Brazilian Oil Boon

Really? The claim - as yet not fully substantiated by researchers - is that Brazil has newfound offshore oil reserves estimated at over 30 billion barrels, possibly more than that. This adds to Brazil's existing 12 billion-barrel reserves. By comparison, the United States has an estimated 21 billion barrels in proven oil reserves. If this new discovery at Carioca-Sugar Loaf and other possible reserves play out, Brazil might come very close to or surpass Russia in proven reserves.

Look for commentators coming out of the woodwork to scoff at the peak-oil thesis.

Marang

Waning Hope

John Cole pretty much gets it right on Clinton:

Even if she blows him out (and I expect her to win by 6-12 pts), she won’t make up any real ground in the delegate race, which, as we all know (except, apparently, at Clinton HQ), is what matters. All she has is the hope that the super-delegates will give it to her, and the only way that is going to happen is if she absolutely destroys his chances at electability. And she has to do just that, because if the supers give Clinton the nomination under any circumstance other than one in which Obama is completely ruined, expect large swaths of Democrats to bail in the general. Forget the AA vote.

That is her gambit. That is her only hope. She won’t win North Carolina, Indiana will be so close as to give marginal gains, and all she has is this last hope that she can knee-cap him and get it from the supers. Of course, she most likely won’t succeed, and instead we will have a crippled Obama limping into the general against a united Republican party armed with a half year of Clinton video clips calling Obama elitist and out of touch and unelectable and stating she takes him at his word that he is not a stealth muslim. By the end of the week I fully expect her to be asking whether or not he is a Marxist.

Pulusan

Photo: Oscar Jaitt

More on the Torture Memos

Stephen Gillers at The Nation:

How could two really smart guys authorize torture using "one-sided legal arguments" that have "no foundation" in law? How could they be guilty of a "stunning failure of lawyerly craft"? The sad answer seems to be that they knew what the President wanted and delivered: torture is OK if you call it something else. Detainees are outside the protection of due process and civilized law. The President's authority is close to absolute. Anyway, no court can review him. (On this last point, the Supreme Court disagreed.)

This incompetence is especially serious because of the conduct it enabled. If a private lawyer gave such a lopsided and wrongheaded analysis to a business client, he'd be history. Lawyers advising private clients about to make important decisions (a "bet the company" kind of decision) meticulously analyze all sides of a question so the clients can assess risk and choose wisely.

The client deserved better, and that raises another issue, the most troubling. Who was the client? The lawyers told the President what he wanted to hear, but the nation was their client, and its sole interest was in thorough and independent legal analysis. Neither the President's political agenda nor the authors' views of what the law should say can be allowed to slant the OLC's work. So maybe the best and brightest lawyers got it so wrong because they forgot whom they served. Maybe they acted politically, not professionally. If so, we are dealing with a perversion of law and legal duty, a betrayal of the client and professional norms, not mere incompetence, which would be bad enough. Whatever the reason, Jarrett should find that this work is not "consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys." Jarrett must hold the lawyers accountable if he means to restore OLC's reputation and vindicate the rule of law.

By the way, Michael Hatfield, a law professor and longtime friend, deals with this issue better than anyone else I've seen to date (in my forthcoming volume, On Torture).

The Influence of Philosophers

Bernard Chazelle, from the same post linked to below, makes note of the relative influence of philosophers on society.

...I like Rawls, too. The man was a giant of 20th c political philosophy, but his impact in the real world has been negligible. Even in the judicial realm, the guy who wrote the book on Justice has had virtually no influence on American jurisprudence. (Does this contradict my previous paragraph? No.) But it didn't need to be so. Rawls was more interested in solving puzzles against Nozick than to be influential in the world at large. That's a pity but that was his choice. On the other hand, Foucault (a deeply original thinker, despite the caricature and some of the idiotic pronouncements he made about Iran) can be credited as much as anyone for the end of capital punishment in France. Not bad for a philosopher who died of AIDS when he was only 57. In this country, if the death penalty is ever abolished, the credit will go to Sister Helen Prejean, a Catholic nun.

This is an endlessly interesting question... for philosophers, at least (to the extent that remains so, the answer may be implicit in the question). Rawls defined Anglo-American political philosophy from 1971 on (the year of publication of A Theory of Justice) - everything was a defense of or critical response to Rawls. The discussion with Nozick (particularly the libertarian work of Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia) was but one piece of the broader evolving framework of political philosophy. Communitarianism as a political philosophy and ethics, for example, largely arose as a critical response to Rawls.

It's true that it's difficult to gauge the influence of Rawls in the larger society, but I don't think this influence can be discounted so easily. I've seen Rawlsian arguments appear in the statements of political figures in the US. I've talked with people at the World Bank who learned from Rawls and had integrated some ideas into their work. I've talked with lawyers who have an easy facility with Rawlsian thought. And I've seen Rawlsian ideas worm their way through public policy discussions.

These are all elites in American society, however. Rawls does not appear to have much purchase at all in the broader society, nor among political activists. Most of my grad students have never heard of Rawls before my class where I teach him.

Part of the issue here is that the US is not France. Integral to French culture is its intellectual life. Even if one hasn't actually read Foucault, one knows his name as a giant of French intellectual life. This is obviously also the case with the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, but even with those with whom many philosophers in the US are not familiar (e.g., Michel Serres, Alain Finkielkraut, and philosophers of lesser fame).

US culture is famous for its anti-intellectual streak. This streak maintains that there is the world of ideas and there is "reality." It suspects that too much delving into ideas merely takes one away from reality. "Reality" is thereby often divested of interesting ideas and new frameworks of thought. Or, rather, certain fields that more directly yield a "product" gain pride of place and influence in American intellectual life. Economics, for example, has its philosophical depths but also provides tools for generating tangible income.

Political philosophical ideas have huge influence over the long term. Democracy as a reflective form of political organization was an ancient Greek invention. Our basic ideas of rights were received from the Enlightenment. Maybe it's best that political philosophers content themselves with the long view.

