The profiteers, the apocalyptos, the chicken hawks, they all wanted to go into Iraq without a thought to the most obvious fact of all—we would be magnifying Iran’s influence in the region tenfold while our policy was to contain it.

It was obvious to the majority of Arabs, most of whom are Sunnis. It was obvious to Sunni Turkey, obvious to Sunni Al Qaeda, and, most important of all, it was obvious to Iraq’s oppressed Shia majority. Once freed of Saddam Hussein’s murderous Sunni rule, they would inexorably seek Iran’s embrace.

Why wasn’t this obvious to the big brains in Washington? Perhaps they didn’t care. Profiteers would profit, the military-industrial complex would justify itself, the generals would get their promotions, the apocalyptos would move the Rapture up on the calendar, the Israel lobby would then be able to target Iran, now its most vociferous enemy, and the chicken hawks would scare us into a security state.

What the invasion has done is reverse more than 1,300 years of history. Since 641, when the newly Muslim Arabs toppled the Iranian Sassanian empire (Sassanian castle, inset), the region had been dominated by Sunni Islam. Once the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates expired, the Sunni Turks ruled the area until the 20th Century.

Our meddling reverses all this, hands Iraq over to the Shias, sets the stage for Iranian imperialism, and very likely ignites a conflict between Iran and the Sunni Arabs of the Middle East. More arms sales, more meddling, more room for apocalyptic thinking and bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.

To Arabs with a sense of history this period might seem something like an Abbasid restoration in which Arabs under Iranian auspices overthrow the Umayyads, who represented milennia of tribal Arab culture and perspective.

Almost everybody but the Sunnis get what they want, except people of good will who value common sense and moderation. Greed and extremism triumph. Even Al Qaeda wins. What a grand victory. Mission accomplished. Heckuva job,

—DM

(Regular podcast to journalism students around the world for The Student Operated Press.)

Strange as it might seem, silence is an important element in good journalism, and in these days of Botox journalism it’s in short supply.

Just listen to the Sunday yak television shows. The people being interviewed can hardly get a word in edgewise so eager are the so-called interviewers to interrupt them. These bad manners are fobbed off as efforts to keep the interview on point. In effect, the interviewer is saying, See what a good journalist I am, I’m trying to keep this empty suit from pontificating and dodging my brilliant questions. Yeah sure, the trouble is the empty suit is doing the interviewing. It’s true, people on the spot obfuscate. They evade, they do anything to change the subject. But if you intend to get good answers to good questions you need to listen to the answers, whether you like them or not. Who knows, someone’s evasion may just may be more interesting than your almighty question. (more…)

The United States of America was born out of conflict with imperialism, but it finds itself unsuccessfully trying to clean up imperialist messes from Indo-China to Iraq.

How has this happened?

I think the answer lies in the tension between Jeffersonian ideal and piratical capitalism. We have failed to reconcile these two driving impulses. Indeed, we haven’t even tried. The people we elect in the name of our ideals sell them out to market interests determined to supplant failed imperialist adventures.

Iraq is such a (mis)adventure. The only sense it made for the British Arabist Gertrude Bell to draw Iraq up as we are now failing to reconstitute it was to satisfy colonialist ambitions. The Turks could have told the British and French, who carved out modern Iraq, and so could have the Arabs. But nobody was listening to them.

In Vietnam the American intelligence community conflated French economic interests with capitalism’s conflict with communism, denigrating the documented fact that Ho Chi Minh, the rebel leader, was more influenced by Jefferson than Marx. History has born this out.

Again and again, we have moved in to pick up colonialist pieces when our historic ideals dictated otherwise. The most intriguing exception is Algeria. John F. Kennedy simply told the French it was time to go. But we didn’t learn the larger lesson Algeria might have taught: terrorism can’t be overcome with state terrorism or with shock and awe. It’s a disease that has repeatedly plagued caliphates and kingdoms, democracies and oligarchies. Violence begets violence. In Algeria the violence of French military mutineers and the violence of the rebels devastated the country, and in the end exhaustion, not policy, prevailed.

The French were not in Algeria or Indo-China out of idealism or the goodness of their hearts. They were business rapists. We’re not in Iraq in the name of democracy, we’re there to make money for business executives and shareholders who hold profit over idealism. The French might talk about La Gloire, the Nazis might talk about the thousand-year reich, and the British might talk about the splendor of Magna Carta, but in the end modern conquest is about money and exploitation.

