spinoff

1.) Declaring Victory

"Iraq Is All but Won; Now What?"
(Los Angeles Times headline, 4/10/03)

"Now that the combat phase of the war in Iraq is officially over, what begins is a debate throughout the entire U.S. government over America's unrivaled power and how best to use it."
(CBS reporter Joie Chen, 5/4/03)

"Congress returns to Washington this week to a world very different from the one members left two weeks ago. The war in Iraq is essentially over and domestic issues are regaining attention."
(NPR's Bob Edwards, 4/28/03)

"Tommy Franks and the coalition forces have demonstrated the old axiom that boldness on the battlefield produces swift and relatively bloodless victory. The three-week swing through Iraq has utterly shattered skeptics' complaints."
(Fox News Channel's Tony Snow, 4/13/03)

"The only people who think this wasn't a victory are Upper Westside liberals, and a few people here in Washington."
(Charles Krauthammer, Inside Washington, WUSA-TV, 4/19/03)

"We had controversial wars that divided the country. This war united the country and brought the military back."
(Newsweek's Howard Fineman--MSNBC, 5/7/03)

"We're all neo-cons now."
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)

"The war was the hard part. The hard part was putting together a coalition, getting 300,000 troops over there and all their equipment and winning. And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but it is not as hard as winning a war."
(Fox News Channel's Fred Barnes, 4/10/03)

"Oh, it was breathtaking. I mean I was almost starting to think that we had become inured to everything that we'd seen of this war over the past three weeks; all this sort of saturation. And finally, when we saw that it was such a just true, genuine expression. It was reminiscent, I think, of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And just sort of that pure emotional expression, not choreographed, not stage-managed, the way so many things these days seem to be. Really breathtaking."

(Washington Post reporter Ceci Connolly, appearing on Fox News Channel on 4/9/03, discussing the pulling down of a Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad, an event later revealed to have been a U.S. military PSYOPS operation--Los Angeles Times, 7/3/04)


2.) Mission Accomplished?

"The war winds down, politics heats up.... Picture perfect. Part Spider-Man, part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan. The president seizes the moment on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific."
(PBS's Gwen Ifill, 5/2/03, on George W. Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech)

"We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like Clinton or even like Dukakis or Mondale, all those guys, McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple. We're not like the Brits."
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 5/1/03)

"He looked like an alternatively commander in chief, rock star, movie star, and one of the guys."
(CNN's Lou Dobbs, on Bush's 'Mission Accomplished' speech, 5/1/03)

 -- ALL THE ABOVE TAKEN FROM fair.org

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

Please find below an e-mail exchange between three individuals on the nature of animal cuteness and attractiveness. The exchange was set in motion by a forwarded image of a nice kitten being funny.

PERSON 1: I'll see your squishy kitten and raise you a panda painted on a human hair - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4836662.stm

PERSON 2: This, my friends,

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25689-2099856,00....

shits on all of your rubbish animal links.

PERSON 3: So it does. However, when calculating cuteness vs. age, one must look at their respective Animal Attractiveness Quotients(tm):

fluff = (no. of paws + (1/age))*(if feline = 10, if other =3)+ cuteness of action[1-10 scale]

whereas

age = age in years * 0.1 therefore a one year old kitten engaged in something very cute = (4 * 10)+10 = 50, whereas a 255 year old tortoise, which has no fur at all, only has a = 255*>1 = 25.5. Therefore the squishy kitten has twice the AAQ(tm) of Clive of India's tortoise. Though it scores significantly lower on the 'bloody hell that's incredible scale'.

PERSON 2: *stunned silence*

PERSON 3:I'm on benefits, I'm stuck at home, and my brain's overactive. Need I say more?

PERSON 1: I was thinking how an octapus (sic) would do, but then obviously an octopus doesn't have any paws, they'd have to be genetically modified tentacles, or slightly furry tentacles maybe. Im off to a private audience with that giant squid soon.. should be fun, at the opposite end of the spectrum.

PERSONS 2 AND 3: *stunned silence*

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

Bloomberg reported this week that US military spending in Iraq and Afghanistan now totals $9.8 billion a month. That's around £5.6 billion. A month. The same report notes that Congress has voted $337 billion "for the wars since September 11, 2001" and that the US's fiscal deficit in financial year 2006 will be a record $423 billion.

