Got invited to a preview of Gunner Palace tonight; it’s the documentary about the artillery battalion in Baghdad.

My reaction to the movie while I was watching it was complicated – up, down, sideways, and back again. And when it was over, I was ready to sit back down and see it again, which is a strong vote that you go see it as well.

The couple that made it tried hard to make a nonpolitical film about the war – which will, doubtless, satisfy no one. It frustrated me, as someone who sees the war fundamentally politically (and I don’t just mean in the narrow sense of domestic politics). And then I just started watching it.

I love the poetry of Raymond Carver, but don’t like his stories as much as many people do. It wasn’t until I saw the film that Robert Altman made of them – Short Cuts – that I realized why.

Carver (and Altman) doesn’t like his characters much. So I wind up asking myself, why should I waste my time with them?

The filmmakers of Gunner Palace – Michael Tucker and Petra Epperstein, a couple who live in Berlin – like their characters very much. They respect them and let them speak, teenage privates and beefy colonels. They show them succeed and fail, and they try damn hard in 90 minutes to give you a window into the year the soldiers they film spent in a war.

It’s not a perfect film; I winced a few times at the visual quality and a few times more at edits and quotes that I thought were unfair. But overall, it’s an excellent film, and in a way a perfect film about this war would have been a lie.

They made a few editing choices I wouldn’t have made; they should have ended it with the quote “When this movie is over, you’ll forget me. The only ones who will remember are us.”

Now that I’ve seen the film, I can testify that that’s just flatly not true.

When it comes to your town, go see it. If you oppose the war, if you support the war, if you don’t give a damn about the war, you should see it so that you’ll remember too.

It’s not every blog that can get linked to by Kos, Wonkette, and the Conservative Political Action Committee all in one 24 hour period…

But it appears that Jeff “Gannon” made an appearance on these very pages – he’s the writer for a small news service linked to the GOP who somehow got a White House Press Pass. Amusingly, he appeared to have a day job that involved web design for – or something more – for a gay escort service, among other things.

The folks opposed to the GOP are working themselves up into a righteous lather because the GOP allowed this … this … seamy guy!! to come into the White House while having (the GOP in this case) worked themselves into a lather about Billy C playing hide-the-cigar with Monica.

I think that’s a dumb and losing proposition.

But there is a serious issue to pick up regarding how this guy got a press pass, and how it is that people who are essentially shills might have been able to participate in press conferences.

Of course, there are shills for the left and for the right. So as a thought experiment, can I suggest that some enterprising blogger with more time on his hands than I have file a FOIA request and ask who got white house press passes allowing them to come to press conferences and what their affiliation was for the date range from, say June of 04 to December of 04??

I’d love to see it…

In a lot of cases, when I look at issues that I can’t make up my mind on, I’ll sometimes look at who’s standing on which side of the room, and make up my mind by choosing who I’d be more comfy standing with than against.

Today, I’m standing, uncomfortably, with Jeff Jarvis on the recent “indecency tax” passed by the House.

It shouldn’t take much explanation why I’m standing with Jeff; he’s a good guy, we see the world in much the same way (although he’s like a foot taller than I am), and on a fundamental level, I don’t like the idea of some pecksniff fining me out of business because I said a dirty word. And I doubly don’t like the idea of handing the government a tool that could be used to marginalize and criminalize speech…when we’d be told that a modern-day Lenny Bruce is being jailed for swearing, not for challenging the government politically.

So why, exactly, am I uncomfortable?
Because I was listening to Kevin & Bean on KROQ the other morning as I drove Littlest Guy to school. It was Valentine’s Day, and they were taking calls on “the worst Valentine’s Day stories” – a women whose live-in boyfriend had burned down her parent’s house when the candles he set up in their bedroom as a romantic gesture set the room on fire while he was out getting champagne. Very funny stuff indeed…and then they explained that they’d give her a copy of ‘All Anal Action v3’ as a prize, and I quickly shut the radio off and had some ‘splaining to do.

Yes, I can listen to CD’s or NPR when I have the kids in the car.

Yes, there are choices.

But somehow, when I think about this, or the New York DJ’s Opie and Anthony who egged a couple into having sex in a church (where they were arrested), I kind of squirm a bit.

Where’s the bottom? Is the market really the only thing that we can legitimately use to determine where the bottom is?

I don’t know. I do know that I’m damn uncomfortable with much that I see in the mass media today. I’m equally uncomfortable with government censorship.

Are those my only choices?

Bruce Sterling has a great post up on his site about the array of possible reactions to crisis (hat tip, LA Voice):

Our future world has been divided into axes of threats and responses.

