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Thoughts on culture, politics, music and stuff by Eric Olsen, Marty Thau and Mike Crooker, who are among other things, producers.
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Saturday, August 10, 2002
Quana: How Do You Feel About the Saudis?
"The Palestinian National Struggle Should Remain Unblemished and Pure" Charles Johnson noted in this post laced with irony the lack of "Muslim peace activists in Palestine." Well, this individual is hardly a "peace activist," but he's the best I could find (subscription required):
"There is no way that one can consider justifying the latest attack on the Hebrew University campus," wrote Hanna Nasir, president of Birzeit University, in Ramallah, in an opinion article published in the Arabic-language daily Al Ayyam, which is published in Ramallah by the Palestinian Authority. Mr. Nasir provided an English translation of the article to The Chronicle.
More excerpts from the op-ed:
The Debate Before the Debate We have quite a conversation going on here about the future of the music industry, and we haven't even launched Blogcritics.com yet. Please go here for a debate between Greg Beato and Farhad Manjoo about the qualities of Internet-based pay music services. Greg follows up again on Farhad's last comment:
doesn't have it yet, it's true, but it does have 18 other Springsteen albums (287 tracks total). Lamenting the artists/albums that these services are missing is basically like saying, "Gee, you know, I would subscribe to Salon Premium, if only they had James Wolcott's Vanity Fair columns." For $10 a month, you're probably never going to have access to every song recorded, just like you're probably never going to have access to every TV show ever recorded for $10 a month. But right now I can't really think of any other subscription service (newspapers, magazines, cable, etc.) that gives you access to so much for so little.
....Your specific question had to do with services such as Rhapsody and Pressplay. Why aren't they good enough? Because they miss the distinction between what people are saying and what people are doing. People might say that they're using downloading just like the use the radio, but that's not usually the case. For that matter, I haven't actually heard anybody say that, so I'm tempted to dismiss it as a straw man argument of your own invention, but I'll address it anyway. Like most people, I listen to the radio while I'm driving. Can I listen to Rhapsody while I'm driving? No. I listen to the radio on my home stereo. Can I listen to Rhapsody on my home stereo? No. Only on my computer, and only if I have a relatively speedy unrestricted internet connection. What do I mean by "unrestricted"? I listen to music all day at work, but if I kept a 128Kbps stream running to my computer all day, I would be chewing up two full channels of a T-1 all day long. My company uses a T1 which allows us to pay based on the amount of bandwidth we use, and just a single Rhapsody stream alone would chew up almost half of the bandwidth we are allotted at our current payment level. Because of this, my company has a pretty strict policy on things like streaming audio or file-sharing software, a policy I helped to write. At work, Rhapsody is not an option for me. In my truck, Rhapsody is not an option for me. At home, Rhapsody is only an option for me sometimes, while I'm near my computer. Fortunately, that is often enough to probably be worth $10 each month (which I currently pay to Emusic), but it doesn't solve my other problems. ....Hey, RIAA: I'm willing spend money on music. I still buy CDs, new and used but mostly used. I subscribe to EMusic. I'm open-minded and fair, and there is money to be made here. Don't serve me feces and call it filet mignon. You want to milk every last penny you can on every song, and you're not even very smart about it. If you were, you'd be listening to people like Janis Ian, who has a great idea for you to make money on stuff sitting untouched in your storage vaults. Stop worrying about the college pirates - you're never going to stop them, you can only hope that they'll grow out of it. Think about the rest of us that want to do the right thing. You're making it difficult. In your futile rush to try to stop the few percent of people who will steal music from Wal-Mart if you ever manage to make it impossible to download from the net, you're setting up obstacles for the rest of us who are honest and just want to have a little bit of say about when and where we listen to our music. Ze Ziggy The lovely and talented Emmanuelle Richard flattered me, asking for input on her piece for France's Liberation on the recording of David Bowie's classic Ziggy Stardust album, now digitally remastered for a 30th anniversary reissue. It looks really good, but being that I can't read French, I turned to a Google translation. They don't have all the bugs out of that system yet. Check this out:
I have no doubt that in French this sucker sings sweetly, and deepest thanks to Emmanuelle for including me. Vive Liberation! or something. Pep Talk 25 business-related ideas for a "changing world":
....We need new ideas on deciding just how big government should get and how intrusive it should be. What should be the trade-off between retaining our precious liberties and securing our country against foreign threats? Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and product designers are rushing out innovations that will allow smooth travel through airports, safe shipping of goods through harbors, and thorough screening of terrorists and terror threats. If these new ideas are successful, Americans may be able to protect their civil liberties and keep their economy open while making the country safer. If they fail, we may enter a darker era. One Orwellian plan proposed by the Justice Dept., called TIPS, would enlist millions of Americans to spy on their neighbors and tip off the government on potential terrorists--a disturbing concept. ....Fortunately, Americans like new ideas, and they like to innovate....We need new ideas to calm us, guide us, and restore us. We need to become comfortable taking risks again. We need to get back our optimism, even a little swagger.
In the 1990s, the gap between rich and poor widened. But poverty rates fell to record lows American culture is fundamentally egalitarian. Wide gaps between rich and poor make most people uncomfortable. So when CEOs take home huge pay packages compared with the wages for ordinary workers, the norms of fairness and social justice seem to be violated. ....But unlike other periods during the past 50 years when the gap has widened, the economy prospered, and the poor did well, too. From 1993 to 2000, the latest numbers available, the percentage of people in poor families plunged from 13.6% to 9.6%, the lowest level on record. The poverty rate for 2001, when it is released in the fall, is likely to be nearly as low, because real wage gains for low-income workers stayed strong that year. Blue-collar wages, adjusted for inflation, rose by 2.4% in 2001, their largest increase in years, with an even bigger jump for service occupations.
What will work in the developing world is a focus on inexpensive, downsized, simple-to-use products Ushaben Patel, a 37-year-old housewife from Navali village in India's Gujarat state, awakens at 5 a.m. each day to milk her cow. A half-hour later, she is at the village milk cooperative center. There, her seven liters of milk are measured and tested. She repeats the routine in the afternoon. Her daily take: $2.80. The money goes a long way. It helps pay for necessities and her two sons' schooling. In fact, the cooperative's impact is visible throughout Navali. In all, 932 of the 6,000 villagers are members, and they have earned enough to help build a new road and housing for schoolteachers. Last year, they even sent money to help earthquake victims elsewhere in Gujarat.
Wrong. The country posting the highest gross-domestic-product growth since 1966 is Botswana, a landlocked nation in southern Africa that's two-thirds desert. Its economy has expanded an average of 7% a year since it won independence from Britain that year, according to the World Bank. And it continues to expand--growth is projected at 5% this year--despite a rampant AIDS epidemic that is now the country's biggest challenge. On a continent where virtually every country is worse off than it was at independence, Botswana offers some lessons in economic management for its neighbors.
