Clearly Baghdad is in tough shape. Undoubtably “mission accomplished” was a foolish PR stunt and Bremer was a disaster. What’s the old saying, “The battle plan never survives first contact with the enemy.” Very true in this instance. Either way, the battle continues — one hopes, for the better. Certainly lessons learned will fill many books.

I think we can all join in wishing that success will come from the coalition efforts in Iraq and that some kind of arrangement will be reached by which that war-torn country can find peace.

Bad and/or misinterpreted intelligence failure (although I noticed Bolton on Lateline last night still conflating WMD’s, terrorists and Saddam Hussein in a single sentence – perhaps he hasn’t got the memo yet). Even the US administration admitted fault with this one.

Administrative failures resulting in the Rumsfeld sacking. Helluva job rummy.

Repeated failure to listen to defence personnnel resulting in too few troops.

“Mission Accomplished” – Very reassuring.

“…months, not years…” – How’s that prediction working out for J.Howard?

Still no Osama Bin Ladin.

Man up and grow a pair Kevin and whyisitso. Something you both obviously hold dear to your hearts has failed. Deal with it and move on.

“I” “we” of course being the all-knowing, all-wise, all-moral, Left. Just how are “we” going to solve the problem for and on behalf of the Iraquis, other than the Iraquis once the coalition are gone? Just who the hell is this arrogant “we”?

…by the Left.

This brings me to my main annoyance, which is the pretense to existential knowledge about the inner working of the current US administration and the various agencies of the US government involved in the Iraq war. I submit that I don

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200702/s1854662.htm

Yeah, I guess I’m just too emotional. The Egyptians have every right to protect their culture without disapproval from Westerners!

There’s nothing sinister in my efforts. On the matter of Islamism, its threats and realities, I simply would like to know what is going on. The dialogue available through the ClubTroppo population is my current favorite way of both finding the cracks in the arguments to which I’ve been exposed and getting exposed to new arguments which test my overall conceptions of the conflict.

I think some information sets are inherently “emotional.” If one is to approach reality with an open mind, there must be an intersection with the inherently unspeakable. Obviously, some people can not or will not address certain issues. I consider no issue out of bounds.

I have a fascination with the spread of memes and propaganda and how they are used not merely to garner votes, but also to protect or destroy the powerful who contend for the valuable resources of the world, and to warp the minds of the sympathetic to create ideoogical foot soldiers for the “cause”. Tracing these memes back to their sources is quite a task. But once one spends a great deal of time in the effort, certain encountered thought patterns begin to be categorizable and, to some degree, source-able. I include some of my own thoughts as well.

This brings me to my main annoyance, which is the pretense to existential knowledge about the inner working of the current US administration and the various agencies of the US government involved in the Iraq war. I submit that I don’t know exactly what went on, and nobody else does either. What the public believes generally falls into the following categories…

1.) Statements put out by the US government that are either true, false, or partially true.
2.) Leaked information from the US government that is either true, false or partially true.
3.) Narratives put out by Think Tanks and Connected Authors that strive to arrive at truth, but nevertheless contain some falsehood and partial truth.
4.) Narratives put out by ideologically-driven periodicals, websites and other information networks that provide some subset of available facts and rumors which confirm the ideological narrative to which the source and its consumers subscribe.
5.) Narratives offered by Foreign Governments in public statements that are either true, false, or partially true.
6.) Leaked information from all other sources outside the US that is either true, false or partially true.
7.) Simplified Narratives put out by Media Outlets and Unconnected Authors that contain sensationalized versions of the various Narratives and Fact Sets available on short notice.
8.) Personal Experience Testimony which, although Irrefutable (unless character is an issue, or co-witnesses dispute the testimony), is by definition subjective and thus de-contextualized.

Now, if there is some agreement that the above categorizations resemble the reality of our information culture, it will be obvious that there is precious little confirmable “truth” available to be had.

If I were to pick a source set to hang my hat on, it would be number 3 in my above list. When those in government now (1s and 2s and possibly 8s) get their chance to be number 3s, then I will feel like I really know what the hell happened. Until then, I’m just asking questions and positing answers for the sake of argument.

Having said all that, the case for a French and Russian effort to derail the Iraq invasion is very compelling to me. Derrida Derider’s protestations notwithstanding. There are quite enough clues, suggestions, facts, business connections, motives, news stories, indictments, etc. to at least begin an inquest. Unfortunately, the fact that spy agencies of foreign governments are involved makes clarity on the matter a near-impossibility. And the US has enough of a problem on our hands without calling out Russia and France, (as some “insider” books have remarked). Especially with the American media, in my humble opinion, being against the administration and Republicans in general and generally in favor of French-centric “Old European” cafe society and faux civility. (The independant studies about the partisan composition of US news agencies seems to support this suspicion.)

In light of all that I have written above on the vagaries of our information culture, I should have written that “Russian and French involvement in derailing the Iraq war is a common suspicion” rather than a bit of “common knowledge.” What can I say, nobody’s perfect.

P.S. The Soviet Union was very very very bad.