In the “Business as Usual” world, threats are mild and low, and nobody is feeling very responsive or inventive. So it’s a sleepy, prosperous time. No need to rock the boat.

In the “Deer in Headlights” world, threats are grave, but society is paralyzed with fear and instinctive conservatism. These people will be mown down in hecatombs. There will be hell to pay.

In the “Never Again” world, everybody is grimly aware of the threat and everyone is resolved to meet in one single, resolute, uninventive way. This is a world war, basically. It’s like a Bush II that never ends.

In “Scout World,” the threat is hysterically extreme but people are hysterically inventive! They’re out beating the boundaries of the possible, looking for anything that works or even doesn’t work!

While I won’t buy off on his casual dismissal of grim determination, I will suggest that “hysterically inventive” is going to be a key to winning…

…we’re in a world where today the best metaphors are around emergence. Let’s emerge.

Colby Buzzell’s blog ‘My War‘ was one of the most amazing blog reads in its all-too-brief life.

He’s gone pro, with a chapter of his new book in Esquire this month (gotta get to the store), but I still check the RSS from his blog.

Today, he copies an email from his ex-Battalion Commander.

Go read it .

The NY Times Magazine today has an article today that more than piqued my interest.

When I first met Ammar Abdulhamid in Washington in the fall, the 38-year-old Syrian novelist, poet and liberal dissident had Damascus on his mind. He had received word from his wife back in Syria that the political situation at home was becoming more precarious for rights activists like himself. As a fellow at the Brookings Institution, he’d been meeting with leading figures in the Bush administration and writing articles in the Arab and Western presses that were sharply critical of the Syrian government; he simply didn’t know what to expect on his return. Now, sitting here in a Damascus coffeehouse in late January a week after his return, he is telling me that he had found reason for optimism about the country’s future in the least likely of places.

“When I arrived at the airport,” Abdulhamid says, “I was told I had to go to political security. It took me some time to find out exactly which security apparatus wanted to speak to me, but then I met with them for two days in a row. I was very up front about my activities and even talked about things they didn’t know yet, like an article I had co-written with an Israeli. One of my interrogators told me that what I was doing would have been unthinkable a few years ago, and he’s right. I got the sense from even some of the security police that they see there has to be a new way of doing things in Syria.”

Things aren’t the same in the last Ba’athist dictatorship. Why?

Recently, intellectuals from Iraq, Jordan and Tunisia petitioned the United Nations for a tribunal to prosecute both terrorists and the religious figures who incite violence. In Egypt, two new publications, Nahdet Misr and Al Masry Al Youm, fault the region’s leaders and clerics alike for keeping Arabs from joining the modern world. The Iraqi election posed a stark challenge to regional autocrats. While Abdulhamid harbors mixed feelings about the United States’ decision to invade Iraq, he says he believes that the American presence in the region is vital to the prospects for reform. “We are an important part of the world,” he says, “and our inability to produce change on our own terms invites people in. The world is not going to wait for us.”

No, it won’t.

That creaking sound you hear is the beginning of a landslide. It will be out of our control to be sure, but the landscape is going to be reshaped.

Juan Cole is in a panic about it, over at the Washington Post:

“This is a government that will have very good relations with Iran. The Kurdish victory reinforces this conclusion. Talabani is very close to Tehran,” said Juan Cole, a University of Michigan expert on Iraq. “In terms of regional geopolitics, this is not the outcome that the United States was hoping for.”

I don’t share the unbridled faith that it will be reshaped to our advantage; but I do think that in the intermediate run it will be shaped to the advantage of men like Ammar Abdulhamid and the ITM brothers (all three of them). And in the long run, that will suit us just fine.

[Update: The NY Times is also challenging Professor Cole’s claim:

The verdict handed down by Iraqi voters in the Jan. 30 election appeared to be a divided one, with the Shiite political alliance, backed by the clerical leadership in Najaf, opposed in nearly equal measure by an array of mostly secular minority parties.

According to Iraqi leaders here, the fractured mandate almost certainly heralds a long round of negotiating, in which the Shiite alliance will have to strike deals with parties run by the Kurds and others, most of which are secular and broadly opposed to an enhanced role for Islam or an overbearing Shiite government.

Go check out the text of Howard Dean’s speech as the new DNC chair today. There’s a lot there that I like.

Republicans wandered around in the political wilderness for 40 years before they took back Congress. But the reason we lost control is that we forgot why we were entrusted with control to begin with.

The American people can’t afford to wait for 40 years for us to put Washington back to work for them.

It can’t take us that long.

And a few things that I question. But all in all, a big ‘YEARRRGH’ for him.

