The Iraq Memorial War Wall

The Iraqi Prisoner

I’ve already noted how closely the actions of the Bush administration, and conservative fiscal policies in general, correspond to a venerable con game called the “Bust-out,” in which fraudsters pretending to take an interest in running a business use a down payment to gain access to the company’s credit lines and assets, then max out all the credit lines, sell off assets at fire sale prices, then clear out just before the deposit check bounces, leaving a bankrupted company hollowed out by unpayable debt.

Readings new stories of how U.S. contractors and military personnel appear to have siphoned off billions of dollars supposedly targeted for Iraq reconstruction projects, an even more venerable con game comes to mind: “The Spanish Prisoner,” in which the mark is induced to pay out large sums of money to secure the release of some unidentified prince being held overseas, in some vaguely defined location, with the understanding that the contribution will be returned tenfold when the grateful prisoner wins his freedom and showers his supporters with royal largesse. A variation of this con, known to police as “419 Fraud” or “Advance Fee Fraud,” has probably turned up in your e-mail – instead of liberating a prisoner, the pigeon is asked to help broker the release of a big pot of money in a West African bank. The target usually expects to get a phat return on the initial investment, but sometimes the con men are also milking the target’s idealism or charitable impulses. To get a picture of how it works, watch House of Games, David Mamet’s first and best film, in which the psychologist heroine is drawn into a long con with the promise of helping her patient get free of his gambling debts. (Though Mamet went on to make another film called The Spanish Prisoner, that con actually doesn’t figure in the plot, curiously enough.) Michael Caine’s character in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is also running a similar scam by convincing rich widows he’s a deposed prince trying to raise money for freedom fighters back home. 

The designation of Bush’s little Middle East killing spree as “Operation Iraqi Freedom” was already a museum-quality specimen of Orwellian Newspeak when he rolled it out, but it becomes even more richly ironic when we consider how the American people were gulled into thinking that by throwing open their coffers to the Bush banditos, they could secure the liberation of the Iraqi people from a cruel dictator in a place many of them couldn’t have found on a map if they had a three-day head start. In return for pretending the whole thing was a John Wayne movie with extra sand on the sets, they would get cheap oil and a nice friendly regime that would recognize Israel and provide us with free military bases, along with the promised cascades of candy and flowers. Remember how we were told the whole thing would pay for itself once the good guys got their hands on all those oil wells? Those were the days, huh?       

Meanwhile, while Bush’s cronies went on looting with both hands here in the States, another team of con-men (maybe even some freelancers — who could tell, with so much money flying around?) tapped into the tsunami – one might even call it the surge — of unmonitored cash flowing into the country. In return, we got a taxpayer-funded training ground for aspiring Islamist terrorists, a pseudo-government composed of crooks, religious fanatics and terrorist sympathizers (kind of like the GOP, when you think about it) and a host of brand-new regional worries that will plague the world long after Bush has strutted off to that great gated community in the sky.  

The only upside I can see to any of this is that political science students attempting to grasp the nature of conservatism need no longer waste any more time studying Friedman, Oakeshott or any of the other great minds of wingerdom. They need only read the latest e-mails from Nigeria, and everything they need to know about conservatism will become crystal-clear.

Weekend Bookchat

Patrick Tyler’s A World of Trouble: America in the Middle East surveys the actions of eight presidencies — from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush — and finds an almost unbroken line of ineptitude, mendacity, bad faith and hubris, from the Suez Crisis to Bush’s lie-driven campaign in Iraq. Tyler draws on newly available archival material and offers some jaw-dropping anecdotes from the history of America’s role in keeping the Middle East ablaze. The sainted Henry Kissinger, who still enjoys a baffling reputation as a master politician and diplomat, comes off particularly badly:

. . . Henry Kissinger, entrusted with a message from Nixon to Brezhnev calling for joint superpower action to end the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and then proceed to a just settlement of the Palestinian question, simply decided, in mid-flight to Moscow, not to deliver it. Nixon’s message, Tyler writes, “threatened to undermine the record Kissinger was seeking to create; that he and Nixon had run the Soviets into the ground and they had protected Israel”. The truth was that the Russian leaders had reacted cautiously and moderately when war broke out, and that Nixon himself had a statesmanlike grasp of what was necessary. But a joint US-Russian initiative “would have thrust Kissinger into the thankless and perilous task of applying pressure on Israel”. So he simply dumped the message. He later encouraged Israel to violate the ceasefire that was supposed to end hostilities so that it could better its military position. With these acts of disobedience – acts which were also, as Tyler says, arguably unconstitutional – Kissinger closed off the possibility that the 1973 war could have been ended on terms which would have left Israel in a less powerful position, making it more amenable to an ensuing push for a settlement by the Americans and the Russians.

