Iraq and Afghanistan: Does America still beat its wife

David Seaton's News Links

"Do you still beat your wife?" is the classic "damned if you do, damned if you don't" question. There is no satisfactory answer to it.

The situation the United States finds itself in the Middle East and in Afghanistan is like a bookshelf filled with tome upon tome of similar questions.

Just as to answer to the wife beating question is self-incriminating, and based upon a hopefully false premise -- that you beat her in the first place -- so it is too if we try to describe Iraq and Afghanistan today as an "either or" proposition.

Taking troops from the "wrong war" and putting them into the "right war" is simply to make worse a shameful situation, one that might be salvaged to some extent, and then setting off merrily to fall into a bottomless pit.

The war in Iraq is/was a criminal error and the USA is stuck with the results. As Colin Powell said, "you break it, you own it." We broke it and we own it. the situation, not the country, but almost the country.

In my opinion George W. Bush is a straight forward war criminal and should be tried by the Hague Tribunal, just like Milosevic or Charles Taylor. I also agree with Barack Obama when he says that the invasion of Iraq distracted the United States from the priority of catching Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. However I would put emphasis on the use of the past tense... It was a distraction, it no longer is.

Osama bin Laden is not the priority he once was and the "terror" (that threatens the USA) is not being fought in either country today. Terror that could affect the USA is to be fought in the immigrant communities of Europe, whose passports grant them visa-free access to the USA, not in benighted Waziristan.

The United States should never have invaded Iraq... but it did and that cannot ever be changed. It is still a matter of argument whether the USA invaded Iraq for "oil" or for "Israel", I think that both were factors, but whatever the reason, it has been a disaster for both oil and for Israel.

Like many people caught in a criminal situation, the United States has to brazen it out. Repentance, Confession, Restitution, followed by Absolution, which is how Christians are supposed to handle such situations, are unfortunately none of them options for a superpower.

Much is still at stake in Iraq.

Take this example:

Do you think that people all over the world happily accept dollars in payment: dollars which the USA prints at its pleasure like bubble gum cards with nothing to back them up except a huge current account debt... and its military power? Do they accept this near worthless paper just because they think we are cute?

Try to imagine your life if America had to buy Euros in order to pay for oil.

In my opinion America's real challenge in Iraq today is to extract itself with mastodontic leisure in order not to terminally destabilize the Middle East.

Most of the Middle Eastern regimes are clients of the USA, this includes an extremely precarious Egypt, with its 70 million people, and most of the major oil producers... excluding Iran.

Any American enthusiasm for accepting Maliki's (of all people's) endorsement of a pre-established date for a complete American withdrawal from Iraq might have consequences similar to those that June to August 1914 had in Europe. A vortex of unforeseen consequences.

At this point the United States must not be seen to bow to any pressure, especially from a rogue puppet like Maliki, a man that the USA installed in the first place.

"Act in haste (invade Iraq) repent at leisure" (leave at a time entirely of our own choosing) should be the guiding principal.

The damage has already been done, it cannot be undone, there is no hurry now. If the USA gets neither oil contracts, bases nor any safety for Israel out of this disaster, it will not only be (justly) accused of criminal behavior, but also thought (justly) to be weak, feckless and stupid. On this point of being thought weak and stupid. the opinion of "nice" people is not as important as the opinion of, say, Russia and China.

If the United States, just because invading Iraq was a criminal mistake in the first place, now "declares victory" and withdraws within a time frame not entirely of its own choosing, a general war may break out between Israel and its neighbors within weeks or months. This is not a serious option and neither McCain or even Obama will finally do that, no matter what they are saying today.

Hold on, it gets worse.

Iraq is a war that strains America's armed forces "to the breaking point", but in fact has been "managed", by a relatively small number professional troops and a pack of venal contractors.

Iraq is civilized, modern country, which we have done our best to destroy, but it is still able to re-organize itself. The situation, in Iraq, miserable as it is, could drag on for years and the USA would still control some of the world's best oil fields at what would probably be a decreasing cost to its forces.

Afghanistan is a completely different story. it never was organized, it never was "civilized"... Afghan's are famous for being the most recalcitrant and bloody minded people in the world... They are famous for that and for flying kites.

To quote my favorite pundit, William Pfaff,

There is a civil war going on in Afghanistan. There may soon be a civil war in northern Pakistan. The Taliban are involved in both, and the United States has every interest in staying out of both. (...) The Taliban believe in a deeply obscurantist mixture of fundamentalist Islam and traditional tribal practice. They belong to the Pathan (or Pushtoon) people, which means that they are kinsmen to more than 40 million other Pathans in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere in Central Asia, whom no one has conquered since Alexander the Great. (...) The vast majority of Taliban undoubtedly are ignorant even of the existence of the United States of America, other than those currently being bombed by the United States in Afghanistan or Pakistan. At one point in their tangled history they afforded hospitality to their fellow-traditionalist Muslim, the Saudi Arabian Osama ben-Ladin. That was their big mistake. The Bush administration made the bigger mistake of becoming entangled with them, for which the United States will eventually be sorry. Barack Obama should think again about what he proposes to do.

To "win" in Afghanistan would mean bringing back the draft in order to put boots on the ground of every inch of Pakistani Waziristan for the next decade (at least). It would probably cause the disintegration of Pakistan itself and destabilize all of South Asia... And still lose!!!

Iraq and Afghanistan have no real connection to each other except the idiocy of George W. Bush. They are a "do you still beat your wife?" equation, to which their is no clean answer.

The harm done in and to Iraq can never be undone, the harm the USA does in the near future, to itself and those oil rich criminals upon which our way of life so depends, is still in the hands of the US armed forces.

Afghanistan, thought erroneously to be the "war we cannot lose", should be left to its own devices.

To not do so invites the fate that Rudyard Kipling so colorfully described,

"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier."

If I didn't think Barack Obama was a total opportunist who will say anything at any time to anyone, I might take what he says about Iraq and Afghanistan seriously and get seriously concerned.

One takes comfort where he can these days. DS

Nobody here but us cyclists, boss

For the third time in three years, the Tour de France was thrown into turmoil Thursday as one of its leaders failed a drug test in midrace. Riccardo Riccò, an Italian rider who has already won two stages this year, was escorted away from the start of the 12th stage by the French police. He was the third cyclist to have tested positive for the banned blood-boosting drug EPO this year. The team he rode for, Saunier Duval-Scott, immediately withdrew from the race.(...) Riccò's disqualification came on the 10th anniversary of the Festina scandal, when institutionalized doping among cycling teams came to the forefront with the arrest at the 1998 Tour of a team director with a car full of performance-enhancing drugs. IHT

"The rest of the Tour de France may offer a bizarre new form of excitement, with people watching to see who the latest is to get snared by the EPO test. (...)The self-importance with which Ricco answered critical questions over the last several days begs comparison with other riders (Lance Armstrong and Michael Rasmussen, for example), who have responded in a similarly arrogant way. … Stock in cyclist credibility has taken a steep dive in value. And an up-to-date EPO-test won't be able to help that much, either." Neue Zürcher Zeitung (courtesy Der Spiegel - english)

"No se puede esperar de los seres humanos facultades sobrenaturales." "You can't expect human beings to have supernatural powers." Fidel Castro, Julio 14 de 2008

David Seaton's News Links
We have been seeing an increasing number of doping scandals in every sport where doping is relevant, which would leave out, maybe, bridge.

