Less than a week from the mid-term elections and I’m starting to get worried that either a) the Democrats will lose, and b) the Democrats will win.

Don’t Count Your Chicken-hawks Before They Hatch

Smart people have a problem. They’re outnumbered by idiots. This is not necessarily meant as a jibe against either party, you understand, but more of a general observation about elite bureaucrats in a representative democracy. Policy is complicated, and simple solutions are easily appealing to the unsophisticated. So the more constituents your average Congressperson meets, the more likely they are to try and dumb things down for their audience. Even worse, there’s no room for nuance when you’re voting for legislation–there’s no such thing as a “qualified yea” or “nay in principle.”

Now we come to the Democratic party, composed of people no more intelligent or uncorruptible than the Republicans, in theory. They’ve had a hell of a time trying to rhetorically outmaneuver the Republican party, beside whom they are terribly afraid of looking like pussies, for lack of a less direct term. The Republicans will say bomb this or that, and Democrats end up looking inert by comparison, if they protest at all. Republicans seem to want to confront problems with brute force, as if the strength of conviction in dealing with something is the same as showing insight or forethought in policy.

Now, I hate to (kind of) side with Ann Coulter against the American Prospect, but I recently found two columns which show why the Democratic party is a poor substitute for the war-mongering stooges who currently control our government. Quoth Robert Farley, on Tapped:

Does the justification for the invasion of Afghanistan hold up in retrospect, or have our difficulties there belied the wisdom of this war in the same way the disastrous occupation of Iraq has underscored the folly of that one? I think that, on balance, the United States was correct to invade Afghanistan, and that progressives were by and large correct to support the invasion.

Farley then goes on to quote all kinds of eminently reasonable justifications for destroying Afghanistan inthe name of democracy and human rights and, above all, the American people. As my boss Danny Schechter points out, the inhabitants of the brown-peopled invasion target du jour don’t really matter to Americans debating foreign policy.

Farley ends up arguing that even though we all knew it was Resident Bush who was going to lead the invasion of Afghanistan and not, as some seemed to want to believe, Captain America and the Justice League, it was still a noble mistake, to steal a phrase from reality’s newest resident, Jonah Goldberg.

Goldberg, by the way, has come up with a solution to the Gordian knot of the American occupation that isn’t half bad; he says there should be a simple plebiscite of Iraqis as to whether or not the U.S. should continue the occupation, and if, as the polls suggest, they want us to leave, we should. Of course, the Iraqi “government” would never hold such a plebiscite, because it retains a nominal hold on power supported only by foreign troops. As we used to say in my political science classes, the country belongs ot whomever holds the ground; the Iraqi government, and even the Iraqi police (death squads and all) can only continue to exist as a banana republic so long as the Coalition military forces protect Baghdad. Everywhere else is falling under the control of decentralized militias, the hallmark of a failed state.

As awful as the occupation is, it is clear that pullout of any kind would leave the country to Iraqis of various militia and death squad affiliations. It’s unclear whether or not a multicultural Iraq could be sustained. Equally uncertain, at least among the elites who pretend to debate this stuff, is whether our presence or withdrawal is capable of reducing the violence. No wonder Democrats are in a moral fog. Apparently, if you want moral clarity, you’d do better to go to “Ms.” Coulter:

If Bush had gone to war with Iraq immediately after 9/11 and waited to attack Afghanistan, Democrats would now be pretending to support the Iraq war while pointlessly carping about Afghanistan. Afghanistan didn’t attack us on 9/11! The Taliban didn’t attack us! What’s our exit strategy? How do you define “victory” in Afghanistan, anyway? It’s a quagmire — aahhhhh! …

The first time liberals had a kind word for the war in Afghanistan was when they needed to pretend to support some war in order to attack the war in Iraq with greater vigor. To get them to support the Iraq war, all we have to do is attack Iran.

Sometimes I envy people whose internal logic is so self-righting it doesn’t need to consider consequences of actions, just bloodlust. I figure Coulter would support bombing any non-Christian country no matter what. At any rate, she’s free to point out liberal hypocrisy when it rears its ugly head, even if she’s a fraudulent plagiarist.