At a time when regulators are a step behind public anger and self-policing is a joke, the attorneys who make a living suing Corporate America have become one of the most powerful forces compelling executives to behave. The scandals have given them a unique chance to pose as Robin Hoods. Consider stock fraud litigator Bill Lerach--who was so widely demonized in the '90s that he all but stopped talking to the media. Lately he has been defending Enron shareholders, airing his own agenda for cleaning up executive suites, and has even been dubbed America's "top corporate crime fighter" by the left-leaning The Nation magazine. Overall, this is a pep talk for Businessweek's professional/corporate audience, but it's pretty interesting as well. Lives of Their Own I love it when comments sections take on a life of their own: Little Green Footballs has become famous for posts with THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY FIVE comments. That's a good day's traffic for most sites. Dawn gets some wild gabfests over on her site. Dean took over like a champ and argued point-by-point the case for the war here - what a stud. Ross does a tremendous health policy site that is often above my head but deserves the kind of attention that other important expert sites get. In addition he's a great music fan with exquisite taste, and he should be much better known for that too. But this is great to see: his "what is the greatest rock and roll cover tune?" post now has 57 comments winding through music history with an astounding array of tastes, genres and knowledge displayed. The list isn't exhausted yet by any means. UPDATE Burningbird takes offense that Dean responded point by point to her anti-war screed on my site instead of hers. Dean had no obligation to do anything - he's just a terribly well-informed reader - and he entered into the discussion via this site so he just continued it here. Bb also takes offense that Glenn Reynolds linked the debate from this end, but didn't mention her or her allies by name. I am certain that the answer is as simple as he doesn't know them, they have not corresponded with him, and his suggestion to "scroll down and follow the links" was meant to be inclusive. In additon, Glenn specifically linked the post where I defended my position on Japan, which is my most original contribution to the discussion. She says:
By all means though, please see Bb's post for a rundown of her anti-war position. The Zoo Just got back from the zoo - it was a zoo: crowded, hot sunny, smelly. Also, it was "Ugly People Half-Price Day," so there were a lot of those. We tried to get the deal but they said, "No way - we're talking U-G-L-Y - like him," pointing to a 500 lb man with no skin. "Now that's ugly - you get in free sir." One of the big differences between Ohio and California is that everyone is a little bit uglier here: the fat people are 15 lbs heavier, the oddly pale people are a shade whiter, everyone's a little flabbier, a little less in shape, a lot less hip. People in California know in the back of their minds that they are being watched at all times so they try a little harder. You never know when they might be making a movie in your backyard or somewhere. One time when I lived in Hermosa in the early-80s, I looked under the bed to get a magazine and they were shooting an episode of Thirty-Something so I had to go in there and help them - good thing I was in shape and everything. So anyway, the zoo is fun with little kids - Lily, and Dawn's niece and nephew. They get excited about the monkeys and the lions and the snakes and lizards - even the butterflies - but I have mixed feelings about all of those big wild creatures confined to their little spaces. Those orangutans always look so sad sitting there like lumps, or hiding from the world with burlap sacks over their heads. It's just gotta be better in the wild. I know most of the little critters don't know any better and they're fine, but the big ones and the smart ones have to be pretty miserable. I hear they give them antidepressants - probably for the best. Rattling Cages We are off to the zoo with the kiddies: we are going to laugh at those below us on the evolutionary chart, throw straws and bubblegum in the cages, feed them all popcorn and cotton candy, and get sunburned. Back in a while with a victim report. Have a nice day. Friday, August 09, 2002
Fighting Fantasy Folding rather neatly into my characterizations of radical Islam, Japan's divine nationalism, and fascism as contagions of the mind is this remarkable article by Lee Harris in Policy Review:
....This power of the fantasist is entirely traceable to the fact that, for him, the other is always an object and never a subject. A subject, after all, has a will of his own, his own desires and his own agenda; he might rather play the flute instead of football. And anyone who is aware of this fact is automatically put at a disadvantage in comparison with the fantasist — the disadvantage of knowing that other people have minds of their own and are not merely props to be pushed around. ....But what happens when it is not an individual who is caught up in his fantasy world, but an entire group — a sect, or a people, or even a nation? That such a thing can happen is obvious from a glance at history. The various chiliastic movements, such as those studied in Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium (Harper & Row, 1961), are splendid examples of collective fantasy; and there is no doubt that for most of history such large-scale collective fantasies appear on the world stage under the guise of religion. ....symbols by themselves do not create the fantasy. There must first be a preexisting collective need for this fantasy; this need comes from a conflict between a set of collective aspirations and desires, on one hand, and the stern dictates of brutal reality, on the other — a conflict in which a lack of realism is gradually transformed into a penchant for fantasy. History is replete with groups that seem to lack the capability of seeing themselves as others see them, differing in this respect much as individuals do. A fantasy ideology is one that seizes the opportunity offered by such a lack of realism in a political group and makes the most of it. This it is able to do through symbols and rituals, all of which are designed to permit the members of the political group to indulge in a kind of fantasy role-playing. Classic examples of this are easy to find: the Jacobin fantasy of reviving the Roman Republic, Mussolini’s fantasy of reviving the Roman Empire, Hitler’s fantasy of reviving German paganism in the thousand-year Reich.
....In reviewing these fantasy ideologies, especially those associated with Nazism and Italian fascism, there is always the temptation for an outside observer to regard their promulgation as the cynical manipulation by a power-hungry leader of his gullible followers. This is a serious error, for the leader himself must be as much steeped in the fantasy as his followers: He can only make others believe because he believes so intensely himself. ....Yet even the most sensitively crafted myth requires something more in order to take root in the imagination of large populations — and this was where Mussolini made his great innovation. For the Sorelian myth to achieve its effect it had to be presented as theater. It had to grab the spectators and make them feel a part of the spectacle. The Sorelian myth, in short, had to be embodied in a fantasy — a fantasy with which the “audience” could easily and instantly identify. The willing suspension of disbelief, which Coleridge had observed in the psychology of the normal theatergoer, would be enlisted in the service of the Sorelian myth; and in the process, it would permit the myth-induced fantasy to override the obvious objections based on mundane considerations of reality. Thus twentieth century Italians became convinced that they were the successors of the Roman Empire in the same way that a member of a theater audience is convinced that Hamlet is really talking to his deceased father’s ghost. ....The terror attack of 9-11 was not designed to make us alter our policy, but was crafted for its effect on the terrorists themselves: It was a spectacular piece of theater. The targets were chosen by al Qaeda not through military calculation — in contrast, for example, to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor — but entirely because they stood as symbols of American power universally recognized by the Arab street. They were gigantic props in a grandiose spectacle in which the collective fantasy of radical Islam was brought vividly to life: A mere handful of Muslims, men whose will was absolutely pure, as proven by their martyrdom, brought down the haughty towers erected by the Great Satan. What better proof could there possibly be that God was on the side of radical Islam and that the end of the reign of the Great Satan was at hand? ....It means, in a strange sense, that while we are at war with them, they are not at war with us — and, indeed, it would be an enormous improvement if they were. If they were at war with us, they would be compelled to start thinking realistically, in terms of objective factors such as overall strategic goals, war aims, and so forth. They would have to make a realistic, and not a fantasy-induced, assessment of the relative strength of us versus them. But because they are operating in terms of their fantasy ideology, such a realistic assessment is impossible for them. It matters not how much stronger or more powerful we are than they — what matters is that God will bring them victory. ....There is one decisive advantage to the “evildoer” metaphor, and it is this: Combat with evildoers is not Clausewitzian war. You do not make treaties with evildoers or try to adjust your conduct to make them like you. You do not try to see the world from the evildoers’ point of view. You do not try to appease them, or persuade them, or reason with them. You try, on the contrary, to outwit them, to vanquish them, to kill them. You behave with them in the same manner that you would deal with a fatal epidemic — you try to wipe it out. So perhaps it is time to retire the war metaphor and to deploy one that is more fitting: the struggle to eradicate disease. The fantasy ideologies of the twentieth century, after all, spread like a virus in susceptible populations: Their propagation was not that suggested by John Stuart Mill’s marketplace of ideas — fantasy ideologies were not debated and examined, weighed and measured, evaluated and compared. They grew and spread like a cancer in the body politic. For the people who accepted them did not accept them as tentative or provisional. They were unalterable and absolute. And finally, after driving out all other competing ideas and ideologies, they literally turned their host organism into the instrument of their own poisonous and deadly will. The same thing is happening today — and that is our true enemy. The poison of the radical Islamic fantasy ideology is being spread all over the Muslim world through schools and through the media, through mosques and through the demagoguery of the Arab street. In fact, there is no better way to grasp the full horror of the poison than to listen as a Palestinian mother offers her four-year-old son up to be yet another victim of this ghastly fantasy. ....Let there be no doubt about it. The fantasy ideologies of the twentieth century were plagues, killing millions and millions of innocent men, women, and children. The only difference was that the victims and targets of such fantasy ideologies so frequently refused to see them for what they were, interpreting them as something quite different — as normal politics, as reasonable aspirations, as merely variations on the well-known theme of realpolitik, behaving — tragically enough — no differently from Montezuma when he attempted to decipher the inexplicable enigma posed by the appearance of the Spanish conquistadors. Nor did the fact that his response was entirely human make his fate any less terrible. Naipaul Pulls No Punches The Nobel Prize for Literature for 2001 was awarded to the British writer of Indian descent, born in Trinidad, V. S. Naipaul. A complex heritage indeed. There is a new interview with Naipaul in the Times Online:
Did his travels give him any inkling of the possibility of the attacks of September 11? “I’ve been aware of madness in the Islamic world. I’ve written about it. The madness of people who have fallen behind technically, and who do not have the will to make the intellectual effort to catch up. I was aware of the religious hatred, I was aware of the indifference to life. I was aware of the anti-civilisation aspect of the new fundamentalism. But I had no idea it had gone so far — the madness. The idea of their strength is an illusion. Nothing is coming from within. The terrorists can fly a plane, but what they can’t do is build a plane. What they can’t do is build those towers. I think people have spoken much rubbish about that event. The poor revenging themselves on the rich! It’s nothing but an aspect of religious hatred. And that is so hard to deal with, or even contemplate. You can deal with the poor striking out, but you can’t deal with the threat of a universal religious war.” Shame and Nausea I don't link Victor Davis Hanson that often anymore because everyone else and their second-cousins do it anyway, and the dude - while a rock of reason and moral sense in a wishy-washy world - tends to repeat himself, repeat himself. But I don't think we can hear something like this often enough:
Palestine, in contrast, is a Potemkin democracy, with the sham facade of elections and republicanism but the dreary reality of an uninterrupted dictatorship since its inception under the Oslo accords. Arafat's initial election was rigged and the absence since then of a real opposition, parliamentary debate, and an independent judiciary proves that - along with the creation of a corrupt clique of hangers-on and often-murderous sycophants. The nature of the Palestinian Authority in and of itself lies at the heart of the entire crisis. Of course, there are sober and responsible leaders in Palestine, but they have no chance to come to the fore through a democratic and legitimate process.