But, honestly, I think this means ceding intellectual territory and practical influence that political philosophy does not need to cede. Rather, it needs to reinvent itself, or parts of itself. On this point, I'd have to agree with Peter Levine (writing in a somewhat different context):

...It's not enough to know whether a given program causes a particular outcome (such as higher incomes, or more civic duty). We must also decide whether those outcomes are good, whether they are distributed fairly, whether any harms to others are worthwhile, and what means for deriving these consequences are acceptable. Further, it's not enough to understand how to run or structure a good program. We must also decide what forms of governance or administration are ethical. (Mussolini made the trains run on time, but that was not an adequate defense of fascism). Finally, it's not enough to know that a given argument or "message" would produce political support for a program. We must also decide which forms of argument are ethically acceptable.

Thus it's a shame that philosophers tend to cede the "middleground" to social scientists, administrators, and tacticians. As a result, no one raises the serious, complex moral issues that arise when one thinks about political tactics, the design of programs, and their administration. This is not only bad for policy and public discourse; it is also bad for philosophy. Theories are impoverished when they miss the middleground...

Some areas of philosophy have developed a middleground and thereby not only served public purposes but also enriched the discipline. Medical ethics is the best example. It's no longer restricted to matters of individual ethics (e.g., should a physician conduct an abortion?) or matters of basic structure (e.g., is there a right to life?), but also to matters of administration, politics, and program design. Medical ethicists work in hospitals, advise commissions, and review policies... I would generalize and say that across the whole range of policy and social questions, it is worth asking moral questions not only about basic rights and individual behavior, but also about institutional arrangements and political tactics.

Quote of the Day

Bernard Chazelle at A Tiny Revolution,

The outrage of John Yoo is not simply that he's a scumbag. It's that I paid his salary. He spoke in my name. He worked for my government. If I go to Sweden and the locals scream "John Yoo" in my face, I cannot pretend I am not related. I am. Although I never voted for Bush and I never missed a chance to trash his name, I have to answer for Bush's and John Yoo's actions in the same way all Germans had to answer for Hitler's. Self-respect is one side of the coin. The other side is shame.

Some will say, shouldn't we be more ambitious and consider being citizens of the world as the only patriotism worth examining? We could, but this wouldn't be ambitious: it would be a cop-out.

I feel little responsibility for a mad dictator in a country I've never heard of. I might feel bad as a fellow human being for the depravity of my kind. But if I hear the CIA propped him up, then I become responsible. People who refused to connect the CIA's actions to their patriotism are simply deluding themselves about the meaning of words.

Torture in Israel

I received an email from the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel on the Israeli exploitation of family members of detained Palestinians to extract confessions. PCATI - itself an Israeli group - works indefatigably against the use of physical and psychological torture in Israel. The email says,

Demonstrating a heightened level of concern surrounding the findings of the report, which show the continued use of interrogation methods that have been condemned as torture or ill treatment under international law, Knesset Constitution Law and Justice Committee Chairperson, Professor Menachem Ben Sasson, has agreed to PCATI’s request to discuss the report in a special committee session, which is taking place, today, the 13th of April at 13:30 in the Knesset. The extraordinary nature of this act is further demonstrated by Professor Ben Sasson’s calling on the GSS to respond to the report during the hearing.

Furthermore, we are filing a High Court of Justice Petition on this matter in the coming days. The petition and the report represent our attempt to attack this issue at more than one level.

Here's an article on the PCATI report, "Family Matters," in Ha'aretz (soon to be released in English). Another article is here. And here's the Jerusalem Post's article on the Knesset Law Committee's hearing prompted by PCATI, which says further that,

Torture has become an accepted tool of the so called "war on terror" and we cannot stand silently by while this tool is being dressed up and made to appear something less than it is. This is but a small part of our contribution, not only to the local fight but the global one too.

Lincoln and Obama

Gary Wills on Lincoln's Cooper Union speech of February 27th, 1860, and Obama's March 18th, 2008 speech in Philadelphia:

The most damaging charge against each was an alleged connection with unpatriotic and potentially violent radicals. Lincoln's Republican Party was accused of supporting abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, who burned the Constitution, or John Brown, who took arms against United States troops, or those who rejected the Supreme Court because of its Dred Scott decision. Obama was suspected of Muslim associations and of following the teachings of an inflammatory preacher who damned the United States. How to face such charges? Each decided to address them openly in a prominent national venue, well before their parties' nominating conventions—Lincoln at the Cooper Union in New York, Obama at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia...

In his prose, Obama of necessity lagged far behind the resplendent Lincoln. But what is of lasting interest is their similar strategy for meeting the charge of extremism. Both argued against the politics of fear. Neither denied the darker aspects of our history, yet they held out hope for what Lincoln called here the better "lights of current experience"—what he would later call the "better angels of our nature." Each looked for larger patterns under the surface bitternesses of their day. Each forged a moral position that rose above the occasions for their speaking.

Mangosteen Chic

The beautiful, delicious "queen of fruits" - the mangosteen, Phronesisaical favorite - long banned from the US for pest concerns has been finding its way into Asian markets in the US for some time. Now, it appears to be making in-roads at NYC juice bars and upscale food markets.

The mangosteen, a Southeast Asian fruit, is stepping into the spotlight this year, its second in markets in the United States. It is available at more stores and the price is down, though perhaps only connoisseurs will eagerly part with $6 a fruit at Dean & DeLuca stores and Agata & Valentina, or $4 at Kings supermarkets in New Jersey...

Eric Helms, the owner of the Juice Generation, shops in Manhattan, buys mangosteens peeled and frozen and combines them and their ruby-red juice (the color comes from the inner skin) with fresh kiwi and mango. The mangosteens’ subtle flavor shines through.

Egad! Frozen mangosteens (which is what you find in Asian markets in the US) are an awful, pallid, and mushy impersonation of the real, fresh thing. The only way to eat a mangosteen is to go to Thailand.
[Thanks for the link, Wes].

The US-Iraq Deal

Leaked to The Guardian.

The draft strategic framework agreement between the US and Iraqi governments, dated March 7 and marked "secret" and "sensitive", is intended to replace the existing UN mandate and authorises the US to "conduct military operations in Iraq and to detain individuals when necessary for imperative reasons of security" without time limit.

