AmbivaBlog

The Victory Meme.

Is it appropriate to be celebrating victory in Iraq?

Retired General Barry McCaffrey reports:

The United States is now clearly in the end game in Iraq to successfully achieve what should be our princip[al] objectives: the withdrawal of the majority of U.S. ground combat forces . . . in the coming 36 months; leaving behind an operative civil state and effective Iraqi security forces; an Iraqi state which is not in open civil war among the Shia, the Sunnis, and the Kurds; and an Iraqi nation which is not at war with its six neighboring states.

Imagine if we had left a year ago!  I'm not going to go all the way back and say, "Imagine if we'd never gone in."  Too late, and too early.  Besides several thousand Americans, tens of thousands of Iraqis who are dead would still be living -- probably still under Saddam Hussein.  How Saddam would have been a player in the terror landscape, how and whether he might have continued to counterbalance Iran, is a never-to-be-known.  And whether the new Iraq will be strong enough to hold, in the high winds of sectarian rivalry and Islamist fanaticism, is not yet known.  But given how bad it was, it's as good as it could be.  And that is amazing.  That is worth celebrating.  Petraeus gets the credit (for an artful combination of counterinsurgency and strategic bribery, or "surge and splurge"), and Bush (and whoever advised him) gets the credit for sending in Petraeus. 

But don't call it "victory," says the very man most responsible for it.  He won't.

[Let's] talk about Al Qaeda in Iraq. They've lost Anbar province and Baghdad, where at best they can mount a couple of mostly insignificant attacks a day. They've vacated the Sunni Triangle. Virtually the entire Sunni Arab population has turned against them, and nowadays not a single Sunni imam, politician or tribal leader of note inside the country supports them—which was not the case even a year ago. While they're still duking it out in the northern provinces of Nineveh and Diyala, the territory AQI can operate in is a tiny fraction of what it was. Their situation is so grim that foreign jihadis are looking for other stomping grounds, and Al Qaeda's top leadership has turned its attention to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Why then don't we just say it?: Al Qaeda in Iraq has been defeated.

"You won't find a single military leader in this theater who will say that," says Petraeus.

"You could be the first, general."

"Yeah, I could, but I won't be."

"At least can't we say 'strategically defeated'?"

"We'll leave that to the academics. [U.S. Ambassador Ryan] Crocker and I explicitly, from day one, together, said that we have got to be coldly realistic and not let our enthusiasms creep into our assessments ... [Success] is still not self-sustaining; there is still a degree of fragility to it, and it could be reversed."

As the general's counterinsurgency guidance puts it, under the rubric "Manage Expectations": "Avoid premature declarations of success." [...]  Petraeus acknowledged that this policy of modesty in the face of success is very much informed by our premature victory ejaculations of previous years (before he took charge, of course). "The champagne bottle remains in the back of the refrigerator," he says. "When you've been in Iraq for as long as actually both of us have, coming up on four years, you're a little less prone to get too excited too quickly."

But I think we're justified in at least getting cautiously excited, slowly.  And in thinking about incorporating into our worldview (if it's not there already) the notion that the United States does not give up.  That's a very useful notion for our survival, security, and morale, even if it's not pure as the driven snow.  If you make a horrendous mistake, do you retreat in shame in the depths of the mess you've made, or do you stay, change course, and clean it up?  Whatever happens to Iraq in the years to come, consider the difference it has made for American security and morale.  Al Qaeda may not be licked yet, but maybe "Vietnam syndrome" finally is. 

POSTSCRIPT:  Writing this made me realize why AmbivaBlog is the right name for this sucker.

Ambivalence is not just a cop-out, it's an actual position -- wanting to stay true to the mixed bag that life is, and not to succumb to the emotional satisfactions of oversimplification, editing the white out of the black or the black out of the white.  It's temperamental Taoism.

It doesn't mean you can't act and make choices, either.  The white half looks a little bigger, and by God, it is!  And the size of the dot varies.  Your actions just have to be accompanied by a certain modesty of affect, something like an existential shrug.  Neither triumphalism nor defeatism will appeal.

Know Someone with Dementia?

Or a neurodegenerative disease?  This may help.  And it can't hurt.