Jewish children do not march in parades with plastic M-16s and helicopters strapped to their tummies; Palestinian kids have been filmed dressed up with toy explosives. Arabs are far safer walking in Israel than are Jews on the West Bank. ....Mr. Atta's crew mouthed gibberish not like Jewish extremists, but identically to Islamic fundamentalists who seek jihad, are promised virgins, and win popular acclaim in Arab countries for blowing apart Western civilians. No wonder Israelis mourned September 11, while many Palestinians cheered; the evil of the World Trade Center resonated with the Israeli public even as it was either condoned or praised by the Palestinian street.
By the way, have you noticed how much VDH looks like Charlton Heston? "I Don't Mean to Brag, I Don't Mean to Boast..." Ginger gets jiggy apropos Superman, laughed at in sophisticated intergalactic circles for "his little worm." Schmitt and Donnelly Say Baghdad Not Mogadishu - Saddam Squirms - Neighbors Scurry Writing in the Weekly Standard:
The Bush administration has threatened to use military force to oust Saddam, who has barred U.N. weapons inspectors from returning to the country. Iraq remains under tight U.N. sanctions until inspectors certify Saddam no longer has chemical, nuclear or biological weapons or the missiles to deliver them. The sanctions were imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, eventually touching off the 1991 war. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Thursday that the Iraqi government hadn't given "an inch" toward meeting U.N. demands for the return of the inspectors. "I don't see any change in attitude," he said.
If war comes, Iraq's best option is to try to force the United States to fight it in the cities, the official said. Saddam knows that the high civilian casualties caused by urban combat is distasteful to the Americans and their European allies. Urban warfare also limits the utility of precision air strikes, as U.S. bombers try to avoid collateral damage to civilian buildings. Also Thursday, an Iraqi dissident leader said he does not foresee any need for a prolonged U.S. military effort because support for Saddam among Iraqis has evaporated. The neighbors are falling in line, according to Jim Hoagland:
These meetings follow reports on official Iranian Web sites that Tehran has recently rejected personal appeals from Saddam Hussein to return Iraqi jet fighters flown out to safety during the Gulf War and to sell Iraq arms and other materiel to repel an imminent U.S. attack. Turkey's military establishment is also content to watch the Iraqi dictator twist in the windstorm. Reports from Ankara suggest that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz's July visit achieved informal understandings of Turkish-U.S. military cooperation in toppling Saddam Hussein. Turkey's politicians, wrestling their way through an economic crisis, are also positioning the nation for war next winter. They have moved up parliamentary elections to Nov. 3 and passed an ambitious legal package of human rights reforms that will improve the lot of Turkey's Kurdish minority. Ankara's relationship with the Kurds in eastern Turkey and northern Iraq was a major topic during Wolfowitz's visit. Turkey gives every sign of having taken Wolfowitz's assurances seriously and having chosen sides. Iraq's weaker neighbors above all avoid the appearance of having chosen. Jordan's King Abdullah is operating in full-panic mode, loudly proclaiming the United States will not be allowed to use bases in his country and arguing against an attack. The Saudis send the same message more subtly but with as much fear and trembling. Such posturing is prudent at this point in a war of nerves. Neither Jordan nor Saudi Arabia wants to give Iraq a pretext for new aggression before the United States is ready. But if the windstorm turns into a real storm next winter, no government near the path of destruction can afford to be unresponsive to U.S. war needs and goals. That would be choosing suicide. "Say It Loud, I'm Black and Hateful" Aaron really is a nightmare: an intelligent black man who somehow still buys into the "identify with our suppressed brethren in the Middle East via the American Black Muslim door because they are Muslim and Black Muslims are Muslim [of a sort] and I am black so when they are done with my Palestinian and Iraqi brethren they may come after me." You are an American, that's all that counts. No one else would identify you with any non-American unless the term "African-American" ties you to that continent. This race to identify with the "suppressed underdog" anywhere on earth regardless of heinousness of ideology went out with the Black Panthers. Let me guess: favorite poet - Amiri Baraka? Let us not be blind to victims but let us also not seek victimization as a shield from personal responsibility. Lastly, how dare you imply Dawn is racist when racism oozes from your every pore? So much to offer, so little to say. Were you beaten by your white keepers as a child? Fight the power, fool. UPDATE No, it isn't the site name (which I thought was funny), it's the mixture of self-pity and contempt dripping all over everything. And you can quote George Wallace and David Duke and it wouldn't mean squat. View people as people and drop the race card. Illegal Downunder Chas Rich notes that if Howard Berman's Copyright/Hacking Bill passes, those who attempt to enforce it will be criminals in Australia:
Californian Democrat congressman Howard Berman has proposed legislation to deal with the rising tide of copyrighted works illicitly traded over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks such as KaZaA. ... Under section 9a of the Victorian Summary Offences Act (1966), "a person must not gain access to, or enter, a computer system or part of a computer system without lawful authority to do so". The penalty if convicted is up to six months' jail. Crow Tools What does this do to the intelligence chart?
The feat, it is said, makes her the first animal other than a human that has shown a clear understanding of cause and effect, and fashioned a tool for a specific task using new materials not encountered in the wild. Not even chimpanzees, our closest cousins, have this ability. ....Professor Alex Kacelnik, who heads the research group, said: "First she tried to get the food with the straight wire, and couldn't reach it. So she pushed the tip of the wire in a crack in the tray and bent it to form a hook. She then used this to get the food. "We were somewhat surprised. To verify that what we'd observed was not a fluke, we tested the same animal again but only gave her a straight wire. Nine times out of 10 she solved the problem to perfection. "What is more, she didn't do it the same way each time. Sometimes she stood on the wire with one foot while pulling the tip with her beak. "Or she stuck the wire into a crevice and worked on it, coming from different angles. If it didn't work right at first, and she couldn't get the food, she'd take it out and fix it so that it did." ....Professor Kacelnik said just because Betty was a gifted tool-maker, it did not mean she was necessarily bright in other areas. "What we believe is that there isn't a single kind of intelligence," he told the UK's Press Association. "Different species have developed different kinds of intelligence appropriate to their particular needs." UPDATE Ken Layne was sent into an avian rhapsody by this story - you will never look at a crow the same way again. MP3's and Sympathy For the Industry Greg Beato thinks the record industry is getting a raw deal in the blogs:
I slipped into your RIAA questions round-up a few days ago with a pro-industry post about Pressplay.com and Listen.com's Rhapsody service that I hoped might provoke a little discussion re: the fact that the music industry is not nearly so static as its critics perceive it to be. I.E., people are asking why the music industry won't even consider Janis Ian's 25 cents a download proposal, when in fact they're actually offering what are arguably much better deals already via the two services I mention above. Alas, my post didn't seem to have any impact, so i went a little further and wrote a piece about these services at my site soundbitten.com. the gist: how come no one in the blogosphere is talking about these services, even if only to explain why they come up short? if you're not familiar with them, basically they offer unlimited, on-demand, CD-quality streaming of catalogs that consist of thousands of artists and songs. For $10 a month. While they certainly have shortcomings, they also represent what I consider to be a significant effort by the music industry to create digital music services that (a) offer fans real value, and (b) are built upon a business model that's more realistic than "let's give away our songs and hope we sell a lot of t-shirts!" ....if you haven't tried these services yet, I encourage you to do so. Both have free trial periods, and who knows -- maybe you can get a group rate for your blogcritics.com project. (for $10 a month, it's like Lexis-Nexis for music critics -- if you're reviewing the latest Bruce Springsteen album, you've got immediate access to over 100 of his previous songs...this doesn't work for every artist, of course, but when it does work, it's pretty great.)
