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Shocks and aftershocks

I am making some progress on this new website idea but it has been slow going with finals. Fortunately that ends Wednesday. Unfortunately I have a TERM PAPER about THE WAR that has been rather disrupted. And it's also due Wednesday.

Here is a screenshot chunk of what I've put together for HongPong.com so far. This information will be strung together and turned into nice chunks of HTML information. I just found out how to import the WHOLE old HongPong.com right into it, but it will be tricky. These notes haven't been filled in for the most part, but pieces are getting added as I come across them. Think of it as sort of a topical filing cabinet with links and groups. Or something... It hasn't totally come together, that's for sure. And hurray, the Neo-cons will all be bright red!

As for the big news yesterday, that about does it for Jihadist Saddam. At the very least, we've got a great super-villain going now. Finally, a bitter and uncertain chapter in this story has closed, and the Baath Party is really finished, as a concentric ring system which made every bit of Iraqi society work backwards, a network of fear and domination which made the nation a house propped up to implode.
For me, the key question is still what happened to those Iraqi buildings, the libraries and the huge government ministries which ran the largest bureaucracy in the middle east. It feels like the loss of all these records was a disaster which not only obliterated so much history, but also rendered almost impossible the process of reconciling the society. (We've focused on bureaucracy, as a system, in contemporary political theory class, which sparks my interest in the day-to-day administration of occupied Iraq).
Unilateral reporter Robert Fisk, April 15, Library books, letters and priceless documents are set ablaze in final chapter of the sacking of Baghdad:

So yesterday was the burning of books. First came the looters, then the arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sacking of Baghdad. The National Library and Archives – a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents, including the old royal archives of Iraq – were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment were set ablaze.

Amid the ashes of Iraqi history, I found a file blowing in the wind outside: pages of handwritten letters between the court of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who started the Arab revolt against the Turks for Lawrence of Arabia, and the Ottoman rulers of Baghdad. And the Americans did nothing.... I was holding in my hands the last Baghdad vestiges of Iraq's written history.

But for Iraq, this is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Museum of Archaeology on Saturday and the burning of the National Archives and then the Koranic library, the cultural identity of Iraq is being erased. Why? Who set these fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?
When I caught sight of the Koranic library burning – there were flames 100 feet high bursting from the windows – I raced to the offices of the occupying power, the US Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau. An officer shouted to a colleague that "this guy says some biblical [sic] library is on fire". I gave the map location, the precise name – in Arabic and English – I said the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn't an American at the scene – and the flames were shooting 200 feet into the air.

It's a moment in time we sort of chalked off from our understanding of the situation, and this extends down to the daily pattern of life in the country now.

But what is the next move for Saddam? Even in a cell the man still has a power, in no small part the ability, and the will, to tell all about how the Reagan administration helped him with all those well-demonized episodes of genocide and mayhem. There is that. But there is also Osama bin Laden about, and he's no bit player right now. As they cheered everywhere from FOX News to the foxholes to the streets of Iraq, I posted this comment about everyone's favorite evildoer. Yes, Saddam's capture helps things come together, perhaps. But who else benefits?

Saddam is Captured

I posted the following the afternoon that Saddam was caught on liberal website DailyKos. Tragically, Saddam was captured the very day I'd set aside for a huge paper on Iraq. That discombobulated the whole thing, much to my dismay...

A Problem: Al Qaeda rationality (Sunday at 19:23 UTC ) [link]

There is something very important here .... In a sense, Saddam's capture is as helpful for al-Qaeda as the invasion of Iraq itself. Saddam, as a corrupt secularist, stood in the way of the middle eastern Islamic revolution intended to produce a sort of caliphate. When Saddam was still at large, military activity against the Americans could still be understood as "Baathist" activity (regardless of that claim's truth). But now it is far easier for militants to refute the "Saddam-lover" label. And now groups which share some of al-Qaeda's principles no longer have his long shadow upon them.

We can't ignore certain historical facts which are easily forgotten to Americans, but very present in Iraqis' daily perceptions of their place in the world. The Iraqis still know that they were the seat of the Caliphate back in the day, and that was a time of prosperity and leadership.

In particular what occurred in Samarra was important. This Sunni town was fiercely anti-Saddam, and yet people stood and fought the US Army, which in turn trashed large parts of the city. Samarra itself was the capital of the Caliphate for a few decades, and hence, people there are far more likely than most other places to have a political logic in sync with al-Qaeda's, although it will also be expressed as Iraqi nationalism and that ultimate evil of neo-con theory, Pan-Arabism.

