Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
I saw Eyedea & Abilities with Dan Schned and Jitla last night. That was an excellent show, and it let out just as the T-Wolves beat the Lakers. We went storming around the packed downtown bars, and it was really one hell of a time.
Today, inside during this endless rain, I am bringing together the elements of the new server "tarfin", poking around, adding mod_perl to Apache2 (a slightly tricky proposition) and helping move some furniture around for people, and cleaning the room a little bit.
Oddly enough in the last 3 days two people have each given me CRT monitors—three, if you include the one that Eric let me use with the Compaq—and now I am in a world of Cathode Ray riches.
Then again, we should take a reality check here and look at a recent piece in the Times:
Studies show that gregarious, well-connected people actually lost friends, and experienced symptoms of loneliness and depression, after joining discussion groups and other activities. People who communicated with disembodied strangers online found the experience empty and emotionally frustrating but were nonetheless seduced by the novelty of the new medium. As Prof. Robert Kraut, a Carnegie Mellon researcher, told me recently, such people allowed low-quality relationships developed in virtual reality to replace higher-quality relationships in the real world.Wisconsin's senator Russ Feingold has put together an advertising campaign on the blogs. My dad recently sent me a Feingold 2004 bumper sticker, which has a certain geographic symmetry across the car bumper from my Wellstone! sticker.
........
Marcus is a child of the Net, where everyone has a pseudonym, telling a story makes it true, and adolescents create older, cooler, more socially powerful selves any time they wish. The ability to slip easily into a new, false self is tailor-made for emotionally fragile adolescents, who can consider a bout of acne or a few excess pounds an unbearable tragedy.But teenagers who spend much of their lives hunched over computer screens miss the socializing, the real-world experience that would allow them to leave adolescence behind and grow into adulthood. These vital experiences, like much else, are simply not available in a virtual form.
For those of you deeply saddened by the lack of news tidbits, well, I have been keeping looser tabs on the news than usual, but I have been saving a lot of news bookmarks, and you can expect that things will be parsed again more closely this coming week.
It took a great deal of hacking around and starting over from scratch a couple times, but the old beast of a Compaq is finally up, running, and correctly talking to its ethernet card. Now I am updating Gentoo with the slick command
emerge sync
which you have to admit sounds nice. Then Apache2 and Php will get on there. it will be nice. Then it will be the new Hongpong.com, if the perl execution is fast enough.
Emmerich's disaster movie 'The Day After Tomorrow' has opened today at the Grandview next door. There are people, I think from MoveOn.org, hanging around talking with people.
Sometimes I ask people coming out of the movies what they think. And sometimes as we chillin on the front porch we overhear their opinions anyway. This one may be interesting.
In news of the server, Jess gave me some old floppy disks and I am making the boot disk necessary right now. The Linux box may be ready to roll tomorrow. Unfortunately, I have to erase the whole HD in order to get the stupid Compaq diagnostic partition on there. Ugh. Stay tuned on that.
My upstairs neighbor Eric let me take an old Compaq Pentium II for this project. The older one worked, but it was incredibly slow. The Compaq, a Deskpro 4000MMX @ 220 MHz, handles Linux a lot faster than the Pentium I.
Unfortunately Compaq was a crappy company that put very important BIOS and boot stuff on a weird little hard drive partition instead of the motherboard, like any sane PC manufacturer. I erased said partition and then installed Linux, but the damn thing won't boot up. Fortunately I found the floppy boot disks to replace it (or else this one). Such is the PC world—bad operating systems and bad hardware setups. The plot continues...
The Gentoo kernel has finished compiling. It took more than an hour. Now, to install the Gentoo distro filez....
Updates:
Now I am thinking about getting Perl, PHP and Apache v.2 onto this beast, which is slow as hell at compiling just about anything. This site has info about PHP and Apache2.
After talking with Paulo last night, I decided to try to install Gentoo Linux on the old Pentium I/200 MHz machine that Alana gave me. After some finagling, the Ethernet card finally started working, which was the main problem when I tried to install Slackware last time.
Now I can ping to my heart's content!
If this works, I will be moving hongpong.com over to the little old machine shortly. That will get the server stuff off my computer, a great relief.
