Good morning, this is Control
Here is my fantasy….
In the future, there’s a place – call it Mission Control – where world problems are intelligently managed.
Perhaps it’s in orbit or on the surface of the ocean.
Actually, there’s more than one; there are lots of little mission controls, scattered throughout the world each feeding its data stream into Central.
Some are small and quaint – like cozy coffee shops, there are large couches and people serenely tapping away on laptop keyboards.
Others are immense and slick and ultra mod. Perhaps like a set from a 1960s Bond movie.
Greenhouse emissions, ongoing and threatened conflicts, arguments between cats and dogs…
All are monitored and addressed by the Mission Control network.
Unattainable objectives, increased danger
“The mission of US forces is to kill or capture Muqtada al-Sadr”
Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of US ground forces in Iraq April 12, 2004
“Israel is determined to continue on in the fight against Hizbollah. We will … stop them. We will not hesitate to take severe measures against those who are aiming thousands of rockets and missiles against innocent civilians for the one purpose of killing them”
Ehud Olmert, Israeli Prime Minister, July 2006
IN AUGUST OF 2004, American forces under Lt. General Sanchez launched a full scale assault on Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army, then massed in Najaf.
Reportedly, hundreds of Mahdi fighters were killed which, considering the Americans’ command of overwhelming firepower (and the Mahdi’s lack of combat experience), was a completely unsurprising outcome.
And yet, despite producing significant losses, Washington’s objective to, in so many words, vaporize al Sadr and neutralize his organization proved beyond reach.
At the time, University of Michigan Prof. Juan Cole described the Mahdi’s structure as being like the “layers of an onion”. One layer could be heavily damaged or destroyed but this wouldn’t kill the organization as a whole. Distributed groups such as the Mahdi, with both centralized and decentralized command and control elements, are, the Americans have re-learned, extraordinarily resilient and able to recover from all but the most extreme forms of military punishment (thermonuclear ordinance comes to mind as “most extreme”).
TEL AVIV’S ASSAULT on Lebanon is, we’re told by both Israeli and American officials, designed to destroy Hezbollah’s war fighting capacity, cajole (read: terrify) Hezbollah’s Lebanese supporters into rejecting the organization, motivate its domestic opponents to take more drastic steps (read: civil war) to neutralize the group as a force and convince its foreign supporters in Iran and the Arab world to cut it loose.
Israeli Air Force commanders were confident, it seems, that a devastating air campaign (a classic ‘total war’ scenario in which civilians are considered targets because of their role in supporting combatants) would simultaneously deal strategically fatal blows to Hezbollah and eliminate its civilian support network.
Now that IDF ground forces are engaging Hezbollah fighters in combat – and taking losses in both equipment and men – the failure of the campaign’s strategic component is being revealed.
Indeed, at the moment it appears unlikely Israel will achieve any of its main objectives (perhaps shattering the Lebanese economy was an objective – if so, that’s largely been accomplished but beyond this criminality…).
Both Washington and Tel Aviv wage classic ‘big war’ military campaigns: aerial bombardment, followed by ground incursion – a French derived tactic fashioned during the First World War. The Israelis have added so-called “targeted assassinations”, kidnappings and other ’special operations’ to their bag of military tricks but in the main, as we’re seeing right now in Lebanon’s smashed towns and villages, there’s a devout faith in the effectiveness of large-scale force deployments to accomplish political and tactical goals.
But modern warfare has evolved beyond the point where states are able to decisively destroy competitors and establish systems more to their liking.
This is partly due to advances in portable killing technology – devices such as shoulder launched anti tank and anti aircraft launchers – that give out-gunned teams of fighters unprecedented amounts of firepower.
Mostly however, it’s the result of the distributed structure of the non and quasi-state organizations Washington and Tel Aviv confront.
