Taken for a Ride

Goddamn xe om drivers with their goddamn motorbikes.

This morning I headed over to a shopping complex (improbably called Saigon Tax). Finding the famous Saigon traffic just as bad as people always said, I caved in after the twentieth motorbike driver offered me his services. When I asked him to take me to the department store, he told me it wasn't open yet (actually this was true). Suddenly faced with an hour to kill, I asked him to take me to the War Remnants Museum.

It was certainly gruesome. Pictures of dead Vietnamese. Deformed fetuses in jars. But also a room of children's drawings encouraging reconciliation and a lot of captured American military hardware.

When I got out of the musuem, he was waiting for me. Then, instead of heading back to Nguyen Hue street like I asked he decided to take a detour to the Saigon River and smoke a bit. The final cost wouldn't have been out of place in Manhattan. Shit. And it was only ten in the morning.

Well, at least I learned my lesson quickly.

Viet Kong

Since this political blog has been moribund for a while, I've decided to revive it with a somewhat different purpose: tracking my new life as a would-be English teacher in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). I've only just arrived, so there's not much I can tell you.

- It's really hot and muggy, though that was expected. I was awoken by possibly the loudest rain I have ever heard in my whole life. I need to buy a dozen umbrellas pronto.

- On my way in from the airport I passed a number of parks, what appeared to be a mosque, endless shops, a KFC, and more motorbikes than there are in the whole universe.

- There are no traffic lights, no traffic signs, no traffic laws so far as I can tell. I take that back; the law is "If you can fit a vehicle into a space, you have the right of way".

- my guest house is basic but clean, which I guess is the important thing.

Half-Baked Alaska

Last Sunday former Alaska senator and Libertarian presidential candidate Mike Gravel stopped by. He talked about that weird ad of him tossing a rock into a pond and got into a heat argument with a local liberal, calling the Democrats 'pussies' and declaring that he had lost faith in representative government.

His basic idea was a 'National Initiative for Democracy' which would make allow the citizens of each state to make laws by ballot proposition. I asked him how, under such a system, one could prevent tyranny of the majority. Unfortunately, he never really answered my question. His only response was 'You have to trust the people'. I do, but not entirely - that's why we have constitutional protections against such things. I have a sneaking suspicion that if we did allow citizens to make all the laws the first three laws passed would make it illegal to be gay, Muslim, or black.

But hey, at least Gravel has no inhibitions:

Wanda, where art thou?

After my last post ws published in a school newspaper, this reponse came in:

Dear Editor,

I was utterly shocked and appalled to read Noah Klinger’s recent article of February 29 entitled “The surge to nowhere.” As a frequent reader of The Brandeis Hoot, I am somewhat familiar with Klinger’s doctrinaire liberalism; as well, his thinly disguised Ba’athist sympathies are no secret.

Nonetheless, it is surprising that even an ideologue such as Klinger could be so totally divorced from reality. During the month when the US troop surge in Iraq hit its apex, the United States lost almost 80 soldiers and marines in combat. By December 2007, that number was less than 20 demonstrating beyond a doubt that the surge has been and remains a stunning success.

In that same time period, fatalities among the Iraqi security forces plummeted from over 200 a month when the surge began to 75 in December 2007. The decline in deaths from sectarian violence has been even more dramatic from almost 1,100 a month when the surge began to a mere 200 a month in late 2007.

But there’s no telling this to Klinger who would rather we had left a genocidal dictator like Saddam Hussein in power than admit that our democratically elected President and his allies in Congress are succeeding in Iraq.

-Wanda Tinasky

Somerville, Mass.

OK. So some lady in Somerville thinks I'm a Ba'athist. All in a day's work.

Wait. "Wanda Tinasky' is not a real person. It was a pseudonym for many years attached to a series of suspiciously erudite letters ostensibly written by a bag lady in northenr California.

So, who really wrote Wanda Tinasky? The current favorite is postmodern novelist and notorious recluse Thomas Pynchon.

Who lives in Somerville.

Weird...

The Surge to Nowhere

During a visit to Baghdad in the late 1980’s, American journalist Tony Horowitz picked up a copy of the local newspaper The Baghdad Observor. On the front page was a story proudly proclaiming that ’sixteen strategic mountain peaks’ had been captured from the Iranians. All of those mountains were Iraqi; their original capture by Iranian forces had never been reported.

The current debate over the success of the Iraqi ’surge’ has followed much the same path. In recent months supporters of the war, who never admitted that anything had gone wrong in the first place and heatedly denied that there was a civil war going on in Iraq, have been loudly proclaiming a turnaround in the Iraqi situation, with reduced violence and the defeat of al-Qaeda. General David Petraeus was hailed as a second Ulysses S. Grant and many conservative pundits suggested he should be made Time’s Man of the Year.

It’s a beautiful idea ruined by some ugly facts. Coalition casualties remain high; in fact, the months after the surge has been among the deadliest so far, Iraqi civilian deaths have lowered somewhat, but remain higher then 2005 levels according to the Iraq Body Count..

While the defeat of al-Qaeda is good news, al-Qaeda was always one of the smallest and least influential militant groups in Iraq, never numbering more than a thousand active members. The US government managed to dispose of them by arming and funding radical Sunni militias who remain the sworn enemies of the elected government in Baghdad. Also, I suppose it is bad taste to point out that al-Qaeda was not a presence in Iraq before the invasion.

Ethnic conflict remains intractable, with the Iraqi parliament unable to form a stable governing coalition due to frequent defections and intra-party revolts. The intermarriage rate between Sunnis and Shi’ites has plummeted to almost zero. Four million Iraqi citizens still reside in foreign refugee camps, mostly in Jordan and Syria.

Of course, the point of this whole discussion is not whether or not the US is winning in Iraq at all. The point is to create a narrative, a narrative of betrayal and squandered glory, in which defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory by liberals in Congress and the anti-war movement. The stabbed-in-the-back trope is a recurring theme in world history, and has found particular favor here in America. As in Europe after the Warsaw Pact, as in Korea after the armistice, as in Vietnam – or, indeed, as in Scooby-Doo - we would’ve gotten away with it, if it weren’t for those meddling kids.