ShrinkWrapped

Saying Whatever Comes to Mind XVIII

This week the Sanity Squad turn their eyes toward Iran’s “Holocaust” Deniers and say farewell to a holocaust enabler, Kofi Annan.  You can down load or listen to Neo, Siggy, Dr. Sanity, and myself at Pajamas Media Politics Central.

On Cultures and Judgments

Yesterday, Jimmy J addressed some questions about the role of culture in our current difficulties in the Middle East.  This is the underlying IED at the core of the ISG report.  The anti-war left has taken the position that the Iraqis effectively are incapable, and in fact don't want, democracy.  This is a derivative of Political Correctness.  (If we cannot make judgments about other cultures, we certainly have no right to impose change upon them.)

One of the reasons I have referred to Political Correctness as a thought disorder is that if one adheres to the tenets of PC thought, one is constantly led into blind alleys of illogical cognitive dissonance.  In my post on Applied Diplomatic Narcissism I made the point that "the hall mark of Narcissism is the failure of the Narcissist to fully grasp that another person's mind does not necessarily operate in precisely the way their (sic) mind operates."  In response Lawnguylander left this comment:

How true but this applies to people looking for a way out of the Iraq mess rather than the people who got us there? How lame. Iraqi minds clearly do not operate like those found in western democracies but we were going to bring them the gift of democracy with our military might? Now that was narcissistic.

Another reader, RT, sent me an e-mail that said something very similar in more detailed and colorful language.  He referenced The Battle of Omdurman-Sudan 1898:

At the battles end 10,000 Dervishes lay dead, 16,000 wounded, and 5,000 prisoners. The battle was over the British army saved, the army lost 48 men and 382 wounded.

Churchill, at least at the time, thought that the forces of civilization had prevailed. Lord Kitchener, the British commander, moved on to the Transvaal several years later to undertake more "civilizing" campaigns against the Boers. The Sudanese were ruled by Egyptian and British controlled strongmen for the next fifty years.

Do you really imagine that our current war in Iraq, with its ever changing rationales and unending carnage, will accomplish anything more than the British did in the Sudan 100 years ago? Good god! The reason history repeats itself is because human nature is so constant. If you believe that savagery resides in one religion or one culture, and that we in the "civilized" West are immune to its corrosive reality, you need to break out your Psychology 101 textbooks and study them. It's not 1939 again and George W. Bush isn't Winston Churchill.

More likely, it is 1898 and the useless slaughter of Sudanese Dervishes has been replaced by the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqis.

In both examples, the emphasis is mine, and both deserve a response.

THOUGHTS ABOUT TRIBALISM AND CHANGE

Jimmy J is a frequent commenter who has previously posted as my guest at ShrinkWrapped;  "One Man's Journey" is thought provoking and powerful.  (If you haven't read it, take a look: Part I, Part II, Part III)  He has now called upon some of his past experiences to raise some very important questions that are at the core of our difficulties in Iraq and are rarely discussed despite their importance.  In this post he addresses concerns about the tribal nature of much of the world and wonders if that implies that our attempts to bring the Arab World into the Modern World are likely to fail. 

THOUGHTS ABOUT TRIBALISM AND CHANGE

In 1965 I was the Officer-in-Charge of a Navy All-Weather Fighter detachment assigned to the Air Force at Tan Son Nhut in Vietnam. At the time the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, (MACV) was commanded by General William Westmoreland. The General held a command briefing once a week when various units briefed him on their missions and how things were going. The Seventh Fleet Liason Officer, a Navy Commander, thought that having a Navy unit doing interceptor missions for the Air Force was a real feather in the Navy's cap and he wanted me to brief the General. I agreed and traveled from Tan Son Nhut to MACV Headquarters in downtown Saigon for that purpose.

When I arrived at the headquarters the Commander met me and informed me that the brief had been called off because of some attacks in the Mekong Delta that required the General's attention.  As a consolation for my time and effort he offered to take me to lunch at a nice Vietnamese restaurant. 

The restaurant was in a hotel where many correspondents and civilian contractors stayed. The lunch was a gourmet treat of French and Vietnamese delicacies. The service was as wonderful as the food. The waiters were never in view, but would appear whenever a dish needed removing, a glass filled or any other need was noticed. It seemed a rather surreal experience to  enjoy such marvelous food and service in a country that was wracked by war and chaos. But Vietnam was a country riddled with irony and contrast.

