Mr. McBobo

Tom Tomorrow gets hysterically funny on David Brooks -- well worth the time it takes to pass through the commerical at Salon: Mr. McBobo, The Intellectually Nearsighted Pundit

Writing faster than I can read...

... the ever-prolific Michelle Chen checks in:

The latest installment in the WTC article series:
Caught in the Smoke: Employees, Residents Cope With 9/11 Fallout
Part Two of a Three-Part Series

An alternative perspective on the prospects of the US occupation in Iraq:
Public Can Force Iraq Troop Withdrawal, Lawmakers and Critics Say
Emerging Splits Over Occupation Policy Give Hope to Antiwar Activists

And a rant on an upcoming book on corporate media:
News Incorporated

Expect more from me in the coming weeks. I just left my job, so it's another endless stretch of unemployed bliss from here on out!

That was quick Michelle -- couldn't handle the workaday world?

How Islam Got to the Philippines

How Islam Got to the Philippines -- interesting, brief article from Slate.

African American history sites

something I haven't emphasized in my postings recently regarding slavery and national memory is that an important aspect of acknowledging and embracing slavery as part of our collective past as a nation is the highlighting of African American experiences and perspectives as central to the American story. Much of my alleged negativity about American history is actually just the opposite; I attempt to expose and include neglected, marginalized and subaltern voices and experiences to show their contributions to the mainstream. For example, in studying the late 19th century, I don't focus on the big, bad Robber Barons and other evil white men so much as emphasize the rise of a working class, African American protest and political organization, women's rights activists, and the political mobilization and contributions of farmers' groups, etc.

A couple of new sites worth visiting explore African American history. PBS has a series beginning on February 9th called Slavery and the Making of America. The website has a ton of resources and links.

An article in today's Times -- Black Migration, Both Slave and Free -- discusses a new exhibition at the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City called In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience. The website seems slow, but is jam packed with primary and secondary source material you won't find anywhere else.

A Question

Is "wingnut" a slur? I teasingly called one of my old students that last night and then wondered whether I had been out of line. The term derives, I assume, from the phrase "right-wing nut" and is used in the left blogsphere.

The legacy of slavery

The Times as an interesting editorial today about the recognition by J.P. Morgan Chase of their participation in the slave trade: An Update on Corporate Slavery.

This comes from the website of J.P. Morgan Chase which also includes the research they did:

Recently, JPMorgan Chase completed extensive research examining our company's history for any links to slavery to meet a commitment to the city of Chicago. Today, we are reporting that this research found that between 1831 and 1865 two of our predecessor banks - Citizens Bank and Canal Bank in Louisiana - accepted approximately 13,000 enslaved individuals as collateral on loans and took ownership of approximately 1,250 of them when the plantation owners defaulted on the loans.

We all know slavery existed in our country, but it is quite different to see how our history and the institution of slavery were intertwined. Slavery was tragically ingrained in American society, but that is no excuse.

We apologize to the American public, and particularly to African-Americans, for the role that Citizens Bank and Canal Bank played during that period.

Although we cannot change the past, we are committed to learning from and emerging stronger because of it. Since these events took place in Louisiana, we are establishing a $5 million college scholarship program for students living in Louisiana.

Smart Start Louisiana will mirror Smart Start New York, an extremely successful program we created and operate in New York City. Through this program, JPMorgan Chase will provide an initial $5 million over five years for full-tuition, undergraduate scholarships to African-American students from Louisiana to attend colleges in their home state. Students will be selected based upon merit and need. In addition to receiving scholarships, the students will have the opportunity to intern at JPMorgan Chase during the summer with the goal of being hired upon graduation.

JPMorgan Chase is, of course, a very different company than the Citizens and Canal Banks of the 1800s. We are committed to creating opportunities for African-Americans within our own firm, and to supporting communities we serve through philanthropic programs focused on economic empowerment and education. For more information, visit the JPMC Today section of this website.

We also realize you may have questions about these research findings. This website provides further details about the research, methodology, and details of findings, including names of the enslaved individuals when identified, parish information and archival citations for those seeking to do further research.

Although much of the information is difficult to look at, we hope it will prove useful to those researching their ancestry, as well as for those seeking to learn more about this tragic period in our country's history.

