Neocon Clusterfuck in Middle East (open thread)

"...in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel...it is sentimental to discuss the subject of war, or peace, without acknowledging that a great many people enjoy war–not only the idea of it, but the fighting itself."

"....somthing frightening, the unhealthy, feverish illicit excitement of wartime..."
-Doris Lessing

Post-oracular hypothesis:  that no thinking person would honestly dispute the distinction between a free-wheeling, cultural-political, descriptive or generic or even centuries-old genetic "desire" for (what will become of the concept of) "war," and someone ignorantly wishing it to happen, or for that matter, refusing the responsibility that comes with power, and for  having significantly, predictably, knowingly, and against the consensus wisdom merely prescient of the glaringly obvious, helped it to happen.  The very intensity and stakes of the current 'crisis' (what makes it new–though never purely original–this time) have everything to do with a certain pressure on 'democracy,' it seems to me.

...in the necessarily finite time of politics and thus of democracy, the democracy to come certainly does not mean the right to defer, even if it be in the name of some regulative Idea, the experience or even less the injunction of democracy...The to-come of democracy is also, although without presence, the hic et nunc of urgency, of the injunctino as absolute urgency [....] the regulative Idea remains, for lack of anything better, if we can say "lack of anything better" with regard to a regulative Idea, a last resort.  Although such a last resort or final recourse risks becoming an alibi, it retains a certain dignity.  I cannot swear that I will not one day give in to it. 
(Derrida, "The Last of the Rogue States," emphasis added)

Elsewhere NPR contributes to our symposium.

Comments

[s0metim3s]

There are also partitions and identifications that democracies shape any sense of urgency around. An interesting blog (via Amie) here, and a bit more here - and I see on snippets of youtube news items that something similar is going on in Canada, in terms of identification as Canadian being the condition of empathy, action, support.

And then there's muppet affect management at the intersections between family, military and nation-state.

[Amie]

electronicLeganon.net

electronicIntifada.net

[s0metim3s]

Another interesting blog (via Sarai). A bit from one of the postings:

only a week before had we smiled upon the Lebanese passion for football during the World Cup, and the exuberant flag parade in the city of favourite teams (Italy, Brazil, Germany, you name it). We had joked how easy and playful the bearing of a flag was: if your team loses, then you just pick another. How exclusive and devoid of choice the bearing of a flag has become now: it can mean your ticket out, and your only guarantee of safety, or it means you cannot get out and are fully exposed to the spoils of war.

[Amie]

lists of protests.

yalibnan.com/site/archives/2006/07/upcoming_protes.php

[Matt]

Two notes: The "desire" for catastrophe, or for apocalypse, and the "desire" for "9/11" seem like rather different things to me.

It makes sense to speak of a "desire" for "9/11" maybe most in terms of a "desire" to render something that has been true and unspoken for some time now, suddenly "plain," as in visible to all (with all the mediatization this implies); to have then a common reference for marking the way the world has been changing, epochal and paradigmatic). Since Derrida was mentioned:

What was signaled, made explicit, confirmed on September 11? Beyond everything that has already been said, more or less legitimately, and to which I will not return here, what became clear on that day, a day that was not as unforeseeable as has been claimed? This overwhelming and all-too-obvious fact: after the Cold War, the absolute threat no longer took state form...

Is "desire" always marked by excess? In any case, the trauma may consist in getting more than one was wishing for, so to speak:

if there were traumas on that day, in the United States and throughout the world, it consisted not, as is too often believed of trauma in general, in an effect, in a wound produced by what had effectively already happened, what had just actually happened, and risked being repeated one more time, but in the undeniable fear or apprehension of a threat that is worse and still to come. The trauma remains traumatizing and incurable because it comes from the future. For the virtual can also traumatize. Trauma takes place when one is wounded by a wound that has not yet taken place, in an effective fasion, in a way other that by the sign of its announcement. (Derrida, "(No) More Rogue States")

Anyway. On another note, Charles, I think I understand what "a certain pressure" may refer to (namely, a pressure at once solely from the Muslim theocratic world (at least on the level of self-presentation), and in another register, issuing from within democracy itself)?

I realize this is just an open thread, Long Sunday style, but the potential ambiguity here, well, it wouldn't likely please the coming auditors.

[Charles]

Thank you for those links, Amie. Is the UTube video really worth signing up to see, st3s? Care to say what it's about?

Here is a fresh group of articles from OpenDemocracy, including a statement John Berger, Chomsky, Harold Pinter and Jose Saramago...