Our conversation that day was far ranging and I have forgotten much of it, but I have never forgotten his explanation of why the Vietnamese and other people that live in the Equatorial Regions of the world find it difficult to accept democracy and capitalism.

A Contrarian Look at the Iraq War

The Conventional Wisdom, as expressed by various members of the MSM, Congressmen, Senators, the occasional artiste, and the odd pundit or two, has it that the Iraq War has been a costly mistake, a disaster that we are losing; in short, in the words of that most traditional of the CW purveyors, Don Imus, "a mess."  It is rarely established by what metric the War is a disaster, though there seems to be a heavy reliance on "body counts" and usually unsubstantiated reports from various stringers that support the meme of the day. 

One of the virtues that the 60s generation had (and they didn't have many, I fear) was a determination to "question authority."  Admittedly, this was often carried to an extreme, and all authority figures were rather indiscriminately held in contempt (though, in an interesting bit of confused idealization, those authority figures who sanctioned the questioning of authority figures rarely tolerated being  questioned themselves).  However, while rarely remarked upon these days, the fact is that the rebels of the 1960s have now become the establishment authority figures of the 2000s, and it is worth questioning their authority. 

(The doyens of academia, the MSM, especially the gray lady of the media, Eurocrats, UNophiles, the entrenched vestiges of the 60s in the Democratic party, are all as establishment as it gets.)

I would suggest that not only are we not losing in Iraq, but we are winning the war; however, we can still quite easily snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

The Council Has Spoken ...

This week the winning Council Post was Part II of Marc Schulman's On Negotiating with Iran and Syria.  The second place post was How to lose support for a war at The Glittering Eye. 

Dr. Sanity's "COME FOR THE EGALITARIANISM, STAY FOR THE BESTIALITY AND TYRANNY" was the non-Council winning post and History's End, History's Beginning at Adventures of Chester came in second on a tie breaker by the Watcher.

As always, all the nominees can be found at the Watcher of Weasels and all will reward your time and effort.

Unfortunately, due to the time pressures of several new projects, I have had to resign from the Watcher's Council.  If you blog and are interested in the opportunity to read some fascianitng posts each week and "meet" some wonderful bloggers, take a look at the Watcher's rules for applying to the Council.  It is a fair amount of work but very rewarding.

The Rot From Within

Kenneth Duran is the film critic for the LA Times and this morning offers his review of Apocalypto, Mel Gibson's latest film.  The review makes it clear that Duran sees the primary experience of the film as an immersion in brutal and primitive violence:

Who knows what violence lurks in the hearts of men? Mel Gibson knows, and he just can't resist putting every last ounce of it on screen. He also can't resist pulling those bloody, still-beating hearts out of human bodies and putting them up on screen as well. And that's just the beginning.

Numerous good things can be said about "Apocalypto," the director's foray into the decaying Mayan civilization of the early 1500s, but every last one of them is overshadowed by Gibson's well-established penchant for depictions of stupendous amounts of violence.

Despite a genuine talent for taking us to another time and place, a gift that under other circumstances would be worth experiencing, Gibson has made a movie that can be confidently recommended only to viewers who have a concentration camp commandant's tolerance for repugnant savagery.

Mountains of hacked up corpses, exit wounds spewing fountains of blood, spears shattering teeth, warriors literally beating each other's brains out, it's all here in living and dying color.

It would be easy to write about the apparent fetishizing of violence that Gibson has been accused of; that would fit the conventional wisdom and a good case could be made that his loving approach to violence and the celebration of violence in his most recent efforts offer multiple, worthy occasions for Psychoanalytic discourse.  It would be easy but I doubt if it would be enlightening.

Applied Diplomatic Narcissism

I have no particular interest in parsing the Iraq Study Group report.  Many very smart people have taken a look at it and there is very little that is surprising arising from the efforts of these elderly celebrants of diplodancing to whom every problem can be solved by talking and, perhaps, treating the people most at risk as expendable and non-contributory.  After all, there is really no other way to understand the thinking behind a report which proposes to determine the future of Iraq and Israel (the connection between the two remains difficult to grasp, but Baker assures us the connection exists) without ever consulting the peoples involved.  There were no Iraqis, no American military, and no Israelis on the panel and very few were actually consulted. 

In trying to understand the ISG approach I imagined the occasion of a second opinion, a common reason for a consultation concerning a difficult treatment case.  In such a circumstance, if I do not interview the patient, their treating Doctor, or their family, but instead rely on the records in the chart and interviews with their next door neighbors, I could conceivably arrive at a recommendation.  It would have the virtue (sarcasm alert) of not being confused by the various desires of the people most intimately involved but would likely suffer the vice of having very little to do with reality. 