The conflict between our political ideals, which the American masses truly believe in, and our business goals is complicated by the rising involvement of religion in secular affairs. Our founders envisioned a secular state tolerant of religious diversity, but many of today’s religionists are intolerant of any ideas but their own. And this is true in Israel and among the Muslims. The rise of stone-deaf extremism in the Abrahamic cultures is the world’s biggest problem.

Extreme capitalism, extreme ideology, extreme religion equal disaster. A nation of ideologues who refuse to hear each other out, who refuse to make room for differences, can’t reconcile capitalist excess with the ideals to which everyone pays lip service. If we’re unable to modulate capitalist enterprise with our social and political conscience we will lose this beloved republic.

—DM

I’ve always thought of snobs as narrow of foot and thin of lip, given to cutlery stares and cold shoulders, none of which describes this broad-footed fellow. But now in my old age and especially when walking around Woodstock, New York, that rainbow-hued, pinwheel-kinetic redoubt of the New Age, I repent of ugly snobbery, because I turned up my nose at the New Age, thinking it shallow, exhibitionist and revisionist.

I failed in my middle-aged pretention to appreciate the New Age for the popularizing movement it was and is. The case for it being shallow and showy has been made by my betters, but why revisionist? My feeling then, back in the 60s, was that you would have thought the New Agers had discovered metaphysics by themselves. And you would have thought that only in the East or among the Native Americans could they find spirituality.

What I failed to see, refused to see, is that mediocre poetry and county fair metaphysics would inevitably lead to rediscovery of William Butler Yeats, father of modern poetry and magus, Paracelsus, John Dee, Robert Fludd, Giordano Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, Simon Magus, the Cathars, Arab alchemy, Gnosticism, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, the works of Frances A. Yates and Evelyn Underhill, and much more.

Because the New Age stirred interest in Celtic traditions, it should have been clear to me, for example, that if the New Agers weren’t reciting Yeats in their various energy centers they soon would be. And because they themselves were so threatening to the old order they would soon rediscover Bruno and the Cathars, persecuted for their supposed heresies. And as they were interested in holistic medicine, they would inevitably see that it has had a long line of martyrs.

Indeed the New Agers’ paths might eventually wind up at Albert Camus’ doorstep (inset) where they would share his distrust of ideologues, even if they might not share his equal distrust of faith.

—DM

The Student Operated Press is an international online venue for journalism students from every nation to begin their careers by communicating with real readerships. It has been my privilege to be a mentor to these students, sharing my experience as a journalist and my reflections on journalism. In this capacity I make weekly podcasts on various topics. This week’s topic is Iraq, the Kurds and Turkey.

—DM 

John Edwards is waging a thoughtful, dignified, intellectually challenging campaign. Hillary Clinton is waging a slick, wary, idea-stingy campaign. Barack Obama is waging a stirring, refreshing, shallow campaign.

Because the Republicans operate in a content-free zone their strategy is Hillary Clinton, pure and simple. Their fallback strategy is Barack Obama. They’re convinced she has too much baggage and is too unlikable to win. They can say this publicly without fear of it tainting them. But they can’t say they believe the country may still be unwilling to elect a black man.

Whether the country is willing to elect a man who inarguably looks presidential but acts like a Park Avenue Bentley salesman is another matter. Mitt Romney, like his abrasive chief rival, Rudy Giuliani, doesn’t have much of a record to stand on. Ask Massachusetts voters. His baggage doesn’t need as many porters and apologists as Giuliani’s, but it doesn’t bear much scrutiny.

So what’s up with this? Why does an impressive candidate like Edwards run behind Clinton and Obama? I asked a young man whose opinions I respect. It’s because people know he’s in with the corporados, he said. But Edwards, a lawyer (never a plus), has spent his career fighting corporados for working people. Ah, but his health care plan would be another insurer bonanza.

My young friend said Obama is a breath of fresh air. Perhaps, insofar as we know what he stands for. In the Illinois legislature he was an effective compromiser. Clinton, on the other hand, is a free-trader whose husband’s globalist policies have caused a lot of wage misery in the United States. She botched a chance to give us universal health care and has a dugout full of corporado pals.

Take the spouses of the chief candidates. Edwards, Clinton and Obama all have extraordinarily attractive, likable and intelligent spouses. So does Romney. The verdict isn’t quite in on Mrs. Giuliani. Unlike her husband, she’s attractive, but she’s almost as baggage-laden.