Voice of America: 32 Percent of Iraqi Respondents Strongly Support Moqtada al-Sadr:
An Iraqi public opinion poll to be released later this week indicates a growing number of people in the country say they support a radical Shiite Muslim cleric whose militia is fighting coalition forces.Meanwhile in Israel, teenagers believe in refuseniks, and conscientious objectors of all kinds, but around 60% had "strong anti-democratic tendencies."In the survey, conducted by the year-old Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, 32 percent of the respondents said they strongly support the fiercely anti-coalition Shiite cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr. Another 36 percent said they somewhat support the cleric, even though he is being sought by the coalition for his alleged involvement in the murder of a Shiite rival, who was killed last year.
The poll numbers place the radical cleric among the three most admired figures in the country, behind the top religious authority for the majority Shiites, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and the political head of one of the largest Shiite parties, Ibrahim Al-Jaafari.
....
The head of the research center, Mr. Duleimi, said that the poll also shows that Iraqis want an interim government that has the power to make sweeping changes after the sovereignty handover on June 30.In listing their priorities, nearly 82 percent said that they want a government that could implement economic reforms. More than 75 percent said the interim government should have the power to replace current governors and ministers. Finally, 74 percent said [the] government should have the power to order coalition forces to leave Iraq.
A relatively large proportion of Israeli teens - 43 percent - support refusal to serve in the territories or refusal to eject settlers, compared with 25 percent of those aged 18 and older, according to a survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute two months ago.Israel would be a confusing place to grow up, worsened by the blanket drafting of 18-year-olds.
....
While 75 percent of adults said a soldier must not refuse an order to evacuate settlers, only 57 percent of teens agreed with that statement. A slightly smaller gap was found regarding the refusal to serve in the territories: 71 percent of adults compared to 57 percent of teens said soldiers cannot refuse on grounds that they object to Israel's policy toward Palestinians.[....]teens of all political stripes assented to the refusal to evacuate settlers at similar rates - around 40 percent. In general, the survey found that teens are largely tolerant of ideological refusal motivated by reasons that are contrary to their own views.
The survey's authors found another cause for concern in teenagers' longing for "a strong leader" to head the country "instead of all the debates and laws." A high degree of support for this statement indicates strong anti-democratic tendencies among teens, whose response rate was 60 percent, compared to 58 percent among adults.
....
It is possible that the reason for these positions is that teens are substantially less interested in political matters. Only 29 percent of teens demonstrated a reasonable level of political knowledge (i.e., were able to answer correctly two out of three relatively simple questions, such as who is the Knesset speaker), compared to 61 percent of adults. Only half of the teens surveyed expressed any interest in politics, compared with two-thirds of the adults.
....
Among teens, 27 percent do not think they will remain in Israel, compared to 13 percent of adults. The situation is even more problematic when it comes to a sense of belonging: nearly half of the teens do not feel they are "part of the country and its problems," compared to a quarter of adults.
What is the point of all this? Numbers reflect reality. One-third of Iraqis like Sadr strongly, and another third somewhat like him. There's your silent majority, Mr Friedman.
I was thinking about going to a camp near International Falls today, but I said I wouldn't if the weather looked terrible. Well, it does. There are tornadoes and crazy warnings all south of us, while the atmosphere has less energy and more slow moisture here.
These summer storms come zooming over us, and their power comes from the intensity of the summer heat--and how it picks up moisture. It's quite fitting that there's a movie about global warming and climate shifts, as the west dries up and the sun makes storms and tornadoes.
What is a pressure point of this global warming? Where are its effects felt the most heavily? Places in the desert that lack air conditioning. So global warming impacts Bush's policy in Iraq too.
Alison gets a lot of flack from people for the gas prices at SA. She is the last domino in a global chain of violence, market anxiety and schemery that stretches all the way to the top of the White House. Energy waves come right to the corner.
Bush is talking again tonight. Will he declare anything about Chalabi? Will he say anything about oil? Or is it just another one of those pop out of the shell for a moment, vanish, kind of things. There was a report in the NY Times today about how furious congressional Republicans are that they can't get the man's attention. If that's how their people in Congress are treated, who the hell is running this operation?
