Althæaphage.
I got an email here. Uh, “Rush,” uh, “now that two of our own have been tortured and murdered by the terrorists in Iraq, will the Left say that they deserved it? I’m so sick of our cut-and-run liberals. Keep up your great work.” Bob C. from Roanoke, Virginia. “PS, I love the way you do the program on the Ditto Cam.” [Laughter.] I read… no, I added that! He didn’t, he didn’t put that in there. [Laughter.] You know, it—it’s—I—uh… I gotta tell ya, I—I—I perused the liberal, kook blogs today, and they are happy that these two soldiers got tortured. They’re saying, “Good riddance. Hope Rumsfeld and whoever sleep well tonight.” I kid you not, folks.
Do I even need to tell you that not a single liberal kook said anything of the kind?
It’s not that they lie. It’s not even that they lie so brazenly, so completely, so shamelessly. It’s that people believe them. It’s not that if only we were speaking out against their lies with more volume and vigor and vim. The indisputable fact of us, being where we are and doing as we do, is enough to give them the lie direct. But the people who believe them don’t pay any attention, and if they do happen across us, they don’t listen. They don’t have to.
Go, Google Abu Zubaydah. Read up on how important he was: a top Bin Laden deputy, al-Qaeda’s top military strategist, their chief recruiter, the mastermind behind 9/11. He’s thirty-five. Two years younger than me. We caught him in 2002. He’d been keeping a diary for ten years, written by three separate personalities. His primary responsibility within the foundation was to make plane reservations for the families of other operatives.
“I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied.
So we tortured him. We tortured him, and he told us all sorts of things about 9/11, and over a hundred people we’ve since indicted on the strength of his coerced word, and “plots of every variety—against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, ‘thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each… target’.”
And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”
At least the president didn’t lose face.
As above, so below: the self-similarity of the wingnut function; string theory for echthroi. Too much has been swallowed ever to turn around and come back up; it’s basic human nature to prefer being wrong to ever admitting one might not have been right. (The sort of human nature one is supposed to outgrow, yes, but.)
“Ignorance is a condition. Stupidity is a strategy.” Cliché? Hell, it’s a shibboleth: Welcome to the Reality-based Community. —Ignorance we can deal with, with the talking and the listening and the reasoning and the debating and the citing. Stupidity requires a different approach. Pathological liars so epically insecure they’ve made up their own network called “Excellence in Broadcasting” and call themselves “America’s Anchorman”? That shit writes itself, but our real fight’s altogether elsewhere.
How terribly civil.
Colleen Holmes, a stay-at-home mother in Portland, Ore., reported an exchange with a Verizon Wireless customer agent that illustrated not only the dismay some Americans feel about the newly disclosed domestic surveillance but also the fear of terrorism that, for many, more than justifies the program.
Holmes said she was so angry about reports that the government was collecting telephone calling records on millions of Americans that she called Verizon Wireless to explore canceling her service and switching to Qwest.
“It’s your constitutional right to voice your opinion,” she quoted the customer service agent as having told her. “If you want planes to fly into your building . . . “
Hey, Verizon? Go fuck yourself.
“...an awfully big adventure.”
Belle has been paying more attention to the Fighting Keebees than I have; she’s found they’ve gone straight from singing “Over There” to playing “Waltzing Matilda.” She quotes a chickenhawk auxiliary:
I think [Tapscott, Morrissey, and Bainbridge] may be suffering some variant of PTSD, worn down by defending difficult positions at the forefront of the battle against irredentist [sic] Democrats in Congress and their fifth-column [sic] in the media.
Which is, itself, enough to send Kieran Healy shrieking for a bottle of Sorkin.
You don’t want the truth because deep down, in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that blog. You need me on that blog.
But it’s Bruce Baugh with the piercing insight that once and for all demolishes the meme: oh, I see. Oh, I get it.
Talking with Mom and Dad about their personal histories led me to this association: what the war party bloggers have done is recreate the experience of being a child in World War II. They write patriotic essays and make patriotic collages, and get pats on the head and congratulations from the authorities. They watch diligently for the mutant, I mean, for the subversive among us, and help maintain the proper atmosphere of combined courage and vigilance. They are not expected to manage the family books, nor invited into discussion of the nitty-gritty, and it seldom occurs to them that there’s even a possibility there—that’s for the grown-ups, and rightly so.
