marccooper

Can Kerry Talk?

The Presumptive Democratic Nominee will have a television hour all to himself on tomorrow morning’s Meet The Press. I’ll be tuning in to see if Kerry can squeeze out one or two complete sentences of conversational speech, or will it be the usual wall-to-wall orating?

Sunday morning’s newspapers are already advancing Kerry’s position on Iraq. The NY Times:

[Kerry] proposes "an international mission authorized by the United Nations" to serve as the main civilian force to revive the Iraqi economy and government, and a NATO security force led by an American commander to keep peace.

As I, and many others, have already noted this is not terribly far off from the position now favored by GW. Especially after the White House endorsement yesterday of the work of the UN's Lakhdar Brahimi or “Brandini” as Kerry mispronounced his name two days in a row last week.

Anti-Bushies clinging to the notion that greater intervention by the UN is somehow going to calm the Iraqi waters might be deluding themselves as much as Bush apparently was when he ordered up the now-revealed secret plan to go to war. (By the way here’s the key excerpt from Bob Woodward’s “Plan of Attack”).

Brahimi has a long track record in Iraq and he’s not exactly loved – neither by the Kurds nor by the majority Shia. Former Coalition Provisional Authority advisor Michael Rubin takes down Brahimi in a National Review piece:

As undersecretary of the Arab League between 1984 and 1991, Brahimi stood by as Saddam Hussein conducted an "Arabization" campaign to drive Iraqi Kurds from Kirkuk and surrounding villages. Brahimi did nothing as the Iraqi government dropped chemical weapons on Halabja, killing 5,000 civilians.
Mainstream Shia hold Brahimi in ill regard. "We don't like Bremer, but Brahimi would be even worse," said a Baghdad Shia merchant with strong business ties throughout southern Iraq. Brahimi, who three months after the end of the first Gulf War left the Arab League to become Algeria's foreign minister, used neither bully pulpit to intervene in the massacre of tens of thousands of Iraqi Shia in the aftermath of the Gulf War. As the new Iraqi government uncovers dozens of mass graves throughout the country, pictures of Brahimi hugging Tariq Aziz, a former deputy prime minister expected to face charges of crimes against humanity, circulate widely in Iraq, sold along with other photographs and memorabilia of the former regime in the Mustansiriyah market of Baghdad.

No doubt the above is polluted with a heavy dose of pro-Bush and anti-UN hyperbole. Rubin should well remember the way Don Rumsfeld, on behalf of the Reagan-Bush adminsitration, was also playing footsie with Saddam at the time of Halabja. And Poppy Bush was more tha happy to avert his gaze as the Iraqi dictator crushed the 1991 Shia uprising. But Rubin’s central warning that Brahimi is tarnished goods should not be flippantly discarded.

Meanwhile, I’ll be looking forward to your honest reviews of Kerry’s performance tomorrow.

P.S. Is Kerry going to work up the courage to say anything meaningful about the reckless White House endorsement of Ariel Sharon's latest wet work?

Bay Area Alert!

If your're anywhere near the Bay Area tonight, Friday, why don't you come meet me at Cody's Books on Telegraph Ave in Berkeley? At 7:30 p.m. I'll be reading from and signing my just-published The Last Honest Place in America: Paradise and Perdition in the New Las Vegas.

Come find out: the deeper meaning of Las Vegas in the popular culture; why Las Vegas looks like our future; why it is indeed the most authentic place in modern America; why nude dancers are trying to unionize; how the corporations muscled out the mob; and whether or not you split 8's against a dealer's ten in Blackjack (yes!).

Or you can just buy the book at the link above. By the way, the above photo of me impersonating Johnny Cash was snapped in front of Vegas' historic downtown Binion's casino by the great photog Anne Fishbein.

More (and more substantial) postings coming later today or this weekend.

Fidel Stoned

The dottering 76 year old Comandante kinda looked that way last night as I watched the HBO premiere of Oliver Stone’s just-minted hour long vanity-doc “Looking for Fidel.”

I was looking for the point of this filmed synopsis of 60 hours of interviews but came up with nada. Oliver seemed as confused as the aging caudillo. And why wouldn’t he be? He doesn’t speak Spanish for one… and he demonstrated a glaring ignorance of Most Things Cuban.

I kept asking myself (out loud!) what exactly is Oliver Stone contributing to this filmed duo of big talkers? (Answer: nothing)

OK… some credit is due. Oliver was the only guy on camera with a bigger head than El Ego Maximo.

