Why I'm Not a Conservative Either - In his famous postscript to The Constitution of Liberty, F.A. Hayek explained why, despite his anti-socialism and anti-statism, he had to disclaim the label "conservative." There are still as many reasons for libertarians to reject the label as ever. Consider first, Best [Neocon-Approved Items] of the Web yesterday on the latest draft guidelines for those military tribunals:
The Defense Department has issued draft procedures for the military commissions that will try noncitizens suspected of terrorism, and it appears civil libertarians were crying wolf. Under the draft procedures, the Washington Post reports, suspects "would be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, could be sentenced to death only by a unanimous vote of the commissions' members and would have the right to an appeal."
That's a nice touch, that "it appears civil libertarians were crying wolf." Actually, the President is stressing that the draft procedures are preliminary, so they could get, from the perspective of civil libertarians, worse rather than better. What's more, the draft procedures are clearly more, um, liberal than the President's original guidelines. How did that happen?
A key step in the development of the commissions appears to have been Rumsfeld's decision to ask for advice not only from the White House, the Pentagon and Ashcroft's Justice Department, but also from a select group of centrist senior lawyers who have served in top positions in both Democratic and Republican administrations -- and who, in several cases, are trusted friends of the defense secretary.
Now here is Christopher Hitchens on the tribunal plans as they stood a month ago:
As an immigrant with a green card, I find that my American wife and American children will not insure me against a secret arrest, against undisclosed evidence, against a verdict with no appeal, or against my execution in a secret ceremony. (As the New Yorker puts it this week, the above procedure is so secret that it may, in theory, already have occurred.)
Now here's the thing: Suppose it came to light that this had happened already, and that, in an FBI-style foul-up, they got the wrong guy. Does anyone have any doubt that, so long as a Republican is in the White House, Best N-AI of the Web would either ignore it or, if they couldn't, justify it any way they could?
Wilderness of Mirrors - The New Adventures - Unqualified Offerings wishes to stress that it remains agnostic about the "China Did It" hypothesis of the man it shall call "Toiler." But one hallmark of a worthwhile hypothesis is that it opens further avenues of research. Try this one:
Let's say China has penetrated al Qaeda and used it as an instrument of Chinese policy. The following questions arise: How long has this been going on? and, um, What did the Presidents know and when did they know it?
August 1998 - al Qaeda bombs two US embassies in Africa.
May 1999 - US bombs Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.
Note that the Observer reported quite a different motivation back in late 1999; though the explanation their investigations turned up - the Chinese were covertly retransmitting signals for the paramilitary Serbian Tigers in Kosovo - actually supports Toiler's belief that China wants to tie the US down in interventions around the globe.
Lifeboat Games, a Preamble - Thanks to the energetic and interesting Slotman's "Insolvent Republic of Blogistan," I found this excellent Guardian piece by Christopher Hitchens. It shows that Hitchens is good for a lot more than just Chomsky-bashing, and just how libertarian his instincts have become. Hitchens tells of getting two phone calls at the beginning of November from insiders warning him to get out of town, right away, as there was a tactical nuke headed for DC:
Officially, nobody now remembers this night of the weak knees. It rated a brief and embarrassed mention in Hugh Sidey's Time column, and that was it. But I shall not forget how some of those in supposed authority decided that the end had come, and made it a point to keep it to themselves and their immediate friends, perhaps to stop the crowding of the roads. That's how it will be on the day of Armageddon, and that's why the citizen should always plan to outlive the state, rather than the other way round.
Wilderness of Mirrors - The Final Chapter(?) - Maybe Unqualified Offerings has not thought far enough outside the famous "box." It just got off the phone with an old friend who toils in the national security bureaucracy. This fellow began by asking himself qui bono. Qui bono is what has bedeviled the "Saudi Arabia did it" theory. This site has repeatedly maintained two things as true: 1) There is no "oil weapon" because the Saudis need our money; 2) The September massacres and the anthrax attacks constitute economic warfare. It just makes no sense for a country that needs our money to attack our economy. Add a third problem: The basic principle of black ops is to avoid using your own nationals. There were just way too many Saudis involved in 9/11 for any putative Saudi planner to feel comfortable.
The same objections do not apply, in my friend's entirely unofficial opinion, to the Chinese.
