The sound you hear is the last shred of Rick Santorum’s credibilitybursting into flames.

Take two from the world-famous Miss Teen South Carolina:

Personally, my friends and I, we know exactly where the United States is on our map.  We don’t know anyone else who doesn’t, and if the statistics are correct, I believe there should be more emphasis on geography and our education, so people will learn to read maps better.

To ask the all-importantquestion, “Is The Bourne Ultimatum anti-American” is a bit like asking, “Is Gladiator anti-Roman?”  Put this way, I think we can immediately see how misguided the question is, since the question makes us say whether the movie is for or against an entire country, way of life or (if you will) civilisation, when the movie in question is pretty clearly an indictment of a corrupt and/or tyrannical government.  “This isn’t us” isn’t quite “there was a dream that was Rome” in rhetorical power, but it conveys a similar idea.     

The first mistake anyone who flings the “anti-American” accusation makes is to equate the government with the society as a whole.  If someone or something is critical of the U.S. government, it is very often deemed anti-American or, if the person doing the criticising is American, unpatriotic.  This plays by the state’s rules: it makes patriotism dedication to the state, rather than to the country, and it makes the state into the embodiment of America.  This is simply not true, and it’s a very good thing at times that this isn’t true.  That doesn’t mean that the citizens don’t have some small part to play in the dreadful policy decisions made by the state (it is our government, after all), but the decisions being taken in Ultimatum are the sort that the public is never supposed to know about because the average citizen of this country would still probably be horrified at ordering the deaths of foreign journalists in the name of protecting some part of the behemoth security state.

This may be why I don’t think the word “anti-American” means very much, at least not as it is used these days.  If it applies to, say, Bin Laden, Gerhard Schroeder and Paul Greengrass in some meaningful way, it seems to me that the word is either far, far too broad to mean much at all or it is used deliberately to obscure what the user is actually trying to say (i.e., “I really don’t like this person’s views, and I’m going to tar him with a really ugly label”).  Here the criticism is that the movie pretty explicitly says that black ops, torture and breeding armies of mindless assassins are all un-American activities (ha!), which can really only offend your sensibilities as an American if you think all of these things are basically necessary and useful tools of the state for the protection of [place whichever buzzword we’re using this week here]. 

Mickey Kaus’ main complaint is that “the film is unredeemed by any sense that America or the American government ever stands for or does anything that is right.”  Here’s the crucial point, since the movie is not concerned with America in general, but is very specifically concerned with one nasty corner of the American government.  It does not, it’s true, spend even five seconds of film time noting the solid work that people in the National Park Service are doing every day, and Matt Damon does not stop his rooftop chase in Tangiers to applaud this year’s charitable giving to hospitals, but I think these things might break up the storyline a bit.  Obviously, I jest, but this sort of thing invites a bit of ridicule. 

Yes, we know that Damon and Greengrass are men with super-liberal politics (Howard Zinn is a Damon family friend, for goodness’ sake), and we know that they don’t understand James Bond (which is their true crime), but what is the basis for charging their movie with anti-Americanism?  That it doesn’t engage in a lot of feel-good, pro-American rah-rah?  This is silly.  I’ll second Chris Orr‘s “jingoistic nonsense” line.

Before I go this morning, I wanted to mention that Fisk has an excellent article on the Armenian genocide.

Well, I had warned you that this day was coming.  I had thought that my intensive Arabic class would interrupt blogging, but I managed to keep posting anyway.  Now that I am beginning the semester at my teaching job, I don’t see how I can possibly keep up the same pace here and still get everything else (including the dissertation) done in a satisfactory manner.  From time to time, I will put up new posts, but I cannot guarantee any regular posting for the next several months.  For a regular dose of Larison, subscribe to The American Conservative(which you should have already done by now).

Perhaps Steve Clemons should stick to foreign policy.  Affrerement, like adelphopoiesisin Byzantium (the terms mean the same thing), is not what the Boswells of the world would like us to think that it is, namely a medieval stamp of approval for homosexual relations.  Byzantinists understand that ceremonies for adelphopoiesis were not ceremonial approvals of homosexual erotic relationships, which neither secular nor ecclesiastical authorities would have approved, but were instead rites designed to formalise a strong social and emotional bond between men or as a mechanism for adoption.  It is strange that some moderns should have such difficulty imagining such fraternal bonds between friends.

