"The Surge is Working"

I've always been pretty sure that the apparent peace in Iraq (peace without progress, to coin a phrase) was going to fall apart this April. However, I had thought this because we've been told troop drawdowns would have to begin then. More recently, however, Bush and Petraeus have found ways to keep troop strength at around 150,000 for the indefinite near-term (pre-surge, in early 2007, the level was around 130,000: at its peak in November, it had reached almost 170,000).

So the current re-eruption of violence in Baghdad and Basra doesn't have much to do with the "surge", yea or nay. Which is much scarier, right?, because that means it's systemic.

First bear in mind some of the very basic demographics of prewar Iraq. It was a majority (two-thirds) Shia nation, ruled by a Sunni minority (Saddam). And it's Arabs throughout: unlike neighbor Iran, whose population is also majority Shiite but ethnically Persian.

Well, those Iraqi Sunnis have largely been evicted, certainly from Baghdad. For years now they've been getting funny little notes slipped under their doors - "Get packed and be gone in a week, or you will soon star in our next beheading DVD." So Sunnis make up a lot of the 2-million-plus refugee crisis crammed up against Jordan and Syria (a crisis we don't hear so much about in the press).

This "Shia Power" movement, if you will, has been abetted especially in the past year by us. One of the ways we've been trying to clamp down on violence over there, in addition to the surge, has been to co-opt Shiite militias by paying them to keep their neighborhoods peaceful. Of course, since our money is flowing through the corrupt and ontologically-questionable Iraqi government, none of these folks has actually been getting paid. So the last best glimmer of cooperative spirit we'd seen from these Shia groups is falling back to its default "death to America" state.

This video from the Guardian UK is illuminating and disturbing (particularly the bit about people murdered by being buried up to their necks and then abandoned).

And now we see these Shiite militias increasingly fighting each other for power, as well as fighting the Iraqi army (basically another very large Shiite militia). Note clearly that none of this has the slightest thing to with with Al Queda in Iraq - an extremely minor player - which (a) comprises a couple thousand fighters at best, and (b) is Sunni. Sunnis aren't faring well in Iraq right now.

Intra-Shiite strife in Iraq is going to get a lot worse before it ever gets better. So if indeed it's true that John McCain (who appears not to know the difference between Shia and Sunni) is staking his presidential run on the success of the surge, then I think we can look forward to President Obama* next January.



*Because Hillary can't win anymore. Or if she does, it will be through such extreme methods that the Democratic party will be cleft in twain and we'll be looking at the rise of the Greens.

P.S. to my "*" -- Yes, this means I was wrong in January when I predicted Hillary would win the nomination. It's fun passing out armchair precognitions, and I enjoyed doing it. But Megan was correct back then to comment that there was plenty of time left in the primaries. The only thing I would say in my defense - which really isn't even in my defense, since I'm claiming I was wrong - is that I was inspired to my prediction by a sense of Hillary's... uhm, what word to use?, let's go with... unrelentingness. And she has surely borne herself out on that count.

Here's a topic for you: prison rape

1 of 32 of us lives in prison, which beats any society in human history (Europe imprisons seven times fewer of its people as a percentage of its population). One of every ten African American males lives behind bars. I've always had a strange, fascinated dread of prison - never mind that I'm not doing anything that could end me up there (though hell, innocence certainly isn't sufficient to keep a fellow out). If I believed in hokum like past lives, I think I'd be convinced I served time in a former one.

So I just read Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man's Prison, which is every bit as dreadful as it sounds. But I'd have to say it's one of the best books I've ever read - the cliche was true in this case that I couldn't put it down once I'd started reading.

T.J. Parsell did a number of incredibly stupid things as a teenager, culminating in the 1978 armed robbery of a photo mat with a toy gun (he did this "as a joke", and never quite explains what the joke was supposed to have been...). Out of jail awaiting trial for the robbery, he was picked up again, this time on a trespassing charge after letting himself into an empty room at the hotel where he was working, trying to avoid going home drunk to his parents. He would go on to spend four years in Michigan prisons, starting at age 17.

A new fish in the Riverside Correctional Facility, Parsell was tricked within a day or two of arrival into believing a little party was being thrown in his honor; he drank some homemade liquor which turned out to be spiked with Thorazine; in his incapacitated state, he was gang-raped. Afterward there was a coin-toss to see which of the men would "own" him. Parsell caught a break, if you want to call it that, by falling into the relatively benign hands of a former negro-league baseball player called Slide Step. Who was a nice guy, compared with the alternatives.

