Work stoppage as a strategy of effecting political ends (such as impeaching improperly elected presidents)

Blogdom,

As an admirer of certain aspects of James Madison's thought, I exercise caution before suggesting any strategy of activism meaning to effect political ends directly rather than improve a democratic/republican system so that it may effect them by an approximation of the ultimate idealized law of the greatest good for the greatest number. As careful readers of Madison know (but Noam Chomsky pretends not to know) Madison's strategy for effecting this gain in aggregate welfare was two-fold; to allow representative government, but not pure democracy, at the highest level, and to have two fundamental layers of government, state and national. Pure democracy in which each question be decided upon by a show of hands, he reckoned in part, was mobocracy, in which a collective decides what to do according to the law of crowds: each part is ignorant of most necessary information and the whole cannot be guaranteed to directly simulate the knowledge its' parts lack. An invisible hand of politics in which the opposite is true is ludicrous to intuition and most forms of reason, and besides that, empirically unprovable given ever-changing definitions of "the good." Madison called the actual mechanism of crowd decision faction formation, a name which implies at least a prisoner's dillemma-like achievement of less than optimal gain from each man competing for himself, and at worst all forms of extra-legal manipulation contrary to the basic premises of government for the people, by the people, and of the people. However, recognizing holes in the theory (there must be holes in any theory), and the lack of competition rendering a parliament an uncontested authority in any single-layered and purely republican government, he allowed considerable leverage to states, and allowed them to have purely democratic (and thus potentially mobocratic) elements, with a supreme court holding ultimate jurisdiction over the propriety of their laws.

As many say today, states (and somtimes cities) are laboratories of new ideas. This is an interesting twist on both Madisonian and economic ideas: a small number (50 max, currently) of tested laws to choose from, developed naturally (mobocratically) in a republic-controlled environment, as an alternative of a market of untested ideas too large to count. I think Madison would be proud of this line of thought: first because empirically tested ideas are information to go on other than instinct, and second because it allows for democratic elements without the perils of pure democracy. And its' no surprise: the idea is the brainchild of a people reared in a system he played a very important role in fashioning.


Democratic mobocracy, however, may very well be the best way to decide upon questions everybody does have the necessary information about given a failure of a globally republican government. When in the course of human events does activism indisputably become necessary? When the republican form of government defeats itself, such as in a rigged election. Therefore, I suggest activism in the face of any future stolen election.



It having been demonstrated "beyond a reasonable doubt" with Bayesian statistical and elementary probabilistic means that an election has been rigged, extra-legal means of action are appropriate. In its' broadest outline, needing details (feel free to comment if you're out there), this is the one I suggest.



A work stoppage, or general strike. May everybody who believes the United States has crossed the line into dictatorship refuse to work until corrective legal measure is taken or new elections are held, (whichever is more democratic-republican under the circumstances), at the risk of their job. Labor is the power of the people. Demonstrating is useless. The only hope of a bloodless revolution should revolution become necessary (such as in the case of a massively rigged election) is to cripple the economic system for political ends.

This is not a question of whether the ends justify the means. It is a question of whether one mean can be used to effect an end of a different kind, which can only reasonably be answered in the positive.



To make this stoppage practicable, rather than a fanciful idea, it is necessary to reduce the number of jobs lost, or for each individual the probability they will lose their job. This requires making deals with factions one doesn't respect. Such as the most abusive of corporations, etc. Natural principles reveal that, once the strike has achieved its' ends, most people will be rehired, as the cause of the strike is the enstatement of a man who will then be the president-elect, which it is in business's interest to please, and, if the strike has enough adherents, there won't be pools of same-skilled alternate employees to hire. This "most" isn't good enough to ensure safety, especially if the arguments behind it aren't known. So steps need to be taken to put at least a few major corporations on the side of the strikers: in other words, to make the companies themselves part of the stoppage, with means of labor, money, reasoning, or whatever else may work.



