From The Guardian’s leader on Iraq:

America has to internationalise the solution to the conflict, not only by replacing its troops with troops from neutral countries…

Besides the “has to” (why?), the above sentence is typically of those who inhabit the completely bizarro world of those who think that merely internationalising something makes it inherently more moral, more acceptable, and more likely to succeed.

Can anyone name neutral countries who are able to provide sufficient troops with the hard-won counter-insurgency skills that the US army has developed? Given that Spain and Italy have already pulled out of Iraq, the EU doesn’t look willing, or even a competent alternative given their failure to place their troops in harm’s way in Afghanistan (with notable exceptions). That’s before you point out that they can hardly be considered neutral given Bin Laden’s recent pronouncements on the EU. On September 11th 2001, we were all Americans. Seven years later, we are all merely kufir. You don’t have to be American.

What about Turkish troops in Iraq? Hmmm, perhaps not. Syria? Well, the Iraqis might look to the problems Lebanon had, and do seem genuinely pleased to have got rid of the last lot of Baathists. Iran? Well, given past history, and recent history, they’d be as welcome as a diversity training officer in Saudi Arabia. Pakistan? Well, perhaps one jihadist insurgency is enough for them. African states? Well, Darfur seems enough, or rather too much for them, at present.

Perhaps The Guardian are expecting Aslan to arrive from Narnia?

Even then I’m sure Bin Laden would find him to be a blasphemous idol who should be beheaded.

Irwin Cotler is calling for the arrest and trial of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for incitement to genocide. Cotler is a former Canadian Minister of Justice and the current human rights critic for the Liberal Party. There is precedent, he said, in the conviction of several Rwandans, including a former prime minister, on such charges by an international court.

From The Jerusalem Post:

…what you have today is the toxic convergence of the advocacy of the most horrific of crimes, namely genocide, embedded in the most virulent of ideologies, namely anti-Semitism, dramatized by the parading in the streets of Teheran of a Shihab-3 missile draped in the emblem with the words, ‘Wipe Israel off the map, as the imam says,’ proving that this is state sanctioned incitement to genocide.

Maybe we can lure him over here with an invitation to speak at McGill.

Although filmed by an anti-war activist, this is an interesting view of a day trip to Washington to protest about Iraq.

Somewhere in Canary Wharf a chap in a three button single breasted Boss suit whispers to a colleague, wearing a double breasted Armani suit. “I say, I was having a drink at lunch with old Pongo. He said he knows someone who works as an accountant at HBOSH who told him that HBOSH is bust.”

Armani suited chap says, “If HBOSH is bust then their shares will fall and we can sell short and clean up”.

And that is just what three button single breasted Boss suit chap and double breasted Armani chap did.

These two chaps acted on inside information to trade in shares.

Unofficial information has to start somewhere. Any information about a company that is not a public announcement has to come from people either inside the company or from their associated advisors. That makes it inside information and trading on inside information is illegal.

What is the legality of acting on information you thought was inside information but was just a load of cockamamie airy fairy fantasy? Can Armani suited chap be prosecuted for insider trading?

And what is to be done with the whole rotten edifice of parasitic financial trading?

Sure, in a capitalist system there is a place for raising funds for worthwhile, and not so worthwhile, enterprises. But most trading is just parasitic that benefits no-one bar the traders involved.

Dude says…

“You wouldn’t be doing any of this if one of the objectives was not to increase the amount of pussy that was available to you. That is what you do,” Hitch says. “You don’t do it to be, ah, the most approval-rated governor of New York, for fuck’s sake.”

…

During the 1992 presidential primary season, Hitchens pointed out, the day that Bill Clinton won the endorsement of the Democratic Leadership Council—”which, in fact, meant it was overwhelmingly probable he would be the nominee”—was the very day he hit on Paula Jones.

“He said, ‘Wait—I could be the next president of the United States. Now, where’s the next cutie? Because I need that now, much more than I did 10 minutes ago,’ ” Hitchens speculated.

And likewise with JFK: “With Kennedy, it’s really all over the guy for everyone to see,” Hitchens said. “From dawn till dusk, from soup to nuts, from everything he does to the last day he dies: ‘I do this to get laid.’ ”

Hitchens is at work on a new memoir, but he couldn’t get away from politics on Wednesday, working on a bottle of Pinot Noir as he talked.