Right now the Tour de France, perhaps sport's most demanding event, is the center of morbid attention and even the victories, or especially the victories of recent multiple Tour winners, Miguel Indurain and Lance Armstrong are suspect. Suspect, because before their amazing strings of Tour wins, little had been heard from either Armstrong or Indurain, therefore cynics believe that their doping was as record breaking in its sophistication as their later deeds on the bike.

Testing science has been playing catchup.

The lesson here is that science is perfectible, creating ever harder to detect dope and simultaneously creating ever more ingenious tests for detecting said dope. What passed inspection a few years ago, won't pass this year: wait till next.

We might call this period that we live in, "the age of optimization": everything is being tweaked and fine tuned constantly.

Anyone who is reading this blog needs a computer to do it and must be conscious of how much the computer has sped up their lives: how much more productive each of us has become with this tool in our hands, and with the Internet added, multiplying that productivity by a magnitude.

However, at some point this pressure to perfection, this process of optimization, of greater and greater productivity, becomes somewhat oppressive and the feeling of fraternity (sorority?) and solidarity with the battery chicken occurs in the more empathetic among us.

We too, like the cyclists and the chickens, are being tweaked and optimized and it appears that we are as helpless in the face of it all as the chickens, if not the cyclists, are. DS

Afghanistan/Pakistan: the new "Vietnam"?

Pashtun tribesman - photo by Thomas Cole

David Seaton's News Links
As a blogger and as a columnist, I'd love to always be original or be a huge expert on a specific subject, but I am what is known as a "generalist", a jack of all themes and a master of none.

If I pride myself on anything, it is on my taste in experts and guides. I have learned who to ask, what to ask, and who to trust and when to trust them and when not and to all of this and all of them, I owe my living.

I happily stand on the shoulders of giants and every now and then, they put me in range of a slam dunk.

Two of my all time favorite experts, William Pfaff and Juan Cole, have both written about Barack Obama's strategy for the war in Afghanistan. A strategy which might be defined as "out of the frying pan (Iraq) and into the fire (Afghanistan). Briefly, to take troops from Iraq and take them to Afghanistan to "fight Al Qaeda".

Pfaff and Cole both coincide in their advice: Bad idea, don't do it.

Please read the quotes below with great care.

Age before beauty, first at bat, William Pfaff:

Barack Obama has announced his intention to commit himself to another disaster in the making. As president, he would dispatch reinforcements “to fight Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan.” During the campaign has repeatedly attacked George Bush for going to war against the wrong enemy, Iraq, in the guise of fighting Al Qaeda. Now he will reinforce the fight against the Taliban, once again in the guise of fighting Al Qaeda. The Taliban are not Al Qaeda, any more than the Iraqis were. There is a civil war going on in Afghanistan. There may soon be a civil war in northern Pakistan. The Taliban are involved in both, and the United States has every interest in staying out of both.(...) At one point in their tangled history they afforded hospitality to their fellow-traditionalist Muslim, the Saudi Arabian Osama ben-Ladin. That was their big mistake. The Bush administration made the bigger mistake of becoming entangled with them, for which the United States will eventually be sorry. Barack Obama should think again about what he proposes to do.

Now for Juan Cole:

If the Afghanistan gambit is sincere, I don't think it is good geostrategy. Afghanistan is far more unwinnable even than Iraq. If playing it up is politics, then it is dangerous politics. Presidents can become captive of their own record and end up having to commit to things because they made strong representations about them to the public.(...) We who admire him don't want Afghanistan to become an albatross around the neck of a President Obama. I am old enough to remember one of the things that nearly killed the Democratic Party as a presidential party in the US, which was the way Lyndon Johnson let himself gradually get roped into ramping up the US troop presence in Vietnam from a small force to 500,000, and then still not win. Afghan tribes are fractious. They feud. Their territory is vast and rugged, and they know it like the back of their hands. Afghans are Jeffersonians in the sense that they want a light touch from the central government, and heavy handedness drives them into rebellion. Stand up Karzai's army and air force and give him some billions to bribe the tribal chiefs, and let him apply carrot and stick himself. We need to get out of there. "Al-Qaeda" was always Bin Laden's hype. He wanted to get us on the ground there so that the Mujahideen could bleed us the way they did the Soviets. It is a trap.

Both Cole and Pfaff coincide that Osama bin Laden is not really the issue. I myself believe that Tora Bora was the unique chance to get him and the US blew it. After that the USA has "taken the bait" and fallen into Bin Laden's trap and should extract itself forthwith.

In the middle of the above extract Juan makes, for me, the most important point:

We who admire him don't want Afghanistan to become an albatross around the neck of a President Obama. I am old enough to remember one of the things that nearly killed the Democratic Party as a presidential party in the US, which was the way Lyndon Johnson let himself gradually get roped into ramping up the US troop presence in Vietnam from a small force to 500,000, and then still not win.

Why is this so important?

Two important premises that I argue from after reading Pfaff and Cole:

• If Barack Obama is sworn in a President of the United States, his first objective, as it is the objective of every young man who has ever been elected president, will be to get reelected president. 2012 will loom before him like a chimera and will color his every thought, his every word and his every action.
  

• Democrats with no military experience are obsessed with not being viewed as wimps (Republicans like Bush and Cheney are too, but the Republicans don't attack them). President Obama, not the world's most mannish boy to begin with, will want to prove beyond a doubt to everyone here and abroad that he has big, big, big, cojones.
  

That need to prove his masculinity was what broke Lyndon Baines Johnson, perhaps the only potentially great president after Roosevelt and cost a million dead Vietnamese and 50,000 dead Americans.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was one of the smartest, big hearted, can do, practical and experienced men to ever sit in the White House. Barack Obama is not worthy to tie LBJ's sandal, or at least nothing in his brief public life would give him any right to presume so. Therefore I think Obama would be much more vulnerable than Johnson to prove he had the "right stuff". That is the formula for disaster, because, don't kid yourself, to "win the war" would finally lead, escalation by escalation into an invasion and dismemberment of Pakistan and that is the abyss, the bottomless pit of America's self destruction if ever there was one.

Quite reasonably you could point out that McCain is also in favor of "winning".

Sure he is. The only thing he has going for him is that people may doubt his health, sanity and temper, but nobody, but nobody, anywhere, is ever going to doubt John McCain's cojones. Which means that if it becomes obvious to military experts that America has to pull out of Afghanistan or suffer the same fate there as the Soviets did, McCain will be able do it without anybody (especially the "Republican attack machine") calling him a wimp or doubting for one moment his patriotism. He has that credit, which would be vital in this situation.

