story you planned.

Tim Dunlop has a terrific post today about the fable of Jessica Lynch, the "more accurate" story that apparently doesn't have a lot of truth at its core. Tim says if he were one of the people who'd felt an emotional attachment to the story, he'd be "a bit pissed" to find out he'd been lied to. Me too -- and I think the same could be said of the war as a whole. If I had bought the argument that we had to stop Iraq from using WMD's, I'd be furious to find that nobody seems to be able to find any. If I'd bought the "free the people" argument, I'd be looking right now at burning and looted libraries and museums, and American soldiers shooting demonstrators and I'd be wondering if I'd been had. Excuse me, sir, I'd be saying, but this isn't quite the image of freedom I had in mind. I'd be wondering about the story I'd been fed. But, of course, there are parts of the country where there's only one story in town. And there are always new lands where we can spread our fables.

But there's got to be a better way to tell a story.

Pfaffenblog has a fascinating (and well-documented) post on who stands to gain from the looting of the National Museum of Antiquities.

As I've said before -- God is an ironist: April is national library month.

This morning, as I was reading the Los Angeles Times, it suddenly hit me that there was nothing in it about the destruction of the National Library in Baghdad. The LAT has always been a somewhat schizophrenic paper -- occasionally the home of great reporting, but also, at times, a bit clueless about what constitutes an important story. So I went to check the other two major U.S. papers, to see how they covered it:

• Baghdad Residents Begin a Long Climb to an Ordered City
  The New York Times buries two paragraphs about the library in the middle of a story about Baghdad's gradual return to order:
  
  
  But even as some Iraqis sought to heal the city's wounds, others, fired by anger and revenge, broke through to the little that was left of untouched government buildings after four days of continuous looting. Among other buildings afire or still smoldering in eastern Baghdad today were the city hall, the Agriculture Ministry and — so thoroughly burned that heat still radiated 50 paces from its front doors — the National Library. Not far from the National Museum of Iraq, which was looted on Thursday and Friday with the loss of almost all of its store of 170,000 artifacts, the library was considered another of the repositories of an Iraqi civilization dating back at least 7,000 years.
  
  By tonight, virtually nothing was left of the library and its tens of thousands of old manuscripts and books, and of archives like Iraqi newspapers tracing the country's turbulent history from the era of Ottoman rule through to Mr. Hussein. Reading rooms and the stacks where the collections were stored were reduced to smoking vistas of blackened rubble.
  
  
  
  
• Major Combat Is 'Over' as Tikrit Falls
  The Washington Post focuses on the change in the Marines' mission from fighting to "peacekeeping," and includes only a single sentence -- if you want to get technical, a single clause -- about the library: "But scattered gunfire still echoed across the city and several ransacked buildings, including the National Library with its centuries of archives, still smoldered."

No one will ever accuse the Post of overplaying the story.


The British press, meanwhile, headlined the destruction:

• BBC: Prized Iraqi annals "lost in blaze"
  
  
• Guardian: Ancient archive lost in Baghdad library blaze
  
  
• Independent: Library books, letters and priceless documents are set ablaze in final chapter of the sacking of Baghdad

At least a few of the smaller American papers picked up this AP story. Still, the fact that our "best" papers don't consider the loss of rare books, including one of the oldest known copies of the Koran, a tragedy worthy of a headline is simply embarassing.

I don't know how I missed this, but the best essay on the looting of Iraq's antiquities is over at Making Light -- followed by a treasure trove of reader comments. And the conversation, three days later, is still going.

Robbing the cradle of civilization
Baghdad is not the only city where civilization is being smashed or trucked away:

Mosul is one of the oldest cities in the world: it is where human beings invented cities, then developed writing so they could write about them. As we drove to the museum, I had the feeling I always have when it's time to visit a museum in a great city. I felt it despite the looting and burning going on around us: curiosity, and awe.

We parked in front of the museum in the place where human memory begins -- a building of red stone, built in a simple but old style, like the lower levels of a zigurrat. A kid with a gun sat in front of the side entrance. The space inside was black. There was no electricity, and we walked inside over a sheet of water, because someone had already taken the water fixtures. In the research and archiving part of the building, the library had been looted, and files were on the floor. Sion found a room full of artifacts smashed on the floor. Clay tablets covered with cuneiform writing were scattered around like refuse. The larger display artifacts were in another wing, and we walked outside to find the main entrance. We crawled through a broken window to see the exhibits.

Inside, we saw a sign that said "Assyria" in printed letters with an arrow, so we followed it. Rows of shattered glass cases had been emptied of smaller artifacts. Some cases were not shattered, but they were empty as well. Either the curators had placed the artifacts in safekeeping, I thought, or officials had stolen them.

We walked until we found the main exhibition hall. The room was sepulchral; the windows had been blacked out with sheets of felt. When our eyes adjusted, we saw the great stone lion that guarded the Ishtar temple at the Nimrud Ziggurat, three thousand years ago. The ghost of an ancient history teacher shouted in my mind, "Look!" The large hall had been built to hold the lion and the graceful winged form on the massive slab next to it: another lion, this one with wings sprouting from its back. Cuneiform covered every inch of its body, and its mouth was open in speech.

We stared at the walls of Nimrud, and we spoke quietly, because we were in a museum.

At the lions' feet were large square beds of sandbags the curators had placed there, in case the bombs knocked the huge stone slabs over. They did it to keep them from shattering when they fell.

I saw a plaque next to the slab with the winged lion. It read, "These stone statues represent the power located at the entrance of cities. They are guards to ward off demons and spirits."

The lions must have been sleeping. On this day, they had failed. -- Phillip Robertson from Cry, The Despoiled City

Ancient archive lost in Baghdad library blaze

George Bush has always treated language the way an abusive parent treats a child -- with nothing but contempt. And so I am sure this loss will mean nothing to him:

"Almost nothing remains of the library's archive of tens of thousands of manuscripts, books, and Iraqi newspapers."

Barbarian.

From the Greek "barbaroi," meaning "babblers," used to mean non-Greeks, i.e., people who didn't speak Greek; from the sound that the Greeks thought they were making: "bar bar bar bar..."

A stupid and meaningless war, never put into reasonable language, that leaves us all babbling and stupid, without language, without meaning.

Speechless.

You think my bitter screed yesterday was a little exaggerated? Don't be absurd. Looting is good.

UPDATE: No, really. Looting is good.

UPDATE 2: It's the kind of thing we want to encourage.

I was preoccupied with real life last week (which should explain the lack of posts from Tuesday through Saturday), but I was surprised not to see any reference to this article in the Los Angeles Times. (I'm sure someone mentioned it, but I didn't come across it.)

