Tar Baby on the Tigris - What we haven't been able to accomplish in Iraq so far: quell the largely Sunni resistance to the occupation and transition. What we haven't been able to do it with: 150,000 troops from the best-equipped army in the world; helicopter gunships; fixed wing aircraft; satellites. What a Shiite-led Iraqi government would not have if it tried to quell the largely Sunni resistance: 150,000 troops; helicopter gunships; fixed-wing aircraft; satellites. We're providing them with jeeps and rifles. The Iraqi defense forces as currently conceived and budgeted will lack anything remotely like the firepower necessary to conquer the Sunni resistance with even the most heavy-handed of tactics. Contrariwise, the Baath-inflected (and infected) Sunni insurgency lacks the firepower that enabled Saddam Hussein's regime to impose its will on the restive Shiite and Kurdish regions (pre-safe area era). For this reason, Juan Cole writes that

I fear I think the US is stuck in Iraq. Sistani clearly fears a Sunni Arab coup, as well, and this is one reason he has not acted forcefully to end the military occupation, which he deeply dislikes.

The prospect is two (or three) sides slugging it out in a war whose dynamism and technological sophistication make the Iran-Iraq War look like Starship Troopers. Imagine two suicide bombers jumping each other and trying to be the first one to blow both of them up.

Am I cheering you up yet?

Since we can't shut down the Sunni-led resistance ourselves, and if the mass of Shiites turn violently against us we're looking at a Big Sandy Dunkirk, the question is whence the best or least bad outcome comes. What's the cause for hope, beyond mindless "stay the course" invocations.

I'm thinking it comes from the foreign fighters. From all reports, even a lot of our Iraqi-born enemies are coming to hate the "people from away" (to use a Maine-ism). Absent a continuing US presence in Iraq, the Monotheism and Holy War crowd becomes the sole focus of nationalist and parochial resentment. Enough to inspire Sunni-Shiite cooperation against them? One can hope. It's not much of a hope, but it's what I got.

When Would You Like to Reschedule? - Anas Shallal of Iraqi Americans for Peaceful Alternatives wants to postpone the elections scheduled for this month in his birthplace:

When I speak to relatives in Iraq, they seem far more concerned about the security of their families than the elections. They say the situation is quickly spiraling into chaos. Election officials are being killed, threatened, and kidnapped daily and the entire Electoral Commission in Anbar province west and north of the capital has resigned.

True enough. But what reason is there to believe that delaying the elections would calm things down? Shallal writes

Those who demand a delay are asking: What’s the rush? Iraqis have waited over 50 years to have an election. Certainly they can wait six more months. Allowing for a six-month delay may not solve the security issues or help the candidates to get their message out, but it can sure go a long way in providing a spirit of cooperation and reconciliation among the competing political and religious factions. It will also save lives. Such a gesture on the part of the interim government can be a catalyst for healing.

Or a catalyst for rousing the Shiite majority to armed revolt. Nor is the notion that the "spirit of cooperation and reconciliation" would be all that cooperative or reconciled, or things all that much calmer in the runup to a rescheduled election six months hence.

There is no doubt the election is going to have huge problems, probably bigger problems than any other course of action except every other one conceivable. Remember that the first elections are only the start of a process of putting a real constitutional democracy in place. All these elections get us to is a constitutional convention. The convention's successful conclusion finally brings on an elected government. And needless to say the most important election comes even later than that: it's the one in which an incumbent loser peacefully cedes office to a victorious opponent. Only then do you know you have a real democracy.

I can't see anything in a delay of this month's vote that makes the process more likely to succeed. Granted, I don't expect the process to succeed. But I suspect the chances of failure are marginally less the sooner the election takes place. And if it's going to fail anyway, we might as well be quick about it.

What if Gene Wolfe Wrote a Space Opera While Thinking of Other Things? Answer: You'd get something very much like the new Battlestar Galactica. By no means am I condemning the show out of hand. I like the hallucinatory aspects, and the traitorous doctor's obsession with religion. Heck, I watched the whole thing, even though I intended to take in only about fifteen minutes for the sake of sociability with Mrs. Offering. As always in these things, the danger is that the creators mismanage the balance between bafflement and revelation. Who is the femme fatale blond chick? Is Boomer's sojourn on Caprica a flashback or an out-of-body experience? I'm not completely taken in by the show's design - I like retro touches in fashion in SF, but phones with cords? But I'll give it at least as much of a chance as I've given 24.