China certainly has a motive. They are a geopolitical rival, they want to be the preeminent power in Asia, they know the US wants to keep that from happening and that an influential sector of the policy elite wants to make opposing China the centerpiece of US defense and foreign policy doctrine. They were pretty pissed off about the Belgrade Embassy too.
China has large, active intelligence services, both domestic and foreign. It has a low-level muslim insurgency in Xinjiang-Uigher. Chinese nationals have trained with al Qaeda. That means there have been opportunities for a good intelligence service to flip Chinese muslim activists and get a line into bin Laden's organization. The Chinese have decent relations with muslim governments because of a consistent anti-Israel and anti-India record. They have great relations with the Pakistanis, and the Pakistanis, and now your ISI-Taliban-al Qaeda connection comes into play.
What's more, says our toiler, he attended one of those talks such people attend by a certified China expert, who said that China's grand strategy vis a vis the US is, ideally, to tie America up by provoking it into intervening all over the place - "imperial overstretch" in other words. Unqualified Offerings immediately asked, waggishly, if the Chinese were funding The Weekly Standard too - then it remembered.
UPDATE: Early editions of this item omitted the crucial word "not" from the first sentence. Oops!
Two Great Pieces on Libertarian Samizdata Today - Both by Perry deHavilland. The first, "Triumph and Realism," argues against the temptation to irrational euphoria in the wake of US military and political success in Afghanistan so far:
Yes, that is quite true and in fact much of Hanson's article is spot on. However I do worry that in the wave of understandable euphoria following the destruction of the Taliban and the scattering of Al Qaeda, that an air of unrealistic expectation and ill conceived adventurism may replace the air of unrealistic pessimism so beloved of the dismal and irrational Buellers and Fisks.
I had no idea Ferris Bueller was an unrealistic pessimist, but never mind. The other piece is a take-no-prisoners response to blogger Brian Linse on gun control, gun shows and gun registration. To Linse's complaint about "endless polarizing rhetorical posts," deHavilland replies "You seem to be demanding that Glenn and Walter argue the issue by first accepting your underpinning axioms (i.e. not 'polarizing' th debate)..."
Libertarian Samizdata announces its purpose as "Developing the libertarian meta-context for the future." That is to say, not first accepting the underpinning axioms of statists before joining the political fray. It is a truism of Washington journalism that conservative politicians get validated as "constructive" by accepting the overall framework of a liberal policy proposal and just adding a trim here and a tuck there. Contrariwise, ideologues "merely" oppose liberal proposals, "without offering an alternative program." If you think there shouldn't be a program, well, you're just out of luck. Samizdata seems to realize that that dynamic is the first thing libertarians need to change.
It Out-Libertarians Libertarians. Pray You Seek It Out - Mickey Kaus is on an absolute roll the last couple of days. In addition to his righteous pasting of David Broder, he has an excellent critique of a Post article on welfare caseloads in Wisconsin and a minor, but important, cavil about an otherwise good piece by Kevin J Hasson in today's - Post. Okay, there's a pattern here. But to those of us who live with the Post, it's an appealing one.
Latest From Washington Post Unintentional Humor Pages - "Paramilitary's Rise Unintended Outcome Of U.S. Assistance" reads the dumbfounding subhead of a lengthy article in today's Washington Post. Apparently all that Plan Colombia money - ahem, Andean Initiative money for the War on - you know, has led to the Colombian Army building up right-wing paramilitary groups as a bulwark against left-wing FARC guerrillas. Whoah! And here's the stunner:
The shifting balance has even allowed the paramilitary forces to take over some coca areas once dominated by the guerrillas. Drug profits are helping them pay troop salaries, buy arms and recruit members from the growing pool of unemployed Colombians.
Are you stunned yet? Let's take the Post at its word that these are "unintended" consequences of Plan Initiative. If they were unanticipated consequences for anyone, those people had no business making drug or foreign policy in the first - oh. Right.
Thinking Like a Terrorist - Unqualified Offerings will attempt to get all paranoid for a bit in hopes of understanding certain Current Events, including the Shoebomber, the newest bin Laden tape and, oh yeah, the prospects for nuclear war in South Asia. Specifically, UO will attempt to make everything fit into a plausible grand strategy for UBL. It will also give some thought to where bin Laden might be.