Iraq has one internationally sanctioned storage site for nuclear materials. As the Americans approached Baghdad, the Iraqi guards abandoned the site. Once the guards were out of the way, the same thing happened to the nuclear site that happened to the rest of Iraq -- it was looted. Televisions, cars, even carpets were hauled off from offices and homes in the complex.

What else the looters took no one knows, but seals meant to detect tampering with nuclear materials were broken.

According to a report by the Institute for Science and International Security (No permalinks -- scroll to "ISIS Issue Brief: Nuclear Revelations Show Need for Resuming International Control of the Tuwaitha Site, by David Albright and Corey Hinderstein, April 11, 2003."), the material not only poses a risk to anyone mishandling it, but "could be useful for terrorists or other nations intent on making nuclear weapons or radiological dispersal devices."

This isn't the first time the Bush administration has taken a "What, me worry?" approach to weapons materials sitting around unguarded. They haven't funded plans to guard or destroy old Russian nuclear materials and weapons, either. But wasn't the point of this war something to do with keeping WMDs out of the hands of terrorists? Doesn't creating anarchy that makes it impossible to know where anything is disappearing to kind of undercut that goal?

UPDATE: Head over to Liberal Oasis for another explanation of Bush and Company's lack of urgency when it comes to securing weapons and weapoons materials.

Ode To Joy
Welcome to the conservative vision of paradise. There is no government in the way to cramp the spirit of bold men who know what they want and are ready to grab it. Everybody's joining the party -- even our brave fighting men and women, who are also making important contributions to the local economy. It's a jungle out there. Only the strong survive, and the weak better get out of the way. And that includes all those liberal elitists, and their obsession with "culture." All those creeps who think they're too smart to just settle in with a good movie like normal people. And those damn humanitarians who do nothing but complain. It's about time they got out of the way.

I bet they're not even collecting taxes in Iraq right now. Does it get better than that?

Yes, it is, as Donald Rumsfeld said, a little "untidy." The hospitals have been stripped of their beds (along with just about everything else) -- but strong, bold men who know how to take care of themselves don't need hospitals anyway.

They need guns. You give a man a couple of Kalashnikovs, he doesn't need any stinking government.



This is what freedom looks like, and it looks good. And if you don't think so, we don't want to hear about it.

Okay, maybe a police force would be a good thing. And one thing you've got to give those Ba'athists credit for -- they know how to keep order. Let's try them first. At least temporarily. In the long term, the only people you can really count on to run a police force are Americans -- preferably Americans working for a company with an atrocious human rights record.

DynCorp. You may have heard of them before. The people who brought you a sex trafficking ring and drunken mechanics in Bosnia. The company that has demonstrated a reckless disregard for law and human life. And which, according to an article in The New Republic last year, has a history of defrauding the U.S. government with clever little tricks like hiring cheap, untrained, and unqualified workers -- DynCorp "aviation experts" at U.S. bases in Germany turned out to be former cooks and cashiers -- and performing unnecessary tasks to pad their bills.

Welcome to the anything-the-UN-can-do-big-bidness-can-do-better vision of paradise -- DynCorp will be policing Iraq.

Hire some out-of-work cooks and cashiers, call them cops, and send them to Baghdad. That ought to work. (What? You got something against free enterprise?)

Utopia. No gun control, no government to speak of, cheap labor, and plenty of opportunities for enterprising and smart young men who are willing to pay their dues. (As long as the killjoys stay out of the way.) A conservative paradise. Coming soon to your neighborhood. And to our fighting men and women, who have done so much to help us achieve this miracle: Welcome home.

Several months ago, I wrote something about Billie Holiday and the song "Strange Fruit." At the time, a reader wrote to tell me about a documentary on the subject that was playing in film festivals and limited screenings. It will be on PBS this week -- tomorrow at 10 on KCET in Los Angeles. You can find a broadcast time for other cities, and read more about the program here.

"War is about dead people, not gorgeous-looking soldiers." -- Susan Sontag

Last week I wrote about images of kindness that are coming from Iraq. Today's New York Times has an excellent article on the flip side: the pictures of the dead and wounded that are being censored.

Peter Maass, reporting from Iraq, had a very good article in yesterday's New York Times about the humanitarian crisis, which adds another layer to the issue -- the fact that the military regards aid as an added, and unwelcome, duty:

The battalion I have been traveling behind does distribute some humanitarian aid, largely through its civil affairs unit. Often it is given to civilians who have been inconvenienced by tanks and assault vehicles parking in their fields. On Thursday, as I waited on the outskirts of Kut during a battle there, several Iraqi men walked out of the city with yellow humanitarian packets — M.R.E.'s for civilians — under their arms.

The art of humanitarianism is to provide aid to the people who genuinely need it, and that's usually women, children and the elderly. The Iraqis with the yellow rations were fighting-age men; it's a good bet they were deserters who were given a thank you meal from the civil affairs contingent at the front, just up the road.

The battalion commander stopped by my S.U.V. recently, and I asked about his unit's humanitarian work. The commander, who is a smart and focused lieutenant colonel, was dispatched to Iraq to kill the bad guys, and he doesn't mind doing so. That's his mission. "Yes, we're giving out humanitarian rations," he told me. "It's kind of the carrot-and-stick approach. No better friend, no better enemy." He does not want to do humanitarian work, he continued. "It's not our job, but we do what is humane and what we can to relieve suffering," he said. "The aid we give out is more of a gesture."

I asked whether he had talked with Iraqis and perhaps shared a meal to find out their needs. He said his civil affairs unit handles those things. He doesn't have time for kebabs. "I don't like eating goat," he said and smiled.

His version of humanitarianism is marching to Baghdad as quickly as possible to get rid of Mr. Hussein. Despite the language in Washington, that's probably the Pentagon's version of humanitarianism, too. And that's why, as the march on Baghdad goes forward, I expect to see more Iraqis begging for water.

Once upon a time there was a war...
News is a story, and like any story, a thousand people can read it and come away with at least a couple of thousand meanings. (I realize most people only get a single meaning from a story, but quirkier brains like mine make up for them by seeing far more than any rational person could see.) That's especially true of much of what passes for information, but really hasn't earned the classification -- the images, the human interest stories, the impressions left without anyone ever really making the argument. More people form their opinions from those things than from analysis of facts and rational arguments. I don't mean to disparage anyone else's thinking. I do it myself. I know the facts -- well, a reasonable collection of facts; nobody knows all of them -- but it's the images and vague, sometimes eccentric impressions that animate me. We all mistake our feelings for opinions -- I don't trust the opinion of anyone who is all logic; it's inhuman -- and while there are certainly dangers in that, I'm not convinced it's entirely a bad thing. Maybe I'm just too Catholic, but symbols, for me, don't just stand for something else, something real. They have a sensual, emotional reality of their own.

