The Whole Thing

Better to Blog Nothing Than Not Blog At All

Sorry I haven't had more to say here lately: I've been doing a lot of reading, struggling with a market that wants to sell off a bit but keeps on running up against good news (I trade index futures, mainly the S&P 500 "e-mini"), and leaving a lot of comments on other people's blogs - including a couple that I haven't even added to my blogroll yet - here, for instance, reacting to criticisms of Bush's "forward strategy" speech at Daniel Drezner's blog, and responding on other issues at Michael Totten's. I've also been hanging at Roger Simon's place a lot (see the roll). The good thing about "militant liberal" blogs (using Oliver Kamm's designation) is that a neoconical guy like me can run into some productive opposition from the not-yet-persuaded as well as the unpersuadable. It wasn't really so long ago that I was in the same position as Roger, Michael, and Daniel - struggling to find a reason to support Democrats.

Two Iraqi blogs I've been enjoying immensely - mainly because the Iraqi bloggers are so heartbreakingly sympathetic - are Healing Iraq and The Messopotamian. Also some good discussion, as well as opportunity for Americans to express their support, in the comments sections there.

I've been thinking about a new piece on the apparent hopelessness of the Democratic Party's position, perhaps beginning with Nietzsche's famous saying sometimes translated as "Man would rather will nothing, than not will at all." I've always associated this statement - which I believe is as much about the desperation of any individual facing helplessness and impotence as it is about the contradictions inherent in asceticism - with Pascal's statement: "The heart has reasons that reason hardly knows." Either would be an appropriate motto for Democratic partisans in the current period - though if my point isn't clear to you, you may have to wait a while for me to explain. There's been so much discussion of the Democrats and their problems lately, and the subject inevitably touches on the plight of the European left and the radical left as well as on critical policy questions: I'm still looking for the right piece of the story to chew on.

Talk to you soon...

Infinite Justice

Not In Ourselves, But In Our Polls

In a post entitled AMERICAN ATTITUDES? INCOHERENT,
Professor Dauber over at Ranting Profs takes a rant on Fox News' latest opinion polling on Iraq. She congratulates Fox for asking some new questions, but wonders whether the responses make any sense.

Whatever one thinks about polls and polling methods in general, there are few subjects, it seems to me, more vulnerable to bad polling than questions dealing with attitudes towards war casualties. The question that's been asked since at least the end of major combat in Iraq has been whether whatever current casualty rates among American soldiers are "acceptable." To answer the question affirmatively requires respondents to associate themselves with a perspective that, if voiced publically by a politician or pundit, would result in bitter criticism along familiar "well, that's certainly easy for you to say" lines. Mark Shields would be all over President Bush if the latter was caught saying anything even suggesting a blithe "acceptance" of casualty rates. On the other hand, to reply in the negative seems to suggest opposition to current policy: Saying that the casualty rates are "unacceptable" would seem to imply either that one feels the troops are being badly led and deployed, or that they should never have been deployed in the first place. The respondents' three choices - "acceptable," "unacceptable," "don't know/no opinion/not sure" - come down to confessing to Eichmann-like inhmanity, peace activist naivete, or stupid passivity toward the most pressing issue of the moment.

I suspect that many respondents answer the question they guess is really being asked, but that different respondents guess differently, and that, in this specific instance, a human reluctance to call any casualty "acceptable" skews results toward the negative. If the question is asked alongside other questions - regarding overall support for the war, longer-term expectations, etc. - then the respondent is also given a chance to "split the ballot," using one answer to provide his or her main response, and the other, less encompassing question to express whatever reservations. The overall statement is not unreasonable at all: "Every casualty is one casualty too many, but we must stay the course."

The Fox questions seem to offer a similar split ballot opportunity, and it may therefore not be surprising that they appear to give contradictory results. Prof. Dauber wonders how it's possible for majorities to believe both that "supporting the troops" means "bringing them home," but that their mission is "part of the war on terror":

[T]he results are -- well, essentially incoherent. A majority of Americans (but just barely) agree with the Bush administration's argument that conceptually the war in Iraq is a part of the overall War on Terror. A majority believe that "support the troops" means -- bring them home. This is staggering. It means the leftist rhetoric that essentially portrays the soldier, the armed US combat soldier, the strongest, most competent, best trained, best equipped, most professional soldier in the history of the world, as an infantilized victim, needing us to protect them, by fighting for them in the political arena where they are presumably helpless, so we can bring them "home" -- in other words, protect them by returning them from danger to saftey is persuasive to a majority of the Americans those soldiers protect. It is a rhetoric that portrays us as the only ones who can protect them since they cannot maneuver in the political realm. Yet a sizeable majority also believes that the right thing to do is to see things through in Iraq, which is obviously only possible if the soldiers stay in danger.

