Feed Editor 10 Feb 2007 18:37:18 GMT A Daily Portal to Minds Without Borders, by Pierre Tristam http://pierretristam.com en http://pierretristam.com/images/vologo3.jpg http://pierretristam.com The apologists of perpetual war in Iraq got lucky last week. The latest catastrophic fiasco over there — the Iraqi government’s face-saving surrender to a truce offered by resurgent Shiite militias — was overshadowed over here by meltdowns in the economy and sectarian battles inside the Democratic Party. From luck to spin. Today, the Bush administration gets to do what it does best: translate defeat at Arabs’ hands into victory with an American accent. For all the wishful talk you’ll hear this week from the Petraeus show and the war apologists, and even from those, like Clinton and Obama, who pretend to be looking for solutions, little will change until they concede that there will be no peace except on Arabs’ terms. To save himself, the occupier has a choice: submit to reality, or keep suffering its defeats while pretending back home that not losing is somehow success enough. 8 Apr 2008 15:54:14 GMT http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/08/c040808.htm A couple of you may have noticed that the email updates have fallen off lately. That's only because I haven't taken the time to prepare them. My apologies to those who were expecting them, my apologiers, now that they're resuming, to those who were glad to do without them, and my thanks for the continuing addition of many new subscribers since I did update last. I know that I promise daily updates on the front page of the Web site. I'll try not to honor that promise: Daily updates are a bit much, and let's be honest, they clutter the mailbox and annoy the reader. I'll update every few days, and more often only when absolutely necessary--in case the world ends or I write something I particularly want to show off. And as I started doing a few months ago, I'll include relevant links and updates from my Middle East Notebooks. 6 Apr 2008 18:50:48 GMT http://pierretristam.com/blog/index.php/?p=184 The word, attributed to the late writer Saul Bellow, is “angelization” — willfully putting someone beyond blame. Angelizing America is the common tongue of all national politicians, the oath candidates implicitly take when running for president. It’s what the most sentimental people on earth expect. It’s what enables a country that committed its share of atrocities in the past and is committing more than its share of moral degradations today to look itself in the mirror and see something exceptional looking back, rather than just another empire trampling down its march of folly, as the great historian Barbara Tuchman called it. Angelizing America is the unspoken, self-evident pledge of allegiance. Someone didn’t tell the Obamas. 6 Apr 2008 18:50:01 GMT http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/08/c032508.htm All right everyone, time to make your voice count and help me out with my first poll. Come on out at About and vote on the question of the week. The next president, whoever it is, will have to deal with the Middle East, as has every president since Harry Truman. The question: where should those Middle East priorities be? It's a lost cause for the current nullity in the White House. But you can help the next president decide. Get out the vote... 6 Apr 2008 18:50:24 GMT http://middleeast.about.com/b/2008/04/04/poll-what-should-be-the-priority-of-americas-middle-east-policy.htm A California court decision almost banning homeschooling was disturbing for a couple of reasons. It’s the first time in legal memory that a court made home-schooling so conditional. And California court decisions are a bellwether of national legal trends. The decision is a warning to the home-school movement, suggesting state regulations and intrusions may be next. The movement has been growing exponentially (30 percent between 1999 and 2003, to 1.1 million students nationwide), not always for the right reasons. Disassociating from one’s community or fearing a secular environment is not, in my view, as good a reason to home school as seeking higher academic standards. But that’s irrelevant so long as parental choice isn’t trumped by government presumption, overbearing enough as it is, on how to educate children. 6 Apr 2008 18:49:41 GMT http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/08/c031808.htm Quick test. Which of the following were acts of terrorism: a) Al-Qaida’s bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, which killed 17 American sailors; b) Hezbollah’s raid on an Israeli military patrol in July 2006, killing three soldiers and capturing two, and triggering a 34-day war; c) The Hamas ambush last week of an Israeli patrol on the Gaza border, killing one Israeli soldier d) Attacks on American troops in Iraq, which have killed about 3,500 soldiers (not including some 800 non-hostile deaths); e) None of the above. The answer, of course, is (e) — none of the above. The full essay... 