Complicating things, Parsell is coming to realize during all of this that he's gay. In case anyone happens to be stupid, it should be said that this doesn't relate to the rape. It's a realization that certainly had to emerge in his mind in spite of it.

So, he's gay. And while serving time in another facility - mind that he's now 18 or so - he falls in love with a young prisoner named Paul. You know how that feels, age 18 and in love: just imagine it happening in a prison, and you'll know that you'll never be able to imagine the intensity of this connection. Better yet, Paul's wiser about prison than Parsell, and so together they have a couple of golden months where they manage to put up a joint front and hold off the maniacs and serial rapists. Then they're separated for spending too much time together. Now, if one of them were a "man" and the other a "boy", it wouldn't have mattered if they'd spent all their free time alone. But as two "boys" together, no go. And, shortly after being separated from Paul, Parsell is raped again.

Obviously, this is a pretty serious book. I don't mind saying that as I finished reading it - at work, during lunch - I had a damn hard time keeping myself from openly crying. It closes with an exchange of letters with Paul, whom Parsell tracks down as part of his writing process. In the 25-some years since they'd last seen one another, Parsell put himself through college at night, entered the tech sector, and moved to the east coast to raise an adoptive daughter with his partner. He'd put prison a million miles behind him. Paul, on the other hand, had botched a prison escape, and with the exception of less than one year outside on probation, had remained incarcerated the entire time.

Their letters glow with a kindness and affection that are almost difficult to bear. I mean, for these feelings to have emerged in the midst of such manifest horror.

So that's the positive side - some transcendence is possible here. But the bigger picture is not particularly rosy. Rape and sexual abuse exist in our prisons as a deliberate tool of social ordering and control. I don't just mean that it's used deliberately by prisoners, to establish a pecking order; I mean that the prison authorities themselves tacitly condone and/or even encourage rape. You certainly can't expect much help from them if, as a prisoner, you report threats of rape or actual attacks - apparently the guards' typical line is that they try not to get involved in lovers' quarrels. According to Parsell, the attitude is that to allow rape and sexual servitude in prison helps the stronger and more aggressive prisoners to let off some steam.

Human Rights Watch has prepared a fascinating, if godawful, report on U.S. prisoner rape that's well worth taking a look at. Certainly, a tenth of our state and federal prisoners are subjected to forced or coerced sex, but the figure may be more like one-third.

Midnight Express notwithstanding, I might prefer serving a sentence in Turkey over doing it here in the United States.

...When the Abu Ghraib photos hit, most folks seemed a little baffled by the weird sex stuff. It was as if we could understand that soldiers in the field would be rough with detainees, but what's with all the nudity and pantomimed coitus and panties on guys' heads? Well, it should come as no surprise that the reservists organizing these activities, Charles Graner in particular, had received their training in prisoner control from the good old U.S. correctional system.

The racial aspect of prisoner rape is also uniquely American. Something like 45% of prisoners are black (as against 12% of the general population), 40% white, and 15% hispanic. Rape appears to occur principally within the racial groups - with the exception of white inmates, who tend to be fair game for everybody else.

I think a lot of folks take an attitude toward this phenomenon - since, after all, the existence of prison rape is hardly a secret - that it's more or less what criminals deserve. But I don't think the reality could possibly bear this out, no matter how cruelly you think we ought to treat our lawbreakers. For one thing, slightly over half of our nation's convicts are nonviolent, including fully three-quarters of the new fish (violent offenders tend to have longer sentences). In 2000, 22% of all prisoners were behind bars for no other reason than that they'd gotten high. And as a whole, it's the nonviolent offenders who are the likeliest victims of sexual assault. The worst, most violent criminals in our system - the ones whose punishments we might rightly want to see be the most severe - are most commonly the "beneficiaries" of systemic prisoner rape. Or whatever you'd call it, since "beneficiary" seems awful crazy to say.

This phenomenon could be relatively easy to bring under control. What would help most, of course, is to admit that many of the Mr.-Tough-Guy laws that have gone on the books in the wake of the Reagan Revolution have done this nation terrific harm. Obviously I'm thinking of the "war on drugs" more than anything here. But the fact is that we have no conscionable excuse to throw seven times the people into jail that they do in Europe. We may have a more violent culture here, but it ain't seven times more violent (and, of course, one of the many reasons America is more violent is our miserably robust prison industry, which, for all the reasons I've been describing, sends people back out into the world a lot more violent than they were coming in).