The United States population is, according to the CIA World Factbook (and they ought to know) 295,734,134. You need a big calculator to work out the next bit, but this means that every man, woman and child, whether a tax payer or not, spends $33.14 a month on Iraq and Afghanistan ($397.65 a year). It means that the money spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars since September 11, 2001, has cost $1,139.54 per person. And it means that everyone in the United States of America owes $1,430.14 this year.

Now, I know, these are raw figures, and in some cases you need to work out taxpayers vs. total population, but this is an op-ed piece and I'm trying to get a point across. We could go on. Spend vs. Gross Domestic Product is increasing, the federal deficit is at an all time high (always is under Republican presidents, somehow: clearly the party of low taxes gets round the problem of raising money by dumping debt on its population rather than, oh I don't know, cutting expenditure); and you have to bear in mind that this is only in what is now laughably called 'defence' - though with this sort of money being spent, surely there's an argument for reconstituting the Ministry of War.

In total, US revenues of $2.119 trillion are offset by public expenditure of $2.466 trillion. It's a massive economy, sure, but it's also storing up some pretty huge debts. You'll excuse me for my obsession about these numbers: I'm doing my tax returns this weekend, and the paltry amount I owe, for which I will be pursued until I am backed into a corner and my legs ripped off and sold for parts by the attack dogs of the revenue (or at least that's what I imagine will happen) is likely to be in the order of 0.0000015366% of the US deficit.

Which makes me feel a bit better, but is unlikely to blunt the teeth of the attack dogs any. And what's worse, of course, is that this is public money. A mother of one of the many American dead in Iraq, when asked why she was continuing to pressure George W Bush about the US's continued involvement, said 'Because he works for me: he is a public servant'.

And this is something that the sheer enormity of these numbers mask. Every dollar that the US government has to spend has come from someone; from duties, from taxation, from levies, sure - but all of this money, all of this $2.119 trillion, comes out of someone else's pocket. We must not be so overwhelmed by the sheer implacable hugeness of the figures that we forget this: it's our money they're spending. And if you can be bothered to do the math, you can reduce it to the personal.

That's when it becomes really scary - because, personally, I worked damn hard for that $33.14 a month that Mr Rumsfeld's going to spend on a botched war, and I'd rather he gave it me back if he's going to do something like that with it.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

Modern warfare, such as it is, is considerably more destructive than it seems at first. ‘Controlling the battle space’, a nice clean expression for pulverising the enemy, involves far more than overwhelming force. It involves the implementation of yet another sanitised expression, C3I – Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence – or, more especially, disrupting the other sides’ ability to use any of them.

On the surface, this, like so many modern military expressions, seems gloriously clean of death. But it isn’t; in fact, it extends the war deeply into the civil population, causing ‘collateral’ deaths whilst sparing the attacking armed forces the inconvenience of actually having to machine gun bread queues.

Disrupting C3I isn’t as simple as bombing railway stations or strafing command vehicles on the battlefield. It means dropping strips of tin foil on power stations to cut off the enemy’s access to electricity: which also, in an industrialised country like Iraq, also cuts off power to hospitals and water pumping stations.

It means jamming radios – not the main military command net, which in Iraq was largely conducted, at least from headquarters to headquarters, by fibre optic cables which cannot be jammed – but the radios of, for instance, the fire and ambulance services. Power and long range communications: the two things without which any urban population ceases to operate coherently in very short order.

And of course that’s what happened in Iraq. No power equals no clean water, no lights in operating theatres, no incubators, no sterilising equipment, no refrigeration. No radios means that even if there were anyone who could help, they could not be contacted.

The spread of civil disorder, of disease and of death, is inevitable: not through the messy, inconvenient and distinctly ‘dumb bomb’ war of old, but just as inevitably and just as effectively. Fixing disruption to the civil infrastructure isn’t as simple as picking the bits of tin foil off the power stations, either: this particular method shorts out not only the stations themselves, but their substations, and sub-substations, right down to the fusebox. Rewiring a house takes long enough. After action like this, the Iraqis have had to rewire the country.

