Pouty Little Girl Watch - From yesterday's hearings:

LIEBERMAN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Secretary, the behavior by Americans at the prison in Iraq is, as we all acknowledge, immoral, intolerable and un-American. It deserves the apology that you have given today and that have been given by others in high positions in our government and our military.

I cannot help but say, however, that those who were responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001, never apologized. Those who have killed hundreds of Americans in uniform in Iraq working to liberate Iraq and protect our security have never apologized.

Joe. I'm not raising Mrs. Jihadi's kids.

Daily Reminder to my Fellow Citizens - We torture people. As a matter of policy.

This isn't about news cycles. This is about our self-respect. Leonard Dickens, a year ago:

Torture is the canary in the coal mine. When your society starts seriously talking about torture, it means you've fucked up and become repressive.

Never Mind The link code on the post that was here is terminally hosed. Pay it no mind.

Poetry Friday - (Every now and then, someone expresses regret that I stopped posting poems here. Color me appeased. The one below is hardcore meta-poetry, based loosely on an actual conversation between my two favorite 20th Century poets, who, naturally, didn't like each other all that much.)

The Subject Was Bric-a-Brac

Frost and Stevens at Key West sit looking
neither out far, nor in deep, nor at nothing.
Nor at each other, save in sidelong glances.
Other bathers sprawl on other chaises
further down the sloping sands. Somebody's
uncle seems to try to read the shadows
of fluttering gulls, while from the trees, the tone
of some bird's song is stubbornly its own.

A sad man gives no quarter to another
merely for also being sad. With a
nod of his massive head, Stevens says, "Robert,
your trouble is your poems are full of subjects."
Frost works his brow, deepening deep cracks.
"Well, your damn poems are full of bric-a-brac."
They rest. There has been attack and counterattack.
Below the beach, in ceaseless repetitions,
the surf gutters and crests like reputations.

© 1998, 2004 Jim Henley

Music Notes - The new Mary Chapin Carpenter songs available from the Morning Edition episode page sound pretty good - less overproduced than typical "radio country," even less so than some of her own past hits, but still full-sounding. ("Grand Central Station" is pretty stark.)

Transuranic Heavy Elements May Not Be Used Where There Is Life - Unwinding tonight by checking out Sappher & Steel websites. I've never seen the somewhat legendary British science fantasy series about two (more or less) time policemen, but it's sounded intriguing. Now I learn there is finally a complete Region 1 DVD set. Via the sapphire & steel q&a site I discovered The Anorak's Guide to the series, and - comics bloggers note - the Look-In comic strip adaptation archives. The comics are not exactly up to code, they have their moments. Johanna might appreciate Sapphire's agency - Steel is as likely to call on her to save him as the reverse.

Stop Thinking Some More! - I've updated yesterday's popular item on the "Protecting" "Children" from Peer-to-Peer "Pornography" Act of 2003.

PSA for Masochists - Comes today an e-mail informing me that

The Democratic National Convention Committee is pleased to announce that for the first time ever, bloggers will be offered Convention access through the official media credentialing process.

Lemme know how it goes, everyone. I'll be sitting this one out. If you've got more of a sense of adventure, e-mail Periodicals@saa.senate.govor apply through the DNC Press Gallery.

Hm. You know who would be good at blogging the Democratic Convention? Megan McArdle. She might even enjoy it. But I think I'd like to send Brooke Oberwetter, because I bet sending her would piss her off, and she does her best writing when she's pissed. Not that she isn't a terrifc writer when she's not pissed, but there's that extra gear she has. Also, we should NOT send Josh Marshall, just to mess with people's heads.

Stop Thinking! It's for the children! Protecting Children from Peer-to-Peer Pornography Act of 2003 makes peer-to-peer file trading illegal:

(a) ACTS PROHIBITED- It is unlawful for any person to distribute peer-to-peer file trading software, or to authorize or cause peer-to-peer file trading software to be distributed by another person, in interstate commerce in a manner that violates the regulations prescribed under subsection (b)(2).

Still in committee, from what I can tell.

UPDATE: Several readers point out that the proposed law doesn't outright ban distributing peer-to-peer file trading software. Instead it seems to do two things:

1) Try to make the process of publishing or installing P2P programs as onerous as possible. For instance, developers would have to verify (somehow) that people installing their product were over 18 or had parental permission.
2) Force P2P developers to "self-incriminate" by including a message with their installation package identifying it as the sort of thing child pornographers use.
3) There's some language in there that implies that developers of legacy P2P programs could face ex post facto trouble for not being in compliance with the law after it passes - stuff about needing to provided uninstall directions and such.