So, again, the suggestion is: put down your placards and stay home from work in the case of a clearly illegitemally elected president. There are not enough compliant soldiers to enact the Taft-Hartley act on the scale I'm suggesting. The weapon of the people is labor, as known by Gandhi, a rather succesful non-violent revolutionary, whatever else he was, and all his followers. This is the answer given unjust regimes, regardless of the situation and whether you're a Wall Street Broker or a day-laborer, a citizen or not.

A retraction ala Beethoven

I am no longer planning to vote for Barack Obama or supporting his candidacy for a simple reason: I find it dangerous to say in any capacity within public life that one would invade a part of a sovereign state that happens to have nuclear weapons on "creditable intelligence" that Al Qaeda (the base) has a base there. The creditability of "creditable intelligence" has a poor track record to say the least, besides which, causing a potential nuclear standoff in any way, shape or form is insanity the likes of which has not been seen from the White House (to my knowledge) since another charismatic but inexperienced leader some forty-five years ago brought the world to the brink of annihilation for a fortnight. In other words, all the JFK comparisons are more on the mark than their supporters imagine, and this is bad because he was a lousy president until the day he got shot, at least in this most important of respects.

Of course, Mr. Obama probably says all this not out of plain inexperience, seeing as even little young inexperienced me knows what's wrong with it, but because it's what a portion of undecided voters wants to hear more than the other portions might be turned off by it. It still appears appropriate to me to call it inexperience and mean something other by that word than a euphemism for demagoguery because experience would teach the said candidate not to say under pressure what under more normal circumstances he or I both already realize should not be said. Any candidate who sleeps in the White House on Jaunary 20th-21st 2009 will find upon waking up that his or her diplomatic record as a president retroactively stretches back to the wild days of his or her campaign. Since diplomacy is the number one job of a president, I'm taking everything said about it right now very seriously. And voting Clinton with some reservations.

It seems to me that the Soviets were as "insane" in actuality as any nuclear-armed Islamic Republic of Pakistan would be if it came to exist, and it seems untenable to me to strike nuclear-armed enemies no matter who they are, what they do, or what they say they "believe". They could use the things! Simple enough, but it seems that game theory and other strategic thought as informed and altered by historical example has largely been replaced in our times by a political "language game" I call "pro-Bush, anti-Bush." Whether you're with him like Romney or against him like Obama, the cowboy has largely decided the backbone of publicly acceptable reasoning for the worse. in particular, he has undermined the Kennan et al. framework of international diplomacy with unthought garbage allegedly drawn from the work of Leo Strauss (a bad writer and besides that a Plato, Maimonides, and Spinoza commentator rather than a political strategist).For the record, this here publicly unacceptable commentator endorses the following theses: A) Kennan et al.'s manner of diplomacy was based on strategic (game-theoretical, for any economists out there) considerations of how to wage cold war given a set of weapons and any state out there threatening our country with them, and their day is on that account not over if it ever began. B) Communism and Islam are both "religions" whose stated and real goal is to inform politics, so if we dealt with one crop of madmen we can deal with another similarly. The only difference is that Islam is purportedtly "stateless." This I find to be purported but not factual. Radical Islam exists only insofar as states harbor it, and this includes both the Islamic republics and the so-called secular dictatorships that tolerate Islamic factions, brotherhoods, and other organizations. That's a big list with question marks, but it's still less dangerous than the good old Soviet Union. So why not render unto Caesar what deters Caesar, whether the Caesar calls himself communist or Muslim? C) If Al Qaeda is really a stateless enemy, rather than a multi-state enemy as I argue, tough talk about getting at one of its arms is assassination by starfish mutilation (the other arms regenerate). Either we're dealing with a nihilistic army of shadows that means to bring about Armageddon for virgins in the sky or we're dealing with states and alliances thereof, but in either case, Obama's gesture is a bad move.

So, like Beethoven ripping up his dedication of the Eroica symphony to Napoleon upon his invasion of I forget which German state, as a Palinodist retracts a poem with another, I offer this argument.