Why is Edwards stuck in third place in the Democratic running order? He’s the man whose ideas, good, bad or indifferent, drive the debate. He’s the man who has demonstrably given more thought to the issues and put his cards on the table. He’s a man without a dodgy past. Is there anything we need more than ideas? Is there anything we need more than a candidate unafraid to say I was wrong, as Edwards did about his Iraq war vote? Surely the last thing we need is another leader who can’t bring himself to say he was wrong. That seems to me irrefutable proof
of immaturity.

How can the press pay so little attention to a man to whom we owe most of the debate? It’s because the press is better at trivializing issues and people than it is explaining issues. And why is that? It’s not only cheap journalism, it’s cheaper journalism, meaning it costs less and offers more bang for the buck. That’s the state of American journalism. Small wonder we have so much trivia and smarm in politics.

Let’s take a new look at John Edwards, and while we’re at it, let’s keep in mind that because the media find the Clinton and Obama camps story-rich environments doesn’t mean the rest of us should overlook how vacuous they are.

—DM

My daughter gave me a lovely silver disk with a labyrinth incised into it for my birthday last Sunday. I noticed, to my pleasure and surprise, it was made in the United States. But then I began to ponder the significance of labyrinths. My wife was lost in our telephone service’s answering tree, and I began to wonder, Have our lives become labyrinths because, in their desire to maximize profit, our service corporations have dehumanized their so-called services?

We spend our days being jerked around from number to number, computer field to field. Often we’re disconnected. More often the response is irrelevant. Promises to correct problems fail to materialize. This is what these corporations think of our time and convenience. Everything is for them. We’re merely hapless buyers, and when our buying power has been destroyed by their relentless robotization of service and exportation of jobs, they’ll shift their operations to cheap-labor markets. We’re expected to be the patriots. They are not.

My daughter’s elegant little gift reminds me that our lives have been labyrinthized without us having any say. When something goes wrong with the economy some Big Head in Washington deplores our unwillingness to save money. Let him (it’s almost never a woman) try to save on what Americans make these days.

My daughter’s gift suggests to me that Big Media have been inviting us to the wrong party, the wrong debate. We’re discussing immigration, for example, as if it were a race issue, a criminal justice issue, an acculturation issue, even a terrorism issue. But it’s a salary issue, an exploitation issue. The corporations want cheap labor. They don’t want to pay decent wages to anyone, and they don’t care about the damage it’s doing to the middle class because they’re internationalists; they don’t give a hoot about the flag many of us are dying for. They believe in flags of convenience. If they need a war to increase profits, we’ll have a war and call it a patriotic crusade, a life and death struggle with Islamic terrorism. If they need more money still, they’ll move somewhere we can’t tax them. Remember the Cold War? Remember when it was called a life and death struggle with evil? Well, get a load of how we’re celebrating capitalism’s triumph by screwing the middle class.

Whose country is it anyway? Are we robots or citizens? Robots will vote as they’re programmed, and that’s just the end some of the supporters of electronic voting machines are seeking.

So the next time you encounter a hopeless telephone tree or an irrelevant computer questionnaire in the guise of helping you, ask yourself if you want to be a robot in a labyrinth. Did you ever vote for this? Did you ever tell a single politician that this is the kind of country you want?

—DM

Yesterday was a landmark in the history of publishing. The weekly Circuits section of The New York Times led off with a story, An Entire Bookshelf in Your Hands by Peter Wayner, about e-book reader technology. Nothing unusual there. Circuits, like Wired magazine, has covered e-book readers all along. What is significant about yesterday’s story is that its underlying assumption is that e-books are here to stay and demand for them is growing.

In 1999 when Online Originals, the respected British online literary press, published my novella, Alice Miller’s Room, the media consensus which, as the poet Percy Shelley said of criticism, is often the measure of contemporary ignorance, held that e-books were a fad. Even now the critical establishment ignores original e-books on the arguable ground that they are vanity publications, the same argument it makes for dismissing print-on-demand books. This argument holds just enough truth to enable its purveyors to fob it off as axiomatic.

But technology is relentless, paying little attention to rear-guard reactions. The printed book industry is not chauvinist, it is protecting a huge investment, trying to milk it for all it is worth, fully aware that technology is reshaping our reading habits. The issue has never been about quality of technology or merit in writing. It has always been about money. But it suits the purposes of the old industry to couch the discussion in terms of quality.

Take newspapers. When we read them online they still look like their print originals, but it is now an interim look. There is no reason why it should last. The technology that dictated the appearance of today’s newspapers is antique. Hot lead gave way a long time ago to offset. That should have enabled newspapers to radically re-examine their appearance, but instead they merely tinkered with it, using the new technology to add color and improve appearances, but failing to make the big advances they now had the ability to make. You can make book on the fact that cutting-edge designers are hard at work shaping the look of tomorrow’s news on your iPhones, Nokias and even your laptops. It will look very different, and so it should. Today’s look is strictly transitional.