Many years ago, I got into a disagreement (okay, an argument) with my extremely conservative brother-in-law about the silly little war in Grenada. His entire case consisted of "Didn't you see the people get off the plane and kiss the ground?" He hadn't the vaguest idea what the war was about (and I can hardly blame him, since no one else -- including me -- knows what it was about either), but as far as he was concerned, that single image demonstrated the necessity of the war so fully that any more discussion was insane. Anyone who didn't see things his way had to be blind, because there was the proof, in color, on television. It drove him nuts that I didn't see the same picture he saw.

I've been getting a lot of mail like that lately. Semi-literate and abusive, most of it, and stuck on the idea that anyone who doesn't support this war must be blind (if not evil). Didn't you see the happy Iraqis by the side of the road, cheering soldiers? Didn't you see that soldier give candy to children? Didn't you see the smile on the face of that spunky little Jessica? Doesn't that tell you anything -- how horrible the people who captured her were, how glad she was to escape? What's the matter with you? Why don't you see what everyone else sees?

To be honest, I don't watch much television, and I haven't seen those images. I'll take the letter-writers at their word that the images are there, although how I would interpret them if I were to see them, I can't say. Despite what some people think, the meaning of an image or event depends a great deal on what the witness is able to take from it. Or bring to it. I did watch a few minutes of CNN yesterday, but perhaps the circumstances under which I saw it might account for the fact that what I saw was very different from what the letter-writers describe.

Annie Sullivan and the Mechanical Men

My daughter played at her first piano recital yesterday. She put on her first-day-of-school dress and her black mary janes, and combed every tangle out of her hair. It's been a long time since every tangle was out of her hair. Neatness is not one of her priorities in life. I didn't tell her to get dressed up. It was obviously just important to her. But she's shy, and I prepared myself ahead of time for the fact that she might decide to back out at the last second. When she didn't, when she strode up to the piano and played, "America" and "When the Saints Go Marching In," it was a wonderful surprise. Who knew my little girl, who can barely speak in public sometimes, who blushes all the way down to her toes when an adult she doesn't know says something to her, had so much courage?

Afterwards, because it was a special day, we took her out to lunch at her favorite Japanese restaurant (which has great food, and, for some unfathomable reason, shelves of Elvis memorabilia at the entrance -- although they toned down the shrine to Elvis a bit since the last time we were there, and, to be honest, I kind of miss its strangeness; I like eccentricity.) On the way home, we rented a movie. My daughter said she didn't want a funny movie (she loves the Marx Brothers) or a kid's movie (I think she was feeling rather grown-up), so we rented an old movie that I first saw and loved when I was about her age -- The Miracle Worker. So I spent a couple of hours with my courageous daughter, watching a courageous teacher, crying through half of it (I'm such a sucker for "uplifting" movies), answering questions, and listening to my daughter's running commentary on what was going on (even 8-year-olds need to interpret the stories they see -- at least mine does.)

And when the movie was over, my daughter went out to ride her bike. I turned off the VCR, and CNN came on. I was still thinking about Annie Sullivan yelling at Helen Keller's parents, who were satisfied to have a daughter who dressed herself and ate with utensils instead of her fingers. She said that Helen was only housebroken, and that wasn't enough, that obedience wasn't worth anything without understanding, that their daughter was entitled to language, to a means of understanding, and expressing what she understood. And on the television were pictures of tanks -- it looked like miles of them, rolling up a dirt road. And soldiers shrouded in so much equipment that it called for more imagination than I've got to picture a human being in there. Sort of a masculine burka, giving off an air of invulnerability, instead of creepy inviolability. And to be honest, the image simply scared me. I'll debate the reasons for this war all you like, but that mechanical and monstrous image, so devoid of humanity, so incapable of human emotion, stood for something ugly in my mind. Does this represent my country -- this monster? It may be unfair -- it is unfair, impressions always are -- but the war seemed to me at that moment to be a massive, hard, and ugly creature, rolling mindlessly along, without a human face, too mechanized to feel, or even really experience, anything. And if I were a different person, with a different cast of mind, I might scream at somebody, "Can't you see what this war is? It's all there, in that picture." Instead I turned off the television.

Maybe my reading of the image had something to do with the fact that I saw it after a day of witnessing quiet courage -- not just my daughter's: child after child got up, made mistakes, and kept going -- and I was still wrapped in a old movie's faith in a vulnerable person's courage, in that strangely out-dated belief that full, expressive humanity matters, and obedience is for dogs. If I'd watched it after a football game, or had been immersed in those images all day, or day after day, maybe I would have gotten a different message: We're big, we're bad, we're the best.

That seems to be the meaning most Americans are taking from those images. I'm sorry I can't see that, but I come to those images from a quieter and more vulnerable place.

I can't say whose reading is right. We bring ourselves to the story, and the story won't emerge unscathed. We look at the same images, but we don't all see the same thing.

Repeating patterns of Jessicas

Yesterday, I linked to several intriguing posts over at Silver Rights, about the media's obsession with the story of Jessica Lynch, and the relative lack of attention paid to minority soldiers -- men and women both. I'm not sure J. is right, although I must say that I had found myself wondering, too, if the situations were reversed and Lori Piestewa, the Hopi woman who was killed in Iraq, had been rescued, and Jessica Lynch had died, if we would not now be seeing the tragic death as more important than the rescue. If we wouldn't be thinking, yes, thank God that one woman was rescued, but we must not forget the brave, blonde girl who died at the hands of evil men, and fight all the harder in her memory. The word "wondering" is the key there. I'm aware of how often the issues and concerns of anyone who isn't white, male or middle class (preferably all three) get shoved to the margins, and when something like this happens, it's pretty hard not to notice that the media is obsessed with one particular woman, and that her pigmentation is different from that of the majority of women in the military. Does that "prove" that the media is biased? Of course not. But it's part of a pattern that, at the very least, makes the issue worth raising. The obsession with "Jessica" (the oddness of using her first name has already been thoroughly analyzed by a large number of the blogs I read) feels an awful lot like previous media obsessions with kidnapped or missing girls and young women, and if you've noticed in the past that that mania doesn't seem to take hold when the missing and murdered children are poor and black, it's impossible not to feel like the same thing is happening in a different arena.

Doesn't prove it, but it's an issue that needs to be raised. And I'm thankful for someone like J. who tells me I'm not the only one who's wondering about that.

If you haven't already noticed that pattern, the idea that the media has singled out a white woman for attention, while ignoring minority women (and men) must seem strange. You can't "prove" it, after all, so it must be your own personal obsession. There's an interesting post up at Soul Rights (blogspotty links -- it's the April 5 post) that responds in that way to J.'s thoughts. "Soul" argues that she's seen a great deal about both Lori Piestewa, and Shoshana Johnson, another captured women, that in fact her exposure to the story of captured women came initially from hearing about Johnson and Piestewa.