Yeah, it's the failure of a presidency before our very eyes, the rolling energy of all the horrible things he's done—all the failures to handle reality—jeopardizes the whole world. Yet that administration has christened itself. Literally, they map the situation onto theocratic ideas. Rick Perlstein reveals that they are synchronized with apocalyptic Christians in their mideast policy, in a sense. In the Village Voice:
The e-mailed meeting summary reveals NSC Near East and North African Affairs director Elliott Abrams sitting down with the Apostolic Congress and massaging their theological concerns. Claiming to be "the Christian Voice in the Nation's Capital," the members vociferously oppose the idea of a Palestinian state. They fear an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza might enable just that, and they object on the grounds that all of Old Testament Israel belongs to the Jews. Until Israel is intact and Solomon's temple rebuilt, they believe, Christ won't come back to earth.Abrams attempted to assuage their concerns by stating that "the Gaza Strip had no significant Biblical influence such as Joseph's tomb or Rachel's tomb and therefore is a piece of land that can be sacrificed for the cause of peace."
Three weeks after the confab, President George W. Bush reversed long-standing U.S. policy, endorsing Israeli sovereignty over parts of the West Bank in exchange for Israel's disengagement from the Gaza Strip.
......(snip).....
When Pastor Upton was asked to explain why the group's website describes the Apostolic Congress as "the Christian Voice in the nation's capital," instead of simply a Christian voice in the nation's capital, he responded, "There has been a real lack of leadership in having someone emerge as a Christian voice, someone who doesn't speak for the right, someone who doesn't speak for the left, but someone who speaks for the people, and someone who speaks from a theocratical perspective."When his words were repeated back to him to make sure he had said a "theocratical" perspective, not a "theological" perspective, he said, "Exactly. Exactly. We want to know what God would have us say or what God would have us do in every issue."
I don't know if the real world is reaching these people, or what. I don't know if they even perceive those who are dying, on all sides. What's the purpose?
Maybe Bush will announce the resignations of Douglas Feith and Rummy!!! I think he'll have to lay someone out tonight. These guys have stacked up their self-important authority so high, any fired political appointees would bring about the collapse of their whole legitimacy.
Yet they are whole, and their legitimacy has already collapsed rapidly. Where are the cracks going to come out? And what gets poured into all the policy? Religious fanaticism? Talk of "the enemy" and "terrorist clerics"? When does it end?
They've all got guns, Mr Secretary. Thanks for giving Chalabi and Iranian intelligence all of Saddam's secret files. Nice move in the war on Evil.
Its a horrible place to be for those young soldiers, and its going to get hot as the burned oil has become carbon dioxide trapping more thermal energy, where it joins the hot dust and burned substances, all heating the place, with no plan...
The former commanding general of Centcom, Mr Zinni, called it Niagara Falls. The energy waves rise and fall, dollars, gallons, bombs...
What do you do now? What can you do? Tell us, oh great secreted President, shaky and irritable.
Ok then, here is the bizarre spam that fills up old stories. They started posting this garbage on my birthday!!
On the other hand, maybe it is all a joke played on me...
So here is the spam, preserved for all time, but stripped of its links. My favorite:
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What can I say? It's weird.
UPDATE:Seems that this thread really attracts the spam. I will leave the barnacles as a record of techno garbage, but close the thread...
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I delete these annoying messages but they keep coming. I have a partial solution: ban the IP number that they come from. Unfortunately, these guys must have multiple computers or proxies. It is annoying, but fortunately there are only about 2 or 3 a week.
The other solution is to turn off the commenting of old posts, since most of the spam is hidden there. However, that would prevent people from adding useful comments to old posts.
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Right now there is a photo of a classic ancient ziggurat and various other Babylonian things of Iraq, along with photos of Baghdad, American occupation troops, shrines and mosques, "flowers from our garden," neighborhoods, a column of smoke from the assassination of the IGC leader, a woman named Faiza in a shop, and an awesome minaret in the ancient city of Samarra that looks like the tower of Babel.
There are some pictures from Baghdad in the 1980s, along with snaps of various Baghdad buildings, and the . There are also photos by Faiza and Raed "in the middle" Jarrar.