The authorisation is described as "temporary" and the agreement says the US "does not desire permanent bases or a permanent military presence in Iraq". But the absence of a time limit or restrictions on the US and other coalition forces - including the British - in the country means it is likely to be strongly opposed in Iraq and the US.

Iraqi critics point out that the agreement contains no limits on numbers of US forces, the weapons they are able to deploy, their legal status or powers over Iraqi citizens, going far beyond long-term US security agreements with other countries. The agreement is intended to govern the status of the US military and other members of the multinational force.

Jonathan Schwartz comments,

...despite the fact that the Iraqi constitution gives the parliament authority to approve all treaties (and the US constitution gives the congress authority to approve all treaties) Bush and Maliki are planning to sign an "agreement" approving a permanent US occupation...without the involvement of either country's legislative branch. Moreover, since Maliki is our puppet, this essentially is the administration agreeing with itself....

And here,

Both the US constitution and the Iraqi constitution require that treaties be approved by their respective legislative branches. Yet Crocker states that Congress will merely be "fully informed" about the US-Iraq agreement. And he doesn't even mention the Iraqi parliament. (It is highly unlikely that either the US Congress or the Iraqi parliament would approve this, let alone both.)

Crocker and the Bush administration justify this by claiming the agreement will not rise to the level of a treaty—that it will be a mere Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which can be concluded just between the respective countries' executive branches. However, all previous SOFAs have merely governed mundane issues, such as "wearing of the uniform, the carrying of arms, tax and customs relief, entry and exit of personnel and property, and resolving damage claims." R. Chuck Mason, the Congressional Research Service's expert on SOFAs, recently stated that a review of over 70 of them found that "none contained the authority to fight." It has always been treaties which do that. The United States does have a SOFA with Germany, but it is the NATO treaty which makes it legal for US troops there to kill people.

Thus the Bush administration position breaks completely with decades of precedent. Moreover, its extremism can be understood by the fact that it logically goes both ways: if Bush and Maliki can together agree without Iraqi parliamentary approval that Americans can be based in Iraq and kill Iraqis, then Maliki and Bush could together agree without US congressional approval that Iraqis can be based in the US and kill Americans.

DC Environmentalist Muslims

I recently posted about students and former students who have blogs. I didn't at the time know of the existence of this one, Green Muslims in the District. Take a look through - good work and good works.

War Crimes Update

Torture decisions were, of course, made at the very top of the Bush administration. ABC News has the story. Jack Balkin comments on possible war crimes charges.

Plant Colors on Other Planets

Via 3QD, here's a fascinating article in Scientific American on what the color of plantlife found on other planets would be, given the variable nature of different stars' radiation spectra and different atmospheric conditions on the planets. A great read.

Fortress Blast Walls

A great little essay by Bryan Finoki at Subtopia on the business of blast walls in Iraq and elsewhere.

...suppose the occupation ends one day, how long will those walls really remain in place, what forlorn legacy is being cemented in the streets of Baghdad today for generations to come? If they were removed at some point, I wonder what would happen to all that concrete? Would it get formally recycled, or broken down into lucrative scrapper markets underground? In such a market, I wonder how much concrete it would take to sustain the life of an average refugee family in Iraq for a month. Who would even own the blast walls if the occupation were to suddenly cease? Would the Americans leave but then come back to reclaim their heaping piles of blast walls one day? Or, could we imagine in a bizarre post-colonial kind of way some newly adaptive reuse project for all these oppressive slabs, say, Bremer Wall refugee rehousing projects? Or is that just too symbolically grim to even consider? How about future bridges and infrastructure made out of old blast walls? Think of all the Iraqi reconstruction projects that aren't getting the attention they deserve compared to the constant fabrication of these barriers.

See also this NY Times article on the US-Mexico border wall. It seems that, in the name of the border wall, 30-some federal laws have been suspended. Border wall law trumps other laws, and Homeland Security is the supreme authoritarian decision-maker.

Lipstick Tree

Iraq Hearings/Questionings

In addition to all the other questions about both the details and the big picture, please also keep in mind a set of questions while listening to, reading about, or humming along with Petraeus' and Crocker's testimony to Congress this week on Iraq progress/regress. The questions are:

• What purposes or outcomes or situations are served by particular maneuvers in the details of both the political rhetoric and actual on-the-ground actions in Iraq? In other words, what are the reasons for a given policy or action?
• What interests are served by a given policy or action? In other words, what particular problem is a policy or action intended to solve?
  

Lost in the daily political wrangling over Iraq and the rhetoric of winning and losing are the reasons for policies in the details and in the big picture. If we ask these questions, we might achieve a better understanding of what the real policy options are so that we can hopefully make wiser choices about what to do and how to reform policies that seem to fail repeatedly even to achieve their stated, immediate purposes. Otherwise, we really are lost in the rhetoric and caprice of "one more corner to turn."

UPDATE:

Here's the thing...

No one, not Crocker or Petraeus can describe what success looks like. When asked by Levin, if all went well what would be an optimistic projection of U.S. troops levels at the end of 2008. Petraeus refuses to answer, saying he can’t know. So he won’t make projections of what success will look like. But both Crocker and Petraeus have absolutely no qualms about projecting the future if we withdrawal from Iraq. This to me is ridiculous. What is the plan for "victory"? What are the projections? They should have to answer those questions, especially when asking for a blank check.

What purposes are served by particular policies? What problems are they intended to solve? If the answer is "I don't know," then the policy is reduced to the absurdity of circularity (i.e., in foreign policy terms, a "quagmire").

Global Climate Change Map

Photo: Matthew Gibbons

I've been thinking about a major online project which I simply don't have the time, resources, or grant-writing energy to do. It would be an interactive data site presenting a global map of greenhouse gas emissions and other activities contributing to climate change. There is, as far as I know, only this site - CARMA - that attempts to do this. The site, UNdata, adds a bit more that could be integrated into the more comprehensive map. But I would also include estimated effects in both global terms and local/regional terms. It would include low-end and high-end estimates of these effects in hydrometeorological, economic, and social terms, differentiating between different emissions (CO2, methane, nitrogen oxides, etc.). Further information could include an assessment of needed practical changes at both the global and local/regional level.