Full disclosure: I was decidedly not a fan of the original show. I have never thought of camp as fun. You of course need to know that there's a Battlestar Galactica blog.

A Fanboy's Update - Oh yeah. Blogger emeritus Hesiod tips me to the Sin City trailer. Also, Brian Linse reminds me to mention Bags and Boards, Variety Magazine's comics blog.

Riverdale PD? Hm. That's not quite right.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Yeah (forestalling e-mail from pnh), now that I reread it,

One of them has just gotten married to a young guy who is apparently a regular character - it takes her awhile to figure this out when she wakes up in the morning, because they were both drunk, but she decides she's happy about it.

does sound like it takes her awhile to figure out that her groom is a regular character more than it takes her awhile to figure out she just got married. Bloggers don't have editors!

A Fanboy's Quickies - Gutterninja has moved. From his site I learn that the other two installments in Warren Ellis' Apparat line came out today. The first two, Quit City and Frank Ironwine came out last week. They were much the most fun I'd had with adventure comics in quite some time. The high concept, to quote Ellis, is

Years ago, I sat down and thought about what adventure comics might've looked like today if superhero comics hadn't have happened. If, in fact, the pulp tradition of Weird Thrillers had jumped straight into comics form without mutating into the superhero subgenre we know today. . . .

Five imaginary first issues of imaginary series from an imaginary line of comics released on an imaginary fifth week.

Quit City is the story of an Air Heroine who retires from her Blackhawk-like group (think the video game Crimson Skies if Blackhawk rings no bells) to return to her hometown of Oakland. The art, by Laurenn McCubbin, is gorgeous, black and white with a lot of grey tones and something of - I swear - a Sterankoesque design sense. (Though her figures are far more fluid.) She gives our heroine, Emma Pierson, a big, open working-class face and a female cop's body. She manipulates her tones and angles in the climactic section so that I had a vague sense of viewing most of the action as through a door peephole. It works. All of the characters are female except for one ghost, and you get the kind of visual individuation of the women that is beyond a lot of the industry's male artists. The story is enjoyable, with echoes of Shawn Colvin's "Sunny Came Home" but without the psychosis. The art is an absolute treat.

Frank Ironwine is the story of a New York City cop. Stop me if you've heard this one before: he drinks hard to cope with the enormities his job confronts him with, and he's taking on a new, young partner dubious of his reputation and methods. You get an intriguing double murder case that, I'm pretty sure, has a gap in its chain of evidence, but I'd have to reread closely to confirm it - my initial impression was that not only does the reader not get all the evidence necessary to reach the conclusion, the protagonist didn't either. What Ellis really wants to do is rhapsodize about how Manhattan is "built on corpses" as far back as its history can be traced. Ironwine is a very skald of murder. (No, this ain't so original neither.) Here again, come for the story, but stay for the art. Carla Speed McNeil of Finder fame draws the title. Her work makes a fun contrast with McCubbin. McCubbin is all grey tones and crooked-but-unbroken lines. She lifts her pen from the page only when she must. Speed McNeil is a scratcher. She loves hatch marks, wrinkles and claustrophobic white space set off with patches of solid black. And as every Finder reader knows, she loves loves loves loves loves to draw cops. She was certainly the artist to draw this one. She makes Ironwine's figure a symphony of rumples. Columbo looks like Don Johnson next to this guy. His young partner, Karen de Groot, in her white pant suit and cropped blonde hair looks startlingly smooth next to him, like a transfer from the Riverdale PD. She has a thankless role in the story - she's there to slowly grasp the wisdom of the sage - but her poses and facial expressions make it clear that she's got the gravitas and just needs the seasoning. She's not a boob. She's not even drawn that way.

McNeil's panel and page designs aren't as flashy as McCubbin's, but that doesn't mean she's not artful about it. A standing detective's head and shoulders cocked at the same angle as those of the supine corpse in the next panel. The door frame that seems to weigh down the cop's neck echoes the couch that props up the corpse's. Down the same page, the detective's shoulder line in the lower left panel parallels the fireplace mantel in the lower right. From such correspondences are unities built. This title won't change the way you look at life, but you will enjoy looking.

Haven't seen the other two titles yet. In the meantime, the gutterninja link offers opinions on them.

