Josh Marshall makes an interesting comparison between Saddam’s execution and “snuff films” from the other side:
If you watch the video of the moments leading up to Saddam Hussein’s execution, am I wrong that it bears a certain resemblance to the terrorist snuff films we’ve watched out of Iraq over the last three years? A dark, dank room. The executioners wear not uniforms of any sort, either civilian or military, but street clothes and ski masks. We now learn that the executioners were apparently taken from the population of southern Iraq, the country’s Shi’a heartland, where Saddam’s repression was most severe. And in an apt symbolic statement on what the Iraq War is about, two of the executioners who saw Saddam off started hailing Moktada al Sadr in Saddam’s face as they prepared to hang him. Remember, al Sadr’s Mahdi Army is the force the ’surge’ of new US troops is meant to crush next year. That’s where we are.
The Iraqi “government” and its American allies could well shout out the cry of the Spanish fascists: “Long live death!” They have sacrificed perhaps the last chance for many years to bring a whiff of life to their wretched country by refusing to go through with this act of revenge which will spawn all to many future acts of revenge over the coming months and years.
Military Times magazine reports the results of their annual subscriber poll, conducted by mail:
Only 35% of respondents approve of Bush’s handling of the war, while 42% disapprove;
41% believe the US should have gone to war in the first (compared to 42% of the general population);
And 50% feel that “success is likely” (whatever that means).
It is important to note, as Military Times puts it:
The results are not representative of the military as a whole. The survey’s respondents, 945 this year, are on average older, more experienced, more likely to be officers and more career-oriented than the overall military population.
Further, 66% have deployed at least once to Iraq or Afghanistan.
In other words, they tend to represent the career soldiers and officers, those most identified with the military as an institution. If Bush has lost this group, the attitudes of the rest of the military is likely much more critical. In fact, a March 2006 Stars and Stripespoll of those fighting in Iraq found “that 72% of them wanted to be withdrawn within a year, while 29% favored immediate withdrawl.”
These soldiers are not sure what should be done about the messes in Iraq and Afghanistan:
Only about one in five service members said large numbers of American troops can be replaced with Iraqi troops within the next two years. More than one-third think it will take more than five years. And more than half think the U.S. will have to stay in Iraq more than five years to achieve its goals.
Almost half of those responding think the United States needs more troops in Iraq. A surprising 13% said the U.S. should have no troops there.
As for Afghanistan force levels, 39% think we need more troops there. But while they want more troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly three-quarters of the respondents think the military is stretched too thin to be effective.
Notice that: 13% of career military believe the US should not be in Iraq at all! Combine them with the three quarters who believe the military is stretched too thin and the conditions look quite ripe for the antiwar movement within the military. No wonder the An Appeal for Redress from the War in Iraq has been signed by Almost 1,000 active duty soldiers. As others in the antiwar movement try to replicate the 1960’s coffeehouses, the conditions may finally be fertile. If so, the antiwar movement may soon be getting a huge boost.
Social Work professor and addictions specialist proposes an intervention for our President [From CommonDreams]
A Formal Intervention with a Dry Drunk President
by Katherine van Wormer
One of the rituals well known to the addiction treatment world is the formal Intervention. The classic Intervention starts with meetings of concerned significant others that are called during a time of crisis. The result is a confrontation of the individual in trouble and an ultimatum of some sort for a drastic change in course (the most famous examples are Interventions of Betty Ford and Elizabeth Taylor for pill use and drinking.)
The long-anticipated report of the Iraq Study Group has been likened in some media reports to the classic treatment Intervention provided to drug users and alcoholics who have “hit bottom.” Seething in its criticism, the report (Intervention) made a number of take-it- or-leave-it recommendations. “This is not like fruit salad,” the head facilitator later explained; the recommendations must be followed as a whole. Characteristic of a person with an addictive mentality, the president responded in a state of denial as do the “enablers” around him. His supporters are getting fewer and fewer, however. And even his father recently broke into tears. We will return to that later.
