The Situation in Iraq

It’s clear we’ve entered a new and critical phase in the Iraq war. We can still win this thing, but only if we carefully read the signals coming from the Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish factions, and tailor a response that promotes our strategic interests.

This is where I fault the Bush administration. It seems the administration never understood the divergent interests of Iraq’s political players, and compounded that error by pursuing an ideological fantasy at odds with real-world geopolitics. It’s even possible to argue—and I stress “possible”—that the invasion itself was a monumental and unsalvageable foreign-policy catastrophe.

But whoa, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There’s still time to pull this one out. It just depends on those in power doing absolutely the right thing based on the information they have, taking into account our interests, and the interests of others in the region. I can’t put it any more clearly than that.

more from McSweeney’s here.

At Harry Kreisler’s Conversation with History, an interview with Ian Lustick (Real Player) on his new book Trapped in the War on Terror. From the transcipt.

[Kreisler] This sense of a threat that this war is addressing shows up in all the opinion polls when you look at the attentive elite and when you look at the broad population?

[Lustick] Yes. As a political scientist you don’t just look at public opinion, and you don’t just look at the answers that people give to opinion polls, because the answers that people give to opinion polls are very much driven by how the questions are framed. So, what social scientists do, what I like to do, is to look at the questions that are asked. If you look at the questions that are asked of elites, whether by the Pew Foundation or the American Foreign Policy Association [to see] what opinion leaders in the United States think, or if you look at the Harris polls and Gallup polls of mass opinion, what questions are asked and how are they asked? The type of question that’s always asked since 9/11 is, “Is the government prosecuting the War on Terror well, or not? Are we winning the War on Terror? Are we losing?” No one asks, “Should there be a War on Terror? Is there an enemy that could be fought effectively with a war?” No one asks that question publicly.

That’s the sign of how deeply embedded the expectations are, and if those deeply embedded expectations are wrong, the country has a hard time correcting its course. Here’s why: our government is built on a Madisonian system. Every interest group and every ambitious politician is supposed to go out in the arena and fight for everything they can get based on what’s good for them. Even if they talk about what’s good for the national interest, the way you get ahead in American politics, whether you’re George Bush or anyone else, is to fight for your constituency and build coalitions and fight for those constituencies. The Madisonian system assumes that the whole country will go in a direction that is the outcome of everyone doing that, so it will never lurch too far in one direction, because everyone has an interest that’s slightly different than mine, and we tend to cancel one another out.

NEW YORK—Days before the fifth anniversary of the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center by terrorists, city officials gathered on the site where the Twin Towers once stood to dedicate the newly completed 9/11 Memorial Hole.

“From the wreckage and ashes of the World Trade Center, we have created a recess in the ground befitting the American spirit,” said New York Governor George Pataki from a cinderblock-and-plastic-bucket-supported plywood platform near the Hole’s precipice. “This vast chasm, dug at the very spot where the gleaming Twin Towers once rose to the sky, is a symbol of what we can accomplish if we work together.” . . .

“Let this circle of flowers—brief, beautiful, and too soon gone—symbolize the respect we have shown for the memories of those innocents who lost their lives on that sorrowful morning by creating this great hole,” said the Reverend Charles Bourne of Lower Manhattan’s Trinity Chapel as the flowers sank into the brown, debris-strewn runoff at the bottom of the cavity. “I firmly believe, as does every person here, that this deep, empty hole has come to stand not only for the New York City of today, but also for the transformation of the entire United States since Sept. 11, 2001.”

more from The Onion here.

Via Crooked Timber, which got it by way of Political Theory Daily Review, an essay by Timothy Sexton on Gang of Four (the punk band, not the uber-Maoist leaders of the Cultural Revolution) as Marxist cultural theory–and now I know where the fascination started, long ago when I was a teenager.

On their second album Solid Gold, the postpunk rock group Gang of Four openly assert their intention to approach pop music as critical theory with a song titled, appropriately enough, “Why Theory?” In answer to their own query of why critical theory should have a place in rock music, the band sings “Each day seems like a natural fact / And what we think changes how we act.” The critical theory that Gang of Four present in their music is a Marxist one centered on the premise that before revolt can take place, one must first penetrate through the consciousness that is determined by capitalistic ideology in order to understand why a revolution is necessary.