Returning to Spitzer, he added that the man’s moral grandstanding and bullish style of governance should have been a dead giveaway to his boudoir habits: “What’s the point of all this if I don’t get an orgasm now? What’s the point of being an alpha male?

“Anyone who doesn’t get this,” he concluded, “doesn’t know diddly-squat.”

bonus — Hitch on some poet and shit

Postone here

I’m very modest at this point. I think that it would help if there was talk about issues that are real. Certain ways of interpreting the world such as, “the world would be a wonderful place if it weren’t for George Bush, or the United States,” are going to lead us nowhere, absolutely nowhere. We have to find our way to new forms of true international solidarity, which is different than anti-Americanism. We live in a moment in which the American state and the American government have become a fetish form. It’s similar to the reactionary anti-capitalists who were anti-British in the late 19th century—you don’t have to be pro-British to know that this was a reification of world capital.

And this gadgie adds…

Iraqi Ba’athism, and the struggle against it, continues to confound today’s Anti-War movement. Ramsey Clark, former United States Attorney General under President Lyndon B. Johnson and founder of ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), exemplifies the problematic stances that the movement has assumed. In 2004 Clark volunteered to defend Hussein at his trial before the Iraqi Special Tribunal, speaking out against the unfairly “demonized Saddam Hussein.” The sight of a prominent opponent of the Iraq War publicly defending Hussein should have caused serious alarm among the Left for the obvious reason that it directly challenged solidarity between the Anti-War movement and the Iraqi Left, which struggled against dictatorship for three decades.

I highly recommend the Platypus International journal of critical letters and emancipatory politics.

It has a load of good shit and that.

What is a platypus?

On surviving the extinction of the Left a story is told about Karl Marx’s collaborator and friend Friedrich Engels, who, in his youth, as a good Hegelian Idealist, sure about the purposeful, rational evolution of nature and of the place of human reason in it, became indignant when reading about a platypus, which he supposed to be a fraud perpetrated by English taxidermists. For Engels, the platypus made no sense in natural history.

Later, Engels saw a living platypus at a British zoo and was chagrined. Like Marx a good materialist, and a thinker receptive to Darwin’s theory of evolution, which dethroned a human-centered view of nature, Engels came to respect that “reason” in history, natural or otherwise, must not necessarily accord with present standards of human reason.

This is a parable we find salutary to understanding the condition of the Left today.

In light of the history of the present, we might ask, what right does the Left have to exist?

Every right — as much as the platypus has, however difficult it might be to categorize!

We maintain that past and present history need not indicate the future. Past and present failures and losses on the Left should educate and warn, but not spellbind and enthrall us.

Hence, to free ourselves, we declare that the Left is dead. — Or, more precisely, that we are all that is left of it.

This is less a statement of fact than of intent. The intent that the Left should live, but the recognition that it can, only by overcoming itself. And we are that overcoming!

So, then, what are we?

We are thinkers on the Left educated and warned by the history of the 20th Century — but not terrorized by it! “Let the dead bury the dead.” Our actions might redeem their suffering yet.

We are motivated, after failed and betrayed attempts at emancipation, and in light of their inadequate self-understanding, to re-appropriate this history in service of possibilities for emancipatory struggle in the present — and the future.

Towards such ends, we might begin (perhaps provocatively) with the list of names that indicate the thoughts and problems issuing from events that, reading history against the grain (with Benjamin), still speak to us in the present: Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Adorno. — Not much more than what is represented by these figures, but absolutely nothing less.

We will overcome any easy and false recognition of such names, and all received wisdom about the thoughts and actions identified with them, to better possible critical recognition and development of our purpose.

In the history of the Left, the dates 1848 and 1917, but less 1968, and not 1989: the aftermath of ambiguous defeats and victories; but, more, the insights yielded by defeats, and the recognition of a present and a history that need not have been, for a future that need not yet be. The restive spirits of 1848 and 1917, in their unfulfilled possibilities, will continue to speak to an unredeemed future.

