Encore Presentation: Embedding

Now we're beginning to see, thanks to Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon, that the awful decline in President Biden's approval numbers was caused neither by public indignation over inflation nor Fox News bogus preoccupation with the president's age, but mostly by our "liberal" media's insane rage over the withdrawal from Afghanistan, I felt like re-upping this post from when it was going on, trying to puzzle out what the journos were so outraged over:

2. There's a large foreign policy community -- especially journalists at places like NYT or WP who worship "objectivity" 99% of the time -- for whom Afghanistan is personal. They have human ties there, with no greater priority -- human nature, understandable -- than...

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) August 16, 2021

4. It's on the rest of us without personal ties to point out the obvious bigger picture: That a government that collapses in days without America propping them up wasn't worth $2.2 trillion and thousands of U.S. lives. Biden was right to leave but...

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) August 16, 2021

... but even Bunch has the same objection to "how" Biden left as all the embeds have: why did Biden bet that the Afghan government would be able to hold out for four weeks, giving us enough time to get all the journalists' friends to safety, along with the American business community and the Afghan employees of the military? Why didn't he realize it would collapse in a week and start moving everybody out earlier?

To which there's one obvious answer, if you give it a little thought: the moving-out process was going to be a trigger for the collapse, as the White House was warned—if we'd started three weeks earlier, it would have happened three weeks earlier, with the same results. Or 12 years earlier, no doubt.

Neoconservative Denial

Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM).

I want to stop, but maybe just one more column, this one from Robert Kagan of the Kagan dynasty, co-founder with Dr. William Kristol of the Project for a New American Century, and prophet of neoconservatism, as he defined it in 2008, as a kind of political faith going back to 1776 and Alexander Hamilton, whose tenets are

a potent moralism and idealism in world affairs, a belief in America’s exceptional role as a promoter of the principles of liberty and democracy, a belief in the preservation of American primacy and in the exercise of power, including military power, as a tool for defending and advancing moralistic and idealistic causes, as well as a suspicion of international institutions and a tendency toward unilateralism. 

(Though the quotation he uses to bring Hamilton to his side is pretty distorted, when he claims that "Hamilton, even in the 1790s, looked forward to the day when America would be powerful enough to assist peoples in the 'gloomy regions of despotism' to rise up against the 'tyrants that oppressed them"; in fact what Hamilton said, not in the 1790s but 1784, had no reference to "assisting" anybody in the future—merely to the young US already then setting an inspiring example, by its underdog victory in the Revolution: "The influence of our example has penetrated the gloomy regions of despotism, and has pointed the way to inquiries, which may shake it to its deepest foundations.")

But is, anyhow, very anxious at the moment from his (officially ex-neoconservative—he now identifies as "'liberal' and 'progressive' in a distinctly American tradition") position as Washington Post opinionist to assure us (contra WaPo's national security columnist, Greg Jaffe, who writes about the "hubris" of the American project) that the effort in Afghanistan was no effort in "advancing moralistic and idealistic causes" ("It wasn’t hubris that drove America into Afghanistan. It was fear."):

Embedding

 

2. There's a large foreign policy community -- especially journalists at places like NYT or WP who worship "objectivity" 99% of the time -- for whom Afghanistan is personal. They have human ties there, with no greater priority -- human nature, understandable -- than...

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) August 16, 2021

4. It's on the rest of us without personal ties to point out the obvious bigger picture: That a government that collapses in days without America propping them up wasn't worth $2.2 trillion and thousands of U.S. lives. Biden was right to leave but...

— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) August 16, 2021

... but even Bunch has the same objection to "how" Biden left as all the embeds have: why did Biden bet that the Afghan government would be able to hold out for four weeks, giving us enough time to get all the journalists' friends to safety, along with the American business community and the Afghan employees of the military? Why didn't he realize it would collapse in a week and start moving everybody out earlier?

To which there's one obvious answer, if you give it a little thought: the moving-out process was going to be a trigger for the collapse, as the White House was warned—if we'd started three weeks earlier, it would have happened three weeks earlier, with the same results. Or 12 years earlier, no doubt.

American Identity Politics

Can't find a decent credit for this photo, but I think it's Kabul in 1960s sometime.

Shorter David F. Brooks, "The American Identity Crisis", New York Times, 16 July 2021:

Why can't liberals be more neoconservative? Don't they have any moral consistency at all?