The addictive mentality I am talking about is a cognitive impairment that is associated with alcohol-drug use, and may have preceded or followed the addictive behavior. George W. Bush, over his lifetime, has gone from one extreme-extensive and long-term binge drinking and at least some cocaine use-to another-affiliation with religious fundamentalism and authoritarian belief systems that cannot be explained by his religious upbringing. From an elitist background, the junior Bush was able to build a political base from a cultural group that was arguably alien from his own. (See What’s the Matter with Kansas?)
For an understanding of this phenomenon of how the drinking and drug use affects patterns of thinking, we need to look at brain research. The most recent brain research, now revolutionized by technological advances in brain imaging, confirms what members of A.A. have known for years, labeled by them, the dry drunk phenomenon. Rigidity, poor impulse control, grandiosity, and all-or-nothing or black and white thinking are the classic characteristics. (See “the dry drunk syndrome” on google.) We now know that once the heavy drinking and/or other drug use stops, a certain amount of cognitive impairment may persist. We also know, however, that the brain can actually be “rewired” through cognitive work.
“You’ve got to work at it.” This is a commonly heard saying of George W. Bush. One thing he has not worked at, however, is what is sometimes called in alcoholism treatment parlance, “the second recovery.” Treatment centers specialize in cognitive work, as does A.A., in effect, aiding persons in recovery to replace irrational, grandiose, and self-centered thoughts, with healthier and more moderate ways of thinking.
The kind of intervention that our president needed was a personal intervention, one aimed at the reasons that Bush fool heartedly and dishonestly (pushing for false intelligence assessments of the international situation) led the nation in a fantasy mission that was doomed to failure against “evildoers” in the Middle East. As I described as early as 2002 and as psychiatrist Justin Frank later, in Bush on the Couch, also concluded, to understand the motives behind the ill-fated invasion of Iraq, we have to consider Bush’s role in his family, the unique psychological dynamics. As any Bush biography makes clear, the younger Bush was not only named for his father, but he was somehow destined to follow in his father’s footsteps most of his life- at Andover, Yale, as a military pilot, in the oil business-only to fail at each juncture until he would enter politics and as commander- in-chief be able to stride triumphant in 2004 and declare “mission accomplished” on the carrier flight deck. Then he would have proven himself to his father and to the world.
In December, 2006, the elder Bush’s tears shed at the tribute to his son, Governor Jeb Bush, told it all. “The true measure of a man is how you handle victory, and also defeat”-these were his exact words uttered at the moment that he got too choked up to continue. Though his loss of control was later claimed to be related to his younger son’s (Jeb’s), earlier defeat in a governor’s race in 1994, it seems far more likely that his tears were shed over the disgraced presidency of his elder son and in recognition for the significance of this debacle for the entire Bush dynasty.
In the future, it will be left to psychologists and historians to ponder the real reason for George W. Bush’s selection as members of his team, the very men like Cheney, Wolfowitz, Powell, and Rove, who, strikingly, had served under his father. Even Rumsfeld also had a historic relationship with Bush, Sr., albeit a problematic one. Above all, the challenge to psychologists and historians will be to ponder the real reason why the younger Bush was driven to an unnecessary and unbelievably costly war “mission impossible.” The Iraq Study Group, which, interestingly, was headed by Bush Sr.’s former secretary of state, James Baker, was summoned in desperation to find a way out of a disastrous course, failed to tackle causality, which, in the final analysis is the most significant issue of all.
Katherine van Wormer (www.katherinevanwormer.com) teaches social work and addiction treatment at the University of Northern Iowa and is the co-author of Addiction Treatment: A Strengths Perspective.
Here are a few of the most valuable of the comments on the death of the popular America’s dictator, who became the anti-American dictator and thus had to die:
Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation. Who could be more deserving of that last walk to the scaffold - that crack of the neck at the end of a rope - than the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler of the Tigris, the man who murdered untold hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons over his enemies? Our masters will tell us in a few hours that it is a “great day” for Iraqis and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his death sentence was signed - by the Iraqi “government”, but on behalf of the Americans - on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the moment of greatest forgiveness in the Arab world.