One of the issues here is that climate change is a rather peculiar environmental problem compared to previous environmental problems. As Birnie and Boyle outline in their landmark, International Law and the Environment, some environmental problems are common property problems; some are shared resource problems; some are common heritage problems; some are sovereignty problems. This doesn't exhaust the possible legal frameworks, obviously, but climate change doesn't fit any of these because the atmosphere is not clearly delineable as property. International agreements have referred to the atmosphere and climate change as the "common concern of mankind." But this requires a perspective that moves beyond inherited perspectives on the nature of property, environment, sovereignty, economic activity, and harm.

A global interactive map could serve as a research tool, a reporting tool/clearing house for national emissions reductions and other mitigation and adaptation measures, a practical tool for developing other policies, and a visualized effort at reconceptualizing international and national norms about climate change.

UPDATE:

Here's another new map: a high-resolution map of the US carbon footprint down to 100-square-kilometer segments.

Winning

Exactly. What is it that the US would actually win at this point, if it were winning anything at all? And then, why should we hold out for that victory, or the unnamed thing that constitutes something resembling and/or spinnable as "winning"?

Tell me, really.

p.s. Iran already won.

Quote of the Day

"At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt."

Who said it? Find out here.

Back to the Mothership

So, the little creatures are going back into Philosophy, are they?

Once scoffed at as a luxury major, philosophy is being embraced at Rutgers and other universities by a new generation of college students who are drawing modern-day lessons from the age-old discipline as they try to make sense of their world, from the morality of the war in Iraq to the latest political scandal. The economic downturn has done little, if anything, to dampen this enthusiasm among students, who say that what they learn in class can translate into practical skills and careers. On many campuses, debate over modern issues like war and technology is emphasized over the study of classic ancient texts...

“If I were to start again as an undergraduate, I would major in philosophy,” said Matthew Goldstein, the CUNY chancellor, who majored in mathematics and statistics. “I think that subject is really at the core of just about everything we do. If you study humanities or political systems or sciences in general, philosophy is really the mother ship from which all of these disciplines grow.”

Nationwide, there are more colleges offering undergraduate philosophy programs today than a decade ago (817, up from 765), according to the College Board. Some schools with established programs like Texas A&M, Notre Dame, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, now have twice as many philosophy majors as they did in the 1990s...

“That whole deep existential torment... It’s good for getting girlfriends.”

[Thanks, Wes]

...Children stop yer nu sin' unless yer renderin' fun,
The mother ship the mother ship,
The mother ship's the one.
The blimp the blimp,
The tapes uh trip it's uh trailin' tail,
It's traipse'n along behind the blimp the blimp....
- Captain Beefheart, "The Blimp (Mousetrapreplica)," from Trout Mask Replica

Sunday Links

The fortieth anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination is also the fortieth anniversary of the Washington DC riots, which happened in angry response to news of MLK's death. The riots affected the city of DC for decades to come, leading first to a "white flight" abandonment of not only some of the city's more dynamic and interesting neighborhoods but also an abandonment of city politics and management. Over the 1990s and thus far into the 2000s, the demographics shifted again towards rapacious real estate investments (or "recovery") driving up prices wildly and ultimately leading to black flight out of the District proper for more affordable housing. There are very few neighborhoods in DC today that are mixed race and mixed income. What remains is just that - what remains in the face of inevitability. Most of the US and world thinks of Washington DC in terms of its federal institutions, the city's terrific museums, and the gigantic mausoleum known as the National Mall. But it has a fascinating history apart from its marble and granite facade, and the riots are the axis upon which the city's recent history still turns. Today, another axis of that history is the continuing appeal to white fears.

And... a song from WFMU.
...
Forever Guantanamo: Raymond Bonner adds more in the NY Review of Books to the unfolding story of politicized legal limbo for the Guantanamo detainees.

It is unclear why the Bush administration chose to file the charges against the six [high-value prisoners] now. But some have suggested that the timing relates to the fact that the provision of the 2006 Military Commissions Act that denies detainees the right to file habeas petitions is currently before the Supreme Court—in Boumediene v. Bush—and a decision is expected before the Court's term ends in June. "It's all about politics, not justice," a senior law enforcement official told me. Nothing has changed in the last three years, he said; there is nothing we know now that we didn't know then. The official predicted that the Supreme Court will rule against the administration in the Boumediene case, because at least one of the Court's conservatives will join the liberals in upholding the principle of habeas corpus. Bush will then blame the liberals on the Court for obstructing the prosecution of dangerous men, whose habeas petitions will slowly wind through the courts. Democrats, and the Democratic presidential candidate especially, will then be put on the spot to defend, or reject, what the Court did, he argued, and it is not hard to imagine the attack ads on anyone who does not support whatever legislation the Bush administration proposes to cure the defects.

...
Lewis Alsamari in Guernica on the pre-US history of Abu Ghraib:

The four AIDS-stricken women were dealt with in a fashion brutal even by the standards of the prison. Stripped of their clothes, they were placed, alive and screaming, into an incinerator so that they and their “vile disease” could be utterly destroyed. In this way Saddam “delivered” our country from the horrific infections of the West and from the inequities of the “evil Zionist state.” I kept quiet about my maternal grandmother’s Jewish heritage. She was one of only a handful of Jews who remained in Iraq during the great exodus of 1950. Before that time there were about 150,000 Jews living in Iraq; now there were fewer than a hundred, and it would have done me no favors if anyone suspected that I might embrace Zionism.

...
Jeremy Waldron on Cass Sunstein's new book and one-percent risk-assessment:

Here’s another example of the way the One Per Cent Doctrine affects real-world decision-making. After we invaded Iraq, it turned out that Saddam Hussein did not have any weapons of mass destruction in his possession and did not seem to have been working on a WMD programme for a considerable time. Some American officials and politicians had lied when they said, before the war, that they were convinced he had weapons of mass destruction. They wanted to make a case for war, and they thought this argument (far-fetched as it was) would work with the public; they believed the public would find it harder to understand or accept the geopolitical premise on which the war was really based: to teach the world a lesson, to show what happens when a regime in an area of economic or strategic interest defies the United States. Others, however, sincerely believed it was possible that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, though they were by no means certain. Of those who believed it was possible, very few would have estimated the probability as low as one per cent. They might have said that in at least one in three cases like this (think about Iraq, Iran and North Korea), or one in five, it will turn out that the rogue regime in question really does have or is developing weapons of mass destruction. Clearly, there was a not insignificant probability. And that, for the Cheney doctrine, is enough. Even if the probability of Iraq’s developing nuclear weapons or the capability to weaponise chemical or biological agents that could be unleashed in a crowded Western city is as low as one per cent, the event in question promises catastrophe, and we have no choice – so the doctrine runs – but to act to avert that worst-case scenario.