As to Iraq: finally the US will have to content itself with the "legacy" of having removed Saddam Hussein and created a freely elected government in Baghdad. Drawing the line under that would allow Americans to still think that they are somehow "special" and save another few trillion dollars and God knows how many lives.

As Pfaff says,

Barack Obama calls the Iraq prime minister’s demand for an American troop withdrawal schedule “an enormous opportunity.” He is right, and it must be accepted. This is what the majority of the American public voted for, but didn’t get, from the midterm American election of 2006.

Instead the Bush government gave Americans the surge. The surge has resulted in Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s demand for a phased American withdrawal from Iraq. Bush expected the surge to produce victory, whatever that might mean, and the right to dictate the terms on which the United States would stay in Iraq, not leave.

Those terms were made known earlier this year: total American exemption from Iraqi law (meaning extra-territorial legal status), veto over Iraqi government decisions, control over Iraqi military and police operations, authority to arrest and imprison Iraqi citizens and foreigners, immunity for American contractors from Iraqi law, and control of Iraq’s airspace.

The surge did the opposite. It created the conditions for Maliki’s demand that the U.S. and its allies leave. General David Petraeus built cement walls in cities to separate Sunnis from Shi’ites. This meant reciprocal ethnic cleansing in sensitive areas, to suppress conflict.

Petraeus paid Sunni tribal groups to fight foreigners – the self-named “al Qaeda in Mesopotamia” – and to keep order in their areas. He encouraged the Maliki government to impose its authority on the radical militia controlled by the young Shi’ite leader, Moqtada al-Sadr.

This created the conditions in which rival power groups, as in Basra, provisionally settled the power issues at stake between them, which would have (and possibly will again) produce conflict when the occupation ends.

The surge segregated groups, imposed truces, and made provisional arrangements to buy peace between factions. It thus created conditions in which the Iraqis want the occupation to end.

Some in Washington don’t want this because the Pentagon has built bases throughout Iraq it certainly does not want to give up, and the State Department has built in the Green Zone the world’s biggest American embassy, complete with tennis courts, swimming pools, leaking roofs and flooding toilets, and a fast-food shopping mall complete with blast shelters, just for Americans, and is anxious to move in and run Iraq. Is all this to be sacrificed to an unwelcome Iraqi sovereignty?

No one knows; but it begins to look that way, as according to the latest reports, American and Iraqi officials have now abandoned negotiations, leaving it to a new American president to take up the matter.

Barack Obama, if elected, would do well to immediately accept the Maliki demand, and leave no U.S. forces behind that could pull Americans back into Iraq. Give the Iraq government what it wants, and leave the disaster of the past six years totally on the account of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney

Who knows, if the US did that, maybe someday, when today's dead have turned to dust, the Iraqis might even feel grateful.

But to use that retreat to up the ante in Afghanistan, thus ignoring the experience of both the British and the Russians there, would be the height of folly and lead to disasters that would turn the Vietnam horror into a dry footnote in the theses of future Chinese historians. DS

Shake your booty! What, no booty left?

"This is by far the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression" Nouriel Roubini

"A total collapse of the US financial system, while not inevitable, is a contingency which should now be planned for." Martin Hutchinson, Prudent Bear

David Seaton's News Links
There is a lot of talk these days about the role of humor in American politics; whether or not a candidate is a suitable butt for jokes, whether or not they can "laugh at themselves" and so on and so on. Whether or not humor is "appropriate".

The American national pastime of navel gazing aside, whoever the next president of the United States is, he should, without delay, get fitted out for an getup like the fellow in the photo is wearing... make up and all. Because that is going to be the role of the next POTUS on the world stage in the foreseeable future.

Losing two wars is something the world can chalk off to youthful folly, people seem ready to forgive and forget unprovoked invasions and the deaths and torture of hundreds of thousands of human beings; but destroying the livelihood of millions of people around the world though ideologically driven, financial frivolity is a little harder to swallow. They are going to resent it.

Whatever the world looks like in 2012, it's going to look as different from today as the world looked after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

If I were the next president of the US, I would try to inspire the people with a ringing speech.

My fellow Americans (pause): This is the time (pause, with meaningful gaze into the middle distance) This is the time (pause) for the American people... (pause) to dig deep into the wellsprings and treasures of our popular culture (long pause) to dig deep into our roots (pause), in order to find the strength and the inspiration to carry us through the difficult days to come.

My fellow Americans, Try this on for size.

(marine band strikes up, POTUS sings in a pleasing baritone):

Once I lived the life

of a millionaire

Spending my money

Oh I didn't care

Taking my friends out

For a mighty good time

Buyin' high priced liquor

Champagne and wine

Oh but just as soon

As my money got low

I couldn't find nobody

And I had no place to go

In my pockets, not one penny

And as for my friends,

Man, I hadn't any

So, if I ever get my hands

On a dollar again

I'm gonna hold on to it

Till that big eagle grins

Cause it's mighty strange,

Without a doubt

Nobody wants you

When you're down and out

"Nobody wants you when you're down and out" - Jimmie Cox

DS

'Taint funny McGee

David Seaton's News Links
The New Yorker and I go a long way back, my parents had a subscription before I was born: divorced, they had two subscriptions and I literally (or illiterately) began to read the New Yorker before I even knew how to read... I even like the smell and feel of the magazine's paper and ink from those days.

Also as a little boy I loved the drawings and writings of James Thurber, all of which proceeded from the magazine and I had a precocious taste for New Yorker cartoons, (plus "Pogo,"of course), that marked me as a bit different from my Disneyed little chums.

Anybody who is a snob before they turn five is likely to be incorrigible.

This is just to make clear that the New Yorker and I are family and I tend to take their covers on faith. Frankly, I can't imagine ever taking sides against the New Yorker on anything.

If I had to speculate, I would say that someone at the New Yorker Magazine is very, very, very pissed off at Barack Obama. This could be for any number of reasons ranging from his policy flip flops, down to a snub at a cocktail party.

What I am sure of that it is not just "innocent" satire. Innocent is the last word I would ever apply to the New Yorker... or to Barack Obama for that matter.

I agree with Mike Huckabee, in my opinion America's sharpest, most human and most interesting politician, when he was asked on Fox if the cover was just satire,

HUCKABEE: Well, I don't know how clear it is, though. It's clear to people who keep up to politics, but if you're walking down the corridor of an airport, you just happen to look over the bookstore, you're just going to see that image, and, frankly, I don't know that the average person who doesn't know "The New Yorker," who doesn't read the article, is going to get that it's satire.

COLMES: If you see an image of Barack Obama -- Michelle looks like Angela Davis, you know, assault rifles, burning flag, Osama bin Laden, who in their right mind would take that seriously?

