May 10, 2002
     Heard on NBC News this morning:
     Mailbox pipe bomber Luke Helder told authorities that he had hoped to plant his bombs around the country in a pattern that would look like a big smiley face in the middle of the US map.

It's All Good

May 9, 2002

Interview with Tom Breuer,
Staff writer for The Scene newspaper
Appleton, Wisconsin

by e-mail, May 9, 2002

Q: You mentioned Appleton in your new book, The City in Mind. Can you
elaborate on your assessment of the city or our region as a whole?

Appleton did what every other town in America did -- it decanted all the primary business from its downtown and put it in an astroid belt of architectural garbage outside of town. This had many nasty unforeseen consequences. The overall result is that it left Appleton in the condition of being just another ruined American place that is no longer worth caring about. When we have enough of them, we'll have a nation that is not worth defending. You also have to consider that the alternative universe of muffler shops, fried food shacks, car dealers, and Big Box stores has poor prospects for the future. So the further effect is that you will soon have two ruined Appletons.

Q: Most critiques of suburban sprawl center on its sustainability from an
environmental perspective (i.e. the impossibility of maintaining current
rates of outward growth indefinitely). Do you think there's a parallel
here with regard to its effects on the culture as a whole?

What authorities call "growth" in our nation is a very narrow range of statistical criteria, mostly about money-making. This is obvious insufficient. The evidence that we see starkly on the ground with our own eyes is a devastated public realm. Have you ever sat through a planning board battle over the permit for a new WalMart? Many citizens will get up and declare that the American Dream is all about their right to save money on discount merchandise. So, the WalMart gets built, all the local merchants go out of business, the town loses a whole group of middle-class people who used to support local institutions, and now you have to apply to the state of Wisconsin for a recreation grant to run little league because the guy who owned the appliance store is no longer there to buy uniforms, et cetera, et cetera -- this is the consequence of those clammoring "consumers" (notice they're not citizens) who insisted on their right to save nine bucks on a hair dryer. We have now gotten so beaten up by the diminishing returns of foolish choices like this that there is almost nothing left of our communities. Here's the good news: it's going to head back in the other direction. We're going to have to live much more locally in the future. Here's some bad news: We are entering a period of austerity and hardship, in large part because we squandered our national wealth building the throwaway infrastructure of suburbia

Q: Even some who might agree with your dour assessment of suburbia will
throw up their hands and say, in effect, the genie is out of the bottle.
To what extent can suburban environments improve themselves and become
what you might term real communities?

In my opinion suburban environments have very poor prospects, in part because we will simply not have the wealth to retrofit them that we had when we built them in the first place. Some of the pieces are unretrofittable, namely the cul-de-sac housing pods. I believe that they will be the slums of the future. The New Urbanists have admirable methods for turning dead malls into mixed-use town centers, and a few have been done, but I'm sorry to say that I don't believe that many of these places will achieve that positive outcome. The destiny of most suburban fabric is to become first slum, then salvage and then ruins. It will take a hundred years or more to clear the crap away. First, though, there is going to be a fantastic orgy of devaluation, default, foreclosure, repossession, bankruptcy -- a huge fight over the tablescraps of the 20th century. People may not like pessimists, but I find phony optimism much more distasteful. The truth is, we are going to pay a steep price for the bad decisions we made over the past half century. Life is tragic. History won't shed a tear for us. We'll have to be brave and carry on in the face of all this difficulty, and try not to become a menace to ourselves and other peoples.

Q: How can city centers, large and small, be reinvigorated? Are there
effective models in the U.S. for doing this?