The American side in Iraq should have learned this one by now: interdiction of C3I caused numerous civilian casualties in the Bosnian campaigns. That they didn’t is another part of the true crime of the Iraq war – the failure of coherent post war planning.

The Americans imagined they’d walk into Baghdad and be met by a ticker tape parade of happy smiling faces, quick change of government, out by dinner time, with a supportive government in place and 10% of the world’s oil reserves safe in the hands of democracy.

Apart from hopelessly misjudging the pride of the Iraqi people, it was exactly their assault on the C3I of the Iraqi nation that has led to an extension of a vicious and bloody occupation. Because in interdicting C3I, they didn’t just stop the Iraqi army – they stopped the country working.

And it’s difficult to make a tickertape parade when you’ve no light to see by, no clean water to drink, no power in your hospitals. It’s difficult to see these boys from Podunk as liberators when your food’s spoilt in the freezer and you have to fight for handouts, when sewage runs down the streets because the drains have stopped working.

Wars haven’t been fought solely on battlefields, leaving civilian areas largely untouched, since the Germans walked into Paris the first time. The Americans especially, whose disastrous war in Vietnam used weapons with ostensibly military aims (Agent Orange was designed to defoliate jungles so troop movements could be seen from above) to devastating civilian effect (birth defects into the, by now, third generation) should be more aware of this than most.

That they seem incapable of learning the lesson of their past defeats is not just stupid: it means that even when they have a victory, they can turn it into a defeat seemingly effortlessly. A little more concentration on their own ‘I’ when they are destroying the C3I of their enemies would have helped at the outset. It is now, unfortunately, far too late.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

P.S. Quote of the day

“Our Paras company at the embassy witnessed a US tank respond to (harmless) Kalashnikov fire into the air from a block of residential flats by firing three tank rounds into the building." – Blair’s UK envoy to Iraq, John Sawer

(For J.A.)

Once upon a time, this writer and a friend ran a small magazine publishing company. It’s defunct now, unable to match the excellence of its products with excellence in sales, and exists only in the archives of libraries.

This friend – lets call him A – and I were working late one night, concentrating as we always did on getting the magazine right (note to budding entrepreneurs: spend less time on getting the product right, and more time on getting the profits up. Learn from our mistakes, please…).

There was a knock on the door, and A pottered down to see who it was – this was central London, and it was late, and we had a large picture window that it would have been expensive to replace, so we always answered the door in case someone was standing there with a brick.

After a few minutes A called me down, saying ‘You have got to listen to this’. At the door was a short man, suffering from the sort of birth defect that leaves one with very, very short arms.

In a cut glass accent, he went into his spiel: he was going door to door selling, essentially, junk: bean filled juggling balls, cigarette lighters, small toys and the like. And he was mesmerising. He had the best sales patter of almost anyone I have heard: funny, engaging, interesting, all the while delivered with a magic and directness that made the slightest piece of junk he pulled out of his bag immediately attractive.

We were spellbound. In fact, we were so spellbound that we offered him a job on the spot. He didn’t take it. He didn’t want it. He liked the independence of walking the streets. He liked choosing when to work, of choosing what to sell, of being his own man.

“I don’t like offices, gentlemen,” he said, “I don’t like timesheets, and I don’t like wage packets. I like my own time, and my own money.” We tried harder. This man was not a good salesman. He was an excellent salesman: and that’s what we really, really needed.

But what we needed did not match what he wanted, and so – hypnotised by him and his pitch – we bought pretty much whatever he had, and shaking our heads went back to our editorial.

Lessons? If you know what you want, you can do what you want, no matter the length of your arms or how weird what makes you happy seems to other people. And you can be good at it, and you can make people envy you.

Why’s he in this blog? Because Spinoff is about ‘power in all its forms’ and this man had more power that night than A or I and, I suspect, continues to have that power, walking the streets carrying a heavy bag of junk and knocking on doors.

I’d like him to know that I have his cigarette lighter in the shape of a motorbike on my desk as I’m writing this. I’d like him to know that if I saw him today, I’d still offer him a job. And most importantly, I’d like him to know he made such an impression that nine years on, I’m writing about him.

Not, I suspect, that that would matter to him in the least. Doing what you want, and leaving a mark in people’s hearts. What’s that if it’s not power?