Unexpectedly I went to the Timberwolves playoff game on Friday. It was fun as hell. They were winning in much of the first half, but it is hard as hell to get rebounds with Shaq around the basket.
I've been lying low this week, trying not to get too psyched out about the news of new photographs, war around the holy Shiite shrines, the wretched border cases in Rafah and along the Syrian border. What does it mean if Chalabi's intelligence was mainly a front for Iranian schemers?
Was the Pentagon that foolish? The answer seems to be that some agencies, such as the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, knew that the guy who talked about mobile bio-weapons labs was a liar, but somehow that sanity check got blocked by someone else in the Pentagon. The State Department and CIA certainly were never big into the Chalabi fantasy.
Chalabi's people were the ones who provided the lurid wallpaper of fear that surrounded us in the leadup to war. The hawks bought the silly garbage because they needed it to justify the unreal, hellish nightmare that has unfolded. They needed the false intelligence to fabricate fear in the public mind.
Finally, David's artwork for our wall came in. It is about damn time and maybe I will put up a couple photos of the drawings, which are made of chalk, ink, colored pens and pencils, all around some good stuff.
I will try to put together some of the new information, but my God it is hard to figure out which way things are spinning right now. One of the key questions is how fanatics like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson view this stuff. I found an interesting story in the Village Voice about 'theocratic' advice in Washington....
Also I haven't forgotten to explain the story of the lawn chair from hell, as an example of weird patterns, rather than a conspiracy. More later, ever later...... The story continues, whether I like it or not. I will have to go back into trying to deal with it, before it deals with me.
This is so bizarre: Colin Powell was being interviewed by Tim Russert, and right as Russert asks the key question about spoofed intelligence at the UN, Powell's media person somehow gets the camera to point away from Powell and stops everything for a few moments. Then Powell gets control again and answers the question.
The video is online. Skip to about halfway to see where—what, the press monkey takes over the camera? This was laid out on this blog, via the Agonist.
I don't know what happened, really. This fixation on video clips is a striking feature of reality lately. I finally finished reading Pattern Recognition, which revolves around a set of enigmatic video clips distributed on the Internet, and obsessed forum-goers search for hidden connections in these videos. And yet who would have thought that William Gibson's 'footage fetishists' would so readily appear in our reality? Now we have enigmatic moments of horror like the Berg atrocity to drive speculation on the message boards in droves.
They are making the case that there are fifty weird things about the Berg video. I will reflect on this a little later. Beware the lawn chair.
Earlier this week Josh Aas told me that a new version of one of the leading OS X web browsers (for we have many) is about to be released. In this case, the browser is Camino, which is quite fast. Camino is an open-source project of the Mozilla foundation, and Josh is one of the Mac programmers involved. You can download the nearly finished daily builds of 0.8 right now— however these are not guaranteed to work perfectly. Josh is especially happy with the bookmark manager he worked on. It seems more useful than Safari's.
In other Apple news, Apple is patenting transparent windows, apparently in an effort to ward off Microsoft from stealing that for their next release of Windows. Here is a story about some of the other things they've patented. In here are some odd alternative ideas for things like the dock—and a mysterious map program?—that were never made.
I might be getting a digital camera soon. That is a very exciting possibility. Here is a story about hacking digital photos, as a promo for a new O'Reilly book about digital photography. Interesting stuff.
[UPDATE May 18] The beta version has officially been released late last night. You can get it.
On Saturday afternoon, I wandered around by the river, followed some of the paths on the hillsides between the Mississippi and the east River Road. There is a waterfall in a steep limestone valley, where the road bends around, between Marshall and Summit avenues. The whole area is covered with trails up and down the hills, with outcroppings, micro canyons with cracked mud. Across, on the Minneapolis side, dudes were fishing. I walked up the River Road, past Marshall and into Minneapolis.
The crowd changes and everyone is wearing shaggier clothes, mysterious winos climb out of the park that has a boardwalk placed atop the river shore. I go further, towards the Melrose four-point megalithic student apartment complex. At least it complements the industrial plastic packaging facility next door, which has its own railroad car full of raw polymer goo—or whatever it was.
