Up the Down Road

No more free snacks, but sky is free and looks much better with Compass! (I should get paid for this advertisement.)

This morning, for hours it seemed (although it couldn't have been), I dreamed about having my blood drawn: waiting in line (there were a lot of people. I was given favorable treatment and allowed to cut the line); watching other people have their blood drawn; inquiring about the number of tubes and what they were for (one was for blood type); watching doctors (there were two, a man and a woman. The man looked like a curator I once knew) brandishing their fast acting sharp shooting needles (they were huge, and made me think of staple guns). It's a dream dreamed entirely in the state of cringe.

Is the Administration preparing to attack Iran?

Given the catastrophe in Iraq and economic recession, the idea of anther war sounds crazy, but does the Iraq war seem rational? What if W. yet wants to go out with a bang? Maybe it's time to suspend disbelief. How many things happened in the last eight years seem believable? 

The scenario may vary:
1. Direct preemptive strike or Iraq II. This will certainly incite domestic oppositions, but how strong will the oppositions be? Why did the Congress--under Democratic control--pass the funding in the first place? (See article.)

2. War by proxy, i.e. America will not attack, Israel will. Will people in America care about a "middle east" war? Elsewhere Hersh argues that last summer's Israeli strike on Lebanon was a dress rehearsal for America's military intent on Iran.

3. Coup either directly instigated by secret American task force or funded and supported by Bush government. Will people in America care about Iranian "domestic" politics? In any case, when we hear about, it will be done already. There will be no time to protest or say no.

It occurred to me that events of world historical significance may well be nonevents, or events that take place precisely around an empty center where, to our habitually thinking, an intention should preside. "Someone has blundered." Who gives the marching order? Perhaps no one has ordered the torture of prisoners, just as "gas-chamber" is a word that must be struck out (see here). (This explains why, upon seeing the Abu Ghraib photos, the immediate temptation is to attribute the act to the intention of soldiers, while in fact the soldiers are themselves evidence of something larger yet absent.) After 1989, there were also discussions as to whether anyone had given explicit order to shoot the students and civilians in Tiananmen. Where does this leave us? Namely, how do you resist a void? Connecting dots helps, but knowledge does not automatically lead to action. Something else is needed. (Unless you are one of Henry James's  characters who "so intensely knew"--and yet the strange thing about them is that they are precisely not in a position to know.)   

Read this article by Seymour Hersh.
 

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Note that "some members of the Democratic leadership—Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections—were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy."

“The Finding was focussed on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” a person familiar with its contents said, and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money.”

This despite the fact that "a National Intelligence Estimate, released in December, that concluded that Iran had halted its work on nuclear weapons in 2003."

A Democratic senator told me that, late last year, in an off-the-record lunch meeting, Secretary of Defense Gates met with the Democratic caucus in the Senate. (Such meetings are held regularly.) Gates warned of the consequences if the Bush Administration staged a preëmptive strike on Iran, saying, as the senator recalled, “We’ll create generations of jihadists, and our grandchildren will be battling our enemies here in America.” Gates’s comments stunned the Democrats at the lunch, and another senator asked whether Gates was speaking for Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. Gates’s answer, the senator told me, was “Let’s just say that I’m here speaking for myself.” (A spokesman for Gates confirmed that he discussed the consequences of a strike at the meeting, but would not address what he said, other than to dispute the senator’s characterization.)

Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference. But the borders between operations are not always clear: in Iran, C.I.A. agents and regional assets have the language skills and the local knowledge to make contacts for the JSOC operatives, and have been working with them to direct personnel, matériel, and money into Iran from an obscure base in western Afghanistan. As a result, Congress has been given only a partial view of how the money it authorized may be used. One of JSOC’s task-force missions, the pursuit of “high-value targets,” was not directly addressed in the Finding. There is a growing realization among some legislators that the Bush Administration, in recent years, has conflated what is an intelligence operation and what is a military one in order to avoid fully informing Congress about what it is doing. ...The claim was that the military was ‘preparing the battle space,’ and by using that term they were able to circumvent congressional oversight.

Since I posted this and, to a less extend, this, this phenomenon has been spreading like wild fire. I don't understand. Is this some sort of auto-serializing tactic? Or what? I know I should be worrying about more important things, perhaps. But my upcoming memoir is going to bear the title "The Loud Landlady's Labrador." Notice the way I creatively bend the rules.