The endorsement season

Blogdom,

This blog, yielding less power than a small local of, say, custom hammer, sickle and flag-makers in a Republican plains-town, can only sway through argument if read at all. Argument requires infinity, and there is thus no rational argument to be propogated by endorsing one of a finite number of presidential hopefuls. Since no politics blog worth the screen-light it's printed on would however be complete without an endorsement, I am giving mine followed by argument.

This blog endorses Barack Obama for President of the United States of America. This blog hopes for the following outline of an administration under this leader: Bill Richardson, secretary of state. Joe Biden, Secretary of something important. Hillary Clinton: Secretary of something important. Somebody-or-other whose name is not John Edwards, to be chosen mainly for strategic reasons, for VP. John Edwards: getting drunk on cocunut-wine on an island in American Micronesia so that he can see two Americas in the midst of a tropical paradise but however not play any role in governance.


Now the argument:

As many Barackites say, lack of experience in Washington and excellent relevant experience in legal life and policymaking elsewhere are exactly the outline of an administration that might accomplish something policy-wise, rather than push a "left" consensus view (unthought compromise) against a "right" consensus view (unthought compromise with more disastrous consequences) and put forth impotent efforts to assure that that consensus becomes the norm (this idea is not rooted in the changing realities of the planet I happen to live on) and that democrats get elected in the future (if recent history has not taught us that the logic of these things does not follow the wills of those currently in power, we haven't been paying attention; that is the theme of this blog if it has just one). Mr. Obama does not disappoint in his role as thinking outsider. I may not agree with every last point of his policy, or share all his values, but he is a policy-thinker, and a policy-thinker is what I want in the White House as long as his core values are not overtly incompatible with my own and he is constrained by interests of which I consider myself a member: that is that he responds to the needs of the American people, of whom I am one, and to some extent the world populace, of which I am also one. Being able to predict neither what kind of American I will be in the future (this is reality, not philosophy, at this point) nor what policy will actually benefit the most Americans, proper values and intentions matter to me.
Mr. Obama is also a policy-speaker. Since, as I stated elsewhere on this blog (William XV post), I believe one of the primary reesponsibilities of a President is to steer public discourse onto a field where it may come up with realistic and effective ideas, I find this to be of prime importance. A vote for a Clinton is a vote for, well, a Clinton, that is someone who doesn't find this to be important at all. I cannot for this reason alone vote for Hillary in a primary. I do think she is a competent politician and think she should be a member of the administration, and will almost certainly vote for her in the general election should she win this round.

In addition, Mr. Obama's skin-color does matter, because, let's face it, we're racists, and the leader of the world being black has the potential to change perspectives on race and ethnicity and via that conduit change the facts of how business is conducted around here, and elsewhere. Mr. Obama's story being multicultural and unique is also good, since it should help put to bed medieval notions that our populace's history is summed up by a few stereotypes.
Also I just like the guy, and that's worth something, to me at least.

Que Bono, part I: Has money no smell?

Blogdom,
The Romans aptly pointed out that money has no odor by which we may judge it's provenance. But it does not escape many people nowadays that sometimes it bears a faint aroma of unintered dinosaur bones preserved and concentrated in vast obvious pools under sandstorms erasing the footprints of the blind camel destiny. However, somebody out there has propogated the idea that the state of Texas, with it's comparatively small reserves, and American corpos out of Michigan, whose product is machinery, not oil, are the perpetrators of the corrupt business of preventing the occurence of an overdue alternative energy push. Common sense dictates that those who benefit the most from keeping oil valuable are those who own the oil reserves, and that those who do business with them have only temporary and incidental interests in the current state of energy. The paper trail does in fact validate this guess--so long as one is willing to accept the proposition that the mad cowboys and troglodyte car-makers can, respectively, draw new contracts and connections, and make new engines rather easily. I accept this proposition. Therefore, beyond the oily smell, it is appropriate to look to the owners of the wells,not the middlemen. Their amazing influence in world politics today inspires in me the following response. Push alternative energy with big dollars, first for environmental reasons, but second, and not unimportantly, to let the clowns and butchers dance in their oil fields.

What exactly is prejudice?