This last first. In some of your better spy novels, the following happens: Intelligence officer recruits charismatic agent who does him and his agency much good. Officer and agent bond in their weird, codependent, ambiguously homoerotic way. Priorities change for the officer's country, and the agent is now not just expendable but counterproductive in the eyes of the officer's superiors. They decide to sacrifice him by betraying him to his enemies. The officer, disgusted, launches himself into the desperate project of saving his agent from the wolves. It usually doesn't work.
But sometimes it might. Unqualified Offerings is absolutely convinced that Osama bin Laden was an asset of Saudi Intelligence, also Pakistan's ISI, and likely remains one. That doesn't mean that either group, or either country, had foreknowledge of the September massacres, though you can bet they weren't as broken up about it as we were. In the suddenly changed autumn winds, official Pakistani policy on al Qaeda and the Taliban blew suddenly in reverse - Saudi policy too, if more equivocally. But in the previous years, there will have been influential people - excuse me, men - in the intelligence agencies of both countries who came to like and admire the man, and probably to believe what he believed. Their personal feelings will not have proven so nimble as Pervez Musharraf's statesmanship.
Would they like him enough to spring him, whether from Mazar-i-Sharif during the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" airlift of ISI officers that the US allowed the Pakistani military to undertake, or from the cave country of Tora Bora across the border into Pakistan, Kashmir and beyond? Maybe. Would Saudi and ISI intelligence officers, working together, have the wherewithal to pull such a thing off? Don't doubt it.
So bin Laden gets out alive. Doesn't mean he's not dead. If he's dead, that doesn't mean that The Plan isn't still in operation either. So what's the plan?
The plan is what it always was: Drive the Jew-Crusaders out of the Middle East and ignite Holy War between dar-el-Islam and dar-el-Jihad. The Plan was never to preserve Taliban rule in Afghanistan. The means are terrorism as both intimidation and economic warfare against the US and inspiration to the militant Ummah. In the early going things have just not gone al Qaeda's way. Attacking the US itself totally blew the intimidation factor. Yes, after terrorists killed American troops in Lebanon in 1983 and Somalia in 1993, the US pulled back. They pulled the troops back to safety. By attacking US soil itself, what al Qaeda accomplished was to destroy the notion of America as safe haven. A safe haven is what you pull back to. If terrorists kill thousands in America we're going to pull our Saudi troops back to - America? To keep them safe??
So that part didn't work. And the psychic contribution of the Flight 93 passengers' to American morale in the dark, early days shouldn't be scanted. Nor did al Qaeda get the generalized anti-muslim pogrom within the US they surely expected and hoped for. Unqualified Offerings is not in favor of detaining hundreds of people without even releasing their names. Nor is UO wild about sneaking torture in the back door by putting detainees in places where you know their fellow (native-born) prisoners will beat them up for you. But even at that, holding hundreds of people on legitimate (if minor) charges in disingenuously bad conditions is a far cry from torching the mosques of America and clapping everyone with a prayer cap or a hijab shawl into camps. There simply wasn't a high enough atrocity level for the militant muslim press to trumpet.
So that part didn't work either. Part of the credit goes to the Bush administration for its early and often warnings against taking out America's frustrations on random Arabs and Muslims. Most of the credit surely goes to the citizens of the United States for just not being assholes like that. Abroad, military resolve and effective diplomacy got the country just enough useful allies within the Muslim world to a) enable America to prosecute the war at all, and b) to avoid a clean lineup of Islamic States versus Infidel States. In particular, the US got the cooperation of the Central Asian Republics, Russia's acquiescence in same, and most of all, managed to split the unsplittable differences between India and Pakistan for three whole months.
In every case, things went more poorly than al Qaeda might have hoped because both the American people and the US administration were better, smarter and more skillful than bin Laden and his strategists believed. They suffered the further handicap of not themselves being as appealing as they kept telling each other they were, either. Afghanistan hated al Qaeda as much as they hated any colonialists. There were plenty of anti-Taliban Afghan muslims ready to carry American water against the arabs and their local clients. And "The Street" found it had places to go, people to see and things to do.