Kevin is devoting lots of time to trying to sort us out. I

His interventions leave me with several impressions.

1 – he’s very emotional. You can’t argue with him without paying obeisance to his list of baddies. And yes Kevin, I think most of your baddies are my baddies too – like the Soviet Union. Corrupt states.

2. – he’s American (Well I presume he is). That’s great by the way – I like America and Americans. But like all us nationalities they have their failings. I’ve been struck by how the Americans take 9/11 as some kind of personalised attack on them. Well of course it obviously was. But the Bali bombings were an attack on us and the West and produced a roughly proportional loss of life compared with our population. But we tend to think of what happened as the result of crazies. We think we should do what we can to fight them but I think there’s a much greater appreciation that it will be hard to fight them because they’re guerillas and they’re crazy. So getting emotional about it and ensuring we’ve bombed someone – even if it is the wrong people – well we don’t have the power to do it anyway, so we don’t make that kind of mistake. I remember someone I didn’t know in America emailing me with SHOUTING capitals saying he was a liberal too, but people in his neighbourhood had been killed in 9.11 and HOW WOULD I LIKE IT. Well I wouldn’t like it, (and I knew someone killed on 9/11) but you’ve got to try to stay rational and do what you can – not charge around like a Bush in a china shop.

4. I have little sympathy for Boulton himself and for the Republicans trashing of anything that gets in the way of their class/culture war. I thought Bush’s almost threatening lecture to the UN was a disgrace. But that’s in the same way that I would regard discourtesy to a judge even if I thought the Judge was a lousy judge or discourtesy to a house of parliament. I think if we have the UN it is important to show it some respect. On the other hand (like a bad or even a corrupt judge) that’s quite different from coming out and speaking the truth – which is where I support Kevin. In many ways the UN is a massively dysfunctional institution and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. I note Fukyama’s observation that the neo-cons were big on trashing the UN with little to offer in its place while trashing Clinton Admin efforts to do something of that kind with the Community of Democracies or whatever it was called. Anyway Kev, you’d know more about the details than I do and no doubt you’ll fill me in plus some.

And I just want to say in closing that the Soviet Union was very very nasty indeed. Very nasty.

Yet another straight lie that the war party has tried to make “common knowledge”. As a matter of public record the biggest single contributor, by far, to the corruption of the oil-for-food scheme was the Australian Wheat Board – read the Volcker Report if you don’t believe me (the same report implicates plenty of American firms too, BTW). As for arms, the Americans were shot at mainly by old Russian and British hardware, with a relatively small amount of new Chinese stuff smuggled from Syria. If the Europeans had been selling arms on any scale to Saddam he’d have killed a lot more GIs.

Friend, the French and Germans opposed American adventurism with the clear understanding that unprovoked aggression founded on a crock of lies would be very likely to end in tears. Why can’t you accept that events have proven them dead right?

And the stuff about Islam is also simplistic bullshit. You’ve clearly been reading too many right-wing blogs.

I think Bolton had every reason to be belligerent towards the UN. To blame Bolton for the long-term failings, corruption and fecklessness of the UN seems to put the cart before the horse. He went in there to clean house, but he encountered the Chavez fan club instead. I think by now it is common knowledge that Iraq was the near-solo project it was for the US because key UN allies had illicit oil and arms deals with Saddam while he was under sanctions. That says about all that needs to be said about that organization.

Shamefully, Australia holds the record for corrupt dealings with Saddam Hussein’s regime, despite numerous warnings to our useless foreign affairs department that it was happening. We didn’t need the UN to help us with it either. To put Bolton in perspective, he was widely regarded as being anti-UN to start with (hence the Democratic filibuster which failed to endorse his nomination).

There

Very interesting response. It would be fun to agree with all your assessments.

You wrote:” That

Nope, they’ve declared victory and gone home – as we should do.

That’s a very negative reading of the history of Islam. You might as well condemn the modern day British for being a brutal seafaring nation of third world exploiters if you want to trawl back through the centuries.

Israel looms as a larger problem than it’s geographical size suggests, simply because they have been used as a proxy for every belligerent position the US has taken in the region. It is this reason far more than any other that contributes to the antipathy towards it in the middle east. I’m in no doubt that middle eastern leaders like to stir up popular hatred of Israel via religion, but that happens in reverse in the west, and nobody bats an eyelid.

Chavez? Idiot dictator. Pity we can’t ignore him. Oil again.

The appeal of social liberalism to ordinary people in Iraq and Iran cannot be understated. Iran was a fairly liberal country until we started screwing around with it (it is no coincidence that the same fools that ran Iran-Contra are now back screwing around again). Result? Disaster.

The major mistake has been to think we can deliver democracy by external force. It’s never going to happen. We should have been flooding them with cheap Toyota’s, Happy Halal Meals and no-money-down plasma televisions. Perhaps instead of destroying their infrastructure and leaving them in a 3rd world state, we might have been better off giving their brutal dictator a billion dollars to live somewhere else. When the population is fat, happy, stultified in front of a TV and up to their eyeballs in debt they will leave the Kalashnikov to gather dust on the wall and the Koran will take pride of place, unread, in hotel drawers across the whole damn place. We have no need to contain Islam, it will rot from the inside. That is why the Islamic leaders need to demonize the west – they know it represents the end of their religion as an overriding force in peoples lives. We just need to gently facilitate it. At the moment, we are doing exactly the opposite and the result is as expected: more fanatics created every day.