Having smashed the Iraqi state and failed to create a viable replacement, the Americans find themselves facing a variety of well-armed, difficult to isolate groups, each with a base of popular support (some more than others, of course). Everything from ex-Baathist military professionals to ruthless Jihadis and gangsters roam Iraqi streets, killing anyone who opposes or displeases them. In this chaotically violent situation it’s impossible to impose your will on more than a very limited amount of territory (US bases and the Green Zone in Iraq for example).
Similarly, Tel Aviv, having denied the Palestinians autonomy in the occupied territories (indeed, occupation itself, along with the ’security barriers’ and bantustans that come with it is, by definition a denial of independence) and frustrated Lebanese politics has not evolved in a direction to its liking is trying to suppress resistance to its objectives by punishing populations supporting non-state adversaries.
Instead of smothering resistance, such wanton destruction tends to make it grow.
Washington and Tel Aviv are unable to alter course and will continue to use their overwhelming military power to force events, as best they can, into desired paths. The outcomes won’t change. As their plans routinely fall into disarray, they will become more dangerous, upping the ante of force employed (other options, such as honest negotiation will not seriously be considered).
Washington and its Israeli proxy pose a great – and growing – threat to global stability. The more defeats they suffer, the more unpredictable they’re likely to become.
The Lonely Books: Empire
Here’s what I’m doing right now.
Well, not “right now” but as often as time permits.
I’m catching up with the Empire party I heard all about but missed when it was as hot (at least, in those quarters where such things are hot) as the surface of Venus.
I’m late for the party but, it would seem, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
When Gulf War 2 was unleashed, Hardt & Negri’s idea of a distributed imperial system with no primary core seemed to have been disproved. The United States was after all, as someone phrased it a few years ago, a hyperpower.
Now that the limits of American power are very plain to see in both Iraq and Afghanistan, a closer look at Empire seems to be in order.
And so I’m reading.
Inner City Youth, London
Future Feeder writes:
Inner-City Youth, London is a narrated photo essay by Simon Wheatly. It attempts to capture the lives of Londons under-privalaged youth and the music culture (grime) that is developing out of their real-world experiences and the influence of mainstream American hip-Hop.
Candy Land
What is the more natural state: war or peace?
From Wikipedia’s article: “Ongoing wars“…
To a man with a hammer…
Red State Son’s Dennis Perrin writes:
What’s going on at this very moment is quite serious, both for the Middle East and for the world.
And far from this being a “defensive” war (the only kind Israel fights, according to its apologists), the present escalation in Lebanon, as in Gaza, is part of a larger strategy that goes beyond kidnapped soldiers and Qassam and Katyusha rockets launched at Israeli border towns. This is about hitting Syria and ultimately Iran, since Israel will not allow any other country in the region to even taste nuclear power. The right to bear nuclear arms is Israel’s alone, and they’ll keep it that way, no matter how many cities they have to bomb and civilians they have to slaughter. You need only to listen to the words of Israeli commanders. Far from sounding cornered and defensive, they are openly boasting about bringing extensive pain to their selected targets. As stated in a Ha’aretz news analysis, “According to the [senior IDF] officers, if the kidnapped soldiers are not returned alive and well, the Lebanese civilian infrastructures will regress 20, or even 50 years.”
Not exactly a fighting-for-your-life statement.
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Siege
via Tom Dispatch
Sandy Tolan writes:
Under the pretext of forcing the release of a single soldier “kidnapped by terrorists” (or, if you prefer, “captured by the resistance”), Israel has done the following: seized members of a democratically elected government; bombed its interior ministry, the prime minister’s offices, and a school; threatened another sovereign state (Syria) with a menacing overflight; dropped leaflets from the air, warning of harm to the civilian population if it does not “follow all orders of the IDF” (Israel Defense Forces); loosed nocturnal “sound bombs” under orders from the Israeli prime minister to “make sure no one sleeps at night in Gaza”; fired missiles into residential areas, killing children; and demolished a power station that was the sole generator of electricity and running water for hundreds of thousands of Gazans.