The coming hardships -- which will include chronic oil market disruptions -- will compel Americans to live differently. We will have to recondense our lives into walkable communities. Working on the non-car-oriented scale will help a lot. Once you get people back to that scale, many good things happen automatically, including the restoration of public space. By the way, it should go without saying that we desperately need a passenger rail system. Amtrak in its current form would embarrass the Bulgarians. It amazes me that we gave $14 Billion to the airlines last October without requiring them to invest part of it in passenger rail, to convert themselves into multimodal transportation companies, not just airlines. The total lack of debate on this at the time shows where are heads are at. In the larger sense, we face the project of severely downscaling virtually all American activities. We will have to restore local-and-regional networks of commercial relations (exactly what the WalMarts destroyed) in all their rich layers. We're going to have to do agriculture differently, more locally, more carefully, perhaps more labor-intensively. Education, too, faces the need for massive downscaling and redistribuition of facilities. I'm inclined to believe that smaller cities and small towns will make out better than the big cities in the near term. Places like Detroit and St. Louis, et cetera, are pretty far gone. Anyway, I doubt the big cities of the coming century will be like the industrial metropoli of the previous era in character. They will shrink. Giant factories are things of the past. There will be more parity between big city and small town in terms of potential economic activity. I hasten to add that I believe the Sunbelt will suffer disproportionately in the coming era of hardship and austerity -- just as it benefited disproportionately during the cheap oil fiesta of the past 50 years.

Q: To what extent do you think people understand the problems you raise, to
what extent might they understand them on an unconscious level, and to
what extent are they ignored?

Not at all. Nada. Zip. I think the American people are sleepwalking into the future. I believe we are completely clueless, tuned out, nodded out in a narcotic rapture of infotainment. The few moments we're actually awake, we're complacent, smug, prideful, chauvenistic, and since the attacks of 9/11 we've added a patina of victimhood to our national psychology. We are very poorly prepared for the realities to come. Because of this, I believe we will have a lot of internal strife in the USA as life becomes more austere, as the DiTech home equity loans are foreclosed and the foreign oil markets start to wobble. Americans will not understand why "normality" failed. There will be a tendency toward blame and recrimination. There may be strife between groups and regions. I can imagine Americans voting for political extremists who promise to bring back the good old days of the 1990s. If we woke up and decided to be intelligent, we could begin the huge project of downscaling America, but I don't think it's going to happen that way.

Q: Do you see a significant government role in fostering certain types of
communities (as in Wisconsin's Smart Growth legislation), or is it more
important to change people's minds?

So far, the excellent ideas of smart growth have met a furious opposition from those parts of our culture in charge of land development and building (and their enablers in banking and finance). That's because the dirty secret of our economy is that it is now almost entirely based on the creation of additional suburban sprawl and its furnishings and accessories. The public debate has been futile and often lacking in coherence. You have weird sideshows going on, for instance the efforts of "environmentalists" to "cure" the catastrophe of suburbia by militating for "green space" -- which ends up being delivered in the form of meaningless bark-mulch and juniper shrub installations. Meanwhile, government at every level has begun to suffer a massive destitution due to the costs of our various wars on terrorism at home and abroad. These outlays are only going to increase as a proportion of our expenditures. Government will struggle to just maintain the pavements on our limited-access highways. Don't expect much from them. What we are witnessing is the Law of Perverse Outcomes colliding with the stark reality of diminishing returns from over-investments in complexity. Bottom line: people don't get what they expect, but they get what they deserve. Prepare for austerity. Prepare to be a good neighbor. Prepare to live locally. Be hopeful, but get real. Prepare to live locally. Be hopeful, but get real.