Salad days.
Yes, I know the Online Integrity signing statement is nothing more than a cudgel wielded by some particularly witless hypocrites, but nonetheless, I must take exception to Chris Bowers’ seemingly sensible initial reaction. “In 2006,” he says,
I have no plans to steal candy from children, or to take money from the collection plate at church. I do not plan to spit on people I pass on the sidewalk, nor do I plan to set fire to a school. I have no intention of committing insurance fraud, insider trading, bank robbery, sexual assault, murder, or genocide. I do not plan on doing any of these things, because I think they are ethically wrong. I also do not plan to sign a pledge indicating that I am not going to do any of these things.
Perhaps; perhaps. But: back in the late ’80s, tail-end of the Reagan years, orientation week or somesuch at Oberlin, and various student groups are proselytizing from card-table pulpits outside Wilder. And if I tell you no one would ever have been so tub-thumpingly stupid as to set up an affirmative action bake sale back then, well, maybe you’ll see where I’m going, but maybe not. —One of the organizations was of course Amnesty International, and one of the buttons they had for anyone to pick up and pin to their jacket (for this was the ’80s, after all) was a red one, I think, that said in big bold white block letters:
STOP TORTURE
And my friend’s rolling her eyes at this, my friend who’s written more than her share of letters to political prisoners. “Oh, that’s brave,” she says. “What, we’re celebrating basic human decency now? You really think someone’s ever going to come up and see that button and say to you, no, no, we need to torture more—”
(Ah, but Michelle Malkin was somewhere in that crowd. So you never know. —Even then, we never knew.)
It takes a nation of millions to hold us back.
Jared’s story illustrates a growing national problem as the military faces increasing pressure to hit recruiting targets during an unpopular war.
Tracking by the Pentagon shows that complaints about recruiting improprieties are on pace to approach record highs set in 2003 and 2004. The active Army and the Reserve missed recruiting targets last year, and reports of recruiting abuses continue from across the country.
A family in Ohio reported that its mentally ill son was signed up, despite rules banning such enlistments and the fact that records about his illness were readily available.
In Houston, a recruiter warned a potential enlistee that if he backed out of a meeting he would be arrested.
And in Colorado, a high school student working undercover told recruiters he had dropped out and had a drug problem. The recruiter told the boy to fake a diploma and buy a product to help him beat a drug test.
Violations such as these forced the Army to halt recruiting for a day last May so recruiters could be retrained and reminded of the job’s ethical requirements.
The Portland Army Recruiting Battalion Headquarters opened its investigation into Jared’s case last week after his parents called The Oregonian and the newspaper began asking questions about his enlistment.
He’s an autistic 18-year-old who didn’t even know a war was going on in Iraq.
“When Jared first started talking about joining the Army, I thought, ‘Well, that isn’t going to happen,’ “ said Paul Guinther, Jared’s father. “I told my wife not to worry about it. They’re not going to take anybody in the service who’s autistic.”
But they did. Last month, Jared came home with papers showing that he not only had enlisted, but also had signed up for the Army’s most dangerous job: cavalry scout. He is scheduled to leave for basic training Aug. 16.
Officials are now investigating whether recruiters at the U.S. Army Recruiting Station in Southeast Portland improperly concealed Jared’s disability, which should have made him ineligible for service.
He won’t be going, thanks to the Oregonian.
On Tuesday, a reporter visited the U.S. Army Recruiting Station at the Eastport Plaza Shopping Center, where Velasco said he had not been told about Jared’s autism.
“Cpl. Ansley is Guinther’s recruiter,” he said. “I was unaware of any type of autism or anything like that.”
Velasco initially denied knowing Jared but later said he’d spent a lot of time mentoring him because Jared was going to become a cavalry scout. The job entails “engaging the enemy with anti-armor weapons and scout vehicles,” according to an Army recruiting Web site.
After he had spoken for a few moments, Velasco suddenly grabbed the reporter’s tape recorder and tried to tear out the tape, stopping only after the reporter threatened to call the police.
With the Guinthers’ permission, The Oregonian faxed Jared’s medical records to the U.S. Army Recruiting Battalion commander, Lt. Col. David Carlton in Portland, who on Wednesday ordered the investigation.
The Guinthers said that on Tuesday evening, Cpl. Ansley showed up at their door. They said Ansley stated that he would probably lose his job and face dishonorable discharge unless they could stop the newspaper’s story.