Though Prof. Dauber might be right about how leftist rhetoric depicts soldiers as victims, I believe she may be overinterpreting the apparent contradictions in the poll results. If you add the three responses together, they make for an entirely reasonable statement: "I'd sure like to see those boys and girls home and safe as soon as possible, but first they've got an important job to finish." Saying they've got an important job to finish doesn't mean that won't ever come home - or won't come home soon enough, all things considered.

Read this way, what's surprising is that as large a number of people answer in favor of acceptability of casualties in the usual question and against bringing the soldiers home as soon as possible in the other question. As a strong supporter of the war, I could still honestly join the majorities for "unacceptability" and "bring 'em home," though I would not do so - not because I consider casualties easy to accept or because I wish to see our soldiers in Iraq a second longer than necessary, but because I'm aware that the first set of answers would be interpreted as "anti-war."

For Some Reason Or Another

For some reason or another, a series of enormously important issues — the future of the Middle East, the credibility of the United States as both a strong and a moral power, the war against the Islamic fundamentalists, the future of the U.N. and NATO, our own politics here at home — now hinge on America's efforts at creating a democracy out of chaos in Iraq. That is why so many politicians — in the U.N., the EU, Germany, France, the corrupt Middle East governments, and a host of others — are so strident in their criticism, so terrified that in a postmodern world the United States can still recognize evil, express moral outrage, and then sacrifice money and lives to eliminate something like Saddam Hussein and leave things far better after the fire and smoke clear. People, much less states, are not supposed to do that anymore in a world where good is a relative construct, force is a thing of the past, and the easy life is too precious to be even momentarily interrupted. We may expect that, a year from now, the last desperate card in the hands of the anti-Americanists will be not that Iraq is democratic, but that it is democratic solely through the agency of the United States — a fate worse than remaining indigenously murderous and totalitarian.

The above paragraph from Victor Davis Hanson's latest essay on Iraq was "thought for the day" at AndrewSullivan.com, and it might well have been the thought for virtually any day over the last several months. With relatively minor alterations it could stand as a leading candidate for thought for the year, and quite possibly as thought for the decade, thought for the generation, even thought for the century.

Except for the opening phrase: "For some reason or another" may have been intended ironically, or it may just reflect a bit of sloppiness. It certainly cannot be taken at face value, for Hanson has shown himself as aware as anyone, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and his bosses, that the installation of Iraq at the center of U.S. policy was not random or happenstantial, but if anything overdetermined. The intersection of the multiplicitious "enormously important issues" that Hanson lists, but does not exhaust, is the inevitable reflection of the multiplicitous causes of war. Indeed, his summary rather conspicuously ignores or at least suppresses the issue of energy resources, which many would reflexively put at the top, and not only because of direct U.S. interest in oil and oil price stability. The geostrategic outlines have been drawn publically, and can be pieced together from Bush Administration statements, but for various good reasons the Administration has been reluctant to dwell on them or to emphasize them too forcefully. It has refrained from frightening observers any more than they were already frightened by the events of 9/11, and it has seen no advantage in placing the wrong kind of public pressure on regimes whose participation in the unfolding war can still be shaped more favorably.

Geology, geography, and geopolitics ensure that the fate of Iraq remains critical to U.S. and the world's interests, just as they also made a Baathist Iraq into a very well-financed threat to those interests. On this score, as typically for an overdetermined strategic interest, each discreet danger acts as a multiplier in relation to each and every other danger. Oil money armed Saddam. A well-armed, well-financed Saddam could directly threaten oil resources in Saudia Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, and the Arab Emirates, and destabilize and otherwise pressure local U.S. allies Turkey, Jordan, and Israel. A well-financed and well-armed regionally dangerous Saddam could escalate his aggression toward Israel even beyond his former support of suicide bombers. Iraq's situation also gave Saddam tremendous leverage against the rest of the world. At the time of his regime's removal, he had already exposed the weaknesses of two premiere global security organizations, the U.N. and NATO. Any further success on the world stage would have in turn magnified his own regional influence again. This bad synergy of mutually reinforcing threats is exponential, not linear - less like a row of dominos leading to a single endpoint, than like interconnected nodal failures on the way to a network crash.