Jeez, did I say Quickies? Let's see what we can manage.

New Avengers #2. I think this will be my last one. The art is dark and confusing. Worse, don't Bendis and Marvel make a fairly basic error in constructing the team? Superhero teams are supposed to comprise characters whose powers complement each other, who each fill their own niche. Here we have Captain America, a super-strong acrobat; Spider-Man, a super-strong acrobat; Daredevil, a humanly strong acrobat; Luke Cage; a strongish non-acrobat; Jessica Drew, Spider-Woman, who is not so strong and, in addition to being acrobatic, flies; Wolverine, a tough acrobat with claws; Iron Man; and, uh, whatsisname, the Thor substitute. (Did I miss anybody?) Three to five of those guys - Cap, Spidey, Cage, Wolverine and Daredevil - are trying to fill at most two niches. More like a niche and a half. Perhaps not coincidentally, the fight scenes are kind of . . . boring. And Spider-Man spends all his time getting the shit kicked out of him.

Strangers in Paradise #70. I never read this book nor much about it, though I suspect, it having gotten to issue 70, that everybody else already has. Terry Moore writes and draws. The main characters are a trio of Las Vegas showgirls with appealingly eccentric personalities. One of them has just gotten married to a young guy who is apparently a regular character - it takes her awhile to figure this out when she wakes up in the morning, because they were both drunk, but she decides she's happy about it. Moore's black and white art is different yet from McCubbin's and Speed McNeil's. He favors smooth lines, minimal shading, no tones and as little black as he can get away with - perfect for conveying light and space in the desert scenes. His favorite thing in the world appears to be eyebrows; the eyebrows in this book have better action scenes than any of the heroes in New Avengers #2. Importantly, he does not seem to condescend to his protagonists, for all that he walks right up to the line demarcating appealing eccentricity from oh give me a break, but then I don't suppose you could get through 70 issues of characters you look down on. I'll keep reading.

For more reviews, see Marc at the Curmudgeons.

A Fanboy's Quote of the Day comes from Johanna Draper Carlson:

The numbers that DC sees as abject failure are pretty darn good when you're not supporting a list of over a dozen vice-presidents.

Hm. Is DC Comics the NHL of the industry, carrying an infrastructure and paying salaries the market just doesn't justify? Could be. Some companies go for "lean and mean;" others just manage the "mean" part.

Deep Breaths - I thought one of the smaller but nevertheless regrettable casualties of the atrocities of September 11, 2001 was Andrew Sullivan's talent. Simply put, the man became a hysteric. He's still easily overheated - John Cole, who ought to know a hot reactor when he sees one, has made a hobby lately of pointing this out. But he may, may be calming down from the "nuke somebody, anybody!" days. He's got a very good item showing how the 2002 "torture memo's" relaxation of interrogation standards for high-level al Qaeda detainees filtered out from those rarefied confines into the military at large and low-level detainees in Iraq and elsewhere.

It put me in mind of Micha Ghertner's argument last month that supporting torture wasn't necessarily an anti-libertarian position, particularly for contractarian, pragmatist libertarians. I thought Micha was obviously wrong for [James] Buchananite reasons. Allow certain government agencies to torture because their mission is so important, and license to torture becomes a bureaucratic status symbol. Other agencies angle to get the same authority because it ratifies their own importance. Those charged with ever less urgent tasks than finding ticking bombs come down with torture envy. Pretty soon some Congressman is urging us to torture drunk drivers, and are you saying the deaths of X Americans a year is not important enough for, ahem, "us" to do what it takes to save lives?

As libertarians we surely believe, whether we fancy ourselves "principled" or "pragmatic," rights-based or contractarian, that any power a government can use, it will misuse. Of course, I've come to doubt that there is such a thing as a "pragmatic libertarian," after years of thinking that I was one.

Doing the Math - Gary Farber decries the heartlessness of the Tennessee government's decision to cut back its ambitious and costly TennCare program in a sarcasm-laden attack on the "cruel and indifferent" decision.

WHY ARE WE WILLING TO HELP THOSE HIT BY A TSUNAMMI of water, but not a tsunammi of health, of their own body's failure?