Really, that's about the whole thing. He's regretting the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and while he recognizes that the Bush-era invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were a catastrophe causing the US to lose confidence in its ability to spread democracy and be a lamp unto the nations, he doesn't get why that should prompt us to quit. Just because our adventure in Afghanistan is a total failure, is that any reason to quit Afghanistan? 

I guess what befuddles me most is the behavior of the American left. I get why Donald Trump and other American authoritarians would be ambivalent about America’s role in the world. They were always suspicious of the progressive package that America has helped to promote.

But every day I see progressives defending women’s rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and racial justice at home and yet championing a foreign policy that cedes power to the Taliban, Hamas and other reactionary forces abroad.

We told you not to invade in the first place! We've been telling you for 40 years! You can't liberate people by force! They need to liberate themselves!

Humility Lessons

Harold Lloyd in Hal Roach's Haunted Spooks, 1920, via.

David Brooks, 21 May

Aside from a few protesters and a depraved president, most of us have understood we need to suspend the old individualistic American creed. In the midst of a complex epidemiological disaster, to be anti-authority is to be ignorant. In the midst of a contagion, to act as if you are self-sufficient is just selfish.

David Brooks, 28 May

But it’s too easy to offload all blame on Trump. Trump’s problem is not only that he’s emotionally damaged; it is that he is unlettered. He has no literary, spiritual or historical resources to draw upon in a crisis.

David Brooks, 25 June

There are five gigantic changes happening in America right now. The first is that we are losing the fight against Covid-19. Our behavior doesn’t have anything to do with the reality around us. We just got tired so we’re giving up.

David Brooks, 3 July ("The National Humiliation We Need")

It wasn’t Trump who went out to bars in Tempe, 

Austin and Los Angeles in June. 

It wasn’t Trump who put on hospital gowns 

and told the American people you could suspend 

the lockdown if your cause was just. Once 

you told people they could suspend the lockdown 

for one thing, they were going to suspend it for others.

Does anybody know what that is about the hospital gowns? It's in the position where Brooks would normally put a bothsides antinomy, so I suppose to counterbalance the Republican individualist bargoers he's referring to some group of Social Justice Warriors going out undistanced, but why would they be wearing hospital gowns, especially when PPE supplies could still be precarious? Dr. Google is baffled; he finds some Wisconsin family planning advocates in hospital gowns picketing Scott Walker in 2015 over abortion law, and a bunch of Darrel Issa's San Diego constituents in hospital gowns in 2017 protesting Issa's vote against Obamacare, but in 2020 it's just nurses protesting the lack of PPE, and they obviously couldn't have been wearing gowns because they couldn't spare any.

West of Eden: Listing Terrorists

Brian Hook, a State Department Iran policy adviser,  on NPR to propagandize for Trump's (or Prime Minister Netanyahu's, or Crown Prince Mohammad's, depending who you ask) decision to list the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a foreign terrorist organization, offered a list of terrorist things they're said to have been responsible for, including the 1983 bombing of the US Marine Barracks in Beirut, which killed 305 people including 241 US military,  the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 including four Israeli employees and 25 Argentines, the 1994 bombing of the Associación Mutual Israelita Argentina building in Buenos Aires, a local Jewish community center, killing 85, the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers complex in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 US Air Force personnel and a Saudi national, and detaining US citizens—

Wait, what? Not that I approve of these cruel and unlawful imprisonments, which include four or five people still jailed at the time of writing, but is it the IRGC that did it, as opposed to other organs of the Iranian government, and is it correctly described as terrorism?

T]he term 'terrorism' means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents. (US Code, via Wikipedia)

“Calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based” and anyone who questions the King or the government or supports any group, party, organization other than that of the ruling elite inside or outside the Kingdom is a terrorist (Saudi Arabia, same source) 

Also, Trump's best friend Kim Jong-un runs a government that's holding US citizen Kim Dong-chul on bogus charges with a 10-year prison sentence, and Vladimir Putin's Russia has held Paul Whelan since December.

But if you leave it out, it looks like 22 years since the IRGC was involved in any terrorist acts, by the US State Department's count, which makes listing it as a terrorist organization now seem like some peculiar timing. Especially since it's election day in Israel, whose embattled prime minister (under threat of indictment for bribe-taking) jumped in to make sure voters understood it as an example of his pull in Washington, Trump's personal favor to him:

“Thank you, my dear friend, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, for having decided to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization,” he wrote in Hebrew on Twitter on Monday. “Thank you for responding to another of my important requests, which serves the interests of our countries and countries of the region.”

Jameh Mosque, Isfahan, via.

