lloydtown 

Iraq: United, or Breaking into Pieces?

Michael Young has a nice piece on Slate, consistent with another piece of his a few days ago. (Link to WSJ via Hit and Run).

I would summarize part of it like this: the U.S. did not cause a civil war in Iraq where none existed before; at worst it destroyed the central government, and is having difficulty helping Iraqis build a new central government, all of which leaves the distinct parts of Iraq feeling their own way, trying to see what they can get for themselves.

To borrow from Locke: when an oppressed people rises up against a tyrant, they are not "re-belling," or bringing back a war; it is the tyrant who has done so by attacking them. Locke sharpens this point by suggesting people have a right to fight not only for their lives, as Hobbes insists, but for their property as well. If you are attacked by the government, instead of being protected by it, you have already been returned to a state of war in which you have a right to fight with all weapons at your command.

Of course, it's not clear to what extent "the Iraqi people" rose up against Saddam. But the main point still stands: no one thinks Saddam was anything other than a brutal dictator. He used brutal authoritarian means to suppress the powerful factions that he knew were present; we surely can't condemn the re-appearance of those factions, to the extent of wishing Saddam's regime or one like it were restored.

Young suggests that Arabs have used various "isms" to suppress and deny the powerful attraction of sects, national groupings and other factions, and at the same time to slow the progress of what we would recognize as modernization. Arab nationalism was one attempt, which was never really successful. And then:

As Arab nationalism endured one setback after another (the most injurious being the defeat by Israel in the June 1967 war), another absolutist notion reared its head and confronted nationalistic dictatorships: political Islam. The Islamists reasoned that Arab nationalism had failed not because there was no broad Arab identity one could conjure up, but because that identity had been defined in secular terms. Islamism posited not only a broad Arab identity, but a broad Muslim one, so that its benchmark was the community of believers—the umma.

But, again, this proved too convenient: Tension, indeed outright enmity, increased between Sunni Islamists and what they called "heretical" Shiites, even as groups such as Hamas showed they could play the nationalist game better than the secular nationalists themselves. Nor did the Islamists explain what they would do with those irksome minorities—Christians, Kurds, Jews, but also secularists—who had, at best, trivial parts in the Islamist narrative.

As the Bush administration tries to get a handle on Iraq, what it agrees to there will be magnified in surrounding countries. In clinging to unitarian myths, many Arab societies and their regimes are utterly unprepared for the consequences of Iraq's demolition of the traditional framework for Arab politics. Many Americans, in itching to declare defeat in Iraq, should grasp that U.S. power still remains great in the region thanks to its control over the nature of the emerging Iraqi state, if only the administration has the nerve to ride the tiger a bit longer.

Seipp, the Old South, and Islamic militants

Cathy Seipp does a neat trick. First she points out that it is often liberals who are somehow sympathetic to anti-American Islam, or who say you can't change cultures too quickly. Liberals, as she says, would not have made such excuses for the Old South.

Then she shifts to the suggestion that the 9/11 terrorists are merely violent criminals, and to deal with them properly, their demands must be understood. She asks: "Were the political grievances of, say, Timothy McVeigh ever discussed seriously? Should we have considered meeting the demands of Charles Manson?"

Well, there was a certain amount of discussion of the grievances of McVeigh. But even more deeply, lots of people made excuses for, elaborated the grievance of, the Old South. No doubt it was not the most liberal people who did so, and the liking liberals have for theocracy and tyranny, as long as it does not apply to them, is amazing. But weren't lots of Republicans sympathetic to the Old South? Didn't Eisenhower, for example, hope there would be no Brown v. Board decision because it might simply enrage the whites down there, and make things worse?

Wasn't there, er, some reason to think this way? Wasn't it actually true--in the 1870s, if the not the 1970s, that democracy and true civil rights would be a long time in coming--this would not be an overnight process?

In the United States.

Link via the Corner.

Kingsley Amis (and Waugh)

I've just re-read the Memoirs of Kingsley Amis. Most of it is really disconnected episodes about specific individuals. The reader is gradually able to put together the memoir-type story: childhood, education, major jobs/postings, career in London as writer, two marriages (then going back to wife #1--surely quite unusual, but I suspect a kind of shadow over many second marriages), kids, major distinctions.

I like Amis's novels quite a bit. Like most fans, I would emphasize Lucky Jim most of all--his first, and one on which he got so much help from Philip Larkin, it's possible Larkin should have been credited as co-author or editor. Then late in his life: Stanley and the Women; and the Old Devils (which won the Booker Prize). A lot of novels in between, which I would say are probably worth reading once. The great ones I will re-read often, and I will be on the lookout for those I have not yet read.