But history will record that the Arabs and other Muslims and, indeed, many millions in the West, will ask another question this weekend, a question that will not be posed in other Western newspapers because it is not the narrative laid down for us by our presidents and prime ministers - what about the other guilty men?…
At first, those who suffered from Saddam’s cruelty will welcome his execution. Hundreds wanted to pull the hangman’s lever. So will many other Kurds and Shia outside Iraq welcome his end. But they - and millions of other Muslims - will remember how he was informed of his death sentence at the dawn of the Eid al-Adha feast, which recalls the would-be sacrifice by Abraham, of his son, a commemoration which even the ghastly Saddam cynically used to celebrate by releasing prisoners from his jails. “Handed over to the Iraqi authorities,” he may have been before his death. But his execution will go down - correctly - as an American affair and time will add its false but lasting gloss to all this - that the West destroyed an Arab leader who no longer obeyed his orders from Washington, that, for all his wrongdoing (and this will be the terrible get-out for Arab historians, this shaving away of his crimes) Saddam died a “martyr” to the will of the new “Crusaders”.
When he was captured in November of 2003, the insurgency against American troops increased in ferocity. After his death, it will redouble in intensity again. Freed from the remotest possibility of Saddam’s return by his execution, the West’s enemies in Iraq have no reason to fear the return of his Baathist regime. Osama bin Laden will certainly rejoice, along with Bush and Blair. And there’s a thought. So many crimes avenged.
The execution provoked intense questions about whether his trial was fair and about what the fallout will be. One thing is certain: The trial and execution of Saddam were about revenge, not justice. Instead of promoting national reconciliation, this act of revenge helped Saddam portray himself one last time as a symbol of Sunni Arab resistance, and became one more incitement to sectarian warfare.
Saddam Hussein was tried under the shadow of a foreign military occupation, by a government full of his personal enemies. The first judge, an ethnic Kurd, resigned because of government interference in the trial; the judge who took his place was also Kurdish and had grievances against the accused. Three of Saddam’s defense lawyers were shot down in cold blood. The surviving members of his defense team went on strike to protest the lack of protection afforded them. The court then appointed new lawyers who had no expertise in international law. Most of the witnesses against Saddam gave hearsay evidence. The trial ground slowly but certainly toward the inevitable death verdict.
To remind us in detail, just who’s SOB Saddam was, see also Cole’s:
Why make things worse by insisting on Saddam’s execution now? Who gains if they hang Saddam? Iran, naturally, but who else? There is a real fear that this execution will be the final blow that will shatter Iraq. Some Sunni and Shia tribes have threatened to arm their members against the Americans if Saddam is executed. Iraqis in general are watching closely to see what happens next, and quietly preparing for the worst.
This is because now, Saddam no longer represents himself or his regime. Through the constant insistence of American war propaganda, Saddam is now representative of all Sunni Arabs (never mind most of his government were Shia). The Americans, through their speeches and news articles and Iraqi Puppets, have made it very clear that they consider him to personify Sunni Arab resistance to the occupation. Basically, with this execution, what the Americans are saying is “Look- Sunni Arabs- this is your man, we all know this. We’re hanging him- he symbolizes you.” And make no mistake about it, this trial and verdict and execution are 100% American. Some of the actors were Iraqi enough, but the production, direction and montage was pure Hollywood (though low-budget, if you ask me)….
My only conclusion is that the Americans want to withdraw from Iraq, but would like to leave behind a full-fledged civil war because it wouldn’t look good if they withdraw and things actually begin to improve, would it?
The article is actually a lamentation for the state of her country:
You know your country is in trouble when:
1. The UN has to open a special branch just to keep track of the chaos and bloodshed, UNAMI.
2. Abovementioned branch cannot be run from your country.
3. The politicians who worked to put your country in this sorry state can no longer be found inside of, or anywhere near, its borders.
4. The only thing the US and Iran can agree about is the deteriorating state of your nation.
5. An 8-year war and 13-year blockade are looking like the country’s ‘Golden Years’.
6. Your country is purportedly ’selling’ 2 million barrels of oil a day, but you are standing in line for 4 hours for black market gasoline for the generator.