I was originally for him because I believed that his 50-state policy would absolutely force the Party out of the Upper West Side and Brentwood and into the neighborhoods where the folks who ought to be Democrats live.

That may just be more transformative for the Party than for the folks…

Today marks the anniversary of the firebombing of Dresden by the British Air Force.

Like a lot of people in the Anglosphere – more than will likely admit it – I first learned of it by reading ‘Slaughterhouse 5’ in high school.

The short version is that British strategic bombers used a combination of high explosives – to create kindling – and phosphorus – to ignite it- to create firestorm that killed half a million German civilians.

The direct military role of Dresden (and Cologne and Hamburg, which were equally treated) was limited, and the question of why Air Marshal Harris and Churchill chose to do this remains a significant issue for historians.

And for us, as we consider the issues around the ‘scope’ of warfare in the modern age.A long time ago, I wrote a paper about the interplay between social forms, the level and cost of technology that was generated by and could support those social norms, and forms of warfare. I pointed out that most societies seemed to cluster in scale at the level that optimally supported their then-preferred means of warfighting.

And that we tended to oscillate between a tribal mode of war, in which wars were typically either symbolic or total, and a ‘Westphalian’ form in which the wars engaged only the military and political leadership and explicitly tried (with varying degrees of success) to leave the peasants alone.

I think that we idealize the Westphalian style of war; we imagine it to be boundable in law and custom, and somehow able to keep the rage and fear that are inextricable from war out of the picture.

But I do think we are slowly moving – for a variety of reasons and with a variety of impulses – toward a system which at least makes some effort to manage what war is. We haven’t come very far.

That’s why General Mattis’ comments made me wince so deeply. I’ve met Gen. Mattis, shaken his hand and sat with him and discussed what he hoped to do when the 1st MEF returned to Iraq. And it was clear to me that he ‘got it’; that he was going to stop the bad guys and defend the good guys – who included the brutalized Iraqi people.

I had no doubt that he was a warrior, and all warriors have some germ of Genghis Khan in them, some desire to see their enemies trampled underfoot, their cities brought down amid tears.

But he knew, I felt then, how to place that impulse in context, and I continue to believe, based on the performance of his Marines, that he knew how to place that context into action, even when faced with a brutal enemy.

I think he slipped when he spoke, and while I disagree with Patterico and don’t believe an official reprimand was remotely called for, I do believe that a general officer ought to know better.

And the reason for that is worth remembering today, on the anniversary of Dresden.

We need to look at it and not see some lesson about the moral culpability of the West and how we’re as bad as the Nazis, or any other brutal regime – as opposed to some idealized nation which has never existed. Instead we should see the lesson of what total war looks like, and what we need to struggle hard to avoid.

We need to be reminded of what we’re capable of and what we need to sacrifice to avoid being driven to do. We should be ashamed of Dresden. We have dirty hands because of it, and an obligation to use those dirty hands to do better.

I’ve looked and looked and can’t find a class on building car bombs or soliciting suicide bombers in the class list over at Hamburg Technical University.

So should I just toss out my notion that there is some root of modern Islamist terrorism to be found in the soil of the antiwestern academy?

Not so sure.

Here’s the issue. Sageman suggests that the future warriors simply drifted into a local mosque, and – alienated and lonely – they fell under the spell of the imam.

When they became homesick, they did what anyone would and tried to congregate with people like themselves, whom they would find at mosques. So they drifted towards the mosque, not because they were religious, but because they were seeking friends. They moved in together in apartments, in order to share the rent and also to eat together – they were mostly halal, those who observed the Muslim dietary laws, similar in some respects to the kosher laws of Judaism. Some argue that such laws help to bind a group together since observing them is something very difficult and more easily done in a group. A micro-culture develops that strengthens and absorbs the participants as a unit. This is a halal theory of terrorism, if you like.

So here’s the problem. If you read the – rants – of the extremist imams, how in the world do you bridge across to thinking that they make any sense at all? How do you go from hanging out with your fellows to accepting what is essentially a fascist theocracy?I think of it as the “standing at the mosque door” question.

When you stand at the mosque door and hear things like this:

“At any rate, if we return to our discussion of the heart of the matter. First of all, we must realize that Allah obligated us to disseminate this religion all over the globe. And first, it should be spread through outreach and calling people to Allah’s word, through pleasing words, gently, and through good deeds. Through letting people hear Allah’s words and showing them Islam. However, if we run up against someone who opposes this path and attempts to obstruct the spread of the upright religion and the light, and to obstruct their reaching others – in this case it is a duty to fight such a person. And Allah said: ‘Fight them until there is no more strife and Allah’s religion reigns supreme.’