Our armed forces are cold-calling schoolkids with leads from No Child Left Behind red tape and county fair honeypots, under such ferocious pressure to put boots on the ground that Corporal Ansley’s put his career in the shitter for one more dubious checkmark in his ledger. —Yes, I’m asking for sympathy for this particular devil. After all, the consensus among the few who still support this war is that we aren’t fighting hard enough. 110% just won’t cut it, goddammit!
Can you even begin to imagine what it felt like, to realize what he’d done? Realize the line he’d crossed? Feel it go so searingly wrong that he tried to wrestle the tape out of the reporter’s recorder?
(Perhaps I have it wrong. Perhaps it was with a profound sense of entitlement that he went to the Guinthers’ door, cap in hand, to beg for his career; extremism in the defense, and all that, and why should I lose my job over your kid’s decision? —Perhaps. But I do try to see the best in people, when I can.)
—Meanwhile? Recruiting’s up up up for the Fighting Keebees. Not even two weeks, and they’ve got 300 recruits and counting!
Soar, you mighty chickenhawk. Soar.
Neither the first word nor the last on profanity, disputation, anger, and civility for bloggers.
The Dragonlord held the blade up, and said, “I was given this weapon of my father, you know.” He studied its length critically. “It is called Reason, because my father always believed in the power of reasoned argument. And yours?”
“From my mother. She found it in the armory when I was very young, and it is one of the last weapons made by Ruthkor and Daughters before their business failed. It is the style my father has always preferred: light and quick, to strike like a snake. I call it Wit’s End.”
“Wit’s End? Why?”
“Well, for much the same reason that yours is Reason.”
Piro turned it in his hand, observing the blade—slender but strong, and the elegant curve of the bell guard. Then he turned to Kytraan and said, “May Reason triumph.”
“It always does, at the end of the day,” said Kytraan, smiling. “And as for you, well, you will always have a resort when you are at your wit’s end.”
“Indeed,” said Piro with a smile, as they waited for the assault to commence.
—Steven Brust, The Viscount of Adrilankha
Making people laugh is the lowest form of comedy.
Kids these days, they have it so easy. Why, Michael O’Donoghue had to mock My Lai and savage Laraine Newman and make the Mormon Tabernacle choir scream in agony and die of a massive cerebral hemorrhage, obscure and half-remembered, to soldier through the sort of shocked silences Stephen Colbert got just by standing up in front of the president and the press and telling the fucking truth. —What does it mean that it isn’t our journalists anymore but our comedians who afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted? Pretty much what it always has, I guess. At least someone’s making an effort.
First, they win. Then we attack them. Then we laugh at them. Then we ignore them…
My sweet suffering Christ, they’re playing the role of the unjustly oppressed right to the bitter hilt. That right there above, ladies and gentlemen, is an attempt by the supporters of preemptive war, the apologists for torture, the real men who go to Caracas, to reclaim the word “chickenhawk.” Maybe white boy can’t say “nigga,” but that is finally once and for all okay: he can now bellow “My Yellaphant!” with pride.
(Cap’n Ed even went the “Webster’s defines ‘chickenhawk’ as” route:
When we looked into it, it turns out that the chicken hawk is a pretty impressive predator. It’s the largest of its family. This species vigorously defends its territory, getting even more aggressive when the conditions get harshest. It adapts to all climates. Most impressively, it feeds on chickens, mice, and rats.
Make of that what you will.
(Well. I can make a hat, or a brooch, or a pterodactyl, or a mighty fascist-looking eagle displayed on a field of gules, you eliminationist twerp.)
A new broom sweeps clean.
They say I worry too much. Do I worry too much? I’m worrying too much, aren’t I.
That woman.
Yes, she’s a horrible, soulless monster. Yes, her latest “book” is an insult to millennia of literate endeavor. But my God, do you have to keep posting those photos of her in your blogs? —Every time you say her name, you feed the dead light in her eyes, and Baby Jesus is forced to strangle another frolicking kitten. (Also, the man-hands jokes, and the bits about the Adam’s apple? Not getting funnier every time you tell them. Hate to be brutal, but.)
Go, and do thou likewise.
According to Susan Tully of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), many Roman Catholics are unhappy with their church leaders who, like Mahony, advocate for illegal aliens. “I am a Catholic, and there’s a whole bunch of us who are calling for a boycott of the Catholic Church,” she says.