HUCKABEE: A whole lot of people who don't bother to do anything other than just look at the image. Believe me, I've been a candidate, I'm telling you that there are a whole lot of people that don't get beyond the surface.

There are a lot of people who follow every bit of the news, but there are many Americans who just read the headlines or they hear the lead story, they don't dig down deep.

That cover -- I can understand why Obama was, you know, pretty burned about it. He was more burned than the flag over this.

The cover pictured above, which has caused such an uproar, is also an occasion to riff on an article in today's New York Times. Here are some choice bits:

What’s so funny about Barack Obama? Apparently not very much, at least not yet.(...) Comedy has been no easier for the phalanx of late-night television hosts who depend on skewering political leaders for a healthy quotient of their nightly monologues. Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O’Brien and others have delivered a nightly stream of jokes about the Republican running for president — each one a variant on the same theme: John McCain is old.

But there has been little humor about Mr. Obama: about his age, his speaking ability, his intelligence, his family, his physique. And within a late-night landscape dominated by white hosts, white writers, and overwhelmingly white audiences, there has been almost none about his race.(...) anything approaching a joke about Mr. Obama himself has fallen flat. When Mr. Stewart on “The Daily Show” recently tried to joke about Mr. Obama changing his position on campaign financing, for instance, he met with such obvious resistance from the audience, he said, “You know, you’re allowed to laugh at him.” Mr. Stewart said in a telephone interview on Monday, “People have a tendency to react as far as their ideology allows them.”(...) There is no doubt, several representatives of the late-night shows said, that so far their audiences (and at least some of the shows’ writers) seem to be favorably disposed toward Mr. Obama, to a degree that perhaps leaves them more resistant to jokes about him than those about most previous candidates.(...) Of course, the question of race is also mentioned as one reason Mr. Obama has proved to be so elusive a target for satire.

“Anything that has even a whiff of being racist, no one is going to laugh,” said Rob Burnett, an executive producer for Mr. Letterman. “The audience is not going to allow anyone to do that.”(...) One issue that clearly has some impact on writing jokes about Mr. Obama is a consistency among the big late-night shows. Not only are all the hosts white, the vast majority of their audiences are white. “I think white audiences get a little self-conscious if race comes up,” Mr. Sweeney of Mr. O’Brien’s show said.(...) Jimmy Kimmel, the host of the ABC late-night talk show “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” said of Mr. Obama, “There’s a weird reverse racism going on. You can’t joke about him because he’s half-white. It’s silly. I think it’s more a problem because he’s so polished, he doesn’t seem to have any flaws.”

Humor is a royal gate into the subconscious and I think this article gives a key to an important thing that the white, college educated American middle classes are looking for in Barack Obama. In a land steeped in irony, the land of the loud raspberry, you are not allowed to laugh at him.

It isn't permitted to laugh at him because in the acceptable discourse of genteel America, it is not allowed to ridicule a person of color for any reason at all no matter how absurd they are and if anyone does so, it is permitted to look down on that person as a despicable, ignorant, racist, pig.

One of the most comical situations in American life is to see a well educated, middle class, white American confronted with that rarest of creatures, an obnoxious African-American (some do actually exist, I'm told) and watch the good lady or gentleman tie him or herself into knots rather than to just tell a putz of color to get stuffed.

Mind you, this is totally hypocritical; skin color still blinds middle class Americans to obvious absurdities. For example, it allows middle class Americans to applaud and to nod approval when a person raised entirely by a white middle class family, with the means to send him to good prep school, solely because of his skin color, has the nerve, the unmitigated chutzpah to lecture the African-American community, as represented by the NAACP on "personal responsibility".

"Now, I know some say I've been too tough on folks about this responsibility stuff. But I'm not going to stop talking about it." While it is right to assail Washington and Wall Street for some of the inequality in the country, "we also have to demand more from ourselves," he said.(...) Obama reiterated his campaign stance that, even if they are disadvantaged, American blacks have to "do more in our own lives" rather than point the finger elsewhere.(...) "It starts with teaching our daughters to never allow images on television to tell them what they are worth; and teaching our sons to treat women with respect, and to realize that responsibility does not end at conception; that what makes them men is not the ability to have a child but the courage to raise one."

This speech is entirely and cynically pitched toward the white middle class and is as enormously cruel and insensitive as the "clinging to guns and religion" remark he made about poor whites.

The plight of contemporary poor black youth and the plight of poor white youth stem from dis-industrialization. I grew up in a town with a large black community and attended junior high and high school with African-Americans and in the 50s they all had fathers with jobs. Real working class, unionized jobs. Those jobs no longer exist.

It is cruel to say,

"What makes them men is not the ability to have a child but the courage to raise one."

It is cruel because as human beings, men and women, be they black or white, have to fuck and children just happen: most of us just happened.

But to "raise a child" is also quite an ordinary thing that doesn't require courage so much as it does money and that in turn means steady jobs that pay enough to have an orderly home life. Poor blacks do crack and smack and poor whites do meths because... there are no jobs for people with little education that pay enough to make a home and to raise a family: they have no future.

Getting back to the point I raised before: America's educated, white, middle class want a president that can't be laughed at.

George W. Bush is the world's laughing stock, a figure of fun for the whole planet. This raucous laughter pains the educated, American middle class: these are people who travel and experience this derision and contempt as a personal affront, and who, behind their mild exterior, are as proud as Old Nick.

If nothing else they want the laughter to stop.

Bush is the laughing stock of the world, in part because of his ineptness, but mostly because America's chickens are finally coming home to roost, the next president is going to preside over a situation of near or perhaps real collapse of America's long held positions in both economic and military spheres.

Any post-Bush honeymoon the next president may have with the world will be very short lived and whoever he is, he too will soon be greeted by angry demonstrators all over the planet and by governments, like the Russians and the Chinese, that are not going to cut anybody any slack just because they are in their 70s or because their hair is curly and their teeth are pearly.

Obama or McCain, the next few years are going to be humiliating, but with president Obama, America's educated middle class and their wannabees will be able to smugly dismiss the jeering disrespect of the world as crude and ugly racism and thus maintain some sense of their own superiority and their belief in American Exceptionalism. DS

Google Streets enters into "mono no aware"

Screen capture of my childhood home, from Google Streets

David Seaton's News Links
"Mono no aware", which in Espanglés would mean, "the monkey hasn't got a clue", is in fact, a Japanese term of art which, roughly translated,

"describes beauty as an awareness of the transience of all things, and a gentle sadness at their passing. It can also be translated as the "ah-ness" of things, of life, and love."

Lets continue with John Paul Gillespie's fine essay on the subject:

According to mono no aware, a falling or wilting autumn flower is more beautiful than one in full bloom; a fading sound more beautiful than one clearly heard; the moon partially clouded more appealing than full. The sakura or cherry blossom tree is the epitome of this conception of beauty; the flowers of the most famous variety, somei yoshino, nearly pure white tinged with a subtle pale pink, bloom and then fall within a single week. The subject of a thousand poems and a national icon, the cherry blossom tree embodies beauty as a transient experience.