That's a valid, even important point. We all pay attention to different media, and get varying amounts of it, and one person's impression is not necessarily representative. I'm very aware -- from mail, from talking to friends and neighbors -- that because I don't watch a lot of television, I don't see the same war most people see. The war on CNN is not the same as the war in the New York Times (let alone, the war in the Guardian or the Independent). And it's a matter of image and context as much as "facts." I think a lot of people would argue that means I'm not seeing the "real" war (the one most Americans are seeing.) I'd just say none of us are seeing the real war, but that's not going to stop us from trying to interpret what we do see. Soul has a different impression of media coverage than J. does -- and to me the different views are simply interesting. We look at the same images, but we don't see the same thing. And all those impressions are pieces of the puzzle.

But something in the later post disturbs me. The argument becomes not "I saw something different," but if you see something different, you must be "grabbing for straws."

I think that's a stick that's used to beat up women and minorities all too often: you're letting your own personal obsessions get in the way of seeing what everyone else sees. As if not to see what the majority sees were mere obstinacy. As if "everyone else" weren't equally influenced by personal experiences, and even eccentricities. The difference, of course, is that white, male, middle-class experiences are defined as the norm. We're all supposed to look through that lens.

But we don't. And we can't. And we shouldn't. You can debate facts, but you can't get somebody to see a story through your eyes. And you lose something important, I think, if you can't simply accept that someone can observe the same scene, or the same picture, you do, and see something you can't see.

As Annie Sullivan might say, we're entitled to understand what we understand, and to the language we need to express it.

After yesterday's jeremiad about the roadblocks that are being put in the way of humanitarian aid and reconstruction in Iraq, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to post a link to this article from The Guardian on relief agencies working in Iraq, and where to donate aid money. Don't count on Bush to pay for cleaning up his mess. Rich boys don't clean up anything.

Running Around In Blog Circles

• Pandagon has a thoughtful post on how the moral confusion of this war makes thought and honest human reaction more difficult. (In a similar vein, Joan Walsh had an interesting -- wrong in some ways, I think, but still interesting -- piece in Salon on the mixed feelings a lot of us share: longing for a quick American victory, as painless as possible for both soldiers and civilians, and a simultaneously longing to see the people in charge pay for their arrogance and deadly mistakes, so that they can't go on to cause more damage. She has a good analysis as well of how that genuine moral dilemma has led some mushy liberals like Nicholas Kristof to see the problems clearly without being able to put the blame where it belongs.)
  
  
• Silver Rights (which I'm adding to the blogroll) considers the death of Pfc. Lori Piestewa, and the disparagement of Army Specialist Shoshana Johnson, and asks some important questions about the relative media disinterest in minority soldiers.And Ampersand (and his fascinating collection of readers) takes off from J.'s post to discuss media coverage of the deaths of women in war.
  
  
• Lisa English tunes in to Democracy Now and comes back with a report that Aaron Brown is "unprofessional, agenda-driven, reflexively defensive, unprepared and ill-informed." I can't get Real Player anymore, so I'll have to take her word for it. But generally I've found Lisa to be a good deal more reliable than Aaron Brown.
  
  
• Digby has been on a righteous tear all week (consider that my nomination for "Blog of the Week," Devra). There are too many good posts to pick out a single "best," and they all work together, anyway. Just go read.

Clip File: Human Rights and Wrongs

Belgium Rethinks Its Prosecutorial Zeal
The Belgians' continuing attempt to refine their universal jurisdiction human rights laws so that war crimes victims can at least be heard, while filtering out "ridiculous" cases. The Prime Minister wants the government to be entitled to reject any cases where the accused comes from a democratic country. On the surface, that seems to make sense, but does anyone really think officials in democratic countries are never guilty of anything that rises to the level of a war crime? This New York Times article seems to accept that premise as uncontroversial, but the idea seems absurd to me.

Cairo, Once 'The Scene," Cracks Down On Gays
The abuse, even torture, of homosexuals in Egypt is, unfortunately an old story. But combined with recent stories about the crackdown on dissent in Egypt, it's hard not to be left with a sense that as the United States cares less and less about human rights, our more dictatorial "allies" become increasingly emboldened.

Spectre Orange
The U.S. used chemical weapons, weapons of mass destruction, in Vietnam, knowing full well what their effects would be. They continue to maim and kill people more than 30 years later.

The World's Other Tyrants, Still At Work
Tyrants take advantage of the world's inattention to crack down on dissidents. It's happened throughout history and it's happening again. While we fix all our attention on the crimes of Saddam Hussein, brutal violations of human rights are carried out in Zimbabwe, Cuba, Egypt, Thailand, and elsewhere. At the risk of repeating myself -- if it's a problem that can't be solved with a bomb or a contract, this administration doesn't see it.

Afghan Women Fear Fallout of Iraq War
There have been positive changes in the lives of Afghan women since the Taliban was forced out, but it doesn't come close to the success story the Bush administration has trumpeted. Women's groups in Afghanistan fear that the war in Iraq will make things worse for them. And it's especially bad because it comes at a time when the codification of women's rights is up in the air.

Their Day In Court
How does an administration that has complete contempt for international law go about planning for a war crimes trial? Awkwardly, and with an emphasis on vengeance. Rumsfeld is only interested in trying crimes that take place during this war, which are directed at Americans. Crimes against humanity committed over the last 30 years are less important because "the crimes in question were not perpetrated against Americans," and therefore "America's interest in seeing them prosecuted is far less compelling than it would be in the case of battlefield atrocities." Well, there's that, and the fact that, if conduct neutrally, such trials might bring up certain countries' complicity in those crimes. How to insure it's not conducted neutrally? Among the plans being tossed around are turning the trial over to Kuwaiti court, or a court run by Iraqi exiles. I'm sure the entire world will see that as a fair trial.

Jim Capozzola says Saddam has escaped and US intelligence knows it. That's why they're already saying that it doesn't really matter if they ever find him. Hmmm....where have we heard that before? Time for a new song, children. Fill in the blank with your favorite target: If you cannot find Saddam, bomb___________.

Yesterday, Edwin Starr died. Now this coincidence. God definitely has a knack for the ironic, doesn't She?

Images of a Kindler, Gentler War
There was a very moving picture on the front page of the Los Angeles Times Sunday: a burly marine with a sad and gentle face, sitting on the ground, holding a little Iraqi girl in a fuzzy pink blanket sleeper. I don't know the whole story behind the picture. The caption is vague: "A medical corpsman with U.S. Marines in central Iraq cradles a young girl after a group of civilians got caught in the crossfire during a battle between Marines and Iraqi fighters." Did the civilians caught in the crossfire include her parents? Are they dead? What will happen to her now? I don't know, and I want to know. But I've looked at so many ugly pictures this week (including one that I would give anything to be able to forget), pictures that most Americans, who don't get news from the internet and foreign press, haven't seen, that this simple picture of a man taking care of a child is a sanity-saver.