Jacques' been taking it for about two weeks.  All I know is that he was getting really loopy, and now he's distinctly less so.  I never know with him "is this a phase or a trend," and when there's a change I never know for sure what's causing it.  It may be a coincidence.  Then again, it may not.

An American Death [UPDATED]

Trampled by crazed shoppers.  At a Wal-Mart.

UPDATE:  This spawns a new term:  shopper hooligans.

I Wish I Could Shake . . .

. . . the feeling I get, watching the Obamas with Barbara Walters, that this isn't real.  That we're all going to awaken, horribly, to reality -- the reality I'm so used to, even reconciled to, comfortable with -- where presidents aren't young and attractive and eerily well-spoken and witty, with picture-perfect families and best-and-the-brightest teams; where they're dumpy and inadequate and ill-fitting and obviously flawed, with the metaphorical equivalent, at least, of bad skin or bad teeth or one off eye; so we can comfortably whine about how we always end up with third-string, B people, like B movies, for president.  That's reality as we've come to know it; as we've loved to hate it.

This feels like living in a TV series, or a liberal's wet dream. 

If I can't shake the feeling, second best would be to put my finger on it.  What's bothering me??  Since I'm not a conservative, it's not that I think Obama is a complete phony or that his policies are going to drive America to ruin.  (Whether or not he had wanted to go to the center, events are forcing him there.  A little like the theories about global warming coming just in time to hold off a new ice age, the economic crisis that got Obama elected is also constraining his hand.)  Since I'm not a liberal, it's not like I think I've died and gone to heaven.  It's not that the Obamas are black, although that is one of the factors that is likely to draw destruction towards them from the fringe -- but the Kennedys didn't need to be black and neither did Ronald Reagan, for someone to take a crack at him.  It's charisma, rather.  (Noncharismatic presidents like Ford and Carter may get guns waved at them, but have you noticed that the dorkier the president, the lamer the attempt?)

The closest I can come is to guess that it feels like a Kennedy repetition-compulsion, a recurring traumatic nightmare.  Young, I was a sucker for the picture, the promise, of excellence, intelligence, eloquence in public service.  I still have those reflexes, but I don't trust them, and not entirely for a normal reason -- not only by way of normal disillusionment.  It was really bad not to get to be normally disillusioned by the Kennedy brothers.  (I'm aware that older people were.  I was just too young -- my memories of JFK are pctures from LIFE Magazine:  ask not what your country can do for you, John-John under the desk, Peace Corps, ich bin ein Berliner, Cuban missile crisis, bang.  Pink suit, roses and blood.  And then, that just smeared Vaseline on the lens you were looking at Bobby through.)  Though it helped some to learn after the fact about Jack Kennedy's horrendous womanizing (Dr. King's, too!) and hushed-up health problems.

Maybe it's a feeling that cynicism is the norm, mediocrity is safe, mediocrity is real and can be trusted to disappoint in familiar ways, comfortable as the hollow your butt has taken years to make in the couch.  Aspiring to vaunting excellence, as the Obamas so publicly do -- quite apart from the actual content of what they're offering -- is breaking out of the parameters of reality, and invites being shattered before it can be dimmed.  And even short of that, it's an illusion, a distraction.  Keep your eye on the half-deflated ball, people.

Sort of like, "Too good to be true is bad."

That's as close as I can get.

A Somber James Thurber Classic.

With a poignant and chilling date.  If you haven't seen it, you should.

TERROR. [UPDATED]

Strikes Mumbai.  Westerners and the Indian economy targeted in "sophisticated, coordinated" attacks -- signature al Qaeda style.  It's timed for the holiday season and the American interregnum.  And the international intelligence community "did not see this coming at all." 

UPDATE:  That's not exactly true.  They didn't see this coming, but they saw something coming -- and precisely because of the vulnerability of the interregnum.  

Western intelligence services have been expecting an al-Qaeda spectacular terrorist attack in this crucial period between the end of President George Bush’s administration and the succession of Barack Obama.

Signals intelligence “chatter” in recent weeks indicated that Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organisation might be plotting an attack “to grab the headlines” before Mr Obama takes over in the White House on January 20. [...]

The multiple attacks on Westerners in Bombay last night showed all the signs of an al-Qaeda strategy — picking on vulnerable Western “soft targets” but not in a country where there would be maximum security. [...]

