|
CounterPunch
February
19, 2003
CounterPunch Diary
Messy
Valentines: Rumsfeld and Franks on Intrepid; Hitchens, the Barstool
Bombardier; Bérubé, Horowitz and David Duke
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
How seriously does the government take its own
terror alerts? St Valentine's Day saw Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld
and Army General Tommy Franks, two top players in the scheduled
onslaught on Iraq, plus a passel of other notables, all floating
on the Hudson, aboard the decommissioned aircraft carrier Intrepid.
Franks, who won it last year, was giving
Rumsfeld the Intrepid Freedom Award, for overall services to
liberty and the western way of life. As a semi-public event it
sounds like a snoozer. These days we don't take awards or prize
givings seriously unless it involves someone being handed a cheque
worth the annual GNP of Brazil for winning a superlotto.
All it would have taken was four more
Martyrs for Allah with a boatload of high explosive and it could
have made the attack on the Cole look like chickenfeed.
Under the very eyes of the Navy and Coastguard?
Why not? Look at what happened a few days earlier in Key West,
the actual day Ashcroft and Riggs announced we're One Nation
Under Orange. I noted it here over the weekend, remember. You
don't? Four uniformed fugitives from Cuba's navy patrol made
landfall on the Homeland, passing undetected by southern Florida's
vast flotillas of Coastguard and Navy vessels.
The four tied up their 32-foot fiber-glass
cigarette boat (sporting the Cuban flag and containing two AK-47s,
8 loaded magazines and a GPS finder tuned to the coordinates
of the US Coastguard station) on the southern shore of Key West,
at the Hyatt Resort dock.
Then, clad in their Cuban army fatigues
(one had a Chinese made handgun strapped to his hip) they wondered
about, marveling at the serene emptiness of the evening streets,
(so unlike bustling Havana, their leader said later) looking
for a police station where they could turn themselves in. Had
they been Terrorists there were plenty of rewarding targets within
a strolling distance, including a major surveillance center for
the Caribbean and Latin America, run by US Southern Command,
also a US Navy base, plus of course Key West's extensive literary
colony.
Maybe the Masters of Terror feel Rumsfeld
is worth more to them alive than dead. After all, the Soviet
Union tried to split NATO for forty years without success. Rumsfeld
and his commander in chief have done the job in barely more than
a couple of years, as Senator Bobby Byrd pointed out in a great
speech on the Hill February 12.
The Barstool
Bombardier
Those, like Christopher Hitchens, who
have argued that a US attack on Iraq will bring democracy in
its wake, plus long- term security for the Kurds should take
a close look at my brother Patrick Cockburn's recent
report from the Kurdish area of northern Iraq. Patrick quotes
Kurdish leaders as furious about their recent conversations with
US commanders, in which the latter indicated that "regime
change" would amount to nothing more than replacement of
Saddam and his senior lieutenants by US officers.
The Kurds also suspect that the US, desperate
to assuage Turkey, has given the Turks the green light to move
into the Kurdish enclaves in northern Iraq. They fear that the
US has decided to undercut all efforts to form a democratic Iraq
in which the Shi'a would have a far stronger role, since they
are the most populous component in Iraq's mix of Sunni, Shi'a
and Kurds.
After a meeting with US officials in
Ankara earlier this month and citing recent public declarations
by US officials. Hoshyar Zebari, a veteran Kurdish leader, told
Patrick "If the US wants to impose its own government, regardless
of the ethnic and religious composition of Iraq, there is going
to be a backlash. This is to give the government on a platter
to the second line of Ba'athists [the ruling party." The
Kurds, Patrick wrote, "fear that a US-led war against President
Saddam might be the occasion for a Turkish effort to end the
de facto independence enjoyed by Iraqi Kurds for more than a
decade. One Kurdish leader said: 'Turkey has made up its mind
that it will intervene in northern Iraq in order to destroy us.'"
Hitchens, the barstool warrior, devotes his column in the current
Vanity Fair to the beneficial properties of booze, citing his
own superb mental powers and physical condition as irrefutable
evidence.
I offer the following commentary as a
public service for impressionable youth, who otherwise might
take Hitchens at his word and assume that one can drink like
a fish and still can row safely to journalistic fortune with
mind and body unimpaired. At least in the old Bohemian days,
as I saw them in Dublin and London in the late Fifties, many
writers were drunks, without maintaining the illusion that booze
would carry them into clear-eyed, keen-brained old age.
The nature of his relationship to alcoholic
beverages has clearly been preying on Hitchens. Not long ago
he accused me in an email of putting about stories that he's
a drunk. I responded that given his tempestuous appearances on
TV, the matter of his drinking hadn't required my agency to become
known to the American people.
In Vanity Fair he triumphantly cites
a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine to the
effect that a glass or two of wine, beer or any other kind of
alcohol every day can significantly reduce the risk of suffering
a heart attack.
Thus buttressed, Hitchens says that his
own rigorous regime of drinking, begun at the age of 15 and continuing
to his present age of 53, has enabled him to work prodigiously
"while still retaining my own hair and teeth and a near-godlike
physique which is the envy of many of my juniors".
He offers tips on how to make drink your
servant, not your master. "On the whole, observe the same
rule about gin martinis--and all gin drinks--that you would in
judging female breasts: one is far too few and three is one too
many. When you get the shudders even slightly it's definitely
time to seek help"
Let me pass lightly over the portly scribbler
that I observed just over a year ago experiencing some difficulty
bringing a lighted match and the first cigarette of the morning
into productive contact, also over the math about the gins. As
far as dry martinis go, there's been sound evidence in the past
to take him as a six-breast guy.