“In other words,” Tully explains, “we’re telling other Catholics, ‘If you want to go to church to receive communion and a service or whatever, that would be fine, but do not financially support [the church].” And as for Cardinal Mahony, she contends, it is important for church members to remember what is truly motivating him.
—“Activist Urges Boycott of Catholic Leaders Who Support Illegal Aliens,” Agape Press
And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?
He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou?
And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.
And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.
But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?
—The Gospel According to Saint Luke,
chapter 10, verses 25 – 29
—cross-posted to Sisyphus Shrugs
Exit strategery.
Meanwhile, Joseph Cannon puts an unsettling story about the steam tunnels under the Capitol next to a recently passed rule regarding the decapitation of government and comes up with a brutally elegant solution to pretty much every last one of the Republicans’ problems. —And while I am well aware that indulging in this sort of conspiracy-mongering and irresponsible speculation is little more than a cheaply glowing pellet, nevertheless: we are all nutbar conspiracy theorists now. It would be irresponsible not to speculate.
Jesus H. Christ in a jumped-up flaming sidecar going over a cliff with a drunken rebel yell.
My God, my God, they really are gearing up to fight the last war.
To determine how much the nuclear balance has changed since the Cold War, we ran a computer model of a hypothetical US attack on Russia’s nuclear arsenal using the standard unclassified formulas that defense analysts have used for decades. We assigned US nuclear warheads to Russian targets on the basis of two criteria: the most accurate weapons were aimed at the hardest targets, and the fastest-arriving weapons at the Russian forces that can react most quickly. Because Russia is essentially blind to a submarine attack from the Pacific and would have great difficulty detecting the approach of low-flying stealthy nuclear-armed cruise missiles, we targeted each Russian weapon system with at least one submarine-based warhead or cruise missile. An attack organized in this manner would give Russian leaders virtually no warning.
This simple plan is presumably less effective than Washington’s actual strategy, which the US government has spent decades perfecting. The real US war plan may call for first targeting Russia’s command and control, sabotaging Russia’s radar stations, or taking other preemptive measures—all of which would make the actual US force far more lethal than our model assumes.
And anyway, they’ve lied about every other goddamn thing they’ve ever done.
When pretending to be “muy borracho” so the madcap stereotypical third-world bus driver will slow down and move over, you don’t take the time to explain to the bus that no, really, you’re only projecting an implacable, irrational lethality; honest, this is merely normal, defensive driving, and your priority is a diplomatic solution to a problem everybody on the highway can recognize. —That shit’s for whoever’s sitting white-knuckled in your passenger seat, mentally running the numbers as to how fast you’re going and how quick they can get the door open and how soft the shoulder might be.
34°4'48" N, 49°42'0" E.
Arak is not an old city, though it is the capital of the Markazi Province, one of the oldest settled areas on the Iranian plateau.
That white patch in the upper-right is a sometime lake and salt-flat, if I’m remembering correctly. It’s the Kavir-e Mighan (or Miqan, or Miyqan, or MeiQan, depending), except this page says it’s the Shur Gel. I don’t remember; I do remember seeing plumes of dust rising hundreds of feet into a hard blue-white sky, the only sign of a convoy of trucks driving across it, lost somewhere in the shimmering heat-haze.
There’s a university in Arak, now: the Islamic Azad University of Arak, founded in 1985, some 23,000 students, degrees in drama, agricultural science, Islamic theology, English literature. —Actually, there’s several universities: the Arak University of Medical Sciences, the University of Arak, the Tarbiat Moallem University of Arak, a campus of the Iran University of Science and Technology. I don’t know how old any of those are. I don’t remember any of them; I remember a small town and dust and open sewers and the incongruities of an American-style suburb thrown up away from all that, platted blocks of yellow grass and red-brick houses and the high-rise apartment towers off over that way.
If I’m remembering correctly, the suburbs were at the southern end of Arak; we looked out on the mountains to the south and west. We’d drive up there and go tromping about. I spelled my name in flat rocks with letters taller than myself in the snow, but when we got back in the car and drove back down to our house and I got out and looked back, I couldn’t see them. When we went out into the country for the last day of Nawruz, I remember it looked a lot like this:
And I remember we could look out the window of our car and see farmers threshing wheat the way they had for centuries:
But if nothing changed for centuries, a lot can happen in thirty years.