The terrorists deliberately sought out American and British passport holders, and according to this article, are reportedly holding about 40 British hostages.

As the unprecedented scale of the attacks became clear last night, it looked to be the most co-ordinated terrorist operation since the targeting of the Twin Towers in New York in 2001.

Big Bro, Lookin in Your Brain.

It is devoutly to be hoped that these tests, being administered on a voluntary basis (so far!) to members of the Denver Police Force, aren't the wave of the future. 

They are brain scans and blood hormone assays to measure unconscious racism.

First of all, it's far from clear that they measure any such thing.  Second, if we were held accountable for our thoughts, we'd all be locked up in jails or mental hospitals.  As the writer of the piece, Rocky Mountain News columnist Vincent Carroll, suggests, there are good reasons why thoughts are private.  Human law enforcement can only judge actions.

Jesus may have said that lusting after a woman in your heart is the same as committing adultery.  But that's your God (or your conscience) looking into your heart, not your government prying into your brain. 

(H/T:  Stephanie West Allen)

Just Say No to No.

How to respond to a rejection letter.  I burst out laughing, envisioning the confused look slowly petrifying the face of the recipient.  It is truly hilarious, and highly useful.  With a little tweaking the concept could be expanded to many other contexts.

Holy Relic of Science Found.

Copernicus's skull.  And it's really him. 

Marie Allen, of Uppsala University, says DNA from the skull is a match for DNA from hairs found in books owned by Copernicus, whose book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium started the movement to viewing the sun – rather than the Earth – as the centre of the solar system.

“The two strands of hair found in the book have the same genome sequence as the tooth from the skull and a bone from Frombork,” she says.

Longer articles linked at the link.

This comes just at a time when I've been thinking how like a religion science is.  I'll tell you in exactly what respect.  I know that science is based on empirical investigation, not faith (even if it keeps crossing the line, becoming dogmatic, and needing its protestant heretics who go back to the data), and that this is its genius, what's brought us to such deeper understanding and greater mastery of the material world -- and we're just getting started.  But understanding and mastery of the world is what we've always been after with our cosmologies.  Science just does it better, at least in terms of investigating the actual arrangement of the material world (which turns out to be much more staggeringly awesome than mere senses and imagination ever managed, though I think some have always had visions of it). Science is the basis of our emerging cosmology, and it has its "culture heroes," as anthropologists call those mythic figures, elevated to semi-divine status, who stole fire or invented the wheel or whatever.  We have much more documentation and information about the actual lives of Copernicus and Galileo, let alone Darwin and Einstein, so they're not likely to become literal demigods, but we have the same kinds of fascination and emotion about them (and some no doubt regard them as divinely inspired).  Culture-hero worship.  We're coming up on the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth next February 12, and it's going to be a very big deal.  There is a large community of people who are obsessed with Darwin's biography, psyche, writings, and works; I've just been talking to one of them, for work.  This is thoroughly comparable to the preoccupation of medieval universities with meditation on the lives of saints and exegesis of the works of great theologians.  And for much the same reason.

Talking About Language and Identity . . .

This looks really provocative too. 

I’ve always been obsessed by languages, perhaps because I don’t really have one that I can claim wholly as my own. It might have something to do with the fact that, having lived in Korea until I was eight, and then in the United States and France, I don’t really have a native language—at least, not the way most people define a native language. I feel at home in more than one language, but never quite completely at home in any. I’ve always been disturbed by how often people confuse the words “nationality” and “ethnic origin”—both here in the U.S. and in France—as though the two were interchangeable. (One’s nationality, all too often, is not the same as one’s ethnic origin—and sometimes neither is the same as one’s national origin.) For me, these terms are far from interchangeable, and my nationality and my ethnic origin give only a partial picture of who I am. I speak French and Korean but do not have French or Korean nationality, which doesn’t keep me from feeling French or Korean, especially when I’m in the U.S., just as I feel very American when I’m in France. As a result, rather than adhere to a nationality or seek affiliation with a native language, I see myself as an inhabitant of the French language, a denizen of the Korean language, and a citizen of the English language. For me, the bond between language and identity is at once unavoidable, tenuous, and paradoxical.  ~ David Hoon Kim

There's more.  I don't have time to read it all right now, but maybe you do.