Gang of Four locate their Marxist theory in the Althusserian notion of expressing resistance through the contradictions inherent in the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA) of the corporate-controlled rock music industry, and the way in which Gang of Four express their theory of Marxist thought is by inducing in the listener an alternative consciousness achieved through contradictions and disorientations that serve to mirror the very sense of disorientation and contradiction that capitalistic consciousness creates.

A Neanderthal wandering around Chelsea might feel at home at Michael Heizer’s show — but then again, he might not. The forms in Mr. Heizer’s eight “stone sculptures” will seem familiar to him, as they are near-exact reproductions of Stone Age tools, a range of Paleolithic and Neolithic implements from disparate parts of the world. But the function could not be more remote. Pointed up with precision from minute user-friendly originals, (made by and for the hand, the tools were an inch or so long) these have been blown up to as much as 16 feet, to confound the hardiest neanderthal.

“Prismatic Flake” (1989) is the longest at 197 inches; some kind of cutting device in its original usage, it is suspended on a steel base, an open cube with welded bracket supports. The sheer, elongated form has the graceful menace of a Samurai sword. Like the other tools, it is reconstructed in modified concrete around a hollow interior. Whatever one’s response to the works aesthetically, technically they are a tour de force.

more from artcritical here.

In The Nation, Liza Featherstone on the class action suit against Random House for James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces.

Back when watching Bill O’Reilly was still fun — before he became a creepy, obsessive nativist — I enjoyed a feature called “The Most Ridiculous Item of the Day.” (He’s become such a sour, humorless ideologue that this segment now falls flat.) Allow me to steal the concept for a moment. Today’s most ridiculous item, hands-down, is the report that readers are suing James Frey — the author of the (partly) invented rehab memoir A Million Little Pieces — and his publisher, Random House, for “defrauding” them. Even sillier, Random House has reached a settlement with these whiny opportunists, and any reader who can show proof of purchase will receive a refund for the full retail price of the book ($23.95 for the hardcover, $14.95 for the paperback). The plaintiffs’ lawyers who scored this one must be laughing their heads off and planning their next Ibiza vacation.

Talk about “frivolous lawsuits.” Stunts like this give a bad name to class action suits that seek to redress genuine wrongs, like race or sex discrimination in the workplace, or pollution. The action against Random House also reflects an absurdly consumerist attitude toward reading: when the book — or author — isn’t what you expected, demand your money back! Bob Woodward presents himself as a crusading muckraker — can I get a refund for the book in which he acts as a mouthpiece for the Bush Administration? And how about all those novels and memoirs that are billed by publishers as “poignant” and “evocative” when they’re actually tedious tripe? Can we send in our receipts for those, too?

Whenever Roald Dahl’s stories come into a conversation, someone will mention, with laughter and a kind of horrified amazement, “William and Mary”, in which the brain and single, lidless eye of a once-domineering, tobacco-hating husband are experimentally preserved with the help of an early life-support invention. Visiting William in the lab, his widow-wife, Mary, lights a cigarette and blows smoke into his furious eye. “I just can’t wait to get him home,” she says. Over the 45 years of his career as a writer, Dahl’s fictions changed in tone, subject and audience, but the points of view of both characters in “William and Mary” typify his approach. The writer’s stare is unblinking, and most of his tales are irritants, provocations. Fantastic as Grimm, neat as O Henry, heartless as Saki, they stick in the mind long after subtler ones have faded: incredible (literally), unforgettable and vengefully funny.

more from Guardian Books here.

Ian Buruma addresses questions of political philosophy, moral accountability and mass psychology in the most rigorous possible way: journalistically. In books on topics as varied as English national character, German and Japanese war guilt and the Chinese diaspora, he has deftly combined interviewing and reflection. This proves a fruitful way to approach the murder, in 2004, of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, the subject of his new book. A Dutch-born Islamist named Mohammed Bouyeri was infuriated by “Submission,” a film van Gogh had made with the Somali-born feminist and politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali about the treatment of women under Islam. So one morning, as van Gogh was riding his bike to work, Bouyeri shot and stabbed him to death. Buruma, who was born in the Netherlands in 1951 and has lived mostly abroad since 1975, is less interested in the details of the killing than in what followed: the ideologies vindicated or discredited, the prejudices revealed and the doubts cast on the workability of what only 10 years ago was considered Europe’s most easygoing society.

more from the NY Times here.

From The Washington Post:

You’re sitting in the center of the fabulousness. The stinky old Fulton Fish Market is gone, and cobblestone streets are lined with boutiques and $1 million condos with floor-to-ceiling windows, and the sky is that razor blue.