So al Qaeda's problem - and here "al Qaeda" means everyone on bin Laden's side, including possible allies in the ISI, Saudi Intelligence and Arabian royal and clerical circles - is that it still wants the same things, and certain concrete facts impede: American military success, the resolve of the American electorate and political class, the successful diplomacy of the President and that favorite whipping boy of the ultrahawks, Colin Powell. Anthrax, if it was an al Qaeda attack, fizzled. No massacres in malls on Halloween, no truck bombs on bridges. Folks here starting to feel pretty good again. The Europeans starting to drift, compliantly, in the US wake. India grumbled that the US seemed to take terrorism in New York very seriously indeed and terrorism in Kashmir not very seriously at all, which had the disadvantage of being true. Pakistan grumbled that by supporting the US they enabled us to replace their clients in Afghanistan with India's, which had the disadvantage of being true. But we made them like it, or at least act like they did.
So suddenly there's a ham-handed attack by Islamic terrorists in India and a ham-handed bombing attempt by a European Islamic terrorist over the Atlantic, and the rumor that bin Laden is in Pakistani Kashmir or in Pakistan proper. The Indians have wheeled their nukes up to the border, the Pakistanis have mobilized their troops and, this very evening, Pakistanis and Indians are killing each other in earnest. None of this, from al Qaeda's perspective, is a bad thing. The India-Pakistan rift is the fault line in the US coalition. (Unqualified Offerings realizes it is sounding "Stratfor-certain," and apologizes.) al Qaeda must see two good things that could come out of this: The US tries to clamp down on India's response to the terror attacks for the sake of keeping Pakistan sweet, in which case we look like hypocrites. Or the US acquiesces in India doing what we ourselves have done, in which case, the US is betraying a muslim ally to another infidel nation.
I think al Qaeda would really prefer the latter. They must love, and may be doing their best to inspire, the rumors that bin Laden is in Pakistan. al Qaeda doesn't, with the possible exception of some of its ISI friends, care about Pakistan as such. Any given muslim state is expendable, especially a non-Arab one. More than anything, it would like the US to "turn on" Pakistan, not just backing India in what might yet end up a nuclear war but forcing US soldiers into the country on the "pretext" that Pakistan is harboring Osama bin Laden. If the plan before September was to provoke a US response, bring down the Musharraf government and, if possible, make off with one or more Pakistani nukes in the confusion, the plan has not yet failed. The administration is going to have to be better, smarter and more skillful yet over the next several days and weeks.
What Do Women Want? - Affordable, professional cosmetics. Clothes that fit. And cost-effective broadband. Ginger Stampley, who has always been linked at the left and will always have the top spot on the Unqualified Offerings link list, has been turning out great post after great post about the economics of practical womanhood. The latest is called, "Economics of Lipstick, Redux." As a Penile-American, I'm finding the whole series fascinating. Ginger applies lucid economic thinking to such Vaginated-American concerns as where is really the cheapest place to buy makeup and why it makes sense that the Gap is having financial problems. She neither aggrandizes nor trivializes these matters. It's the kind of political economy that, before blogs, only Virginia Postrel took seriously - I still remember a classic Postrel piece on the rise of nail salons in Reason a few years ago. Otherwise, the only people writing about such topics were fashion magazines or the sorts of feminists who consider it genocide that a woman can't walk around with twigs sticking out of her hair.
No doubt the Davids Broder and Brooks consider intellectual musings on practical fashion to be frivolous if not decadent. But a signal service of Ginger's recent pieces is that they offer an important corrective to caricatures of economics and even "the market." "The market" is not about reducing all human values to monetary values. (Nor is libertarianism about valuing "getting and spending" over "love and friendship," despite what Chronicles editor Thomas Fleming imagines.) Economics is simply about understanding how people pursue their ends, and the market is the place those ends can be effectively pursued, whether getting, spending, love, friendship or "an out-of-production eye pencil."
One More Thing - Unqualified Offerings has ranted against the notion some have advanced that the September massacres and the Autumn War have somehow redeemed America from frivolity and decadence. On that subject, Kausfiles' takedown of today's David Broder column is a signal service. Kausfiles does not do anchors, so look for the only 12/26 item.
I Remember You - Here is a courtroom sketch of shoe-bomber Richard Reid. He hasn't aged a bit, has he?