In the early days of Psychoanalysis, when this new treatment approach was meeting with some success in alleviating the distress of people for whom traditional approaches were thoroughly unhelpful, Psychoanalysis was over-sold, as happens with most new treatments for desperate conditions.  All Psychological disturbances were thought to be amenable to the proper and judicious applications of the "talking cure."  Unfortunately, painful lessons were yet to be learned.  Certain patients, with certain conditions, could not be helped by talking, even when they seemed ideal candidates for the treatment.

The realization that certain young, intelligent, charming, well spoken individuals might not actually be treatable took some time to penetrate the fog of our desires.  Unfortunately, Sociopaths entered Psychotherapy with very different goals and intentions than the treating Professional, and therein lay the problem.

Mommy, They're Doing it Again

Two brief vignettes:

Shortly after 9/11, a mother of a four year told me that she had left the TV all day that terrible day.  She didn't realize that her 4 year old was watching the replays of the attack until her daughter called out to her, "Mommy, they are doing it again."  Her 4 year old did not realize that each viewing of the attack was a replay.  To her, every viewing was a new attack.

During my last year in Medical School, I took a one month elective at the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital Prison Ward.  This was a unit for people who had been charged with serious crimes and were being evaluated to determine whether their mental state rendered them capable of criminal intent and competent to stand trial.  One man was fairly typical.  He was actively delusional and had been arrested for a serious assault.  He explained that he had been informed by the newsman on Channel 2 that he was in great danger and that a white man was going to kill him along with many other people.  When he was on the street shortly thereafter, he saw a white man, realized this was the assassin (and heard the Newscaster confirm it by saying, "Its him!") and attacked the man, who was a stranger, in order to protect himself and other innocent people in the vicinity.

In the first case, a child lacks the mental maturity and capacity to realize that the images she is seeing on her TV are not depictions of current reality but a replay of a past act.  In the second case, a psychotic man lacks the capacity of reality testing, which would have informed him that his perceptions were being dangerously skewed; in fact, what he "heard" were auditory hallucinations rather than a newscasters verbal productions.  There is no question in these two situations that we cannot hold the child or the psychotic fully responsible for their level of understanding and behavior. 

Yet, the question we must address now is more complicated.  What happens when a population hears and sees the message, authoritatively presented everyday by newscasters, that an Oppressor is killing innocents?   

Saying Whatever Comes to Mind XVII

This week the Sanity Squad turn their attention to the resignation of John Bolton, an inauspicious sign for those who would like the UN to become relevant, and the dangerous distortions introduced into the body politic when we can no longer trust our eyes and ears to tell us the truth.

Join Neo-neocon, Dr. Sanity, Siggy, and myself and listen in or download our latest Podcast, Peacekeeper of the Antagonists.

Stasis in the Middle East

It seems likely that the next two years will feature Congressional hearings meant to disguise the lack of ideas or plans from the Democratic side of the political spectrum for resolving any of our difficulties in the Middle East.  There is enough residual Bush hatred from the left that the Democrats will have difficulty assisting him, as is evidenced by the decision of John Bolton to resign rather than suffer the ignominy of a losing Senate vote, yet there is also enough realism among those who desire a Democrat in the White House in '08 to recognize that losing in Iraq, if seen as caused by the Democrats, would be fatal to their chances.  This is a prescription for stalemate and stasis.  In normal times (if they ever exist) stasis and stalemate in Washington are not especially worrisome and are often to be preferred.  However, when there is a war on, the calculation changes.

As I suggested in my post last week, the war in the Middle East is not about Iraq, it is about Iran (and the HISH Alliance/Hezbollah-Iran-Syria-Hamas.)  Iran has an important election coming up next week which will tell us something about the public face that their regime will turn toward the West.  If, as expected Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi wins the election, it bodes poorly for peace and tranquility in the Middle East.  As Allahpundit described several weeks ago:

In a move that would push Iran even further into the diplomatic wilderness, Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, 71, who publicly backs the use of suicide bombers against Israel, is campaigning to succeed Grand Ayatollah Ali Khameini, 67, as the head of the Islamic state.

Considered an extremist even by fellow mullahs, he was a fringe figure in Iran’s theocracy until last year’s election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a fellow fundamentalist who views him as his ideological mentor…