Please don't feed the neocons

This is a thing you can do in Ethiopia, feeding hyenas. Via Lipstick Alley.

The neoconservative eminence Robert Kagan endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in February, in the second-last sentence of a lengthy denunciation of the Trump that doesn't otherwise mention her at all, and taking the distressed tone of a father suggesting that the family will have to sell little Clara into slavery, regrettable as that option might be, if everybody is to survive:

For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.

This week Kagan came up with a still more furious condemnation of the Trump, "This is How Fascism Comes to America", in which I notice that he doesn't mention Clinton at all, and Corey Robin noticed another thing, which is that Kagan's argument against Trump takes the mirror image of a familiar form:

According to Kagan:

What he offers is an attitude, an aura of crude strength and machismo, a boasting disrespect for the niceties of the democratic culture that he claims, and his followers believe, has produced national weakness and incompetence.

This, remember, is what makes Trump not a normal political candidate. It’s what makes him a candidate whose appeal and program “has transcended the party that produced him.”

Unleavened Prose

Shraga Weil, 1963, Four Musicians (but they're the four sons of the Haggadah: Wise, with shofar; Wicked, with drum; Simple, with a "horn", maybe some lengthy double-reed instrument; and the One Who Does Not Know How to Ask with rattles). Via Jewish Heritage Online Magazine.

Could the GOP be facing an intellectual Exodus? Forty years ago, neoconservatives started migrating toward the Republican Party. Is a reverse migration possible? —Daniel Drezner, Washington Post, April 19 2016. H/t Driftglass.

Each year at the blessed season of Passover we remember the story of how God led the people of Israel out of bondage in the fleshpots of Egypt to the promised land, thousands of years ago, but we also think of the experience of those who have gone through similar kinds of oppression throughout history, and the hope of redemption held out to all, from the enslaved African Americans in earlier days of American history to the victims of war and violence in our own world today. Or the neoconservative intellectuals who toiled for generations under the whips of their ruthless capitalist overlords until at last the weight of their chains grew too great and they rose to free themselves.

I mean, fleshpots being fleshpots, it wasn't that bad in some respects, but they did have to spend literally minutes each week typing things on impenetrable and disgusting subjects like climate science and gynaecotheology when all they really wanted to do was urge on the troops to kill Arabs, make fun of stupid liberals and their ill-fitting clothing and theoretically complicated sexual habits, and handicap vice presidential candidates.

Men are earthy, Ross is mercurial

Because I refuse to make the Uranus joke.

Mars by Sandro Botticelli (1483) and Venus by Nicki Minaj (2012), image by Daniel Fernández.

'Missus!' shouted the fat boy.
    'Well, Joe,' said the trembling old lady. 'I'm sure I have been a good mistress to you, Joe. You have invariably been treated very kindly. You have never had too much to do; and you have always had enough to eat.'
    This last was an appeal to the fat boy's most sensitive feelings. He seemed touched, as he replied emphatically —  'I knows I has.'
    'Then what can you want to do now?' said the old lady, gaining courage.
    'I wants to make your flesh creep,' replied the boy. Pickwick Papers, 8)

Monsignor Ross Douthat, the Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, was doing his Joe number on Sunday, asking us to be afraid—be very afraid—of the consequences of socialism, perhaps only ten or a dozen years away:

What have I learned from my mistakes?

Denial skills that will last a lifetime!

Victor Varconi and Elinor Fair in Cecil B. De Mille's The Volga Boatman (1926). Via.

David Brooks writes:

Suppose you had a chance to take a time machine trip back to Iraq in 1968? You could smother the infant Rafid Ahmed Alwan in his cradle, so that he'd never grow up to be the informant Curveball who made up the story about Iraq's mobile biological weapons labs (actually trailer units for pasteurizing milk and generating hydrogen), which didn't convince the German agents who interrogated him but did convince Tony Blair, who didn't.

Without Curveball there would have been no Iraq War, right, because nobody in the United States ever imagined invading Iraq to overthrow its government until then—not until the slam dunk evidence of Saddam Hussein's imaginary weapons of mass destruction assembled itself spontaneously in the corridors of Langley and Dick Cheney said to himself, "My God! Apparently this man is a threat!"

Because it's just like Hitler, really.

West of Eden: A couple of updates

Images from the National Library of Medicine.

Three weeks or so ago, as Leon Panetta was out hawking his memoir of youthful defiance back in the old days of 2011 or so when he was a stripling Defense Secretary of 72 or 73, you may have noticed the particularly ghastly story about Saddam's Real WMD.