Like Olden Times - Unqualified Offerings is caught up in the Blogger outage, though it refuses to give the reasons for that outage the satisfaction of detailing the problem. This item comes to you the old-fashioned way - manual coding into a text editor. (Textpad, of course!) Since it's Mrs. Offering that has gotten the Society for Creative Anachronism bug, and not her husband, UO will not overdo the primitive bit. But there's a terrific article on the Army's Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, Louisiana, in today's Washington Post. Well no wonder it's good, he said, looking at the byline finally - it's by Richard Leiby, a longtime Post staffer who has done excellent reporting on everything from Waco to Elvis Costello. At the JRTC, specially-trained "bad guy troops" make a specialty of humiliating "good guy troops" cycled in from other bases, with the help of locals who play civilians-on-the-battlefield. Leiby is even too classy to allude to the movie "Southern Comfort." (An illogical Fareed Zakaria column on the op-ed page is not yet available on the web, apparently, so we must pass it by.)
Slate's Tuesday Morning Quarterback spends the first part of this week's column ranting against one of Unqualified Offerings' favorite targets, corporate welfare in the form of taxpayer-financed sports stadia. But it gets better! There is a tedious passage of antisuburban twaddle late in the article in which TMQ refers the reader to "a telling article on this subject [by Roberta Brandes Gratz] for the journal of the Michigan Land Use Institute , an important land-preservation organization; read her here. But in an act of mercy appropriate to the season, he doesn't actually include the link info on the word "here."
God bless us everyone! Especially Ev at Blogger, who has been working hard all day.
UPDATE: Blogger is back! This post and the next two, originally entered manually, have been republished through Blogger for the sake of accurate indexing. Also celebrated by adding an extra paragraph break...
Christmas Suggestion - If you use Morpheus or Gnutella or one of the Napster successors and are still in the Christmas spirit, search for these wonderful live tracks:
Red Meat - I'm not a paleoconservative, nor do I play one on the web. I read some paleoconservative organs, though, even paleoconservative organs that imagine that they are libertarian. There's no way that 21st century libertarians can unreservedly ally themselves with the paleos, but then, libertarians can't unreservedly ally themselves with neoconservatives, so-called civil libertarians, the business roundtable, leftist drug war opponents, or those gun- and abortion-rights supporters for whom their single issue is the single "choice" they trust their fellow citizens to make.
The flagship paleo journal is Chronicles. I found the Christmas issue, "And the Word Was Made Flesh," especially valuable. Chronicles represents not just the Christian Right but the Catholic Right, and I came away from the current issue understanding Catholicism, and the more "Catholic" protestant sects, maybe for the first time. I was reared in that protestant denomination known to anatomists of faith as "the closest church," and have not been a believing Christian since high school, so my catechism was haphazard.
More than one article stresses the significance of the physicality of the Incarnation. (Note: In the scramble to ready Unqualified Headquarters for its Christmas dinner guests, my copy of the current Chronicles has gone missing. Nor does Chronicles make its current issue contents available on the web. So I have no links or lengthy quotes.) Contrasting the presentations of Jesus in the Gospels and the Koran, in which Jesus is a paragon of asceticism, the author avers that "No sane host would invite the Muslim Jesus to the wedding feast at Cana." Elsewhere, an author argues that the Gospel story itself rebukes the Puritan impulse - by taking on human flesh and allowing Himself to be "born under the Law to redeem those born under the Law," God's message to humanity was that the physical world matters, and that salvation must be worked out in the physical world. "Incarnation" includes the root carn- - "flesh" - but we see the word even more clearly in later romance languages: meat. God became meat as we are meat.
What I finally understood after reading the magazine was the logic of Catholicism. In the Protestant tradition, the Catholic belief that the Sacraments are necessary to salvation is unfathomable. Protestants believe in the unmediated experience of God. But if you read the meaning of the Gospel as God's affirmation of the physical world and physical works as the theater of salvation, then it's plausible that it is necessary to Do Certain Things in certain ways - the world is for believers to do those things. And the Catholic insistence on the necessity of mediating institutions makes sense too. Perhaps Protestants see the Divine Christ among us as a sign of the direct experience of God and Catholics see the Human and Divine Christ as the Glory of God Shuttered, betokening the need for a Human-staffed, Divinely-guided Church to interced with Christ as Christ interceded with God.