What I think is important here is not only the apology, or the "reparations," but the way this kind of historical acknowledgement allows us to continually rethink our past and our relation to the past. While the people at J.P. Morgan Chase individually bear no responsibility for the evils of slavery, they do continue to earn benefits from slavery -- as do we all, to some extent. Slavery was instrumental in building up the wealth of this country, something we all are heirs to and beneficiaries of to this day.

Iraqi elections

Nice op-ed in the Times today on the Iraqi elections: Looking for Purple Fingers in Sadr City, by Bartle Breese Bull.

Historical origins and parallels

Is the latest Bush Doctrine simply an updating of the Monroe Doctrine? Tom Wolfe thinks so in The Doctrine That Never Died.

Is Iraq another Vietnam? Todd Purdum examines the resonances in Flashback to the 60's: A Sinking Sensation of Parallels Between Iraq and Vietnam. Frank Rich touches on some of the connections in Forget Armor. All You Need Is Love.

Charles Pierce on Iraq

I just love this guy's writing, available on Friday's on Eric Alterman's blog:

Correspondents’ Corner:

Name: Charles Pierce
Hometown: Newton: MA
Hey Doc --
Did I just hear Richard Perle on Nightline say that the biggest mistake we made in Iraq was not handing the country over to Ahmad Chalabi three years ago? Yes, and the biggest flaw in our national economy is that we haven't turned the Federal Reserve over to Ken Lay. Yes, and the biggest mistake I am likely to make in trying to understand this Festival of Fruitcakes is failing to have laid in enough mushrooms to get me through the State of the Union. To be fair, Perle tap-danced all around the name until Koppel finally brought it up, and then he said "Ahmad Chalabi" the way most people say, "trichinosis." Still, sweet storebought Jeebus.

The elections over there can put you in a tough spot. Of course, they've been oversold. Of course, they will be used as cheap ammunition for the various brave souls manning the guns at Fort Honorarium. Of course, they won't matter a damn as far as the violence is concerned; imagine the insurgent who says, well, we're going to stop killing these people because they have a national assembly now. This is Cakewalk Theory 2.0. And, now, one of the war's principal architects tells us that everything could have been avoided if we'd just "handed the keys" over to a passel of crooks you wouldn't trust to park your car. To hell with being fired. When are some of these clucks going to simply get laughed out of town?

Still...

Some people are going to vote even though they've been told they will be killed if they do. Nobody in this 40-percent turnout, sucker-for-the-cheap-wedge-issue, talk-show-babbling country of ours has a right to do anything but admire that, and make sure that the undeniable courage on display doesn't get sold down the river for a three-point bump in some future Gallup Poll. This war isn't just a monumental blunder. It's also an ongoing act of betrayal by a bunch of second-rate thinkers who never in their lives have displayed an ounce of the courage that some anonymous woman in Baghdad will evince today.

Voting took place today, apparently with some violence, but not as much as some might have feared. But the voting is only a part of the story, and maybe not even the most important right now. This report from the pro-war Senior Editor of the New Republic Lawrence Kaplan sees the project of liberal democracy as already failed in Iraq (note that he uses the word "liberal" in its more traditional sense, defining "liberal democracy" as "a political system that protects basic rights and freedoms").

Homeland Security State

Last week I posted an article by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts condemning today's conservatives. One thing he wrote struck me:

Once upon a time there was a liberal media. It developed out of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Liberals believed that the private sector is the source of greed that must be restrained by government acting in the public interest. The liberals' mistake was to identify morality with government. Liberals had great suspicion of private power and insufficient suspicion of the power and inclination of government to do good.

Liberals became Benthamites (after Jeremy Bentham). They believed that as the people controlled government through democracy, there was no reason to fear government power, which should be increased in order to accomplish more good.

The conservative movement that I grew up in did not share the liberals' abiding faith in government. "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

That is, I think, a fair enough thumbnail description of the differences between liberals and conservatives in the 20th century. I consider myself heir to the populists and progressives of the 1880s-1910s because they embraced the role of government in minimizing the effects of an increasingly powerful "plutocracy" and ensuring social justice. At that time it became clear that the government was not the seat of power in society, the corporate and banking world was. So I have seen government as part of the solution. And the conservative dream of a truly competitive, entrepreneurial capitalist world is at least one hundred years out of date.

I was often critical of the Clinton/Gore dream of international liberalization through capitalism -- corporate globalization -- becuase they did not emphasize workers' rights and environmental issues enough. An interesting op-ed in the Times criticizes Bush for not believing enough in the transformative and liberating power of capitalism: The Market Shall Set You Free, by Robert Wright.