Someone who actually knows a lot about Cuba, writer Annie Louise Bardach, published a revealing little Q &A with Oliver on the eve of the HBO showing.

Poor Oliver got bamboozled by intrepid Annie when she pulled that old journo trick of handing him a long length of rope:

ALB: Did you ever think to bring up why he doesn't hold a presidential election?
OS: I did. He said something to the effect, "We have elections."
ALB: Local representative elections. But what about a presidential election?
OS: We didn't talk about it, especially in view of the fact that our own 2000 elections were a little bit discredited.

Yawn.

Lyndon Bush Johnson?

The war in Iraq – and it continues to be a war— is not Vietnam. But GW’s presser earlier this week sure brought back the good old days when a blustering LBJ and a sweating, squinting Dick Nixon would dissemble and dodge while struggling to explain the steadily sinking American enterprise in Indochina. Here’s a few graphs from my latest column in the L.A. Weekly:

Bush seemed firmly planted somewhere in 1968, lost in a fog of arrogance, denial and self-delusion. Our soldiers would stay “as long as necessary.” Escalation in blood, treasure and troops was now a certainty. Our unshakeable resolve no longer had anything to do with WMDs but now, as in the battle for Hue, was all about American “credibility.” The transparent fiction of an allied democratic (and feminist!) indigenous Iraqi government to whom full sovereignty, no less, would be transmitted a few weeks from now was boldly resurrected from the shattered legacies of Marshal Ky and President Thieu. Just as Vietnam, as we were told, was the intransigent frontline of the life and death struggle against World Communism, Iraq was once again deemed the key battle in the overall War on Terror. And Tricky Dick no doubt cracked a grin from his too-shallow grave as Bush said he would prevail in November because “I’ve got a plan to win the war on terror.” The only question left hanging is if it’s the same “secret plan” Nixon had to end the Vietnam War. Till now, it certainly looks like it.

I invite you to take a moment and read the complete version.

Too bad Christopher Hitchens doesn’t work for the Bush White House. He’s such a better advocate than the poltical crew he’s defending in print. His pro-war arguments remain the most compelling on that side of the fence and should be taken seriously even by the most anti-war folks among us. Check out Hitch’s piece in Slate this week.

If the United States were the nation that its enemies think it is, it could quite well afford to Balkanize Iraq, let the various factions take a chunk each, and make a divide-and-rule bargain with the rump. The effort continues, though, to try and create something that is simultaneously federal and democratic. Short of that, if one absolutely has to fall short, the effort must continue to deny Iraq to demagogues and murderers and charlatans. I can't see how this compares to the attempt to partition and subjugate Vietnam, bomb its cities, drench its forests in Agent Orange, and hand over its southern region to a succession of brutal military proxies.

I wrote last year that if Hitch ran Foggy Bottom and Michael Ignatieff ran the Pentagon, the war might have been worth supporting, But they don’t. And it wasn’t.

Still Leaderless

Wednesday afternoon I’ll be posting my latest full-length L.A. Weekly column on Bush’s press conference tonight.

For the moment, I’ll say only this: I don’t think many Americans care to keep hearing the President say why we went into Iraq. He already galvanized a majority on that matter.

They want to know now what he’s going to do to get us out.

But it was shades of LBJ as Bush vowed to stay the course and hinted broadly at coming escalation. Bush looked anything but like the self-confident post 9/11 leader of his favorite image.

Kevin Drum has a smart, real time blog/log of the press conference. Some of Drum's conclusions:

Bush was relentlessly on message, but even more than normal he seemed like he wasn't sure what to say. Lots of hesitations, lots of grasping for words, and absolutely no specifics. I honestly don't know how this kind of thing goes over with most people. Bush was, as usual, clear about staying the course in Iraq and clear about the threat of terrorism, but there was nothing new to announce, no real acknowledgment of serious problems, and no change of strategy. I wonder if he risks looking out of touch with what the public is seeing on the evening news every day?

My bud Roger L.Simon, a Taliban-mugged liberal, has a disinctly dissenting point of view.

I think Bush did very well and helped himself with this press conference. Most of all, he comes off as sincere and passionately committed--and I think on the War on Terror he is.

I, on the other hand, think George W. Bush is in a lot of trouble. The too-often supine White House press corps was uniformly hostile tonight and coverage promises to get a lot bumpier. If we can only keep John Kerry offstage long enough in a “sealed steel shipping container” as Mickey Kaus suggests, there might actually be a real fight in November.