The history of modernity is not finished yet, nor will it be, short of redeeming its promise. Therefore, we do not share the (mislaid) feelings of exhaustion with the modern, but we recognize a certain abdication of its emancipatory transformation, which haunts us with its necessity.

We recognize our necessity.

We agree with the young Marx in “the ruthless criticism of everything existing.” Unlike Hegel in his struggle against Romantic despair after 1789, we recognize the necessity of our present only as “bad.” Our present does not deserve affirmation or even respect, for we recognize it only for what came to be when the Left was destroyed and liquidated itself.

And so, with the story of Engels and the platypus, let us begin to address the improbable but not impossible tasks and project of the next Left.

Five years ago I was worried that the war in Iraq would not occur. Let me be more specific. Five years ago I was concerned that the international community would fail to hold Saddam Hussain to UN resolutions about Weapons of Mass Destruction. Such a weakening of the UN, in the wake of the attacks on the 11th of September 2001, was clearly an unacceptable risk. In addition, I hoped that the removal of Saddam by an outside force might provide a mechanism for liberating the Iraqi people, without the disastrous consequences of the civil war that would undoubtedly have taken place if he had fallen by some as yet unseen mechanism. For me, the humanitarian aspect was always of equal importance.

We know now that the decision to enforce resolution 1441 was correct. Saddam Hussain was not in compliance. Thankfully, chemical weapons were not used on our troops, and it appears that Saddam Hussain fooled all the intelligence agencies of the world, as well as many of his own military staff. Less helpfully, this has seen the arguments about WMD made in good faith represented as deliberate lies in order to start a war for ignoble purposes (insert your own purpose here).

Sadly, the consequences of the war have been disastrous in terms of the level of human suffering, whatever the estimate you choose for the level of civilian deaths. There were clear failures of post-war management and failures of imagination. Both Bremner and Rumsfeld, the latter who was kept in post long after the failure of his policies was apparent, carry a large responsibility for this. The disbanding of the Iraqi army was a tactical mistake. Far too few troops were deployed. Naive staff were put in charge of important post-war reconstruction projects. Failures of imagination include: not judging correctly how Iran’s interests would be played out in the region and not clearly appreciating how Al Qaeda had already mobilised jihadist forces by carrying out 911 successfully. A Western force in a recently destabilised Arab nation with porous borders, viewed down the retrospect-o-scope, was always going to be a magnet. These twin perils have been largely behind the failure of Iraq up to the end of 2006.

Of course, the decision to invade Iraq was made and cannot be retreated from, even if the Liberal Democrats appear to simplistically believe they can (Witness Charles Kennedy on Newsnight tonight). One cannot easily calculate the losses that would have occurred if the invasion had not taken place, but it is clear that supporters of the war were wrong in their assessment of the capacity of Iraq to recover after Saddam been removed, and were overly optimistic in the light of other liberal humanitarian interventions that had recently occurred. However, those still living in February 2003 should break out of their chains, and focus on February 2008 and what the right policy should be now.

Gerald Baker in the Times correctly notes that the failure in Iraq is due more to a lack of neoconservative influence at the Whitehouse, rather than a surfeit.

In fact, you could easily argue that it was an insufficiency of idealistic neoconservative zeal, not an excess of it, that so undermined US military efforts in Iraq.

Mr Rumsfeld especially, as he is expected to argue in his forthcoming memoirs, never much believed in the idea that the US should try for a transformation of the political culture of Iraq. That was presumably why he resisted the calls of some neocons for a much greater commitment of US military resources to the war. His favoured approach seems to have been a quick victory over Saddam, his replacement by a US-friendly government and a quick exit by US forces, not the long occupation that real political transformation evidently requires.

What is more, it is probably fair to say that it was only when Mr Bush dismissed Mr Rumsfeld and started to listen more closely to what neoconservatives such as the AEI scholar Fred Kagan were saying that US fortunes in Iraq began to turn around.

Mr Kagan was one of the intellectual authors of the “surge”, the steep acceleration of US military efforts that was hatched last year and which seems to have produced the clearest signs of success in stabilising Iraq since the US invaded five years ago.

Five years on we have the responsibility to finish what we have started. Rumsfeld can be wrong on more than one issue. Let us hope he is wrong about the chances of democracy taking root in Iraq.