While Thomas Jefferson wisely feared a strong and inaccessible central power, by the turn of the 20th century that power was no longer invested in the federal government but in corporations and financial institutions. And from the 14th Amendment to Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the federal government was often the instrument for overcoming obstacles to democracy placed by local powers.

I have also never really invested a whole lot of energy in fearing the feds will take my liberties away. I have often worried more about what the credit card companies do with my information than what the government does. Is it time to start worrying? Civil libertarians might want to take note of this Tomgram about the Homeland Security State.

Responsibility for the past

I have been talking in class about the relationship we have with our past. I am often accused by students of not being objective enough, of being too judgemental or too negative about particularly U.S. history. I accept this criticism, to some extent. Sometimes I overlook the beauty and glory and awfulness of the past as past, as separate and unbridgeable. My emphasis is on using the present to understand the past AND using the past to understand the present. Neither process is simple or easy. I have intellectual and epistemological reasons for looking at history this way, but I also have a moral, or even emotional reasons. To me the past is not dead. It is something we carry with us whether we know it or not. And as we put together our imagined communities -- particularly the nation, in our identities as "Americans" -- we assume some stories of the past as our own, again, without necessarily even knowing or acknowledging them. So, in part, my "negativity" about the American past is an attempt to counter our master narratives and myths which I believe to be not merely too positive, but evasive of central parts of our history, particularly slavery and the conquering of the west. This does not mean that we all should go around feeling bad all the time, or that our history is uniquely evil, but that our story is, at the least, very complex and morally ambiguous. For example, the more I read about the SCFF (So-Called Founding Fathers), the more I appreciate them. And the more I see of the world and its history, the more I appreciate the genius of the SCFF's ideas and implementation of those ideas. But we can't simply shift off to the side, as incidental or destined-to-be-overcome-by-progress, their slaveholding and any other parts of their stories we find to be less than admirable. Sometimes those stories are central; hence I like to think of Sally Hemings as a Founding Mother.

So I was interested to see German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, declare, "The overwhelming majority of Germans living today do not bear guilt for the Holocaust. But they do bear a special responsibility." What exactly that responsibility is needs to be continually discussed.

Brad DeLong quotes Amitai Etzioni on Germans' "communal responsibility" for the Holocaust:

Communal responsibility is based on the fact that we are born into a community and share its history, memories, identity, achievements, and failures. We are not simply individual human beings, who can retreat behind a Rawlsian "veil of ignorance," secure in our universal rights and historical innocence. We are also members of specific families and communities. We cannot help but share their burdens, just as we share in their treasures; their responsibilities as well as their privileges. Thus, an American inherits both the proud memory of the Boston Tea Party and the agony of slavery; both the marvelous work of the Framers of the Constitution and the slaughter of Native Americans; the vigilant protection of freedom--from Greece to Korea--and the killing of innocent children, women, and other civilians in My Lai. The memory of slavery is particularly telling. Abolished some 134 years ago, before the ancestors of most contemporary Americans had even immigrated, slavery is still part of the American past; we cannot erase or ignore it. Most important, our aggrieved past commands us all to act, not merely the sons and daughters of plantation owners. We are all co-responsible for that which our community has perpetrated and condoned, for both past sins of commission and omission.

In the same sense, just being a German means being part of both a great culture that gave the world Goethe, Kant, Bach, Schiller, Heine--and the Nazis. I am not saying that the brighter moments in all our histories shine to the same extent, nor that the darker ones are equally troubling. But I am pointing out that we are all members of a community, and as such, bearers of its burdens. Like others, I prefer the notion of responsibility over that of guilt, particularly when it concerns people who personally could not have been involved in the crimes committed. I do not hold that guilt is always harmful or inappropriate or a poor source of motivation for positive social and moral deeds. But it can generate negative feelings, and sometimes debilitating consequences. I know a fair number of younger Germans who are obsessed with Germany's past, who rather than drawing lessons from it, wallow in its wrongs. They turn morose and depressed, and are forever defensive and apologetic about their country. Unfortunately, like digging into an old wound, their pain does not lead them to make affirmative commitments. In contrast, the concept of communal responsibility calls attention to the fact that whether or not one is guilty in the personal sense, one has a responsibility to build on the particular past of one's community, drawing on its assets and learning from its liabilities...

