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New
York Times Screws Up Again; Uday, Qusay Deaths are Bad for Bush and Blair;
Kroeber and the Indians; General Hitchens Visits the Front
by
Alexander Cockburn
July
28, 2003
Reeling
from one blunder to the next, the New York Times plummeted to new depths on
July 25, combining a serious falsehood with possible misrepresentation of
authorship.
On
the op page for 7/25 appeared a column, datelined Havana, under the name
Gustavo Arcos Bergnes, identified as Secretary General of the Cuban Committee
for Human Rights, and titled "A Prisoner Becomes A Warden". The
column narrated how its author had been with Castro in the original attack on
the Moncada in 1953, had been imprisoned by Batista along with Castro and other
comrades, had eventually turned against Castro. The thrust of the column was to
compare the relatively decent prison and trial conditions (and eventual
amnesty) enjoyed by Castro and the others in l953, with the grim sufferings and
stinted rights of political prisoners in Cuba today.
Towards
the end of the piece came the following sentence: "(Although there is no
doubt in my mind that my younger brother, Sebastián, died in prison in 1997
because of deliberate lack of medical attention.)"
In
fact Sebastian Arcos died in Miami of cancer, a couple of years after he was
released from prison for humanitarian
reasons.
But surely, you ask, Gustavo Arcos would remember where his brother died.
Gustavo
is a brave and admirable person, but he is also very old and frail. The odds
that he wrote that op-ed are slim indeed. For one thing, he doesn't speak
English.
On
the topic of the mess at the NYT, our old friend (and CounterPuncher), former
Times-man John L. Hess had this to say on WBAI on July 15: "Bill Keller
wrote not long ago that he was amazed to find himself a hawk. That's the mark
of a true Times man. He may waver around, but he comes out Right in the end.
The staff clapped hands yesterday when he was named executive editor. They were
all sore at Howell Raines for saying he'd been chosen as editor to shake them
out of their sleepy ways. It's no doubt true that his drive to make a splash
encouraged some reporters to go hog wild. Yesterday the Times ran half a page
of corrections to a single article and it was the third such public disgrace in
a few weeks.
"But
there are several reasons to doubt that Keller is the man to cure that. For one
thing, he was the editor in charge when the Times ran waged a campaign accusing
Wen Ho Lee of selling atomic secrets to China. For another, neither Bill Keller
nor Howell Raines nor their boss Arthur Sulzberger has uttered one peep about
the serial lying of Judith Miller. For two years, she's been faking evidence
about weapons of mass destruction. Alex Cockburn has a devastating wrap-up in
the print edition of CounterPunch of Miller quotes that helped drag us into war
with Iraq. When the Times does a skin-back of that campaign I'll believe it has
truly reformed."
Bye,
Bye Uday and Qusay: Why the news is Bad For Bush and Blair
Short
of good news ever since the end of the formal war, Bush and Blair are naturally
exultant that Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay, have been satisfactorily
incinerated in Mosul, presumably victims of someone eager to collar the $30
million reward for turning them in.
But
though Saddam's sons deserve everything they got, and more, the news of their
demise should not be cause for great rejoicing in the White House and 10
Downing Street. In the event that Saddam soon follows his sons into the Great
Hereafter, that would not, in anything other than the short term, be great news
for Bush and Blair either.
For
obvious reasons, Bush and his entourage have been eager to identify Saddam,
Uday and Qusay as the instigators of the attacks on the US and UK occupying
forces, with attendant steady, demoralizing trickle of casualties.
To
suggest otherwise would be to concede that there might be long-term, organized
opposition to the Allied occupation which has less to do with Saddam Hussein
and his clan, and more with nationalist, or Islamic/nationalist opposition to
the invaders.
The
fact that Uday and Qusay were holed up in the house of a relative scarcely
suggests that they had elaborate flight plans, replete with secret command
bunkers, prepared in advance of the US/UK invasion. It looks as though, like
many others suddenly on the run, the only plan they could come up with was a
desperate rap on the door of a family friend.
With
his epic record of blunders and miscalculations we're probably safe in assuming
Saddam wasn't much better prepared. All those elaborate scenarios about
ratlines to Russia or even nearby Syria were so much hooey. So in the end the
huge reward for Saddam will weigh heavier than loyalty or fear and he'll end up
dead too.
With
Uday and Qusay finished off, Bush may enjoy a short-term uptick on the polls.
Maybe the attacks on US and UK troops will slow, but they certainly won't stop
and in the medium term they'll probably increase.