The verification provisions (point one above) are especially suggestive. They don't just burden developers by requiring them to keep records that freeware distributors normally can't be bothered with. They mean that the distributors will have a handy list of personal information on all their users. The next thing that will happen is that the RIAA will demand access to the lists, just as they've taken ISPs to court to get their user info. Taking it for granted that all the stuff about "child pornography" in the bill has the same function as a hypnotists swaying penlight, this last is surely the purpose of the act.

Also, reader William Herold says much fun can be had replacing the words "peer-to-peer system" with "printed paper" in the text of the act. But I would caution you that he conveyed this message in words, which have themselves been used in the distribution of kiddie porn.

O Save Us From Ourselves, Caring Local Government! - Someone died in Beloit. Naturally, someone wants to pass a law now. (Via Mrs. Offering.)

"I have no idea what a Baath Party is, but I like the sound of it" - IRAQI GENERAL GETS 'QUEER EYE' MAKEOVER:

In explaining the Joint Chiefs' misgivings about General Saleh, General Myers said, "We felt that giving military authority to a gentleman who could basically take Saddam's date to the prom without her suspecting anything was, under the circumstances, ill advised."

From the Borowitz Report.

Advice to a ProphetPoet I got an nice e-mail from a woman who has been writing poems and getting compliments on them from friends. She wanted advice on submitting to publishers and entering contests. I put together some inevitably personal thoughts on the matter for her and figured I'd run it here. Apologies to those for whom this stuff is old hat. I've been out of the poetry submitting game for some years now, but from what I hear things haven't changed significantly:

Hi __________: I'll advise you the best I can, but keep in mind that any advice I give will be necessarily limited in perspective.

First, the brute truth is that publication as such is not hard to achieve. The country is full of literally thousands of poetry journals, some highly selective, some not. If you get a copy of Poet's Market you'll have access to addresses and submission guidelines.

I have never seen the sense in entering contests myself. Quite a number of them are outright scams - you pay to enter and gain nothing worth winning for winning them. (Ginger Stampley informs me that Metafilter has started a thread to track these.) They exist to enrich the contest administrators. In many of these, your "prize" is to be published in an anthology that you will be invited to buy to see your work. If you should be so silly as to do so, you'll find your poem scrunched up among several per page.

The thing is, the "respectable" contests by "real" poetry publishers are eerily similar. They exist to raise funds for the publication itself - saving the publishers the bother of putting out a journal people actually want to buy or finding a patron who believes in the journal's mission - the odds are poor and if you win you . . . don't actually get a lot.

So I recommend skipping the contests and just submitting to magazines. Poet's Market at least used to code its entries from Roman numeral I-IV. I for very open to new contributors, often taking much or even all of what they receive; II for somewhat selective - your average university literary journal or independent publication comes in here, typically taking less than 10% of submissions; III is a "limited market", one that runs relatively few poems, rejects 99.9% of what it gets offered, tends to publish only well-known poets etc; IV for "specialty market," your magazines that run just baseball poems, or only science fiction poetry or poems about living with dwarfism.

Poet's Market is only so useful because you can't really get the flavor of most publications. It's a good idea to go to your local literary center or university library or funky newsstand and browse/buy interesting-looking publications. The ones that interest you in PM that you can't find, you should order a sample copy of. This gets into money very quickly, particularly if you are young and on a liberal arts grad's income, or older with mouths to feed.

Now ask yourself the following questions: Who are my favorite contemporary poets? How does my work honestly compare to theirs? Where do they publish their poems? What are my favorite literary journals?

It is possible that the answers to teh above questions are I don't have any; Not applicable; Still not applicable; and I don't have any. If that is true for you, then you should stick to submitting to the Category I journals while you explore the world of contemporary poetry, or even delay attempting publication entirely. Really. You might also want to start with local reading series, to meet fellow poets and hear what else is out there.

Really the rewards of publishing poetry tend to pale beside the rewards of writing it. I realize the above probably doesn't sound encouraging, but it's not an encouraging endeavor. This is true for good poets as well. A friend of mine has published two books and considers himself grotesquely undervalued. The fact is he's correct. However, it is absolutely true that, as the late Judson Jerome said, if you can't get your poems published, it means you ran out of stamps. There is SOME publication out there for everybody.

True and Righteous Altogether - So Tacitus says that

[The American Civil War] established for good that the United States, as a fundamentally revolutionary power which, by dint of its founding principles, assumes a universal application of those principles, assumes the right to invade, conquer, and forcibly reorder unjust societies that otherwise pose no real threat. Which is to say, in that era, the American South.