[Matt]

"The niceness of evil" indeed.

[s0metim3s]

Charles, the vid up on youtube is a commentary on Sesame Street's involvement in massaging the message of the war. I put it up here. -- 'Daddy's got to go away and do grown up work, help some people', is what some kids are supposed to be told, and then there are others, whose parents apparently are so terrible that they use them as 'shields'.

[Matt]

Michael Bérubé links to a good article, wherein:

The contradictions of Israeli self-presentation - "we are very strong/we are very vulnerable"; "we are in control of our fate/we are the victims"; "we are a normal state/we demand special treatment" - are not new: they have been part of the country's peculiar identity almost from the outset. And Israel's insistent emphasis upon its isolation and uniqueness, its claim to be both victim and hero, were once part of its David versus Goliath appeal.

Collective cognitive dysfunction

But today the country's national narrative of macho victimhood appears to the rest of the world as simply bizarre: evidence of a sort of collective cognitive dysfunction that has gripped Israel's political culture. And the long cultivated persecution mania - "everyone's out to get us" - no longer elicits sympathy. Instead it attracts some very unappetizing comparisons: At a recent international meeting I heard one speaker, by analogy with Helmut Schmidt's famous dismissal of the Soviet Union as "Upper Volta with Missiles," describe Israel as "Serbia with nukes."

Israel has stayed the same, but the world - as I noted above - has changed. Whatever purchase Israel's self-description still has upon the imagination of Israelis themselves, it no longer operates beyond the country's frontiers. Even the Holocaust can no longer be instrumentalized to excuse Israel's behavior. Thanks to the passage of time, most Western European states have now come to terms with their part in the Holocaust, something that was not true a quarter century ago. From Israel's point of view, this has had paradoxical consequences: Until the end of the Cold War Israeli governments could still play upon the guilt of Germans and other Europeans, exploiting their failure to acknowledge fully what was done to Jews on their territory. Today, now that the history of World War II is retreating from the public square into the classroom and from the classroom into the history books, a growing majority of voters in Europe and elsewhere (young voters above all) simply cannot understand how the horrors of the last European war can be invoked to license or condone unacceptable behavior in another time and place. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in Treblinka is no excuse for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian woman waiting to cross a checkpoint. "Remember Auschwitz" is not an acceptable response.

In short: Israel, in the world's eyes, is a normal state, but one behaving in abnormal ways. It is in control of its fate, but the victims are someone else. It is strong, very strong, but its behavior is making everyone else vulnerable. And so, shorn of all other justifications for its behavior, Israel and its supporters today fall back with increasing shrillness upon the oldest claim of all: Israel is a Jewish state and that is why people criticize it. This - the charge that criticism of Israel is implicitly anti-Semitic - is regarded in Israel and the United States as Israel's trump card. If it has been played more insistently and aggressively in recent years, that is because it is now the only card left...

Something is changing in the United States. To be sure, it was only a few short years ago that prime minister Sharon's advisers could gleefully celebrate their success in dictating to U.S. President George W. Bush the terms of a public statement approving Israel's illegal settlements. No U.S. Congressman has yet proposed reducing or rescinding the $3 billion in aid Israel receives annually - 20 percent of the total U.S. foreign aid budget - which has helped sustain the Israeli defense budget and the cost of settlement construction in the West Bank. And Israel and the United States appear increasingly bound together in a symbiotic embrace whereby the actions of each party exacerbate their common unpopularity abroad - and thus their ever-closer association in the eyes of critics.

But whereas Israel has no choice but to look to America - it has no other friends, at best only the conditional affection of the enemies of its enemies, such as India - the United States is a great power; and great powers have interests that sooner or later transcend the local obsessions of even the closest of their client states and satellites. It seems to me of no small significance that the recent essay on "The Israel Lobby" by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt has aroused so much public interest and debate. Mearsheimer and Walt are prominent senior academics of impeccable conservative credentials. It is true that - by their own account - they could still not have published their damning indictment of the influence of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy in a major U.S.-based journal (it appeared in the London Review of Books), but the point is that 10 years ago they would not - and probably could not - have published it at all. And while the debate that has ensued may generate more heat than light, it is of great significance: As Dr. Johnson said of female preachers, it is not well done but one is amazed to see it done at all....

Hm, well, not sure about that last bit. But the comments that follow are, I think, especially revealing.