There are a lot of students moving things around today, and so it is yet again the time for comings and goings. I didn't go to graduation today because I felt stressed out about dealing with all the people, after all the weird stuff going on, and the various rifts that have formed around people at Macalester and the world as a whole. It is a shitty thing for my friends who are graduating, but I needed to get away for a little while and not hear anyone else's voice.
I have not written much here in a while, for the most part since finals started, and this last week of saying my seasonal goodbyes to friends that are winging it out of the Twin Cities for the summer. For some incalculable reason, Andy Tweeten has elected to ride out the national elections in Montana—until November—a sacrifice which only a hearty denizen of Big Sky like A. Henry could possibly handle. Apparently it is still snowing around there. Tell us when spring starts!! Then drink a six pack just in time to put your parka back on.
Arun Muthiah has also winged it to colder climes. He is in Australia somewhere, and might end up working at a swank hotel on the Gold Coast. This is much more pleasant in June and July than Oman. And yet will another country of white people really solve anything?
One of my professors is returning to Afghanistan this summer, and this is pretty exciting but ever so slightly alarming, because we all know how smoothly things work out over there.
There are a lot of people that are cycling home for a few weeks, until June, then coming around again, more than last year. That should be lots of fun.
In other news a couple friends are thinking of new ideas for websites and such. I am uncertain what might come of it, but I am happy to have a little time for such new ideas, if they can be prevented from sinking in that thick, crushing July haze, which this year promises to be thicker than usual...
It's a heart of darkness revealed and a grandiose, expanding theater of horror, where one obscene image after another chases grainy beheadings through a rippling poppy field of raving militant ex-officers who want to crush everything.
The lunatics have their hands on all the levers of power and words don't fit together like they used to. In the summer, it is hard to keep thinking along the same lines as before.
After a huge thunderstorm blew through this week, I darted off to drive around with Arun and look at how the whole river valley, and all the buildings, were bathed in a golden light. There were only a handful of cars, and the sky roiled with soft, rippling clouds arcing behind the storm, dark and receding on the eastern horizon. The sun sliced golden through heavy, roiled evening air. I dodged around the fallen trees, tossed branches and garbage bins strewing the roads.
As we came around to the northwest side of downtown Minneapolis, the glass towers glinted as if made of shining limestone under the dark sky. We drove into downtown, then along the Lake of the Isles as the sun finally came down. Minneapolitans were impressed, taking pictures. (I had no camera).
Finally, after the sun set, a chocolate ice cream cone at Sebastian Joe's, where I used to go when I was very little, living in Minneapolis. As we stood outside a man talked with his inaudible friend in a green compact.
"How are can we say we're liberating the people when we're killing them? Sixty percent of the people in that prison were innocent. How is that freedom?"
All my cynicism has been repaid a thousandfold, but is it gratifying?
Hahaaa, the war is a shameful disaster, as I suspected! What a bunch of cretins, now they've been laid low!!! Moral superiority r00t3d!! [Dance on ashes]
What a horrible idea. This turn of events does not bring me much gratification. Rumsfeld is an evil man, plain to see for all, now. At least things like that have been made clear.
So make no mistake, please. I am filled with anger and confusion about these turns of events. I am shamed that all the little kids in this country have to face these pictures of sexual humiliation, where my generation got the cracking of Berlin Wall, and those in between just had the dirty Clinton stuff.
This whole field of torture, this surreal complex of shame and sadomasochism was supposedly carried out by a half-dozen mountain hayseeds. No, As Sy Hersh peels back a third layer on the Onion of Hell, he says that a special operation was tasked with coercing War on Terror targets with a number of techniques, including sexual humiliation (and perhaps blackmail tied to the photos).
I had my suspicions. When I posted a link to this report on the suspicious deaths of Afghan prisoners from the Guardian last March, it felt oddly out of place with the narrative they gave us. Now it looks like one of the first icebergs spotted.
This whole stream has set off a 'logik bomb' in American identity, while already parts of Washington are trying to steam along again, and the rest of the world looks on with puzzlement and fear.
I went wandering around because the symbolic logic that underpins American 'moral authority,' hegemony, soft power, whatever you want to call the attractive force that binds together a system of rule, all of it has been supercharged by the flipping images and dozens of deaths—of poor Iraqi Shiites, a huge chunk of the population—spilling out, hitting holy sites, setting one Iraqi against another.
