Author: greg

Slate‘s Timothy Noah rounds up some public relations experts to explain the increasingly reality-challenged statements of/give advice to Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf. Meanwhile, In the SF Chron, Ashraf Khalil comments on a live FoxNews interview with US troops in one of Sadaam’s palaces, juxtaposed with a live rooftop statement from al-Sahhaf denying that there were any US soldiers in Baghdad. [Khalil bonus: the translator apparently struggles and ad-libs to accurately capture all the color of al-Sahhaf’s statements.]
As bloghdadded earlier, the NYT‘s John F. Burns was ahead of this news curve; here’s how he closed his April 3 report from the streets of Baghad Read carefully. You don’t have to argue over the definition of “cakewalk” to see that, in PR terms, al-Sahhaf is not actually lying (well, except for the whole “bitterly defeated” part) :

At Kut, [al-Sahhaf] said, the Americans had been “bitterly defeated.” At Hilla, too.
“We’re giving them a real lesson today,” he burbled. ” `Heavy’ doesn’t accurately describe the level of casualties we have inflicted.”
As for reports that American troops were nearing the airport at Baghdad, he chuckled. “The Americans aren’t even 100 miles from Baghdad,” he said.

I say, credibility straining, obfuscation, and trying to put a pretty face on ugly events is SOP for an Information Minister, even if his title is “White House Press Secretary.” Mike McCurry empathizes, “”I’m sure the poor guy has to do this because someone’s going to shoot him if he doesn’t. At least I never had that problem.” That sighing sound you hear may be a sadly envious Ari Fleischer.
Update: Slate rounds third with a lengthy list of al-Sahhaf profiles and fascinating speculations.

Don’t quite know where to categorize this post…probably between “Hey, that was my idea,” and “Maybe if you’d mentioned it or moved on it…” David Edelstein looks at David O. Russell‘s 1999 GW1 movie, Three Kings through 2003 GW2 eyes:

Again and again, he uses color, sound and surreal interpolations to break through the viewer’s movie-fed, CNN-filtered, rock-‘n’-roll-fueled dissociation. With its jarring mixture of tones, “Three Kings” was not a box-office blockbuster. But it looks more and more like a classic.

What timing.A year ago, I met David when he came to NYC for a MoMA film dept. award. Since hanging out with him again in Feb., I’ve been thinking of the prescience of Three Kings. On his screen, Russell mapped the moral complexity on both sides in a very humanistic way, even as the twin towers of Sadaam’s evil and UN/US righteousness dominated the other, television screens.
In addition to the outrage of the US not supporting Iraqi uprisings in ’91 (which is acid-etched in 3K), Russell’s opposed to the current, um, incursion. But what also jerks his chain is the appropriation of 3K‘s “blown out, grainy, kinetic, CNNish” look and feel by the Go Army recruitment campaign.
I’ll root around and post some audio/video of DOR talking about Three Kings. Stay tuned. [In the mean time, try the DVD‘s great commentary tracks.]

Meg Laughlin’s Sabbathy report from Camp Bushmaster, Iraq, in the Miami Herald [via IP]:

“Army chaplain offers baptisms, baths”
In this dry desert world near Najaf, where the Army V Corps combat support system sprawls across miles of scabrous dust, there’s an oasis of sorts: a 500-gallon pool of pristine, cool water.
It belongs to Army chaplain Josh Llano of Houston, who sees the water shortage, which has kept thousands of filthy soldiers from bathing for weeks, as an opportunity.
”It’s simple. They want water. I have it, as long as they agree to get baptized,” he said.
And agree they do. Every day, soldiers take the plunge for the Lord and come up clean for the first time in weeks.

Camp Bushmaster??

Dean Falvy turns to Huig de Groot–aka Hugo Grotius, the Dutch inventor, essentially, of international law, who died in 1645–for a very useful, not-at-all-polemical discussion of legal and other implications of the US invasion of Iraq. The only point of view which is flattened is the one where our world has changed so utterly that “old” ways and ideas are useless on their face.
[Cocktail party tip: it’s pronounced GRO-shus, like bodacious, not GRO-tee-us, like grody. Now go impress your friends.]