So reducing the prison population would greatly help, not to mention that it would - hey, Republicans! - save us money. Since that won't happen, the next step is simply for prison authorities to exert a modicum of will to stop the problem. Patrolling blind spots of the prison, following up on complaints, use of protective custody, etc. could all begin to change the perception that sexual abuse is tolerated. In 2003 - thanks partly to the group Stop Prisoner Rape, of which T.J. Parnell is a board member - the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 was passed. Which is great, but I think is only a beginning.

The economy is imploding

For six years I've been expecting this to come down the pike. So it's taken a little longer than I'd thought:

(article)

Now, this piece doesn't blame Bush for anything per se. Also - who knows? The proactive and somewhat unprecedented actions being taken by the Fed may succeed somewhat in containing the damage. But it's Bush's $3 trillion war in Iraq that has put a squeeze on government resources, his downshifting of the tax burden onto the middle class that has squeezed the economy generally: and it was his administration's solution to this problem to create magical wealth for regular Americans by loosening regulation of our housing markets - letting us take on mortgages we couldn't afford, which caused the entire market to be bid up into a bigger balloon than the notorious tech bubble of the 90s. Possibly worse still, he has allowed "financial innovations" in which these bad mortgages were compiled into complex new financial instruments - complex enough to hide their riskiness from the Wall Street giants that are now starting to go bust because of them.

Sure, yeah, George Bush isn't 100% to blame for all of this. Alan Greenspan, for one, deserves a lot of credit (and even he said over the weekend that this is the greatest financial crisis faced by America since the end of World War II). Certainly in general, the culprit is the broader Republican philosophy that all market regulation is bad (which, ironically, may well lead in this case to massive government intervention into the economy). But sure, I'd put Mr. Bush and his administration over the 50% mark for culpability here.

I don't believe in Chris Hedges

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-winning war correspondent with a background in religion (his father was a minister and he attended seminary himself). In his previous book, Hedges attacked American Christian fundamentalism. This time he's come out swinging against the "New Atheists" because (guess what's coming. You'll never guess what's coming - ) they're fundamentalists too.

This clip covers some of what Hedges is out to say in his new book, I Don't Believe in Atheists (and his thoughts are explored in greater depth in this Salon interview):



Hedges' criticisms seem bracing; he comes on as a smart and measured critic. Of course, when he says human reason (which he simply conflates with technology and its potential for harm) is elevated by atheists to the status of a fundamentalist's god... well, that sounds bad, eh? I remember from way back in Phenomenology class that you're supposed to call this "scientism", and you're supposed to think it's bad. But one wonders how Chris Hedges feels we should intellectually engage the world around us. I mean, look - if religious literalism and scientific literalism are both problematic, as he suggests, and cultural relativism (which you might call anti-literalism), that's no good either - what then?

Goodness, triangulation may work as a political strategy, but I don't see how moderation among various approaches to knowing Truth in this world (ie, throw 'em in a blender) is likely to be the best approach to Truth. Shouldn't we, in engaging, judging, and assessing the world around us, hold some root principles? Or is that just to be scorned as "fundamentalism", and we'd be better off convening a committee? You know, let the midpoint between Pastor John Hagee and Doctor Steven Weinberg (however you'd define that) be called The Official Best Epistemology?

I'm curious too about the pat way in which Hedges asserts there has been no ethical progress in human history. Unspeakable atrocities do go on around us, and I cede that as a war correspondent he knows more about it than I do. All the same, there has indisputably been ethical change over history, change that you might even want to call progress.

Put it this way. It seems to me that the important variable among ethical systems is in how big a circle they draw. Who's in the circle - who's us - and who's them? Because them can end up getting whacked something terrible if us decides they're a threat. Well, there are exceptions to the claim I'm about to make (many of them in the form of world-historical ethical disasters), yet it seems to me that the circle of us has been painfully and reluctantly expanding over time. Slave emancipation, women's suffrage, the current inevitability of gay marriage, the increasing acceptance of animal rights, you name it. I don't think the fact that I think this - and that I think it's a cause for some hope in a terrible world - makes me a crazed-eyed utopian idealist as Hedges says: and to the extent that he connects the desire for a more perfect ethical world, with Pol-Potish means of achieving that world, I am gravely goddamn offended.