He quotes excerpts from the Tennessean on the impact the program cuts will have on current adult beneficiaries. He skipped this part:

The cuts will radically slow the rate of TennCare's projected cost increases. With the changes, the program is expected to cost Tennessee taxpayers an extra $75 million next fiscal year — rather than the $650 million extra that was expected without the changes.

The population of Tennessee was 5.7 million in 2000, according to the population-averse NPG.org. The extra $575 million would, according to the Tennessean article, be funded one third by the state of Tennessee itself and two thirds by the federal government. The state share comes to not quite $34 per person or, roughly, $135 per family of four.

One way to look at this is that that's not even two and a half bucks per family per week, a can of soda for everyone and you shouldn't drink that much soda. Another way to look at it is that Gary doesn't want everybody to foot the bill, only "those who can spare it, in return for the benefits we've enabled them to earn and enjoy." Is that half of Tennessee's population? A quarter? Raise your per-family cost accordingly.

But there's yet another way to look at it. The Tennessean has a graph. The graph gives no reason to think that next year's $650 million increase would have been the last one. It suggests, rather, that the program would keep increasing at roughly the same rate for the foreseeable future. So the extra $135 over 2004 taxes this year becomes an extra $270 over 2004 taxes next year, an extra $540 in four years and so on. Again, if you have a percentage of Tennessee taxpayers that you (not "we") have decided can spare it, multiply those numbers accordingly. Then consider that TennCare's costs have "nearly tripled since 1993," again per the Tennessean article Gary found, from $800 million to $2.7 billion dollars. Further consider that the Tennessee government provides other services: I imagine some of them may be increasing in cost too.

There's another wrinkle. Gary clearly believes that "we" should be providing a TennCare-level program nationwide. In that case, we couldn't really divide those individual and family cost shares by a third on the assumption that the money was "free," out of state money that only cruel libertarians would resent forking over because the amount would be so small. The equivalent of the entire cost would be borne by Tennessee because other states would be paying that kind of money for their own programs. (Or the federal government would be paying for all states. Same difference.) In that case, next year's projected increase over 2004 taxes would be $135 per resident, $570 per family, with like increases as far as the Magic Eightball can escry. Again, if you want to tax some subset of the state's residents for that, multiply accordingly.

I am not comfortable contemplating the real consequences to the people Tennessee will be tossing off the rolls. I am mindful that successive tax increases of the scale required to keep TennCare going at the current level would have their own negative consequences and damage lives in less visible ways (as through lost jobs, or less funding for prosaic government responsibilities like police and road upkeep), but I read the stories and still feel guilty. We have insurance in this house, but medical expenses can still be a worry. We have aging parents facing their own cost problems. Either my wife or I could find ourselves out of work in short order, things being things. (And I understand that medical expense issues are far keener yet for Gary than they are for us.) But we also don't have a boundless claim on other people's money. Strangely, in his own comment thread, Gary writes

Alternatively, we impose a middle man. We choose together to elect, via fair mechanism, a state and nation. We pick representatives to, ya know, represent us. And to vote on how we choose to give and take money from ourselves, along with choosing benefits that enable us to earn and have that money, and without which the laws of our chosen country, we'd have no such money -- said money wouldn't exist! -- and then we tax those who can spare it, in return for the benefits we've enabled them to earn and enjoy.

I think Gary's "we" and "ourselves" here cover a multitude of sins. And while it may be true that "a state and nation" enable "us" to have money, it's at least as true that without the productive activity of individuals and voluntary groups state and nation themselves could not exist, nor could the benefits "we" use them to bestow on "ourselves." But leave that aside. His proposal is exactly what Tennessee has done. It chose representatives to vote and choose benefits, and said representatives have decided that they can't take that much more money for that many more benefits. This isn't any kind of libertarianism. It's the social democracy he calls for in action.

Ding Dong. Witch Dead. - Of local interest only, but wheezing-fraud FM station WHFS today switched, with no notice, from "alternative" to spanish-language. Teresa Wiltz in the Post writes

Since 1969, WHFS has served as the arbiter of cutting-edge rock in the Washington area, introducing listeners to acts such the Cure and the Violent Femmes.

The station was either first in the nation or one of the first to play a whole host of legendary acts, but for the last decade and a half its been a fraud, just another Top-40-for-people-with-lip-rings "modern rock" station playing whatever the labels' promotions people told them to play. Was a time you could hear Muddy Waters, Eddie Cochran and the Dead Kennedys in a single set. The station continued to try to live off its historical cred long after went from a station that played Costello's "Radio Radio" to a station that exemplified it. One time, a few years ago, they played Cake's "Rock & Roll Lifestyle." The irony was exquisite; the error, never repeated.