6 Apr 2008 18:49:24 GMT http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/08/c031108.htm On Saturday, Mr. Bush vetoed a bill that would have outlawed the CIA's use of torture in interrogations (a bill, it should be noted, John McCain, alleged opponent of torture, voted against). He had the temerity, our Dear Leader, to begin his official endorsement of torture in his radio address this morning with these words: “Good morning.” Good for him and his kind of delusional sadists, maybe. Not so good for this country, whose reputation today takes one more plunk toward the abyss of rogue and less than ordinary nations. Not so good for the rest of the world, either, whose nations have been disbelievingly howling, in Babels of translations, that most American of plaints: “Say it ain’t so.” This spring training for terrorist-interrogators (for torture is terrorism at its distilled worst), it very much is so. The United States is officially, proudly, the land of torturers. It’s true that the United States has been at this for years. But the difference here is not only that the president is endorsing torture, but that he’s doing it so openly and willfully. It isn’t arrogance anymore. It isn’t even hubris. Arrogance and hubris suggest that at least some awareness that public perceptions still matter. In Bush’s mind, perceptions are for the birds. This is pure tyranny. His statement embracing torture, a study in mendacity, is worth a line-by-line look. 6 Apr 2008 18:49:04 GMT http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/08/cn030808.htm By day’s end Hillary Clinton’s campaign will be over. If she chooses to keep it on life support seven more weeks, it’ll end on April 22 in Pennsylvania , where Barack Obama’s numbers are surging faster than John McCain’s born-again conservatism (the same John McCain who considered switching to the Democrats in 2001 and discussed joining the Democratic ticket over six meetings with John Kerry in 2004). Either way, Democrats are poised to do what they do best come November: lose. 6 Apr 2008 18:48:48 GMT http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/08/c030408.htm Had William F. Buckley Jr. not long ago become a has-been—and intellectual dandy who overstayed his uses by about 25 years, which coincides roughly with Ronald Reagan’s first symptoms of Alzheimer’s—the tributes he’s been receiving from the right and the left would have been revolting, as opposed to merely nauseating. You expect the self-deluded right to revel in an elegiac orgy for the founder of grand delusions as ideology. You expect it less from liberals, who’ve nevertheless been swallowing whole the conventional ruse that while Buckley was a conservative, his intelligence, his wit, his probity, his stylistic elegance, kept him many cuts above the bullying Hannity-OReilly-Limbaugh sort. What crock. Buckley’s grace, when he displayed it, was his Trojan horse. His ideas, his politics, his insinuation of religion in politics, his obsession with liberalism as subversion and his dressing up of rank bigotry as some sort of moral redress are among the rea 6 Apr 2008 18:48:17 GMT http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/08/cn030208.htm Why dress up Arabs as the bad guys? For the same reason that Ann Coulter and like-minded racists have started referring to Barack Obama as B. Hussein Obama. The middle name’s Arab origin is supposed to provoke self-evident revulsion. It works, pushing all sorts of bigoted little buttons in the mind of the American voter whose ethnic tolerance for things Arab draws a line at humus. That voter will never go for the combination Arab-Muslim-Saddam cocktail that “Hussein,” with a little help from the Coulters of the world, evokes, because anti-Arab chauvinism is still accepted currency in most political circles, especially when it appeals to that other deranged strain in the national psyche — that the most powerful country on earth is somehow besieged, alone and vulnerable to sleeper cells snoring in Arabic. In this calorific stew-pot of paranoia, “B. Hussein Obama” is a bait made to order. 6 Apr 2008 18:48:01 GMT http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/08/c022608.htm But to Obama’s detractors, whose ranks grow in proportion with his popularity, Barack's middle name, “Hussein,” is a gift, the bait that keeps snagging on just the right smears that, Obama’s race being off limits, can always attach to his Arab-sounding past. Arabs (along with gays) are the last remaining groups Americans feel comfortable stereotyping and presuming guilty of whatever. It doesn’t have to be terrorism. It doesn’t have to be anything at all. It’s guilt by ethnicity, a vague, unspoken coloring that just hangs there, like an unmovable obsidian cloud over an otherwise sunny stretch of Norman Rockwell canvass. 4 Dec 2007 12:24:44 GMT http://pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/c120407.htm No one has time to read books, magazines, journals, newspapers and the Notebooks. So we read a few noteworthy pieces from periodical universe and summarize them for you. In the earliest days of the Notebooks, when the site could count its readers on the fingers of a Saudi Arabian caught stealing, this used to be a regular and half-way favored featured. It may be revived periodically, as printed matter accumulates in toto with the guilt of not eulogizing it. Here then are this week's eulogies. 