Leaderless

I was just about to write a Where’s Waldo-like posting, asking where the hell is the Presumptive Democratic Nominee at a time when Iraq was looking ever more like Lebanon and Bush was busy guiding lobbyists around his ranch? And then I stumbled onto John Kerry’s bloated and windy op-ed in Tuesday morning’s WashPo.

I printed it out on thin-bond paper, held it up to my desk light, turned it sideways and back, tested it for disappearing ink and … alas.. still couldn’t figure out how Kerry’s position is substantially different than Dubya’s stated mission:

No matter who is elected president in November, we will persevere in that mission...
But to maximize our chances for success, and to minimize the risk of failure, we must make full use of the assets we have. If our military commanders request more troops, we should deploy them...Moving forward, the administration must make the United Nations a full partner responsible for developing Iraq's transition to a new constitution and government…We should urge NATO to create a new out-of-area operation for Iraq under the lead of a U.S. commander.

But the UN, which administered economic sanctions against Saddam, is about as popular as Tommy Franks in Iraq. As to NATO, well, it might be able to cough up 20,000 troops – more likely 5,000 or less. Kerry sputters on:

Finally, we must level with our citizens. Increasingly, the American people are confused about our goals in Iraq, particularly why we are going it almost alone. The president must rally the country around a clear and credible goal.

Kerry, true to character, doesn’t state what that goal just might be. Remember he’s still having trouble telling us what the deeper meaning of his campaign is other than that he’s the Anti-Bush. In the meantime, the country remains leaderless.

Sex And Sistani

I’ve spent the last week posting some fairly grim news from Iraq and I hope we’ll keep the debate going that has started in the previous two postings.

But time out to look on the brighter side… at least for a few minutes.

You know that Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Husaini Sistani? Our principal moderate ally? The good as opposed to the evil Mullah on whom we have seemingly banked the whole future of a Democratic Iraq? Turns out our Brother has got one helluva rocking web site that I’ve been alerted to by Carl Bromley of Nation Books.

Not that it’s in five languages, with scrolling art, photos of holy sites, drop down menus on “Ideological Questions” and “Islamic Law,” but it seems that when the Grand Ayatollah isn’t consumed by the task of building the future Iraqi nation, he’s available for interactive online counseling on hundreds of subjects from anal and oral sex to how much to tax a camel and if it’s OK or not to levy interest on “non-believers” (of course it is!).

No, I’m not smart enough to make this up. Send a question, any question into Ayatollah Sistani and you will get back a personalized answer that bears the official seal of his holy office.

Don’t get too jacked up about this as the Ayatollah frowns on any self-abuse excluding, of course, beating your chest or scalp with chains.

Here are some of the pearls I have gleaned from the Q & A page on Brother Sistani’s website:

ON MASTURBATION: Question: When I am unable to do Muta’h (temporary marriage), am I allowed to masturbate?

Answer: Masturbation is not permissible under any circumstances.

ON ANAL INTERCOURSE:
Question: My question is, what does the holy book Quran and prophet Mohammad (pbuh) say about anal sex even if the wife agrees to experience this with her husband?

Answer: As deduced from narration anal sex is permissible; but it is strongly undesirable. Permission is bound to wife’s agreement and consent to anal sex. If she is not consenting, it would be impermissible.

ON ORAL SEX:
Question: I am really sorry that I have to ask this type of Question. But Since I grew up in a western country; I rally don't much about our religion. And I can't ask this Question to my parents due to subject matter. Brother my question is, can we have an oral sex before or after the sexual intercourse or can we have oral sex at all? Is it haram?

Answer: Oral sex act is permissible with the consent of both husband and wife provided that no liquid gets into the mouth.

If you think that’s hard, just think how complicated it’s going to be to properly suckle a child after the handover of sovereignty:

The child's mother is the best person to suckle a child. It is better that she does not claim any award from her husband for suckling the child, although it is good that he should reward her for that. However, if the mother demands more payment for suckling than a wet-nurse, her husband can entrust the child to the wet-nurse.

It is recommended that the wet-nurse, whose services are obtained for a child, should be Shia Ithna-Asheri, sane, chaste, and good looking; and it is Makrooh for a wet-nurse to be a non-Shia Ithna-Asheri or ugly, ill-humoured or illegitimate. It is also Makrooh to entrust the child to a wet-nurse who has given birth to an illegitimate child.