The elements of this scenario were all visible in the first Gulf War, and, like actors playing different characters of the same general type, they re-appeared again in the sequel, and have undergone yet another costume change for the aftermath now showing in the same theater. At the time of Gulf War 1, the main threat appeared to be Saddam's own aspirations for regional domination, as joined to a direct challenge to an international system based on inviolable state sovereignty. The important fact about Baathist ambitions was not so much that they were grand, but that they were not entirely unrealistic. Following Gulf War 1, those ambitions were put on indefinite suspension, but issues of regional and international influence remained very much in play. Containment was deemed require the stationing of U.S. troops within the borders of Saudia Arabia, and the extended political and economic deprivation of the Iraqi people under U.N. sanctions - both measures serving to inflame regional and international attitudes, especially wherever Al Qaeda sought recruits.

For these reasons, or the broader strategic situation comprised in them, it is foolish to criticize those Americans who in large majorities have regularly replied to pollsters that they believe Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. There is even less reason to attribute the existence of these beliefs, as many on the left habitually do, to some nefarious Bush Administration campaign of guilt by false association. The Bush Administration could not have been more explicit about its arguments that 9/11 changed its approach to Iraq. At the same time, it is impossible to conceive of Al Qaeda as it was ca. 9/11/01 without including the prior history of US relations to Iraq. That these two avowed and proven enemies of the U.S. were, for their own part, completely aware of their external, objective connections has been confirmed by independent researchers and reporters such as Stephen Hayes as well as by various government intelligence services. Even the New York Times article of several months ago that, through leaks from CIA interrogations of captive Al Qaeda leaders, attempted to debunk the notion of a Saddam-Al Qaeda "alliance," implicity confirmed contacts and negotiations. In other words, Dick Cheney did not, as so many on the left have charged, "lie" or "mislead" or "goof" when he said he could not deny a Saddam-Al Qaeda link: No honest, informed observer could say anything else. That he and the American people generally have maintained their suspicions, even against a massive counterpropaganda campaign in all the major media, is proof of their intuitive strategic insight and stubborn good sense, and of the lack of same in their self-superior critics.

Even without reference to specific historical actors, events, and interconnections, the course of recent history almost amounts to an exercise in physics: The U.S. yielding precisely the surpluses - in military power, wealth, technology, civil society, and so on - required to fill the Middle East's abhorrent vacuums. For a number of practical and historical reasons, Iraq was always the best and most likely first stage in the inevitable project to re-make the region, though events in Egypt, Saudia Arabia, Iran, or Jordan could also conceivably have forced our hand. If, assigning further values to the equation's main variables, we accept further that Al Qaeda and all that it represents were bound sooner or later to provoke a strong response, and that any expedition to Afghanistan alone would be unlikely to suffice in eliminating the threat, then a U.S. strategic initiative begins to look inevitable, and Iraq again looms large as a militarily and politically intolerable complication, second as necessary staging area, and third as independent threat in its own right.

All of those "enormously important issues" mentioned by Hanson, and several other issues as well, were built into the Iraqi challenge and into this moment in history long before George W. Bush assumed office, and any discussion of the war's justifications and outcomes not undertaken in this context simply cannot be taken seriously. If some failure of will, imagination, or insight in the wake of a major terrorist event had forestalled a recognition of strategic imperatives, then the war might conceivably have been deferred, perhaps for years, probably to be fought at much greater cost and under less favorable circumstances, but some version of Operation Iraqi Freedom would inevitably have been tried, if not by our current president, then by one of his successors.