4 Dec 2007 12:24:05 GMT http://pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/wr120207.htm What’s embarrassing, what’s reviling, is that one of the most violent and murderous nations on the planet, the only genocidal one at the moment, can still manage not only to deflect attention on a manufactured scandal of cartoonish proportions, but to do so in the Prophet Muhammad’s name, whose message and spirit the Sudan has been smearing to the sound of endless bloodletting for decades. There would be redress, not insult, if every Muslim (if not every human being) were to brandish a teddy bear tomorrow and call it Muhammad, not only to protest the imbecility of genocidal zealotry, but, more poignantly, to speak for the innocence of millions of Sudan’s children lost to genocide, lost to fanaticism, lost to the very opposite of the meaning and purpose of Islam as Muhammad taught it. 30 Nov 2007 02:09:29 GMT http://middleeast.about.com/b/2007/11/29/teddy-muhammad.htm An essentially metaphysical experience with books in England three decades ago comes to mind every time I hear that books, as Newsweek’s current cover has it, are “going digital.” Many books will, but I think it’s a mistake to think of digital books as merely electronic versions of their hard-copy equivalents. They’re entirely different creatures that yield different experiences, even if the words are identical in both formats. I don’t think I’d have experienced nearly the sense of salvation that I did that oppressive fall in Canterbury had my grandmother zapped me a gigabyte of books from her computer to mine, as opposed to sending me a box-full of my cherished Jules Verne collection. A book is also its cover, its place on one’s shelves in the same way that it has a place in one’s history, like a memory’s limbs. 28 Nov 2007 14:12:14 GMT http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/c112707.htm Before the men of Annapolis lay claim to breakthroughs, before they pretend to know what their people want and how best to break seven or eight decades’ worth of barbaric enmity, they’d have to start with honestly dispensing with the Holy Land’s worst mine field. They’d have to agree, once and for all, that peace is made on secular grounds, that the gods only muck things up, and men’s religions even more so. They’d have to agree that the bigotry of an Israeli lieutenant colonel, the zealotry of a rabbi, the murderous glee of a Palestinian shopkeeper and the cat-fighting priests of the Church of the Nativity are all the very mad and maddening examples of what Israelis and Palestinians both cannot accept, must not accept, if they’re ever to make peace. 28 Nov 2007 14:11:36 GMT http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/cn112607.htm We are constantly reminded—or told or warned or yelled at—that Iran should not get The Bomb. “The world,” even the fashionably reactionary New York Times wrote on Oct. 29, “should not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.” Why not? In countries like Pakistan and Iran, the nuclear pageantry is fanatical and mad, but it differs from its Western equivalent only idiomatically, not substantially. In these young nuclear powers’ minds—the warped minds of the nuclear age birthed in the United States—it restores the dignity and respect the whitish West still denies the browner East. The bomb is an insurgent symbol of redress, a late flowering of colonial blowback. 28 Nov 2007 14:11:05 GMT http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/c112007.htm “One thing you can still do is circumnavigate Manhattan island on the hundred-and-twenty-five foot S.S. Manhattan, leaving Pier 1, Battery Park, twice daily, at 10:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m.—forty-five miles, three hours, $1.75, special rates to servicemen.” So wrote Philip Hamburger in a Talk of the Town piece for the New Yorker in November 1943. One thing I never did in almost a decade of living in New York and two more of subsequently visiting it often enough that, all told, I have no excuse not to have done it, is circumnavigate the island in the city I love most at least once. It’s one of my rare regrets, especially now that Manhattan has been so disfiguringly, because not figuratively at all, diminished by the scarfacing of 9/11. 28 Nov 2007 14:10:40 GMT http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/cn111907.htm Shortly after 9/11, Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud, the world’s 13th wealthiest man, wrote a $10 million check for the 9/11 families fund. Giuliani’s administration cashed it. Then returned it. Giuliani didn’t like what Alwaleed said—that “the government of the United States of America should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance towards the Palestinian cause.” This incident illustrates Giuliani’s autocratic side, his purposefully narrow world view, his parochialism. Sounds familiar? But that posture speaks loads about the American establishment’s attitude towards Arabs in general, and powerful Arabs in particular. 