Glenn Reynolds is yodeling defiantly about "record companies [that] have been assaulting music-sharing systems so vigorously" simply to maintain "their stranglehold on promotion and distribution." Janis Ian is warbling softly about the RIAA, the American Dream, and "a general strike" against the music industry: "Just one week of people refusing to play the radio, buy product, or support our industry in any way would flex muscles they have no idea are out there…" Doc Searls is singing the blues about the premature death of Internet radio and an absence of "low-friction" ways to financially support radio stations that aren't in the business of selling consumers to advertisers. As indefatigable as a super-elite squadron of boy-band members, such critics belt out their grievances with great style and enthusiasm -- and still the greedy record industry refuses to listen to them! For years now, music fans have complained that commercial radio sucks. For years now, music fans have railed against $18.98 CDs that contain one good track and 14 lousy ones. For years now, music fans have been terrorized and persecuted by RIAA henchmen who insist that previewing new music via MP3 file-sharing is the most malignant form of piracy ever devised. And how has the music industry responded? With pointless copy-protection schemes and endless litigation. Its latest affront to fans? Comprehensive, low-priced digital music services like Pressplay.com, Listen.com's Rhapsody, and the RealOne MusicPass. Janis Ian, Glenn Reynolds, and Doc Searls are apparently too smart to be taken in by the sleazy, Big Entertainment schemers behind these ventures, because they seem to be ignoring them altogether.
Some services, like Listen.com's Rhapsody service, offer "streaming," meaning that the music doesn't reside on your computer. Others, like Pressplay and MusicNet, offer downloads instead, but they limit the number you can have each month. "None of these services seems to know what the consumer demand is for," Sinnreich says. For a subscription service to work, he thinks it needs to offer four features: content from all five record labels; the capacity to play songs from as many computers as you like; CD burning, for an incremental fee; and "no limitation on the number of songs you listen to in a month -- you have to make them feel like they're getting a lot." As they're currently designed, none of the services let you feel that way. Listen's $10-per-month Rhapsody service has a fantastic interface, and, since it has content from all five labels, you can find much of what you'd like on it. The Norah Jones CD was there, and with a broadband connection it streamed over beautifully. You can listen to any song as often as you'd like -- an option that gives a taste of what a perfect subscription service would feel like. The only trouble is, Listen won't let you burn -- and, as one file trader asked, "Who wants to be stuck listening to shit at their computer?" A Listen spokesman says that the company is working on offering CD burning, but the licensing issues make it difficult right now. Pressplay, on the other hand, does let you burn a limited number of tracks, depending on how much you pay. The $15-per-month plan, for example, lets you burn 10 tracks, though you can't have more than two from the same artists per disc. (Though he didn't provide details, a representative for Pressplay said that the company would soon unveil a new version, and the company's pricing model would change "significantly.") Pressplay's catalog is lean, though, too lean to pay much for. And its many rules, like the many rules of all these systems, have a way of sticking in your craw; as you keep using the system, and it keeps telling you how much less "credit" you have, it's hard not to get annoyed and wonder why you ever left the land of the free. According to the subscription services, their limitations can be traced back to licensing deals with the record labels. There isn't any uniformity to it; different labels release different catalogs to different services, with varying restrictions and at confusing price scales. For example, subscription services must pay more to the labels to offer a download than a stream, even though, on a broadband connection, there is hardly a difference between the two -- and the stream, which can be played on many machines, may in fact be preferable if the download can only be played on one machine, which is a common restriction. Why do the labels have these restrictions? It smacks of old-style thinking -- an inability to recognize that the longer they delay these services, the bigger, and more out of control, trading will become. Glenn Reynolds questions the viability of MP3's as a long-term music storage method:
Maybe I'm wrong about that, but when I really like music, I want hardcopy, not just hard-drive copy. Perhaps there will be a technological fix. In the meantime, CDs have actually gotten pretty damned cheap -- until you factor in the markup needed to pay for record execs' cocaine and fancy cars. And the DIY, more-or-less nonprofit approach to music may be what kills big labels, one tiny bite at a time. When you look at the people willing to operate rock clubs on an effectively nonprofit basis, you have to wonder: as the population becomes richer, and has more leisure time, perhaps all sorts of activities will move from the for-profit to the not-really-for-profit sector. Sheila Lennon with the Providence Journal website (and a member of Blogcritics.com I might add) has an innovative system for bands and MP3's:
Today, it's all back. New bands can again create pages with mp3s they own the rights to, and add photos and links to their websites; bands already on the site can finally update their mp3s with new tunes. (If you don't know how to make an mp3, get your CD to me with this form and I'll rip it myself.) Readers will again be able to hear what a band sounds like before they pop for the cover at a club. We created this mp3 site for the readers, local musicians and fans (including ourselves). It's all free, there are no strings. If you know of any Southern New England bands who want to get their tunes out, please tell them to check it out. UPDATE Greg Beato replies: hey Eric, Thanks for posting some of my comments. You know, I think it that Salon article by Manjoo was actually the thing that finally got me to check out Pressplay.com and Rhapsody when it appeared about a week ago. Manjoo makes them sound pretty underwhelming, but it's also pretty clear that he's squarely in the anti-record industry camp, and determined to see the proverbial cup as half-empty. for anyone who is dead-set on demonizing the music industry as a rationale for amassing a music collection without having to pay for it, i can understand how they might say otherwise. but for someone who understands that a never-ending supply of free music is just as fanciful a notion as the notion that digital tracks should cost $1.50 a piece, these services are a huge step forward. As for MP3s vs. CDs and permanence vs. ephemeralness, well, I don't think it has to be an either/or scenario. Arnold Kling at corante.com is right that CDs will become less and less of a factor -- but just as you can still buy vinyl if you really want to, there will continue to be some kind of CD market for people who want to have a "permanent" fixed digital copy of a song. but as MP3 players and cell phones and radios become net-enabled, there will be less and less a need for this as a streamable copy of any song you want will always be one click away...(as for quality, right now, with Rhapsody's 128 kbps streams, I can't really tell any difference.) The other big thing about these services is that even if they never evolve into a viable downloading solution (i.e., something you can use to make CDs), they still answer the two major rationales for unauthorized file-trading ("I want to preview new music before buying it..." and "I use MP3s the same way I use radio -- I listen to the songs, but that doesn't mean I'd ever buy them.") In other words, if they fail to catch on, then that sends a pretty clear message to the music industry, which is basically: "You know what? That stuff about previewing tracks, and a new form of radio? We were lying! We just want free music." and who knows, maybe people really do just want music for free, and aren't willing to pay anyone -- record companies, artists, etc. -- for it. i think that will have bad consequences for music production in general (just as i think news media for free will have bad consequences for journalism...) in the meantime, it seems like music industry criticism has become such a kneejerk reaction amongst fans and commentators that it has in effect blinded them. janis ian is asking for 25 cent downloads when what's arguably a much more reasonably priced alternative actually exists already. glenn reynolds is holding up mp3.com as an alternative to "Big Entertainment" when in fact it's owned by Vivendi Universal. Farhad Manjoo apparently thinks that getting instantaneous, high-quality streams is somehow "far from fun" even when the alternative includes getting mislabeled, half-downloaded, low-fidelity MP3s via file-trading networks like Bearshare and LimeWire. Anyway, enough from me. It's time to listen to some Janis Ian. I don't know if she knows it or not, but three of her albums are available on Rhapsody...and instead of paying 25 cents a track to listen to them, i can listen to them all for 33 cents (i.e., that's what it costs per day to subscribe...) best, greg