To reprise the earlier networking metaphor, Gulf War 1 was an improvised fix intended to preserve systems integrity; troop deployments, no-fly zones, and U.N. resolutions, inspections, and sanctions were temporary patches; Gulf War 2 has unfolded as an attempt to re-engineer and re-boot after replacing failure-prone hardware. With or without a Gulf War 3, the next step may require a total overhaul of the entire network - or even its full replacement. In addition to being immensely costly in itself, such a project would probably involve the suspension of services (peace and economic development) to most if not all clients. It would aim for resumption of business under conditions somewhat resembling previous ones, but there could be no guarantee of success.

The Proxy War

The reaction and the reaction to the reaction to Malaysian PM Mahathir's recent speech to a world assembly of Islamic political leaders has reminded us all, as apparently some of us need reminding, that antisemitism lies again, or perhaps we should say still, near the core of the world's greatest and most dangerous conflicts. Recent commentary has included economist-pundit Paul Krugman's mind-numbingly superficial and excruciatingly unenlightening New York Times column attempting to hold George W. Bush's foreign policy responsible for a conflict that goes back 1,300 years. This column and its author have already been dealt with, one might wish to say dispatched, by Oliver Kamm, but the exchange of comments that followed the post on Kamm's blog turned inexorably to the clash of civilizations that Mahathir appears to envision, with Islam on one side and the rest of the world, described as under Jewish control "by proxy," on the other.

What has widely been taken as the key section of Mahathir's speech, which was unanimously applauded by those in attendance and which received nearly unanimous approval by Muslim observers worldwide, ran as follows:

1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategise and then to counter attack....

We are actually very strong. 1.3 billion people cannot be simply wiped out. The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them....

We are up against a people who think. They survived 2000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power. We cannot fight them through brawn alone. We must use our brains also.

Of late because of their power and their apparent success they have become arrogant. And arrogant people, like angry people will make mistakes, will forget to think.

They are already beginning to make mistakes. And they will make more mistakes. There may be windows of opportunity for us now and in the future. We must seize these opportunities.

Though opinion in the West universally condemned Mahathir's invocation of classic antisemitic paranoia, and though Western leaders denied once again that they are at war with Islam, the world's 1.3 billion (or so) Muslims have not, on the whole, appeared to concede either point. It seems that, regardless of what the West thinks or intends, the Islamic world, or a very influential and sizeable section of it, thinks it is at war, and, wherever and however else it may be wrong, the Islamic world has much history and even some common sense on its side. It also possesses the ability to prove itself correct simply by fighting. The only question remaining would then be how many in the West will agree with one of the commenters on Kamm's blog: "I think it's time we realise that values and ideas are something that should be fought for. Violently if it comes to that."

A series of questions flow naturally from this observation: Which values and ideas? How hard? Who will do the fighting - and where?

During the Cold War, the presumption underlying mutually assured destruction and deterrence strategy in Europe and elsewhere was that we in the West would rather risk the virtual obliteration of whole continents, including our own, than yield our freedom. Today, however, as an American, I am forced to wonder how widely shared the sentiment of "live free or die" still is. I believe that it is still generally the reflex here - it's our peculiarly abstract form of nationalism - but I don't have a sense for what motivates the populace "over there": I imagine confusion, denial, and wishful thinking occupying the place in the European heart where the fierce love of tribe and country used to be. It might be interesting to see polling on the subject. In any event, it seems that European leadership and bureaucratic inertia (same thing?) are motivated by a desperation to defer the question, not an unreasonable objective, but it's as true in peacetime as in warfare that the enemy gets a vote.

The Islamic radicals seem, by contrast, to be quite forcefully in favor of "live Islamist or die," though the commitments of the larger Islamic population seem somewhat less sure, thus the resort, turning to the main topic of this discussion, to racism and conspiracy theories. In any event, when "live Islamist or die" meets "live free or die," then it seems inevitable that some amount of dying will be done, and, if history is any guide, it will be done by Islamists in far greater numbers than by the free.

As for Islam and the Jews, there are kernels of truth in Mahathir's hopeless and paranoid ramblings. It is no accident that the Jews have flourished wherever freedom and its benefits are strongest, just as persecution of the Jews so often accompanies a nation's political, moral, and economic decline. In this sense, the Jews do rule the world "by proxy," but it's in a way that Mahathir may be incapable of comprehending - in precisely the same way that he appears incapable of comprehending the dependence of scientific and technological advances on the free flow of people and ideas. The Jew's proxy is freedom - which rules by refraining to rule, and rules most decisively wherever the world is least ruled by ignorance.