May 6, 2002
   We had our first weekend of warm, sunny weather here in the Un-Sunbelt and it is possible to enjoy the illusion that all is well in the world.  But this is a world of dynamic disequilibrium -- meaning, shit happens -- and we live in a culture that is habituated to ignoring the diminishing returns of our responses to shit happening -- meaning that probably sooner than later we will be overcome by the unanticipated consequences of our diminishing returns.
    This is clearly seen in our economic relations.  America has been the biggest cheerleader for universal free market capitalism.  What goes unstated is that we want it to be American-style. We want all other economies to function as we do, for example externalizing the cost of doing business by destroying local economic relations and thus local communities, as WalMart has been so successful at doing,  In places like France and Japan, there is a belief that small-scale local commerce has tremendous social value, so retail falls under rather rigorous regulatory and licensing systems.  It's nearly impossible to open a big box discount store in Japan because the community value of an existing street of small local shops, including Mr. Yamamoto's 400 square-foot appliance store, is perceived to far exceed the equivalent nine dollars that a given customer might save on an electric rice-maker purchased at a deep discount.
     This perhaps casts non-Americans in a too-innocent light, so let's take another example. America enjoys vast amounts of cheap merchandise from China. The trade between American retailers and Chinese manufacturers, ramped up especially in just the past ten years, has been the basis of American Big Box discounter's triumphalism. What a bonanza of cheap stuff: 25-foot-long garden hoses for $9.99, all-cotton shirts for $9.99, clock-radios for $9.99, stainless-steel frypans for $9.99.  All made in China. You stagger out of the Target store in amazement.  What we don't see is another set of cost externalities this relationship permits China to accept -- the world's most phenomenal rates of environmental destruction and pollution, and systems of factory wage-slavery so grotesque that their like has never been seen even in America darkest years of industrial adolescence. Many of these externalities will in turn be passed along by China to everybody on the planet in the form of greatly increased greenhouse effect gases and the dreadful unknown-unknowns of global warming.  The social externalities of wage-slavery (and the profiteering it represents) may translate before long into political turbulence in China that could easily result in a more aggressive regime eager to both preserve order and secure resources by any means necessary.
     We have entered a truly new era without any conscious awareness. We have crossed a frontier of civilizational history.  We face the task of having to downscale all our activites, and to do it in a way that will not just allow the human race to survive a time of global turbulence, but to preserve what is best in our culture and institutions so that we can go on bravely, confidently, and even joyously. The downscaling of America is a project we can take up without becoming any less great a people than we take ourselves to be. Basically, it means trading quantity for quality.  More on this in the weeks ahead.

April 29, 2002,
     Sunday's New York Times featured a front-page story on our preparations for some eventual big operation in Iraq (i.e. a war) which included this interesting remark by R. Glenn Hubbard, chairman of the President's Council of Economic advisors. He said a surge in oil prices caused by conflict in the Middle East and Iraq would not by itself have a large effect on the US Economy.  We'd get over it rapidly, Hubbard said. No problemo. What planet is he living on?
     The national imagination is currently gripped by delusions regarding oil and its relation to American reality.  Another one that emanates from government circles (i.e., from persons who ought to know better) is that oil in general is no longer so important to the US economy.  As if we could keep on living the way we do with any less of it than we currently get (at bargain prices).  Tell that to the millions of people around the nation who are commuting around the beltways and Edge Cities.  Tell it to the airline industry or the companies who manufacture things with plastic components. Tell it to the denizens of Dallas later this summer when they get another fortnight of 100-plus-degree weather. Tell it to agribusiness in the Central Valley of California. Tell it to the division of WalMart that runs their warehouse-on-wheels, a system in which merchandise is constantly in motion in trucks out on the interstate highways (coming to final rest only in the customer's garage). Tell it to the domestic tourism industry. Tell it to the production builders of farflung suburban housing developments. . . .
      Another delusion is that Russia and its former satellites in Central Asia are serenely standing by to become our new primary source of imported oil in case Arabia is forcibly de-Saudified (or in case sabatoeurs mess with the oil infrastructure there).  It will be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for any American entity to build and/or protect pipelines across any part of Central Asia.  Anyway, we will discover -- probably the hard way -- that oil-starved China has first dibs on that supply, which is right next door to them. Does the Chinese military elite have a scenario for a contest with the US over this region?  I don't think the generals are playing Mah Jong in their conference rooms. How many divisions might the US send to Afghanistan to maintain hegemony over pipelines there?  Did I hear anyone say "zero?"
      Anyway, US officials assure us, there's plenty of oil in South America, where the Monroe Doctrine is still in effect.  That's reassuring.  With over 300 incidents in recent years of Columbian insurgents breaking US-owned pipelines, and with Hugo Chavez back in the Venezuela driver's seat after the world's record shortest coup-de-etat (to which the US gave at least moral support).
     By the way, I'm not against the idea that the world has to find and neutralize Mr. Saddam Hussein's arsenal of WMDs.  But if we're serious about undertaking this adventure, the American people ought to be prepared for real consequences in regard to lifestyle.  Sooner or later an American president is going to have to tell the truth: the cheap oil fiesta is ending and get ready for different living arrangements.  The world does not owe us a drive-in utopia.  George W. Bush appears unaware of these complications. When the hammer falls, he might find himself being the nail.