And damn good propaganda, too. Yeah, I know that. I know full well when I'm being manipulated. And I know that Americans who haven't seen the horrible pictures I've seen are really getting their strings pulled. They're not being given relief from the horror; they're being given a visual emblem for what some very cynical men would like them to believe this war is all about -- good, strong men trying to stop the suffering and save the innocent.

But the fact that the image is emotional blackmail doesn't make it false. Here is a picture of a good, strong man, holding a child on a battlefield, a little girl who pretty desperately needs someone to hold her. I just want to cherish that man, and thank God for him, because I think that nurturing instinct is the best thing we've got going for us. In times like these, especially, we really need that man.


We also need to get as mad as hell at the souless bastards who are trying to piggyback on his goodness.

Expect to see more pictures like that. Army doctors bandaging beautiful children. Soldiers passing out gum and candy, giving water to shrouded women.

People will die for those pictures.

I don't just mean that in a broad, general way -- that people die in wars, and images of compassion are designed to make us forget that. I mean it quite literally. Lives are going to be lost in the pursuit of images of goodness. Those beautiful pictures fuel this ugly war.

I hope you'll bear with me while I try to explain that.

This war is meant to end in occupation. That means we will have to fix anything we break (although Bush and Company do seem to be consulting the Lousy Landlord's Handbook on How To Force Tenants to Pay For Maintenance). There's a good side to that: they really do seem to be trying to be as careful as possible with the infrastructure. So far. Everyone is more careful with what he thinks of as his own property, after all. And even though they may be careful for cynical and greedy reasons, it's a good thing anyway. More civilians died in Iraq after the Gulf War than during -- and that was primarily because of infrastructure damage (combined with sanctions.) It looks like the odds of it being better this time around are good. Inshallah.

A war that ends in occupation has to be a war for "hearts and minds" -- a phrase I hear more and more, always with what, to my ear, is an astonishing lack of irony. You don't want to piss off the people you plan to govern. No more than necessary, anyway. And you really don't want to deliberately put civilians in harm's way, especially if you plan to get high and mighty about the enemy doing the same thing. If Pax Americana is going to make everyone forget about her rapacious streak, she better paint on a pretty face. That doesn't sound bad, but it is. It means -- to this administration at least -- that the invaders must be seen as the good guys: taking care of medical needs, handing out food and water. Everybody -- over here and over there -- has to believe that we're sending a righteous, humanitarian army. We shoot, we bomb, we kill -- because, really, we don't have a choice -- but afterwards, we'll make it all better. Bush promised. The same people who do the killing will do the healing.

That might just be the single worst idea that ever oozed out of this slimy administration.

Humanitarian workers know that mixing military and humanitarian work is a huge mistake. (A "mistake," that is, if your object is to help people, but perhaps not a mistake at all if you have different motives.) Soldiers aren't trained to do that sort of thing, and when they do, they screw it up badly. Dangerously. Their good hearts and good intentions are just wasted.

Distributing aid is not a matter of showing up with boxes of food and handing it out to whatever grateful souls come along. Professional aid workers are experts at assessing needs. They get into a community and find out what is needed most -- food, water, shelter, medicine -- and take care of the most urgent needs first, not the needs that make the best pictures (a medical corpsman holding a child is inspiring, but what he's doing doesn't come close in importance to a team of engineers repairing a water treatment plant -- as the Red Cross recently did, off camera, near Basra -- which might save thousands of lives by preventing a cholera outbreak.) Professionals know how to get aid to the people who need it the most.

When the process is handled by people who don't know what they're doing, you get meaningless p.r. stunts, and even nightmarish situations like the recent debacles in Safwan, and elsewhere, in which young men grabbed boxes of food, leaving women, children, and the elderly with nothing. Some of the food aid was later sold. The British Army has been handing out powdered milk -- which can be life-threatening if you aren't sure people have a source of clean water. (And the British are better and more experienced at this sort of thing than we are.) No "hearts and minds" were won in those hand-outs. The people who were lured to the elusive "aid" were understandably angry.

At least I hope their anger is understandable. My fear is that Americans, after being fed images of military kindness, will hear about Iraqis' anger and be baffled and insulted by it. They'll ask themselves, "What's the matter with those people? Why aren't they grateful?" That's one of the worst aspects of the game that Bush and Company are playing with humanitarian aid. It makes us all cynical. It makes us believe that there's no point to helping people.

Mixing humanitarian aid and military strategy can lead to situations even worse than what happened at Safwan. Emergency aid organizations operate under a strict code of conduct that ensures that nothing is given a higher priority than helping people, and that everything that can be done to protect the dignity of people receiving aid is done, including making them parners in the process, not just passive recipients. A man in Safwan complained to a reporter, "They're purposely trying to humiliate us and make us look like animals." Receiving aid is not pleasant under any conditions, but when it leaves recipients feeling humiliated, it's a pretty good sign the "aid givers" don't know what they're doing, or that aid is not the real goal.

Throw out the code of conduct, use humanitarian aid as a means of accomplishing military goals, and before you know it, food and water are being used as bait for people who give information. Aid -- which is short supply -- ends up going not to those who need it most, but to those who know the most (and are willing to share their information.) That's outrageous -- at least as bad as mixing aid and proselytizing.

More than a month ago, Nick Cater, writing in The Guardian, called this "the compassion con," which is as good a description as I've heard. The con was already playing out in Afghanistan, where aid workers have been complaining for months about the military deliberately blurring the lines in local people's minds between soldiers and aid workers -- putting those aid workers' lives in jeopardy (and, in fact, a Red Cross worker from El Salvador was recently killed in Afghanistan; two Afghan Red Cross workers who were in the same car were unharmed.)

In Iraq, the confusion is being made even worse. Aid workers who enter Iraq are being told they have to wear military ID tags. Whatever anger Iraqis feel about the invasion -- and it's pretty clear now that the neocons were as wrong as they could be when they suggested there would be no anger or hostility -- could come down hard on unarmed Westerners identified as part of the military. Help that might have been given won't be, because people won't trust aid givers who seem to be part of an invasion.

Nicholas de Torrente, executive director of Doctors Without Borders (which is already operating in Baghdad), recently explained:

Humanitarian aid is distinct from any attempt to win over "hearts and minds" by providing aid in that it does not have any other agenda than helping people, whoever they are and wherever they may be, on the basis of need alone. The danger is that, if independent humanitarian aid efforts, and independent aid organizations, are seen as part of the military-led relief effort, it can have serious consequences in terms of security and access to people in need. Aid workers can become a target, particularly in a war-zone that is tense, volatile and politically charged. Our protection is our humanitarian identity, and it cannot be compromised. What we need from the military is a clear distinction (military always wearing uniforms while carrying out relief for instance). The military should also allow for independent access. For our part, we should also operate distinctly and independently (no participation in armed convoys for instance). As a clear sign of our operational idenpendnce we take no money from any belligerant in any conflict, in this case the US, UK, and other coalition partners.