[Craig]

IDF studies Deleuze & Guattari and Debord.

http://janedark.com/2006/07/being_rich_must_make_you_smart.html

[Amie]

YOU CAN'T KILL A BABY TWICE
by Dahlia Ravikovitch (translated from the Hebrew
by Chana Bloch and Ariel Bloch)

By the sewage puddles of Sabra and Shatila,
there you transported human beings
in impressive quantities
from the world of the living to the world
of eternal light.

Night after night.
First they shot,
they hanged,
then they slaughtered with their knives.
Terrified women climbed up
on a ramp of earth, frantic:
"They're slaughtering us there,
in Shatila."

A thin crust of moon
over the camps.
Our soldiers lit up the place with searchlights
till it was bright as day.
"Back to the camp,
beat it!" a soldier yelled at
the screaming women from Sabra and Shatila.
He was following orders.
And the children already lying in puddles of filth,
their mouths gaping,
at peace.
No one will harm them.
You can't kill a baby twice.

And the moon grew fuller and fuller
till it became a round loaf of gold.

Our sweet soldiers
wanted nothing for themselves.
All they ever asked
was to come home
safe.

(via Shortterm memory loss)

[Amie]

http://www.remue.net/spip.php?article1728

[Dick]

In the spirit of balance, I wonder, what do people make of this quacking?

(maybe it's mean-spirited, but sometimes wonder why those guys are on your sidebar at all).

[Matt]

Billmon:

I've been watching events in the Middle East off and on for the past 25 years, and I've seen the Israelis get ugly before. But I can't remember a time when I've seen them this ugly -- Ariel Sharon's scowling mug excepted, of course.

It's almost as if bits of Sharon's DNA have been duplicated and injected into the entire Israeli cabinet and the general staff: Massively disproportionate use of force (as defined in the Geneva Conventions, not the fevered war porn fantasies of Right Blogistan) reprisal terror bombings, an if-it-moves-shoot-it mentality on the ground:

"Over here, everybody is the army," one soldier said. "Everybody is Hezbollah. There's no kids, women, nothing."

Another soldier put it plainly: "We're going to shoot anything we see."

And now a proposal to turn all of southern Lebanon into a free fire zone.

This all might be considered normal military behavior for, oh say, a Bosnian Serb militia captain, circa 1991, but when the political and military leaders of an allegedly civilized state start talking this way, something big is going on, and going wrong. The dehumanization of the enemy (much of the Israeli press routinely uses the word "terrorist" to refer to any Hizbullah fighter or Palestinian militant), combined with the rage and humiliation at not being able to stop the rain of rockets falling on northern Israel, are knocking the props out from under whatever remains of Israel's claim to be different from, and morally superior to, its enemies.

The Israeli national persona has always had a macho swagger to it (it's part of the rationale for the state -- that Jews should be able to act like "normal" masculine hyperpatriots everywhere) but what we're seeing now is something different. It has a nasty edge of hysteria to it, a compulsive need to prove to the Arabs, and the world, that Israel still can and will stomp on anyone who gets in its way. The fact that Hizbullah is now demonstrating the limits of Israeli power -- or rather, the limits on how much Jewish blood the Israeli government is willing to spend to exercise that power -- is only making matters worse. The Israeli leadership elite is starting to sound like the semen-crusted violence addicts at Little Green Footballs. Given how much real violence the generals and politicians can inflict, that's a sobering thought, to say the least.

Combine this with an enormous sense of historic grievance ("Serbs will never be beaten again!" "The Versailles Treaty has shamed the Fatherland!") and a gnawing fear of encirclement, and you've got all the ingredients for a catastrophe, of the kind that could leave the Israelis, and their American patrons, up to their necks in blood -- of the innocent and the guilty alike.

Indeed. A warm welcome to Billmon on the blogroll.

[Aldrich]

An excellent post by Michael Bérubé, for those six or seven of you who have not seen it yet.

[Matt]

I thought I'd never say this, but even though it draws on the despicable "Harry's Place" to help make a few questionable distinctions (particularly wrt the word, "fascist"), this post Bérubé links to strikes me as correct.

Lenin & co's unblinking allegiance to Galloway's cheering for Hezbollah right now is...less than inspiring.

[s0metim3s]

The SWP not being opportunistic would be the surprise.

Anyway, http://www.beirutletters.org/

[Long Sunday]

[...Letters From Beirut...from Long Sunday]

[Gaston]

The estimable Billmon, warmly welcomed here, has an amusing recent post where one reads that Hizbollah "probably" welcomes the deployment of the Lebanese Army in the South as a "usefull supply of fresh human shields."

[Charles]

How Washington goaded Israel, one and two

via

What prevents radicals from acting strategically?

via