...
Tony Karon on a pattern further revealed by the recent Basra assault:

The pattern is all too common: The U.S. or an ally or proxy launches a military offensive against a politically popular “enemy” group; Bush and his minions welcome the violence as “clarifying” matters, demonstrating “resolve”, or, in the most grotesque rhetorical flourish of all, the “birth pangs” of a brave new world. Each time, the “enemy” proves far more resilient than expected, largely because Bush and his allies have failed to recognize that each adversary’s power should be measured in political support rather than firepower; and the net effect of the offensive invariably leaves the enemy strengthened and the U.S. and its allies even weaker than before they launched the offensive.

...
Jim Johnson discusses Amnesty International protest posters directed at the Beijing Olympics.

...
Dennis Perrin on the cold dead hands of Charlton Heston:

As president of the NRA, perhaps his greatest acting role, Heston made a big fuss about "fascist" gun control laws, pretending that the countless millions of American gun owners are somehow a besieged minority, like Jews in Nazi Germany. It was an asinine, ahistorical stance, but it played big with his core audience: white guys who whine about being "second-class" citizens in a world dominated by effeminate white liberals, black gangstas, militant fags and lesbians, and assorted multiculturalists who make decent white people feel ashamed of their heritage. Heston pushed for an America where one could "be white without feeling guilty," clearly a pressing problem where whites dominate and own every major power outlet.

...
Scott Horton on the rating of George W. Bush as president.

And... handing off his problems.
...
* The coming water wars in Central Asia.
* Private equity firm buys rights to ecosystem services of Guyana rainforest.
* Plastics in the oceans.
* Finally, getting at coal power policies.
* Nope, the sun is not responsible for climate change.
* Dance in a Brooklyn swamp.
...
And a Spanish cherry:

Justice in Iraq

The United States military announced on Saturday it had charged a civilian contractor in Iraq under U.S. military law for the first time.

Finally! What made the difference?

Alaa Mohammad Ali is accused of stabbing another contractor, the military said in a statement. It did not specify his nationality.

Paterna

Errol Morris on Documentary Reenactments

Here, in reference to a stupid question about The Thin Blue Line:

It never occurred to me that someone might think that the re-enactments were not re-enactments at all, but honest-to-God vérité footage shot while the crime was happening. It’s crazy for someone to think I had just happened to be out on that roadway, that night, with a 35-millimeter film crew and many, many cameras – cameras taking multiple angles, high angles from overhead, low angles at tire-level looking under the car, even angles inside the suspect vehicle. How could anyone think that? How could anyone believe that? Of course, people believe some pretty amazing things, and it made me think: is it a legitimate question? How do we know what is real and what is re-enacted in a photograph? What is real and what is a simulacrum? It’s a question about images. How do we know what is happening for the first time and what is a re-enactment of an event? In a photograph or in a movie? How do we know it hasn’t been doctored or altered to deceive us about the “reality” we imagine we are observing?

Dude, Whoa

Mike Gravel doing Helter Skelter (via Balloon Juice).

Ensete

Photo: Markku Hakkinen

Assholes on Torture

I think Douglas Feith has finally given us the best label of all for this disastrous presidency. Of course, it's directed at those who think torture might possibly be a bad thing. He's calling me and you "assholes." Me, I'm proud to be a member of the asshole-based community.

The most important read on yesterday's release of John Woo's 2003 memo on torture is less the analysis of the memo. The memo itself, however fundamentally outrageous as a legal and moral document, really doesn't add much to the existing understanding of the administration's torture policy and previously public series of memos justifying the policy. Woo is clearly a legal hack, but I'm less concerned about that and more concerned about the manufacture of his memoranda at the top level of the US government. The Woo memos are prominent only because the administration sought justification for what it was already doing and would continue to do, and Woo provided a legal scapegoat.

But, if you're so inclined, check out Marty Lederman's lawyerly assessment here, here, here, and here. See also Jack Balkin's discussion here. Throw in Emily Bazelon's and Glenn Greenwald's discussions. But...

The most important piece today is by Phillippe Sands in Vanity Fair. It provides even more basis for what should be, ultimately, war crimes charges at the highest level of the government. This is the most important essay you could read thus far into the year if you're interested in the nature of your government. "Asshole" is an appellation of subtle beauty in comparison.

The Fish with the Forward-Looking Eyes

There's a story here to be created.... It had a faraway look in its eyes mutely expressing a history of absent parents, dead-end jobs, and dreams of Broadway.

With its unusual flattened face, the fish's eyes appear to be directed forward, something Pietsch says he's never seen in 40 years studying the structure, classification and habits of fishes. Most fishes have eyes on either side of their head so that each eye sees something different. Only very few fishes have eyes whose radius of vision overlaps in front, providing binocular vision, a special attribute well developed in humans that provides the ability to accurately judge distance.

Happy Anniversary, Madam Mayo!

Phronesisaical friend, Madam Mayo, celebrates her 2nd blog anniversary with a neat post on lessons learned. We're glad to see a nod to our quirky selves. Thanks, Madam! And may your world be filled with abundant atemoya!

Hope in Zimbabwe

Photo: Philimon Bulawayo / Reuters

Robert Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF party has conceded that they lost the first round of elections in Zimbabwe. But...

Mugabe's Zanu-PF party said a second round would be needed as Tsvangirai had failed to clinch the necessary 51% of the vote to win outright, according to Reuters.

Two senior party sources said projections showed Tsvangirai getting 48% of votes, Mugabe 43% and a third candidate, Simba Makoni, a former Mugabe loyalist, 8%.