Besieged Palestinian families, trapped in a locked-up Gaza, are in many cases down to one meal a day, eaten in candlelight. Yet their desperate conditions go largely ignored by a world accustomed to extreme Israeli measures in the name of security: nearly 10,000 Palestinians locked in Israeli jails, many without charge; 4,000 Gaza and West Bank homes demolished since 2000 and hundreds of acres of olive groves plowed under; three times as many civilians killed as in Israel, many due to “collateral damage” in operations involving the assassination of suspected militants.
“Wake up!” shouted the young Palestinian journalist Mohammed Omer from Gaza on San Francisco’s “Arab Talk” radio in late June. “The Gaza people are starving. There is a real humanitarian crisis. Our children are born to live. Don’t these people have any heart? No feelings at all? The world is silent!”
[...]
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Entropy: the final god
Tuesday July 11th 2006, 2:58 pm
Filed under:
Apocaparty
I have a headache and headaches slow progress to a crawl at this darkly sunlit dystopia of a blog.
The headache itself is insignificant. Billions of people get headaches everyday. What could be more common than a headache?
Perhaps my distress is brought on by the barometric pressure, or the high humidity.
Or perhaps, it’s the result of the thought that – in my lifetime – this global civilization, built upon petrochemicals, will retreat into…
What exactly?
Doug Henwood interviews (podcast) Jim Kunstler who, at his blog and in his books (particularly The Long Emergency), tries to describe some of the unprecedented problems facing humanity and what some of the solutions might be.
Kunstler seems confident there are solutions, but dubious we’ll put any of them into action.
And maybe that’s why I have a headache on this warm, muggy day.
I tend to agree.
Nir Rosen and Matt Taibbi on Iraq: Compare and Contrast
Within weeks of each other, on-the-Iraqi-ground, experience-based essays by Matt Taibbi and Nir Rosen were released.
Taibbi’s article, published by Rolling Stone and evocatively named “Fort Apache, Iraq“, details his four week trip embedded with the US military – including a stretch with the American 158th Field Artillery unit.
Journalist Nir Rosen, a New America Foundation fellow who, we’re told, can “pass for Middle Eastern”, has lived the past three years in Iraq. His article, published by Truthdig and titled “The Occupation of Iraqi Hearts and Minds” focuses on the devastating impact on Iraqi lives of American occupation.
Taibbi writes:
To understand the war in Iraq, you first have to understand the people who are fighting it. And the way to do that isn’t to burst in with your head in a point, bitching about WMDs and croaking passages from Arab-history books. Jump in the truck and shut your mouth; get on board, literally and figuratively. In America, everyone has an opinion about Iraq, even me — but if you’re going to take the step of actually going there, you’ve got to give it a chance.
Which seems fair enough.
Indeed, if Taibbi had simply reported on the people and events he witnessed without too much (or any) interpretive comment, his essay would stand as a kind of earnest adventure story – a gripping tale of a young man’s sincere effort, at real risk of life and limb, to see a world changing situation close hand. But the urge to reach for large conclusions using off-the-shelf symbology is tough to resist.
It’s possible, I think, to glean one of the dominant trends of mainstream American thought about Iraq – at least, on the not quite ‘cruise missile Left‘ end of the liberal scale – from Taibbi’s piece. Taibbi, as far as I know, can’t speak Arabic and, as an obvious Westerner, had understandable safety concerns while in-country so his exclusive association with US troops was both practical and inevitable.
Still, at the end of his frightening four weeks with the rough riders, he comes away with the banal (and also, by now, very often repeated) insight that American troops are people too – just caught up in a whirlwind that pulls in the wicked right alongside the virtuous – destroying both.
Iraqi fighters, by contrast, are smoothly stereotyped into one, flat dimension. They’re fanatics, pure and simple, apparently only motivated by “…the same old totalitarian double-think from the last century that sent Nazis and Communists on crazed quests for paradise by sanctioning the violence buried in their dumb hearts.” An oddly comprehensive assertion, at least in ambition, since it leaves out what is probably one of the most basic original causes of the guerrilla war: revenge on Americans for direct and indirect harm done and the chaos of the occupation itself.