Confused as I am? Not to worry. The Ayatollah has a direct email address, sistani@sistani.org . He readily invites all your questions -- mundane and otherworldly.

If you send him a query, as I hope you will, please be kind enough to post a copy here so we can all read it! It’s important to know what our key allies are thinking.

In the meantime, keep your hands where we can see them.

P.S. I was reluctant to click on the button the Ayatollah had placed for questions regarding "Sea Animals." Sheep, maybe, but sheepshead bass? After much trepidation, I capitulated to my curiousity and clicked anyway. How relieved I was to read this exchange:

Question: Caspian sturgeon should be counted as fish with scales or without scales?

Answer: If it does not have scales, it is and the caviar taken from it would be haram also.

Whew!

Get Out Of Iraq By Following Through?

Ok. Beyond the equally empty calls of either troops out now or don't flinch and get tougher, my friend Micah Sifry, editor of the Iraq War Reader, has come up with an intriguing draft of a "way out" of the Iraqi swamp. Here's an excerpt from his current blog posting:

Could it be that the only way out of the Iraq quagmire is through it--i.e., to call for early elections and Iraqi self-determination and to say, hey, we didn't find an WMDs and the dictator is gone, so our business here is done?

I've taken a look at the current opinion polls, which still show a slender majority backing the US presence, despite the latest terrible news. Is that because a majority still thinks Iraq was involved in 9-11? Not any more. Is that because a majority thinks the war is going well? Not any more. I think it's because a majority still believes in "finishing the job," which--if the evidence from the first Gulf War is still relevant--means supplanting the dictatorship and leaving Iraqis better off. Poppy Bush's failure to do so after the first Gulf War was, at its core, the main reason why American by a startling large majority viewed that war as a failure by 1992

So, while it's tempting to argue for just pulling out, not only is that a bad electoral strategy for anyone trying to beat Bush, it's also out of tune with public opinion. Better, I think, to call for early elections, internationally supervised, designed to allow Iraqis to represent themselves.

What think?

The Brits: "The Lid Has Come Off"

“Thousand Flee Iraq Fighting; Council Totters” is the ominous title of the front-pager by Tony Perry and Nick Riccardi that will lead Saturday morning’s L.A.Times.

Only the Bush administration can now deny that a historic turning point is upon us in Iraq. At least Washington’s most steadfast allies, the Brits, are starting to face up to the quickly unfolding and very ugly reality:

"The lid of the pressure cooker has come off," British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told BBC radio. "There is no doubt that the current situation is very serious and it is the most serious that we have faced."

No kidding. Even the Iraqi Governing Council, the interim administration hand-picked by the Bushies, is threatening to implode. More from the Times:

As the U.S. sought to stamp out uprisings across central and southern Iraq, its civilian administrators faced a different kind of turmoil in Baghdad. A Shiite member of the Iraqi Governing Council, Abdul Karim Mohammedawi, suspended his membership in the 25-member body and four others threatened to follow suit to protest what they described as collective punishment of Fallouja residents by U.S. Marines.

The Associated Press, meanwhile, describes Baghdad and parts of central Iraq as “chaotic.”

But the epicenter of the crisis remains Fallujah. Another AP report describes the chilling scene:

The people of Fallujah carried their dead to the city's soccer stadium and buried them under the field on Friday, unable to get to cemeteries because of a U.S. siege of the city..

The fighting has killed more than 280 Iraqis and four Marines, and has seen heavy battles that have damaged mosques and destroyed buildings angering even pro-U.S. politicians and turning the city of 200,000 into a symbol of resistance for some Iraqis…

I’m still searching for someone to come up with a plausible plan to move forward (or to reverse course).

From the Right come warnings that this is no time to back down, that to fold now would mean a U.S. surrender in the War on Terror. But this misses the greater point. The horrific scenes and mounting death toll out of Fallujah are generating a tsunami of anti-Americanism that could have negative repercussions for years or even decades to come. How many Arab hearts and minds are we winning this week?

On the Left, the official anti-war “movement” is equally off-kilter. An urgent call from the main peace coalition, UFPJ, brims with hyperbole and distortion. “The U.S. military is now using massive 500-pound bombs against civilians…” it falsely reads.

Sincere anti-war forces are now paying a heavy price for their complacency last year when they let fringe elements occupy the leadership of their movement. UFPJ was supposed to be the more moderate faction but it has had no hesitation to ally with the Kim-Il Sung worshippers in the more extreme A.N.S.W.E.R. group. No surprise then, that the best UFPJ can muster now is the empty slogan: “We must bring the troops home now.” Sure. That's a lot of help in the current crisis (See sane lefty Nathan Newman's great piece from a year ago Where The Peace Movement Went Wrong).