Books too will look different, because there is no reason not to take advantage of cyberspace’s hyperkinetic environment. There is no reason for static text and freeze-frame images, used merely to break up text, in the 21st Century.

—DM

The protracted charade about General David Petraeus’ September report on conditions in Iraq has become tedious to almost everyone but the reporters and politicians, so obvious is it that it has been overtaken by events. It’s just another version of the game the commander-in-chief has played all along: I’m just doing what the generals tell me. Unfortunately for the country the game tells us more about ambitious generals than it does about a discredited President.

One of the events that has overtaken General Petraeus’ report—remember, he has already told the BBC we need to stay put—is the positioning of 160,000 Turkish troops along Iraq’s northern border. This may well prove to be the event that overtakes everything else.

Turkey, a Sunni nation and a member of NATO, has been telling the government of Nuri al-Maliki in Baghdad for more than a year now that it must curb pan-Kurd ambitions in northern Iraq. The situation is far more volatile than the press has described. The Shias have their own militias. The Kurds have the well-trained Pesh Merga, which is in fact a standing army. But Iraq’s Sunnis have only their tribes. That in itself is enough to explain Sunni concerns.

The Kurds would like to see an independent Kurdistan. Considering the large Kurdish minorities in Iran and Turkey, it is not difficult to see why Shia Iran and Sunni Turkey are worried. Short of independence, the Kurds would like a semi-autonomous Kurdistan, which would contain Mosul’s rich oil fields. The Kurds could then continue to agitate for a greater Kurdistan, perhaps even arming militants inside Iran and Turkey.

Where does this leave us? In the soup, where we have been from the beginning. Consider these combustibles:

—Turkey has not set foot on Arab land since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
— Iran and Turkey are traditional enemies. Iran would feel as threatened by an expanded border with Turkey as the Arabs feel threatened by a militant Iran.
—The Sunni Arabs have more in common with the Turks than they have with the Iranians, but the reappearance of Turkish soldiers on Arab land would be viewed with alarm.
—There are more than 100 million people in the world of Turkish origin. Turkey, a secular nation with an Islamist party in power, regards itself as the protector of these people. There are large Turkish minorities in Iran and Afghanistan, and people of Turkish origin are spread throughout Central Asia.
—Turkey has no oil, but it is host to oil pipelines. Moving into northern Iraq would give Turkey control of its oil fields. The Turks would say they have come only to stabilize the situation, but that is our story too, and we have already witnessed how many people in the world believe us.

If we are soon presented with a situation in which Turkey has as many troops in Iraq as we do it will change the entire equation, and yet the Washington establishment—the press, the government, the think tanks, the industry lobbyists—are all silent about an eventuality that would change everything in a thin minute.

—DM

Things have been going well for the firm of Cheney, Bush, Rapture & Apocalypse, just as foreseen by Anthony Burgess, who wrote A Clockwork Orange.

The dismantling of the American middle class is well underway. That pesky American Dream has been archived under D for drivel. Exploitable labor is plentiful, and we don’t even have to call it slavery. The population is fat, sick, scared and bamboozled. People are working crazy hours for less to pay for a war that has bankrupted us. Our education and health care systems are strictly Third World. We’re making fat cats fatter for machines that rig elections. And dissent has been successfully confused with disloyalty.

Yes, all in all, it has been a good time for CBRA. Of course, it would be nice to build that superhighway from Mexico to Canada and shut down The New York Times. Or maybe just getting Rupert Murdoch to make it an offer it can’t refuse would do the trick. All in all, it’s good time if you have enough money to buy into a hedge fund.

Meanwhile, the federal security state is mining data and coming up with new ways to panic us into its cold embrace. The various terror alerts and other fright tactics have distracted us from the fact that the states’ rights advocates have given us the most centralized, high-flying and authoritarian federal government we’ve ever had.

But, don’t be alarmed. The Apocalypse is coming. This is just a transition from our high hopes for a compassionate society and a secure future to the End Time when all of us moderate idiot-dissenters who just want to get along will get our comeuppance.

And if we have to give China and India a middle class at the expense of our own for a while, don’t worry, it’s worth the sacrifice. Oh, and as for the question of whether the corporados are fooling the Rapturists or the Rapturists are fooling the corporados, well, you might as well talk about cold comfort in hell.

Welcome to the United States of Dystopia.

—DM