Here, the evangelical Christians who believe that God blesses those who protect the Jews are much more right than those secularists whose commitment to unbelief seems to make them blind to all such distinctions. Just as the Christians, after a long and bloody historical adolescence marked by familiar overdone gestures of independence, may have finally, to the great benefit of all concerned, come round to recognizing that Christianity is Judaic, the only hope for Islamists and secularists alike may be to recognize and accept their own religious and historical parentage. (Even the Hindus have lately been casting their lot with the Jews - possibly because the Hindus are finally turning Jewish, or possibly because the Jews have always secretly been Hindu, even if they don't look Hinduish - I'll have to think about this one.)

So long as Islam sets itself against the Jews, it sets itself against the same processes of modernization that Mahathir deludedly embraces, and it is doomed always to be fighting at a disadvantage in the war that it insists on having - whether that war is fought mainly by terrorist radicals and their pursuers, by conventional means, or through colder forms of economic and ideological struggle. By corollary, the apparent ongoing relapse into antisemitism in Europe is one of the clearest signs that European culture has been going dangerously off course: It seems destined to achieve the one thing that historical experience makes it most determined to avoid - becoming a principal battlefield in another catastrophic conflict.

I may have to bow to conventional wisdom and revise the position expressed in my post on Islamic fascism. In combining all of the elements that threaten Pax Americana and global progress generally, Islamic fascism may indeed be emerging as the "main danger," or at least the focus of dangers, for this generation and for the always-unforeseeable future - even if the direct costs of the clash between the West and Islam may eventually be exceeded by its collateral effects.

I still like America's chances in that battle, but only for as long as we remain a proxy in good standing.

Asking the Wrong Question

In a post entitled "Teaching the wrong lesson," Deacon at Power Line reviews another "let's make it simple" piece on the Iraq war, this one by Jonah Goldberg at the National Review OnLine. Though both Goldberg and Deacon recognize that, as Goldberg puts it, "there were lots of good reasons to topple Saddam," each associates himself most strongly with a single simple idea - that the U.S. needed to make an "example" of some country in addition to Afghanistan.

Goldberg enunciates a series of variations on the idea of the new sheriff/new convict/new kid smacking down the worst bad guy/biggest meanest cat/worst bully in order to send a message. For further authority he cites a typically loose formulation from Tom Friedman of the New York Times:

The "real reason" for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world...Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that world.

Notice how Friedman's one "real reason" quickly turns into three reasons - "could," "deserved," "right in the heart of that world." Suddenly, the one simple idea turns into the outlines of a complex strategy. It's this kind of messy self-contradiction that has led some observers to accuse Friedman of disingenuousness.

Deacon puts his own position somewhat differently, and more cleanly:

One of the main reasons I advocated going to war was to send a message to other Middle Eastern regimes. The message was something like this: "if you even dabble in terrorism or weapons of mass destruction, we will come after you, and we will do so regardless of what the EU and the U.N. have to say."

To Deacon's credit, he is able to take this line of reasoning another step, and at least face the possibility that he was wrong:

But how does this rationale look now? While perhaps sound in theory, it doesn't seem to have worked out in practice. The unexpected failure to find WMD, coupled with exaggerated but real post-war difficulties, have caused enough erosion of public domestic support for our efforts to "unteach" the lessons of our victory. That is, Middle Eastern regimes now have little reason to believe that we will be coming after them any time soon, at least in the absence of the approval and participation of the EU and the U.N.

As for the "lessons of our victory," these were undoubtedly an aspect of the U.S. interest, though in foreign policy discussion they are usually offered in the language of "credibility" rather than, say, Goldberg's image of "smacking the stuffing" out of a bully. On this score, I'm not so sure the message hasn't been delivered, even if there's little credible threat of follow-on invasions: There never was any likelihood that an Iraqi expedition would be succeeded by a march west, south, or east. The message was one of U.S. committment. A collapse of will could return the message to sender, but that's another issue.