“We don’t agree with those who disavow this completely and say that the religion [of Islam] doesn’t use the sword. No. Islam uses the sword when there is no other alternative. Therefore wisdom, as the religious authorities say, consists in utilizing each thing in its proper place. If there is need for the sword, then it is wise to use the sword, and if the occasion requires kind words and outreach, then it is wise to utilize them.”

And to me, there are at least two parts to it.

First, how is it that, in a century that conquered fascism, we ignored this kind of passionate fascist belief for so long? I read things like this once in a while before 9/11, and was amused. “Wow, those guys are nuts,” I used to think.

But we tolerate them. We tolerate them in our cities, as opposed to compounds in rural Idaho, where their white counterparts tend to pool. Why? Because we believe that no one who isn’t white can really be racist.

Why? Because the academic annti-Western left today sees the world through a very simple lens.

I stress very strongly, not the left at large or overall. It’s a very small tradition of anticolonial, pseudo-nationalist radicalism that eclectically and often incoherently grabs what it needs from Marxism, poststructuralism, postcolonial theory, and even conservative thought now and again (though often in unacknowledged ways).

It is also a tradition that is completely unable to face its own contradictions. Churchill’s much-cited remarks on 9/11 are an indication, for example, of the underlying moral incoherence of his writing (and writing like his). The principles that are used to value some lives (Iraqi babies dying under sanctions) and not others (people in the World Trade Center) have no underlying ethical or moral foundation: they’re purely historicist and instrumental. The original sin of modernity is seen as the expansion of the West; it is perceived as a kind of singularity that utterly destroyed or erased historical experience to that point. The only moral vector, the only capacity to act immorally or to commit evil, descends from that original sin. If you’re associated by social structure with that expansion, you are bad. If you are a victim of it, you are good.

Norm Geras touched on the same point:

In affecting the general alignment of most of the socialist left in the conflicts that have preceded and followed the events of September 11, 2001, all this effort that I have tried briefly to characterize might just as well not have taken place. For even if more advanced models of theoretical explanation are now available to the left, it nonetheless seems to suffice in any given international conflict to know that on one side is the United States, and that the United States is a capitalist power that always has designs on the natural and human resources of the rest of the world. If you know this, everything else falls instantly into place; all other levels of analysis, all other considerations, are superfluous. They can either be ignored altogether, or they can be conceded in passing, but as merely secondary and hence ignorable in practice. The political alignments are always defined by the primary determinant-imperialism. But how does this differ from imperialism’s being the only thing, with every other social, political, or ideological reality merely epiphenomenal, taking its place and meaning within the whole from the one true cause?

So on one hand, we turn a blind eye to beliefs that – if they were voiced in a Protestant church in the late 20th century – would be on the front page of the newspaper. But we don’t talk about them, because to do so would disrupt the tacit understanding that any statement – any rage, any claim – is valid if it is addressed against the hegemonic West, or more particularly, the United States.

And on the other, we immerse people in a community that believes that those claims – that everything wrong in the world is the result of Western history. So now, you’re lonely and far from home, in a society where you feel slighted – where you were once the best-educated, richest young man on the block. And now you’re another poor, unhappy student.

And why?

Well, because of the West, of course.

And if you come to believe that – and I have friends from New York who do – how much easier is it, standing at the door of the mosque – to go ahead and step inside.

Here’s Cole on Jonah Goldberg:

Goldberg helped send nearly 1500 brave Americans to their deaths and helped maim over 10,000, not to mention all the innocent Iraqi civilians he helped get killed. He helped dragoon 140,000 US troops in Iraq. And he does not have the courage of his convictions. His excuse is that he couldn’t afford to take the pay cut!

What is Goldberg going to say to the tens of thousands of reservists he helped send to Iraq, who are losing their mortgages and small businesses and have been kidnapped for 18 months at a time (not what they thought they were signing up for) by Rumsfeld? “Well guys, thanks for carrying out the policy I wanted to see, and for putting your own little girls into penury. I’d have loved to help out, but my little girl is more important than yours and besides, I like a good meal and I hear you only get MREs.”

See, Goldberg is a – wait for it – chickenhawk.I’ve talked about the political and intellectual bankruptcy of that charge before.

It is, primarily, a slur designed to end debate rather than an argument intended to advance it, and I’m way past surprised that Professor Cole would use it.

But hey, I guess I’m a chickenhawk too by his standards, so here’s my white flag of surrender to those who make it an issue.

Can we just let the military serving in Iraq vote on the war and abide by their choice?

I’d be happy to, although I fear that Dr. Cole might be less so.

But hey, he’s not serving either, so why should he have a voice in it?