That distinction is being deliberately and cynically blurred. And it's not going to get better.

The heads of many aid groups who are working, or plan to work, in Iraq -- including CARE, Refugees International, Mercy Corp, Oxfam, and Save the Children -- recently sent the president a letter (pdf.) urging that the UN, not the United States, co-ordinate humanitarian aid in Iraq. Their goal is to help suffering people, not make an invading force look nice, and current plans make that impossible. But what are the chances that this administration shares the goals of people at Oxfam and Save the Children? What are the chances than any of them have ever thought about what they could do to help another human being (without making a profit)? What are the chances they care enough even to avoid making the same stupid mistakes they made in Afghanistan?

The Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for Iraq answers to the Pentagon, and is run by a team of recently retired generals, headed by another retired general -- Jay Garner. There are reports that Colin Powell has tussled with Donald Rumsfeld, trying to stop aid and reconstruction from being controlled by the military, so that the process will be more acceptable to foreign countries. And Congress seems to be siding with Powell. But Powell's idea of international cooperation seems to be that the U.S. will do whatever it wants, and the UN's role will be limited to endorsing what goes on. As Powell, phrased it, the UN will provided a "chapeau."

Take that, Jacques Chirac. We get the oil. If you're nice, we'll let you be our chapeau.

Quite simply, this administration believes that if it can't be accomplished with a weapon or a corporate contract, it doesn't need to be done. They know how to kill. They know how to pass around contracts. And they have nothing but contempt for peple who know how to build and nurture. After all, if they were smart, they'd be rich. People are going to die because of that attitude. Probably off camera.

UPDATE: The New York Times has an interesting article on Ricardo Munguia, the Salvadoran Red Cross worker who was killed in Afghanistan, and on how the increasing dangers facing aid workers in that country could force organizations to cut or curtail desperatlely needed programs. The trouble with the article is that it makes it sound as if Afghanistan is simply an inherently dangerous place, and while there's some truth in that, I think it needs to be clarified that both the lack of an international presence outside Kabul, and the deliberate blurring of the distinction between military and humanitarian workers, have increased the danger, and in the long run make for a less stable Afghanistan.

It ain't nothin' but a heartbreaker
It seems ironic, doesn't it? The man who recorded the funkiest, most danceable anti-war song ever died yesterday. If "War" replaced "Give Peace A Chance" at anti-war rallies, I might even join in. (Well, I'd dance anyway. I dance a lot better than I sing.)

So long, Edwin Starr. I swear we'll keep singing your song.

Letters
Yesterday I promised I was going to drop the subject of extremism and moderation, but this morning I found this letter in my e-mail box, and it's just too good not to share. I've been picking at the margins of the topic. I think it bothered me that the issue came up over an objection to an essay, because writing is sacrosanct to me. I just cringe at what I see as an attempt to turn off the critical mind. I understand the argument about not antagonizing people unecessarily -- I've made it myself a few times -- but when it comes down to suggesting that people shouldn't explore a certain idea because other people disagree and we'll make them mad, and they won't vote for Democrats --- that's dangerous. That turns off our critical facilities, and we desperately need them. Yes, even if it's over as minor a matter as what we see when we look at pop culture. Often it's through those seemingly unimportant issues that people clarify their ideas about more important issues. (Blame my seventies feminism for this belief: Most of us began to understand sexism not through big political issues, but by looking at our own lives, and being aware of small, disturing things in our culture. The big picture came much later.)

I think there's a huge difference between saying that "No blood for oil" signs at a demonstration are probably more harm than help (which I think is true) and telling people, say, that they shouldn't write about the connection between business and war because it makes liberals look anti-business. I have nothing against strategy and tactics, but you can't carry it so far that you're telling people not to speak the truth as they perceive it.

That said, I think there are more important issues involved, and I think this letter delineates them in a very helpful way. It helped me sort out some of my thoughts on the subject anyway. I hope it has the same effect on other people:

My own rambling thoughts on extremism

I think the extremist topic is central, because so many people lump all extremists into the same category. There are extremists, left and right, who worship violence and power and they get lumped into the same category as extremists who see injustices that the center prefers to ignore.  This is very convenient for the self-image of the centrists. They never are made to feel like pariahs, because when they are spectacularly wrong about something they are standing with the majority. When mainstream opinion shifts, then centrists shift with it. If they admit they used to be wrong, they don't feel too bad, because everyone they respected felt as they did.

A couple of years ago I read a biography of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (All on Fire, by Henry Mayer). Garrison is the classic extremist, and the abolitionists were still being reviled when I was taught history. I think some folks now criticize them from the left, as being still tainted by racism. Garrison himself was about as free of racism as a 19th century white man could be -- I don't remember the details, but I think the closest he came to showing racism was in an argument with a black abolitionist, where Garrison seemed to unconsciously assume that he should be treated with more deference. That could have even been mere vanity, not racism. Anyway, getting back to my point, Garrison has always been pilloried as an extremist, but I think it was because he was completely right and the society in which he lived was completely wrong. Even a century later, when historians were ostensibly non-racist, they still instinctively sided with the mainstream of America in the 1850's and saw the abolitionists as trouble-making fanatics who wouldn't compromise. Mid-20th century historians simply couldn't see the issue of black slavery as the moral equivalent of the Soviet Gulag. In fact, I encountered a conservative in Atrios's comment section who had difficulty with that comparison. After all, there can be no comparison between Soviet communist slave labor camps, and, well, American slave labor.

And of course, there were also the violent extremists like John Brown, someone we would now call a terrorist, and since some abolitionists romanticized him, their cause was further tainted.

I think the same dynamic is at work today. I know the human rights issues best, so I focus on that. You have some immature jerk like the professor at Columbia (De Genova, I think) who wished to see large numbers of American soldiers die.  I call him immature because I suspect that is the problem -- it sounds like the sort of outrageous thing an adolescent or someone with an adolescent mentality would say.  Or maybe he really is a vicious bloodthirsty leftist. At any rate, in either case he is deservedly a pariah. (Though if he apologizes, I think people should let it go.)

Now take the defenders of American foreign policy. They don't openly call for people to die, but in reality they support policies which they know kill innocent people, sometimes deliberately. But that's a mainstream position and so nobody is ever called to account for it in any serious way. There might be exceptions to this, in cases where large numbers of Americans die. But large numbers of foreigners -- doesn't matter, unless it becomes a major PR problem. (Which is why the US is being relatively careful in Iraq.)