As the Joker said after frying the mob boss with the joy buzzer in the first Tim Burton Batman movie, "I'm glad you're dead!"

The original WHFS family (literally - it's the Einstein family) survives, sort of, as WRNR in Annapolis, with a weak signal and a format that's a shade too triple-A for my unreserved enthusiasm. All I want is a station that plays Eminem AND Muddy Waters AND Eddie Cochran AND Buddy and Julie Miller. Really, is that too much to ask?

Reading Room - When people ask, "Jim, are there any batshit-crazy hawkish pundits who are nevertheless worth reading?" I tell them, Yes. Steven Vincent. He's batshit-crazy, all right. (Basic vocabulary point: We don't call people "insurgents" if they work for their government as opposed to fighting it. That's not what the word means. Some "conundra" aren't.) But he also does real reporting, has been to Iraq in more than a Mark-Steynian drive-by way, and tempers his neocon zeal with a measure of appreciation of the limits of mere will. Not that there aren't plenty of injunctions to persevere in our historic etc, but along the way to them you can learn quite a lot from Vincent's writing. (See the item on the broadly anti-feminist program of even the most pro-American Shia leaders, for example.) Even when he gets speculative, his possible futures are more textured than the big rock candy mountains of reform and cultural transformation one gets from his confreres. As a bonus Googling "site:spencepublishing.typepad.com+schools+painted" produces no results.

Vincent's book is sitting on the silver chest downstairs for eventual review. The outside matter suggests it will have genuinely good reporting, but it also gives the impression that the author imagines that honor and pride are somehow strange Arab or Muslim cultural tics. Needless to say that may prove to be an unfair reading of the actual book, though.

Death of the Death Squads? - Very possibly. See here, here and here. If true it will mean both the right and the smart outcome. That just leaves the matter of all the hawks in the jingosphere who disgraced themselves with preemptive defenses of the concept. Armed Liberal, who didn't, looks better all the time. Comparatively speaking.

Now THAT'S Stingy - "Days after the Tsunami struck, the EU imposed crippling tariffs of $4,540 a ton on Thai exports of cumarin, a plant extract widely used in perfume. Fraser Nelson reports in The Business that the move is designed to protect the French company Rhodia, Europe’s only producer of cumarin."

Via Walter in Denver.

It Didn't Start with Bought-a-Gate - Matt Welch uses Armstrong Williams as the springboard to a fine imprecation at Reason Online:

There are two profoundly undemocratic through-lines in the state's repeated purchase of propaganda. The first is the foul notion that we are a nation of people who literally can't handle the truth, and so must be influenced in ways we don't even realize by a government that knows our best interests better than we do. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is totalitarian thinking, familiar to anyone who has to clench their teeth at the Venceremos! mural every day or to live through entire decades where entertainment products were vetted and decoded for secret political messages.

The second is an alarmingly cavalier approach to pissing away taxpayer money.

There's more.

This is the same lesson America learned from George Washington when he ended the Whiskey Rebellion by crucifying half the state of Pennsylvania on his front lawn - Fafblog on what I understand we should be referring to as "so-called 'death squads'."

Warblog Fanboy Rampage - In tonight's installment, we pick on an anti-Bush dove in a Crooked Timber thread devoted to an item by - me. Some people have no fvcking gratitude, huh? Anyway, "too kind by half" writes (quoting me in his first line):

the man had a big head start on us

Come again?

We were holding hands with him the whole time!

No, no, no, no, no! This myth will not die. The US government was only intermittently semi-tight with Saddam. It's absolutely true that, during a period of the Iran-Iraq War, it winked at Saddam's use of chemical weapons and may have provided some germ stock useful for a biological weapons program. During other years of the same war, John Poindexter and the brain trust that - unsettlingly - has returned to high authority in the last couple of years was providing Iran with satellite intelligence on Iraqi troop movements - along with arms, in return for hostages. And at the very end of the war the US government tilted decidedly in favor of Iraq because the Iranians began committing the major foul of threatening the oil routes through the Persian Gulf. Before all of that, Iraq was a Soviet client state and monarchical Iran a US proxy. Post-Shah, the official, if cynical, US policy was "dual containment," which was about keeping both countries at loggerheads and as weak as possible. Dual containment remained our policy right up to 2002.