The Middle East, by contrast, was always the “elephant path of history,” as Israel’s fabled defense minister, Moshe Dayan, put it. Legions of conquerors have marched up and down the Levant, and from Alexander’s Macedonia all the way to India. Other prominent visitors were Julius Caesar, Napoleon and the German Wehrmacht.

This is not just ancient history. Today, the Greater Middle East is a cauldron even Macbeth’s witches would be terrified to touch. The world’s worst political and religious pathologies combine with oil and gas, terrorism and nuclear ambitions. ~Josef Joffe

Of course, by “visitor” Joffe is being quite literal: Napoleon was obliged to depart soon after he arrived, and the region played essentially no role in the wars that followed, Caesar didn’t bother to stay for long, and the Wehrmacht “visited” a lot of places that were not of great strategic value (they got around).  When was the last time the Near East actually possessed the strategic significance Joffe attributes to it?  Realistically, the region has not been a significant “strategic arena” since the 17th century, and that is being fairly generous.  Near Eastern campaigns in the world wars were relative sideshows, and while important the region was never the main stage during the Cold War.  What great powers exist in the region now that have changed this?  Not even the discovery of oil has changed the region’s marginal importance. 

South and East Asia are shaping up to become such a “central strategic arena.”  Numbers, wealth and the concentration of several major military powers all indicate that it will be the main arena of the future, if it is not already.  In fifty years’ time, our heirs will look at our obsession with the Middle East (assuming that we have not perpetuated it until then) in the same way that modern Europeans must regard the scramble for Africa with some amazement.  Late 19th century colonial advances into Africa were just symptoms of the rivalry of European powers, and it was in Europe where the major power struggles were going to take place.   

Besides, a withdrawal from Iraq will not realistically entail any rapid departure from the Gulf as a whole.  Fears of total Iranian domination are just that–irrational fears.  Kooky predictions of Chinese domination of the western Pacific are even less credible.  (Last I checked, the Pacific Fleet still existed, and there is this country called “Japan.”)  Additionally, Joffe’s article contradicts itself: at the same time that he says that America isn’t dispensable, he warns that our allies will seek “insurance” elsewhere.  But if there are no other powers that can credibly provide it, where will they go? 

No, American superpower will persist well after any withdrawal from Iraq.  Leaving Iraq will be a setback, but it will almost certainly not unleash the sort of worldwide backlash against the U.S. that Joffe predicts.  Rather than opening the floodgates that will threaten to sweep American power away, getting out of Iraq will stop the bleeding of U.S. prestige and power, which are daily being consumed by an open-ended, pointless occupation of Iraq.  Articles such as these are a good sign that war supporters have become extremely desperate and have dug in with their last excuses for keeping the war going.  Perhaps they sense that the country has turned against them so strongly that their only hope is the most irresponsible kind of fearmongering.  Then again, they have never had much in the way of other arguments.

In his brief statement, Gonzales reflected on his up-from-the-bootstraps life story, the son of migrant farm workers from Mexico who didn’t finish elementary school. “Even my worst days as attorney general have been better than my father’s best days,” he said. ~MSNBC

But I’ll wager that his father didn’t lay waste to the federal department in charge of law enforcement, and he probably didn’t work to subvert the Constitution and federal statutes.

It was looking grim there for a while, but it seems that Gonzales is finally gone.  I couldn’t imagine how he would have lasted another 17 months until the end.  It’s encouraging to start the week with some good news.

Whether this is spin for our benefit or the actual story, it is remarkable how we once again have a prominent Cabinet member trying to resign and we hear that the President didn’t want to accept the resignation.  Either Bush really is that stubborn, or this is how he wants to be perceived.  It’s quite odd, actually, since Bush suffers the political damage of a member of his Cabinet being forced out by scandal and political pressure, but he doesn’t even reap the reward for making the decision to remove the person in question.