There's also a hierarchy of allowed and unallowable criticisms of American foreign policy. It works like this:

1.  Sins of omission: The US mainstream loves to criticize itself for not intervening to stop other people's crimes.  The most popular one (pre-Iraq) involves the claim that the Clinton Administration could have stopped the Rwandan genocide and chose not to do it.

These criticisms may be valid. The point is that these criticisms are welcomed, even embraced. The emphasis is on the evil that other men do and how we might have a duty to stop it. Then people get into the classic Wilsonian interventionist vs. Kissingerian realist debate about whether American idealism should be allowed to dominate our foreign policy.  The American foreign policy establishment absolutely loves this moral conundrum. When centrists want to debate morality in foreign policy, this is what they usually want to talk about. The Samantha Powers book on this subject was universally acclaimed.  In fact, I think centrists like to talk about this because it makes them feel good about themselves, in an odd sort of way. Aren't we decent compassionate people at heart? Isn't it a shame that we live in a harsh world where we can't always help people, much as we might wish to?  And (on a darker level), doesn't this give us an excuse to go in and invade when we want to for other reasons?

Anti-interventionist leftists hate these discussions. We would rather see a discussion about how international organizations could be strengthened to serve as anti-genocide cops. But our preference might make us a bit blind ourselves -- in 1994 in Rwanda, maybe it was the US or nobody.

2. Sins of commission, Type A (helping our murderous allies) The US mainstream isn't so eager to talk about how we support mass murderers overseas and the more direct the support, the less they want to talk about it. Another rule of thumb -- past irrelevant crimes can be discussed, but current crimes, or past crimes of current relevance are likely to be ignored. At no time is anyone ever allowed to point out that support for mass murderers overseas is the moral equivalent of supporting terrorists, except that terrorists usually kill fewer people.  In fact, for a centrist, accusing someone of "moral equivalence" is the most devastating charge in their arsenal. To the extent that there is any argument here,  it seems to be that our support for murderers can't be compared to other people's support for murderers, because we have supposedly legitimate foreign policy goals and our enemies do not. Being a democracy means we are the good guys and have a special dispensation to do whatever we think is in "our" interests. (Scare quotes should be placed around all pronouns in foreign policy discussions, but it would get very cluttered-looking.)

The real reason behind the "moral equivalence" charge is that it diverts attention from America's crimes and forces the leftwing extremist to defend himself.  No, we don't think America's brutal crimes justify 9/11, etc, etc. Of course, if a few leftwingers do defend terrorist attacks as some sort of justified retaliation, then they deserve to be denounced. But the idea behind the cry of "moral equivalence", which goes back to the days when Reagan was supporting death squads, is to put critics of American crimes on the defensive. It's a very crude propaganda technique, but with centrists it seems to work.

3.  Sins of Commission, Type B (America kills innocents directly and deliberately): This is almost unmentionable, except in an indirect fashion. The NYT will let out the fact that water treatment plants were hit in the first Gulf War, and even that this caused epidemics, but no motivation is mentioned, not even when they report that Human Rights Watch said it was a violation of the laws of war.   For the NYT this is a fact to be mentioned quickly before moving on to discuss America's generally good wartime intentions.

The idea that American government officials could be legitimate targets of a war crimes trial is in the same category of unmentionable topic. One can say that there are extremists who want this, even former leftwingers like Hitchens, but we all know what those extremists are like.  To a centrist, the notion of a war crimes trial for a high-ranking American (as opposed to a lower class rube like Lt. Calley) is a sick joke, the perfect example of extremist absurdity. Moral equivalence at its very worst.

The hell with centrist thought.  (Not centrists -- some of my best friends, etc...)

There's no reason to think that we extremists are always right either, of course. We've got our own blind spots and if we don't watch it, we just reproduce the herd mentality of the centrists. And centrists are very definitely herd animals. They like to see people on their left and on their right, because it gives them a feeling of safety being in the middle. And there's no need to apologize if they turn out to be wrong, because all the respectable people around them thought the same. There's safety in numbers.

I used to be a centrist and I actually remember thinking that way -- that one should listen to the left and then to the right and that the truth would generally fall somewhere between the two extremes. And my "left" wasn't very far left either. And I hear other people talk that way. The mainstream press almost always defends itself by saying "Well, we're getting hit from the left and from the right, so we must be doing something right." I saw almost that exact quote a few days ago in the NYT, citing a network source. A herd animal response. Where was the centrist white American on the slavery issue in 1850?

The herd animal analogy might seem too contemptuous -- I'm not saying that these people are all sheep.  (Actually, I was thinking more of bison -- big dangerous animals that trample you underfoot when they stampede.) But centrists, in my experience at least, think they're especially open-minded people who listen to both sides, when more often than not they're people who've made up their minds about how things are based on the prevailing prejudices. Those prejudices might be right, but sometimes they're not, and centrists are slow to catch on when that's the case.

-- Donald Johnson

More Letters

First a note of thanks for your series on the meaning of "extremism". Not so long ago I took a political orientation quiz that diagnosed that I was more libertarian and more to the left than Gandhi. This brought the label of "extremist" on me (as if my articles hadn't already) and I felt very much alone in the world, an odd duck bleeding from thousands of shotgun pellets and waiting for still more to come from all quarters.

All my life I've tried to live with and answer to my peers. Being a pacifist, I'm always being put on the spot for my beliefs. In addition to the usual "What would you do if an Iraqi soldier had your wife on the chopping block and was going to make goulash out of her?" questions, I'm also called a coward and a zealot. I'm not a sign-carrier -- I haven't been to a demonstration since 1994 -- and I am actually used to living with people who disagree significantly with me. I live in Orange County, California, for Christ's sake.

What hurts the most is that being who I am merits an out and out dismissal when my beliefs get put on the line or if I question the rationale behind someone else's view. Talking to a centrist is like being put inside a coffin and rolled down the hill: the whole object of the discussion is to disorientation without revelation. (More at Pax Nortona) -- Joel Gazis-Sax

My two cents: We definitely need leaders who can speak to the radical arguments -- who can address, as you put it, the roots of things. And that person really shouldn't be a Democratic Party presidential candidate. -- Josh Kamensky

After reading Donald Johnson's post I wanted to just add a few last thoughts. The first is that after watching too many hours of CNN, BBC and FOX this last week, I heard not a single anti-war voice, not a single serious criticism of Bush and Rummy and the rest, and not a single moment of genuine compassion for the dead -- though there were enough tributes to the heroism of "our" boys and girls. So I have to wonder about any discussion of extremes. I mean the absence of real reporting in the mainstream is pretty obvious, and the government propaganda equally obvious, and if to ask for such voices to be heard is extreme, then fine, I am extreme.

But it goes beyond this -- and here is where Johnson's letter made me think, because I like it a lot. And yet, there is still an assumption about the good intentions of this government, and previous governments, as if we can't really somehow bring ourselves to say that those in charge -- people like Bush and Cheney and Wolfowitz and Ashcroft -- are simply bad bad bad people, immoral and criminal people. 