In other words, we only "were holding hands with him," and cynically offering tacit support to Saddam's vicious counter-insurgency tactics, during those periods when it suited us. When it didn't suit us, we didn't. What's to complain about?

(Fanboy Rampage concept stolen from, uh, Fanboy Rampage.)

24 Little Hours - Matt points out something I hadn't properly appreciated, because I am slow: the internal inconsistency of the story:

If you can really get the bad guys to fess up in 90 seconds by putting a bullet in someone's knee, then Bauer should be torturing people all the time and not pussyfooting around with all this satellite surveillance, deception, etc.

Even where fictions deliberately diverge from the laws of the reality we know, such as how long it really takes to make someone talk, readers, critics and writers themselves generally prize internal consistency. That may be a hard sell, though, for John Cole, who taketh not kindly to Matt's - and presumably my - poking and prodding at the holes in the script's logic:

You know why Jack Bauer shot one guy and not another? Because it was in the fricking script.

I hate to have to say this, but based on the tone and tenor of your previous posts, it may be necessary. At any rate, I think you need to know- Kiefer Sutherland really didn't shoot anyone. It was all fake- so when you get done analyzing 24, please don't call the California State Police with information about some gruesome shootings you saw on television.

He also writes that

'24' is a fictional television series. That means it is made up, and is intended to be broadcast for entertainment purposes.

Indeed. (Hm. Cool word. Maybe I'll try to work it in more often, make it a kind of signature. Nah. It'd just become a tic.) But where was I? Oh yeah. I wasn't entertained. Or, more accurately, such entertainment as I got was the "wrong kind" of entertainment. Specifically, it was the enjoyable contempt one can take (for awhile) from stupid things. I felt compelled to explain why I didn't like it. How come? The writing thing. It's kind of a reflex any more.

This gets to the inescapability of esthetic judgment, I think. John is trying to make criticism irrelevant by placing "entertainment purposes" beyond its bounds. But he can only do that by tacitly promoting an esthetic that things that are "made up" shouldn't be judged on the basis of internal consistency or on a genre-inflected correspondence with reality. Now, I don't think he really believes this. If, frex, Jack Bauer grabbed evil terrorist Kalil by the hair, only to have his neck open like a jar lid to reveal a tiny alien foreign service officer in his miniaturized command center guiding "Hassan" like a robot, I don't think John would like it, though it would still be made up for entertainment purposes. He might even think it "stupid."

If so, my guess would be that it would be because he thought the tiny alien represented a betrayal of the dramatic contract the series seemed to be making with the viewer. That's my own complaint with the new season, and I think Matt's too. 24 doesn't just sell "slam-bang non-stop action!" It sells moral dilemmas torn from today's headlines! Fox promotes the new season by, among other things, running segments on its news shows tying the series to current events. Given that kind of setup, the result seems like a cheat. To me. And not only to me, obviously. I think John just has a different threshold of what "feels like cheating" when it comes to this particular show, and that's fine. But the kind of cheat isn't vanished by 24's status as a "made up" thing.

Meanwhile, Drizzten gives the made up show now quarter in "24: A Libertarian Nightmare." (Spoilers abound.) I'm particularly intrigued by his conclusion:

It would be a nightmare to be a bystander and get caught up in these plots and whether the bystander acknowledges it or not, the roots of the nightmare start in the libertarian objections to those plots.

But what America wants to know is, where is Polytropos at this critical point in our nation's esthetic history? Oh.

"Seriousness" is a term they have to use, of course - Drizzten finds me another appreciation of Will Eisner. It is, in part, a critique of the NYT's:

"Seriousness!" Rarely has a major American talent been done such a grave disservice in his obituary. "Deliriousness," perhaps! Whimsy, imagination, unbridled creative vision, visual innovation, mature comic-book innovation, stunning storytelling, unparalleled influential visual style, certainly! But seriousness – posh on that! That is a denigration of Eisner, a term appropriate to a comic-book creator a whole lot less important than he was. Don't bridle this great genius of the imagination with that classroom term!

The essay rambles at the start and later gets into rather puffy language when it adverts to "those [other comic book creators] who must be given their due." But author Louis Black offers an especially vivid account of the virtues of Eisner's Spirit comic.

