AUTHOR: levinson DATE: 4/16/2003 08:55:00 AM ----- BODY: The Pentagon has declared Mr. Bush's War over. A classic whiz-bang operation (pay no attention to Seymour Hersh) if there ever was one. Looking down at the shattered hulk of a country that is Iraq, I am none too optimistic. Looking down at the charred remains of prosperity in our own country, I am positively despondent.

Wall Street has been doing backflips over the past few weeks in a vain attempt to convince itself and Alan Greenspan that the war really was the thing holding the economy back. Not so my friends, not so. Those poor saps trying to cold call their way out the broker's pit at Morgan Stanley are in for a hard life lesson. The great and powerful New Economy is stalled and there is simply no telling what is going to happen next. One thing is for certain, there is no leadership in Washington on this. It's tax cuts and damn the coffers from the administration.

No doubt those that were willing to countenance the idea of supply-side economics have woken up to the futility of the concept, but they will get no hearing in the Potomac swamp. The ugly face of the Bush economic plan will be on full display during budget negotiations, and there is no place in its plans for anyone making less than $200,000. A reckoning could be in the works for these oligarchs, but only if Joe Nobody stands up and asks for his share of the pie. The steel-toed kick in the teeth he gets as a response may leave enough of a mark to start a hellfire call to roll back the hypocrisy and gluttony that has come to rule the roost in Washington, but for the sober observer down in the trenches there is only war, terrorism and recession down the road. It is time to stockpile because nothing good is coming down the pike this year and everyone needs to be ready. -------- AUTHOR: levinson DATE: 4/10/2003 01:54:00 PM ----- BODY: Interesting testimony from Wolfowitz today. He publicly backs away from Chalabi and strikes his best Woodrow Wilson pose. Though that pose would not be considered Wilson's best. First the good. I think Wolfowitz is exactly right when he illucidates the reasoning against the UN running the show in Iraq: "We want to make sure this process works, and we don't have so many hands on the steering wheel that the vehicle goes into a ditch." The UN is a wonderful institution, but it is too subject to the whims of its less serious and more meddling members. It needn't be this way in the future, but that is the current state of the UN. Though I don't have much faith in our regime to effectively rebuild the Iraqi regime, they are currently the best we, or anyone else, has. That needn't be the case in 18 months, but we'll get off track if we go down that road at the moment.

Now the bad. As testimony goes, this was, overall, not good. Not good for our country or the Iraqis. We have created immense amounts of chaos throughout the country and our responsibility to the Iraqis is deeper because of that. Contrary to Wolfowitz's inclination, we must provide the Iraqis with a blueprint. People who have never had a democracy cannot create one out of whole cloth. The administration of a government is a very complex job and one with which we have a lot of skill and experience. Providing control and a blueprint does not mean creating an Iraqi puppet regime for the United States. Whomever steps up to lead Iraq will be seen by some in the Arab world, perhaps many, as a tool of the CIA and the Mossad. It is the same in our country when a certain fraction of our people are convinced that any republican politician is a tool of big business (mostly oil) and any democrat is a tool of the unions, the NAACP and/or NOW. -------- AUTHOR: levinson DATE: 4/09/2003 12:10:00 PM ----- BODY: Saddam is gone and so is his regime. Let a thousand factions bloom. One runs out of adjectives to describe the size of the power vacuum that is being created in Iraq. I don't mean at the top of the heap; any damn fool wishing to take that job on is welcome to it. Even that crank Chalabi. The Iraqis know this and thus Chalabi's chances of filling that post until the tanks pull out is extremely high. But once those tanks do leave, Good Night Irene. There has been nothing subtle about our handling of this situation to date, but it is subtlety above all that is required when working in the middle east. No western government has yet mastered it (nor has any middle eastern government). As we have already seen in Afghanistan, the indigenous people know our game and play it well.

We cannot hope to effectively replace the bureaucracy of the Ba'ath party. Constructed by and for some of the most vile and inhuman scum ever to walk the earth, it was nonetheless pervasive, effective and meticulously constructed. A regime of fear is no easy thing to maintain, and this one did not rot from the center the way the Soviet Union did. We had to roll in the armor and smash it to bits. I thought there was another way to accomplish this, but what's done is done. Now the real game begins. Every exile and torture victim hungry for a vengeance killing is going to start stalking the streets from Umm Qasr to Kirkuk. They know we don't do the details well and thus will keep out of site, but the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates will soon be strewn with corpses.