Amazing History Day Project

Here at WPU we host New Jersey History Day, the winners of which go on to National History Day in DC. I have been a judge for the past couple of years and expect to continue til I am old and grey (if I am not completely bald first). It is a wonderful day -- the middle school and high school students go all out in preparing their exhibits, essays, videos and performances, and the winners are justifiably filled with pride when they receive their awards. Some of the projects are truly excellent historical productions. But I have never seen anything like this amazing story published in the Guardian:

Teen Documentarians Hail Miss. Arrest
Saturday January 8, 2005 2:01 AM

By NICOLE ZIEGLER DIZON
Associated Press Writer

CHICAGO (AP) - Hundreds of miles from a Mississippi courtroom where a suspect pleaded innocent Friday to the 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers, three suburban Chicago high school students received accolades for their role in publicizing the case.

Teenagers Sarah Siegel, Allison Nichols and Brittany Saltiel spent more than a year working on a 2004 documentary about the killings. The project included a rare phone interview conducted by their teacher with the man arrested Thursday, reputed Ku Klux Klan member Edgar Ray Killen, and helped generate a congressional resolution last June asking federal prosecutors to reopen the case.

``I was really happy for all the families who I knew had been waiting for this for 40 years,'' the 17-year-old Siegel said. ``It was also a little saddening to know that it took 40 years for justice to start working.''

Congressmen including Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat and civil rights activist who knew the three slain workers, credit the students for working to keep the case in the spotlight and unearthing new details.

``I was very inspired and very moved by the work that these three students brought before us,'' Lewis said Friday. ``I think they were crucial in bringing us to this point.''

In the summer of 2003, the girls met with Barry Bradford, their teacher at Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, to discuss possible projects for the annual National History Day competition. They stopped him after his first idea: telling the story of 21-year-old James Chaney, 20-year-old Andrew Goodman and 24-year-old Michael Schwerner.

The three young men were participating in Freedom Summer 1964, an effort to register blacks in the South to vote, when they were beaten and shot to death, allegedly by Klansmen. Their ages, not much older than the girls, struck a chord.

``We just thought something about those three men and their dedication to the movement really stood out,'' said Saltiel, 16.

The students pored over court transcripts and interviewed former prosecutors and investigators, witnesses, family members of the victims and government officials for their 10-minute documentary. They also sought out Killen, now 79, for a phone interview.

Bradford decided to conduct the interview after a Justice Department official expressed concern about the girls having to testify in the event Killen said something incriminating.

Killen didn't implicate himself, Bradford said, but he did say the reason civil rights workers were so hated at the time was because people thought they were recruiting blacks to be communists.

Soon after that interview, Bradford said his and the girls' names were posted on a white supremacist Web site that accused them of trying to skew the truth.

``I think it was truly a little startling to them to realize that there are still remnants of that archaic mind-set,'' Bradford said.

The students say the most rewarding part of their project was meeting with family members of the slain men, including Goodman's mother and Chaney's brother, who called them ``superhero girls.''

Frontline show on Al Qaeda

Frontline is usually pretty darn good. I don't know if Al Qaeda's New Front has aired yet, but I noticed it will be available online starting this friday. Their webpage for the show looks excellent too.

NPR on Chilean privatization of Social Security

I have been recommending NPR to students (even requiring one class to listen! I sneak into their garages at night and check the preset buttons on the radio), but yesterday I heard a report on the privatization of Social Security that didn't jibe with everything else I had been hearing on the issue. Hmmmm, I thought.

Well, Digby has the follow-up, run-down, take-down, and smack-down of NPR -- With Friends Like These. Thanks Digby!

"Pretty Words vs. Reality "

Rogier van Bakel in his blog Nobody's Business places Bush's Inaugural droppings up against real stuff from planet earth. Guess which side comes out ahead?

He also includes his take on Zakaria's article about the speech -- Pretty Words vs Reality — the Sequel

Gonzalez and Tyranny

DHinMI over at DailyKos builds a historical argument to claim that Alberto "Gonzales advocates policies consistent with tyranny." Is DHinMI just a loon, or does his historical case make sense?