For me, there is a true north, and his name is Immanuel Wallerstein. Well, he’s not fooled by all the horseshit flying around:

Worst of all, they seem to believe that, merely by purging the element of exaggerated unilateralism practiced by the current regime, they will be able to restore the United States to a position of centrality in the world-system, and regain the support of their erstwhile allies and supporters, first of all in western Europe and then everywhere else in the world. They seem really to believe that it’s a matter of form, not substance, and that the fault of the Bush regime is that it wasn’t good enough at diplomacy. It’s true that not all Democrats feel that way, and indeed for that matter not all Republicans and independents. But at this moment, those who are ready to take a real look at the fallacies of U.S. policies are a minority – furthermore, a minority without a clear agenda themselves and certainly without a major political leader to express an alternate view.

But because the war in Iraq is so vastly unpopular and the Democrats (the majority of whom voted for the war anyway) may well coast back into power despite not having a coherent plan to end it.

Last weekend, I watched an amazing spectacle: a debate on Meet The Press between Maryland’s senatorial candidates, Democrat Ben Cardin and Republican Michael Steele. This debate was aparently broadcast live from Bizarristan, because Steele was trying to outflank Cardin on the left on Iraq. I suppose it’s the only thing to do when you’re running against one of the few Democrats who had the brains to vote against the war in the first place. Cardin wants to rotate all combat troops out of Iraq by 2008 in what he calls an “immediate drawdown” of forces. But wait! Steele claims he’s for immediate withdrawal, and he’s the only Republican to do so as far as I know. This is brilliant, because he knows he’s totally covered by his Republican colleagues, who would never agree to such a thing. Watching Steele try and squirm his way out of the Republican party platform was excruciatingly entertaining.

The political posturing will continue on both sides, but in the meantime there is no good way out of Iraq–and everybody knows it. Bush’s rhetorical strategy of defining victory as continued engagement smacks of desperation, as if he were bombing a sales presentation but begging for just a few more minutes to continue making his failed case for the client.

So, everyone will backpedal furiously to beat the devil, and deaths will continue unabated. C’est la guerre. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Follow The Money Down The Drain

One of the most brutal rhetorical debates about Iraq is whether or not the country is currently involved in a civil war or not. I say “brutal” because the country is in the middle of a civil war, and those who try to whitewash this reality seem do so only for their own political gain. Here we’re talking about the Iraqi and American governments and their apologists.

If you ask most political scientists what causes civil wars, you get two answers: ethnic or tribal fragmentation within a state, and poverty. A corrupt government and well-financed guerilla movements help things along. Stanford political scientists Fearon and Laitin put out a thesis recently that said poverty is really the best indicator, as richer multi-ethnic countries generaly avoid civil wars, while those scrambling for resources tend to cleave their societies along tribal lines.

Iraq clearly qualifies as ethnically fragmented (andis becoming more so by the day [along religious lines]), but what about the poverty?

Much has been said about Iraq’s slide into “anarchy.” A recently declassified CENTCOM briefing confirmed that within the military, they aren’t pussyfooting around the realization that Iraq is in “chaos” (whatever you do, don’t call it civil war–we prefer “spontaneous mass civil conflict”). From the New York Times expose:

In evaluating the prospects for all-out civil strife, the command concentrates on “key reads,” or several principal variables. According to the slide from the Oct. 18 briefing, the variables include “hostile rhetoric” by political and religious leaders, which can be measured by listening to sermons at mosques and to important Shiite and Sunni leaders, and the amount of influence that moderate political and religious figures have over the population. The other main variables are assassinations and other especially provocative sectarian attacks, as well as “spontaneous mass civil conflict.”

A number of secondary indicators are also taken into account, including activity by militias, problems with ineffective police, the ability of Iraqi officials to govern effectively, the number of civilians who have been forced to move by sectarian violence, the willingness of Iraqi security forces to follow orders, and the degree to which the Iraqi Kurds are pressing for independence from the central government.