Lots of wit/word-play, puncturing the pretensions of those who deserve this treatment; perhaps an argument for kindness toward those who have taken enough of a beating--or who habitually take beatings. A consistent effort to get inside the mind of female characters. Is this successful? That's not really for me to judge. Many chapters in the Memoirs are named after individuals--only two after women, the novelist Elizabeth Taylor and Margaret Thatcher. Amis like Waugh can make an intelligent person want to read Ivy Compton-Burnet, Elizabeth Bowen, and the aforesaid Taylor, much more than Anthony Powell, Graham Greene, or whoever.

I think there are three fairly well-done women in Lucky Jim, and there are some twists in the later novels. In the Old Devils, the wife Peter is leaving is uglier, less charming, nastier, and even a bit older than the woman he is going to. The old story. But wife Number 1 is almost one of Shakespeare's fools, telling nothing but the brutal truth. She gets one of Amis's nastier lines about the Welsh: "Is it true there isn't even a word for 'truth' in the Welsh language?"

In Stanley and the Women: Wife #2 initially seems a haven of sanity, bookishness, quiet but thoughtful music, and love--especially in contrast to crazy Wife #1. Ah, but Wife #2 turns out to be crazy too. Ah, so this is straight misogyny? No, because the craziness of Wife #2 is a response to pressure--she may be doing the best she can in a bad situation. And this makes the protagonist think poor old Wife #1 has always showed a certain humanity and dignity in bad situations--like being married to him. So he stays with Wife #2, resolving to be nicer to Wife #1, in all (well, at least quite a bit of) humility.

True, the male psychiatrist keeps repeating like a Greek chorus: "women are mad," and there is a fair bit of evidence that women don't rely on 'reason, rules, all that," in quite the way men do.

Anyway, I keep wanting to go back for more. But there is something claustrophic in Amis. He has been quoted saying something like he supports the morality of the "ordinary bloke," or something like that, who buys a round at the pub when it's his turn, and sometimes when it's not, tries to put others at their ease or says little rather than, say, trying to make others uncomfortable with no justification. Something like middle-class decency, as defined more or less by Amis. He remains very good at puncturing people--he says often that a literary reputation is bloated or undeserved. He brings up episodes that are humiliating for a famous person, even if they have nothing to do with his books or whatever. First Malcolm Muggeridge and then himself, impotent with Sonia Orwell, comes roughly in the middle. The whole piece on Muggeridge drips with resentment, sarcasm, and malice. How could Muggeridge be a literary person? His few books made no sense. How could he be a tough-minded intellectual, who just happened to be on TV? He was a phenomenally lazy interviewer. How, above all, could Muggeridge end his life as some kind of high-minded Christian, urging people not to dwell on the lower things?

But there is a lot of: people were rude to me. People put down something about me or my life. I know the university at Swansea where I taught wasn't very good, I didn't need people telling me. In his way he has a very strict sense of how people should behave, and it's more about the pub than a formal dinner (which he tended to hate, presumably not being in much control of the conversation). He's always aware of the potential cruelty, or simply the indifference to the feelings of others, of the upper classes (as in his novel the Biographer's Moustache). He pinpoints the conversation of egotists, while admitting he's probably one himself. He's somehow always painfully middle-class--not simply fearing that something might go wrong, and he might be embarrassed even if he has not taken a mis-step, but convinced that something will go wrong, and being really drunk won't quite excuse it all. A feeling of incurable awkwardness or gaucheness that Oxford might have aggravated rather than cured in a middle-class youth.

Which brings me to Waugh. Waugh's father had more of a white-collar job than Amis's, and Waugh probably had some slightly posher forebears, but both were raised in the London suburbs, and both fathers commuted to daily jobs. Waugh seems to have overcome any awkwardness about meeting people--or his massive boredom--by being generally the loudest or the rudest person at a gathering. Amis has two Waugh stories: one about a Spectator party at which people passed around Waugh's ear trumpet, pretending to play it like a real trumpet. Waugh got angry, and said he would never come to such a party again. In the volume of Waugh's letters, Mark Amory says of Ann Fleming: "Stylish and witty, she was not in the least afraid of Waugh and when he used his large ear-trumpet more than seemed necessary she struck it with a spoon: 'The noise, Evelyn told me later, was that of a gun being fired an inch away.'"