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

2005 was crap for people dying. This Spinoffite lost six friends between the last two months of 2004 and the end of 2005. Tsunamis, car crashes, cancer, old age and the actions of our American ‘allies’ all contrived to kill family and friends, seemingly at random. The only connection between them was that I could have done with them still being around.

We’ve already written in this blog about our friend Paul, who despite being dead many months is still at the core of any meeting of the Spinoff crew. (Is it crew? Or Crewe? For that matter is there a Crewe crew? We – the free press – demand answers, etc…)

You know what it’s like when someone dies. You spend ages seeing them by accident in crowds: seeing them going into doorways, in crowds on the subway, just out of view on the television news. But slowly they seem to fade from the visual memory, and it becomes hard even to bring their faces back to mind. But for this writer at least, their voices echo into the present.

My great-aunt, a joyful and happy character even into her final blind and deaf days, could still laugh at the world – and it’s her voice I hear when I really need cheering up. A truly clever and great man, my mentor, who characteristically died saving his family in the Asian tsunami, had a way of muttering when writing newspaper articles that I’ve started to do myself.

An Iraqi friend, whose delight in the achievements of his young son always found itself in his muttered ‘mashallah’s, slips his voice into my head whenever I see small children playing (and yes, Mr Bush, I put his death straight onto your head and dearly hope you will be judged harshly for it).

And some days, when the missing of them feels like a physical pain, wrenching at the inside of my chest, and I want to cry for the very need to see them again, if I’m lucky I can hear their voices, still clear and alive, still full of the richness and humour that made me glad to be their friends in the first place, echoing in that little space in my head where they still live.

As a bit of a god-botherer, I hope I shall see them again. But until then, I hear dead people. And I’m very grateful I can, because it makes their loss more bearable. A little.

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

P.S. Today’s Irony Watch -- Mr D. Rumsfeld

"They (the Iranians) are currently putting people into Iraq to do things that are harmful to the future of Iraq and we know it. And it is something that they, I think, will look back on as having been an error in judgment."

So God told Tony Blair to go to war in Iraq, did He? We’ve dealt with this when George Bush said the same thing (http://spinoff.blogspirit.com/archive/2005/10/10/head-vo... and there’s really no need to go into the arguments again.

It should be said, however, that positing this particular outbreak of nastiness as something provoked by the Christian God rather gives weight to those who call the Iraq war a ‘crusade’. We don’t want to take this up with politicians - we’d rather take it up with God.

The rather wonderful ‘Angels and Demons in Art’, (by Rosa Giorgi, published in the J Paul Getty Museum’s series on Imagery In Art, go buy it now), shows innumerable artworks in the western tradition where God directly intervenes in human affairs*. These interventions betray a character best described as bi-polar.

The God of the Old Testament is, in his own words, trouble: “I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me” (Exodus 20:5). He gets a change of heart in the New Testament, it’s true, equally inconveniently for our fundamentalist friends, for whom smiting is much more fun than turning the other cheek, but there’s no doubt that this is a deity who could get a little chippy at times.

But we thought he’d stopped telling people to go to war. We thought he’d started working in order to, well, if not exactly stop them, to at least mitigate their effects. One of the Ten Commandments is, after all, ‘love they neighbour as thyself’. And the blessed mother of Christ certainly isn’t in favour of smiting.

So what’s going on here? God’s told two major world leaders to mobilise their entire country to go and dump on some other country? Why? What’s he thinking of? Did he say ‘Yes, go to war’, or ‘Oh… alright. If you must’?

No he bloody didn’t. It would be inconsistent with Christ’s revelation for him to do so, and even a triune god, who must every so often have a bit of a spat with his various component parts, isn’t going to go back on something as major as the death of his son just because it’s politically convenient for some of his followers to capture a bit of oil-soaked land.

The question is not that God told them to do it. That’s obviously nonsense. It’s that they’re using his name to drag us into, and keep us in, a war.

And without being too apocalyptic about it, if someone told them to do it, and it wasn’t God, who was it? And what will he tell them to do next?

Yours etc.,

Spinoff.

* Angels come from images of Assyrian genies, apparently. Which must be a bit of a bugger for fundamentalist Christians, since the Assyrians would most certainly not have approved of a Christian god, and the Jewish god used them to teach his people a lesson more than once…