Years ago, I worked with a gay former priest, former because of John Paul II's edicts against gay clergy. He was one of the most interesting men I ever met (my coworker, not the Pope), and we talked frequently about religion. A spectator sport to me, it meant much more to him. He remained committed to the Catholic Church that refused his services, because, he said, the Catholic tradition best met the needs of intellectual rigor and Christian belief. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how he meant that. Now, thanks to a magazine that abhors gay clergy every bit as much as the Pope, I think I almost might. As a bonus, it gives me another angle to consider the Catholic SF novelist Gene Wolfe, especially his classic, The Book of the New Sun.
Oddly, almost every Chronicles reader I know is a gay poet. They've all been Chronicles contributors at some point, too. (Unqualified Offerings published a handful of poems in the magazine many years ago, but never mastered the gay trick of being sexually attracted to men.)
Government Turkey? - Unqualified Offerings learned to cook turkey in self defense: its grandmother believed that the bird was not done unless you could braid rope from it. So UO has dressed many, many turkeys for holiday dinners over the years. This year's bird, from the ever-reliable Shady Brook Farms, seemed odd. No, it smelled fine. But there was almost no skin flap by the neck aperture, and a considerably smaller, well, butt plug by the opening of the chest cavity. These are important items because, while one doesn't eat them, they are what seals in stuffing. Then Unqualified Offerings was struck - a couple of years ago, government busybodies opined that people shouldn't cook stuffing inside the bird any more because someone, somewhere might get sick, maybe. The idea was that the center of the bird won't get hot enough and the blood that drips into the stuffing will not cook all the way and WE'LL ALL DIE!!!
Not being a government employee, it took Unqualified Offerings about five seconds to wonder why, if this is really a problem, government busybodies didn't simply suggest running a metal skewer or two into the heart of the cavity to conduct the needed heat there. (UO probably had this thought while plunging The Official 1.6 Gallon Toilet of the Nanny State in Unqualifed Headquarters.)
Anyway, it occurred to Unqualified Offerings that perhaps Shady Brook Farms had begun trimming its end flaps to make it harder to stuff turkeys. However, there is no evidence of this on their website. They have a FAQ, which advises, perhaps a bit grandiosely, "As you go from aisle to aisle collecting your groceries, be sure that the turkey is the last item placed in the shopping cart, just prior to checkout." But they inveigh not against stuffing the bird. They do have a link to the National Turkey Federation, which advises, once the thigh temperature reaches 180 degrees F,
Move the thermometer to the center of the stuffing. Once the stuffing has reached 160 to 165 degrees F., the turkey should be removed from the oven and allowed to “rest” for 20 minutes. This makes carving easier and allows stuffing temperature to continue to rise to at least 165 degrees F.If you do this, the Federation assures you that
you and your family can continue the tradition of preparing a delicious stuffed turkey without sacrificing quality or safety.
I Heard Him Exclaim - Merry Christmas to you and yours from Unqualified Offerings, Mrs. Offering, Offering Boy, the Littlest Offering, Unqualified Dog and The Cat Who Won't Go Away!
Thought for the Day - In the early 90s I hired a nice, somewhat whacked-out guy to work in the bookstore I was running. He was a guitarist, a deadhead and had served in the army in Central America. In the interviewer he remarked casually that "I've been in combat. I've been under fire." I didn't bother saying You weren't supposed to be! I put it down to exaggeration and moved on. A few years later, it came out that US troops had done a lot more in the way of fighting in Central America than the Reagan Administration swore they had done. Last night my neighbor, a man who has won awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, alluded with cynical amusement to having, as a marine, been in on what he called "the military side of our diplomacy" in Central America.
So. Question One: What are the two segments of the population most prone to political conspiracy theories? Urban blacks and rural whites. Question Two: What are the two segments of the population that disproportionately comprise the armed forces? Hm. We get to reuse our answer to the first question.
