Another year of slurping up collegiate wisdom

The first week at Macalester has been going off pretty well. I am in a couple very good politics classes, a computer hardware class and urban geography. It should be challenging this year but enlightening. One of my politics classes focuses on the field known as 'critical theory' as put forth by the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse, etc. Kind of psycho-social neo-Marxism, it could be described as. That's interesting... Besides that everything is excellent here at the house on Grand, despite the occasional weird incidents like the raving drunk who came up to us on the porch at 3 AM last night.

The word of the weekend I say goes to Maureen Dowd who sugggested that

Does Mr. Bush ever wonder if the neocons duped him and hijacked his foreign policy? Some Middle East experts think some of the neocons painted a rosy picture for the president of Arab states blossoming with democracy when they really knew this could not be accomplished so easily; they may have cynically suspected that it was far more likely that the Middle East would fall into chaos and end up back in its pre-Ottoman Empire state, Balkanized into a tapestry of rival fiefs -- based on tribal and ethnic identities, with no central government -- so busy fighting each other that they would be no threat to us, or Israel.

The administration is worried now about Jordan and Saudi Arabia in the face of roiling radicalism.

Some veterans of Bush 41 think that the neocons packaged their "inverted Trotskyism," as the writer John Judis dubbed their rabid desire to export their "idealistic concept of internationalism," so that it appealed to Bush 43's born-again sense of divine mission and to the desire of Mr. Bush, Rummy and Mr. Cheney to achieve immortality by transforming the Middle East and the military.

Also check out a disturbing report in the Observer UK about how Iraqis randomly killed by the US are barely noted officially.

What is perhaps most shocking about their deaths is that the coalition troops who killed them did not even bother to record details of the raid with the coalition military press office. The killings were that unremarkable. What happened in Mahmudiya last week should not be forgotten, for the story of this raid is also the story of the dark side of the US-led occupation of Iraq, of the violent and sometimes lethal raids carried out apparently beyond any accountability.

Everyone should look at this really amazing interview with Jason Burke, someone who has examined Islamic militancy closely. (Link via Altercation) For those of you who believe that al-Qaeda is a self-contained, concrete organization rather than a loose network of militants, consider:

There?s an understanding among the Western public that Al-Qaeda is a coherent, organized terrorist network with a hierarchy, a command and control structure, a degree of commission and execution of terrorist acts by a few individuals.

That simply isn?t the case. The biggest myth is that all the various incidents that we are seeing are linked to some kind of central organization. One of the reasons the myth is so prevalent is that it?s a very comforting one.

Because if you clearly get rid of that central organization, if you get rid off, particularly bin Laden?and a few score, a few hundred people around him?then the problem would apparently be solved. Unfortunately, that idea is indeed a myth and bears very little resemblance to what?s happening on the ground.

There was a pretty wild story in the Washington Post on Sunday about al-Qaeda setting up a front in Iraq (which of course it didn't have before) to cause havoc etc. The article also has a lot of speculations about Al-Qaeda leaders hiding in Iran after the Afghanistan war, and plotting the recent Riyadh bombings. This article in turn sparked a lot of disagreement in part because it was written by somewhat discredited WaPo reporter Sue Schmidt, who might be more ready to jump on Iran with unproven allegations drawn from the Iranian exiles who hate their government. That site, Talking Points Memo, points to a good blog kept by a middle east studies professor who also debunks aspects of the story.

Talking Points Memo is written by Josh Micah Marshall, who writes on Salon, the Washington Monthly and a Washington newsletter The Hill. I really like his writings on various topics around Washington, such as this new piece detailing how the Bush administration hates experts who they see as controlled by a 'namby-pamby' liberal ideology, and hence disregards real facts:

By disregarding the advice of experts, by shunting aside the cadres of career professionals with on-the-ground experience in these various countries, the administration's hawks cut themselves off from the practical know-how which would have given them some chance of implementing their plans successfully. In a real sense, they cut themselves off from reality. When they went into Iraq they were essentially flying blind, having disengaged from almost everyone who had real-world experience in how effective occupation, reconstruction and nation-building was done. And much the same can be said of the administration's take on economic policy, environmental policy, and in almost every sort of policy question involving science. Muzzling the experts helped the White House muscle its revisionist plans through.