UN corrupt and useless? It would help if we could get the US to send a non-belligerent ambassador in there, just for starters.

Thank you for your response. I find it very hard to offer prescriptions for the future when I’m not even sure I understand fully what’s going on right now.

Clearly becoming energy independant must be a priority. Unfortunately, so far, unless we all ride bicycles, the technology just isn’t there. An all-electric culture run via Nuclear power plants might be an idea. Although people in this country are still spooked to death about Nuclear Power and Tesla Motors’ great new electric car, is priced a bit too up-market for the average consumer at a quarter of a million dollars. The Prius hybrid seems to have been created more a to allow forward thinkers to feel good about themselves rather than to solve the actual problems at hand. Ethanol and Hydrogen seem like they’re not as viable as they once seemed, requiring just as much energy to move the fuel as is provided by the fuel itself. And I don’t know if Carbon taxes to push along these alternative technologies will do anything except annoy everybody and hurt the economy.

It seems like the future must be lossless solar cells, which would have to be a nanotech venture. My understanding is that this research is going quite well but is at least a decade off from viability and another twenty from nationwide implementation. I guess geothermal energy might be a possibility too, although not much is being done in that field at all because its just too monumental. An enzymatic engine might be great too, also way way down the road. And I suppose someone might come along with new magnetic materials that change our paradigm about what an engine mechanisms might look like.

In the meantime, though, we’re still stuck with at least 30 more years of consuming oil, I think.

But even if we cut off our oil consumption tomorrow Salafists will still be able to make all the bombs they require. And they probably will still have all the Russian made weaponry they could possible dispense with. And nuclear science will still be out there. And the very rich and consistent tradition of Jihad will still be there and the Islamist conception of Martyrdom and Dhimmitude and honor killings and genital mutilation and hatred of western values and all that… And China and Russia would probably grab all the oil we don’t use, because it’ll be a lot cheaper. This will allow those countries, whose human rights records are worrisome to say the least, to become world-players in record time.

You say the way to defeat salafism is to open up Muslim communities so they see the benefits of social liberalisation. I’m afraid you lost me there. Sayyid Qtub, Osama Bin Laden’s near-direct progenitor, was absolutely horrified at the very social liberalism you suggest would be the West’s selling point. Social liberalism is a main selling point of Salafism. The whole point of the much hated neoconservative philosophy vis a vis the middle east is that Islamists are the gatekeepers of those societies. If we want to show Muslims the benefits of social liberalism we have to remove the gatekeepers first. And the gatekeepers do not want to go. My understanding is, these Salafist gatekeepers would rather their people suffer under Islam than prosper under the aegis of the infidel. I’ve met quite enough ex-Palestinians here in America who have told me exactly that.

Israel is a ten mile strip of land. A drop of water in the ocean of Islam. Blaming Israel for much of anything wrong in Islamic-western relations is to play the PR greivance game the Islamist way. The problem of Israel mostly has to do with Islamist supremacy and sharia-sanctified Dhimmitude and the conflation of the political with the religious in Islam. Most people can not fathom these zealous aspects of political islam so they don’t seed them into the equation when thinking about Islam’s attitude toward Israel.

Besides that, it couldn’t be just the west’s errors, or Israel, or the west’s social liberalism that is causing the problem. Islamists have massacred every religion and creed under the sun, from Coptic Christians to Animists to Hindus to Zoroastrians to Africans to Armenians to Jews to Bhuddists to the various competing sects in their own religion. At Islam’s edges there is always warfare and if they in fact believe their creed as much as they seem to, there always will be warfare at the edges of Islam. Islam was at war with the west and everybody else long before oil was discovered in the Middle East.

Your idea about “allowing the UN to start policing the trouble spots” is baffling to me. The UN has no such interest as far as I can discern in doing any such thing. Islamists used the UN as protective sheilds in Lebanon because they knew the blue-helmets wouldn’t get involved. As much as I wish the UN was a positive force in the world, I see absolutely no evidence of it. From the Oil-for-Food joke which gave a great reason for the UN to sit-out Iraq to the sexual abuse in Africa, I think its all of a piece — corruption.

Just look at the reception Chavez got in New York. Brandishing Chomsky’s book to general delight in the Assembly Chamber. Now Chavez is destroying Venezuela’s economy the same old way every tin-pot socialism-infected dictator with populist dreams has destroyed his nation through the last 100 years. He’s printing money like a madman and Inflation is flying through the roof. If only someone had handed him Freidman instead of Chomsky!

All to say, the UN is feckless, Islamists have a very long history of antipathy toward the west and want to destroy it, and opening Islam to western liberalism is part of the problem.

The question then becomes, should Islam just be contained? And if so, how?