All Kidding Aside it's worth noting that, assuming Armed Liberal is as opposed to death squads as he is to, well, me, the Instapundit link he earned deals exclusively with the blogosphere grabass aspect of his post. His substantive points regarding policy get no attention whatsoever - he is simply grist for the ressentiment mill.

Warning - I am apparently inconsistent. Armed Liberal of Winds of Change (Motto: Thinking is Hard!) points out that I am hypocritically in favor of using American special forces to attack actual al Qaeda terrorists, who belong to an organization that murdered 3,000 civilians in the United States in 2001, but against using American special forces to train "Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen" to kidnap and kill not just guerrillas who kill US troops in Iraq, but also "their sympathizers" and to generally (to quote the original Newsweek article), "create a fear of aiding the insurgency." Or, as Strategy Page put it:

In the past, only people who were obviously guilty were sought. But now, the known allies and kinfolk will be rounded up.

(My emphasis.) These are obviously the same thing and who knows why I'd favor one but not the other.

The tragedy is, Armed Liberal himself knows, almost:

But to create a whole force specifically to do that and wage a 'shadow war' would be - as I've said in the past - far more damaging than helpful.

It would be damaging largely because by their nature such efforts must be covert, and thus unaccountable. They deal in death on a retail level, and the people who must practice and control such efforts must become used to operating outside even the boundaries of civilized violence and mayhem. So in creating such a force, we'd be creating and subsidizing a group whose explicit mission was to kill outside of any accountable control, who would necessarily associate with people who don't have much regard for the rules of civilization and whose activities would take place deliberately away from any kind of scrutiny.

That's very good. The only things I'd add to that are that, first, our intelligence on the insurgency has never been good, which means our idea of who the "known allies and kinfolk" are will be awfully fallible. Iraqi clannishness and sectarian fissures mean that the "hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen" are unlikely to have much better intelligence themselves. Second, inevitably these unaccountable murder programs become vehicles for score-settling and opportunism by the participants - a chance to off one's business rival or get back at the woman who spurned one's advances, to avenge oneself on whoever looked at oneself crosseyed.

There's also the problem that collective punishment (such as hostage taking) is unjust and, when committed by other countries, a war crime.

The tragedy of Armed Liberal is that, trapped in his persona, he seems inhibited from concentrating his concerns. He can't get through an entire item criticising the death squad proposal, which was made by the Bush Administration and has been defended by his fellow hawks, without trying to make the thing somehow about the iniquities of peaceniks. Thus the effort to find an inconsistency that isn't there. This is the tragedy of the liberal hawks, generally: they're better at the hawkish part than the liberalism.

Too Clever by Half - My bias in favor of off-the-rez CIA is pretty thoroughgoing, but I can't sign up to this:

THE world may be better off if Osama Bin Laden remains at large, according to the Central Intelligence Agency’s recently departed executive director.

If the world’s most wanted terrorist is captured or killed, a power struggle among his Al-Qaeda subordinates may trigger a wave of terror attacks, said AB “Buzzy” Krongard, who stepped down six weeks ago as the CIA’s third most senior executive.

“You can make the argument that we’re better off with him (at large),” Krongard said. “Because if something happens to Bin Laden, you might find a lot of people vying for his position and demonstrating how macho they are by unleashing a stream of terror.”

Might, as he says. Might not, either. Regardless, Osama bin Laden is responsible for the murders of 3,000 people on American soil. These subordinates of his should be on the list too, but the tonic effect here and abroad of capturing or killing Osama bin Laden would be too bracing to forego for some hypotheticals.

Via OTB.

24 More - Two more hours tonight and I wanted to see if it unstupided at any point. Short answer, No. The staged robbery that becomes a hostage situation sent the show into a Neverland of Stupid that - say this for it - had a breathtaking scale to it. I want to watch through the hour that covers the scheduled "trial" of Defense Secretary Heller, to find out what twist the show has planned for the other 19 hours. Plus, Stupid like this only comes around every so often. I'm hoping. And maybe, just maybe, they're lulling us into a false sense of, um, derision.

Sure are a lot of scheming bitches on this show, aren't there? Maybe they need a little torture to keep them in line!