The fact that the US allowed all the Iraqi government ministries to be destroyed (and allowed Chalabi to run amok earlier) dramatically increased the chances that fissures will form between Sunnis and Shiites by destroying the bureaucratic basis for accountability and reconciliation.

Let's not forget what al-Qaeda literally means: "the base." Iraq, perhaps more so than Saudi Arabia, is a historical base of this political pattern, and such an anarchic, well-armed territory that it's the base for all kinds of activities. (Saddam cooperated with the Saudis to suppress domestic Islamic militants. Without his block, why not assume that the Iraqi Islamic tide will destabilize Saudi Arabia??)

It is a relief for Iraqis to finally have Saddam's shadow of potential ascendance disappear, but now the many anti-Saddam, anti-American militants no longer have to refute ties to Baathism. Yet sectarian friction is going to increase, and no one can say anymore that the other guy is doing it in Saddam's name.

Time for That Special Babylon Feeling

(Fri. Dec. 12)

In the last week, right in the middle of finals, I submitted an opinion about the Middle East (Who? Me?!) to this year's final Mac Weekly.

UPDATE: In an ironic act of God, Saddam Hussein was captured two days after this was published. Rarely does the limb get slashed so quickly. It still holds together, I say

The United States finds itself at an ultimate nadir. We occupy hundreds of thousands of square miles of central Asia?s most historically fractious territory. The nearly-forgotten Taliban has sprung back from Pakistani strongholds, and Saddam is finally free to join the audiotape-jihadist club.

Mesopotamia, the valley where the party started, is a smoldering, fourth-world ruin, flooded with a mixture of suspicious military-industrial corporations and mujahideen. The army?s mass arrests, its deployment of armor in urban areas, the razing of homes, and encircling towns with razor wire echo the terrible confrontation around Jerusalem that Bush has defiantly refused to confront. America grows inured to the daily violence and tragedies facing both Iraqis and American troops as young as first-years.

Nothing can shake this eerie sense that it is not just that Bush has failed us; rather, it is the whole underpinning of civilization itself, past and present, which has been shaken from its foundations.

It is not merely the museums of early history plundered, but the sites of our very genesis that lie destroyed. In those looted ruins, what was once knowable about our original nature has been smashed into darkness. We can never recover this loss.

The anarchy that transpired was not just an obscenity to today?s Iraqis; it was an attack on every ancient people there, and all their descendants. It destroyed our link with history, a knife in our collective soul more damaging than any crime humanity has yet witnessed. America still struggles to control a land it barely understands.

A stunning report by Seymour Hersh in this week?s New Yorker spells out the path America now seeks. The Pentagon will escalate their operations against Iraqi militants, using Special Forces hit squads to assassinate those whom our new reconstituted Baathist security forces point fingers at, Vietnam?s Phoenix Program for the 21st century.

Who better to train U.S. troops than their Israeli counterparts? Happy to build their occupation assassins into our expanding War on Terror, Israeli ?consultants? have already visited Baghdad. But which American general is putting the project together? None other than William Boykin, who publicly equates the Muslim world with the devil. According to reports, speaking before fundamentalist church audiences that ?Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army.?

Bush, insensitive to Boykin?s hate, is a special kind of leader. He is afraid of newspapers. He told Fox a little while ago, ?I glance at the headlines. I rarely read the stories. I understand that a lot of times there?s opinions mixed in with news. And I appreciate people?s opinions, but I?m more interested in news. And the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what?s happening in the world.?

Yet his objective sources keep ducking the important questions. They didn?t send enough troops to Iraq. Why? Why was there no peacekeeping plan for the Iraqi cities? Why didn?t the Pentagon plan to defend the Iraqi government ministries? Why do they forbid Iraqis from unionizing? Why can?t they control the enormous caches of captured arms around the country?

Is their goal chaos in the name of order? Pain and death in the service of defending our freedoms? Democracy, or Michael Ledeen?s ?creative destruction??

Their special plans have unfolded. Now the abyss between America and the Arabs has busted wide open. It is well past time to get rid of Rumsfeld and the incompetents who have botched the occupation. We must go hat in hand to the UN and ask the world to repair the political catastrophe we?ve sown at its root. If we quietly accept this path, we will never know peace again.