George: the Mother of All Perps

Howard Fineman gets briefly and refreshingly blunt here in Newsweek in reviewing GWB's attempted seance last night. This is not the sort of thing we're accustomed to in our Mainstream Media, (and of course that is why thinking folks have found alternative means of accessing accounts of actual world events).

Mandatory qualifiers: the lines about not being able to leave or lose in Iraq and a "giant version of the Taliban" have me contemplating self-infliction.

What does "lose" mean at this point? Is it just me, or aren't we still awaiting a definition of "winning" and "losing" that are actually relevant to the awful circumstances of the George Bush War? I don't know about you, but I have never yet heard any explanation and definition of either that actually means anything in real-world human terms. Bring It On.

And we "can't afford to leave"? What the hell is that? Ever? And wouldn't any sentient nuanced creature agree that Dick, George, Don, and Condie (et al) have already more or less given up on the Taliban in Afghan territory?

George W. Bush spoke with all the confidence of a perp in a police lineup. I first interviewed the guy in 1987 and began covering his political rise in 1993, and I have never seen him, in public or private, look less convincing, less sure of himself, less cocky. With his knitted brow and stricken features, he looked, well, scared. Not surprising since what he was doing in the White House library was announcing the escalation of an unpopular war.

The president may well be right that we cannot afford to leave or lose in Iraq. He makes profound sense when he observes that a collapse of Iraq would mean the rise of a giant version of the Taliban's Afghanistan—with a million times the oil in the ground.

But if he was trying to assure the country that he had confidence in his own plan to prevent that collapse, well, a picture is worth a thousand words. And the words themselves weren't that assuring either. Does anyone in America or Iraq, or anywhere else in the world for that matter, really think that the Sunnis and Shia will make peace? Does anyone think that embedded American soldiers won't be in danger of being fragged by their own Iraqi brethren? Does anyone really think that Iran and Syria can be prevented from playing havoc in Iraq and the rest of the region by expressions of presidential will?

Just Listen!

A co-worker a while back introduced me to lectures-on-tape, in the general spirit of informal continuing ed and possibly even self-improvement. Having tasted the nectar now, I'd add to the list of benefits a nurturing of the spirit of curiosity. I routinely find that I end up researching other words, concepts, books, etc., as a result of these experiences. My normal day involves an hour or so of pedestrian time when I commonly am receptive/available to some form of audio entertainment, and I was open to lecture/speaking as an option to music. Modernism in Literature and Science Fiction were pretty intriguing. My personal music-listening is suffering, but, suddenly savvy, I'm now plumbing the library.

The lecture genre seems to be rare at the library; my choices have tended towards standard non-fiction books. One recent listen was "Islam - a Short History," by Karen Armstrong. I struggled a bit in dealing with Islam-specific jargon and terminology, not least through the difficulty of not always being able to tease out just what the possible spelling of these unfamiliar-sounding words might be. But having finished the listen, it is a terrific book, and I have few actual criticisms - I think it was a good decision by author to challenge the listener (reader) to deal with the subject on its' own terms and with the appropriate vocabulary. Some of it I got, some I did not. I have a good list of terms to explore via Wikipedia and Google and such, and it is certainly an inspiration for continuing self-ed. Always a Good Thing, eh? Or are you of the incurious tribe? (If so it must be discouraging to find your clan numbers plummeting - down in the low 30's even prior to that pathetic SOTU from what I hear.)

It goes well beyond vocabulary. How was I supposed to know that Mohammed's transcribing of the Koran occurred back in the seventh century (I think that is right!)? Who knew that these teachings involved a full recognition of a series of six or so major prophets including Abraham, Solomon, Jesus, and Mohammed, and seemingly no heirarchy between them? Maybe I had the mumps the week this stuff was taught.

How about the idea that the resulting religion was wonderfully egalitarian, tolerant of Jews and Christians, both prevalent in the area at the time, and any other spiritual creed. All for example living in semi-harmony in today's Saudi Arabia. Mainstream Islam may well deserve credit for a less combative history overall than Christianity. Islam proved through many centuries, per Armstrong, to be amazingly resilient, dealing with being beleaguered and conquered by such as the Mongols and then the Christian Crusaders, among others, yet finding a way to update and maintain their spiritual underpinnnings while submitting to temporary subjection.

The book goes on to address the difficulty the Islamic world has experienced in handling the modern secularism that has been the norm for us in the "west." Armstrong emphasizes that the modern republican state model so familiar to us (albeit increasingly threatened by tyranny in the Bush era), with church-state separation, citizen control of government, etc., evolved somewhat organically in the West over the course of several centuries. Not surprisingly, it has not proven easy to simply adopt such a system on the fly in a much older civilization with an entirely different zeitgeist. The book touches on the numerous stumbles and struggles that have occurred in attempts to meld Islam and modernity.

I find it hard to believe that any of the upper echelon of the Bush administration has properly read and taken the information in this book to heart. Maybe it is only my rustic naivete and innocence, but I want to believe we'd be talking a whole different ball game if they had. Okay, yes, that theoretical education would have to be coupled with enough spiritual evolution to be interested in among other things the progress of humanity as a whole, i.e., a foresaking of capitalism as the ultimate goal and also the nationalism/militarism that has so eroded the basic principles of our former enlightened state. And there's that heart. Case closed?

Recommended.