A Fanboy's Notes - Read today issue one of Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's The Dark Knight Strikes Again, sequel to the landmark The Dark Knight Returns. Dark Knight Returns was unprecedented in a way that DK2, as Dark Knight Strikes Again is styled, probably can't be. In fact, I can't find a single innovative feature of DK2. Its pleasuredrome dystopia is off the shelf - reminiscent of Howard Chaykin's American Flagg, to stick to comic book precursors. After DC's Kingdom Come and Marvel's Earth X, this is just another story of aging superheroes fighting over whether and how to save the world. I would argue, in certain moods, that Miller was the first good comic book writer (there had been great storytellers for decades), so its a shame that on one page the words he puts in Superman's mouth give the game away - the passage all but screams, "I - AM - RATIONALIZING!" There are no philosophical complications. Earth has the dystopia it has because it is secretly ruled by a couple of famous supervillains whom Unqualified Offerings will refrain from naming. It's not too hard to pick a side to root for.
But it moves! Carrie Kelly, who has traded her Robin costume for a Catwoman suit between the end of Returns and the beginning of DK2, remains a ton of fun, accidentally swallowing the Atom and having to puke him back up, redoing the Flash's costume because she considers it unfashionable and riding herd on the Batboys that Bruce Wayne began training at the end of Dark Knight Returns.
DK2 will be three parts and I'll buy the next two. Just don't go into it expecting a revelation.
Sucks To Be You Dept. - Fuzzy, big-eyed "Taliban" soldiers are having a hard time in captivity, according to an Associated Press article that MSNBC.com has titled "Afghan prisoners cold, hungry, sick." There are 3,000 prisoners crammed into a prison built for 200. As it happens, the only prisoners quoted are Pakistanis, and on the evidence of the article, the bulk of the prisoners, if not all of them, are foreign adventurers. The Red Cross is quite restrained in its criticism:
“The reality is there are over 3,000 prisoners there, and the authorities are swamped,” said Simon Brooks, head of the ICRC in northern Afghanistan.
Saeed, a 24-year-old Pakistani, said he joined the Taliban only three months before he was wounded and captured in Kunduz. He was desperate to get back home and waiting for contact from Pakistani officials. Pakistan has said it wants confirmation of prisoners’ nationalities before deciding what to do with its citizens.
“Pakistan is our country. They should help us,” Saeed said.
Because You Didn't Demand It! Mary McGrory, sometimes called "the Ellen Goodman of the south," writes today on young John Walker in her (unacountably) weekly Washington Post column. Perhaps one should call her the Dadaist Ellen Goodman instead, since much of today's column defies not just common sense but simple comprehensibility. Consider the beginning:
An unbidden guest may turn up at many Christmas dinner tables this year -- a most unnerving, even haunting presence. John Walker, the 20-year-old American Taliban, causes consternation and rage among his countrymen, but he's the only individual on the cheerless acreage of Afghanistan they can relate to.
Huh? Let's grant the arguable premise that Walker is an individual in the first place, and not an unmoored id flitting blindly after some dimly perceived, Ultimate superego. What does McGrory mean by her claim that Walker is the only one in Afghanistan that "his countrymen" can relate to? She doesn't say. Is the assertion so clear to those with less antipathy toward McGrory's class than Unqualified Offerings has that it needs no explanation? If one attends the same dinner parties McGrory does, or at least does not despise the very idea of them, is it self-evident that his countrymen "relate to" Walker better than they do to the late Mike Spann, or the special forces guys, or the freed missionaries, or, to go native for a moment, all those Afghans happily getting fashion makeovers now that the grip of foreign agitators like John Walker has been lifted from their necks? (Christ, I feel like Russ Smith contemplating a Maureen Dowd column all of a sudden...)
Perhaps if you are a member, like McGrory, of what the conservatives call the world's first dissident ruling class, a child of the bicoastal elite who goes all the way to outright war against the US actually constitutes "a most unnerving, even haunting presence." I suspect that for most Americans, however, Walker simply constitutes an asshole. The world is full of them and their principle product, and there's nothing especially "haunting" (not to say odiferous) about it.
But wait! There's more!
Some have pointed to Marin County as the villain of the piece, even though Walker's early childhood was set in the heart of suburbia, Silver Spring, Md.