They had nothing to do with the fantasies that Cheney and Rumsfeld and the gang used as a phony casus belli, the smoking mushroom and the clouded guns; they were merely the tactically useless but extremely dangerous old chemical weapons that US troops found lying around unprotected in Iraq during the 2003 invasion, supplied to Saddam Hussein by his pals in the Reagan administration 20 years earlier for his war against Iran—and the Times found 17 US service members and seven Iraqi police officers who had been seriously hurt by the things, who weren't getting proper care, while their cases had been kept secret by the authorities for a decade or more, apparently out of nothing more than embarrassment.

And if you did notice it, you may have noticed what the Pentagon said when it was asked for a comment, and shaken your head and clicked your tongue:

Landmarks in strategeric thinking

Duckling huddle, Riverside Park.

Any doubts about the return of the US warplanes to Iraq in the defense of Erbil (and its US consulate) against the troops of the self-denominated Caliph of not-Baghdad ought to be resolved by the speed with which those doughty senators, McCain and Graham, came out to condemn it on Thursday:

Well, it did erupt.

Baghdad 2003, erupting. Photo by Robert Gauthier/AP.

Fouad Ajami, the scholar of Middle Eastern studies who explained Arabs and Muslims to the Bush administration, famously informing Vice President Cheney in 2002 that if American troops were to liberate Iraq from the rule of Saddam Hussein, Baghdad and Basra would "erupt in joy", died yesterday after a battle with cancer, at 68.

He quickly realized after the invasion that something was not quite right: Iraqis, he was saying in November 2003, were just too contradictory, longing for modernization and rejecting it at the same time:

Desert Stormed

Baghdad coffeehouse, 19th century.

“The first thing I think we need to do is call together the people that succeeded in Iraq, those that have been retired,” the senator continued. “And get together that group and place them in responsibility positions so that they can develop a policy to reverse this tide of radical Islamic extremism, which directly threatens the security of the United States of America.” (Via)

Yes, McCain wants a team of Super Friends under the firm but friendly command of General Petraeus and old Fred Kagan tagging along behind with his clipboard to come and surge those militant Sunni suckers back into Syria, where he can ship them [jump]

Vampire foreign policy

"I never drink... wine."

Shorter David Brooks, "The Autocracy Challenge", May 30 2014:

Obama's proposal to make U.S. foreign policy less violent is all very well, but autocrats. It has been scientifically proven that autocrats need to be cockslapped every 17 months or so. And there's an autocrat under my bed, Daddy, I'm scared.

Big Dick Cheney was visible on the TV complaining about Obama, and specifically his approach to Iraq and Afghanistan, and I was so shocked by this public display of um, [jump]

Wormtongues

A bag of nightcrawlers unearthed by BooMan: A letter by self-denominated "foreign policy experts from across the ideological spectrum" running in the Weekly Standard urging the president

not only to ensure that Assad’s chemical weapons no longer threaten America, our allies in the region or the Syrian people, but also to deter or destroy the Assad regime’s airpower and other conventional military means of committing atrocities against civilian non-combatants.  At the same [jump]

Royal Selangor Wormtongue wine flute.

Return of the Undead

Neocon Revival (the architectural style). Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban, Dhaka, Bangladesh. From Wikipedia.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Neocon Revival", New York Times, August 2, 2013:

Don't you miss neoconservatism?
Don't you miss cheerful Irving Kristol?
Did you think neoconservatism was all about bombing Iraq?
Wrong! That was just a side issue.
Neoconservatism was all about getting people food stamps.
Small-government food stamps, natch.

From Sadly, No, June 2008.

West of Eden

I just learned from Wikipedia that the Latter-Day Saints hold the Garden of Eden to have been located in Jackson County, Missouri, right around Independence. After the Flood, when Noah's family ended up in Mesopotamia, they named the local rivers Tigris and Euphrates and whatnot to remind themselves of back home in America, as a later generation of Americans would name bits of the New World after Utica and Montevideo and Cairo.*

Title page of Basilius Besler's Hortus Eystettensis (1613). From the Chicago Botanic Garden website.

Also about the genius crank and sometime small-time rock idol David Rohl, who places it in eastern Iran, in the plain below the Caucasus near Tabriz, a more fragrant and evocative theory to this old helpless Orientalist (I normally manage to hold this disgracefully [jump]

*Which they obviously didn't, come to think of it; they named all these towns after places they had never been and of which they cannot have had any very precise ideas. I mean, not Plymouth or Boston perhaps, but Alexandria? Lebanon, PA?