Tyler also demonstrates  the problems caused by the ”special relationship” between America and Israel:

Tyler does not go quite as far as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, for whom the Israel lobby lies at the heart of American foreign policy; but he is nevertheless a keen critic of the special relationship between the United States and Israel. Indeed, what is perhaps most striking is the constant American appeasement in the face of Israeli aggression. “Don’t lie to me! I’m sitting here watching it on CNN!” Reagan yelled down the telephone to Menachem Begin in 1982, after the Israeli leader had reneged on a promise not to bombard Beirut. But in typical fashion, Reagan did nothing about it – a pattern that has been repeated, by and large, ever since.

Meanwhile, Tyler writes that Bill Clinton fumbleda one-in-a-lifetime chance to capitalize on  ”a great convergence: the end of the cold war, the advent of Yitzhak Rabin’s premiership and the PLO’s decision to recognise the Jewish state.” By letting himself be manipulated by Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, Clinton tried to force a settlement and had the whole thing blow up in his face. He then blamed Yassir Arafat and everyone except himself for the collapse.

The manifold failures and disasters of the Bush administration have left Barack Obama with one hell of a mess to clear up, but one can only hope he might find time to read Patrick Tyler’s A World of Trouble. He might not be able to improve the situation, but as Tyler makes clear, simply not making things worse will put him miles ahead of his predecessors.

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How did so many public fixtures come to be named after Ronald Reagan? How did so many people come to believe that this dozing fantasist, whose administration was a carnival of corruption and who presided over embarrassing military failures ,  single-handedly defeated the Soviet Union, reduced the size of governmentand revived the American economy through tax cuts and positive thinking?

Why, the  way just about everything else beloved of conservatives, from crackpot economic theories to fake bestsellers, comes into being: a small group of dedicated crusaders with access to wingbucks lobbied for them round-the-clock, then created the illusion they had come about through overwhelming public demand. Will Bunch, in his new book  Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future, chronicles the rise of the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project in 1997, and argues that its rewriting of history (a creation of a fantasy version of a president whose legacy is, at best, highly debatable) is a hindrance to the present and fitire of America

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The memoirs of a renowned editor give us a glimpse of a vanishing era in American publishing — and an amusing look at how a neocon blowhard got wild-man lessons from Norman Mailer. A cultural history of Americans and their automobiles.

Zbig Fun

Let’s start the last day of 2008 with a bit of lowdown fun as former national security Zbigniew Brzezinski smacks around winger hack Joe Scarborough during a talk about the ongoing horror in the Middle East. Brzezinski, a courtly and diplomatic man, tries to school Scarborough in a gentlemanly fashion, but finally gets tired of the hack’s blowhard spinning and says, “You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it’s almost embarrassing to listen to you.” Scarborough’s petulant response is worth noting as well.

Nobody Likes Dubya

But it’s not his fault! He just couldn’t change the tone in Washington because of that darned recount business.

Of course it had nothing to do with him acting as though he’d won in a landslide, then proceeding to lie us into a war, let a city drown and generally screw things up.

The Bush Rules

One of the most amazing aspects of the Bush Bust-Out is that the con-men running the show have made no bones about their contempt for the people they’re fleecing — i.e., us. Of course Cheney and Bush sneer at poll numbers showing the majority of Americans living outside of insane asylums can’t wait to see them gone. They’ve never been about anything but padding their pockets, expanding their power and opening up the public coffers to looting by their cronies. As far as Bush is concerned, his only “accountability moment” came in 2004, when he managed to scam his way back into the job his daddy’s buddies appointed him to. Every time he spoke in public after that, there should have been subtitles reading, You had your chance and you blew it, now don’t come bitching to me.

I’ve already suggested that Barack Obama should simply give his spending intiatives names like the Blowing Up Dark-skinned People in the Desert Act, or the Kick Muslim Ass Act, or the Feed Hungry Millionaires Act because everybody knows wars and tax cuts never have to be paid for. And if Republicans try to block him in Congress, or if his currently stellar poll numbers should drop, Obama should simply get up there and say, “In the words of my predecessor, I had my accountability moment in November 2008. You got a problem with that, go cry to Sean Hannity.”