Whee - Strategy Page tries to make death squads sound logical and even just. But they slip this in:

This could get very ugly, because it means sending in raids with orders to take certain people “dead or alive.” Family members will be arrested and held hostage (a traditional Iraqi, and Middle Eastern, technique for getting fugitives to surrender). Specially trained Kurdish and Shia Arab police SWAT teams will be used for a lot of this, supervised by American Special Forces. Raids like this, carried out by American troops, have been going on for over a year, but the Iraqi government has now authorized the use of a much larger list of suspects. In the past, only people who were obviously guilty were sought. But now, the known allies and kinfolk will be rounded up. This will be seen, and reported by the media, as “war on Sunni Arabs.” Well, not quite. It will be war on a minority of the Sunni Arab community.

Translated from the hawkish:

1. We've decided to "respect Arab traditions" after all, at least the ones involving hostages.

2. We'll be playing Iraq's ethnic groups off against each other (specially trained Kurdish and Shia Arab teams used against Sunnis.

3. We'll be hauling in allies AND kinfolk.

Raids like this, carried out by American troops, have been going on for over a year . . .

Via Glenn Reynolds via AW.com blog.

The Weekend in Torture - The new season of 24 started tonight, and started with a dramatization of one of those contrived hypotheticals used to justify torture. Jack Bauer shoots off the kneecap of a detainee and threatens to shoot off the other one to make him talk, because there are only ten minutes until a terrorist strike. Later he threatens to tell the President that the current boss of the Counter-Terrorism Unit "had the suspect for half an hour and couldn't break him." As a "realistic" fictionalization of intelligence work, this is balderdash - breaking suspects without torture can be the work of days or weeks, when successful at all. "Successfully" breaking someone with torture is a matter of hours or days when dealing with a trained, committed subject. A real trained Islamist terrorist operative in that situation is going to crank up the prayers, prominent among which will be the phrase "just ten more minutes!" It used to be that the CIA concentrated on enabling its own assets to hold out for 24 (or 48) hours - after that they could say anything they liked.

A trained, committed Islamist terrorist down one kneecap with one to go would almost certainly have the presence of mind to lie in that situation, too. That might make interesting television, you know? Hotshot counterterrorism officer cuts corners to force information out of a suspect, gets bamboozled and, gosh, this stuff isn't so simple. Previous seasons of 24 have been all about selling at least the image of Isn't So Simple. It looks very much like, in this one at least, ISS may have degenerated into one more action thriller about the tough investigator who knows you have to throw out the book to catch the bad guys. Hijinx ensue.

Meanwhile, I learn that our Sunday talk shows were full of Republican mouthpieces spinning their own screenplay treatments, all of which feature them, not wielding the tongs, you understand, but leering over the shoulder of Doctor Jest as he plies his utterly justified trade. I explained the function of all ticking bomb scenarios awhile ago. The explanation requires no updating.

Sean Collins e-mails

I think what's going on is that war supporters, who believe that a successfully prosecuted neocon/liberal-hawk War On Terror/Muslim World Transformation Project in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere would be a great boon to the world, are hesitant to make noise about the torture issue because they feel (accurately) that the anti-war forces, who wish to discredit not just the use of torture (as they should) but the entire war project (which war supporters believe they shouldn't, and that would include me, of course), are using and will use the torture issue to attack the entire enterprise.

This is close to my actual argument, which I've been making since before the invasion phase of the Iraq War: that it would inescapably lead to American atrocities, because it would inescapably lead to a guerrilla resistance. The hard part for me is that torture has also been part of the Afghanistan-centered operation that I equivocally supported too. On this test, not only have I not been proven wrong about Iraq (to say the least), the Afghanistan doves haven't been proven wrong either.

And speaking of inevitable atrocities, get ready for Iraqi death squads.

All together now: Saddam was worse! In terms of body count in Iraq this is true, though the man had a big head start on us, so we ought to be allowed a couple of decades to catch up. But what about the world ? Is it better? And are we? We have gone from a time in which the tyrant of an oil patch with a broken army and 23 million inhabitants practiced a tyranny which all decent people abhorred, to a time in which the largest and most powerful country in the history of mankind justifies torture and contemplates assassination teams - we should call them terror squads - as official policy. And the people who most consider our virtue unchallengeable are the quickest to publically avow our need to torture and murder. That is quite a change. Is it hard to see why so much of the world regards it as unwelcome?