Accepting that, in an important sense, the American Civil War really was about slavery - because in an important sense it really was - the claim still betrays a serious misunderstanding.

It's a staple of pointless arguments about the Civil War to distinguish whether it was about "national unity"/"independence" OR slavery. Ask anyone but a committed abolitionist in the North and he'd have told you National Unity. Ask most Southerners of the time and they'd have told you the flip: independence. But you'd have Alexander Stephens bragging that "the great truth" on which the Confederacy was founded was the inferiority of blacks. And on the side of the North, the causes of Union and Abolition were united in the person of Lincoln himself.

While Lincoln disclaimed the label of "Abolitionist" for most of his career, his grand theory, laid out in the "House Divided" speech, was that the Union would either sunder itself or, failing that, become all slave or all free. Given that the national demographics were tipping to the point that the "Slave Power" would no longer control national politics that meant, by Lincoln's own logic, that Union became Abolition. So while early in the war Lincoln spoke exclusively the language of Union, he surely knew the implications of his theories.

The actual principle Lincoln established by force was that slavery was an unworthy basis for "one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another." Indeed, Lincoln and official federal policy rejected the idea that the South constituted a separate people ("society" in Tac's formulation) entirely. (Count the stars on the Union flag during this time.) Lincoln didn't have a program to reorder Brazil (still slave). He held up despotic societies like Russia as bogeymen to frighten his countrymen into right conduct, but never gave any indication throughout his career of wishing to contravene the principle of "the friends of liberty everywhere, but the guardians only of our own." Lincoln viewed the American Civil War as an entirely American affair - something to be sorted out among us - the White Southron and the Negro Slave were us as much as Lincoln was. He opposed the one foreign war of his day. At his most officially melancholy, he wrote

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

This is not the righteousness of the crusader. This is the trepidation of the wicked, informed by a sense of sin. "American slavery," not Southern slavery. It is North as well as South "by whom the offense came." On Lincoln's view, all Americans had a duty to expiate an American sin - its Original sin. This is as far as you can get from the idea of a righteous America remaking the globe.

Reader mail. Matt Hogan:

Much of your points about freedom from foreigners I think reflects the fact that neolibertarians remember Locke but not Hobbes. The two are a team. Locke is the best nature of a social contract, Hobbes is the social contract. Without the latter, the former is impossible. Germany and Japan worked because they had powerful internal social contracts which enabled them to surrender and rebuild (the emperor authroized surrender, the Fuehrers successor authorized and other parts of the more normal social contract -- literate cooperative society kicked in). Iraqis do not have that and cannot be forced to. The neo-s have locked in Locke and hobbled Hobbes.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden:

Regarding that Tacitus post, I must have missed the bit where Saddam Hussein's Iraq declared itself entitled to deploy armed Federal agents to arrest fugitives from Baathist persecution in American cities, and compel the cooperation of local authorities in bundling them back to Baghdad.

I also must have missed the part where they declared that they owned American defense facilities in the American homeland, and commenced armed attacks on them.

So yeah, the invasion of Iraq was _just like_ the American Civil War, an expression of the American idea that it's "right to invade, conquer, and forcibly reorder unjust societies that otherwise pose no real threat." Why didn't I see that before?

Okay, sarcasm aside, Tacitus's basic error is encoded in his assertion that "the American people as a whole accept the Union conquest of the South as right and just: some because of an ideological belief in the integrity of our national territory, but most because of slavery." Arguing about whether the Civil War was "about" or "because of" slavery is a staple of Usenet tomfoolery, and of course in most reasonable senses it was. But what Tac is glossing over is that the precipitating causes were _aggression by the South against the North_. The North never had the option of taking a lassez-faire approach; the basic logic of slavery compelled the South, for pretty much the entire first half of the nineteenth century, to wage a continuing and aggressive fight to compel the rest of the country to cooperate in the maintenance of its slave society. (To say nothing of its expansion, westward and southward.) The idea that the Civil War was an aggressive and unprovoked attack by North against South is a staple of Confederate ideology, and it's clever of Tac to try to re-deploy it as justification for the idea that we ought to go out conquering foreign countries in order to democratize them, but it's bullshit when it comes from neo-Confederate gravy eaters and it's bullshit when it comes from a basically good egg like Tac.

I suppose now I'm going to get it from Myles Kantor and Gene Callahan if they still read this blog, but there you have it.