Remember,
many Iraqis saw the only virtue of the invasion as the end of a hated regime.
If Saddam gets nailed too, that fear will finally dissipate and then more
Iraqis will focus on the business of driving the Americans and the British out
of their country. More US and British troops will get killed, but the rationale
that this is the last ditch resistance of the cornered Saddam clan will have
disappeared.
It's
a cynical proposition, but Bush and Blair will be much better off if Saddam is
not run to earth, at least until some advanced point in next year's
presidential campaign season.
Even
the killing of Uday and Qusay won't help much in the steady erosion in both
Bush and Blair's popularity, because of the reasons for their slump. They
stitched together a handsome patchwork of lies about Saddam's Weapons of Mass
Destruction and that patchwork has fallen apart. No amount of grandstanding by
Blair in Congress about the absolutions of history alters that.
Take
the current uproar in the UK about the suicide of Dr David Kelly, the biowar
expert charged by Blair and his minions with leaking disobliging information to
the BBC. The plan of Blair's spin team in 10 Downing Street, headed by Alastair
Campbell, has been to create a diversion, to occlude the obvious: that Blair
and his cohort obviously mangled the truth about Saddam's WMDs.
This
is the reason for all the howling from Number 10 about the BBC's charges, based
on interviews with Kelly by three separate BBC reporters, that Blair's people
"sexed up" (words never used by the BBC)the original report on WMDs
prepared by Britain's intelligence services.
But
the record is clear enough. First, Britain's intelligence services rushed from
one preposterous piece of inflation to the next, accepted crude forgeries,
plagiarized a student's essay off the internet, and so forth. Kelly himself was
an assiduous threat inflator till near the end, and maybe guilt over his own
role, contributed to his very strange decision to kill himself. (Or maybe the
security services were threatening him with some damaging personal revelation
unless he denounced the BBC for misrepresenting his remarks to their
reporters.)
Then
Blair and his team took these threat inflations and inflated them even further.
Whether it was some intelligence officer in MI6 or one of Blair's flacks who
came up with the notorious 45-minute launch time for one of Saddam's bioweapons
is a legitimate but not very important question. They were all in the business
of exaggeration, as was UNSCOM, which has thus far escaped well-deserved
rebuke. The same is true this side of the Atlantic. The press has finally
caught up with the matter and won't let it drop. Neither will the Democrats.
It
will take a lot more than the killing of Uday or Qusay to turn this tide.
Driving
up highway 101 from Eureka to Crescent City, just south of Orick I kept an eye out
for a scenic rest area which, according to a memoir by his wife Theodora, had
once been the site of a cabin owned by Alfred Kroeber.
It's
through Kroeber that the Yurok made their way in the world of learning, their
lives distilled into a monograph and footnote. In 1900, Kroeber, the father of
academic anthropology in California, began a series of encounters with the
Yurok that lasted many years. Many of these Q & A sessions were at this
cabin formerly located in the scenic rest area where I was now peering under
the hood of my wagon, trying to figure out why my brakes had stopped working.
Here,
at the place known as Sigornoy, Kroeber would interrogate Indians, chiefly
Robert Spott, a Yurok theocrat. Their conversations eventually had academic
consequence in such works as Yurok Narratives and figured in Kroeber's
dispassionate reflections on the supposed 'character' of the Yurok, scattered
through various works. The Yurok were, he wrote on one occasion, an 'inwardly
fearful people the men often seemed to me withdrawn.' Kroeber mused that 'for
some reason, the culture had simply gone hypochondriac.'
Kroeber
never got around to mentioning that between 1848, the start of the gold rush,
and 1910, the Yurok population in the region was reduced from about two and a
half thousand individuals to about 610. Disease, starvation and murder had
wiped out about 75 per cent of the group. It is as though an anthropologist
studying the inward fears of Polish Jews never mentioned Auschwitz.
In
his Handbook of the Indians of California, published by the bureau of American
Ethnology in 1925, Kroeber wrote that 'there is one Indian in California today
for every eight that lived in the same area before the white man came.' Then he
mused that 'the causes of this decline of nearly 90%are obscure.'
Kroeber,
eager to identify American anthropology in terms of 'millennial sweeps and
grand contours', had little patience with that shorter chronological span
encompassing the extermination of most of the California tribal groups he was
presuming to study. As he put it, 'the billions of woes and gratifications of
peaceful citizens or bloody deaths' were of no concern. He visited the
desperate native Americans of California, writing these tranquil ethnologies,
sometimes, after only a couple weeks with the group, all but ignoring the end
of history elapsing before his eyes.