For background, you might want to consult a couple of recent writings:

Conservative columnist and blogger Andrew Sullivan in the NY Times Book Review, Atrocities in Plain Sight

and

in the New York Review of Books Torture and Gonzales: An Exchange, By G. Jan Ligthart, Robert S. Rivkin, Reply by Mark Danner; In response to Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story (October 7, 2004)

[Update on Sullivan: I am decidedly a non-fan of his work and thinking, but he has been very strong on the torture issue and, now that the election is over, seems ready to really turn against the war -- though like most conservatives-with-a-brain these days, he is having a hard time reconciling his love of power with his principles.]

Compare and Contrast...

this piece from the Times, Communicator in Chief Keeps the Focus on Iraq Positive

with this piece, Across Baghdad, Security Is Only an Ideal

and this, Anti-Vote Violence in Iraq Is Intensifying, Latest Data Show.

Your assignment is due immediately!

Wow...

Any conservatives out there care to respond to this extraordinary article from a staunch conservative, reprinted here in full from ZNet?

End-Timers & Neo-Cons
The End of Conservatives
by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts; January 19, 2005

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during 1981-82. He was also Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review.

I remember when friends would excitedly telephone to report that Rush Limbaugh or G. Gordon Liddy had just read one of my syndicated columns over the air. That was before I became a critic of the US invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration, and the neoconservative ideologues who have seized control of the US government.

America has blundered into a needless and dangerous war, and fully half of the country's population is enthusiastic. Many Christians think that war in the Middle East signals "end times" and that they are about to be wafted up to heaven. Many patriots think that, finally, America is standing up for itself and demonstrating its righteous might. Conservatives are taking out their Vietnam frustrations on Iraqis. Karl Rove is wrapping Bush in the protective cloak of war leader. The military-industrial complex is drooling over the profits of war. And neoconservatives are laying the groundwork for Israeli territorial expansion.

The evening before Thanksgiving Rush Limbaugh was on C-Span TV explaining that these glorious developments would have been impossible if talk radio and the conservative movement had not combined to break the power of the liberal media.

In the Thanksgiving issue of National Review, editor Richard Lowry and former editor John O'Sullivan celebrate Bush's reelection triumph over "a hostile press corps." "Try as they might," crowed O'Sullivan, "they couldn't put Kerry over the top." There was a time when I could rant about the "liberal media" with the best of them. But in recent years I have puzzled over the precise location of the "liberal media."

Not so long ago I would have identified the liberal media as the New York Times and Washington Post, CNN and the three TV networks, and National Public Radio. But both the Times and the Post fell for the Bush administration's lies about WMD and supported the US invasion of Iraq. On balance CNN, the networks, and NPR have not made an issue of the Bush administration's changing explanations for the invasion.

Apparently, Rush Limbaugh and National Review think there is a liberal media because the prison torture scandal could not be suppressed and a cameraman filmed the execution of a wounded Iraqi prisoner by a US Marine. Do the Village Voice and The Nation comprise the "liberal media"? The Village Voice is known for Nat Hentoff and his columns on civil liberties. Every good conservative believes that civil liberties are liberal because they interfere with the police and let criminals go free. The Nation favors spending on the poor and disfavors gun rights, but I don't see the "liberal hate" in The Nation's feeble pages that Rush Limbaugh was denouncing on C-Span.

In the ranks of the new conservatives, however, I see and experience much hate. It comes to me in violently worded, ignorant and irrational emails from self-professed conservatives who literally worship George Bush. Even Christians have fallen into idolatry. There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill anyone for George Bush.

The Iraqi War is serving as a great catharsis for multiple conservative frustrations: job loss, drugs, crime, homosexuals, pornography, female promiscuity, abortion, restrictions on prayer in public places, Darwinism and attacks on religion. Liberals are the cause. Liberals are against America. Anyone against the war is against America and is a liberal. "You are with us or against us."

This is the mindset of delusion, and delusion permits no facts or analysis. Blind emotion rules. Americans are right and everyone else is wrong. End of the debate.

That, gentle reader, is the full extent of talk radio, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal Editorial page, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and, indeed, of the entire concentrated corporate media where noncontroversy in the interest of advertising revenue rules.

Once upon a time there was a liberal media. It developed out of the Great Depression and the New Deal. Liberals believed that the private sector is the source of greed that must be restrained by government acting in the public interest. The liberals' mistake was to identify morality with government. Liberals had great suspicion of private power and insufficient suspicion of the power and inclination of government to do good.

Liberals became Benthamites (after Jeremy Bentham). They believed that as the people controlled government through democracy, there was no reason to fear government power, which should be increased in order to accomplish more good.