"What this means is that we are looking at a rerun because he did not win with a margin of over 51%, which would have given him the job straight away," one of the sources told Reuters.

The government has yet to produce any results from the presidential election, heightening fears that it is trying to massage the vote in the face of a crushing defeat.

The opposition claims that, according to unofficial tallies, Tsvangirai had 60% of the presidential vote, twice Mugabe's total. Private polling organisations also put Tsvangirai ahead.

UPDATE:

For ongoing updates, see the Zimbabwe blog, This Is Zimbabwe.

Las China

Me llaman el desaparecido
Cuando llega ya se ha ido
Volando vengo, volando voy
Deprisa deprisa a rumbo perdido

Cuando me buscan nunca estoy
Cuando me encuentran yo no soy
El que está enfrente porque ya
Me fui corriendo más allá

Me dicen el desaparecido
Fantasma que nunca está
Me dicen el desagradecido
Pero esa no es la verdad

-Manu Chao, "Desaparecido"

Among the surprises we encountered in Guatemala City the week before last, one we should have expected: the Semana Santa processions and their associated ephemeral grandeur. None of us had been tuned in enough to the religious calendar to note, even in passing, that our arrival in Guatemala City would coincide with the eve of Palm Sunday; much less that we'd find ourselves -- staying in the heart of zone 1 in the center of the capital city -- right in the middle of some of the most elaborate and crowded processions in the country.

The processions are familiar enough, I think, to folks who know something about the celebration of Semana Santa in Spain and parts of Latin America: that photo above is of an unfinished alfombra, or tapete -- an elaborate, temporary street carpet made of stenciled, colored sawdust. This one was made by a group of young students from the school across the street from the Guatemala City Casa del Migrante, and the low light does no justice to the careful coordination of its color and design. But you get the idea.

After alfombras have been created along the route -- a fairly complicated schedule of the processions, which happen day and night throughout the week -- the thing proper begins:

guys dressed as Roman Soldiers (the elaborateness of their outfits a direct correlation to the social status of the neighborhood) are followed through the streets by the andas themselves -- big, elaborate Holy Week-oriented floats -- carried collectively along the route.

They're followed by a band. And then a bulldozer, a dumptruck, and a small army of city streetsweepers; working efficiently, they erase, in a matter of a few minutes, any sign of the recently-trampled alfombras.

On the evening of the first picture, above, several of the migrants staying at the Casa had come out to take part in the creation of an alfombra on the theme of migration, directly in front of the shelter. Among them were a young pair of Chinese women who, as far as anyone could ascertain, had been brought to Guatemala to work in the sex trade. They spoke no Spanish, and very, very little English. No one knew for certain if they had chosen to come to Guatemala, but it seemed unlikely that they had arrived with an understanding of the use they would be put to, there. They wound up at the Casa in between being discovered -- by someone -- in Guatemala City and being deported.

That's one of them, in fact, in that first picture -- that blur in the bottom right-hand corner. In the few days we spent there, inexplicably popping in from the States, with our cameras and tripods and digital recording equipment, we had managed only to achieve a kind of friendly non-verbal rapport. When they jumped playfully into the frame of my evening photo of the alfombra, and when they pressed in on each side of me to see the resulting picture, they crossed all kinds of figurative borders, of course. But their closeness was also just warm and human and happy. It felt good.

It felt a lot better than not being able to explain -- they probably knew? -- why they weren't in the picture after all, how I had been trying to avoid using the flash, how they moved too quickly through the frame for me to record them at all. It was with a kind of frustrating desperation that I smiled at them, and shrugged. And they walked away to find another photographer. And then, a few nights later, they disappeared.

Opening Day

Happy Opening Day tomorrow. Go Padres.

Route 3 Through Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam

Photo: Justin Mott for The International Herald Tribune

With trade across these borders increasing by double digits every year, China has helped build a series of roads inside the territory of its southern neighbors. The Chinese government is paying half the cost of a bridge over the Mekong River between Laos and Thailand, due for completion in 2011. It financed parts of Route 3 in Laos and refurbished roads in northern Myanmar, including the storied Burma Road used by the Allies in World War II to supply troops fighting the Japanese. China is also building an oil and gas pipeline from the Bay of Bengal through Myanmar to Kunming.

Taken together, these roads are breaking the isolation of the thinly inhabited upper reaches of Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam, areas that in recent decades languished because of wars, ethnic rivalries and heroin trafficking. The roads run through the heart of the Golden Triangle, the region that once produced 70 percent of the world's opium crop.

The invasions of new trade routes.... The Kunming-Bangkok route is especially fascinating given its history as fragmented opium routes and what it could mean in both benefits and costs for a poor country such as Laos.

Withdrawal

Zbigniew Brzezinski, writing in the Washington Post, outlines a rough picture of a US withdrawal from Iraq. It'll have to happen, even if few are talking about how. Brzezinski, in my view, sketches about as decent an option as the US now has. It will, however, take a new president committed to wiser foreign policy and better (i.e., existent) diplomacy. Nothing about it will be easy.

Contrary to Republican claims that our departure will mean calamity, a sensibly conducted disengagement will actually make Iraq more stable over the long term. The impasse in Shiite-Sunni relations is in large part the sour byproduct of the destructive U.S. occupation, which breeds Iraqi dependency even as it shatters Iraqi society. In this context, so highly reminiscent of the British colonial era, the longer we stay in Iraq, the less incentive various contending groups will have to compromise and the more reason simply to sit back. A serious dialogue with the Iraqi leaders about the forthcoming U.S. disengagement would shake them out of their stupor.

Ending the U.S. war effort entails some risks, of course, but they are inescapable at this late date. Parts of Iraq are already self-governing, including Kurdistan, part of the Shiite south and some tribal areas in the Sunni center. U.S. military disengagement will accelerate Iraqi competition to more effectively control their territory, which may produce a phase of intensified inter-Iraqi conflicts. But that hazard is the unavoidable consequence of the prolonged U.S. occupation. The longer it lasts, the more difficult it will be for a viable Iraqi state ever to reemerge.

