Viagra and £60m

From the WashPost: “Col. David Hogg, commander of the 2nd Brigade of the 4th Infantry Division, said tougher methods are being used to gather the intelligence. On Wednesday night, he said, his troops picked up the wife and daughter of an Iraqi lieutenant general. They left a note: "If you want your family released, turn yourself in." Such tactics are justified, he said, because, "It's an intelligence operation with detainees, and these people have info." They would have been released in due course, he added later. The tactic worked. On Friday, Hogg said, the lieutenant general appeared at the front gate of the U.S. base and surrendered.” And the colonel is actually proud of himself.

Press Association headline: “Saddam's Sons Had Viagra and £60m.” Now, that’s a party! The article notes that that’s 3X the amount of the American reward. A Times story says that many Iraqis believe Saddam hasn’t been caught because he has a magic stone.

Now that things are going so badly (50 dead US soldiers since the war “ended”), the army has stopped “embedding” reporters.

Residents of the Liberian capital had their water cut off by the fighting days ago. Fortunately American soldiers are there--protecting shipments of beer to the American embassy. I saw it on the BBC. While the US has been doing nothing to get rid of Charles Taylor, it has demanded that the rebels, who are doing something about it, withdraw from their positions in Monrovia, which would give those positions back to Taylor.

I HATE SUMMER RE-RUNS. Texas state senators have fled the state, to Albuquerque, as another special session to pass the redistricting plan is called. They are surrounded by NM state police to protect them from any bounty-hunters that the Texas R’s might use. Really. Incidentally, this is the second special session, coming immediately after the first one. So why call it a separate session? Because the Lite Governor had promised to abide by the senate rules requiring 2/3 for a bill to be considered. Since he lost that by one vote, he decided that his promise only applied to that session.

Given the complete failure of US intelligence (in more than one sense of the word) in predicting events in Iraq and elsewhere, the Pentagon has decided to turn to the futures market, and let investors bet on assassinations, terrorist strikes and North Korean missile attacks.

George Monbiot, however, says it’s a failure not of intelligence but of ideology. Or perhaps theology because, he says, the US is no longer a nation but is now a religion:

Its soldiers have entered Iraq to liberate its people not only from their dictator, their oil and their sovereignty, but also from their darkness. As George Bush told his troops on the day he announced victory: "Wherever you go, you carry a message of hope - a message that is ancient and ever new. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, 'To the captives, "come out," and to those in darkness, "be free".'"

So American soldiers are no longer merely terrestrial combatants; they have become missionaries. They are no longer simply killing enemies; they are casting out demons. The people who reconstructed the faces of Uday and Qusay Hussein carelessly forgot to restore the pair of little horns on each brow, but the understanding that these were opponents from a different realm was transmitted nonetheless. Like all those who send missionaries abroad, the high priests of America cannot conceive that the infidels might resist through their own free will; if they refuse to convert, it is the work of the devil, in his current guise as the former dictator of Iraq.

As Clifford Longley shows in his fascinating book Chosen People, published last year, the founding fathers of the USA, though they sometimes professed otherwise, sensed that they were guided by a divine purpose. Thomas Jefferson argued that the Great Seal of the United States should depict the Israelites, "led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night". George Washington claimed, in his inaugural address, that every step towards independence was "distinguished by some token of providential agency". Longley argues that the formation of the American identity was part of a process of "supersession". The Roman Catholic church claimed that it had supplanted the Jews as the elect, as the Jews had been repudiated by God. The English Protestants accused the Catholics of breaking faith, and claimed that they had become the beloved of God. The American revolutionaries believed that the English, in turn, had broken their covenant: the Americans had now become the chosen people, with a divine duty to deliver the world to God's dominion. Six weeks ago, as if to show that this belief persists, George Bush recalled a remark of Woodrow Wilson's. "America," he quoted, "has a spiritual energy in her which no other nation can contribute to the liberation of mankind." ....

So those who question George Bush's foreign policy are no longer merely critics; they are blasphemers, or "anti-Americans". Those foreign states which seek to change this policy are wasting their time: you can negotiate with politicians; you cannot negotiate with priests. The US has a divine mission, as Bush suggested in January: "to defend ... the hopes of all mankind", and woe betide those who hope for something other than the American way of life.

The dangers of national divinity scarcely require explanation. Japan went to war in the 1930s convinced, like George Bush, that it possessed a heaven-sent mission to "liberate" Asia and extend the realm of its divine imperium. It would, the fascist theoretician Kita Ikki predicted: "light the darkness of the entire world". Those who seek to drag heaven down to earth are destined only to engineer a hell.