Google has developed a new wrinkle called "Google Streets", which is the nerd's somei yoshino sakura.

Last night I used Google Streets to look up some of the houses I lived in as a child. Places where I haven't set foot and hardly thought about in nearly 50 years.

It was strange to use the mouse to follow the streets of my long ago childhood like a robot diving camera exploring the Titanic.

Like a robot or like my own ghost wandering unseen among its once familiar objects.

I found that I remembered where everything was, each corner that had to be turned to get to each place and floods of memories, few of them happy, at every poke of the mouse.

A Spanish friend of mine, wise in the ways of intellectual property, born and raised in a dictatorship, says that Google has to keep inventing all these toys in order to justify the sinister amount of information, all tied to our IPs, that they are gathering from and about us.

However, if you are old enough, and far away enough from your roots, and you truly want to schlep mono no aware, Google Streets is for you. DS

Gagging on the Kool-Aid

The Kool-Aid Man

Some Obama supporters worry that the spectacle of their candidate eagerly embracing his old rival, Hillary Clinton, and traveling the country courting big donors at lavish fund-raisers, may have done lasting damage to his image as an arbiter of a new kind of politics. This is a major concern since Obama's outsider credentials, have, in the past, played a large part in his appeal to moderate, swing voters. In the new poll, McCain leads Obama among independents 41 percent to 34 percent, with 25 percent favoring neither candidate. In June's NEWSWEEK Poll, Obama bested McCain among independent voters, 48 percent to 36 percent. Newsweek

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There are all kinds of independents, left, right, center... you name it. They probably only have one trait in common: an aversion to drinking Kool-Aid.

Drinking Kool-Aid is about commitment, sacrificing core principals can only be justified, if it can be justified, in pursuit of a great cause.

Certainly, nothing could be more absurd than to drink a Kool-Aid with no ideological content whatsoever.

Newsweek wonders:

But perhaps most puzzling is how McCain could have gained traction in the past month.

This election is not about McCain, it is about Obama, McCain cannot win, but Obama can lose.

My reading of Barack Obama that he is his own space or he is no space at all. His secret has been the charm of his difference. If he loses that special quality, and by now there is little left, it will be like Cinderella's coach turning back into a pumpkin and all the pretty horses back into scurrying, little mice.

That is what is happening now, I predict it will go very fast once it starts and that some of the super-delegates may begin to have second thoughts by the end of the month.

The Democrats have thrown a once in a generation opportunity away. DS

I couldn't believe what I was hearing

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I admit that I had thought that Amy Winehouse was just another one of the media grotesques, a sort of Paris Hilton with a beat.

I thought that her big hit "Rehab" was a catchy update of the Stax/Atlantic sound, sung in blackface. I sang it in the shower, hummed it in the metro.

This afternoon I was having coffee in my local, when the video shown above was played on some music channel and then, suddenly I discovered that I was listening to a very fine, an extraordinarily fine, potential saloon singer.

A saloon singer, by my definition, is someone that is able to take an ordinary, flat, tin pan alley lyric, and through what Noel Coward called "the power of cheap music", to mysteriously and effortlessly enter uninvited into some of the painful inner reaches that we, the most empathetic of anthropoids possess... as if they had been given a pass key.

A saloon singer is not a jazz singer. Billy Holiday was a saloon singer and Ella Fitazgerald was a jazz singer -- to name the two finest of their species. Someone said that when Billy Holiday sang, "my man is gone", your heart broke and when Ella sang the same line, it would be "my man is gone. He went out for cigarettes, he'll be back in ten minutes, can I take a message?"

You don't even have to understand the lyrics for this to work. Edith Piaf was perhaps, with Lady Day, the greatest saloon singer that ever lived and when I was a kid and didn't understand a word of French, I used to play her records over and over again. It's in the voice, not the lyrics.

There is one line in Amy Winehouse's song, "Back to Black", that goes, "I died a hundred times"... and bang there she is right into the special place that only saloon singers find, with nothing... and she does it every time she sings the line.

If this young lady doesn't die of a drug overdose, or ruin her voice, she could recreate saloon singing, be the female Sinatra.

If they finally do drag her off to those ten weeks of "rehab", she says she doesn't have time for, I suggest that she take some time and a piano player and go over the great American songbook. She could wash her face and shave her head, cut the stepin fetchit and live to be a hundred. It's there, she has it, I hope we don't lose it. DS

Living in interesting times

World leaders have proclaimed a "shared vision" on climate change, but failed to bridge differences between rich and emerging nations on curbing emissions. BBC

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I guess it is because we are nearing the long Spanish vacation time, which I hope to spend under a pine tree reading William James's "The Varieties of Religious Experience", but these days writing about current affairs is getting to be like pushing a long dead, ripened pig through a swimming pool filled with treacle.

Today's "story" is the G8

The G8 meeting in Japan is a huge non-event. Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times has this delicious parody of a G8 communique by Alan Beattie on his blog:

An ineffectual international organisation yesterday issued a stark warning about a situation it has absolutely no power to change, the latest in a series of self-serving interventions by toothless intergovernmental bodies.

“We are seriously concerned about this most serious outbreak of seriousness,” said the head of the institution, either a former minister from a developing country or a mid-level European or American bureaucrat. “This is a wake-up call to the world. They must take on board the vital message that my organisation exists.”

The director of the body, based in one of New York, Washington or an agreeable Western European city, was speaking at its annual conference, at which ministers from around the world gather to wring their hands impotently about the most fashionable issue of the day. The organisation has sought to justify its almost completely fruitless existence by joining its many fellow talking-shops in highlighting whatever crisis has recently gained most coverage in the global media."

It is nice to know that I am not alone in my spleenfulness.

Most of the photo-ops I see these days of world leaders meeting, performing stunts, eating together, shaking hands and generally bonding, remind me of the banality of the picture of Archduke and his lady getting into their limousine to be driven around Sarajevo way back in June 1914, moments before one of history's most earth shaking events. I keep wondering who will be the Gavrilo Princip that finally sets our gooey mess alight.

Certainly things don't look auspicious this summer. Soothsayers and the like are rather grim.

Being a multi-Celt, gifted most unwillingly with the second sight, and wary of things that go bump in the night, I admit that I am much weighed down with dark forebodings.

Having trained as an artist, I see no contradiction between being a historical materialist and keeping hats off of beds.

May the roof above us never fall in. And may the friends gathered below it never fall out. DS

Choking in the clutch

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A great many people on the left, on the right and on the center are increasingly puzzled by Barack Obama's "turn toward the center" and are unable to explain it.

I have a theory, of course.

I'm afraid that I'm going to have to tell a golfing story.

I don't like golf, I don't play golf, I don't even watch it on TV.

However, my late father was a businessman and he had had to spend a great deal of time and money to become reasonably competent at the game; as such proficiency was indispensable to him in his wheelings and dealings and he once told me the following story.