Almost like that day.

Five years ago, this neighborhood in downtown Manhattan, a few blocks from the twin towers, was covered in half a foot of gray ash. Now, Jason Lowney, 28, and Patrick Darragh, 24, down drinks and talk that emphatic guy talk, and Sept. 11 feels pretty distant. “People thought downtown would be a ghost town,” says Lowney, a husky and dark-haired insurance adjuster. “I think it’s stronger .”

More here.

From BBC News:

Experts at the BA Festival of Science, in Norwich, heard that vaccines could be created against the molecules which trigger allergies. The scientist leading the research – Dr Ronald van Ree, from Amsterdam University – said a vaccine with no side effects was in sight.

About one in 70 people have an allergy to foods such as peanuts or shellfish. New genetic engineering techniques are being tested to reduce the effect of the proteins in food that cause adverse – sometimes fatal – reactions. It is hoped that scientists will be able to make the molecules safe enough to use in drugs that fight food allergies via the immune system.

These would be used in conjunction with compounds designed to reduce inflammation – one of the most dangerous effects of allergic reactions.

More here.

From Slate:

Downtown New York after the attacks.

More here.

Self Portrait, by Jennifer Prevatt, 2006.

See more of Jennifer’s work at Society, 2104 8th Avenue (at 114th Street).

See Zeina Assaf’s work at EmcArts, 127 West 122nd Street.

Saturday, September 9, 2006 12:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
& Sunday, September 10, 2006, 1:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Much more information about the many participating artists and venues here.

To mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Slate asked novelists, artists, journalists, and other thoughtful people a question: What work of art or literature has helped you make sense of the attacks and the world after them?

Harold Bloom, Haneif Qureshi, Jane Smiley, and others respond:

Reza Aslan, author, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam 
Landscapes of the Jihad, by Faisal Devji, a professor at the New School. The book is an erudite analysis of the rise of jihadism as almost a new kind of “sect” within Islam—one that combines mystical and traditional elements of Islam with a sophisticated globalization effort based on an ethical, rather than political, worldview…

More here.

John Gravois in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Each fall thousands of graduate students from foreign countries make the pilgrimage to American research universities. For past generations, that pilgrimage has often been a prelude to lives and careers here. But for Mr. Mahale, as for more and more Indian students, the United States isn’t so much the land of opportunity (there is plenty of that in Mumbai), as it is the land of leverage, of certain well-defined comparative advantages. Graduate education is still one of them.

Going to America was only a rite of passage into the Indian technical elite. But what Mr. Mahale may not have fully realized that night was that it was not a rite of passage he was making alone. The same technologies of travel and communication that have made it possible for Western corporations to set up shop abroad have allowed international-student associations to establish more and more sophisticated campus niches in the United States.

On the other end of Mr. Mahale’s flight, another group of Indians was ready to receive him — a close-knit, well-organized network of fellow graduate students who had staked their claim in North Carolina so well, it sometimes felt like they had never left India.

More here.

3QD friend Edward B. Rackley reports from Africa in his blog, Across the Divide:

I’m presently working here on child rights violations committed by the government, its various bodies–particularly its forces of order–and by insurgent groups. The sheer quantity of documented violations boggles the mind, and are enough to declare the prospect of childhood in Burundi a lethal undertaking. If the man in blue isnt raping or killing the little folk, they’re dying from diahrrea or a fever for lack of basic health care.

Independent experts appear to agree that Burundi is a tragic place. The Happy Planet Index, published by the New Economics Foundation, an economics thinktank in the UK, recently rated Burundi 176 out of 178 of the world’s (un)happiest countries. Zimbabwe and Swaziland took the last two spots.

Yet the country is ravaged in seemingly countless other ways, many of which are undocumented by the national press, local human rights bodies or their international equivalents. This week, however, Human Rights Watch and the Burundian Association pour la Protection des Droits Humains et des Personnes Détenues (APRODH) released a 75-page report, “A High Price To Pay: The Detention of Poor Patients in Hospitals,” documenting how Burundian hospitals detain hundreds of indigent patients, sometimes in inhumane conditions.

More here.