7. For every 5 hours of no electricity, you get one hour of public electricity and then the government announces it’s going to cut back on providing that hour.
8. Politicians who supported the war spend tv time debating whether it is ’sectarian bloodshed’ or ‘civil war’.
9. People consider themselves lucky if they can actually identify the corpse of the relative that’s been missing for two weeks.
A day in the life of the average Iraqi has been reduced to identifying corpses, avoiding car bombs and attempting to keep track of which family members have been detained, which ones have been exiled and which ones have been abducted.
Finally, and very sadly, Riverbend notes the transformation and brutalization of her feelings. Every death used to matter. She no longer has room in her heart to mourn for all:
Here we come to the end of 2006 and I am sad. Not simply sad for the state of the country, but for the state of our humanity, as Iraqis. We’ve all lost some of the compassion and civility that I felt made us special four years ago. I take myself as an example. Nearly four years ago, I cringed every time I heard about the death of an American soldier. They were occupiers, but they were humans also and the knowledge that they were being killed in my country gave me sleepless nights. Never mind they crossed oceans to attack the country, I actually felt for them.
Had I not chronicled those feelings of agitation in this very blog, I wouldn’t believe them now. Today, they simply represent numbers. 3000 Americans dead over nearly four years? Really? That’s the number of dead Iraqis in less than a month. The Americans had families? Too bad. So do we. So do the corpses in the streets and the ones waiting for identification in the morgue.
Is the American soldier that died today in Anbar more important than a cousin I have who was shot last month on the night of his engagement to a woman he’s wanted to marry for the last six years? I don’t think so.
Just because Americans die in smaller numbers, it doesn’t make them more significant, does it?
Perhaps this transformation stands as the greatest indictment of the Iraq war. Unleashing the evils of war has unleashed the evil in each of us.
Let us hope that 2007 will be the year that the first evil ends so that we can begin to deal with the second evil.
As word comes that the former dictator Saddam is to executed tonight by those kept in power by the American occupiers, the words of former CIA field officer Robert Baer, from Time magazine, are appropriate:
Making a Martyr Out of Saddam
If the deposed Iraqi leader is executed now, the country’s Sunnis will always think of Saddam’s rule as a golden era
By Robert Baer
Now is not the time to execute Saddam Hussein. With Iraq still under coalition occupation, as far as Iraqis are concerned the rope around Saddam’s neck will be American. The Shi’a and the Kurds may not care whose rope it is — they just want the man dead and their pound of revenge. But for the Sunni, Saddam will become an instant martyr.
You’d be hard pressed to find a Sunni — or for that matter anyone else — who thinks Saddam’s trial was fair or impartial. The Coalition Provisional Authority, the institution dedicated to dismantling Saddam’s regime, established Saddam’s tribunal. Its first head was the nephew of Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile who dedicated his life to destroying Saddam. The tribunal’s presiding judge is a Kurd from Halabjah, the Kurdish city Saddam gassed in 1988. How could the man vote other than to execute Saddam and still expect to go home to Kurdistan?
The list goes on. Iraq’s judiciary clearly is not independent — the Shi’a-led council of ministers has appointed and removed the tribunal’s judges according to political whim. Saddam’s trial was conducted inside the Green Zone, protected by American forces and paid for by American money. The U.S. Department of Justice was integral to the prosecution’s investigation and training the tribunal’s judges and lawyers.
Sunnis aren’t alone in their view of the trial. Europe refused to participate in it because it believed the trial could not be fair and his execution would be a foregone conclusion. The U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers of the Human Rights Council issued a press statement that the tribunal is illegitimate.
It doesn’t matter to the Sunni that Saddam is guilty of the crime he’s charged with: the massacre of 140 Shi’a villagers in 1982 in reprisal for an attempt on Saddam’s life. At the risk of oversimplification, the Sunnis think the Shi’a villagers deserved it. It was that kind of rough justice that Saddam used to keep Iraq together.
