Midweek Update

I need to get something in here, been a while. I have been remiss in my movie going, if not my movie watching. Finally got around to watching Forty Guns, which I found back before Christmas - 2 copies, actually! bought them both, one as a Christmas gift, one for myself.... But then it sat on the shelf...finally righted that wrong. Wil I review it? Sooner or later, right?

Not now though. Sitting in starbucks: a bit of a zoo, actualy. A host of eager youth being trained in the jargon of coffee making - a "red eye"? how to make 2% milk? how to mark down the more appalling concoctions - non fat mocha chai with raspberry... something. My head. Meanwhile - 2 people sharing a table, having 2 separate conversations on their phones, in 2 different languages - not English! makes you proud to be an American in the 21st century!

I could blog about politics. Look over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, where you can find a cornucopia of bad ideas being swatted down. (With or without wildly inappropriate metaphors.) If only we could invade Saudi Arabia and seize their oil fields! then there'd be no gas crisis! But you damn liberals would call that "imperialism"! (That's Glenn Reynolds, more or less.) Or - if only we had the will to kill everyone who moves in Iraq! then we could win! (That's a good deal of the right blogosphere, Jeff Goldstein being singled out.) It makes you wonder. It makes me wonder - what would actually be a victory in Iraq? Some of the comments at LGM mention this - that no one seems to quite know what winning means. (This is partly because winning in a war means achieving your political goals - but those have never been defined to anyone's satisfaction, have they?) As far as I can see, this is a war that wwe can't win, because the only political goal we can come close to articulating is that we leave it stronger and more secure than we went in - there is no way we could have accomplished that. Iraq never posed a problem for us (not since 1991) - the only way they could hurt us would be if we invaded them, and made their problems ours. Done and done.

It strikes me that there are basically two outcomes that could be, in fact, won or lost. 1) The establishment of a client state, with not regard to its domestic policies; 2) the partition of Iraq into a series of states, without a civil warm, and with some of them, at least, clients of the USA. These are outcomes that could be achieved (or not) - but neither are poltically viable, really. First - either would almost certainly lead to prolonged bloodshed and chaos. It is hard to imagine either outcome appearing without a long period of violence. Second - is either of those better for us by any standards than the pre-invasion status quo? Let alone the main objection: would it be possible to wage this war (at all) for those ends? and would it be possible to achieve those ends without the kind of commitment we don't want to make (that is to say, The Draft, first and formost.)

That reminds me: anyone who talks about "will" or "toughness" and does not start with the necessity to bring back universal conscription is not worth listening to. It is notable how many of these arguments are in fact quite explicitly about how to avoid making any actual sacrifices, or showing any actual will. Calls to nuke Iran are not calls for national will - they are calls for a way to accomplish some end without any risk to ourselves. Start with a draft and the assumption of years of war, gas and oil rationing, etc., and maybe you have a right to be heard. Otherwise - how can you even pretend to take these people as anything more than cowardly sadists? There's not much more dangerous, I have to admit, than people unwilling to run any risks who insist on the importance of willpower and strength.

I am not in the mood to get into too much of this, though having started... I will leave it. Confuse my poor innocent readers, thinking they'll find more Roger Clemens hagiography, or maybe something about Barry Bonds or the Clippers. Sorry! Politics! duck!