The conservative movement that I grew up in did not share the liberals' abiding faith in government. "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Today it is liberals, not conservatives, who endeavor to defend civil liberties from the state. Conservatives have been won around to the old liberal view that as long as government power is in their hands, there is no reason to fear it or to limit it. Thus, the Patriot Act, which permits government to suspend a person's civil liberty by calling him a terrorist with or without proof. Thus, preemptive war, which permits the President to invade other countries based on unverified assertions.

There is nothing conservative about these positions. To label them conservative is to make the same error as labeling the 1930s German Brownshirts conservative.

American liberals called the Brownshirts "conservative," because the Brownshirts were obviously not liberal. They were ignorant, violent, delusional, and they worshipped a man of no known distinction. Brownshirts' delusions were protected by an emotional force field. Adulation of power and force prevented Brownshirts from recognizing implications for their country of their reckless doctrines.

Like Brownshirts, the new conservatives take personally any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a critic is to be an enemy. I went overnight from being an object of conservative adulation to one of derision when I wrote that the US invasion of Iraq was a "strategic blunder."

It is amazing that only a short time ago the Bush administration and its supporters believed that all the US had to do was to appear in Iraq and we would be greeted with flowers. Has there ever been a greater example of delusion? Isn't this on a par with the Children's Crusade against the Saracens in the Middle Ages?

Delusion is still the defining characteristic of the Bush administration. We have smashed Fallujah, a city of 300,000, only to discover that the 10,000 US Marines are bogged down in the ruins of the city. If the Marines leave, the "defeated" insurgents will return. Meanwhile the insurgents have moved on to destabilize Mosul, a city five times as large. Thus, the call for more US troops.

There are no more troops. Our former allies are not going to send troops. The only way the Bush administration can continue with its Iraq policy is to reinstate the draft.

When the draft is reinstated, conservatives will loudly proclaim their pride that their sons, fathers, husbands and brothers are going to die for "our freedom." Not a single one of them will be able to explain why destroying Iraqi cities and occupying the ruins are necessary for "our freedom." But this inability will not lessen the enthusiasm for the project. To protect their delusions from "reality-based" critics, they will demand that the critics be arrested for treason and silenced. Many encouraged by talk radio already speak this way.

Because of the triumph of delusional "new conservatives" and the demise of the liberal media, this war is different from the Vietnam war. As more Americans are killed and maimed in the pointless carnage, more Americans have a powerful emotional stake that the war not be lost and not be in vain. Trapped in violence and unable to admit mistake, a reckless administration will escalate.

The rapidly collapsing US dollar is hard evidence that the world sees the US as bankrupt. Flight from the dollar as the reserve currency will adversely impact American living standards, which are already falling as a result of job outsourcing and offshore production. The US cannot afford a costly and interminable war.

Falling living standards and inability to impose our will on the Middle East will result in great frustrations that will diminish our country.

Navigating the Web

I just discovered this page from the Times, CyberTimes Navigator which provides a useful set of links to news, search, and reference sites. I notice they don't include any blogs -- which seems to be an oversight, but maybe that would just be too difficult a task.

Librarian-extraordinaire Richard Kearney's latest webliography for my Historical Methods course (this term on the history of popular culture) is up, and he will be updating it over the next week or so.

I will be updating my links (but it is very time-consuming) so that the random "blogrolling" list on the right side of the page will not be so unwieldy. Stay tuned.

Iraq update

As the Iraqi election day approaches, one can only hope that the date marks a "turning of the corner" -- unfortunately, we have turned so many corners in Iraq we seem to be either back where we started or lost or, at least, dizzy. "Turning the corner" is to this war what "light at the end of the tunnel" was to the Vietnam War. And that light turned out to be akin to the light people profess to see before leaving their embodied existence.

A couple of perspectives worth noting: Colin Powell, in the Financial Times (highlights are in bold):

Copyright 2005 The Financial Times Limited
Financial Times (London, England)
January 13, 2005 Thursday

HEADLINE: Powell gives bleak assessment of Iraq security problems
BYLINE: By GUY DINMORE

DATELINE: WASHINGTON

Colin Powell, outgoing secretary of state, says he would like to see US troops leave Iraq "as quickly as possible" but that the strength of the insurgency does not allow the Bush administration to set a timeframe for a withdrawal this year.