I was underwhelmed by Pressplay, and though I think Listen.com's Rhapsody is a great service for people who mostly listen to music on their computers, I'd call it perfect if it offered either burning or MP3 device portability. Pressplay recently revamped its pricing model; I haven't tried the new service, but it sounds like a major advance. I'm not sure, though, if it allows you to take your downloads off your machine -- I think they don't, which is a shame. Also, none of the services have all the artists. I'm not sure I'd ever pay for anything without The Beatles or Radiohead. If Beato likes these services, that's fine; but I suspect he's not representative of the majority of music fans, who want a service that seems like it offers more than you could ever use. There's no question as to the kind of system people want: they want Napster and Audiogalaxy, not Pressplay. If the music industry were smart, it would have bought AudioGalaxy for $10 million, changed nothing about how it works, and gated the whole system for a $20 monthly fee. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I don't see why that wouldn't work. The industry blames file trading for a 10 percent drop in CD sales; I'm sure this system would have at least made up that money, and probably a lot more. Industry-defenders can kick and scream and say that such a system will never work because people would just start e-mailing each other songs, or they'll use the free traders, or something else. But perhaps one sign that the industry is so stuck in the mud on this thing is that it never even thought of doing that; what would it have cost them to try? They could have done a one-month experiment on AudioGalaxy ... but no such luck. Beato says "Farhad Manjoo apparently thinks that getting instantaneous, high-quality streams is somehow 'far from fun' even when the alternative includes getting mislabeled, half-downloaded, low-fidelity MP3s via file-trading networks like Bearshare and LimeWire." But I didn't mean that Pressplay and Rhapsody offered less fun than Limewire and Bearshare; I meant they're less fun than Audiogalaxy and Napster, they're less fun than what you want in music. Nothing in file-trading is fun anymore -- I spent an hour on Limewire yesterday getting Bruce Springsteen's new album, something that would have taken me five minutes with Audiogalaxy. But none of the pay systems have the album, so I had no choice. I wonder which part of this situation Beato would call "fun." The album's good, and when I leave work today, I'm going to buy the CD. Thursday, August 08, 2002
LAUNCH NEWS FOR BLOGCRITICS.COM I have received a wealth of excellent material from our Blogcritics contributors - this is going to really be something. We are all over the place stylistically, musically, tonally, and every other -ally you can think of. I can't wait for the launch. THE LAUNCH - we will launch the site next Tuesday, August 13, and WE HAVE CONFIRMED Cary H. Sherman, the No. 2 person at the RIAA (President and General Counsel) for a live online interview FOR TUESDAY'S LAUNCH. I have to confirm final details with Mr. Sherman tomorrow, but all looks GREAT. We will have to submit questions in advance, and there are issues still not resolved within the organization and thus not open for discussion, but this will be an amazing meeting of the minds. There is still time to submit your questions in the comment section here or on the original post here. Please spread the word about the launch and the MEETING OF THE MINDS! Basic Blogcritics.com facts here and here. Turning Japanese, I Really Think So Now, I have used canned expressions regarding the general theory of war/no war against Iraq et al because I have nothing particularly novel to add. I buy the pro-war line essentially whole. My philosophical opponents have also offered nothing new by way of anti-war theory: it's my Steyn against your Fisk, my Hanson against your Said, my National Review (and New Republic for that matter) against your Guardian. The only original content I have delivered in this matter has been in explicitly conflating the postwar experience of Japan with that which is hoped for in the Arab/Islamic world. I will revisit this area. Jonathan Delacour is dismissive:
Nothing could be further from the truth. (And one can't help noting the irony in the fact that Eric buttresses his argument with totally conventional, left-wing Japanese anti-war sentiment, which if it was uttered by Americans, would attract only his derision.) Japan was infected with a divine nationalism bug which became their religion, much as Nazism became Germany's national religion. The emperor is a direct descendant of the divine - he is a god - and it became Japan's duty to enlighten the world with this revelation, much as it is the Islamist's duty to enlighten and subjugate. Japan threw itself into this because honor demanded it, and honor is paramount in Japanese culture. In its zeal Japan committed atrocities and, puffed up with hubris, even attacked the United States. After a prolonged and bitter struggle, America finally prevailed after not one, but two atomic bombs were dropped killing hundreds of thousands. Nothing Alan Cook says here conflicts with anything I have said:
In an honor/shame society, defeat = shame, and this shame allowed the Japanese to reject the faith that had caused them the defeat. Delacour continues:
The ideals demonstrated themselves on a very objective and practical level through the Occupation reinforcing the appropriateness of the American victory. No one amongst the Japanese imagined a similar magnanimity toward losers had Japan prevailed. Yet, none of this would have been possible if Japan had not been soundly, thoroughly defeated. They started it, they gave it their all, they lost, time for a drastic change. No change without the loss, and the loss had to be total and beyond question: no "what if," no "yeah we lost but..." Total defeat clears away space in the collective brain for a total rethinking. You can explain it away all you want, but the fact that Japan lost brutally and decisively made them malleable to change. Period. The fact that the American occupation was not vindictive but constructive prevented the Japanese from transferring any guilt onto us. As to how the Japanese really feel: I overstated my original position to make a point. Though the Japanese are amazingly homogeneous, they are not monlithic. I was speaking in generalities and those generalities still hold: the Japanese accepted the fact that their ideology had led to disasterous defeat: they started it, they lost, the consequences were their own fault. My experiences in Japan were 23 and 14 years ago, so maybe the general tenor has changed and maybe a younger generation does feel sorry for themselves, but this has not been my experience. Nor has been that of Pontifex:
While I was in Japan, I had the opportunity to interview a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima. She was 5km from the blast area. She related the horrors of the bombing, very few of which I related above, to me. And the rest of it as well. Her message, she told me, was that nuclear weapons are horrible tools of destruction that should never be used. And she wanted that message to spread as far as it could. She told me that she was not angry at the Americans for what they had done. The Japanese had started the war. And the Japanese were working towards the same atomic weapons that we used -- which may suprise breathless Western journalists, but ah well. But she seemed plenty angry at her own government, for starting the war, and leaving the victims of it on their own.
What she meant was not that the Japanese had no belief system but rather that beliefs are something you put on and take off like a set of clothes. They realized that militarism had led to a catastrophic defeat at the hands of democratic America and so they thought, "Let's try democracy instead (particularly since the Americans are insisting that we do)." Or, more exactly, let's run American-style democracy through the Japanese blender and see what comes out. Exactly as they had done during the Meiji Restoration when, within a couple of decades, they replaced over three hundred years of Tokugawa autocracy with a complete social system based on British, French, and German models. The Japanese film director Tadashi Imai—whose career straddled the wartime years—provides a classic example of this peculiarly Japanese pragmatism. Imai made pro-Communist films before and after the war and pro-militarist films during it. The guilt and remorse the Japanese felt may have been totally directed inward - "Look what we did to ourselves! How could we have been so stupid?" - but it is guilt and remorse nonetheless. How else to explain the lack of resentment toward the U.S.? How would you feel toward the perpetrators if your country had been ruined and two of your cities vaporized if you still thought your cause was right? Massive resentment, which is not to be found. The only possible explanation is that the Japanese blame themselves, or at least their government and the system that led to this destruction, and not the messengers - us. How does this transfer to the Arab/Islamic world? Not perfectly - no real world analogies are perfect, and those who say the Arab/islamic world is divided and diverse are correct. BUT, the problem - Islamist militancy - is exactly what binds these diverse elements together and is exactly what needs to be utterly defeated and discredited so that an ideological transformation, similar but not identical, to that of the Japanese, can be effected. Only calamity can cause the needle to jump out of the groove, and we must cause that calamity and cause it soon. Dean Jumps In Burningbird senses a weariness on my part to engage in a point by point debate. This is so because I sense we have no common ground whatsoever. That is why I have presented detailed overviews on the various issues: they indicate where I am coming from. As Dean has said: "We are talking past each other." But Dean - bless him - has entered the fray:
Your most important basis is the absence of international law supporting an invasion. This point, alone, is easily worth an entire blog, but let me suggest the following: Most importantly, Saddam Hussein's previous intransigence regarding inspections has left him in violation of at least some of the UNSC resolutions passed at the time of the Gulf War. Zunes and company would disagree, but DoState and DoD would agree w/ me. So, at some level, there IS an international law-based argument for war. But, one could also argue that international law does not exist, in the manner domestic law does. Law is rooted upon a common polity's understanding of the rules under which all of its members will live. In that regard, there is no common global polity. There are statements that many claim to live by, but the reality is that those "commonly accepted principles" are far more often observed in the breach. Take, for example, the presumed human right of freedom of speech, properly limited (i.e., no shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater). Is freedom of speech a universal right? The UN Declaration of Human Rights would make it appear so. Yet, realistically, how many nations abide by this? I'm not even going to claim that we do, necessarily. The point is, if "international law" is to mean anything, it has to have some modicum of universal acceptance. I would therefore submit that your "no international law basis" is, in fact, insufficient to bar US action, or even inaccurate, insofar as the US actually DOES have a legal basis for its intervention. (Would it change your mind if the UNSC approved a war?) ----------------------------------------- Another problem is your claim that we would be conducting an invasion/operation with no allied support at all. Or, as you put it, "At this point we would, literally, be an invading army surrounded by enemies, in a land that we don't know, separated by great distances from a base of support. All of this without the support of most of the world, including many strong allies." Let me first caution you that public pronouncements and actual reality are often at odds. Analysis by pundits (including yours truly) are even less trustworthy(!!). That being said, It is hardly clear we'd be doing so w/o allies. Looking at a map of the region, one can conclude that Bahrain and Turkey are almost certainly on-board. Based on public reports, Qatar is on-board. Kuwait is likely on-board. Jordan may well be on-board. Even Syria may well be on-board. Access to just SOME of these states would provide us w/ significant infrastructure. Think about Kurdish territories, about US facilities in Central Asia, and the possibilities become even more numerous. Your reference to Afghanistan is notable, since prior to the beginning of operations, similar claims were made: Iran would oppose us, Pakistan would be closed to us, the Russians would never sanction the use of Central Asian states' facilities, etc., etc. What actually happened? Iran de facto cooperated w/ the US in its operations in Afghanistan (not least because they hated the Taliban more, just as they rather dislike Saddam), and are today divided on whether to become friendlier w/ us, rather than united against us. Certainly, they did not actually oppose us, whatever the more religious mullahs declared (another example of the difference between what is SAID and what is DONE). Pakistan, today, is LESS of a hotbed of Wahhabi-ist schemings than it was in, say, August 2001, if only because Musharraf has felt compelled (and enabled) to crack down on the ISI. The Central Asian states opened their borders to us, and the Russians, far from opposing, are more closely aligned w/ us. Criticisms of the US from the Duma, which were somewhat louder last year, are far more muted today. ------------------ Your comment on not winning provides an indication of your view of this debate. As far as I can tell, you have NO definition of winning. Killing Hussein is not winning, reordering Iraq's political situation is not winning. If I were to agree w/ your strategic calculus, I'd agree that there was no point in fighting a war either. But I don't, and therefore, at a fundamental level, we are talking past each other. But let me point out a simple reality: IF Saddam Hussein had been toppled, be it in 1991 at the end of the Gulf War, or sometime during President Clinton's administration, then maybe 9-11 wouldn't have happened, at least according to Osama bin Laden. Why do I say that? Think about bin Laden's purported three reasons for 9-11: 1. Sanctions on Iraq. If Saddam had been eliminated, it is hard to imagine that the resulting government, in all likelihood in chaos, and probably under US domination/guidance, would have denied inspectors access to Presidential palaces (built for Saddam) or had the wherewithal to continue any WMD program. And the US/UN would hardly have kept sanctions in place, as a result. 2. US troops in Saudi. Why are they there? To keep Saddam out. No Saddam, no troops in Saudi. I mean, think about it. There were NO US troops in Saudi prior to 1990. And that was w/ a Soviet AND an Iranian threat at the time. Why'd they be there now, if there were no Saddam. 3. Israeli-Palestinian fighting. While this would have been underway regardless, let me suggest that the absence of $25K bounties to families of "martyrs" from Saddam's agents would represent a significant decrease in incentives for martyring yourself. And it would represent fewer funds for training suicide bombers, manufacturing them, etc. All three of these considerations are still in play. So, at a minimum, eliminating Saddam (and hierarchy) would represent, for me, one heckuva win. "It Starts in Baghdad" Now, back to Iraq. Shelley very carefully, logically, and not without eloquence presents a case against war with Iraq, etc., that is so diametrically opposed to my own as to be breathtaking. Our perspective on what nominally could be called the same set of "facts" are so alien as to proceed from different dimensons. The bulk of Shelley's argument is this:
I could continue with other reasons why we can't legally invade Iraq. However, there's an FPIF report that lists these, so I'll submit this now as part of my argument, open to rebuttal of course. As a personal summation, though, I did want to add that no matter how much we believe that Saddam Hussein is planning heinous actions, and no matter how sure we are that he's financing terrorism, if we act in violation of international law (law that we have relied on in the past), then we have become, in efft, the world's worst nightmare -- a US no longer bound and constrained by law. If we have no legal basis for an invasion, we have no strategic basis either. If we invade Iraq, we will do so without the support of any ally in that area (except Israel). This means that the invasion must be managed without the support of many of our current military installations in the region. In addition, the bonds between the differing Arab countries, loose bonds at the best of times, will strengthen and we will, most likely, see other countries in the region 'side' with Iraq, even though traditionally they may not agree with Hussein. At this point we would, literally, be an invading army surrounded by enemies, in a land that we don't know, separated by great distances from a base of support. All of this without the support of most of the world, including many strong allies. As an example of our experience with invasion into a country in the Middle East, let's examine our intervention in Afghanistan. Though our intervention there was in conjunction with an ongoing struggle, with nominal approval of the people in the region, it has been less than successful. In fact, we are still rooting out Al-Queda members, and the political situation in the country runs from fragile to fragile, week after week. And this despite the facts that the invasion of Afghanistan occurred with help and support from surrounding countries, and with at least tepid approval from most of our allies. Now we're more or less permanently committed to the region because if we leave in the forseeable future, chances are the country will destablize -- as happened to give the Taliban power in Afghanistan in the first place. Eric, there's a reason why the military has been against the invasion of Iraq. From a purely dispassionate viewpoint, there is no advantage to the US or to Israel to invade Irag now. Strategically, we won't win. We might bomb the hell out of the country, but we won't win. We might kill Saddam Hussein, or capture him, but we won't win. All we'll do is kill a whole lot of people, massively damage the country, destablize the region, create a whole group of new enemies, force more people into the underground as terrorists, and build yet more reason to fight a new battle, this one taken to the streets and the buildings and the churches and the schools of the US. Ultimately, when you seek to defeat and humiliate a foe using superior force, he will use any means -- any means -- to fight back. He does not become malleable. Strategically, there is no short-term or long-term advantage to the US or to Israel to invading Iraq in violation of international law, and without support of allies. As much as many of you despise the UN, our best approach, at this time and with our current knowledge of the situation in the Middle East, is to work with the UN security council.