Thirty miles to the northwest these days there’s a brand-new heavy water production plant. Heavy water is water made with deuterium atoms, rather than simple, light-water hydrogen; it’s used to moderate neutrons in nuclear reactors that run off natural uranium, rather than enriched uranium. Just the ticket if you’re trying to get a nuclear program off the ground.
I haven’t seen the list of 400 possible sites the president plans to attack in Iran, but I can tell you the Arak heavy water facility is on it. I don’t know if it’s hardened enough to require a nuclear bomb. If so, it’ll (probably) be a B61-11, which could generate between 25,000 and 1.5 million tons of radioactive debris—depending on the yield “dialed in”—some thirty miles northwest of a house I lived in, thirty years ago.
If not, it’ll just take a lot of conventional ordnance. —And I know, I know: who cares? The Russians loved their children, too. So did the Iraqis.
I just can’t help but take this personally. I’m only human.
—cross-posted to Sisyphus Shrugs
Mutually assured destruction.
Veteran Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory accompanied me on one of my futile visits to his office, where she spent better than an hour listening to us argue about “circular errors probable” and “MIRV decoys” and the other niceties of nuclear nightmare. When we were leaving, she, who had seen a lot of politicians in her long day, turned to me and said, “I think your guy Cheney is the most dangerous person I’ve ever seen up here.” At that point, I agreed with her.
What I was not thinking about, however, was the technique I once used to avoid being run off the road by Mexican bus drivers, back when their roads were narrower and their bus drivers even more macho. Whenever I saw a bus barrelling down the centerline at me, I would start driving unpredictably, weaving from shoulder to shoulder as though muy borracho. As soon as I started to radiate dangerously low regard for my own preservation, the bus would slow down and move over.
As it turned out, this is more or less what Cheney and his phalanx of Big Stategic Thinkers were doing, if one imagined the Soviet Union as a speeding Mexican bus…
And I wish to God I could believe it was nothing more than this; nothing more than a projection of implacable, irrational lethality, a bit of cakewalk brinksmanship, steely-eyed diplomats pounding tables to distract from the inevitable blink.
Some operations, apparently aimed in part at intimidating Iran, are already under way. American Naval tactical aircraft, operating from carriers in the Arabian Sea, have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions—rapid ascending maneuvers known as “over the shoulder” bombing—since last summer, the former official said, within range of Iranian coastal radars.
Last month, in a paper given at a conference on Middle East security in Berlin, Colonel Sam Gardiner, a military analyst who taught at the National War College before retiring from the Air Force, in 1987, provided an estimate of what would be needed to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. Working from satellite photographs of the known facilities, Gardiner estimated that at least four hundred targets would have to be hit. He added:
I don’t think a U.S. military planner would want to stop there. Iran probably has two chemical-production plants. We would hit those. We would want to hit the medium-range ballistic missiles that have just recently been moved closer to Iraq. There are fourteen airfields with sheltered aircraft. . . . We’d want to get rid of that threat. We would want to hit the assets that could be used to threaten Gulf shipping. That means targeting the cruise-missile sites and the Iranian diesel submarines. . . . Some of the facilities may be too difficult to target even with penetrating weapons. The U.S. will have to use Special Operations units.
One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites.
—Seymor Hersh, “The Iran Plans”
But we cannot trust the people we’ve put in charge of our country. Whether they’re thinking of Iran’s nascent nuclear program as John Perry Barlow’s speeding Mexican bus or not, the fact is they will not blink and they will not falter and they will not turn away.
Can I be crystal fucking clear for a moment? The destruction I mean is not some tit-for-tat exchange of container nukes for bunker-busters. (It’s not like the people we’ve put in charge of our country will miss New York and LA all that much anyway.) —What I mean is if we do this thing, the audiences of tomorrow will cheer as their pulp heroes bravely square off toe-to-toe with implacable American stormtroopers. What I mean is, there is no difference in this world or the next between dropping enough conventional and nuclear ordnance to take out 400 suspected sites and flying a couple of passenger jets into office buildings on a cloudless autumn day. Either is so monstrous as to be beyond any possible, rational measurement or comparison.
Look! See! How good we have gotten, at fighting dragons!
Shorter 2007:
Because we had to nuke Iran, we drove what was left of this country completely into the ditch.