A Quickie, as it Were - The joys of working in accounting at the beginning of the month. All I got for you is the best headline ever, via Radley and Jacob Grier. I need to get to this fascinating and, in many ways, very mistaken Tacitus item when I get the chance, but it ain't gonna be tonight. Right quick: No, I don't share the usual movement-libertarian abomination of Abraham Lincoln or idolizing of the Confederacy. But there's a lot more to say about the matter.

Tortured Thoughts - A couple of Abu Ghraib quickies:

1) Let's not confuse the pictures with the story. There may have been worse abuses that didn't get photographed. That's the thrust of Seymour Hersh's New Yorker report on Abu Ghraib, which quotes the official investigation into the prison.

2) So far, we hear a lot about how the abuse was the work of only "six soldiers," or, as a fallback, a miniscule percentage of our troops. To get an idea of the impact within Iraq, though, we have to ask the question from the opposite end: What percentage of detainees have been abused? If most detainees have been processed through Abu Ghraib and most of them passed through the, um, care of the "six soldiers," then the impact is huge.

3) There's been a lot of criticism of the decision to release the pictures. The idea is that they're inflammatory, hurt the war effort and so on. There's no question whatsoever that they're having a huge impact on Arab (and non-Arab) opinion outside Iraq. I'm sure they have an effect within Iraq too, but it's likely that the facts of the abuse itself have had more. Iraq is not full of warbloggers who only believe bad news about the occupation when they have both unimpeachable documentary evidence in front of them and an admission from the White House or the Pentagon. It's full of the families and friends of the people piled naked in those pictures. To the extent any of the abused have been released, their stories have been believed where it matters, on the ground in Iraq, long before we heard about it back here. To the extent that any orderlies or other local workers at Abu Ghraib have described what they've seen or surmised, they've been believed; same for the wives and sisters who have managed to get word of what their men have undergone. The only people who didn't know what was going on were us.

Why it Matters - Following up on the item below. What, then, is the value of national independence, even of crummy nations? In the absence of independence, you have, of course, dependence. Where you have dependence, you have contempt on the one side and resentment on the other. Actually, you have both on both sides. Everything from American abuse of Iraqi prisoners to Iraqi abuse of American corpses flows from the fundamental asymmetry of the relationship. The only thing that can overcome the dynamic is love - real love, the kind that leads a wife to wipe her paraplegic husband's ass day in and day out for a decade, or a father to bear his daughter's clinginess at three and a half. And love can be too weak. Why don't you just die already? we find ourselves thinking at the shriveled, demanding wretch in the wheelchair who was a cherished grandparent. I can't take any more, we mutter, closing the door on the drug-addicted boyfriend we've given chance on chance.

Pity won't do it. If anything, pity will simply put you into the situations from which contempt and resentment flower. This is the kind of thing that, in other contexts, conservatives and libertarians not only understand, but take as central.

We do not love the Iraqis. We never have, nor they, us. Such love as either party has had has been for a dream of what the other might be. Add to contempt and resentment the fury of disappointment.

Last Words of William Wallace - At Crooked Timber, Kieran Healy marvels that

More generally, it seems to me that American war hawks continue to show little ability to put themselves in the position of the occupied Iraqis and ask how they might respond themselves in such circumstances. I find this odd because you'd think that a strong tradition of personal liberty and local autonomy backed in part by private gun ownership would predispose you to have that sort of sympathy.

The problem, I think, is a confusion of not just terms but our own (American) traditions. "Freedom!" cried Wallace as he died, in the movie at least. But what did he mean by that. His Scotland was clan-based, with a system of hereditary rulerships. By "freedom" the historical Wallace could not have meant everything we do in the sense of individual liberty and the circulation of elites. No, he had to have been thinking of freedom's other meaning: local independence from foreign control.

In one sense of the term, Iraq is "free" if individual Iraqis may speak, assemble, worship and work as they choose, select their leaders without coercion and remain secure in their persons and property from arbitrary search, seizure, arrest and execution. In the other sense of the term, Iraq is free so long as it is not ruled by an outside power.

The thing is, the American revolutionary tradition gives weight to both conceptions of freedom. Georgian Britain was far from the greatest despot of its day. The case has been made that, if anything, pre-revolutionary colonists were less burdened by Royal oppression than citizens of equivalent class in metropolitan England. And as has been pointed out, it was not even certain that the Founding generation would choose republicanism as the new nation's organizing principle.

So the Revolutionary generation was motivated at least as much by freedom from "foreign" control as freedom from individual oppression. If anything, they viewed freedom from foreign control as a prerequisite to guaranteeing individual liberty. I think that's the aspect of the American tradition that neolibertarians have lost touch with. While the type of society they (and I) would like to see in the Arab Middle East accords with American values, the method they have chosen - what Diana Moon calls "forcing them to take a gigantic, neverending aptitude test [in civics]" - is not. It is the American tradition's antithesis.