It seems that the environment of torture spilled out of the norms created by the Bush administration's War on Terror policies, as desperation and a failure of intelligence last year led the army to start abusing Iraqi they picked up for intelligence tidbits. The confusion of ends and goals spirals ever further, eroding our very ability to deal with reality.
Fortunately, everyone wants to get plastic surgery now, as the television commands!
What we claimed as The Order is vanishing, but life rolls on, albeit at higher gasoline prices. I rode the bus back along University on a Saturday afternoon, and people still existed, they haven't been wiped away by the confusion that spreads every day.
Apparently, that was the 'reality check' I was looking for. It is too damn easy to be a college student and get swallowed up in the bubble world of Macalester, something that the seniors always like to observe... and I am a senior now. Where did normality go?? Was it on the bus?
It's the damn summer. Grit your teeth. Get serious. Either the collapse is coming, or it isn't. Either Bush's administration bends and crumbles, or it whiplashes all over, civil war, Arabs, Christians, Jews, Pashtuns, Chechens, nukes, oil, heroin. Goddesses of greed and avarice in the sky. Merchants of war fill the cracks. Profits for the madmen of all sides...
Oh, I forgot. On my birthday they declared sanctions on Syria. Brilliant.
Friday is the day of cleaning my room and everything else.... Hooray for being 21. It is a time to listen and drive around, not write.
Well May 11 has finally come--it's my 21st birthday, and we had a great party at 32 Wheeler last night. I can't believe I made it this far, and I am sort of at a loss for words these days.
The world has changed so much since I turned 20, so much since 19 or 18. Who would have thought it?
I'm going off to have dinner with the family now. I must try not to think about the dogs of war that Mr Hersh published, try very hard.
I just finished all my work for the semester, in the form of a very extensive report, "Outsourcing War: the Emergence and Deployment of Privatized Military Firms in the United States."
Within lie my reactions to the Abu Ghraib war crimes, as well as their evil schemes for world domination and all the rest.
After watching that testimony for five hours yesterday and writing this paper about the evil contractors, I am feeling emotionally winded and mentally distorted. That is why God made this a Saturday. It is time to party. I will have something more to post tomorrow.
Here is an excerpt from the paper's conclusion:
As testimony on torture at Abu Ghraib unfolded before Congress today, the focus on the images themselves is conspicuous. While the Taguba report clearly details widespread torture and a breakdown of the Geneva convention, Rumsfeld clearly indicated that he believed it was the images that carried such staggering impact.
It is perhaps fitting that people frame their view in terms of the images, from the bodies of the Blackwater personnel swinging on the bridge to the images of sexual humiliation and torture at the prison. The prison images fix the depraved heart of darkness at a place and time, bringing forth an overwhelming revulsion that cuts across the huge, widening abyss between America and the Arab world. If these images deliver the shock therapy to our identity that finally forces us to return to the norms of basic human decency, peace and kindness, then perhaps the torture served a higher moral purpose.
The funny thing is that Ariel Sharon's withdrawal proposal was voted on by about 50,000 Israelis out of several million, but it is heralded as a definitive, withering loss for the old bastard. I think the plan is horrible because it is based on abrogating fundamental Palestinian claims before negotiations, and it reinforces systemic distortions in Israeli society that lead to expansion of the settlements and racist policies of land confiscation. However the withdrawal from Gaza was a good thing that even the IDF would like to do.
Here are some various things about how happy the settlers are now (and dreaming of political domination of all Israel) as well as how horrible it is for Bush to be in this situation where a bunch of rightwing lunatics have basically sawed off the limb he'd climbed out on.
Serge Schmemann in the NY Times, cautiously balanced:
The symmetry of these [peace] proposals was highly delicate — knocking out any element collapsed the whole.WaPo editorializes the Poor Wager:Americans have known this ever since they became the principal mediators in the conflict. Though the United States has been an unwavering supporter of Israel since the 1967 war, American presidents and secretaries of state have recognized that a credible mediating role also requires assuring Palestinians that the United States hears their grievances and will not give Israel a free hand to decide their fate unilaterally.