Nor do the Sunni care that Saddam is guilty of a lot more bloodshed, from gassing the Kurds at Halabjah to the invasion of Kuwait. Nor do they care he was a catastrophically incompetent leader who more than the United States led to their downfall.
All they care about is this: as the current war grinds on, as Iraq’s death toll starts to approach Saddam’s deadly legacy, as the Sunnis lose more and more of their power, as memories fade, Iraq’s Sunni will think of Saddam’s rule as a golden era. They’ll remember Saddam as the leader who kept Iraq together, kept them on top and prosperous, kept the Shi’a and the Kurds in their place, and kept the Iranians from invading during the Iran-Iraq war. They may never look at Saddam as Saladin, the Muslim general who liberated Jerusalem in 1187. But when the rough edges do wear off, Sunnis will look at Saddam as a martyr.
Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East, is the author of See No Evil and, most recently, the novel Blow the House Down.
Prior to supporting the President’s planned escalation (aka”surge”), Orgeon Congressman David Wu says people should as “Would you send your relative to Iraq?”
“We need to focus on whether we would choose to send our own son or daughter, our own wife or our own husband off for a temporary surge in Iraq,” said Wu, D-Ore. “If we wouldn’t do that, then should we permit this administration to roll out a potential product like that?”
Of course, those of us not in Congress should also ask: “Why do you continue the funding of this flawed product?”
Boston’s WGBH radio show Open Source with has a show on the Lancet Iraq Mortality Study. It features Les Roberts, Juan Cole, critic Colin Kahl, and several Iraqi bloggers.
A new poll brings the startling news that an overwhelming majority, over 80%, of Americans believe in angels:
A bluebird in the garden, a spirit in a house, a kind man on the side of the road. Americans are big believers in angels, although not necessarily the ones with halos and wings.
An overwhelming majority, almost regardless of backgrounds and religious convictions, think angels are real, according to an AP-AOL News poll exploring attitudes about Santa Claus, angels and more.
Belief in angels, however people define them, is highest — almost universal — among white evangelical Christians, 97 percent of whom trust in their existence, the poll indicates. But even among people with no religious affiliation, well more than half said angels are for real.
Among the findings about angels and Santa:
Protestants, women, Southerners, Midwesterners and Republicans were the most likely to believe in angels, although strong majorities in other groups also shared that faith. Belief in angels declined slightly with advanced education, from 87 percent of those with high school education or less to 73 percent of those with college degrees. Overall, 81 percent believed in angels.
86 percent believed in Santa as a child. And despite the multiethnic nature of the country, more than 60 percent of those with children at home consider Santa important in their holiday celebrations now.
Nearly half, 47 percent, said Santa detracts from the religious significance of Christmas; over one-third, 36 percent, said he enhances the religious nature of the holiday.
91 percent of whites believed in Santa as a child; 72 percent of minorities did. One quarter of those now living in households with incomes under $25,000 did not believe in Santa.
The poll of 1,000 adults was conducted by telephone Dec. 12 to 14 by Ipsos, an international public opinion research company. The margin of sampling error for all adults was plus or minus 3 percentage points.
If it’s one thing to believe in angels, it’s something else to explain exactly what an angel is.
“A presence that you feel around you, is my opinion,” said Elizabeth Daves, 63, of Flemington, N.J. “I accept them — to come whenever they want to.” And she said they came, and have comforted her, since her mother-in-law died in their house.
Edward Pelz, 80, of Grabill, Ind., said he believes that angels are guiding him, even though it’s impossible to explain to anyone else.
“Have I ever seen one? Nope. We depict an angel as a person that’s white, has a robe on, has wings on back. I’m not sure that’s the way they look. So for me, I think sometimes there’s angels that aren’t that way.”
Pelz recounted a story about a man who showed up to change his tire when he had a flat in Ohio five years ago.
“I look at life — I say, well maybe I had an angel with me here today. It could have been just another man doing a good deed.”
Although Santa took knocks in the poll for diminishing the religious nature of the holiday, some grown-ups who considered him a benefit to the season cited the spirit of selfless giving that he represents.
