I’m sitting in a hotel room in Vancouver, listening to the TV. And the ad for the Toronto Globe and Mail comes on and says… “It’s not just news, it’s a conversation…”

Mr. Jarvis, did you write that??

I’ve smacked Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber more than a bit – and regret none of it – but the guy made sense on something this week, and I won’t be able to live with myself until I compliment him for it.

He suggested that President Bush not receive the Sinn Fein representative at the White House this St. Patrick’s Day.

If the government wants to send out the right signals it should go ahead and hold the function – but invite only representatives of those political parties that are committed exclusively to democratic politics. This may sound like diplomatic niceties – but it would send a quite powerful signal, and, I suspect, have a substantial chastening effect on a group of people who are in sore need of chastening.

Makes good sense to me.

And it’s timely. Here’s the Guardian today:

Sinn Féin was in crisis last night as another prominent member in the Irish republic was dragged into the multi-million pound IRA money-laundering investigation police say could connect republicans to the £26.5m Northern Bank robbery.

As the first of the seven people arrested in raids across Cork and Dublin this week appeared in court charged with IRA membership, a former Sinn Féin vice-president and one of the most well-connected bankers in the country was helping the police with their inquiries.

The depth of U.S. support for the IRA during the bloody 1980’s can’t be overstated.

And it’s a shameful thing.

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.