There are three possible ways we can go about protecting ourselves. The first is to individually protect targets and citizens here at home. We would call this the defensive reaction. It would involve more careful screening of whom we let into the country, stronger security at our borders, more stringent security measures in our everyday lives, (identity cards, mass fingerprinting/DNA recording, more) no private encryption, frequent check points, and so on. It would involve physical barriers with guarded gates around important potential targets, probably a ban on large gatherings of people, and other security practices that would most likely involve a large surrender of many civil rights we currently enjoy. And even so, we would still be pathetically open to attack. Terrorists - we called them "freedom fighters" - carried out successful missions in Nazi and Communist controlled countries where the nature of the police state was even more repressive than what I've just described. In other words, the defensive solution is no solution. Very well, what of the alternatives? A second possibility is to do nothing, and hope the threat goes away by itself. This is the European approach. It was also the US approach, until it became apparent the threat would not go away by itself, and that the threat was directed at us. Which leaves a third possibility that can best be summed up in the old chestnut: "The best defense is a good offense." In other words, fight the battle against terror on the territory of the terrorists as much as possible. But what, you say, is that territory? Don't terrorists, by their very nature, avoid the problems of territorial vulnerability that states suffer from? Yes and no. Yes, in that rarely do terrorist take over states, and if they do, at that point they cease being traditional terrorists and become state terrorists, another, and more easily attacked, kettle of fish. But even terrorists don't exist in limbo. They must have money, communications, weapons, places to train, places to hide, places to store up supplies and otherwise create the infrastructure that even a non-territorial organization needs to maintain effectiveness. And that is where real states come in. For various reasons, (usually of deniability or unpredictability), certain states find the ability to make use of terrorist organizations not directly controlled by themselves to be highly useful. And in order to make use of such groups, they offer to trade the things the terrorists need in return for the right to task the terrorists with missions favorable to their own goals and interests. Saddam Hussein's Iraq is such a nation. The documented connections between Hussein's regime and innumerable terror groups are legion. Even today, it is Iraqi and Saudi money that principally bankrolled the various Palestinian Arab terror groups - even to subsidizing the families of the suicide bombers. We also know that Saddam Hussein has no way to reach the US mainland short of making use of terror cells. Yet without the ability to threaten the US mainland, he has no leverage whatsoever against the US, should it decide to attack him. Therefore, as a quasi-rational actor, he would be insane not to attempt to make an alliance with anti-US terror groups, and use them as a means to threaten the US with the projection of his own power. If there is such a thing as a "root cause" of terror, it is not poverty or desperation, it is states that sponsor, succor, support, fund, and protect terrorists. Iraq is such a state, and its tyrant ruler, Saddam Hussein, is faced with an intolerable choice. If he cedes enough power to pacify the United States and her worries about him, then he will at the same time become too weak to maintain his own grip on the Iraqi tyranny he now controls absolutely. But if he doesn't cede this power, then the US will crush him. Either way, he loses. He is effectively in what Steven Den Beste and others have pointed out is the endgame of a war game scenario called tit-for-tat: If the US attacks Iraq, the game is over for him, and he might as well use everything in his arsenal, including his terror assets. Yet he has no way to dissuade the US from attacking him, short of ceding so much power he will be toppled anyway. For him, it is a lose-lose situation. He has only two options: Wait, and hope that some other force turns the US away from him (and do everything he can to help any such force develop, hence his support of Arafat and the others as a distraction), or launch his assets in what is sometimes called The Samson Option. From our point of view, it is inevitable that Saddam, if he remains in power, will eventually back terror attacks against the US mainland. He has probably already done so. Since our primary goal is to defend the US against such attacks, the best way to do so is to attack Saddam as soon as possible. Why as soon as possible? Because game theory tells us he will attack us us when we attack him, and he will do so with everything he has, even if the bid is suicidal. Obviously, the less he has, the better for us. If he doesn't have nukes yet, then that is one less threat he can try to deliver against us. What about ignoring him? I touched on this before. The big problem with that is that, aside from the probability he has already attacked us, we can never be certain he won't supply some terror group with the means to damage us badly on its own. Here's why: Just as we regard our ICBMs, nuclear submarines, and B-52 as strategic threats, able to project US power world-wide, so does Saddam regard access to terror cells as his own version of a strategic threat, with similar projection capabilities. Yet in order to maintain control of this threat, he must succor it. That's the trade they agree on - Saddam gives them money, supplies, shelter, equipment, and so forth, and they do his bidding. If he doesn't, they'll find somebody else who will. The end result of this is that it's inevitable something really nasty from Saddam's armories will wind up in terrorist hands, because they will demand it of him as the price of working for him. We can't allow that, because our primary goal is the defense of the United States. But the only way to prevent it is to cut the tree at its roots. Those roots are buried deep in the soil of Baghdad. Which is why we'll be going there soon, and the fires of hell will be going with us.
A deterrent fails either if your opponent doesn't care about it, or if he doesn't think you'll use it. There can be many reasons why he might think that, and he might be wrong. But if he misjudges the situation, attacks you and you do then use your deterrent, it may be satisfying but it didn't accomplish its mission of preventing the initial attack against you. It's something of a truism among those who serve on missile subs that they must at all times be ready to launch, but if they ever do then it means that their mission has failed. Their mission isn't to destroy an enemy, but to prevent an enemy from attacking us. Any time a deterrent can't reasonably be expected to work, then you must be willing to use other means and sometimes a preemptive attack is the most effective. Sometimes it's the only answer. Saddam is not suicidal. But he is arrogant, cruel, crafty, and totally contemptuous of us. He has underestimated us again and again. The policies of his government, and the way his government has tried to deal with us over the last 10 years have demonstrated a complete misunderstanding of what we are and what we're willing to do. The current negotiations about the inspectors demonstrates this clearly. Last September, in the wake of the attack against us, Bush made the Taliban what I referred to then as an "offer they can't accept". He demanded that the Taliban arrest bin Laden and turn him over to us unconditionally, and kick all traces of al Qaeda out of Afghanistan. As we all now know, this wasn't possible because by that point al Qaeda owned the Taliban and bin Laden was effectively the ruler of the Taliban-controlled parts of Afghanistan. al Qaeda troops made up the core of the army which was fighting against the Northern Alliance. bin Laden's money helped keep things going. We out here in the rest of the world didn't know these things, but I suspect that our government did. The Taliban were not able to comply with that demand. They tried making alternative offers, all of which were rejected. No, it's not acceptable for us to give our evidence to the Taliban for trial in an Afghan court. No, we won't accept a court in a neutral Muslim country, either. And so on. I believe that Bush knew full well that this was something the Taliban could not do, but it was politically important to make it look on the surface as if there had been a way out short of war for the Taliban prior to an American attack. By the same token, the current demand by the US and indirectly by the UN for the return of the weapons inspectors with unlimited and unfettered rights to search for and destroy WMDs and the equipment which produces them is a demand that I believe Iraq can't actually comply with. I cannot prove what follows but I'm willing to bet money on it: since the inspectors were ejected, Iraq has been going full-bore on development of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. I believe that they have substantial stocks of nerve gas, probably have weaponized anthrax but I do not believe they have yet produced a nuclear weapon. Their excuse for ejecting the inspectors was that the WMDs had all been found, there were none left, and that it was time to end the process and remove the economic sanctions. The reality is that the entire several-year process of weapons inspection was one big cat-and-mouse game with the Iraqis doing their best to hide what they had, but with the inspectors actually making some progress and finding things. Since the inspectors were ejected, the Iraqi line has been that they have none any more. I believe they are lying, and I believe that if true effective inspections were to begin again it would quickly become evident. What's been going on in the political maneuvering is that the Iraqis are trying to arrange a situation where the sanctions against them are partially or fully lifted before inspections begin again, and that the inspections will take place under circumstances which make it possible for the Iraqi government to again play cat-and-mouse. Among other things that they tried to insist on was the idea of a limited period, more or less "If you can't find where we've hidden them in three years, you have to give up and pretend they don't exist." Oh, and they also want a promise ahead of time that the US will not attack if they let the inspectors back. (To which Powell responded that the point wasn't inspection, it was disarmament. I understood what he meant: there's a difference between ineffectual inspections and ones which really find and destroy Iraq's WMDs, and there's been no indication yet that Iraq was willing to actually cooperate with the inspectors.) I do not think that this is the struggling of a desperate man, looking for some sort of compromise as was the case with the Taliban offers of various ways of having a meaningless show trial for bin Laden at which he'd be acquitted by a fixed court. I think that these proposals by the Iraqis are genuine, because I think they think we're stupid or gullible enough to agree to them. I think they actually believe that they can manipulate the situation so that the sanctions can be lifted and the threat of war removed without their actually having to give up their WMDs. Their recent proposal for members of the US Congress to come, and to bring with them any experts they wish, and to have three weeks to look around, was an example of that. It's ludicrous on its face; no-one can find anything in three weeks. But that was the point; Iraq was willing to risk that because it would look as if they were open to inspections without actually being so. The problem is two-fold: Saddam has some weapons of