If things are "simple" in Iraq, then they are simple in a different, more general way. There is one truly simple explanation available, but it doesn't tell us much in itself: The U.S. invaded Iraq because U.S. leaders perceived that doing so would be in the U.S. interest. That's the problem with the "let's make it simple" exercise: If your simplism is narrow enough to be meaningful, then you put yourself in danger of simple contradiction. If your simplism is general enough to avoid this danger, then it probably won't be very meaningful.

More important, the key question is almost never Deacon's "how does this rationale look now?" "Now" is trivial. Focusing on "now" leaves you open to one trap after another - overwrought concerns over the post-war state of the military, the belief that a failure to locate battlefield deployable WMDs would exhaust the WMD issue, failure to consider the potential costs of whatever real alternatives to the actions taken, and so on. Even settling the narrowest questions will take a bit more time than has passed at this point - a few more months, or years, or decades.

Mainly for Grown-Ups

There were two reasons why I included the phrase "mainly for grown-ups" in the title of my Amazon list of favorite recent science fiction novels: First, I am implicitly conceding that as a genre SF is still associated by many with comic books, silly movies, and adolescence, but I am also insisting that there's something there for mature adults. Second, I'm giving fair warning that some of the novels, in style and content, would not be appropriate for young readers.

Two of the novels on the list, Peter Watts' Maelstrom and John Barnes' Kaleidoscope Century, strike me as particularly grown-up in both respects. Both offer decidedly bleak visions of the not very distant future, Maelstrom describing a world in which quasi-governmental and corporate interests must constantly struggle to stay one step ahead of ecological disaster, even while each temporarily successful intervention in turn produces new unanticipated dangers. Eventually, a specialist in the control of "baby apocalypses" realizes that the latest new microbe he's tracking, nicknamed "Behemoth," is moving well beyond infancy:

...[T]he dice had just kept rolling, and the hundredth throw had landed square on the Oregon coast. [He] knew the story: microbes, in sufficient numbers, make their own rules. Now there was a place in the sun where Behemoth didn't have to fit into someone else's world. It had been creating its own: trillions of microscopic terraformers at work in the soil, changing pH and electrolyte balances, stripping away all the advantages once held by natives so precisely adapted to the way things used to be...

It was every crisis he'd ever faced, combined and distilled and reduced to pure essence. It was chaos breaking, maybe unbreakable: little bubbles of enemy territory growing across the face of the coast, then the continent, then the planet. Eventually, there'd come a fulcrum, a momentary balance of some interest to the theoreticians. The area inside and outside the bubbles would be the same. An instant later, Behemoth would be the outside, a new norm that enclosed shrinking pockets of some other, irrelevant reality.

The collateral damage in this biological war is often brutal, an observation that returns me to the original theme on appropriate audiences: When not simply wiped out amidst desperate, remote-controlled quarantining procedures, the human characters in this novel are often driven to extreme anti-social behavior, and Watts does not shy away from direct descriptions of perverse, often sexualized violence. Additionally, his information-dense yet elliptical style might prove difficult for many young readers.

The stylistic texture of Kaleidoscope Century would probably strike the average reader as more congenial than Maelstrom's: Any given paragraph of the novel reads like a "normal" piece of first-person narrative fiction. The following passage deals with the main character's activities behind German lines during the "Eurowar":

...[S]ince these poor bastards just wanted the war to go home and leave them alone, that was what they had predicated their defense on - protecting each individual house. So I could walk right up the middle of the street, in the middle of the day, and though almost everyone telecommuted now to avoid the weapons targeted on transit, nobody was patrolling the streets; they sat in their individual cocoons and waited for the blow to fall on one of them, even though probably half the houses in the village had picked me up on sensors, and the householders were undoubtedly sitting with their hands on their guns, waiting with sweat staining their armpits.

In almost every other way than style on the level of the paragraph, however, the book will be difficult for many readers. Like Maelstrom, Kaleidoscope Century is a highly contemporary version of the traditional SF cautionary what-if? tale, but while Watts sticks mainly to "hard" SF, even providing a helpful appendix on the scientific research on which he has based his extrapolations from current trends and ideas, Barnes takes longer speculative leaps: Just how far he's gone is unveiled only as key underlying questions are (mostly) answered within a narrative that will strike many as perplexingly disjointed and contradictory, in that it follows the narrator's own struggle to sort out memories that seem to suggest an impossibly long life in which key events are being recalled in multiple incommensurate ways. Making the result even more off-putting is that the character's contradictory memories are those of a revolutionary, terrorist, mercenary, and criminal who has played a key supporting role in more than a century of world-devastating warfare. The many atrocities he reports, and sometimes re-reports in slightly altered versions, sometimes suggest up-close-and-personal versions of the worst stories from the Yugoslavian civil war. There is nothing in the works of De Sade, Goya, or the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic that far exceeds the obscene cruelty starkly visualized within Barnes' kaleidoscope.