This
posture bothered some of Kroeber's professional associates. The linguist Edward
Sapir wrote him in 1938, 'You find anchorage--as most people do, for that matter--in
an imaginative sundered system of cultural and social values in the face of
which the individual has almost to apologize for presuming to exist at all. It
seems to me that if people were less amenable to cultural and social mythology,
we'd have less Hitlerism in the world.'
In
the back of my station wagon I had the special 1989 California issue of The
American Indian Quarterly, in which Thomas Buckley discussed Kroeber's attitude
to the Yurok and his relationship with the Yurok aristocrat, Spott. Buckley
described how Kroeber was once asked why he hadn't paid any attention to recent
Yurok history and acculturation. Kroeber answered that he 'couldn't stand all
the tears' that these topics elicited from his Yurok informants.
Not
that Kroeber was indifferent to pain. He'd been through a fairly harrowing time
in the century's second decade, suffering from Meniere's disease and psychic
ailments, undergoing some lengthy sessions with a Freudian psychoanalyst. He
also corresponded with Freud himself. Kroeber's remark about the tears
reminding me of a sudden outburst from Freud once, to one of his intimates,
about the filthy and despicable lives of people who ended up on his couch in
Bergasse 19.
There
may be a secret text here. A fellow who had it from a Yurok once told me
Kroeber was a closet gay and Spott was his lover. Freud fortified Kroeber's
addiction to the sweeping cultural judgment. 'Among other things', Kroeber
wrote in his big work Anthropology, 'Freud set orderly, economical, and
tenacious; or, in its less pleasant aspects, pedantically precise,
conscientious, and persistent; miserly; and obstinate to vindictiveness. Now,
just as the anal-type description fits certain individuals quite strikingly, it
seems to agree pretty well with the average or modal personality produced under
certain cultures. This holds for instance for the Yurok of native California
and their cotribes of the same culture. It holds also for certain Melanesians
On the contrary, within Oceania, Polynesians, Indonesians, and Australians are
wholly unanal in character, the Australians in fact standing at a sort of
opposite pole of living happily in disorder, in freedom from possessions, and
in fluctuations of the moment. And the Siamese are certainly oral if the type
has any validity at all.'
Kroeber
was basing his perceptions of the Siamese on the work of Ruth Benedict, who had
never been to Siam but was keen on majestic generalizations about native
traits, having begun her career by contrasting two American Indian cultures, that
of the Plains bison hunters and that of the Southwestern Zuni and other Pueblo
farmers, as being respectively Dionysiac and 'Apollinian' (to use Kroeber's
spelling). During the second World War, the US government commissioned Benedict
to write a study of Siam and she responded speedily enough, stating in her book
that much in Siamese politics and society could be explained by early child
nurture, during which period infants were permitted to manipulate their
genitals freely.
Spott
was once reproached by his nephew for spending so much time with Kroeber, whose
work didn't do the Yurok much good. 'Ah, Harry,' Spott answered, 'white men
hurt so much. We have to help him.'
The
Indian had a surer grip on the ethno-cultural problems.
From
the New York Post
July 24, 2003 -- For Christopher
Hitchens, the dramatic deaths of Saddam Hussein's evil spawn will always be the
one that got away. The Vanity Fair reporter was in Mosul, Iraq, being shown around
by the 101st Airborne the day before the crack American unit cornered Qusay and
Uday Hussein and killed them in a six-hour firefight. "I flew back to
Washington, D.C., on Monday night," he tells PAGE SIX. "I had just
gotten in and was making some phone calls, when my friend said, 'Turn on the
TV.'" Hitchens wasn't surprised by the lethal efficiency of the U.S. Army,
and praised its military intelligence. "They were rolling up these
networks. They were getting more tips than they knew what to do with," he
said. "They were very, very confident."
Hitchens said media coverage, which
focuses on U.S. casualties and the complaints of soldiers who want to go home,
left him unprepared for the reality in Iraq. "Morale is very high"
among both troops and Iraqi citizens. "People waving American flags at the
troops in the street: you can't fake that."
It
doesn't seem to have occurred to Hitchens to inquire where the Iraqis got those
flags.
Alexander Cockburn is the author The
Golden Age is In Us (Verso, 1995) and 5 Days That Shook the World:
Seattle and Beyond (Verso, 2000) with Jeffrey St. Clair. Cockburn and St.
Clair are the editors of CounterPunch,
where this article first appeared.