Tough love has often been needed. In the first Bush administration, Secretary of State James Baker III held up loan guarantees to Israel over the issue of settlements; President Bill Clinton compelled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to withdraw from Hebron. No administration accepted Mrs. Meir's definition of evenhandedness.
Until last month, that is, when President Bush signed off on Israeli West Bank settlements and the abrogation of the Palestinians' right of return. He said he was merely recognizing the facts on the ground, and there is an element of truth to that, even if he missed the larger point. Anybody who's been to Ariel or Maale Adumim knows these "settlements" are real cities, just as everyone knows that a skyscraper in Tel Aviv will not revert into a Palestinian's olive grove.
But knowing how things should end has never been the problem in the Middle East. It's always been about how to get there, as the vote in Ariel Sharon's Likud Party, rejecting his initiative for Israel to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza, has made so abundantly clear.
It's hard to believe that Mr. Bush failed to realize that by denying critical elements of the Palestinians' national narrative, he was stripping them of negotiating leverage and undermining whatever faith they still had in American mediation. His father could have explained it to him; so could a close reading of his own road map, which held that refugees and borders were issues to be resolved at the negotiating table.
PRESIDENT BUSH's ill-considered bet on Israel's Ariel Sharon is looking shaky barely two weeks after it was made. Mr. Sharon's decisive loss of the referendum Sunday within the right-wing Likud Party on his plan to withdraw Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip may have crippled the initiative -- or, at least, Mr. Sharon's ability to implement it. It's not yet clear what the political consequences will be in Israel, but the prospective damage to the Bush administration is already obvious.Christian Science Monitor says Bush Out on a Limb with Sharon, but at least the vote clarifies how worthless the Likud party is:The president delivered to Mr. Sharon, in writing, historic changes in the official U.S. position on a final Israeli-Palestinian settlement, thereby enraging Arab opinion and alienating European allies at a moment of crisis in Iraq. By staking out positions on Israel's annexation of parts of the West Bank and the non-return of Palestinian refugees, Mr. Bush compromised the ability of the United States to serve as a mediator for a future final settlement. In return, Mr. Sharon has now allowed 50,000 members of his hard-line party, or less than 1 percent of Israel's population, to reject the withdrawal the administration portrayed as justifying its concessions. Mr. Bush won't take back his commitments; unless the pullout is somehow revived, the result will be another blow to U.S. standing in the Middle East -- one the administration can hardly afford.
That plan, which cut the Palestinians out of the loop on their future, was strongly endorsed by President Bush in order to help Mr. Sharon win the vote. But both men have now suffered a big loss. And Mr. Bush only ended up undercutting the war on terrorism in ignoring the Palestinians and thus angering even more Arabs.Now to Haaretz which carries a fine analysis of how Sharon's two 'revolutions,' the Likud party and the settlement movement, might combine to bring him crashing down:Yet despite failures in both these approaches, the extremes - Arafat on one side, and the Jewish settlers and most of Likud on the other - have unwittingly exposed their active opposition to a two-state solution. They both defied an idea that most Israelis and Palestinians want. They can more easily be isolated as obstacles to peace.
Likud, like Arafat, can no longer be counted on to make the necessary concessions. And as the US has decided it can't trust Arafat anymore, it must also think twice about endorsing any peace plan from an Israeli government.
Now, it appears that two movements - both fathered by a revolutionary named Ariel Sharon, the Likud and the settlement enterprise - may come together in a new synthesis, in effect a new revolution, spurred by a joint offensive that may ultimately spell the end of Sharon's career.John Kerry tries some Israel love at a speech before the ADL, talking about how he once toured the country and decided to proclaim things on a ridge at the end:
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The mother-model of Zionist revolutions, David Ben-Gurion's Labor movement, has spawned no end of rivals and parallel revolutions, none more energetic and influential than the settlement movement in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.The movement combined religious-Messianic zeal with two principles of early Labor ideologues: territorial maximalism and land conquest through the creation of new settlements by small collective groups.
There is indeed a weird echo in this, as Democratic presidential candidates and Iraqis alike take the ancient dead seriously.