While some rush for the jugular, others will set up cabals (backed by foreign governments) that will begin to demand a piece of Chalabi's hide as soon as whatever sham process we use to select him is over. The fight for democracy in that country will be bloody, and the entire region is in it for keeps. My impulse is to say that the only way to ensure democracy in Iraq is to get knee deep in the marshes and tell every agent from the peninsula to start running for the border. But that, my friend, is how imperialism gets into trouble.

The Great Game is about subtle politics of the kind we were once exceptional. Those times are long past, now, and as I scan the Potomac, I see that our current regime doesn't know the game and wouldn't be up to the job if it did. -------- AUTHOR: levinson DATE: 4/09/2003 10:02:00 AM ----- BODY: When the idea of a US-led invasion of Iraq started almost a year ago now, we were just coming down from the peak of the second intifada in Israel. The center of Jenin had been bulldozed completely after a suicide bomber destroyed a passover seder in Netanya, Israel. I had spent considerable time looking at how Israel had been created and how Palestine had not been created beside it. As the two sides continued their struggle over the creation of Palestine and the US began contemplating liberating Iraq, I began to wonder to what degree the circumstances of a nation's birth shape its national character. This question has pushed itself to the front of my mind again as the damnatio memoriae of Saddam's regime has commenced in Baghdad. Fred Kaplan has a short bit about how the Iraqis are faring at this.

The specific manner in which each and every icon is removed is not particularly important. What is significant is the overall apathy with which we've been greeted. In this sense, I use the word overall to describe the mean reaction exhibited by the Iraqis as reported in the media. Whether this is at all close to the median reaction I cannot tell. I am troubled by the apathy of the Iraqis because what is happening in their country is something quite new in the world. We have liberated a people that were both unwilling and unable to liberate themselves. We have done this without broad support in the country and without a significant indigenous opposition group. The result is a power vacuum of astonishing size. Such a thing is extremely dangerous. Since there has been no communication with the populace for over a decade, we cannot predict how that vacuum will come to be filled. Cheney et al. have already airlifted their chosen Karzai into southern Iraq, but Chalabi is not a man that can wield influence in the country without either a) a strong American military presence or b) holding on to major pieces of the Ba'ath apparatus in the bureaucracy. Neither of these is a prescription for success for a new Iraqi government.

Another wild card is, of course, the other Arab regimes. It will be interesting to see how they attempt to manage the vacuum. They won't sit on the sidelines and let the US put up a puppet government, even for a short time. -------- AUTHOR: levinson DATE: 4/07/2003 10:55:00 AM ----- BODY: Apparently peaved at being bumped from Rumsfeld's hotlist of dictators the US plans to attack in the near future, Kim Jong Il today made a bid to get back into the A-section of the world's newspapers. I doubt Rummy would waste an opportunity to insult Kim in the normal course of business, but this is not the normal course, there's a war on. It will be interesting to see if Pyongyang steps up its efforts to garner some sort of rebuke from the Bush regime over the next week. -------- AUTHOR: levinson DATE: 4/06/2003 01:42:00 PM ----- BODY: Bernard Lewis was on C-SPAN2 this afternoon taking calls from noon to 3pm. It's being rebroadcast in about half an hour and hopefully a transcript will be available sometime soon. Edward Said's vitriol aside, Lewis has an amazing depth of knowledge about the entire Middle East region. In my mind, one of his greatest assets is his recognition of the difficulty westerners have in relating to the general society in the region. The most interesting of these differences for me is one of nationalism. It is engrained in our societal makeup that peoples will band together in large numbers to form a cohesive society that seeks to differentiate itself from others by both custom and boundary. We like to reinforce our nationalist ideas by demarcating exactly where group A's land ends and group B's land begins. The makeup of the European continent being the most visible manifestation of this nationalist tendency. Lewis discusses these difference succinctly here and more in depth here. Some of the highlights of his discussion today were:

• The history of the west's interaction with the region that began with Napoleon and Nelson and ended with Bush I and Gorbachev.
• That many critiques of the US's handling of the region recently focus not on the US acting as an imperialist, but not being an effective imperialist. I would love for him or someone else to expand on this subject.
• The importance of humor in the history of Islam and in the current Muslim world. Lewis said he knew of no other culture that throughout its history has held humor as so essential to the makeup of both social and literary society.
• That Islam is not anti-development. In its heyday, the Muslim world was more commercially expansionist and accepting of commerce than the European nations.
• That the word 'islam' does not mean peace alone. It has many meanings, one being peace, but that its meaning when used in reference to the faith mean surrender.

Again, hopefully a transcript will be available soon so that I can quote from him directly rather than paraphrasing from memory which is always a quick way to mischaracterize both statements and issues. --------