Amis's other story about Waugh is more familiar. One lady who had known him for years said his "arse-creeping" to titled people or people who were otherwise "somebody" was disgusting. She gives an example. Instead of just admiring furniture, etc. (which, by the way, Amis would always pretty well ignore) Waugh would say: "I don't think you realize how much all your friends love what you have done here, and here, and here."

Alternating gush and rudeness? Still liking, and getting along with, spirited women who don't go along with all the dramatics? Waugh may have solved the "society" problem better than Amis did--but he also relied heavily on booze.

Is PowerPoint dumbing us all down?

Colby Cosh, reading fairly deeply into a lot of different things as always:

From a report on problems with the space shuttles:

Several members of the Task Group noted, as had CAIB before them, that many of the engineering packages brought before formal control boards were documented only in PowerPoint presentations. In some instances, requirements are defined in presentations, approved with a cover letter, and never transferred to formal documentation. Similarly, in many instances when data was requested by the Task Group, a PowerPoint presentation would be delivered without supporting engineering documentation. It appears that many young engineers do not understand the need for, or know how to prepare, formal engineering documents such as reports, white papers, or analyses.

My Summer

My son got his Bronze Cross. Next summer, after his 16th birthday, he can take the Lifeguard course and then actually work as a lifeguard.

I've had a few days off, here and there; no real vacation. My wife and I saw "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" in a theatre--our first time in a theatre for years. Quite enjoyable. A twist on the War of the Roses in that they make pretty serious attempts to kill each other, and then make up (still bickering).

I'm preparing to teach a seminar on Aristotle's Ethics. I went downtown to hear a talk on the Ethics by a guest speaker. After about a month of heat and drought, we have had some rain, and a tremendous storm today.

The woman who has been named the next Governor General of Canada is gorgeous, a TV personality (to a limited extent a filmmaker), exemplifies the "rags to riches" immigrant (from Haiti), has a French passport as well as a Canadian one, and has already had to clarify whether she is loyal to Canada, as opposed to a Quebec separatist. At one time the only way to get that job was by some kind of very distinguished public service--a record that was basically beyond question.

Nobel Peace Prize for Sharon

There's really not much to say about Israel's withdrawal from Gaza, planned and directed by Ariel Sharon, but I want to say something.

There may be no precedent for a country, that has defeated all its enemies in war, withdrawing from part of the conquered territory with no guarantee of peace, but in the hope that this is a step toward peace. The Israelis were aggressive in pulling the pieces of their country together in the 40s and 50s, and they have a policy against granting any new citizenships to Arabs, even or especially those whose families lived in "Palestine" before the creation of Israel. But the Israelis have not acted like imperialists. They were repeatedly attacked by enemies who denied them any right to existence; and they won. The West Bank and Gaza were the spoils of a war that Israel did not start.

And now: Sharon as leader of a country, and to some extent leader of the Jewish people, is asking some of his own people to sacrifice land, homes, the lives they were building for their families. The supremely disciplined Israel Defence Force is carrying out a very difficult job, with no weapons, often in tears. The Security Wall seems to be doing some good; small pieces of the West Bank are being sacrificed, but that is all at least for now--until the Palestinians make some significant concessions.

The Israelis are on the side of humanity, and Sharon deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.

I just bought the issue of the Atlantic with an article chronicling what a disaster Arafat was; I may have more on that later.

Iraq Round-Up

Michael Young suggests the U.S. must do something to prevent both Syria and Iran from exploiting the ongoing uncertainty in Iraq. Iran is the biggest problem, but it would be hard to take on; Syria is probably more vulnerable. So: the Bushies will be tempted to start another war, this time in Syria, hoping to put on a show of force that will impress both the insurgents in Iraq and the Iranians. Perpetual war in order to achieve peace; is that what people mean by Trotskyism?

Still, it makes sense that the U.S. would benefit from doing something dramatic, instead of allowing Iraq to drift into increasing disorder. The growing response from the left is that the U.S. should simply withdraw from Iraq as quickly as possible. Following the logic of their rhetoric so far, Bushies tend to say: this would only show weakness, open us to further attacks at home, etc.

Larry Diamond has a long, rambling post on TPM Cafe. Mostly he insists that even where some good might be done by U.S. forces in Iraq, the present administration is not competent to do it. "The Bush Administration confronts a dilemma that it cannot resolve." "It is too late to simply reverse this [the polarization of the country along...ethnic lines]." The U.S. "must" withdraw. How are these ringing negative assertions any more well-grounded than the positive assertions from the other side? Diamond does give the U.S. credit for pushing to get Sunnis included in the Constitution-making process; and he does say the truly pro-Iranian Shiites are not a majority even in southern Iraq--and they do not include Sistani. Still, they might be able to take over.

