Rummy's Player

In "honor" of the tenth anniversary of "Shock and Awe," here's a little ditty I wrote back in early 2003.

RUMMY'S PLAYER

He are a drunken driver with a silver spoon

his Junker father spat into his tomcat mouth

(they is an old-time family founded on appointments,

an oily bunch of skull-and-boney schoolyard bullies).

He are no self-made man, no rocket scientist,

but just a five-to-four minority pretender,

a spastic spoiler of subject-verb agreement,

a legacy admission threatening to use

tactical atomic weapons to destroy

reinforced Iraqi bunkers underground. 

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When you hear the Serious People all agreeing about something, whether it's a war in Iraq or Iran, a "debt crisis," or the impending doom of Social Security—BEWARE.

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And Rummy still can't admit he was wrong:

10 yrs ago began the long, difficult work of liberating 25 mil Iraqis. All who played a role in history deserve our respect & appreciation.
— Donald Rumsfeld (@RumsfeldOffice) March 19, 2013

Arabic translators

From Language Log:

Stephen Benjamin ... He volunteered for the Navy, went to the Defense Language Institute to learn Arabic, and was ready and willing to go to Iraq. He never got there. Why? Because military snooping on IM exchanges between Benjamin and his roommate revealed that they are gay, as a result of which he was discharged from the Navy.

Now you know it: keeping gays out of the military is more important than talking to Iraqis.

Chirac was right

An interesting observation by Julian Barnes in his NYRB review of That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present, by Robert and Isabelle Tombs:

Although public opposition to the Iraq war in Britain is high, it would take a lot more fair-mindedness than most British (or Americans) are capable of for them to utter, instead of "Blair [or Bush] was wrong," the simple words "Chirac was right."

Headlines; Brian Turner, "Here, Bullet"

The big headline in the International Herald Tribune today:

"Rice to return to Mideast with plan"

I don't know which is worse: the idea that she had no clue what to do on her previous trip(s) to the Mideast, or the idea that she is bringing a plan from Bush along, whose previous plans for the Mideast have not been particularly successful.

It makes me want to stop reading the newspaper. I get the same reaction when I read The New Yorker sometimes: there's yet another article about how badly things are going in Iraq, and all it makes me want to read is Brian Turner's poetry collection Here, Bullet. Turner was a GI in Iraq, and his collection is uncannily powerful. Poetry is indeed "news that stays news," as Ezra Pound said. Three poems from the book are on-line from when they were published in The Georgia Review.

The Wrong Metaphor

In the February 13 & 20, 2006, issue of "The New Yorker," Hendrik Hertzberg touched on an issue that has bothered me since the days immediately after the events of September 11, 2001:

"In calling it a war, Bush emphasized its seriousness, but at the cost of granting its criminal perpetrators the dignity of warriors."

The metaphor of "war" has many problems, but what I immediately disliked about the phrase "war on terror" back in 2001 was that it seemed to eliminate the possibility of dealing with Al Qaeda as a criminal organization whose members should be put on trial in criminal courts. That dislike has been more than justified: the United States has put almost no-one on criminal trial for the September 11 events (or if it has, it has declared the results secret and hence eliminated any public effect that such trials might have, if only for the morale of Americans). In contrast, just to name two other countries, Spain has had criminal trials about the Madrid bombings, and Italy is also pressing criminal charges against "the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Madrid bombings."

I mentioned the problem of "war" as the central metaphor to an acquaintance in October, 2001. She happened to have once been George H.W. Bush's personal assistant (after he was no longer President). She said that starting a war against Afghanistan did not preclude judicial approaches to September 11. Unfortunately, it has.