mass destruction and I believe he is actively working to acquire more of them, and also to acquire working nukes. Other nations have weapons like that but no intention of using them against us, which makes them at least tolerable (if uncomfortable). But I also believe he has the will to use them against us. He would not do so directly, as a formal act of the Iraqi government. If nerve gas is released in NYC or if Miami is nuked, then any nation formally taking credit for it will unquestionably regret it, and Saddam is realistic enough to know it. But if he thinks he can fool us, and deliver those weapons indirectly in such a way as to preserve plausible deniability, then I think he believes he can escape our response. In that case we have no deterrent. The way he'd do it is by leaking those weapons to a group like Hamas, or Hezbollah, or al Qaeda, or Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Berkeley, and let them take care of delivery, since they'd be quite happy to die during the process. With respect to a nuke, let's be clear that there is no direct defense. There are ways that such a weapon can be delivered to an American city which are virtually certain of succeeding, and almost impossible to detect. (No, I'm not going to say what they are.) If someone out there has a bomb and truly decides to use it against us, one of our cities will go away. The idea that we'd be able to stop the attack is not credible; we cannot rely on defense to save ourselves. We'd try, but we would probably fail. The best way to stop such an atttaqck is earlier in the chain. Once such weapons are in the hands of groups willing to make suicide attacks, our deterrent doesn't work against them. We have to stop the source of supply, and by far the most probable source of supply is Iraq. These things are not certainties. There's no proof available to me. What I have is a strong suspicion that Saddam may think he can get away with giving weapons like that to other groups to use against us, if he can manage to do so in a fashion sufficiently surreptitious and indirect so that we can't directly prove that they came from him, even though we'd have a strong suspicion of it. In that case, he would think we'd be paralyzed and wouldn't respond. If an enemy knows you have a deterrent but doesn't think you'll use it, you have no deterrent. That is the situation I think we have to preempt. And containment doesn't stop this, because smuggling is much too easy. Iraq has been smuggling thousands of tons of oil over the last few years; 500 kilos of nerve gas would be trivial. (The most likely smuggling route would be through Syria, and it's difficult to see how we could prevent it.) If we contain him, then he's free to continue to work to develop more and better weapons (including, eventually, nukes), and he's free to give them to others to use against us. He might not, and if he tries he might not succeed, but the stakes are too high in my opinion to take the chance. The risk and consequences of inaction, of letting him have that opportunity, are higher than the risks associated with attacking. I do not believe he can be assassinated, and I do not believe we can foment revolution or induce a coup. I think our only choices are containment and invasion, and I think containment is too risky, and only postpones the invasion. Because even if he is not willing to give those weapons to al Qaeda, what about Uday when he takes power? That man is supposed to be a raving maniac; no-one knows what he'll do. Those weapons are also dangerous against us in a direct war, but the longer we wait to attack, the more and better weapons he'll have. It's already too late to take Saddam out without any risk of their use, but though there is a substantial risk of them being used against us now if we attack, the risk rises if we wait. There's no question that an attack would be expensive (in both blood and money) and dangerous and that the results could be very chaotic. It's a lousy choice. It's just that all the others are worse. Now, returning to the "humiliation" issue, again my work has been done for me, this time by wise reader Dean:
....this war is not based on equalling the numbers of dead from 9-11, but in achieving a larger goal, one of (hopefully) knocking out the underpinnings that support not only a terrorist infrastructure, but a group whose worldview holds the US (and, yes, Israel) as the ultimate target for destruction. The "humiliation" which sparked the Japan discussion is aimed, not at humiliation for its own sake, but in persuading those who adhere to this worldview that they are WRONG, that "the course of history" does not run in their favor, by providing concrete, hard reality as evidence. And if they nonetheless refuse to change their minds (and, yes, it is incredibly difficult to change some people's minds), to at least make it incredibly difficult for them to achieve that end. And, please note, there are ADDITIONAL means towards these ends. Education, re-education, providing a moral example (such as was evidenced in post-war Japan and Europe by US aid), all are part and parcel. They CAN work, but only in an environment where their message is not constantly under threat (such as from folks who would ban or kill ALL Christians, Jews, Hindus, etc., from their land), just as de-Nazification could only work in a conquered Germany. As to the concept that Iraq, led by the irreligious despot Saddam, will not serve as the "example" we seek to demonstrate the futility of the Islamist worldview, there is some merit to this concern. Regime change in Iraq, no matter how decisive, may not convince Islamists that their fundamental beliefs must be abandoned. However, it might. Though Saddam himself is irreligious, he has cloaked himself in the language of Islamism in order to draw support from other Islamic countries, he has identified his country with those other countries, and supported the movement elsewhere when it has served his own ends. Regarding instability in the region, let us turn to Mark Steyn:
So if you want to destabilise the entire region, where’s the best place to start? Answer: the regime that represents the height of the stability junkies’ folly. It was the fetishisation of stability that led to Bush Sr, Colin Powell and co. leaving the Saddamites in power 11 years ago. ....it’s late summer 2002 and we’re still ineffectually bombing Iraq every week while somehow managing to get blamed for systematically starving to death a million Iraqi kids — or two million or whatever it’s up to by now — through UN sanctions, though funnily enough UN sanctions don’t seem to have so tightened Saddam’s purse strings that he can’t find 25,000 bucks to give to the family of each Palestinian suicide bomber. More than that, he’s still here. And, simply by being still here, he’s what passes for a success story in the Arab world. He’s living proof to the boneheads on the ‘Arab street’ that you can be violently anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-everything, and get away with it. Today, French flights are once again landing at Saddam Hussein International Airport in Baghdad. With every year he survives, the will to constrain him diminishes and his legend throughout the region increases. ....it’s not strictly necessary for a new regime in Iraq to be better than its predecessor, only different. That sends the important message that whose fingernails you rip out in the dungeon of the presidential palace is your affair, but start monkeying with us and you’ve written your last romantic novel, moustache boy. That’s the immediate and critical US aim. Nonetheless, whoever succeeds Saddam will almost certainly be an improvement. That’s to say, he will, at worst, be a post-11 September General Musharraf — a non-deranged dictator who’ll stick the anthrax programme on the back burner, attend to more pressing economic matters, and thereby set in motion a chain of events, state by state. Just to run through a few: Saudi Arabia: I don’t believe those stories in the British press about the Kingdom being on the verge of collapse. In fact, I’d say they most likely came from Crown Prince Abdullah himself, desperate to stave off the invasion of Iraq. His ludicrous ‘Palestinian peace plan’ served as a grand diversion this spring and he’s hoping this latest wheeze will see him through to New Year. One reason why the House of Saud wants Saddam to stick around is because the first thing a new Iraqi regime will do, liberated from UN constraints on oil exports, is start pumping an extra couple million gallons a day. It’s a small point but one worth noting that, by keeping Saddam in power but restricting his ability to sell oil, the West to a certain extent punishes itself. A new regime in Baghdad, whether democratic or not, means more oil, which means cheaper prices at the pump, which means more pressure on the House of Saud, whose underpants get tightened a notch with every per barrel dollar drop. Thus, Saddam’s removal could be seriously crushing. ....Iran: as I write this, the original Islamist nutters are firing on their hapless citizens in Tehran, Esfahan, Ghazvin and other Iranian cities. The popular demonstrations are to mark the 96th anniversary of the constitutional monarchy and, so far as one can tell from the patchy reports, it sounds more like Hungary 1956 than Czechoslovakia 1989. But there are some interesting details. Protesters report that the regime’s riot police are speaking Arabic. That confirms rumours that the mullahs have hired Saudis, Iraqis and others to do the heavy work of shooting civilians. The likelihood that a young pro-Western population will be cowed by Arab outsiders decreases significantly after Saddam’s gone: they’ll no longer be the crack troops of the regional superpower but only the despised remnants of a loser regime. The Palestinian Authority: the Palestinian people are perhaps the best testament to the defects of stability. They’ve been kept in an artificially stable environment for half a century: the faux ‘refugee camps’ of Jenin and the like, which are effectively UN-supervised terrorist-training facilities now populated by three generations of ‘refugees’ who’ve never lived in the places they’re supposed to be refugees from. The millions of displaced persons in postwar Europe or India at partition should thank God they never caught the eye of the UN. All-out war to the death would be preferable, regardless of who won. Either the Arabs would get their way and push the Jews into the sea or the Arabs would be decisively beaten once and for all. But neither scenario would have led to the remorseless descent into depravity that the Palestinians have accomplished in their UN-mandated limbo. The death-cult psychosis doesn’t exist in isolation: it’s armed by Iran, bankrolled by Iraq, and philosophically sustained by Saudi Islamism. It will not survive the liquidation of its state patrons. This is good news for any Palestinians interested in actual life. None of the above will happen without a massive humiliating military defeat of the Arab world’s Number One loonitoon. Shortly thereafter, the Ayatollahs and ol’ man Yasser will be gone, and the House of Saud, Junior Assad and Mubarak will follow. Think I’m crazy? Look at the map the last time we went to war with Saddam. In 1991, Afghanistan was still communist, as were the Central Asian republics; Pakistan was under the corrupt Sharif regime; and the newly united Yemen was on its way to civil war. Eleven years later, General Musharraf is trying his hardest to be Washington’s new best friend, and American forces are in Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and even Georgia. The Middle East’s eastern and northern borders have quietly become an American sphere of influence. The regimes on the ground are of varying degrees of unattractiveness, but none of ’em is causing the West any trouble. That’s the way Araby will look in a couple of years. It starts in Baghdad, and soon. |
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