My father knew a man that made a lot of money betting on golf.

Let's call him "the oldest member".

He was a little old fellow, not very strong, not very tall, not very heavy... he couldn't hit the ball very far, but he could hit it very straight and with total control, his little chip shots were jewel perfect and his putting deadly.

But the most important thing about him is that he didn't have a nerve in his body, he was as cold as ice or perhaps it would have been more correct to say that he had the sort of disattachment that Zen archers and yogis are supposed to possess.

Despite the ice in his veins, he was a friendly, unassuming, insignificant, little fellow with a successful, if modest business, known to have money, who never had any problem finding someone to play a round of golf with him.

The compleat hustler, he chose his victims with care.

Those that he preyed on were the brilliant natural golfers. The sort of fellows who captained their school golf teams in high school and college, who might have had fantasies of "turning pro" before the responsibilities of wife and children or a seat on the board of the family firm took them on to more prosaic paths: men who drove the ball far, who sometimes came in under par. Hearty, aggressive and self-confident... until the man my father knew crossed their paths.

The first few holes were played for peanuts and the "oldest member" lost them cheerfully, all full of admiration for the solid drives and brilliant birdies of his mark.

After about three of four holes the "oldest member" offered to double the bet at each succeeding hole. Soon the "natural" was winning big bucks. Everybody knew the little old fellow could pay... it was like taking candy from a baby.

By about the twelfth hole the "oldest member's" victim was winning a fortune, a fortune which doubled at each succeeding hole.

But then, way at the back of the winner's mind a dark, spark of a little genie began to pull at his coat... "But what if I lost? Impossible! Lose to this pitiful duffer! ... Yeah, but what if?" the little genie would murmur, "Christ, I'd have to take another mortgage on my house if I lost this, my wife would divorce me if she found out I lost this much playing golf with an old man. I won't be able to pay my daughter's orthodontist."

And so thought succeeded thought and the natural's hands began to sweat and his game slowly became erratic... The powerful drives began to slice into the rough, while the little old man was onto the green with three or four of his plumb line dribbles and into the cup in two or three unadventurous, but perfect, puttlings: meanwhile the natural was blasting furiously out of the sand and beginning to bogey.

Finally, broke and broken the natural trudged away, so humiliated that he never told another soul at the club what had been done to him. In this way "the oldest member" was able to continue his devil's game.

End of story

What does this have to do with Obama?

Simply, that Obama is a "natural" and the "old man" in my story is "reality", certainly not McCain.

I imagine when Obama announced he was running for President, Hillary was considered "inevitable" and he thought that running in the primaries would at least make him into a national figure and position him for veep or whatever and then he discovered that he had tapped into some sort of vein of mass hysteria and craziness of the kind that periodically sweeps America throughout its history and it all began to get out of control.

Things like this began to appear.

"Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul." Mark Morford, San Francisco Chronicle

How is a Hawaiian from the South Side of Chicago supposed to handle horse shit like that?

When I read Morford's piece I wondered whether it was possible to laugh and vomit at the same time without strangling.

After winning the primaries Obama suddenly saw that, from being a junior Senator and a former community organizer, he was now the favorite to become, literally, the most powerful man on earth.

All that is really standing now between him and unimaginable power and responisiblity: the chance to fail like Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush, are his own ghosts and inner demons... and his game is beginning to fall apart.

Probably the best time line of this process comes from paleo-conservative Pat Buchanan:

• Samantha Power was tossed off Barack's sledge after calling Hillary a "monster" and suggesting Barack's Iraq timetable was not set in concrete. Robert Malley was canned for having talked to Hamas, though that was his portfolio at a think tank for conflict resolution.

• Barack pole-axed pastor Wright and, though he said he could no more repudiate his church than his family, shortly after the second time Wright went off, Barack severed all ties to Trinity United.

• Barack has spoken of how he cringed at the racist reaction of his white grandmother after she was accosted by a black man on a bus. Grandma has now been rehabilitated in a new ad as the loving woman who inculcated good old Kansas values into little Barack.

• When his own surrogate, Gen. Wesley Clark, suggested John McCain's war service did not automatically qualify him as presidential timber, a storm erupted. Barack proceeded to cut the general's legs off.

• His had been one of a few Senate voices to speak of Palestinian suffering. But Barack's address to the Israeli lobby read like it was plagiarized from the collected works of Ze'ev Jabotinsky.

• When the Supreme Court declared every citizen has a Second Amendment right to a handgun, Barack stood with Justice Scalia. When Scalia said the court ought not to have taken away Louisiana's right to execute child rapists, Barack was with him again.

• When Congress voted the telecoms immunity from prosecution for colluding with the Bush administration in wiretapping citizens, Barack stood with Bush and the telecoms. Fearing it might cost him his huge money-raising advantage over McCain, Barack tossed campaign finance reform over the side.

• In Ohio, Barack was a populist opponent of NAFTA. He is now a free-trader. Yet when economic adviser Austan Goolsbee told the Canadians pretty much the same thing, Barack disinherited him.

• As July 4 approached, Barack gratuitously dissed his friends at MoveOn.org for their "General Betray Us" ad mocking Gen. David Petraeus. And that flag pin Barack got rid of after 9-11, calling it a "substitute ... for real patriotism"? It's back on the lapel.

• Last week, Barack said that, after he meets with Petraeus and his field commanders in Iraq, he might "refine" his commitment to withdraw all U.S. combat brigades within 16 months.

• And finally, Obama has co-opted President Bush's faith-based initiative and claimed it as his own.

In the center-center, The Financial Times grumbled.

All this is a mixture the left finds toxic – and it allows Republicans to attack Mr Obama for cynicism and inconsistency. So much for his new kind of politics, they say.(...) Mr Obama needs policies that retain the left’s loyalty, underline the Democrats’ case for change, impress independents and move the country with conviction in a new direction. It so happens he has one: comprehensive healthcare reform, an issue of historic importance for the country’s fiscal prospects, economic vitality and moral self-confidence. Lately it has been relegated to secondary status, behind taxes and national security. Mr Obama needs to put that right.

Progressives are the most worried. Bob Herbert of The New York Times sounds positively heartbroken.