Blogdom,

The simplest answer to a relevant question is oftentimes the most difficult to apply. This post is an attempt to give the simplest possible answer to the titular question and show why it is the best, but also the most difficult answer.

Prejudice etymologically means judging in advance. I propose, with no political goal in mind, to take this breaking up of the word into its elements as the definition despite the well-known linguistic truism (inapplicable tautology) that etymology does not determine meaning because I don't like the meaning my society is giving the word right now. If I am not to be a slave to others' usage, and thus to let my very linguistic potentiality be dictated by foreign wills and be rendered thereby incapable of thinking for myself, I must use the recourse of the only shared objective fact about the word outside its' usage--its etymology. The danger of newspeak lies not only within the hearts of bureaucratic establishments of perfect totalitarian regimes, but within our hearts. It is a danger that looms over us at every turn, in every choice of words we make. If we lived in a world of pure speech, without guns or enforceable threats, it would be the mother of totalitarian regimes rather than its' offspring. As it is, the situation is much more complicated, but the danger of totalitarian regimes lies in our speech as well the arms we bear or find thrust in our face. Wishing to avoid newspeak, I'm defending myself with a natural ally against it--call it oldspeak.

If prejudice means judging in advance, as I am bidding it to mean, it can bear no necessary relation to bigotry based on race, class, gender, or creed. This is simply not what the word would then mean. Any judgement made about presented evidence concerning an event or person in advance of the presentation of the evidence would be a prejudice. This is simple enough. Why don't we just avoid such a habit?

Judgements must be made randomly or from a basis. This is an applicable tautology. We know that making judgements completely at random is both difficult and dangerous. That leaves the question of what basis we are to form jugdements upon. We arrive at the scene with our previous materials, which we know not the shape of, and receive evidence we know not the shape of. We come, we see, we judge what exactly is before us. The question is by what we are going to be directed in our judgement. Surely something, but what? What about this: judge by no thing but by your wits. We can argue about whether man should be the measure of all things, but we cannot argue that she/he can be. That is a simple fact. Here's why I think the should clause also belongs in our after-the-fact judgement of this particular sentence.

"Whatever comes to mind" is not only an acceptable basis of judgement, but the only basis of judgement that is not prejudice given there are no other prejudices present (a weighty condition, I admit). Any methodical decisions as to how we are to judge what comes our way next, whatever it be, is a prejudice. Saying that we should always judge people by actions, not words, that a sovereign nation always has rights, that people who believe they have a homeland on the basis of their ancestors having lived somewhere are always justified in this belief, that the law of the land should always be followed, and many other sentences that make no mention of distinctions between people based on "who they are", however defined, are prejudices--that is advance judgements. No wonder the trumpeters of these principles don't apply them magnanimously--they're just not as prejudiced as they like to sound.

However, that justice always demands equal treatment of people is not a prejudice, because it is not a judgement. It is a rule for how to apply what judgements we may make. "Do not judge by race, class, gender or creed," is not a judgement either---it merely states that certain other sentences aren't good judgements. So all maxims are not prejudices, but all maxims not based on the usual suspects are not necessarily free of prejudice. If they are judgements, being maxims, that is sentences meant to be applied in the future, they are indeed prejudices.

Judgements concern conceptual entities--be they people, nations, homelands, musical forms, emotions, or anything else. Every mention of a conceptual entity is not a judgement, but every judgement mentions a conceptual entity. "Equal treatement of people" clearly mentions one of these, but it brilliantly fails to tell us either what a person is, or what treatment should be applied in a situation. For that matter it fails to tell who is a person--if we can't tell, we're not fit to make judgements anyways. It may seem paradoxical to say that guidlines for making judgements are acceptable and praise gut instinct at the same time. But gut instinct is trained too; in fact it is precisely what is trained with no particular end in mind. Rawls's veil of ignorance is a veil against self-interest, but not against all prejudice as here defined.