And from the mushy John Kerry center we get mostly mumblings about multi-lateralism. Like Western Civilization itself, a wonderful idea. But what do we really do except continue to watch the bodies pile up?

No White Hats In Iraq

Possible good news just coming in: “a unilateral suspension of offensive operations” by U.S.-led coaliton forces in Fallujah while some sort of cease-fire is being attempted. Perhaps a step back from the abyss, and maybe just in time. Or maybe just a breather in coming prolonged bloodshed.

A couple of days ago I mentioned the top-drawer reporting coming in from Baghdad by the Washington Post’s Karl Vick. In Friday morning’s paper, he serves up another cutting-edge report on the percolating upheaval in Iraq.

Solemn announcements boomed from mosques across Baghdad on Thursday beseeching Iraqis for donations of blood, money and medical supplies for "your sons and brothers in struggling Fallujah." And across the capital, Shiite Muslims joined Sunnis in rolling up their sleeves and reaching into their pockets…

… On Thursday, residents of Kadhimiya, this overwhelmingly Shiite neighborhood in northern Baghdad, were giving what they could to help Sunni insurgents in Fallujah…

The Sunni-Shiite divide, already narrower in Iraq than in some parts of the Muslim world, is by all accounts shrinking each day that Iraqis agree their most immediate problem is the occupation. Many here say that, whatever value there was in deposing Saddam Hussein, the Americans have exhausted their goodwill and fueled suspicions by staying too long and producing too little progress.

While bridging a sectarian divide seems like generally a healthy proposition, there is damn little to celebrate in this turn of events.

The forces that oppose the U.S. occupation, until now, have shown little capacity to develop any worthy leadership. An alliance of convenience between Saddamistas and fundamentalist clerics might, indeed, pose a formidable threat to the plans of the Bush administration (whatever those plans may be), but it’s an even more menacing dagger hanging over the future of the Iraqi people.

Hard to say – from my perch in SoCal—just how much popular support the insurgent militias actually wield. Probably a lot of passive sympathy but I doubt seriously if there is much pro-active support. Iraqi Shia blogger Alaa writes from ground-level:

“It has been a fearful week. So far, thanks God my family is still all right. Our neighborhood has up to now been out of the way, but I don’t know how long this will last though. Our life, however, is paralyzed at the moment.

If you check my fellow bloggers you will get more or less the feeling of the decent, helpless (or should I say hapless) majority. I can tell you without any hesitation that you get a much better insight by reading us than all the media reports. Please don’t believe what they are telling you about us. Some of the bloggers are Shia like myself, and some are Sunni like Ziad, and about this you will find our feelings are quite similar both regarding the zombies of Fallujah or the thieves of the Mehdi Army. My family is hiding in the house with doors locked and bracing for trouble.”

There are some compelling arguments to be made against a further escalation by the U.S. More troops and a tighter clamp-down could easily provoke a gotterdammerung, or however you say that in Arabic. But Alaa, for one, sketches his worst fears should there be the (unlikely) case of a U.S. withdrawal:

“What has been demonstrated now is the almost certain scenario to be expected if the U.S. decided to suddenly withdraw and leave the matter to local hands. The Country will be divided to three regions in no time. Those who will be in control in two of these regions will be precisely those against whom the Coalition is battling at the moment, the third will be under the control of the Kurds of course. Civil war between these groups will inevitably ensue very quickly. It is now clearly demonstrated that there are no viable local forces to stand against these elements. In addition, terrible pogroms and atrocities will be perpetrated against all the democratic movements and individuals and ordinary people.”

Am I suggesting damned if we do and damned if we don’t? Probably.

P.S. To any lefties tempted to celebrate the “revolution” underway in Iraq, or write off folks like Alaa as right-wing collaborators with the occupation forces, you should take a gander at the statement of the Iraqi Communist Party issued this week denouncing the armed uprisings. Here’s an excerpt:

“It is quite clear that these developments do not serve, in any way, the country’s stability, and will not help to resolve any of its numerous problems, but rather will lead to further deterioration of conditions on all levels…If this course of events is persistently maintained, the people will then find themselves in a vortex of violence and violations of the law with unpredictable consequences and an extremely negative impact on the current main objective of the Iraqi people: to take control of power from the occupation forces on 30 June.”