A man of prodigious fortune, coming to add his opinion to some light discussion that was going on casually at his table, began precisely thus: "It can only be a liar or an ignoramus who will say otherwise than," and so on. Pursue that philosophical point, dagger in hand.

--Michel de Montaigne, Of the art of discussion.



Stab back: cmnewman99-at-yahoo.com


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A matter of priorities:
Here's the article that seems to be the momentary rage.

Some Iraqis, however, question the allocation of U.S. forces around the capital. They note a whole company of Marines, along with at least a half-dozen amphibious assault vehicles, has been assigned to guard the Oil Ministry, while many other ministries -- including trade, information, planning, health and education -- remain unprotected.

"Why just the oil ministry?" Jaf asked. "Is it because they just want our oil?"

Before and during the war, I remember lots of catastrophic scenarios being bandied about. But among the visions of the entire Arab Street (where is this street, anyway?) joinng al-Qaeda and Israel nuking Baghdad, I don't recall hearing anyone express concern about the risk that museums and hospitals would be looted by liberated Iraqis. Is there any reason we should have expected this? I've heard it stated that there was some looting in Paris after its liberation as well--but did they really try to clean out the Louvre? (And did U.S. troops stop them? "Put down the Mona Lisa, Monsieur, and come out with your hands behind your head!") I suppose with hindsight it's easy to say we should have realized that people this destitute would grab anything they could once order broke down, but that they'd actually loot hospitals never occurred to me at least. Did anyone predict this?

On the other hand, we knew that there was a huge risk Saddam's men would set fire to the oil wells if attacked. They had done it before in Kuwait. And they did in fact use trenches full of burning oil as a military tactic (albeit a pretty ineffective one). Further, oil fires take years to extinguish and cause terrible environmental pollution. (Preventing that sort of thing is usually pretty high in the priorities of America's critics, trumped only I guess by the need to generate conspiracy theories about us.) Finally, the oil is crucial to the immediate economic future of Iraq and its people. The loss of historical treasures is tragic, but only from the perspective of people who already have food on the table.

Forces are limited. You have to figure out the areas of greatest risk and commit them accordingly. I've seen the usual suspects trying to make hay out of this story, but I have yet to hear any attempt to mount a serious argument on either of the following points:

1) That the danger to Iraq's museums, hospitals, etc. was known beforehand to US planners to be serious enough to require specific preventive measures.

2) That this risk, if known, was remotely as great or as consequential as the risk that the oil fields would be detonated.

If you don't address those two points seriously, then you have no basis to infer from our allocation of resources that we don't "really" care about the Iraqi people.

So, no Jaf, we don't want your oil. We want you to have it. We were trying to save it for you from the same guy we were trying to save you from. Sorry we didn't also manage simultaneously to save you from yourselves.

But you know, ultimately only you guys can do that.


posted by CMN at 7:34 AM
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Aha! My secret plot to take over the blogosphere by plying its most prominent citizens with food and drink is proceeding perfectly! Now I just need to have Glenn over... Or maybe I could just send him some cookies.

Ironic, isn't it, that I should gain admittance to the sphere of ascetic contemplatives by means of wine-soaked repartee?
posted by CMN at 2:32 PM
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Quote of the day:

"Note to Medical Science: please give Oriana Fallaci another ten hale years, but should she pass anytime soon, put her brain in Ms. [Monica] Belucci's skull. Entire religions would arise to worship such a being."

Lileks, of course.
posted by CMN at 1:02 AM
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And we used to compare him to them. Here's an Onion piece that sounds like it could have been written by Scrappleface.
posted by CMN at 6:44 PM
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Speaking of Lucas, he was just on the receiving end of quite a Pejmanian panegyric. I should really be glad that my son is smarter, more talented, and better looking than I am. Right?
posted by CMN at 5:25 PM
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Days of miracle and wonder. So I'm sitting in my office at work, and a box opens on the screen in front of me, filed with words floating in an animated fish tank. It's my nine year old son Lucas, who wants to ask if I know of any good websites for his science project on time travel. I assume he's at home, and ask him to tell Paola that I'll be home as soon as my filing gets back from the court so I can fax it to the east coast defendants into whose hearts I wish to strike terror. He replies that he's actually not at home, but at work with Paola, who brought our laptop there for him to use. If you stop and think about it, every single one of the sentences I just wrote describes a truly miraculous way of living and doing business. We live in an age of science fiction, and we take it for granted. But sometimes it just hits me.