These factors are evaluated to create the index of civil strife, which has registered a steady worsening for months. “Ever since the February attack on the Shiite mosque in Samarra, it has been closer to the chaos side than the peace side,” said a Central Command official who asked not to be identified because he was talking about classified information.

Ever since the White House started denying Iraq was in the midst of civil war, I’ve been wantig to ask them what their metrics were–that is, if they were in a civil war, how would we know? It’s nice that at least someone in the military is keeping an eye on things with actual measurements, because science says if it can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist.

So we have symptoms of civil war, but a complete avoidance of diagnosing the actual disease itself. Conservatives seem to think the underlying cause is either Al-Qaeda (if they’re still committed to the mission) or that Arabs are intrinsically anti-democratic (if they’ve given up in despair).

But nobody wants to admit that what is fueling civil war is the impoverishment of Iraq. Let me be clear about this, becuase the reduction of Iraq to pauperism is a project that the United States has been working on for quite some time.

First there was the embargo following what we called “Operation Desert Storm.” It is generally acknowledged that the embargo killed over one and a hlf million Iraqis, one million of them born after Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. When Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright was asked about the horrific casualties, she said, “it’s worth it”–ostensibly because starving the country was supposed to foment a civil war against Saddam.

After several years of scattered bombings and no-fly zones, an Oil-for-Food program was devised by the United Nations as a way of alleviating the suffering of the Iraqi people, but of course it ended up enriching the coffers of Saddam and once again subsidizing his reign of terror over the populace who could now afford to eat, at least.

But when Bush invaded in 2003, we totally wiped out the Ba’ath state and the Iraqi economy. We destroyed infrastructure, schools, hospitals, aid offices, homes, businesses and the like. We irradiated every city with radioactive depleted uranium munitions. We seized the oil fields and shipping lanes.

The Oil-for-Food program had nothing on the Coalition Provisional Authority when it came to corruption. Not only did the CPA seize Iraq’s oil wealth (Iraq, which sits on the world’s second largest oil reserves, was actually importing oil from Kuwait during the CPA’s reign), but it carried out a massive kleptocratic campaign to the tune of $8.8 billion dollars which has never and will never be accounted for. Even now, The Big Four — Exxon, Chevron, BP and Shell are poised to take control of Iraq’s oil fields, spiriting away the money that might be used for reconstruction if the America wasn’t so hell-bent on making Iraq a third-world country with first-world resources. It makes a certain kind of sense–we trust Western oil companies a hell of a lot more than we trust any Muslim, and that’s what Bush keeps hinting at when he warns of a terrorist state with unlimited access to oil money.

But the CPA is hardly the only war profiteer exporting Iraq’s natural resourses. Recently it was discovered that the Iraqi military seems to be running an arms trade on the side, stealing $8 million in U.S.-supplied weapons intended for the security of the country. And then there’s the military contractors.

As I’ve mentioned before, the Iraq project entails the world’s largest corporate fraud operation. Scottish criminologist Dave Whyte says the “scale and intensity of the corruption and fraud perpetrated by the occupation is unprecedented in modern history.

The occupation and its business partners in crime aren’t just stealing money from the Iraqis; they’re stealing money from the occupying countries’ taxpayers. The occupation is basically a huge financial sinkhole for Iraq and everyone else. The Iraqi government is both racketeering victim and embezzler; on the one hand they’re being charged what amounts to protection money from oil revenues by occupying forces, while at the same time they’re skimming off the top to fund death squads among other sordid ventures.

When people are impoverished, when they are fighting each other over scraps, civil wars break out. The destruction of Iraq, which everyone saw coming, had one natural consequence, only we can’t bring ourselves to admit it. Congress recently decided, by the way, to close down the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, as a reward to the auditor who is constantly uncovering contractor fraud and corruption in our “reconstruction effort.” This craven act shows above all why the United States is incapable of helping Iraq out of the chaos we have caused there.