28 Nov 2007 14:10:00 GMT http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/cn111607.htm Judging from the Bush administration’s numbers—50 consecutive month of job growth, six years of uninterrupted economic growth, after-tax per capita income rising an average of $3,800 per person since Bush took office—we should be dancing in the streets. Then why, on average for all seven years of Bush’s presidency, have just 12 percent of Americans rated the economy as getting better (compared with a 52 percent average during Clinton ’s last five years)? The gulf between real incomes and the typical middle class household budget, calculated for you inside, answers the question. 28 Nov 2007 14:09:28 GMT http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/c111307.htm A Senate committee produced the kind of report we should have had at least four years ago—on the true costs of the war, including interest payments on the borrowed money financing the follies, the $16,500 it’s cost the average American family of four from 2002 to 2008, the $36,900 it’ll cost from 2002 to 2017. But the major media have mostly ignored the report. It's as if just enough spinning from the Bush administration wards off the kind of critical examinations we need most: if a report is produced in Congress but no major media are willing to note it, has it really been written? 28 Nov 2007 14:12:50 GMT http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/bn112107.htm Hillary Clinton is not the most hawkish foreign policy Democrats among 2008 hopefuls. Barack Obama, who suffers from that Kennedy inferiority complex, is. At least that’s the conclusion one is forced to draw after reading their respective white papers in Foreign Affairs. Obama’s preceded Clinton’s by several months. Maybe Clinton is softening her image. She is all about adaptation, triangulation, obfuscation. And she gives few specifics. That said, her Foreign Affairs piece projects a more human, less bombastic Clinton foreign policy than we’re generally led to believe. But it also projects an astonishing reverence for the status quo and a fatal misunderstanding of how American power is perceived abroad: she makes no distinction between the way Americans want it perceived, and the way it actually is perceived. The question is not whether she can be trusted. It is whether she considers her education complete. If yes, we—the United States and the world—have not seen the end of their American-enabled troubles. 13 Nov 2007 16:25:12 GMT http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/cn111207.htm The truth is that if Nicolas Sarkozy was running for president of the United States, he’d be further left than Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards put together. His closest kin, in domestic policy anyway, if not on all matters Iraqi, would be Dennis Kucinich. His environmental kin would be Ralph Nader. His muscular secularism makes Democratic and Republican Bible-thumpers — which is to say, every leading candidate for the presidency, including craven converts like John McCain and Rudolph Giuliani — look like religious zealots. Which brings up two questions: Why do American liberals dislike him so much? The answer lays in Sarkozy’s weird pandering to the Bush administration and most things American. It’s time for both liberals and Sarkozy to grow up. 9 Nov 2007 02:20:40 GMT http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/cn110807.htm It’s February 7th. A Blackwater sniper is standing on the roof of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in Baghdad, across the street from the state-funded, American-created Iraqi Media Network. The Blackwater sniper is ostensibly guarding an American diplomat in a meeting at the ministry. A 23-year-old Iraqi guard is standing on a balcony of the Network building. The Blackwater sniper shoots him in the head. Kills him. It gets worse. 9 Nov 2007 02:21:14 GMT http://pierretristam.com/blog/index.php/?p=95 On Daniel Levin, acting assistant attorney general in 2004, who underwent waterboarding to inform his analysis of different interrogation techniques. Keep in mind that Levin did not declare waterboarding illegal, but he was fired as he was working on a memo on the various torture techniques used by the Bush White House. Still, Olberman is slightly off base here, making Lvin out to be a hero. Levin was part of the machinery of torture that justified the unconscionable. He just wasn't oiled to the White House's satisfaction. Note, by the way, how every major news source reporting this story, like ABC, takes the White House at its word when it claims waterboarding produced confessions from three al-Qaeda suspects. 9 Nov 2007 02:22:40 GMT http://pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/bv102907.htm For the first time in the history of Gallup polling, a president, the president—the Lord and Savior himself—has earned a “strongly disapprove” rating of 50 percent. George W. Bush’s performance, in other words, is now more intensely disapproved of than Richard Nixon’s who, at his very worst, had earned a 48 percent “strongly disapprove” rating. 