From BBC News:

The channel said it showed al-Qaeda leaders “preparing for the attacks and practising their execution”. Bin Laden is seen walking outdoors in a mountainous area wearing a dark robe and white head gear. The broadcast came four days before the fifth anniversary of the 11 September 2001 attacks. The footage also shows the al-Qaeda leader meeting senior figures Ramzi Binalshibh and Mohammed Atef in what al-Jazeera said were the mountains of Afghanistan.

Binalshibh was captured in 2002 and Atef was killed by a US air strike in Afghanistan in late 2001. The BBC’s Adam Brookes in Washington says it appears to be a meeting held just a few days before the 9/11 attacks took place. He says that although there will be little current intelligence to be gleaned from the videotape, the images and their ghostly quality serve as reminders of the intricacy and potency of the 9/11 plot.

Al-Jazeera also showed a tape said to be of the new al-Qaeda leader in Iraq urging Iraqis to join with insurgents.

More here.

From MSNBC:

The latest study from Canada reports that 17- to 18-year-old males have a slight edge in IQ, based on an analysis of more than 100,000 SAT scores. But even the researcher behind the study acknowledges that the findings don’t represent the final word on gender and intelligence. Past studies have tended to declare the gender intelligence contest a virtual tie, with men rating higher in spatial ability (for example, reading a map) and women having an edge in verbal ability (using a varied vocabulary).

In their analysis, Rushton and Jackson interpreted the SAT results from both the math test (where males do better) and the verbal test (where females do better), focusing on 145 questions that seemed to emphasize general intelligence – also known as the “g factor.” “The g factor really is the active ingredient, if you will, that permeates all types of intelligence,” Rushton told me. Rushton cites an easy example of the difference between a low-g and a high-g task. First, think of the last four digits of your phone number. That’s low-g. Now, think of them in reverse order. That’s high-g. “It is a real cognitive load for everybody,” Rushton said.

More here.

Although scientists have been committing their memoirs to paper for centuries, there seems to be a difference in tone between memoirs written in the twentieth century and those that came before. Earlier memoirs describe a world where science was still largely an amateur activity—literally, one pursued out of love—rather than a profession. In their memoirs, Joseph Priestley, Charles Darwin, and others demonstrate a sentiment about science rather than any distinct scientific personality. That sentiment was infused with an abiding wonder and fascination with the natural world—not wholly devoid of ambition, of course, but also bounded by a humility that came from their respect for the vast amount that was, and would remain, unknowable. The ambition to be the known discoverer of new truths about nature was concealed, in large measure, in the stylistic modesty of the student, a modesty in tune with the culture of the age. Present, too, was an idealism that perhaps could only be nurtured in an age of amateur science, still filled with a healthy appreciation for the power of chance. Not long before his death in 1727, Isaac Newton touched on this sentiment when he wrote, “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

more from The New Atlantis here.

Egyptians have a wonderful variety of nonverbal expressions. My favorite is the exclamation, “yeah-eh,” with a stress on the “eh,” which is roughly synonymous with “wow!” And as with “wow” there is something boyishly sincere about saying “yeah-eh,” although Egyptians of all ages do it. Toward the end of our night at the Sheraton one of Mahfouz’s friends related, at full volume, a conversation he had with an old-timer from the film industry. They were trying to decide who was the best screenwriter of all time. During the fifties and sixties Mahfouz wrote many scripts for the great Egyptian director Salah Abu Seif. Everybody could see where this story was headed, but the friend drew it out. Who do you think this old-timer said was the greatest ever, he shouted? Was it x, y, or z? Mahfouz was silent, not even indicating he had heard the question. Well, it wasn’t any of those guys. The greatest ever, according to this old-timer (and he would know), was … Naguib Mahfouz! Mahfouz’s eyebrows shot up over the rims of his dark glasses. “Yeah-eh!” he exclaimed, genuinely surprised.

more from n+1 here.

O.K., here’s my idea: Maybe it’s time for Bob Dylan to shift from writing more songs to writing more books. Chronicles, the first volume of his memoirs, was brilliant; Modern Times, the new album, a wildly overhyped disappointment. I don’t want him to stop singing and playing, just spend more time writing Chronicles-level prose rather than giving us more of the doggerel verse of Modern Times—songs that only hard-core Bobolators could praise. “Bobolators,” you might recall, is the phrase I coined for the sycophants who lavished praise on his leadenly pretentious film Masked and Anonymous (The Observer, July 28, 2003). It marked the moment of my exile from Bob-land, the Dylan-industrial complex restricted to those who never say an unkind word.

more from Ron Rosenbaum at the NY Observer here.