* * * *

      I was surprised that anyone was greatly surprised by the victory of rightest Jean-Marie LePen in the French national runnoff for the coming presidential election.  Guess what -- Europe is a lot closer to the Middle East than America is. From this nervous vantage they are watching an historic meltdown of order in that part of the world and wondering how many millions of refugees will try to pour into their nations (bringing bad attitudes and belligerant agendas with them). LePen may be a neo-fascist boob, but his victory shows, among other things, how inept the political center has been as guardians of national culture. Living in America, where for years the center has promoted everything but E Pluribus Unim, you wouldn't know that the concept of a national common culture had any value. (The disdain for common culture originally emanated from the left as multiculturalism, but has been co-opted now even by Mr. Bush, who wants to suspend the immigration laws for Mexicans here illegally in order to pander for an increasingly pivotal Hispanic vote.)  The French apparently remember the situation ten years ago when Algerian extremists went on a rampage planting bombs in subway stations all around Paris.  That was their September 11th -- except it went on for much longer than one day -- and they're not eager to import a new generation of bombers. The message therefore is an urgent one to the European center: get serious about defending your nations against the coming anarchy (or extremists will volunteer to do the job).

April 22, 2002,
      I ventured into the heartland this weekend, specifically to Denver, Colorado, for yet another cold splash of Clusterfuck Nation reality. You know, living as I do in a main street town that has been relatively successful (by US standards) at resisting the suburban death machine, it's shocking to see what "normal" life has become in other quarters of this republic.
     I stayed with a friend who is a faculty member at a university there. He lived with girlfriend and kids in the gloaming of 1960s and 70s vintage sprawl that extends for tens of miles beyond the relatively tiny kernal of true urbanism at the center of this hypertrophic mess.  It was officially Littleton, but not quite the same place that spawned the Columbine High School Massacre of 2000 -- those kids came from the 1980s and 90s burbs a little further out. Where we were, the old one-mile section roads from the initial 19th century survey had all turned into eight-lane commercial strips lined by the usual architectural garbage and screaming signage clear across the flat prairie horizon, with monocultures of cul-de-sac housing tracts filling the quarter-sections in between. While I was in the midst of plenty, surrounded by discount merchandise, and with every wondrous food product known in the universe, from mesquite-flavored jerky to arugula pesto, and no shortage of bathrooms or clean water, it was hard to imagine a more dismal human ecology. It was also difficult to imagine that places such as Littleton have a future.
      While I was there, we made several excursions around the metro area, always in the car, always attended by the cell phone, necessary for coordinating the difficult logistics of the family Saturday, with children needing to be shuttled from one play venue to the next. It was normal and it was all completely insane. These suburbs of Denver are exactly the kind of American places that are going to be crushed by the coming disorders of destabilized oil markets and the attendant political mischief.  We tolerate their ugliness and civic impoverishment because we are sleepwalking in the rapture of our cheap oil addiction. The wake-up call is going to be extremely harsh, like the thrashing agony of heroin withdrawal. It may shake our country to pieces.
    The depressing trip out to the Denver aiport captured the whole dilemma for me. There it stood out on the treeless plain, so far from the city that it could have been in outer space. Planners of the 1980s had assumed, I'm sure, that this metro organism was going to continue to grow in exactly the same way far into the future, and so they left plenty of room for another generation of suburban metastasis between the new airport and the city. Yet what a place like Denver really faces is not more-of-the-same, but rather the drastic and desperate necessity to downscale itself, to compress and condense itself, to reduce its hypertrophic scale, to exchange low-grade quantity for quality.
     By the time Denver realizes this -- in the form of a popular consensus -- it will almost certainly be too late to take action. Then the question will be: how much damage and civil disorder can it endure, and how long will it go on, before the organism can repair itself. . . if ever?