It is also important to recognize that most of the anti-U.S. insurgency in Iraq has not been inspired by al-Qaeda. Locally based jihadist groups have gained strength only insofar as they have been able to identify themselves with the fight against a hated foreign occupier. As the occupation winds down and Iraqis take responsibility for internal security, al-Qaeda in Iraq will be left more isolated and less able to sustain itself. The end of the occupation will thus be a boon for the war on al-Qaeda, bringing to an end a misguided adventure that not only precipitated the appearance of al-Qaeda in Iraq but also diverted the United States from Afghanistan, where the original al-Qaeda threat grew and still persists.

The Void

Image: Stephen Brooks

Physicists Make Artificial Black Hole Using Optical Fiber. (Via 3QD). OK, that's interesting. Wonder what that involves...

To make their event horizon, Leonhardt and colleagues used a titanium sapphire laser and a microstructured optical fiber—one containing a hexagonal arrangement of air-filled holes that ran its length. They first transmitted an ultrashort, intense laser pulse down the optical fiber. The optical fiber is susceptible to nonlinear effects, such that when an intense pulse of light hits the fiber, it changes the physical properties of the fiber. In this case, the first pulse created a distortion that amounted to a change in the fiber’s index of refraction, which moves along with the pulse. The pulse itself was slowed by the distortion. Leonhardt and colleagues then sent a “faster” stream of infrared laser light in pursuit of the first pulse. When the faster-moving second pulse encountered the distortion, it got trapped at its edge and couldn’t break past it. This edge became the fiber’s “event horizon.”

“Light propagating in a moving medium is similar to the light propagating in curved space” such as you would find near a black hole, explains Volovik. So “it is possible to create artificial horizons.”

Following Einstein’s theory of relativity, as light approaches the event horizon, it would slow down immensely and be stretched out; time would also proceed very slowly. Scientists have worked out what this deceleration would look like, and Leonhardt and colleagues say they observed the predicted effects in their optical-fiber event horizon.

Leonhardt and his colleagues hope their artificial event horizon will let experimentalists see whether anything can escape from a black hole.

There may be a drawback (although the project below is not the same as above): Black Hole Eats Earth.

...Walter Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a "strangelet" that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called "strange matter." Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the U.S. National Environmental Policy Act.

For more, try here.

...For in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything. Since he is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, the end of things and their beginning are hopelessly hidden from him in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the Nothing from which he was made, and the Infinite in which he is swallowed up. (Pascal, Pensées sect. II, 72).

Flashes of Brilliance

Maybe it's spring in the air, but the blogoid internets seemed to do a particularly good job yesterday of producing interesting analyses on Iraq. Five pieces on Iraq that you must read:

Spencer Ackerman: Ensuring Permanence: The Bush Administration Is Negotiating a Long-Term Iraq Occupation. (Also check out Ackerman's McCain Foreign Policy: Bush Doctrine Plus).

Tony Karon & Alastair Crooke: Iraq and U.S. Faith in Violence.

David Bromwich: Euphemism and American Violence.

John Robb: Sadr's Defensive Strategy.

Marc Lynch: Another theory for the pile.

Loquats

Photo: Ming Wei Shen

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, Father of Recorded Sound

Like so many things at which Americans insist they were first, the French actually were:

For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words "Mary had a little lamb" on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison's invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades.

The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.

"This is a historic find, the earliest known recording of sound," said Samuel Brylawski, the former head of the recorded-sound division of the Library of Congress, who is not affiliated with the research group but who was familiar with its findings. The audio excavation could give a new primacy to the phonautograph, once considered a curio, and its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer who went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison...

Scott's 1860 phonautogram was made 17 years before Edison received a patent for the phonograph and 28 years before an Edison associate captured a snippet of a Handel oratorio on a wax cylinder, a recording that until now was widely regarded by experts as the oldest that could be played back.

UPDATE:
Listen!

Normalizing Hiroshima

Photo: Helmut

Ron Rosenbaum:

That's what everyone says after visiting Hiroshima, the statesmen and citizens who sign the guest book at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. We will never forget. But maybe we will. The very fact that Hiroshima is thriving with its KFC and Starbucks, with the carefully manicured lawns of its "Peace Memorial Park"—the only evidence that hell was unleashed here—may have the opposite, anodyne effect. This is not John Hersey's Hiroshima, the Hiroshima of the horrific immediate aftermath, but is to a certain extent a Hiroshima that says a nuclear detonation is a transient thing, something that's eminently recoverable from with a little time and some good landscaping.

Now, really. Ron's apparently easily distracted by coffee and fried chicken.

I've lived in Japan on three separate occasions at different stages of my life. I've been to the museum in Hiroshima and the Peace Park - I've seen the nuclear shadows of people obliterated from the world in an instant, leaving only the "shadow" outline of their body on the concrete. I've also been to Nagasaki. I spoke some Japanese then. I wandered the streets, ducked into bars, and neighborhood restaurants, talked to locals. My impression of Hiroshima - and I realize it's only that, a personal impression - was of city that was steeped in its horrific past. It was striking because I had traveled all over the country and had never visited a place like this. I felt a sense of suspicion. I was given disdainful looks. I experienced the one and only time in Japan in which someone tried to rip me off. Now, I don't want to say that Hiroshima has some kind of essence of which these are eternal qualities. This is simply anecdotal experience. It is an experience I encountered nowhere else in Japan. But the bombing of this industrial city continues to have deep effects on its very identity and mood. How could it not? Hiroshima's message regarding the atomic bomb is that we should never forget the horrors of nuclear weapons. This is how the museum is presented. You are confronted unflinchingly with human disaster.

Nagasaki chose a different message. Perhaps this is because Kyushu, the lush western island on which Nagasaki rests, was always open - for 300 years - as a matter of Japanese policy to foreigners and different ideas. The cultural mix is apparent in the architecture, customs, and friendliness of the people. The memorial at Nagasaki preaches love. It says that the unqualified horror of nuclear war is only surmounted through continuing to urge messages of peace and love and openness. Nagasaki as a place tries to forgive. The contrast with Hiroshima, in my experience, couldn't be greater. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the yin and yang of Japanese pacifism.

It's offensive and typically America-centric to say that Starbucks and KFC are somehow distraction enough to change either of these necessary messages.