The Bush admninistration has set the bar so low that a new basement has to be dug to give it clearance. Even if Obama does nothing but keep the Pentagon from getting hit by another airliner, or keep another natural disaster from wiping out an American city, he will have been a roaring success — by Bush rules.

The Delusion-Driven Life

I was all set to dismiss this Newsweek article about arts and culture in the Bush era — and Joshua Alston’s argument that the revamped Battlestar Galactica should be considered the defining Bush-era television show — as a typical year-end stem-winder, but it’s generated some surprisingly interesting discussions about which bit of pop culture should get the Bush crown.

Scott McLemee and Matt Yglesias agree with Alston that BSG is the signature Bush-era show, and there’s no question that the series has rung some brilliant changes on the scenario of a society faced with the threat of an enemy that can blend in with its potential victims, then strike with genocidal force at the the worst possible moment.

Some of McLemee’s commenters raise interesting points about the likely impact of the Bush Bunch’s favorite what-if scenario — what if the only way to keep a nuclear bomb from going off was to torture a suspected terrorist? — not only on Mel Gibson’s sado-theological tract The Passion of the Christ, but on the rise of torture-porn movies like Hostel and the Saw franchise. The Bushies and Jigsaw share a penchant for using pieties and moralism as a muffler for sadism, along with the delusion that arbitrarily imprisoning people and subjecting them to appalling torture is a means to a higher end, a sure-fire way to reveal greater truths, and even an avenue for self-improvement. (Amanda, the franchise’s second-string villain, becomes Jigsaw’s assistant because she thinks her torment at his hands actually turned her life around.) If “I am not a crook” sums up the Nixon adminstration, maybe “I want to play a little game” should do the same for Bush.

Personally, I think The Wire should be considered the defining Bush-era show. Not because it’s a brilliant critique of the war on drugs — that farce was rolling long before Dubya toddled into the world stage, and will continue to grind up lives and laws for decades to come. Not because it’s a dauntingly ambitious, multi-leveled study of an entire city — again, the forces it examines so closely were at work before Bush arrived. Not even because the second season shows a major drug investigation thrown off the rails because a key villain is valued by the FBI as an anti-terrorist asset — stories that deal with the complicated morality of undercover operations go back to Prince of the City and even further.

The Wire is the perfect Bush-era show because it depicts law enforcement fighting a real problem — rampant, socially corrosive drug abuse — in deluded ways that ensure the problem not only persists, but intensifies. As clever and resourceful as McNulty and company may be, they are basically stupid in that they fail to grasp the fact that no matter how many “big fish” they manage to catch, they are never going to drain the ocean those fish swim through, and their efforts will only act to encourage the growth of more predatory species. The destruction of Avon Barksdale and the defeat of Stringer Bell’s plans to become a respectable businessman doesn’t do anything to halt the flow of drugs; it simply clears the way for the even more monstrous Marlo Stansfield. Because the efforts of the narcos constantly disrupt street-level organizing and raise the stakes, the worst fates are reserved for the players who allow stirrings of decency to color their judgment: D’Angelo Barksdale, Stringer Bell, even Proposition Joe and his desire to do business as quietly as possible. The only significant improvement in the lives of Baltimore residents comes in the show’s third season when Bunny Colvin, one of the police brass, takes it upon himself to establish “free zones” for drug dealing in the vacant areas of the city, and his ideas baffle the crooks as much as the cops. (”We grind and you try to stop us,” one of the corner boys complains. “Why you wanna go and fuck with the rules?”) Ironically, when word of the free zones gets out, the city’s corrupt incumbent mayor sees the benefits and loses valuable time trying to figure out how to present them in a positiive, politically palatable manner.  His weaselly challenger also recognizes that Colvin has pointed the way out of the endless, no-win drug war, but knows he can ride to power by whipping up public outrage against the “rogue cop” and his “legalization of drugs.” Everyone gets to talk tough and claim a victory in the war on crime, but at the end of the day the residents are once again cowering behind locked doors as the drug trade grinds on.

The fifth season, which focuses on the decline of newspapers in general and the Baltimore Sun in particular, is generally considered the weakest, but in fact it brings all of the show’s concerns together in subtly interesting ways. Because HBO would not commission a full run of episodes, the show’s creators didn’t have time to develop their plotlines and characters properly, so the central conceit — a detective cooks up a fake serial killer in order to get funding restored for real police work — seems cynical and forced. I’d have preferred a storyline that grew out of what came before, maybe even one that played off Bunny Colvin’s brainstorm. But the fifth season jolts us with the realization that while the dramas of the first four seasons have been played out, it’s all been lost on the city’s newspaper, where the lives of the homeless are only of interest when the managing editor thinks there’s “a Dickensian angle” and drug-war propaganda goes unchallenged. And when the serial killer story ius snown to be a fraud, the whole thing is kept quiet because careers — and, it turns out, a Pulitzer Prize — stand to benefit from the story’s continued existence.