(Diamond was a senior advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority during the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. He has a book out called Squandered Victory.)

The most striking part of his remarks, linked by Kevin Drum, are to the effect that building permanent bases in Iraq, to replace the ones in Saudi, must have been a major U.S. objective--an unspoken one--from the beginning. This sounds right to me.

Maybe one main thread of the history that will someday be written will go something like this:

1. Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush Jr. were never ideological Republicans--they were moderate Republicans like Ford and Bush Senior--in whose administrations they had risen. They never gave any sign of having the "vision thing," to quote from Bush Sr. Maybe they were constantly full of ideology and wrath, frustrated at answering to, and defending, blockheads, but there was never any sign of that. Reagan at least gave them more of a taste for the vision thing. Maybe somebody, somewhere, has some inspiring PowerPoint slides?

2. Even before 9/11, Bush wants to withdraw big US bases from Saudi Arabia, while building big new ones close by. (Why close by? Er ... oil.) Saudi leaders, trusted by Bush, convince him that military occupation, combined with religious and cultural differences, is sure to breed resentment and political instability. (Unless you saturation-bomb the civilian population, as in World War II. That could work). A pro-American oligarchy will have difficulty helping their American friends in this situation.

3. Somewhere in here, the neo-con PowerPoint slides become very important. We don't just act for oil; we're Boy Scouts. We act for democracy. If we build and spread pro-American regimes, that's almost like spreading democracy--and it might magically turn out to achieve the spreading of democracy!

4. So Bush is thinking: why not regime change in Iraq? There's been a lot of talk that Saddam might have WMDs. No sane person will be sorry to see him regime-changed. He's not running a democracy. Everyone remembers being mad at him over Kuwait. It's personal for Bush and some senior advisers.

5. Post-9/11: It becomes more urgent to do something (more than Afghanistan). Overwhelming force, shock and awe, should do the trick (Powell doctrine). (Although not nearly as many tanks this time--they take too long to transport). There will probably be a pro-American uprising. (Insert Chalabi crap here--also WMDs, ties to Al Qaeda). Whether any of this is true or not, the weakening of Islamic terrorists, or regime change in a place that has the kind of regime that might have once supported terrorism, or might do so in the future, is a worthy goal. Convince the followers of terrorists, if not terrorists themselves, there is no hope except in Westernizing/modernizing. Benefits for whole region, world, democracy. More neo-con Power Point slides.

6. As both Afghanistan and Iraq drag on, the Bushies stick to the message that military occupation, combined with religious and cultural differences, is sure to do more good than harm. (This somewhat contradicts the rationale for closing the Saudi bases). Saddam was evil. Americans reject any claims of moral equivalence between themselves and ... er ... anyone else.

Waugh Again

Waugh's letters are a long read. Lots of witty, bright stuff; melancholy toward the end.

Roman Catholicism: Waugh really goes after John Betjeman, who becomes committed to High Anglicanism or Anglo Catholicism--the kind of Anglicanism that most resembles (at least superficially) Roman Catholicism. Waugh says this is worse than outright Protestantism--the belief that lots of people can be good Catholics in different ways, no need for Rome, etc. Waugh probably helped influence Betjeman's wife to convert, but not Betjeman himself. (There's a last Dutch joke about Betjeman, which I will look up). UPDATE: to Lady Diana Cooper, 28 Nov 64: "Betjeman's son has become a Mormon. Ghastly but B is Dutch."

The Ladies he loved. Everyone has commented that he was attracted to spirited, charming women who could handle themselves--bright, but not necessarily with a lot of formal education. Some of them he kept writing to, with no real attempt to convert them to Christianity or Roman Catholicism. He treats Nancy Mitford, very affectionately, as a hopeless heathen. He even urges her not even to mention the Church or the Creator--like the Albert Brooks line, "Don't say nest, don't say egg."

Family. Some of the famous rudeness to his children is here. (Auberon Waugh's memoirs have the worst stuff). Yet he ended up being friends with them all, and visiting the grandchildren.