Hillary the Republican Conspirator

Christopher Orr:

1) Matt Drudge hyped a photo of Obama in Somali garb that he claimed (and the Clinton campaign declined to deny) Clinton staffers had been circulating.

2) Bill Clinton went on the Rush Limbaugh show on the day of the Texas primary--after Limbaugh had spent days urging GOP voters in the state to cross over and vote for Clinton in order "rig" the election and ensure that Democrats nominated the weaker of their two candidates.

3) The Clinton campaign has been circulating an article in The American Spectator alleging that an Obama adviser, former Air Force chief Merrill McPeak, is an anti-semite and a drunk.

4) When Clinton attacked Obama on Jeremiah Wright yesterday, she did it at an editorial meeting of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the vanity publication of Richard Mellon Scaife, while sitting next to Scaife himself.

Cachao

Israel "Cachao" López, the great Cuban musician, died this past weekend.

Cachao, as he was universally known, transformed the rhythm of Cuban music when he and his brother, the pianist and cellist Orestes López, extended and accelerated the final section of the stately Cuban danzón into the mambo. “My brother and I would say to each other, ‘Mambea, mambea ahí,’ which meant to add swing to that part,” he said in a 2006 interview with The Miami Herald. The springy mambo bass lines Cachao created in the late 1930’s — simultaneously driving and playful — became a foundation of modern Cuban music, of the salsa that grew out of it, and also of Latin-influenced rock ’n’ roll and rhythm-and-blues. For much of the 20th century, Cachao’s innovations set the world dancing.

In the late 1950’s, he brought another breakthrough to Latin music with descargas: late-night Havana jam sessions that merged Afro-Cuban rhythms, Cuban songs and the convolutions of jazz. The mixture of propulsion and exploration in those recordings has influenced salsa and jazz musicians ever since...

“His phrasing and his attack and how he functioned in the orchestra was unique to Cachao,” the actor Andy Garcia, who reinvigorated Cachao’s career by producing albums and documentaries in the 1990’s, said in a telephone interview on Sunday. “He always played bass with the bow in his hand. He would go back and forth. And as he was strumming with his fingers, he always had the bow in his hand and the bow would strike the bass percussively.”

Cachao played with abandon. You hear it. This isn't pleasant, lopingly structured salsa and mambo, or the watery, bleached "world music" version. It's rough and aggressive at times, fast, the musicians - some of the best of Afro-Cuban music - absorbed into their craft. It's joyful.

WFMU has a nice set of downloads. Captain's Crate has another nice set.

A Particular Universal Proposition

Jacques Louis-David's The Death of Socrates, 1787

Logic has long used the proposition, "all men are mortal," as a staple of syllogisms: as in "All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal." The proposition is a universal affirmative proposition to the extent that there is a necessary connection between "man" and "mortal." That is, a universal proposition ("all men are mortal") states that all members of a class (men) carry a further designation (mortality). (A particular proposition holds only that some members of a class have that particular designation).

Universality as a metaphysical notion further holds to the extent that the proposition is true for all times and places. "2+2=4" is a universal proposition in this sense. Its truth doesn't change if you're in medieval Calcutta, ancient Rome, or modern Dekalb.

But, although long considered universal both logically and metaphysically, the proposition "all men are mortal" may not really be true. For one thing, developments in genetics and cellular biology suggest new possibilities for extending life, even indefinitely. Other developments in artificial intelligence suggest a transformed notion of life and immortality in which one could upload human consciousness to virtual bodies.

It's curious to think of this proposition above all as a black swan. If "all men are mortal," that well-worn absolute certainty of Intro to Logic, is simply a false, formally universal proposition, what does this say about universal propositions or metaphysical universality? I also wonder what this does to the central proposition of most Asian religions - but specifically the religions of Tibet, Nepal, and India - that everything that lives, dies.

Anti-Jaguar Wall

The wall being constructed on the border between the US and Mexico is also becoming a barrier to the migratory range of the jaguar, reducing further its ever-precious habitat at a time when Central American countries are seeking to preserve jaguar corridors. Jaguars in the southwestern US are rare today. Nonetheless, their habitat still extends as far north as New Mexico and Arizona.

In Olmec, Aztec, and Mayan jaguar myths, the jaguar was a creature of authority and strength, as well as mobility between different physical and spiritual worlds due to its rare feline capacity for inhabiting not only the trees and the earth, but also water. It is a symbol at the core of indigenous identity in the Americas so profound that its non-existence would entail the evolution of a completely different culture over the last three millennia. In the name of racial identity and spurious economic arguments, the jaguar in North America will also end with the wall, its non-existence the symbol of reactionary weakness and cultural immobility.

Kelendang

Linksaical

Photo: Andrew Holbrooke/Corbis

Soot. It's a more damaging problem than previously thought.

On Norway's pledge to become "carbon neutral" by 2030.

"Chemical geography." On unmonitored radioactive and chemical waste off the coast of northern California.

The New Hydrological Temples of Modern India.

Another sign of growing inequality in the US: the gap in life expectancy rates grows.

Liberals doing their own bigotry thing.

NY Times chief correspondent in France says goodbye after 5 years, leaving behind an astounding trail of clichés about "the French." (...ah, life in the 16th arrondissement!). SuperFrenchie sums it up.

East German escape tales.

Phronesisaical friend, Abbas Raza of 3QD, "defends" Pakistani dictatorship at n+1.

Obama's other brilliant speech last week; the one on foreign policy.

Al Giordano's "five givens" as we approach the Democratic Convention in Denver.

Sadrist "civil disobedience" campaign in Iraq.

Iran trying to help in Basra... by supplying electricity.

Successful! Michael Schwartz on Baghdad:

Over the course of five years, Baghdad, the capital city of Iraq, has been transformed from a metropolis into an urban desert of half-destroyed buildings and next to no public services, dotted by partially deserted, mutually hostile mini-ghettos that used to be neighborhoods, surrounded by cement barriers reminiscent of medieval fortifications. The most prominent of these ghettos is the heavily fortified city-inside-a-city dubbed the Green Zone, where Iraq's most fearsome militia, the United States military, is headquartered.