Mr Powell told National Public Radio yesterday the US leadership had been "in almost non-stop meetings for the last couple of days" reviewing the security problem while coalition forces were adjusting their "tactics and strategy and deployments".

"It's not possible right now to say that by the end of 2005, we'll be down to such and such a number. It really is dependent upon the situation," he said, referring to the training of the new Iraqi army and police.

Mr Powell's bleak assessment, less than three weeks before Iraqis are due to elect a parliament, reflects what advisers close to the administration and former officials describe as an understanding in the State Department and Pentagon of the depth of the crisis.

But, they say, this is not a view accepted by President George W. Bush.

One counterinsurgency expert said Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, had a "brutally accurate" picture of the situation and the potential dangers.

But a member of an influential neoconservative policy group said that such warnings "stop well short of the president".

He said Mr Rumsfeld, criticised for the conduct of the war, had an interest in hiding the true picture from the president.

According to Chas Freeman, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and head of the independent Middle East Policy Council, Mr Bush recently asked Mr Powell for his view on the progress of the war. "We're losing," Mr Powell was quoted as saying. Mr Freeman said Mr Bush then asked the secretary of state to leave.

A senior White House official said he had no knowledge of such an exchange and added: "The president acknowledges there are significant challenges. "He does not characterise them as insurmountable. Others do."

Analysts are concerned that with the departure of Mr Powell and his replacement by Condoleezza Rice, the president's loyal national security adviser, the White House will be further shielded from dissent.

Mr Powell, who often clashed with Mr Rumsfeld over policy towards Iraq and Iran, seemed to allude to this when he said he had been "secure enough" in his relationship with the president to argue his point of view.

"A president is not well served when he has people in his cabinet who have points of view but are not prepared to argue those points of view forcefully for fear that it might leak or it looks like members of the cabinet are squabbling," Mr Powell told Fox News.

The White House is stressing the January 30 election is just the start of a process that is scheduled to lead to a national referendum on a constitution by October and another parliamentary election by December.

Mr Powell said there must be Sunni representation in the government to be formed after the elections. This reflects US efforts to persuade the main parties of the Shia majority, who are expected to sweep the polls, to co-opt members of the Sunni minority into the administration and the drafting of the constitution.

US leverage rests upon awareness among the Shia that their government is unlikely to survive a civil war without continued US military support.

High anxiety over the elections is also evident among Arab allies of the US. Karim Kawar, Jordan's ambassador to Washington, said that he feared that elections without solid Sunni participation would lead to an "Islamic republic of Iraq".

"That's not what the American taxpayers hoped for," he said.

Charles Boyd, a former general who had opposed the war, said he was dismayed at the administration's lack of commitment in fighting it.

"Our government is not mobilised for war of this size and complexity. We are acting on a 'business as usual' format," he said.

Another sign that our President disdains the nasty negativity of reality comes from the Nelson Report, a respected Washington-insider newsletter. Via the Al Franken show blog:

BUSH REJECTS BAD NEWS
The Nelson Report is a daily political tip sheet and analysis written for the past 20 years for the (US and Asian) corporate and government clients of Chris Nelson, a former Capitol Hill staffer and UPI reporter. (He was actually the first to break the looted explosives story before the election; Josh Marshall then posted it to his blog.) This Monday, he wrote:

There is rising concern amongst senior officials that President Bush does not grasp the increasingly grim reality of the security situation in Iraq because he refuses to listen to that type of information. Our sources say that attempts to brief Bush on various grim realities have been personally rebuffed by the President, who actually says that he does not want to hear “bad news.”

Rather, Bush makes clear that all he wants are progress reports, where they exist, and those facts which seem to support his declared mission in Iraq...building democracy. “That's all he wants to hear about,” we have been told. So “in” are the latest totals on school openings, and “out” are reports from senior US military commanders (and those intelligence experts still on the job) that they see an insurgency becoming increasingly effective, and their projection that “it will just get worse.”

Our sources are firm in that they conclude this “good news only” directive comes from Bush himself; that is, it is not a trap or cocoon thrown around the President by National Security Advisor Rice, Vice President Cheney, and DOD Secretary Rumsfeld. In any event, whether self-imposed, or due to manipulation by irresponsible subordinates, the information/intelligence vacuum at the highest levels of the White House increasingly frightens those officials interested in objective assessment, and not just selling a political message.