People Not Born Yesterday include TalkLeft, which notes "We have been reporting on alleged Iraqi prisoner abuse for a year" and provides links to the proof.

Helpful Pointer - Matthew Yglesias readers looking for discussion of the "Red State World" phenomenon on this site can find it in

The Barber of Beirut
A Grand Strategy for the Rest
Late Night Mail to a Defeatist

"Barber of Beirut" contains the most sustained argument.

Do the Math - It takes four sentences for Glenn Reynolds to start whining about John Kerry in his attempt to condemn the Abu Ghraib abuses, not counting two Kim Du Toit sentences blockquoted. Sentence three manages to state forthrightly that "it should be dealt with very, very harshly."

Sentence two assures us that this is "not the same as Saddam's torture" for reasons that, bluntly stated, have yet to be demonstrated. (The US government "renders" terror suspects to foreign governments to be tortured. The six guards were supervised by military and civilian intelligence personnel. Their superiors are under investigation. The Pentagon screened The Battle of Algiers, in which the film's most charismatic character justifies the use of torture in counter-insurgency, last summer. The Post later quoted one of LTC Sassaman's soldiers comparing his unit's treatment of the locals explicitly to Colonel Mathieu in the movie - this in connection with the investigation into the drowning of Zeyad's cousin.)

And sentence one simply introduces the Du Toit quote, which is that he hopes "these assholes go to jail" because "when the Islamist pricks do this kind of thing to our soldiers, I want to be able to go after them with a vengeful spirit."

Excuse me, Officer. I speak Jive, so I can say that the Du Toit quote, properly translated, is not as bad as it sounds.

But have you noticed how much more forthright actual soldiers and veterans who blog have been in expressing their outrage? In addition to the ones I've linked in prior items (Tacitus, Sgt. Stryker), see Arkhangel and LT SMASH. Now compare with civilian Daniel Drezner, normally among the cream of conservative bloggers, who devotes most of his passion to resenting that Arabs have gotten indignant about it.

UPDATE: Tacitus defends Daniel Drezner. (Glenn Reynolds is, apparently, on his own.) Drezner himself adds an absolutely full-throated condemnation to his original item (you already have the link in the preceding paragraph), writing 'This may have been one of those times in which I let my "mild nationalism" (as Matt put it) get the better of me and, as a result, compose a post with too much truculence and too little penitence in it.'

Tacitus writes "Let's be honest and declare that what happened at Abu Ghraib, while awful, was a mere fraction of the horrors that go on in Saudi, Egyptian, Syrian, and yes, old Iraqi prisons." Absolutely, let's. And prisons in non-muslim nations too: Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Thailand, Israel, China, even the Philippines - all countries that have been credibly accused or admitted using torture in interrogation or punishment. I do not doubt that the Arab countries Tacitus lists can hold their own or excel any of the others, though. We are not as bad.

Yet. I'll keep saying this. My question is not "Are we as bad as Saddam's Iraq?" but "Are we getting more like it or less like it?" We might never get as bad as Saddam's Iraq or even squalid old Egypt, second-largest recipient of US aid in the world before Iraqi reconstruction began. But we can be much better than those countries and yet a disgrace to ourselves.

Tacitus also writes that "We are repelled by the barbarity of our soldiers' actions because we see these things as wrongs in themselves: universally repugnant and immoral," while Arab public reaction contains a large component of "right and wrong not as things in themselves, but as functions of who does what to whom." I'm sure this is at least partially true of Arab public opinion. Maybe even greatly true, though both he and Drezner seem mainly to be assuming it to be the case. (One of Drezner's commenters pointed out that the clerics of Fallujah condemned the mutilation of the dead contractors' corpses contemporaneously.)

But here in our own house, I'm not sure that "we" feel as strongly about the matter as Tac thinks. Certainly he, much to his credit, sees these things as wrong in themselves. But Tac is, in his way, as odd a duck politically as I. Once you get outside the nicer corners of the blogosphere (say, a certain Rottweiler's site), you start to see quite a bit of Leninist morality on our side. But see Kevin Drum, Matthew Yglesias and Diana Moon on the real public reaction to My Lai 4. I've seen some dodgy "man on the street" newspaper quotes too this weekend, but I'm too tired to go finding them now.

Nevertheless, let me be clear: American political culture is healthier than Arab political culture. Let's keep it that way.