But Hedges is right: I don't think this circle has expanded equally all around the world. Also, I fear that this "progress" in ethics may map to our affluence better than to anything else. In other words, impose crushing poverty on France (say) and the folks there may indeed begin reenslaving one another.

Hedges says he's no moral relativist himself, that he thinks female genital mutilation, for instance, is an atrocity. He also says he knows there is a capacity for evil in every person, and that if a violently-oppressed minority turns to violence, we should not be so terribly surprised. Well hell, friend, where that's concerned I think you and I live in the same mental world. And if it weren't for the fact that you (Mr. Hedges) keep announcing that my personal disbelief in the supernatural means I'm a closet genocidal maniac - then I don't think we'd be in any disagreement here at all.

Yes, that's right. In the Salon interview and at the end of the YouTube clip, Hedges wants to tell me all kinds of things about myself as an atheist of which I had been blissfully unaware till now. For instance, that I want to murder religious fundamentalists (I deny their basic humanity. I consider them a them.). Or that I would like to join with American Christian fundamentalists in supporting a war of worldwide extermination against Muslims. Fascinating stuff. I'd had no clue I felt like that.

I'm being snide, of course, because something else is going on here and it's clear what that something is. Hedges was inspired to write I Don't Believe in Atheists because he had encountered exactly two of them. And he does pick at some genuine weirdnesses about Sam Harris (argues in favor of torture) and Christopher Hitchens (thinks the Iraq War was an outstanding idea) that there's little to argue with. These are bad things these guys said: guys whose books I've mainly read while cheering.

Which is great. If Hedges thinks Sam Harris is intellectually shallow, and that Christopher Hitchens is a solipsistic provocateur, he should write up his report of it. And he may even be right (at least about Hitchens, ha ha.). --But what about, let's say, Daniel Dennett? He's one of the "four horsemen" of the new atheism, right?, and there's no dirt out there against the guy. Dennett hasn't advocated the universal dismemberment of the Hajis, nor the replacement of the U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual with scripts from 24. So - how to handle that, if you're Hedges? Just don't mention Daniel Dennett, that's how.

But you can't avoid mentioning Richard Dawkins, can you?, foremost of the horsemen and the fellow who principally set this New Atheism notion rolling in the first place. Dawkins is something of an embarrassment for a Chris Hedges. Because Dawkins is strident, vituperative, even arrogant in his disbelief, yet has been vociferously against war in general and the one in Iraq in particular from the start; and to the best of my knowledge, he advocates neither torture nor nuclear first strikes. He may not be a Bertrand Russell pacifist (note how his atheism too did not a genocidal maniac make), but he dutifully thinks George Bush is a fool and believes in peace. So good grief, Chris Hedges, what can you say about Richard Dawkins?

"Well, Dawkins is a little different, because he's British." [Salon interview]

Come again? Where the do you think Christopher Hitchens is from? Mobile, Alabama?

So we have some significant silliness going on here. Hedges takes some dumb - okay, call it "reprehensible". He takes two reprehensible things said by two men with whom he had uncomfortable scraps at public debates (Harris, Hitchens). He smears these bad beliefs warrantlessly - indeed in the face of counterexamples - across anybody who agrees with the two guys on other matters (ie, that supernatural entities don't exist. Even if it's sometimes fuzzy whether Sam Harris even agrees with that). Then Hedges goes on to say that this New Atheist "movement", swollen as its ranks apparently are with pro-torture maniacs, is somehow a social force of such scope that as soon as it throws in its lot with its sworn enemies the Christian fundamentalists, then boy, we're in for a global Muslim holocaust.

Wha...? Have you been to a Humanist meeting? First of all, their biggest concern, beyond maintaining a supply of cheese danishes, is about drawing wide ethical "circles" - a big us. These are people who are damn unlikely to advocate violence against anybody. More importantly, there are few enough Humanists and/or atheists out there that if you crammed them all into a clown car, it wouldn't even look particularly funny to watch them climb back out.

Freethinking, this is to say, is hardly a terrifying social movement. It takes a struggle to conjecure that under the most generous definition (the absence of religious affiliation), we make up 16% of the population. And it's less. Because 16% counts everybody who says, "I disagree with organized religion. But I just feel that, you know, out there somewhere, you know, there's something."

In conclusion:

It is at minimum, ironic to claim atheists are so dangerous that they may help trigger a world holocaust - and what makes them so dangerous is that they hysterically demonize groups of people.