The last stop on the tour Kerry told to the audience was Massada, where, after a lengthy discussion of the suicide by the survivors on the desert plateau-palace rather than be captured by the Romans, Kerry and the other members of the delegation found themselves, he said, on the ledge where air force cadets are sworn in."And we stood on the edge and we yelled `Am Yisrael chai!' And boom, across came the echo, the most eerie and unbelievable sound. And we sort of looked at each other and we felt as if we were hearing the souls of those who had died there, speaking to us."
The settlers are punch drunk happy! Their day has come!
Thousands of young people from the Jewish settlements of Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip yesterday stood at dawn in the amphitheater next to the Neveh Dekalim Local Council building and sang Hatikvah, and the hymn "I believe."Aw shucks. Nobody asked the IDF what they wanted:It's exactly the way Independence Day prayers end in National Religious communities - the national anthem along with a kind of religious anthem, the Maimonidean principle of faith that begins "I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah."
Before they began singing, the young people had been listening to Rabbi Rafi Peretz, head of the pre-army study program at Atzmona and a reserve IAF pilot who is greatly admired by the young people of Gush Katif. He spoke of "the war we won - a war for the love of this people. Something new was born today. Now, bring on the general referendum, and we'll win that as well."
The settlers of Gush Katif sense a time of grace is upon them. Rabbis, local council heads, and especially young people speak frequently of the need to expand their door-to-door campaign.
"Anyone who was part of this operation saw what spiritual energy is," said Rabbbi Yigal Kaminsky, Gush Katif's regional rabbi. "Everyone gave his spirit, his soul, his body to the struggle. When you begin to peel open the hearts, the bond between us and all of Israel is revealed in a big way."
IDF leaders believe a bilateral arrangement and agreement are preferable to a unilateral move. Ya'alon said during internal discussions that he supports the idea of leaving the Gaza Strip, but in the context of an agreement. In other words, the idea is correct, but not the method and the plan. The claim that he is opposed to leaving Gaza is therefore incorrect. On the other hand, like Prime Minister Sharon, the chief of staff and others on the general staff say Israel has no partner today for negotiations. Their stance is contradictory: If there is no partner, how is it possible to achieve a bilateral agreement?I like that: war as peace. Now that they are disengaging it's really all out.The disengagement plan concept of "minimizing the damage" originated in the IDF in recent months. It has taken on various forms, and has become an operational plan of sorts. The military responses to the attacks on Israeli targets are becoming harsher. This can be measured in the number of Palestinians killed in each attack of the ground forces. They no longer try to spare Palestinian arms-bearers, whoever they may be. Not only is Hamas in their sights. It is also no coincidence that Hamas leaders Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi were assassinated after the disengagement plan was born.
More than once in the past, the IDF has taken a restrained approach, as opposed to the proposals of the political echelon, and especially the prime minister. No longer.
Again let me say that I am very sorry that I haven't had time to post anything on the site, but I am working on my term papers and really don't have the time. Also for some reason my back really hurts and it makes it a bitch to use the keyboard.
Seymour Hersh is an American hero.
My major paper is on privatized military firms and the news is all over TV tonight--thanks in part to Mr Hersh--that private military firm personnel mainly working for CACI have been implicated in ordering MPs to torture prisoners. This alongside all the Blackwater stuff..... It is pretty damn shocking.
Last semester I was writing a critical theory paper about the war in Iraq in December, and the very day I'd set entirely aside to write it was the day they captured Saddam Hussein. This paper has been unfolding a little more smoothly but wouldn't you know it I keep finding these awesome primary sources like the comprehensive CPA analysis below. Dang nabbit!
I will be posting the paper when its finished, as it's turning out fairly well.
Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, has been pegged as a possible leaker of the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame to a syndicated columnist, according to accounts in a book by former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, Plame's husband.I knew it. Libby Libby Libby!In "The Politics of Truth," to be published Friday, Wilson says Libby is "quite possibly the person who exposed my wife's identity," according to The Washington Post, which obtained an early copy.
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"The other name that has most often been repeated to me in connection with the inquiry and disclosure into my background and Valerie's is that of Elliott Abrams, who gained infamy in the Iran-Contra scandal," he writes.Another suspect named in Wilson's book: White House chief political adviser Karl Rove. "The workup on me that turned up the information on Valerie was shared with Karl Rove, who then circulated it in administration and neoconservative circles," Wilson writes.