Fighting a real problem with fantasy, delusion and self-serving political manipulation. Those are the defining qualities of the Bush administration’s war on terror, and The Wire has them down cold.

A Really Big Shoe

Having just read George W. Bush’s latest flip of the bird to America and the rest of the world on his bloody fiasco in Iraq, I now find myself wishing Muntander al-Zaidi’s aim had been just a little better.

But rather than mourn lost opportunities, let’s let that Iraqi journalist point the way to a proper sendoff for the Boy Emperor on Jan. 20. On that blessed Tuesday, let us all hang shoes from our roofs, porches and front doors. Maybe even dangle little Bush Push-Off shoes from our car antennae. Let the word go forth across the nation and around the world: Jan. 20, 2009 will be A Really Big Shoe, and I don’t just mean that in the Ed Sullivan sense.

We will mark the day by eating Sole Food: fillet of sole, shoe-fly pie — feel free to write in with your own suggestions. In fact, if you like you can e-mail images of your observance of the Really Big Shoe to The Opinion Mill and we’ll post them as possible.

Musical selections will also be appreciated. I’m starting my song list with “Glad to See You Go” by The Ramones, “Hit the Road, Jack,” by Ray Charles, and “The Time Has Come to Say Sayonara” from the M*A*S*H soundtrack.

Mean-spirited, you say? Just remember: the man who lied us into a ruinous war, trashed the economy, packed the judiciary with religious flakes, opened up the public coffers to looting by his cronies, and turned American into a torture-loving Third World nation is leaving office free of worries about impeachment, prosecution or even the loss of his pension. He isn’t even going to be tarred and feathered, or ridden out of D.C. on a rail. And he’s smirking about it the way Joe Mantegna smirked at Lindsay Crouse at the end of House of Games: “You must admit, we did have our fun.”

So let’s have ours. Good laughs are g0ng to be hard to come by as the damage from the Bush yearrs continues to spread.

A Uniter, Not a Divider

For the first and probably only time in his eight misbegotten years in office, Bush has brought the world together. It’s downright inspiring to see an issue on which the Saudis, the British and the French can agree.

Of course you’ve seen the video of the shoe-throwing incident. All I can say is that Bush has the reflexes of a guilty man. He ducked like he’d been expecting something like that for years.

The man whose limo was egged during his first inaugural ceremony now prepares to leave office with people throwing shoes at him. I can’t say I approve of the actions, but neither can I say they were unfitting.

The Final Fantasy

Leave it to Peggy Noonan, the magic dolphin lady herself, to articulate the last and most comforting lie to be cherished by conservatives as their nasty little boy prepares to toddle out of the White House:  “At least Bush kept us safe.”

I realize that the winger time sense is quite elastic, which is why they’re blaming Barack Obama — whose presidency hasn’t started yet — for a recession that began when Larry Kudlow was still squealing about a “Bush boom.” But anyone willing to look at a calendar can seen that it wasn’t Bill Clinton who was in the White House when the World Trade Center fell and the Pentagon shook. It wasn’t Clinton who laughed off the clear warning that al-Qaeda was ready to strike within the U.S. It wasn’t Clinton who sat like a doe-eyed child in that elementary school classroom while the worst terrorist attack in our history was carried out, and it wasn’t Clinton who let the mastermind of that attack get off scot-free.

I realize the conservatives insist on grading Bush along a pretty shallow curve, but in a sane world where wingers didn’t dominate punditry and Bush wasn’t being fellated around the clock by FoxNoise,  9/11 would have been grounds for impeachment, not celebration.  So the sentry allowed 9/11 to happen, but nothing of equal horror has happened since so we’ll just let that little mistake slide? Not on your life.

Magic thinking is the default mode of modern conservatism, so it’s hardly surprising that Bush’s supporters are constructing a Tolkien-style fantasy in which Dubya was the last king of Gondor and Obama will be the inept steward under whose watch all kinds of bad things will happen, until another great white daddy can be found to reclaim the throne. And if he carries the reforged Sword of Milton, maybe the magic marketplace fairies will come back, too.