I find Rawls's veil too maxim-driven. Maxims are lessons extractable from situations we've seen before, and expect to see again. Even if reality repeats itself nicely, which I doubt that it does without our prejudiced help, maxim-based ethics requires us to know what situation we are in before acting--a condition that is simply too strong given the speed of the world and mankind's particular abilities. Additionally, they don't allow intermediate cases--there being neither an intuitively obvious space of situations nor an intuitively obvious space of maxims, they don't mix very well.

Our wits have landed us in bad situations before. But our attempts to get around them have fared worse. So if you don't like your guts, change them. Why complain that our categories are vague and amorphomous? They're supposed to be. "Vague" is what we're adding here on this earth. Why complain about limit cases, exceptions, cases that both are and aren't a thing? Categories allowing of such cases are precisely what we are creating that inorganic nature cannot. If we try to decide in advance of any specific event how we are to categorize and judge it by any criteria other than what comes to a mind not under the influence of prejudices, we are, you guessed it, prejudiced. Gentlemen, fire up your neurons. You have no idea what's about to hit you.

Why are competitive games with mutual benefits not gauche?

Blogdom,
Among the most basic ideas of economics both before and after the game theory revolution is competition with mutual benefits for both competitors. I don't know the intellectual history of the powerful concept, but I doubt very strongly that it originated with the dismal science. Its most natural field of application is politics--incuding war.


For instance, imagine two groups with vastly different goals, both of whom have authority, derived from different sources, share a world. Imagine further that in this world, there is a vast imbalance between both physical and intellectual resources and outcomes material or otherwise. Further imagine that one of the parties is steward to the benifiteers of the resource/outcome imbalance and means to maintain it, while the other means to gain a share of influence for a worldview appealing to very few people that can win neither a democratic nor an economic contest. I can make such an ungainly pile of assumptions without detracting from realism in my model because, as you guess, I actually imagine no part of them.


What will they do? They will fight each other like so many companies, to the benifit of both--but not to the benifit of those who aren't playing. The "aggregate gain in welfare" clause usually tacked on at the end of the article is summarily defenestrated simply because there is no medium of exchange in politics, which playing field helps determine the cultural "value" landscape rather than assuming it, and because the players are offering no product to the public on which their welfare depends, save the imposition of their own worldviews.



Nevertheless, certain principles generally associated with economics apply here. In particular, the continuum of cases from monopoly (monoideology, single player game), to duopoly (duoideology, "clash of civilizations") to oligopoly (the several to many case) to perfect competition (plethora of opinions covering the range of the currently thinkable, open society) should respectively be expected to generate better and better outcomes the more players there are. Except that, again, this market/world can assume nothing: no predetermined product, value, or medium of exchange. Thus, instead of some better than normal profits and some underproduction of a product that remains the same no matter who is producing, we the people, members of the general public and thus bearers of general welfare, get a vast under-production of public ideas which de-legitimates the ideas we are ourselves still quite capable of producing. You're in, you're out, or you're crazy. That clause is the platform on which the maniacs American and pan-Islamic fight each other while we watch. The public, of course, pays the entrance bill. The World Pseudo-Wrestling Federation competitors all get paid, and the winner is, needless to say, predetermined. The Bushies win on vast military superiority, and rally a great majority of people with something to lose to their side, on the strength of the vast intellectual superiority of the societies they claim to represent, but from whose science, law, and traditions they have actually divorced themselves entirely. The Bushies get most of what they want, while the weaker party gets a few theocracies here and there and sympathy for itself and disgust for its opponent among the people with nothing to lose. Two lunatic viewpoints have gained respectability, which means they are part of the mental landscape whether we profess to agree with either or not. In my opinion, the ideological idiom's overall shape determines far more than apparently coherent positions taken within its' space. I am sure others disagree and know things I don't, and would like commentary on this point.


I don't think all this merely an explanation of the undeniable fact that the distribution of wealth and power is getting worse. It may be that, but, on account of the culture of what is in part a culture war being determinants of spaces rather than positions taken in pre-established ones, it would be a mistake to use such yardsticks: the numbers have not been constructed.