Back in January when Barack Obama pulled off his stunning win in the Iowa caucuses, and people were lining up in the cold and snow for hours just to get a glimpse of him, there was a wide and growing belief — encouraged to the max by the candidate — that something new in American politics had arrived.(...) Only an idiot would think or hope that a politician going through the crucible of a presidential campaign could hold fast to every position, steer clear of the stumbling blocks of nuance and never make a mistake. But Barack Obama went out of his way to create the impression that he was a new kind of political leader — more honest, less cynical and less relentlessly calculating than most. You would be able to listen to him without worrying about what the meaning of “is” is. This is why so many of Senator Obama’s strongest supporters are uneasy, upset, dismayed and even angry at the candidate who is now emerging in the bright light of summer.(...) But Senator Obama is not just tacking gently toward the center. He’s lurching right when it suits him, and he’s zigging with the kind of reckless abandon that’s guaranteed to cause disillusion, if not whiplash. So there he was in Zanesville, Ohio, pandering to evangelicals by promising not just to maintain the Bush program of investing taxpayer dollars in religious-based initiatives, but to expand it. Separation of church and state? Forget about it. And there he was, in the midst of an election campaign in which the makeup of the Supreme Court is as important as it has ever been, agreeing with Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas that the death penalty could be imposed for crimes other than murder. What was the man thinking? Thankfully, a majority on the court left the barbaric Scalia-Thomas-Obama (and John McCain) reasoning behind and held that capital punishment would apply only to homicides. “What’s he doing?” is the most common question heard recently from Obama supporters.(...) There has been a reluctance among blacks to openly criticize Senator Obama, the first black candidate with a real shot at the presidency. But behind the scenes, there is discontent among African-Americans, as well, over Mr. Obama’s move away from progressive issues, including his support of the Supreme Court’s decision affirming the constitutional right of individuals to bear arms. There’s even concern that he’s doing the Obama two-step on the issue that has been the cornerstone of his campaign: his opposition to the war in Iraq. But the senator denied that any significant change should be inferred from his comment that he would “continue to refine” his policy on the war.(...) that’s a very dangerous game for a man who first turned voters on by presenting himself as someone who was different, who wouldn’t engage in the terminal emptiness of politics as usual. Time flies and the Iowa caucuses seem a very long time ago.

The gray lady herself recoiled, sniffing in shocked dismay.

Senator Barack Obama stirred his legions of supporters, and raised our hopes, promising to change the old order of things. He spoke with passion about breaking out of the partisan mold of bickering and catering to special pleaders, promised to end President Bush’s abuses of power and subverting of the Constitution and disowned the big-money power brokers who have corrupted Washington politics. Now there seems to be a new Barack Obama on the hustings. First, he broke his promise to try to keep both major parties within public-financing limits for the general election. His team explained that, saying he had a grass-roots-based model and that while he was forgoing public money, he also was eschewing gold-plated fund-raisers. These days he’s on a high-roller hunt.(...) The new Barack Obama has abandoned his vow to filibuster an electronic wiretapping bill if it includes an immunity clause for telecommunications companies that amounts to a sanctioned cover-up of Mr. Bush’s unlawful eavesdropping after 9/11. In January, when he was battling for Super Tuesday votes, Mr. Obama said that the 1978 law requiring warrants for wiretapping, and the special court it created, worked. “We can trace, track down and take out terrorists while ensuring that our actions are subject to vigorous oversight and do not undermine the very laws and freedom that we are fighting to defend,” he declared. Now, he supports the immunity clause as part of what he calls a compromise but actually is a classic, cynical Washington deal that erodes the power of the special court, virtually eliminates “vigorous oversight” and allows more warrantless eavesdropping than ever.(...) Mr. Obama endorsed the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the District of Columbia’s gun-control law. We knew he ascribed to the anti-gun-control groups’ misreading of the Constitution as implying an individual right to bear arms. But it was distressing to see him declare that the court provided a guide to “reasonable regulations enacted by local communities to keep their streets safe.”(...) There are still vital differences between Mr. Obama and Senator John McCain on issues like the war in Iraq, taxes, health care and Supreme Court nominations. We don’t want any “redefining” on these big questions. This country needs change it can believe in.

Arianna Huffington is more in the strict governess line.

Running to the middle in an attempt to attract undecided swing voters didn't work for Al Gore in 2000. It didn't work for John Kerry in 2004. And it didn't work when Mark Penn (obsessed with his "microtrends" and missing the megatrend) convinced Hillary Clinton to do it in 2008. Fixating on -- and pandering to -- this fickle crowd is all about messaging tailored to avoid offending rather than to inspire and galvanize. And isn't galvanizing the electorate to demand fundamental change the raison d'etre of the Obama campaign in the first place?(...) Watering down that brand is the political equivalent of New Coke. Call it Obama Zero. In 2004, the Kerry campaign's obsession with undecided voters -- voters so easily swayed that 46 percent of them found credible the Swift Boaters' charges that Kerry might have faked his war wounds to earn a Purple Heart -- allowed the race to devolve from a referendum on the future of the country into a petty squabble over whether Kerry had bled enough to warrant his medals. Throughout the primary, Obama referred to himself as an "unlikely candidate." Which he certainly was -- and still is. And one of the things that turned him from "unlikely" upstart to presidential frontrunner is his ability to expand the electorate by convincing unlikely voters -- some of the 83 million eligible voters who didn't turn out in 2004 -- to engage in the system. So why start playing to the political fence sitters -- staking out newly nuanced positions on FISA, gun control laws, expansion of the death penalty, and NAFTA? In an interview with Nina Easton in Fortune Magazine, Obama was asked about having called NAFTA "a big mistake" and "devastating." Obama's reply: "Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified." Overheated? So when he was campaigning in the Midwest, many parts of which have been, yes, devastated by economic changes since the passage of NAFTA, and he pledged to make use of a six-month opt-out clause in the trade agreement, that was "overheated?" Or was that one "amplified?" Because if that's the case, it would be helpful going forward if Obama would let us know which of his powerful rhetoric is "overheated" and/or "amplified," so voters will know not to get their hopes too high.(...) The Obama brand has always been about inspiration, a new kind of politics, the audacity of hope, and "change we can believe in." I like that brand. More importantly, voters -- especially unlikely voters -- like that brand. Pulling it off the shelf and replacing it with a political product geared to pleasing America's vacillating swing voters -- the ones who will be most susceptible to the fear-mongering avalanche that has already begun -- would be a fatal blunder. Realpolitik is one thing. Realstupidpolitik is quite another.

And Pat Buchanan sums it all up well too.

We may be misunderestimating Barack. But the question of 2008 remains: When all is said and done, who is this guy?

I think it is all more simple than that.

Obama the natural has been playing double or nothing with the oldest member, who is reality, not repeat not, John McCain: and seeing laid out before him, like the Promised Land before Moses, the greatest of successes or the most humiliating of failures... he is choking and his game is falling apart. DS

Seventh of July... San Fermin

In the Guadarramas

In the Guadarrama mountains

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I've just come back from a weekend in my dacha in the Guadarrama mountains. My lifeboat.

Even in the hottest Spanish summer, there we sleep under a feather quilt. In the winter it gets down to minus 20 degrees... centigrade. What in India would be called a "hill station"

It is literally in the middle of a forest, I have a solar panel for electricity, no running water, a chemical toilet, a gas refrigerator, an herb garden, no TV, no telephone or Internet... even cellphone coverage is spotty. For me it is paradise. I don't know if I could live without it.

After following international politics for months on end, I am desperate to disconnect. And in that pure and chilly silence, total disconnection is possible.