As a piece of willful obtuseness, this is hard to beat. I figured out some time ago that Walker grew up within blocks of Unqualified Headquarters, an unpretentious neighborhood indeed. But only someone from Cleveland Park or Georgetown could imagine that Silver Spring is "the heart of suburbia." Official Washington pulls on the place like a gravity well. In the households of the Lindhs and their ilk, ambition is not about climbing the corporate ladder, but achieving prominence in in the world of subcommittees, foundations, think tanks, lobbying firms, approved media and the federal bureaucracy - becoming, that is to say, more like Mary McGrory. (Then you move to Bethesda, Potomac or, if you really hit the jackpot, Georgetown.) You could say that to the extent that the Silver Spring of Walker's formative years had ambition, it aspired to the condition of Marin County. There is plenty of Unofficial Washington to be found here - auto mechanics, restaurant owners and workers, family doctors, immigrant construction workers, insurance agents. But that was not the Lindh family's Silver Spring.
Pause to grudgingly acknowledge the clear-eyed part of McGrory's peroration, on Walker in Afghanistan:
Familiarity did not breed the contempt that was called for. Did he not know what was going on? Kevin Sullivan of The Washington Post hardly had his feet on the ground in Kabul when he quickly documented the reports of weekly orgies of execution and dismemberment in the soccer stadium. It was official Taliban policy.Walker could not have missed the street police beatings of women who showed a flash of ankle when their burqas slipped. Did the onetime hip-hop fan not miss music? Perhaps not. He had no problem with Sept. 11.
And that's enough of that! Let's cut to the end:
Our treatment of Walker will tell a great deal about us, revealing whether we are a great nation that treats its wayward children sternly but with humanity. We can't make a martyr of John Walker -- or a spectacle. We should show him just who he is -- and who we are, too. What we need now, most urgently, is more information.
And now McGrory sounds like "the white Alice Walker!" who wanted us to punish Osama bin Laden with love. Question: If we already know that we must treat Walker "sternly but with humanity" and all that, then why do we need more information, "urgently" or otherwise?
A Frank, Constructive Dialogue - Thomas Nephew over on the excellent Newsrack blog takes another whack at the Saudi question, complicating his analysis with actual history. Unqualified Offerings reads Newsrack and so should you.
Be of Good Cheer - Natalija Radic posts a deeply moving rebuttal to Maureen Dowd's cavils about the new Prada store opening "not far from Ground Zero" over on Libertarian Samizdata:
People in Sarajevo would have to dash across roads to go to the markets, risking death from Cetnik snipers and artillery fire on a daily basis. But if you ever go back and look at the videos, look very carefully at the people. You will see women with clean hair, lipstick and makeup. Men wearing pressed jackets and even ties. People determined to retain their humanity as well as just survive another day.I think Maureen Dowd does not understand, at least not yet, that if the monsters can make you live in their world of poverty and sorrow, then they have truly beaten you. That is why when I realised that Benetton was about to open a shop in Sarajevo in 1995, I wept because I realised that the nightmare was almost over at last. So Maureen, take it from me that there is nothing noble about 'sweat suits and old clothes already in the closet'. Listen to me and go to that place in New York, only a few blocks from the World Trade Centre that those evil people destroyed. Wander through the wonderful opulence of Prada's shop and gaze at the exquisite Italian style, treat yourself to a nice little black dress: then look around again and realise that you have won and they have lost.
We Are Devo -In response to an item on Libertarian Samizdata, Ginger Stampley muses on Argentina, Afghanistan and debt relief:
And then it occurs to me to ask another couple of questions: what if the loans to the developing countries are doomed anyway, as part of the "rollout costs" for infrastructure there?
The problem here is the notion that Argentina is a developing country. The opposite has been true for going on a century now. Argentina has "undeveloped", just say "devolved." A hundred years ago, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world. It achieved independence barely three decades after the United States, it was industrialized, educated, cosmopolitan, blessed with a temperate climate and adequate resources. By the time of the Falklands War the odious junta was complaining that it was a poor third-world country being picked on by a rich first-world one. To the extent that that was true it was because folks like the junta had worked hard to make it that way. Argentina fell for every stupid ideological fad of the 20th century. It developed large and sometimes violent communist movements. In Peron it raised up the purest example of actual fascism outside of Europe. It gave in to the same temptation to Bonapartism that the rest of South America did. It served, to the sorrow of its people, as a veritable laboratory on the question of just what causes national poverty: "neocolonialism" or bad domestic politics. Bad domestic politics was decisively enough to drive Argentina from rich democracy to poor tyranny. And the journey left a legacy of political infantilism that has bedeviled the country's fitful attempts to climb back out, right up to the last week.