Churchills. He saw a lot of Randolph Churchill, son of the famour man, over the years. There were periods when Waugh was intensely irritated with him, other periods when they were great friends in a drinking buddy sense, still others when Waugh deeply pitied him--probably for his loneliness and his inability to get his life in order. When the famous Churchill died, Waugh was asked by many media outlets to give a tribute of some kind, but he refused. His rather nasty summary (to Ann Fleming, Ian Fleming's widow): "He is not a man for whom I ever had esteem. Always in the wrong, always surrounded by crooks, a most unsuccessful father--simply a 'Radio Personality' who outlived his prime. 'Rallied the nation' indeed! I was a serving soldier in 1940. How we despised his orations."

I don't know--my father always cried at any reminder of one of Churchill's speeches. Churchill is one of the few Brits for whom a lot of Americans feel unqualified respect. Which brings up:

Americans. In all fairness, Waugh didn't want to be known as a supporter of anti-Americanism. At one point he refused to allow The Loved One to be published in a Communist country, for example, for just this reason. (Perhaps his book would have subverted Communism, as Lucky Jim did in Czechoslovakia). His oldest daughter married an American professor, and he still made jokes like "that grandchild doesn't count--he's an American." When Waugh's older brother Alec became writer-in-residence at Oklahoma, Waugh wrote: "We shall end teaching the Yanks. I think I once saw a play about Oklahoma. They did not seem a very critical people. But I understand that American undergraduates are in a perpetual state of mutinous ferment."

UPDATE: It amused me, again, that Waugh writes to Ann Fleming about her husband's James Bond books. 13 March 63: "I am surprised that old Kaspar thinks James Bond highly sexed. In the film you took me to I saw no evidence of this--rather the reverse. Gaming & homicide seemed his weaknesses." 28 March: "Bond's passions....I thought he looked very temperate....The real satyromaniac doesn't care what women look like--old, young, deformed, all are the same. That wish to be seen about with notably pretty girls suggests Beaton and Kaetchen Kommer." I think this is very funny: a many who wants a woman to dress up, do her hair, put on some nice jewelry, and go with him to the casino for all to see, is probably not actually making love to her. Clinton may be an example of what Waugh means.

Another re-discovery: to William F. Buckley, 4 April 1960: "[Senator Joseph] McCarthy is certainly regarded by most Englishmen as a regrettable figure and your McCarthy and his Enemies, being written before his later extravagances, will not go far to clear his reputation. I have no doubt that we were sent a lot of prejudiced information six years ago. Your book makes plain that there was a need for investigation ten years ago. It does not, I am afraid, supply the information that would convince me that McCarthy was a suitable man to undertake it."

I read the Buckley/Bozell book once--the newer edition in the 70s. Even the idea that "an investigation was necessary" rests on the presupposition that Truman was soft on Communism. That's preposterous.

Did Truman have to drop (2) nukes?

Via Kevin Drum: an article in the Weekly Standard arguing that Japan was not prepared to surrender unconditionally, or give up its form of government including a kind of supremacy for the Emperor, until after both bombs were dropped.

I have been inclined to think that at least the second one was gratuitous as far as getting Japan to surrender--and it was probably intended to keep Stalin out of Japan.

Richard Frank says no. There was widespread support in Japan for continuing to fight, even in a losing or suicidal cause. There was a widespread belief that the position of the Emperor could be maintained. Frank argues that leaving the Emperor's powers intact would be an invitation to re-build the military and start conquering again.

The U.S. was at a point where if Japan did not surrender unconditionally, massive "conventional" bombing would begin, designed to destroy the Japanese economy. This would have caused many deaths, and untold suffering to millions.

Frank also points out that Japan was running a murderous empire--thousands of their fellow Asians dying every day. Those were lives that were saved by the nuke bombings and the surrender that followed.

The Hiroshima bomb was dropped on August 6; the Nagasaki bomb on August 9. The Soviets entered the war against Japan on August 8.

Shiites Taking Over Iraq?

The new draft Constitution for Iraq is far more "Islamic fundamentalist" than earlier documents--which were basically drafted by Americans.

Folks at the Corner, of all people, have revived the concern that the Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani has actually been using the U.S. invasion for his own purposes--not to build a democracy, or peace with the Sunnis, but to establish some kind of Iran-friendly theocracy. The "blood and treasure" of the U.S. may have been sacrificed to achieve someone else's foreign policy goals. (See also here).

U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad may go down in history as a great man--given one difficult file after another by Bush. (See here and here). He is clearly pressing for 1. a constitutional settlement that can bring peace to Iraq and 2. women's rights, and other secular/Western features (via Instapundit). We can only wish him luck.