The substitution of the term “incursion” for “invasion” has a controversial history, one that goes generally forgotten or ignored by most present-day users. In what became known as the Incursion Address, Richard Nixon infamously announced, “This is not an invasion of Cambodia.” That’s his story, and he instructed his staff to stick with it. Four days later, students at Kent State, protesting the “incursion” labelled their own actions an incursion, and four of them were shot by National Guard troops.
Since that time, the term has been most commonly applied–as a strident voice points out, and as any NY Times reader or NPR listener can note–to Israeli actions in Lebanon and, more recently, the Occupied Territories. Hmm. Seems like pretty heavy baggage to lug into Baghdad with you.
If you’ve mastered the not-so-subtle nuances of “liberation vs. overthrow,” take a look at “incursion vs. invasion.” In a revealing but thoroughly unscientific snapshot of Google News (results 1-10, sorted by relevance), “incursion Baghdad” returns 9 US media sources and 1 UK paper quoting the Centcom spokesman. “Invasion Baghdad,” on the other hand, brings up 8 foreign news sources (including Reuters UK) and two US stories: one quotes an American human shield, and one from the Times titled, “Food, Too, Can Be a Weapon of the War in Iraq”.
Update: Check out Geoffrey Nunberg’s article on “war-speak” in Sunday’s NYT and Andy Bowers’ pre-emptive war glossary on Slate.

The Peace Pledge Union Project has a good overview of Norway’s highly successful use of nonviolent tactics to resist and stymie the Nazi occupation. Resistance began almost immediately after the occupation; actions were rapidly disseminated via 300+ underground newspaper/chain letters (“type 20 copies and give them to people you know”) and through professional associations, unions, and social clubs.
When Germany tried to usurp these institutions, they’d dissolve via mass resignations (and the occasional accidental archive fire), only to reconstitute as an underground network. “A British military historian, interviewing German generals after the war, was told that they’d found nonviolent resistance much harder to deal with than armed and violent opposition.”

Historians have worked hard to discover and record in great detail the military facts of war. The hidden history of civilian lives in wartime needs the same scrupulous telling. Damage done by and to civilians caught up in war’s horrors is a warning to their leaders against embarking on war at all. The positive actions of civilians who choose to act nonviolently in the face of war’s violence are a model for what might well be the only way to abolish war once and for all.

Reading I’m reminded of: Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India, by Ashutosh Varshney. “Strong associational forms of civic engagement, such as integrated business organizations, trade unions, political parties, and professional associations, are able to control outbreaks of ethnic violence, Varshney shows. Vigorous and communally integrated associational life can serve as an agent of peace by restraining those, including powerful politicians, who would polarize Hindus and Muslims along communal lines.” [A New Scientist interview with Varshney.]

For the second month in a row, Artforum is looking back at the 80’s. Douglas Crimp talks with surviving members of Gran Fury, the art collective which grew out of ACTUP and the early days of the AIDS crisis. Other participants included: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Todd Haynes, and Tim Rollins. [update: these guys were in Group Material, a different collective. My bad. Thanks, Andrea.]

Gran Fury with The Pope and The Penis at the 1990 Venice Bienale, image:artforum.com
L to R: John Lindell, Donald Moffett, Mark Simpson, Marlene McCarty, and Loring McAlpin.

Some relevant excerpts:

Tom Kalin: We went from being wheat-pasting hooligans to suddenly having real resources and opportunities and a platform from which to speak. This brought about a crisis of conscience in discussing how to articulate the group because the stakes had been raised…
Loring McAlpin: We also had a long discussion about whether we should be in the Venice Biennale at all. We had wanted to hang banners in the street, remember? And they said, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ And there was a moment when we wondered whether it was enough for us to just be inside an art institution, but we decided it was a public enough venue to merit doing it…
Marlene McCarty: I want to go to bat for Venice. We cannot forget how much press came out of that piece, which was far more public than a billboard would have been. That work got AIDS on the cover of Express.
Robert Vazquez: But we’re being disingenuous when we say that we planned to send a huge photograph of an erection to Venice, intended as a provocation to the Pope, and worried that no one would notice. We knew very well what we were doing…
Donald Moffett: What I hear now is a rhetorical neglect coming out of the White House that is very similar to where we were fifteen years ago…
That legacy (the Gran Fury Collection at the NY Public Library) is an educational resource for another generation. After all, we didn’t come out of nowhere. We dragged the history of this kind of art into the ’80s and the early ’90s. And it will be reinvented again..

Once in a while,
I’m standing here, doing something.
And I think,
“What in the world am I doing here?”
It’s a big surprise.

— A Confession (May 16, 2001, interview with the New York Times), from Hart Seely’s piece on Slate, “The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld,”

… Let me have no friends or companions
But a wine-flask and a book,
That I may avoid all association
With the deceitful denizens of the world.
If I lift my skirt above the dust of the world
I shall tower above all in total independence,
Like a lofty cypress…

— excerpted from The Ghazals of Hafiz, works of the great 14th century Persian poet, translated by A.J Alston.