9 Nov 2007 02:21:56 GMT http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/bn110807.htm What did Paul Tibbets, commander of the Enola Gay (the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima) do in his old age? He peddled replicas of the bomb over the Internet—WMD memorabilia, as repugnant a trade as the kind that specializes in the trinkets of Nazism or the gold teeth of Pol-Pot’s harvests. People bought in. That’s what happens when atrocity is not only overlooked but transformed into something essential and heroic. Harry Truman did it politically when he declared the dropping of the bomb “the greatest thing in history.” Tibbets did it folklorically. And a war crime became a whoop. Is it any wonder we find it so easy to be the world’s nuclear judges and juries? 7 Nov 2007 16:02:25 GMT http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/c110607.htm Rudy Giuliani’s foreign policy paper in Foreign Affairs—part of the journal’s series inviting every presidential candidate (well, every candidate they consider appropriately submissive to the establishment game) to write an oath to the 9/11 and Iraq War status quo—begins with this pompous sentence: “We are all members of the 9/11 generation.” It’s a pretentious reference to World War II’s supposed “greatest generation,” mixing nostalgia with aspiration: Giuliani wants his own war. He has it. He calls it, even more pompously, “the Terrorists’ War on Us.” (His capitals, our bane.) It gets worse from there. 7 Nov 2007 16:01:41 GMT http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/cn110307.htm There it is. Andrew Mayer, the University of Florida student tased by campus police during a town hall appearance by John Kerry last month, is no longer a victim of police brutality. Now he’s just an apologetic 21-year-old looking to publicly atone in a vat of whitewash. Press, police and his university (what to expect from grifters, goons and graters?) have ganged up on him worse than when those Blackwater-type cops slammed him down and electrocuted him on Sept. 17 (incidentally, one day after Blackwater’s authentic madmen murdered 17 Iraqis in cool blood). One more example of this country’s obedience to police-state diktat. 7 Nov 2007 16:01:05 GMT http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/cn110107.htm Show trials wouldn’t be possible without a ready public, without judges primed to let the travesties smear courtrooms and juries gullible to buy into the scam. Just as the press fuels fears and prejudices disproportionately more despicable than the hysterias in question — “illegal” immigrants, the drug war, child abductions, sex offenders, whatever Nancy Grace is talking about — the press is doing so consistently with what writer Susan Faludi so aptly calls “the terror dream.” The closer to home, the more sensational — and the most phony the fears. On that score, The New York Times is no more discriminating that Lou Dobbs or Nancy Grace. 7 Nov 2007 16:00:23 GMT http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/c103007.htm “I would like to move away from the sham democracy we have had in Pakistan,” Gen. Pervez Musharraf told Time magazine in December 1999, less than two months after seizing power in a bloodless coup that deposed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Musharraf was the head of the Pakistani military. “I want a true democracy at the grass-roots level,” he continued, “where people can govern themselves and run their own health programs and road construction. I intend to devolve power from the center to the provinces and from the provinces to the districts.” It didn't work out quite as Pervez fibbingly fantasized. See a full profile of the dictatorial Musharraf... 7 Nov 2007 16:03:18 GMT http://middleeast.about.com/od/pakistan/p/me07110507.htm A week ago Sarah Baxter, the Washington correspondent for the London Times, wrote a piece asking: “Where do you stand in the new culture wars?” She included a test designed to gauge the test-taker’s liberalism—phony or authentic, as the case may be. It’s a tendentious test: Sixteen questions closer to prompting required answers than testing the varied limits of progressive liberalism: By definition, liberalism is not dogmatic. The test almost forces you to be. But it’s worth taking, if only as a trigger to debate. I “passed” the test, answering 15 of 16 questions, making me “a true progressive” according to Baxter’s criteria, as I suspect most people here would be. Still, the one question I failed revealed why the test is a neocon’s idea of liberalism. 28 Oct 2007 22:03:44 GMT http://pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/cn102907.htm Out At About: Ramadan is the month-long observance of Islam’s holy month. It entails, among other requirements, absolute abstention from food, sex, and impure thoughts during daylight hours (children, the elderly, pregnant and menstruating women and long-distance travelers are generally excused). All bets aren’t quite off when the sun goes down, but have a seat: It’s time for Iftar, dusk’s fast-breaking meal, and stereotype-busters are the main course. 28 Oct 2007 22:02:50 GMT http://middleeast.about.com/b/a/000017.htm