“Now, if you are using Santa Claus to push a $100 robotic dinosaur, then that’s a problem,” said Ron Montgomery of Louisville, Ky. But the 64-year-old grandfather counts himself as a Santa believer to this day.
“It’s the whole atmosphere,” he said. “Santa Claus is the spirit. The trees, the church, the whole works. You actually see more of your neighbors.
“It’s a feeling. It’s not like a ghost. It’s an attitude.”
Pelz felt another spirit when he walked into his backyard on a winter’s day — that of the wife he lost over two years ago. He called her Mom.
“She loved bluebirds,” he said. “In the wintertime, we don’t have bluebirds. I was out in the back, thinking, ‘Mom I’d like to see you,’ and this little bluebird comes by.
“I don’t know, maybe that’s an angel. It was just something I wanted to see. Maybe I imagined it. Next thing you know, it flew off. What is an angel? Is an angel something that has a heartbeat like us? Or is it …?”
The thought trailed off.
The sense given here is that “angels” are a remedy for a profound loneliness, a sense of a benevolent presence that enhances life’s meaning and protects us. After all, we live in a society that, compared to most other industrialized countries, does not, either in ideology or practice, protect its citizens. The vaunted American individualism means that each of us faces our fate alone, with only potential support from our families. If we fall, there is little or no safety net to keep us from falling to the bottom.
Of course, this applies only to the majority of us. The wealthy have elaborate safety nets. CEOs are guaranteed tens of millions of dollars in “severance packages” if and when they fail. Their pay goes up regardless of performance. And the George W. Bush’s have wealthy families and their pals to bail them out when they fail. Perhaps they believe in angels because they’ve experienced undeserved beneficence.
As for the rest of us, Santa or angels are the only creatures potentially available to save us when disaster strikes: job loss, death of spouse, or loss of a loved one in Iraq (a fate virtually never experienced by the wealthy and powerful). We know that society will leave us to our fate. It’s either Santa or angels or disaster.
For decades it was rumored that Sigmund Freud had had an affair with his wife’s sister Minna Bernays. Carl Jung claimed so, but others denied it. Now a German sociologist has found a new tantalizing bit of evidence:
But a German sociologist now says he has found evidence that on Aug. 13, 1898, during a two-week vacation in the Swiss Alps, Freud, then 42, and Miss Bernays, then 33, put up at the Schweizerhaus, an inn in Maloja, and registered as a married couple, a finding that may cause historians to re-evaluate their understanding of Freud’s own psychology.
A yellowing page of the leather-bound ledger shows that they occupied Room 11. Freud signed the book, in his distinctive Germanic scrawl, “Dr Sigm Freud u frau,” abbreviated German for “Dr. Sigmund Freud and wife….”
Freud’s wife, Martha, knew about his trip with Miss Bernays, if not its nature. The same day Freud signed the hotel ledger, he sent his wife a postcard rhapsodizing about the glaciers, mountains and lakes the pair had seen. In the card, published in Freud’s collected correspondence, he described their lodgings as “humble,” although the hotel appears to have been the second-fanciest in town.
The evidence is persuasive enough for Peter Gay, the Freud biographer and longtime skeptic on what he called “the Minna matter,” to say that he is now inclined to revise his work accordingly.
“It makes it very possible that they slept together,” he said. “It doesn’t make him or psychoanalysis more or less correct.”
Does it matter? Psychoanalysts and Freud scholars will continue the debate. A certain faction appears to believe that psychoanalysis rises or falls with the moral reputation of its founder. If Freud was “flawed,” then so must be his creation.
Another opinion can be seen in an email I received this morning from my fellow psychoanalyst Michael Roloff:
So Freud did have an affair with Minna! Good for him!
In any case, the hagiography of Freud has been slowly dying as even psychoanalysts have gradually started to accept that all of us are human, even we analysts.
As for me, I find it interesting, just as Freud is a more interesting person the more we realize that he was a person. The fate of psychoanalysis doesn’t rest on Freud’s reputations but rather on the combination of the insights it provides into human nature, the guidance it provides for therapists, and the empirical evidence regarding its central tenets.