In August 2002, Marshall wrote a fascinating piece in Salon about how a schism exists in the Rumsfeld Pentagon between the brass and the top civilians (i.e. the Neocons):

The Bush administration's most right-leaning political appointees are concentrated at the Pentagon. And nowhere is that tilt more evident than in its Middle East policies. The Bush appointees have not just ignored recommendations from military advisors and civil servants but have often ousted or sidelined those who have had the temerity to offer any policy advice. Over the last 18 months, there has been an exodus of career civil servants leaving the Pentagon policy shop for stints on Capitol Hill or with other Defense Department-affiliated institutions, according to a half-dozen such departees who spoke to Salon -- far more than is normally the case when administrations change from one party to the other. Many of those slots have been filled by ideologues and think-tank denizens who can be relied on to serve up the right kind of advice to their superiors.

When most people think of neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, they think of men like Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary, and Richard Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board. But the second tier of civilian appointees at the Pentagon is stacked with Wolfowitz and Perle proteges who are in many ways even more conservative in their views than their mentors and -- as the Rhode incident shows -- a good deal more hotheaded...

In the minds of these second-tier appointees, taking out Saddam Hussein is only part of a larger puzzle. Their grand vision of the Middle East goes something like this: Stage 1: Iraq becomes democratic. Stage 2: Reformers take over in Iran. That would leave the three powerhouses of the Middle East -- Turkey, Iraq and Iran -- democratic and pro-Western. Suddenly the Saudis wouldn't be just one more corrupt, authoritarian Arab regime slouching toward bin Ladenism. They'd be surrounded by democratic states that would undermine Saudi rule both militarily and ideologically.

As a plan to pursue in the real world, most of the career military and the civilian employees at the Pentagon -- indeed most establishment foreign policy experts -- see this vision as little short of insane. But to Bush's hawkish Pentagon appointees the real prize isn't Baghdad, it's Riyadh. And the Saudis know it.

He also wrote a great article in the January Washington Monthly about how terrible Dick Cheney is at making decisions.

As far as the resignation of the Palestinian Prime Minister is concerned, that was unfortunate but really it was the poor man's only card to play. What, precisely, was he supposed to do? Buy off a few armed gangs and make them sit tight as Israel failed to relax the occupation (as well as cease constructing settlements as the Road Map demanded)? It should be remembered that he only could have moved against that 'terrorist infrastructure' in the cities where he controlled Palestinian security forces (he only controlled a few of these groups anyway). It was a pointless venture because Israel and the U.S. never gave him any slack. Israel didn't even stop trying to kill Hamas members. Well, that's one way to do a cease-fire. Finally, Ariel Sharon is safe from peace, as one Israeli put it. Israel, by the way, did bomb Lebanon a little bit this week, but that's how it goes these days. And a panel found that the Israeli police treated Israeli Arabs as 'the enemy' in a riot just after the beginning of this Intifada.

Naturally Bush didn't address the dramatic Palestinian peace plan failure, or the economy, in his barrage of platitudes this evening. His polls are falling and this whole conflagration is such a marvelous. $87 billion, money well spent. Mr Marshall says this evening:

We went into Iraq to eliminate Saddam's stock of weapons of mass destruction, to depose a reckless strongman at the heart of a vital region, and to overawe unfriendly regimes on the country's borders. Agree or not, those were the prime stated reasons. Now we've got a deteriorating security situation and a palpably botched plan for reconstruction. And our effort to recover from our ill-conceived and poorly-executed policy is now the 'central front' in the war on terror, which is among other things extremely convenient.

The president has turned 9/11 into a sort of foreign policy perpetual motion machine in which the problems ginned up by policy failures become the rationale for intensifying those policies. The consequences of screw-ups become examples of the power of 'the terrorists'.

We're not on the offensive. We're on the defensive. A bunch of mumbo-jumbo and flim-flam doesn't change that.