But being only with Americans, thinking only about Americans, writing only about how strange and marvelous and terrible Americans are, especially when they’re trying to help – these well meaning, heavily armed suburban fish out of water – dramatically narrows the breadth of your vision.
You end up settling for over-reaching conclusions like the following, which Taibbi deploys as part of his closing statement:
“This is the place where two existential dead ends have come around in a circle to meet in an irreconcilable explosion of violence — the bureaucratic ennui and intellectual confusion of modern civilized man vs. the recalcitrant, prehistoric fanaticism of Al-Qaeda’s literally cave-dwelling despotic mob. Human history has traveled in two exactly opposite directions for the last thousand years, and the supreme irony is that both paths led straight here, to this insane stalemate in the Mesopotamian desert.”
[...]
Four weeks of white knuckle travel through “Fort Apache” (a label rich with Indian War era American meanings) teaches Matt that this conflict is solely the result of bored ‘bureaucratic moderns’ meeting ‘prehistoric’ primitives for a brutal fight to the death…for no geopolitically apparent reason.
You can imagine Taibbi time warped to the past and musing – with similarly aligned sympathies and quasi-philosophical detachment – about the chaotic clash between a 19th century, ennui-afflicted US management class and the Lakota. No need to investigate the order of things too deeply when there’s a ‘clash of civilizations’ coloring book handy.
Nir Rosen also spent time with American troops and recognizes their humanity but critically, he used his unique situation as a person who can “pass for Middle Eastern” and who speaks Arabic to record what these confused, frightened boys and girls from Taibbi’s tree-lined suburbs and small towns are doing – each and every day – to Iraqis.
Rosen writes:
Three years into an occupation of Iraq replete with so-called milestones, turning points and individual events hailed as “sea changes” that would “break the back” of the insurgency, a different type of incident received an intense, if ephemeral, amount of attention.
A local human rights worker and aspiring journalist in the western Iraqi town of Haditha filmed the aftermath of the massacre of 24 Iraqi civilians. The video made its way to an Iraqi working for Time magazine, and the story was finally publicized months later. The Haditha massacre was compared to the Vietnam War’s My Lai massacre, and like the well-publicized and embarrassing Abu Ghraib scandal two years earlier, the attention it received made it seem as if it were a horrible aberration perpetrated by a few bad apples who might have overreacted to the stress they endured as occupiers.
In reality both Abu Ghraib and Haditha were merely more extreme versions of the day-to-day workings of the American occupation in Iraq, and what makes them unique is not so much how bad they were, or how embarrassing, but the fact that they made their way to the media and were publicized despite attempts to cover them up. Focusing on Abu Ghraib and Haditha distracts us from the daily, little Abu Ghraibs and small-scale Hadithas that have made up the occupation.
The occupation has been one vast extended crime against the Iraqi people, and most of it has occurred unnoticed by the American people and the media.
snip
I believe that any journalist who spent even a brief period embedded with American soldiers must have witnessed crimes being committed against innocent Iraqis, so I have always been baffled by how few were reported and how skeptically the Western media treated Arabic reports of such crimes. These crimes were not committed because Americans are bad or malicious; they were intrinsic to the occupation, and even if the Girl Scouts had occupied Iraq they would have resorted to these methods. In the end, it is those who dispatched decent young American men and women to commit crimes who should be held accountable.
[...]
This strikes me as a more mature view, one that isn’t built upon the paradoxically grim yet soothing fantasy of Americans as do-gooders caught-up in a maelstrom of Western melancholy and Middle Eastern savagery.
Reading Taibbi’s peice made me wonder whether it was possible for Americans to learn anything, really, from the Iraq disaster. He travelled thousands of miles, right into a war zone, only to lovingly look, once again, into the same old mirror.
Neglect is a harsh god
Robots.
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While I try to re-energize whatever part of my psyche powers this hobby known as blogging, please enjoy the sight and sound of QRIO, Sony’s cancelled robotics program.