April 15, 2002
      What a tough assignment for Colin Powell: going through the motions in a diplomatic dance that seems headed for an inevitable outcome -- all fall down. There is a tragic, grinding momentum to both the gathering pan-Islamic rage against the US and Israel and the machinations of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the Ayotollah Ali Khamenei as they prepare to attempt a catastrophic intervention against Israel, using Syria as their first-line proxy.
     Surely back in Washington plans are being laid for a worst-case scenario. And just what would that be?
     An Iraq-Iran-Syria-Palestinian alignment is ranging itself as a forward bulwark against an American attack on Baghdad. The Palestinians keep up suicide bombings with the intention of confounding American diplomatic efforts, provoking further Israeli operations against Palestinian towns and refugee camps, fanning rage against Israel and crippling Israel's economy.  The Syrians permit Hizballah to launch rockets against Israel's north.  Israel retaliates against Syria. Iran and Iraq then declare jihad against Israel and the fun begins.  Perhaps the Saud family is toppled in the process.  All bets are off on scheduled oil deliveries.
      Are the Iranians and Iraqis are crazy enough to go down that path?  I think so.
      The Israeli military can turn their principal cities into ashtrays.
      Eventually, the US will be compelled to take sides -- Israel's.
      Will Islamic "sleepers" then carry out terror missions within the US?  It's possible.
      Will the infrastucture of Middle Eastern oil be sabotaged?  A distinct possibility.
      Will Europe become involved?  Britain yes, the rest, no.
      Probable outcome: several shattered Islamic nations.  A global energy crisis.

April 12, 2002
     Probably later than sooner, Israel will have to get its settlers out of the West Bank and cede the territory in toto to Palestinian jurisdiction. But -- a big but -- they can't do it while Palestinians continue to bomb Israeli pizza parlors and hotels. When Israel does manage to disentagle itself from the West Bank, it will enjoy a great tactical advantage. The West Bank can be treated like a sovereign nation, and if its occupants then choose to launch attacks of any kind from there on Israel, the IDF can justifiably counter-attack massively.
     Tom Friedman of the New York Times has made a pretty good case for the use of American or NATO troops to keep the peace while negotiations begin.  Among the many obvious problems -- Arafat's utter lack of credibility as a negotiator; Sharon's committment to the West Bank settlements -- I see one that Friedman hasn't addressed: With so many enraged Muslim extremists, terrorists, populists, chauvenists, lunatics, and just plain unoccupied young men in the region (and in nations adjoining the region) wouldn't US or NATO troops become the new target of choice for Islamic discontent?  Wouldn't the bombers and the gun squads simply be re-directed at the peacekeepers?  I think so.  That is exactly what happened with American troops in Lebanon in 1982.  Same thing in Somalia when the US tried to protect UN food relief shipments from being hijacked by warlords.
     There is broad faction of groups in the Islamic East who are determined to both wipe Israel off the map and to run a jihad against the West, America in particular.  Their interest is not to assist with a negotiated settlement that would create a clear and defensible boundary for Israel.  Their interest is served by keeping the pressure up, sending the bombers out regardless of what proposals are made, keeping the ammo and explosives supplied, to keep the situation muddled, tense, bloody, and hopeless.  Their interest is to run an asymmetrical war organized by international gangs, not nations which could be blamed and counter-attacked.  Their long-term strategy is to widen the war and draw the US into an asymmetrical military morass over a huge region. They don't care about the number of casualties they take.  They welcome death. They want to set the world on fire and they may accomplish it.
     The only thing that constrains them is Israel's ability and willingness to meet their aggression at any level, from a knife-fight in a hallway on up. In a truly widened war, for instance, with a substantial number of rockets emanating from Lebanon (which is under Syrian control), then a certain nation that begins with an "S" and ends with an "a" will be turned into an ashtray. Same thing with the nation that begins with an "I" and ends with a "q."  The wider war will eventually cut two ways. Israel's defenses are formidable.  Part of the insanity of Jihad Inc. is its failure to recognize that.
     America's chief interest, besides protecting the existence of Israel, lies in our continued access to Mideast oil, which is subject to cut-off either as a means of straight-up economic warfare afainst the US, or by the toppling of regimes like the Saudis of Arabia who do not have the stomach to use the oil weapon. The infrastructure of oil production is also subject to sabotage on the ground by maniacs. Underneath the admirable cool of Colin Powell and the plain speech of George Bush is a desperate effort to keep the oil running. Without it, we head straight for Great Depression II.