I have to write a think piece for the August, beachcomber's edition of my newspaper and fortunately, in great part thanks to this blog and the helpful comments and tips I get from my readers, I have most of it written before I even start... If I didn't, I'm not sure I could pull it off... American politics, especially, have me as bored and as depressed as if I were working in a McDonald's.

I saw a line in a splendid article by Charles P. Pierce in Esquire, that gives the exact, fine flavor in my gall.

“I look forward as president to going before the world community and saying, ‘America is back. We’re ready to lead,’ “ Obama says on the radio, the static crackling and popping and the transmission fading, and it takes a moment for the cynic to wonder whether or not the world wants America to lead. Maybe the world wants America to sit down and shut up for a while.

I'm not sure what the rest of the world wants, but I love to get away from its noise. DS

The elephant in the room

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I have written reams about America and Israel's tragic folie à deux, which is slowly destroying the political health of the USA and may end up literally destroying Israel.

The other day I ran across the video I am showing above these lines.

It is a Dutch TV documentary about "The America, Israel, Public Affairs, Committee" (AIPAC). There is a running commentary in the Dutch language, but since in this version there are English subtitles of the Dutch commentary, and all of those interviewed are speaking in English, it is like watching a normal American "in depth" news piece.

This documentary is about the most succinct and balanced exposition of the whole question that I have yet seen.

What is amazing is that something as balanced as this would be impossible to see in the USA.

Americans are always saying, "it's a free country", but believe me, I have experienced a very serious dictatorship (Franco's) and at least on the subject of the relations between Israel and the United States, America is in no way, "a free country".

I think with oil at $146 (today), that if Israel attacks Iran or if the United States attacks Iran at the behest of Israel and if that attack and the ensuing conflict pushes oil over $200 and that in turn brings on something bigger than just a normal recession, then there is going to be terrible social-cultural backlash against those responsible and that in turn will rend America's social fabric to shreds.

The knock on effects of such a backlash are difficult to imagine, but they would surely take the United States over some kind of edge and into a fall from grace and innocence from which it would never recover, because somehow, as the Dutch film explains very well, since the 1970s America and Israel have become of one flesh, joined at the hip. I have even compared the relationship of The USA and Israel to that of Sinbad the Sailor and the Old Man of the Sea.

If you find the film as interesting as I do, I suggest passing the link along.

Here is the YouTube link. DS

Europe and Europe's games

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In the last few days we have been able to observe two visions of Europe, both of them real, yet vastly different one from the other.

One was the European Union’s post Irish referendum debate and the other was the European National Football Championships.

In one of these versions of Europe, there was endless bickering, insults and cries of foul play, while in the other all was civilized dialog, harmony and respect, truly fit to be set to the tune of Beethoven’s “Hymn to Joy”.

The civilized version was, of course, the football championships.

Who knows, perhaps having previously eliminated the English may have contributed to the peaceful, constructive atmosphere.

Certainly the beginning of the French presidency was quite another matter, it opened with French President Nicholas Sarkozy and European Trade Commissioner, Peter Mandelson trading insults.

The EU is gasping like a beached fish.

Poland’s president refuses to sign the Lisbon Treaty’s ratification after the Irish “no”and Vaclav Klaus, the conservative Czech president, says “the treaty is finished. There is no possibility of going on with it.”, while Roberto Calderoli, vice president of Italy’s Northern League and a minister in the Berlusconi government, said: “Every time the people have been consulted they have torpedoed to spectacular effect a model of Europe that seems far from what they want.”

But have Europe’s leaders ever really asked the Europeans what they actually “want,” beyond demanding their “yeses” and rejecting their “noes”?

The Economist quotes a Eurobarometer poll this week which finds that only 52% of EU citizens consider membership to be a good thing for their country; in France, the figure is just 48%.

Perhaps, in this context, the commission’s proposal of a 60 hour work week was a bit ill timed.

Among all the hand wringing over the consequences of the Irish “no” to the Lisbon treaty, the always sagacious William Pfaff thinks that Europe seems to be heading toward “the existing and enlarged Europe continuing as an integrated economy and trade zone, loosely associated with the United States in a subordinate role, but with no foreign policy or international personality of its own because of the conflicting interests and conceptions of its numerous members.”

Many feel that such a Europe would be “irrelevant”.

However, Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times wrote, “Irrelevance is not particularly dignified or noble. But it could still be the logical choice for Europe. Arguably, the EU has achieved a sort of nirvana. It is too strong to be attacked; and too weak to be asked to sort out the rest of the world’s problems. Europe has become a giant Switzerland.”

One could do a lot worse than being a "giant Switzerland".

If only the European Union could capture the spirit of European football, where, for example, Russia, Turkey and Croatia already form part of Europe and played beautifully. DS

A sweet, sweet moment in Spain

Xavi Hernández - 1.70 m (5 ft 7 in)

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Today Spain is still one large hangover after the victory celebrations.

After 44 years, the country with the world's best soccer league finally won a major tournament: the European Nation's Cup.

But the best thing about it, and what Spaniards are happiest about was the way it was won, their national team's style of play.

Today's Spain plays a type of collective "all for one and one for all" football that is based on keeping possession of the ball, of moving it in intricate patterns until the opposing team is off balance and then striking. This requires enormous ball handling skills and vision of the game.

This is the natural form of Spanish play as Spanish footballers, in general, are shorter, slower and of lighter build than most of the other major soccer powers. However they have only started to play like this in recent years.

An old Spanish communist, a veteran of the civil war, who had returned to Spain from exile in Mexico during the 1980s, told me an interesting story once.

He said that in the days of the Spanish Republic, Spain played elegant, classy soccer but since most of the players and coaches were of working class origin (soccer is a working class game) and were naturally people of the left, when Franco won, they were all dead, in prison, or in exile.

Consequently at the end of the civil war there were almost no good trainers or skillful players around to teach the basic skills. Remember that there were none of the videos, which today allow little Swedish children to try their luck practicing Brazilian esoterica like the folha seca. In the 40s and 50s of the last century, if you couldn't actually see it in person, you simply couldn't learn it.

In answer to this the Franco regime invented the myth of the "furía española" a hotblooded fury that would carry all before it. Playing wildly, without skill became a symbol of hairy chested, fascist, machismo... and losing became a national pass time.

Because to be shorter, slower and lighter of build than most of the other major soccer powers, and skill-less to boot ... and then, also to be "furious" is a sure recipe for disaster... and so it was.

So you can see that to finally recover Spain's old playing style has even a certain political significance. This explains Spanish Prime Minister, Zapatero's statement that winning the European National Football Championship, was the "end of the transition".

Thus, in this era of "Iron Men" and "Hulks" and "X-Men", nitzchean "super men" with super powers, an era of Nike, of Beckhams and Ronaldos, in days like these, a group of stubby, "boys next door", who when they get the ball, you never see it again until it is in your goal net: these smaller, lighter and slower young men have just skillfully won one of world sport's greatest prizes and may win a good deal more of them. DS