One element that ties these two dystopias together is a partly repressed political dimension. Both imagine a 21st Century in which the United States has been amputated from history, freeing democratic capitalism's economic, cultural, and ideological competitors to fight each other for pre-eminence. The result is the war of all against all, with technology providing an impetus toward irreversible catastrophe. In Watts' post-American world, an alternative does finally emerge that initially takes on familiar left-revolutionary, collectivist values and outlines, but it remains too contingent and provisional (or, arguably, contrived) to be strongly embraced or criticized. Barnes is much more explicit: He imagines the war of all against all producing a clear victor in the form of a self-perpetuating mind control technology that, in the typical manner of futuristic science fiction, both recalls and imaginatively elaborates upon 20th Century totalitarianism. Wherever either author's personal commitments and political intentions, if any, may lie, each offers a vivid literary argument in support of what we could summarize in the phrase "American global influence."

The socially conservative guardians of virtue and high aesthetics may reject such works as, in a word, pornographic. Others who, like many adolescent boys, are drawn to transgressive escapism may not glean the implicit arguments for moderation that traditional leftist criticism would immediately identify as "reactionary" and possibly "decadent." What's inarguable is that the futures imagined by Watts and Barnes are repellent: They repel us into the present, no more certain than ever what tomorrow may bring, but more aware of what we cannot afford to lose.

A Lot More Said Than Done

Jessica's Well has turned up a January 1946 LIFE magazine devoted to the difficulties encountered in post-war Europe. The post has received a lot of attention at LGF and elsewhere, mainly because the pessimism about occupied Germany and its future, and the criticism of the Allies, remind many of current attitudes towards Iraq. There are without a doubt some rough parallels, but the comparison quickly breaks down - and leads to places that most people are reluctant to visit.

It is certainly conceivable that - like World War II and the reconstruction and Cold War that ensued - the Iraq operation and the larger War on Terror represent enterprises with the potential to re-make the world, but the LIFE articles should also remind us of the sheer unreality of so much current discussion. If we are doing world history here, we are doing it massively on the cheap - at least so far.

We are all rightly concerned about the deaths of American soldiers and of Iraqis, too, but this "war" would register approximately as an ancillary probing action in the World War II context. Reliable estimates put total direct World War II casualties, military and civilian, in the range of 60 million - including around 20 million Russians and 4 - 7 million Germans (depending on whether you count deaths that occurred during the immediate post-occupation period mainly in the Soviet sector). The 60 million figure may also be quite low, as there appear to be no reliable estimates of the numbers of deaths in many countries - especially China, whose civilian losses have been put by some observers in the range of 10 to 20 million. And there are other ways of considering the numbers: In a couple seconds at Hiroshima, probably on the order of 10 times as many people were killed as have been killed in the entire Iraq operation. In a minute of combat at Omaha Beach, the US lost more soldiers than have been lost in Iraq in seven months.

In terms of physical destruction, the devastation of Europe's cities and infrastructure defies description. Put in financial terms, paying for the war meant that many participants went far beyond bankruptcy into total financial breakdown and disconnection from the world economy. In the United States, financing the war led to budget deficits that regularly exceeded total receipts for the years 1942 - 1945, in peak war years by factors of two or more. In 1943, the government spent more than three times what it took in, and the resultant deficit represented approximately 30% of Gross Domestic Product. In present day terms, the numbers would equate with a budget deficit over 3 trillion dollars. By contrast, the budget deficit estimate for next year was recently revised downward to under 400 billion, which would be well under 4% of GDP in a 10 trillion dollar economy, and would stand within the normal range for the U.S. going all the way back to 1930.