Oh. And at one point Lucas wrote, "I'm sorry my grammar wasn't good in that last sentence."

Into a chatbox.

That's my boy.
posted by CMN at 6:38 PM
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If the opening skit on SNL this week isn't making fun of the Black Knight Sir Sahaf and his BBC page boys, I'm going to be disappointed. I know, they're an easy and obvious target, but I still want to see it.

Update: Well, close. Lame, but close. The best segment was the CNN parody.
posted by CMN at 11:28 AM
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Best served cold. I'm sorry, but Saddam being vaporized in a bunker blast somewhere just doesn't seem satisfactory. It's like one of those manipulative thrillers that always let you down in the end. You know the ones, where they spend the whole movie building up your hatred of the villain. He repeatedly inflicts unspeakable suffering on innocent people, and does so with an air of idle amusement. Impervious to remorse or compassion, he smugly taunts those whose wives he has raped, whose children he has tortured. It's transparently manipulative, but it works like a charm. You can't help but want to see this guy go down. Way down. The problem, though, is that the more creativity they use in building up the villain's evilness, the higher the bar is set for what constitutes just desserts. Mere death is too easy for these people. You want to see them broken, because the most offensive thing about them isn't their acts, but their lack of human feeling. You want to see them in real fear, real suffering. And you want it to last long enough to expiate all the suffering they inflicted on others. This is the deep-rooted moral sentiment that Dostoevsky put so eloquently into the mouth of Ivan Karamazov. It is of course frowned upon by civilization and the higher forms of morality that civilization seeks to promulgate to maintain its own existence. But it is ineradicable, which is why there's so much entertainment that vicariously panders to it. The problem is that the civilizing impulse, while not doing away with revenge fantasy completely, nevertheless manages to emasculate it. Heroes never torture villains, even though everything we have seen makes us feel that the villain deserves that and more. Because that would in some way legitimize revenge and torture and take us a step away from civilization. So we are left most of the time with comeuppances that feel horribly hollow and anticlimactic. For the villain to be killed in hand to hand combat with the hero is minimal satisfaction at best. For him to die horribly by means of one the same cruel mechanisms he used on others is better, but usually too quick--good only for a moment of fear and pain, when what one really wants is psychological suffering of the kind that the victims experienced. The only movie I can think of that accomplished this was The Crow, because there the hero actually had the power to transfer the suffering deliberately inflicted on the victim directly into the villain's consciousness. Perfect justice.

So it is with Saddam and his sons. Getting blown up is far too impersonal and instantaneous. Ideally they'd be captured alive so that the new Iraqi government could try them. Not us, not the Hague. The Iraqi people. They're the ones with the right to try these guys. That process in and of itself would be punitive, because it would give these people who are used to wielding the power of life and death at whim over everyone around them some salutary humiliation, some time to let it sink in that now they are in the power of their victims. And this would be the best outcome politically as well, because then Saddam would be subject not to the rightly suspect "victor's justice" but to victim's justice. And though they'd probably want to inflict the death penalty, maybe for these guys long term humiliation in prison is actually a better punishment than death. Ideally chained at the bottom of some cistern with an opening at the top where the public could come and pay their respects. If the prisoners were in danger of drowning in respect, they could always open a drain once in a while.
posted by CMN at 12:01 PM
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Dialing it in. We went to see Phone Booth the other day. Gee, I wish I too could be stalked by an omniscient guardian sniper who would kill a couple random people just to force me to face up to my character flaws and remake my life.
posted by CMN at 11:48 AM
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