Quote of the Day

"There is an enemy within—dormant in our own fragile minds and emerging with paranoid intensity at times of stress. Our only antidote is to insist on evidence. Whenever there are charges against a person or group, we must ask insistently: How do we know? Show me the proof. Show me three times. Show me 10." Johann Hari, "Why the Wicked Witch Isn't Dead: The Timeless Allure of Witch Hunting," Slate, April 20, 2009.

Quote for the Day: Healthcare and Farmers

Reading an article that Tom sent me and that I linked to two posts below, I came across an interesting quote. The article is about sustainable farming, the hard truths of trying to farm organically and the collective will needed to amend our farming practices. Here's the quote:

If we're going to ask the market to pull in a new direction, we'll need to give it new rules and incentives. That means our broader food standards, but it also means money—a massive increase in food research. (Today, the fraction of the federal research budget spent on anything remotely resembling alternative agriculture is less than 1 percent—and most of that is sucked up by the organic sector.) And, yes, it means more farm subsidies: The reason federal farm subsidies are regarded as anti-sustainability is mainly because they support the wrong kind of farming. But if we want the right kind of farming, we're going to have to support those farmers willing to risk trying a new model. For example, one reason farmers prefer labor-saving monoculture is that it frees them to take an off-farm job, which for many is the only way to get health insurance. Thus, the simplest way to encourage sustainable farming might be offering a subsidy for affordable health care. [my emphasis]

Barack Obama has it right: everything comes back to health care. Solve the health insurance problem in this country, and other problems will be on the way to being solved, or at least one big hurdle to solutions will be removed.

Source: Paul Roberts, "Spoiled: Organic and Local is so 2008," Mother Jones, March/April 2009. www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/02/spoiled-organic-and-local-so-2008

Today's Quotation

"It's all about homage, isn't it? Listening to the ghosts....You need silence to listen to your ghosts. As a great man almost said, attention must be paid to our ghosts." --Alan Bates, playing the character of Oliver in Oliver's Travels, a British mystery mini-series; also starring Sinead Cusack and Bill Paterson)

Today's Quotation

from John LeCarre's The Constant Gardner:

She would never, as she thought of it now, have put herself in the firing line where she was determined to remain, fighting for the things she was determined to be loyal to--even if, boiled down, they made pretty simplistic reading: truth, tolerance, justice, a sense of life's beauty and a near-violent rejection of their opposites--but, above all, an inherited belief. . . that the system itself must be forced to reflect these virtues, or it had no business to exist. . . And the fact that she was working for the system did not oblige her to accept the system's lies. . . On the contrary, it obliged her to reject them, and put the system back where it belonged, which was on the side of truth.

Quotations, Part II: Incompetency and ineptitude

From Patrick Cockburn's editorial, "Iraq is a Country No More," The Independent, 16 March 2008:

In those first months after the fall of Baghdad it was extraordinary, and at times amusing, to watch the American victors behave exactly like the British at the height of their power in 19th-century India. The ways of the Raj were reborn. A friend who had a brokerage in the Baghdad stock market told me how a 24-year-old American, whose family were donors to the Republican Party, had been put in charge of the market and had lectured the highly irritated brokers, most of whom spoke several languages and had PhDs, about the virtues of democracy.

In Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, from Baghdad to the Pentagon (2008), A. J. Rossmiller (former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst) writes:

In my office [Office of Iraq Analysis] where we constantly read reports straight from the ground, the general consensus--despite being overwhelmingly populated by conservatives--was that the Iraq project was a debacle, mainly due to incompetent leadership in the Pentagon and the White House. We joked that President Bush had finally set up the conservative religious government he dreamed of. . . only it was an Islamist one in Iraq rather than a Christian one at home. (215)

From The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq (2005), by George Packer, on the looting that occurred in Iraq immediately after the U. S. forces won Baghdad:

"We're incompetent, as far as [the Iraqis] are concerned," said Noah Feldman, the New York University law professor who went to Baghdad as a constitutional adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority. "The key to it all was the looting. That was when it was clear that there was no order. There's an Arab proverb: Better forty years of dictatorship than one day of anarchy." He added, "That also told them they could fight against us and we were not a serious force." (138)

"Our people don't understand what's going on, so they think the Americans are deliberately creating this chaos," Dr. Butti told me. The conspiracy theories were an attempt to make sense of the absurd. . . The notion that bad planning, halfhearted commitment, ignorance, and incompetence accounted for the anarchy simply wasn't believable. How were Iraqis to grasp that the same Washington think tank where Bush offered Iraq as a model for the region had contributed to the postwar collapse by shooting down any talk of nation building? Deliberate sabotage made more sense. (166)

From A. J. Rossmiller's Still Broken:

To be viewed as legitimate by its people, a government must generally be competent in two areas: security and basic services. Iraqis view the United States as the government as much as they view their own elected officials as the government (after all, they reason, an occupying military must control the state, right?), and failure to meet those basic requirements offers insurgents an opportunity to present themselves as able to govern effectively, or at least better. Further, because Iraqis see the U.S. as overwhelmingly powerful and advanced, they think we must be able to provide security and economic opportunity--so if these things do not exist, many believe, it must be because we purposefully fail to provide them. A frequent reference among Iraqis is that the U.S. put people on the moon; how could a nation that can land on the moon not provide electricity? (52-53)

From Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006), by Thomas E. Ricks, on the Coalitional Provision Authority (CPA)--or, less honorably known as Can't Do Anything:

The U.S. civilian occupation organization was a house built on sand and inhabited by the wrong sort of people, according to many who worked there. "No clear strategy, very little detailed planning, poor communications, high personnel turnover, lots of young and inexperienced political appointees, no well-established business processes," concluded retired Army Col. Ralph Hallenbeck, who worked at the CPA as a civilian contractor dealing with the Iraqi communications infrastructure. Personnel was an especially nettlesome issue. Hallenbeck said that in addition to being young and inexperienced, most of the young CPA people he met during his work as a contractor were ideologically minded Republicans whose only professional experience was working on election campaigns back in the United States. It was, as Zinni later commented, "a pickup team." Scott Erwin, a former intern for Vice President Cheney who worked on the budget for security forces, reported that his favorite job before that was "my time as an ice cream truck driver." (203)

From Packer's The Assassin's Gate, on the young members of the CPA:

Most of them [young members of the Coalition Provisional Authority] seemed to be Republicans, and more than a few were party loyalists who had come to Iraq as political appointees on ninety-day tours. They were astonishingly young. Many had never worked abroad, few knew anything about the Middle East, and that first summer only three or four of the Americans spoke Arabic. Some were simply unqualified for their responsibilities. A twenty-five-year-old oversaw the creation of the Baghdad stock market, and another twenty-five-year-old, from the Office of Special Plans, helped write the interim constitution while filling out his law school application.(184)

Almost all of [head of the CPA, Paul Bremer] Bremer's confidants were Americans. The Arabic-speaking ambassadors with years of experience in the Middle East had less access to the administrator and less work to do than his small coterie of trusted aides from Washington. An Iraqi who was close to the CPA told me that, in general, the less one knew about Iraq, the more influence one had. (198)

Why should we still care about the incompetent leadership of the Bush administration in the Iraq war? Because those leaders are still in power and because the Republican Party's nominee for president, John McCain, shows no indication of making any changes in leadership. The same people who advised George Bush are advising John McCain.

A Few Quotations: No Justice

Some of my reading recently has rather serendipitously connected with current events, particularly the war in Iraq. I've been thinking of how to write about what I've read. Until then, here are some quotations from that reading.

From Greg Mortenson's and David Oliver Resin's Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace. . . One School at a Time (2006), in a conversation with Pakistani Brigadier General Bashir Baz, who was reacting to the beginning of the war in Afghanistan:

As he studied the [television] screen, Bashir's bullish shoulders slumped. "People like me are America's best friends in the region," Bashir said at last, shaking his head ruefully. "I'm a moderate Muslim, an educated man. But watching this, even I could become a jihadi. How can Americans say they are making themselves safer?" Bashir asked, struggling not to direct his anger toward the large American target on the other side of his desk. "Your President Bush has done a wonderful job of uniting one billion Muslims against America for the next two hundred years."

From Andrew Eames's The 8:55 to Baghdad: From London to Iraq on the Trail of Agatha Christie (2004), in a conversation with Alp Aslan, a Turkish man in Konya, Turkey, who answers the author's question about regional responses to the war in Iraq, which at that point hadn't yet started:

"Iraq will probably be a better place without Saddam Hussein, but the war must not go on for too long. Might is only right for a limited time, look at Genghis Khan. Justice, that is the important thing. If the US treats Iraq with justice, then I don't think there'll be any backlash from here...."

From A. J. Rossmiller's Still Broken: A Recruit's Inside Account of Intelligence Failures, From Baghdad to the Pentagon (2008):

In America's Iraq, the burden of proof is on the suspect. Guilty until proven innocent. The action units place the responsibility on the intel crew to sort out the guys they grab, and the intel guys figure that the action units will bring in only legitimate targets. In that space an innocent individual becomes a prisoner."

From Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, by Thomas E. Ricks:

[Nir] Rosen, an Arabic speaker who had spent time in Egypt, Qatar, and Jordan, was stunned at how little the American soldiers understood of their environment. On another raid he witnessed, soldiers burst into a house, shot a man named Ayoub in the hand with nonlethal pellets, and arrested him. They seized two compact discs with images of Saddam Hussein on them--not knowing that the titles on the discs, in Arabic, were The Crimes of Saddam Hussein. "The soldiers saw only the picture of Saddam and assumed they were proof of guilt," Rosen wrote. Several hours later intelligence operatives intercepted a telephone call by another man. "Oh, shit," said Army Capt. Bill Ray, an intelligence officer; the man they had detained "was the wrong Ayoub." (275)