If for many reasons Gulf War 2 resembles a battle, or a theater operation, more than a major war, and if the larger war is not yet really over, by far, then the situation in Iraq does not represent a true "post-war" situation at all. This possibility is more than just a debating point. Anti-American observers are fond of comparing the deaths at the World Trade Center on 9/11 to the numbers of Africans who die every day due to disease, famine, and war, or even to the numbers of motorists who die every year in auto accidents. The future may still yield easier comparisons - of the type that do not force the observer to explain symbology, contexts, and the realistic concern over possible repetition and escalation. Events may yet take a course that, like the events of our inexpressibly bloody past, make current controversies look ludicrously, or heartrendingly, naive. The overarching goal of current policy might even be summed up as an attempt to ensure they remain so - and thus to prevent World War II from ever becoming a very relevant point of reference.

If we consider human nature, this goal may begin too look more difficult than we would like to admit. If we fail, then the survivors may look back nostalgically to the days of Operation Iraqi Freedom and even 9/11 - perhaps recognizing them as milestones, but also seeing them as symbols of a time when the nation still enjoyed the luxury to anguish over just a couple of buildings, just a few hundred soldiers, just a few thousand innocents.

New Visitors

Welcome to anyone who's come by via links from Normblog and Natalie Solent. I hope that you will find material here of interest, will feel free to leave comments or send criticisms, and will check back again sometime.

I intend to to expand further on the themes in the post that Norm linked, taking into account both Norm's thoughts as well as recent speculation about the state of the left at The Belmont Club and elsewhere.

Natalie linked TWT while responding to a question I posed to her regarding science fiction. I haven't yet gotten to that subject here, but may soon. In the meantime, here's a list that I put together for Amazon of some of my favorite recent SF novels.

A Million Last Gasps

Andrew Sullivan has lately been pursuing a jihad against the endless "Bush lied" lies and other distortions that mark so much of current political discussion. I've sent him my own note of thanks, but a key question remains as to what mixture of dishonesty and brainwashing the various media and political figures who relentlessly mouth these misstatements are expressing.

When FRONTLINE producer Martin Smith, in the online chat Sullivan excerpts, tries to defend himself against hostile questioning by equating the words "grave and gathering" with the word "imminent," a statement which really is not very far from "2 + 2 = 5" or "We have always been at war with Oceania," I tend to think he's showing the symptoms of brainwashing (induced reflexive intellectual responses to external stimuli) more than of dishonesty. Most of the meme-mad false witnesses probably fall under this category, and their vulnerability to this peculiar form of left-liberal false consciousness is probably enhanced by the Peter Principle corollary that often makes people who are poor at questioning themselves more likely to succeed in highly competitive fields like journalism and politics. In the latter field especially, being able to believe one's own lies with unstinting fervor is practically a job requirement.

The resultant spectacle is loathsome, but is probably unavoidable. The war on terror and specifically the Bush approach to it represent strategic, possibly world-historical, turning points that, in political terms, in turn represent a crisis for the left, whose failures in the 2002 Congressional elections confirmed that the dangers to its political relevance were not just grave and gathering, but imminent as well: In a word, they were and remain immanent, as in emerging inexorably from within prevailing conditions, and in a manner accelerated by 9/11 and by Bush's necessarily aggressive response to the total geostrategic challenge. In this context, virtually the entirety of the left's post-9/11 political reaction to Bush - from initial patriotic unity to the more recent rather unpatriotic convulsions - has to be seen as originating in sheer existential panic. In the media, among the Democratic presidential candidates, throughout the anti-war movement, and everywhere else where regressive progressives gather, a fantasy world is conjured where left-liberal positions and beliefs are essential, important, and meaningful, and left-liberal ambitions remain within reach. Those who chant the left-liberal mantras and lash out at anyone who dares to interrupt them are like victims of terminal illness, pitifully relying on denial and grasping at quack medicine because the truth simply cannot be intellectually administered.

Under conditions of political crisis, the sick-to-political-death ideologues cannot open their mouths without releasing torrents of bile. As for the supposedly objective reporters, we've long known that the vast majority voted Democrat and held liberal views. Their latent biases and affinities are being forced to the surface, and cannot long survive the light. All their twisted utterances, all their ludicrously slanted headlines and relentlessly biased descriptions, from FRONTLINE to the New York Times to the AP to CNN, suggest a million or so last gasps.