Why, if my interpretive synthesis is sensible, is no one using game theory analysis of the current war from a more than military stanpoint? The obvious and superficial answer is that the ideas come from economics and are considered so much right-wing filth on that account. I don't buy it, even if in frustration at the difficulty of formalizing the sort of remarks I make offhand, people may bring themselves to think that way on occasion and pronounce the weighty judgement of considering something bullshit. The truth is that, until game-theory logic can assume less pre-established measurement dimensions (wealth, income, power for groups already given) motives, and workable strategies, these remarks are just that--passing commentary. Likewise and more generally, I don't think anyone deeply holds any thought-out version of the opinion that physical science starting with building blocks is the only real science and the only one we will ever need. The social sciences are, it seems, still very young and undeveloped.

May the sectarian games begin

Blogdom,

What seventh-century schisms you have in your head, might it not be better to abandon them here? In 1979, the radical Shi'a leader Ayatolla Khomeni put the face of the equally execrable Sunni "philosopher" Sayd Qutb on a postage stamp. A year later, Iraq and Iran were at war, nominally over a rather small, if oil rich, piece of territory, with regional influence in the background. Both sides stirred up a religious sentiment: Sunni-Shiite strife.

Perhaps it would be irresponsible to claim that the current sectarian conflict in Iraq has no ancient and religious roots on such a slender basis. But it would be far more irresponsible to claim that they indeed do on the downright unmeasurable basis of the fact that the Sunni and Shi'a denominations have been around for quite a while. As it would be irresponsible to claim that statements of identity ranging from "I am a Sunni" to "life would be better for me in Iran because I am a Shiite" necessarily point to a deeply seated religious identity or a belief that religion is an all-important aspect of life. Whether they are made by a power hungry warlord or an inductee caught in their web, they simply cannot be interpreted at face value.

Which is why I claim that the point of sectarian strife, wherever it may arise (and this is certainly not the first time, east, west, or middle-east), here as usual has nothing to do with the purported identity of the factions. Just as in seventeenth-century Europe, a conflict for resources in a society without established capitalistic institutions, and their consequent individualistic brand of organization and individualism, needed a focal point and found an easily available one, at just about everybody's expense. This notably does not automatically mean that the foot-soldiers believe what their leaders tell them, are being "indoctrinated" in the name of Islam, or are otherwise the peons of forces they don't understand which use powerful symbols to manipulate them. It could in fact be the case that leaders and coerced share an intellectual view on strategy and events, without making the coercers and the coerced any less coercing or coerced. I don't know: somebody should ask the Iraqis for a change.

It may seem historically naive to pretend that men attached themselves to what banners they found not having any other options. But while the Shi'as of the snows of yesteryear are, at least in most cases, ancestors to the Shi'a of today and Sunnis of our times are likewise descended from Sunnis of Ottoman times, social or "religious" immobility, while a scourge leading to violence, doesn't make a surface continuity a good clue to what is going on. But arms arise not from the hands brandishing them but from a situation that requires them to be brandished. Iraq is to my knowledge a country with little-developed financial institutions, a context of tribal patronage, and a huge stock of natural resources as principal asset. Students of post-colonial African history should not be surprised at what is going on or look to theological mania for an explanation. The vast difference between "Magi-magi" (water, water) religious fighting orders and various denominations of Islam doesn't particularly matter. The fault lies not in the Koran but in the contract book. Likewise, the fault in early modern Europe lay in sweeping and uneven socio-economic change, and not the bible, the advent of a new interpretation of it, or an inconsistency between the bible itself and practiced European religion.

America's original intentions in Iraq seem (to a member of the ignorant public that knows little more than what he reads in the papers) to have been to take its' seat on OPEC, a large percentage of oil revenues, a controlling hand in middle eastern affairs, and evacuate leaving a few good army bases behind. None of these conditions are tolerable to any part of the order that be in Iraq. The administration seems to have seen a Sunni dictator and assumed it could promote Shiites to get its' way (this was hardly a secret), using the age-old strategy of promoting an underling to get a protectorate. As the name implies, a protectorate is a peon in international relations, and usually gives tribute to the protector, or in the modern context, gives the protector control and most profits in key industries, which can take a variety of forms. So far, so good. This oft-repeated historical scenario matches the above conditions, which are an amalgam of the popular and official reasons for the invasion. Which however raises two big questions: "how much?" and "what else?"