This raises questions about our democracy and about how to rescue it (although after 50 years of perpetual war I wonder what I might mean) I want to think there is something to be saved, but at this point all I see is total media monopoly and a world increasingly run by corporations and the vested interests of the war economy, run by an elitist few with utter disregard for the poor and suffering of the world. When I realize that nothing is said about depleted uranium (for instance) since the war started -- in mainstream media, certainly nothing on TV anyway, and little anywhere else -- then I wonder what world I am living in and I wonder if a discussion of moderate and extreme and center and so forth has any meaning at all.

This makes me feel pessimistic and I don't like that feeling, and yet I don't know how else to feel. Part of my depression is how naive and uncritical most Americans seem to be, how arrogant and self satisfied a culture this has become, and how clearly it will destroy itself, if not destroy everything. For a government to lie about bombing a market or a hospital is one thing, but to continue to spew out jingoistic and hyper-nationalist rhetoric while children die and then to wax concerned about the Geneva Convention is just more hypocrisy than I can take.

Well, I know this is rambling, but it's the result of my mind incrementally dissolving in the vertigo of swill from the Pentagon and CentCom and the "embeds" and all the rest of this spectacle. I did have a nice exchange with Kevin about his posting, but I fear we will never agree about this topic. Joe Lieberman is hardly going to help matters and neither is Kerry for that matter.

Regards, John Steppling

Extreme Ramblin' On My Mind
Probably no one wants to return to last week's moderation vs. extremism debate, but something about it is still stuck in my brain. Part of what bugs me, I think, is the word "extremism." Politics, let me be the last to state, doesn't hang on a straight line stretching from far right to far left. Nevertheless, if someone said that my politics were "far left," I don't think I'd object to the description, except maybe to point out that I can be pretty moderate in some areas. I might even hit mildly conservative on a few issues (okay, maybe not...)

I'd call myself a radical, in the sense of someone always digging at the roots of problems, not their fruits, and someone who doesn't have much faith in superficial changes (but will vote for them anyway -- I practice moderation and modesty in radicalism).

Does that make me an "extremist?" I mean, honestly, how extreme can a woman who drives a compact station wagon be? I've been a card-carrying member of the PTA for 13 years now. I'm the person in the neighborhood people leave their kids with if they've got to run an errand. How out of the mainstream is that?

Last week, Kevin Drum's post about liberal "extremism" struck a nerve in me, partly because I think of myself as radical but not extreme -- and I had the impression the post was suggesting that to be one was to be the other (which could easily be over-reading on my part) -- but also because I think that anyone who is paying attention and whose brain is functioning at all is, at least occasionally, going to have radical, un-mainstream thoughts. Maybe this is just the bizarre perspective of an artist, but to me different is good. If you see exactly what 90 percent of the country sees, you've probably been watching too much television. Moreover, one of the things that most disturbs me about the current direction of this country is how dangerous it is becoming to express original thoughts.

I think that to be human is to think and express whatever quirkiness emerges. And that means you're not going to see things exactly the same way as every other human being. There's no down side to that. It's something to celebrate. We lose that (and sometimes I really feel like we're in danger of losing it), and we've lost the only thing that can get us out of this mess -- free thought, freely expressed.

I started thinking about this as I was reading a post over at reading & writing (blogspotty links -- scroll down to Go ahead, call me an elitist) about the "fog of half-formed opinion" that most Americans live in. At the moment, mainstream America doesn't pay much attention, doesn't look very carefully, and doesn't trust its own perceptions. (An uneasy feeling in their bones was telling them the war was a dreadful idea, and they told pollsters that, and then let themselves be talked out of that knowledge. Half the battle for the anti-war movement, I suspect, is helping Americans realize that their gut instincts were right.) Maybe it's always been that way to some extent, but over the last few years, there's been an increasing homogenization, I think, an increasing descent into a dumbed down, overly entertained numbness. And I think when you suggest that it's wrong, or politically disadvantageous to perceive something different from what everyone else perceives, you push us deeper into that hole. That's not the solution -- it's the problem.

(And I know you're all bored to death with this topic, so I'll try not to mention it again.)

Wow! Matt's a pro! He'll be writing for The American Prospect, which should, in the next year, get smarter, funnier (I especially liked number 3) and more human. Congratulations, Matt. I couldn't have happened to a more cherubic and pinchable cheeked guy.

And I bet he doesn't like Mark, Luke, or John either

"I am going to pray for George Bush's heart to change, so that he begins to want to be a part of the human family...I am going to pray for him to be OK today, to feel loved, and to be fed, because I think that if you want to change the way you feel about someone, you have to change the way you treat them. I'm going to try to treat him better. Maybe I will send him a little something; socks perhaps, or felt pens. Or balloons. He's family. I hate this, because he is a dangerous member of the family, like a Klansman. To me, his policies deal death and destruction, and maybe I can't exactly forgive him right now, in the classical sense, of canceling my resentment and judgment. But I can at least acknowledge that he gets to eat, too." -- Anne Lamott

"Anne Lamott, blathering on mindlessly in the current Salon" -- Andrew Sullivan

"Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." — Matthew 5:43-44, blathering on mindlessly in some old book that doesn't meet Andrew Sullivan's rigorous intellectual standards.

I can't decide -- should I send Andrew Sullivan socks or felt pens?

Match that Blogger!

I've written before about trying to explain a war I don't believe in to my eight-year-old daughter. I've simply decided that it's better to shelter her from as much of the news as I can. It occurred to me the other day that I was roughly her age (a year older) during the Cuban missile crisis, and I have no memory of it whatsoever. I'm pretty sure until I was in high school, and read about it in my history book, I had no idea that world came close to ending. I'm actually pretty grateful now that nobody told me about it. I had enough problems without being told that grownups were about to blow up the world.

Some people can't shelter children. There are children with parents and brothers and sisters in the war, and if they don't have some idea what's going on, it doesn't shelter them, it confuses them, and frightens them all the more. They're in my prayers all the time, along with the family members and teachers who have to help them make sense of it all.

NOTE: The links are messed up. Scroll down to March 25.

No, I didn't disappear. I was just one of Bloggers' victims today, and haven't been able to publish since yesterday afternoon. And now I'm too busy. (I'm squeezing in a couple of minutes while my daughter has her piano lesson downstairs. She's working on duets of America the Beautiful and My Country Tis of Thee for her recital on Saturday. Who says liberals aren't patriotic?)

No time to write, but I at least want to get up a link to the best thing I read today: Natasha has a long and just plain brilliant post about why conservatives can't be feminists (and what some Muslim women could teach them about women's rights.) Go read it. Unless Blogger decides to torture me some more, I'll be back tomorrow.