The more troubling thing I've noted in
recent years is Hitchens' odd excursions from reality. I refer
here not to the nonsense he quite often writes, but quite simply
a level of fantasy in his perceptions and recollections.
Not so long ago I got a peremptory email
from him, written late a night, demanding I rescind a vile slur
made against him on the CounterPunch website edited by Jeffrey
St Clair and myself.
I wrote back, pointing out that a retraction
was unnecessary, because no such slur had been made. After a
few days, during which I assumed he'd re-read my item and realized
his mistake, he sent another e-mail, demanding a retraction once
more.
An acquaintance of mine, no fan of Hitchens,
remarked to me last week that he reckons the man to be a victim
of "early Korsakoff's Syndrome". What's that, I asked.
Back came his answer promptly: "KORSAKOFF's
Syndrome (from K, a Russian neurologist) an organic brain psychosis.
A severe neurological disorder brought on by years of heavy alcohol
abuse, compounded in turn, by vitamin deficiencies caused by
self-neglect. It's characterized by disorientation, a variety
of neuro deficits and complaints, and, most significantly, a
memory loss of a unique kind that is the signal feature of the
disease: sufferers tend to confabulate. That is, when asked a
question they cannot answer based on memory, they just ad lib
stories to fill in the gaps---often at great and garrulous length---providing
detailed information the patient genuinely believes to be true
but is wholly fictitious."
The exact quality of Hitchens' memory
will become highly germane some time in the medium future. Sidney
Blumenthal is scheduled to publish his memoir of the Clinton
years, and he is devoting some pages to the manner in which his
erstwhile buddy Hitchens tried to get him put away for lying
to Congress.
At issue is precisely what Hitchens remembers
Blumenthal as saying about Monica Lewinsky in their notorious
lunch at the Occidental in downtown DC. Last year Hitchens told
an English interviewer that he is ready to remember even more
disobliging material from that lunch, in the event Blumenthal
takes after him in the upcoming memoir. Some would call this
Tactical Korsakoffism.
Alas, Korsakoff is not available for
comment on Hitchens as a possible advertisement of his diagnosis.
He died in 1900, at the age of 47.
Bérubé,
Horowitz and David Duke
Our chronology of the Lerner flap has
Michael Berube in a twitch. He says we charged him with being
in league with David Horowitz because he partook in debate on
the latter's site. There's a lot of frothing about Stalin and
Milosevic and guilt by association.
We find it pretty ripe that Berube should
whine about guilt by association after he and Cooper and Corn
have spent months smearing the peace movement because the Workers
World Party and ANSWER have been organizing demonstrations. So
far as David Horowitz's site is concerned, we take the same view
of anyone discussing the peace movement on it as we would someone
spending time on David Duke's site "debating" Aryan
genetic superiority. Duke isn't interested in "debate"
on that issue, any more than Horowitz is. It's like Michael Lerner
finally taking his case to the editorial page of the Wall Street
Journal, which only gave him space because the mad-dog editors
wouldn't pass up any chance to smear the peace movement.
Please note, we thought the organizers
should have given Lerner a chance to make an ass of himself,
even for 15 minutes. Come to think of it, we also don't think
much of the agreement among the four organizing groups that criticism
of any one of these groups disqualified any prospective speaker,
such as Lerner. ANSWER obviously stood to gain most from this,
because more people want to criticize it. Rules about "no
criticism" shouldn't be part of the Left Organizer's Toolkit.
Last word (at least for the time being)
on the rabbi. Michael Taylor writes to us that "My own Lerner
story from around 1969 at an anti-war conference in Ann Arbor
Michigan: I am standing in a cafeteria on University of Michigan
campus getting breakfast, conversing with Lerner as he is holding
a piece of toast at a rakish angle, honey dripping unceremoniously
to the floor, the guy completely oblivious to the mess he is
creating."
Tear him for his honey-dripping!
Yesterday's
Features
Elizabeth Connell
And
You Thought It Was Cold in New York: Exclusive Photos from Antarctica
Ron Jacobs
The
Streets Belong to the People
The Liberation of Midtown Manhattan
Joanne Mariner
Scenes
from the Streets of New York:
A Cold, But Exhilarating Saturday
Tariq Ali
Regime
Change: Here and in Iraq
Vanessa Jones
"Somewhere in Texas a Village Has Lost Its Idiot"
Joe Quandt
An
American Crisis:
Let Us, Like the Iraqis, Have No Illusions
Willliam Hughes
Mayor
Bully:
Bloomberg's March Restrictions Spark Outrage
Sam Husseini
Compass
Roses
Robert Jensen and Rahul
Mahajan
People of Conscience can Change History
Wayne Madsen
After the Fall
Anthony Gancarski
Return
to the Stone Age?
The Last Days of Bill Buckley
Robert Fisk
The US is a Nation Divided
Ralph Nader
Big
Oil and the War on Iraq
Adam Engel
Live from New York, It's:
Lizard Brain on Line for the Log Flume
Website of the Day
Compass
Roses
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- CounterPunch Special:
The Persecution of Gershon Legman by Susan Davis: Smut, the Post Office, Commies
and the FBI;
- Reeling Democrats: Is Pelosi the Answer?
- Gandhi v. Hitler: the Secret Race for the Nobel
Prize;
- Sullying Mario Savio's
Memory;
- Lynching Then and Now;
- Earn While You Learn: Chris Whittle and Child Labor;
The Case of the Pompous
Professor;
- The Class Struggle in
Boston: All that
Effort, But What Did They Get?
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1 800 840 3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|