"How much?" is, I believe, 60% of oil revenues with the possibility of manipulating prices to the advantage of the US and to the detriment of all the oil countries (do you think Chavez's behavior is a coincidence?) and the form of government of your constrained choice. Whether or not it is possible to remake a country in one's image in a matter of weeks (guess where I lean on that one?), an actual functioning democracy is a friend of the USA. Like the rest of them, it will compete a little in certain industries, generally to the benefit of both countries (read an international trade primer if you don't believe me), and be part of an international order that benefits the first first and the others a little less and a little later. If it also happens to be a proctectorate whose money we bring home most of, great for us, and considering the alternatives, perhaps not too bad for them either. 40% of oil revenues and a chance to develop other industries with an already well-trained elite could make for the best country in the middle-east. No joke. If the answer to the functioning capitalist democracy question just so happens to be an incredibly surprising "no, sorry," a Shiite theocracy that gives us, and particularly the oily-handed among us, a windfall of resources is another kind of friend of the USA. We the people just don't care. (This also was hardly a secret). There are two little problems here: first, the 40% doesn't cover it under a theocracy which won't develop those other industries, especially if the well-trained happen to be Sunnis, as they mostly are, and second, the Sunnis in Iraq and the rest of the oil-rich world would be adversly affected.

And there is the "what else." The domino theory's real text was that the rest of the gang of butchers sit pretty. Not too likely when they have much to maintain and nothing to lose by doing otherwise. Questions of course remain. Why did a particular Iraqi Shi'a choose Moqtada al-Sadr as tribal protector rather than al-Sistani? Were there not emotions or psychology involved? I don't know. What I do think I glean is that most of the Iraqis, Sunni or Shi'a, knowing actual democracy just wasn't going to happen, felt they needed the other 60% of oil revenues. Not enough to die for, but those making the decisions are not in the line of fire. That still doesn't mean that they have a fundamentally different world-view than those who are sent to fight.

Nonetheless, talk of a "cult of death" or "radical Islam" is not entirely off the mark. Not only can circumstances engender a cult of death in the Middle East as elsewhere when there are few other options (anybody check the mentality at the Maginot line lately?), but these circumstances include cultural resources. Societies closed to outside influence lose some of their more complex neural and anthropological patterns. The reasons this has hapenned in the middle east are complicated, mostly unknown to me, and beyond the scope of this note. It seems clear from many sources of evidence that this has hapenned, and change cannot be effected by denying it or playing victim identity politics.

The Sunnis and Shi'a fight each other to fight us. To win this bizarre war that has to be fought in the face of the American army's invincibility, it is critical that neither side wins in a conventional sense. If this war could be reduced to an ordinary two-sided conflict, Americans versus somebody else, the American army's invincibility would again come to play. The goal for both sides is to kill each other and just enough of our troops to force an unconditional "get out." The condition negated is 60% and a seat on OPEC. After we get out, what happens is anyone's guess. Without foreign interference, the Shi'a win, and we've a got mighty dangerous Iran-Iraq peace on our hands. More likely, there will be enough foreign interference to destabalize vast swaths of the middle east. I don't think the adminstration foresaw the "kill each other to annoy you" tactic. They were students of previous wars, which had for the most part been two-sided. Knowing the dictatorial structure of middle-eastern governments and communities, the Shi'a theocracy/U.S. protectorate option seemed viable. Everybody of course foresaw Sunni resistance from within and without the borders. That resistance requires money and would not have been practicable in a two-sided war. A mere fund-freezing and a few threats would have stamped it out.

Bush's failure was tactical, but behind that tactical imbecility was a simplistic world-view according to which factions are what they are, want power, and cooperate with those who give it to them. He didn't know the middle east, to be sure, but there is nothing specifically middle-eastern about what's going on.