April 8, 2002,
      Prime Minister Sharon was unmoved by President Bush's command for Israel to cease its anti-terror operations "without delay."  Like George Clooney's madcap character in O Brother, America is "in a tight spot."
      We wish the world would approve of our global efforts to root out terrorism using every weapon in our arsenal from the B2 Stealth bomber to the A-above-middle-C piano wire garrote, but we're very uncomfortable about Israel dismantling the Palestinian terror regime on the local scale.  We make our demands because not doing so we would risk alienating the rest of the Islamic world, losing whatever grudging support we thought we could muster for a future Saddam hunting expedition, and putting our desperately-needed oil imports at hazard. The short-term conundrum for America: how to not appear craven.
      The US has no more use for Yasser Arafat than the Israelis do, because he can't close a deal. All parties would benefit from a change of Palestinian leadership. The failure of an alternate faction to emerge is itself telling. It indicates either that Arafat's way (continual insurrection) is the only way, or that his regime holds its own people in captive thrall. Or perhaps it indicates that no credible Palestinian figure wants to begin a peace process.  If an Israeli prime minister failed as spectacularly as Arafat has, plenty of candidates representing a wide range of views and policies, would step forward to replace him, some of them desperate peaceniks.
     So the systematic dismantling of Palestinian terror infrastructure (the bomb-making laboratories, the caches of Kalashnikovs and RPGs, the suicide bomber field leadership) will continue until the Israeli Defense Force feels the job is complete.
      The US ends up looking feckless.
      I hasten to add that our leaders, from Bush and his close advisors to Secretary Powell, General Zinni, and Director Tenent, have played their roles in this tragic script pretty honorably. The violence is deplorable, including the awkward and brutal use of Israeli tanks in the labyrinth of the Palestinian towns. The violence should have been deplored and the US properly did so. Alas, the Israeli operation was necessary. There was no other way to discontinue the suicide bomber program. It was probably even desired by the PLO as a means for enhancing their "victim" status -- a smokescreen for their diplomatic ineptitude and intransigence.
      The further consequence, though, is that America's impotence only puts the Islamic nations in their own tight spot. The call will arise for them to do something, and what will that something be?  Widening of hostilities? Use of the oil weapon?  The Arabs, too, are cravens. When it comes to real war, they know that they would get their asses kicked if they jumped in.
     Observers so far have scoffed at the idea that Saddam Hussein's declared oil boycott will have any effect on the global supply, but whatever the truth is -- even whether Saddam would actually embargo his oil or just sneakily route it through alternate sales channels -- the markets are certainly responding by bidding up the price of crude more steeply than at any time since last spring.  And now that Iran has joined its longtime enemy Iraq in supporting an oil boycott, who knows whether other Islamic nations will either fall into line, or be dragged unhappily into it. My own sense is that a unified sentiment for an oil boycott will take shape because 1.) it is the most potent non-military weapon of the last resort that they have, and 2.) there is an historic inevitability to it (I admit the latter may be tautological).  We should have a clear picture by the end of this week.
      

April 2, 2002,
     Watching the eminentissimos on the Sunday morning TV news analysis shows I was struck by their absolute inability to offer a coherent idea of what the US can actually do about the whirlwind of war in Israel. For instance, Sandy Berger and Zbigniew Brzezinski (NSC chiefs under Clinton and Carter) on Sam Donaldson's ABC panel confounded the plastic-haired-one's entreaties to provide some inkling of a way to mediate or resolve the conflict.  It's hard not to conclude that there is not much the US can do to even bring about a temporary ceasefire.
     What well-intentioned bystanders might wish for the region is beside the point of what is actually liable to happen.  The other states in the region are growing extremely restive.  Iraq is now loudly promoting the idea of a pan-Islamic oil boycott against nations that support Israel (who could that be?). The US state department dismisses Sadaam's statements as "ramblings," but are they whistling past the graveyard?   The Saudis say that an oil boycott is "out of the question," but the Saudis do not represent all Arabs; they are but a ruling clan among many other clans, not to mention the minions of Osama bin Laden, who would be the next caliph of Riyadh if he could manage it. The unwillingness of the Saudis to use the oil weapon, may be an invitation to topple their regime and replace it with one that would gladly play the oil card.
     Beyond the roar of international opprobrium aimed at Prime Minister Sharon, it is hard to imagine what else Israel would do -- with suicidal bomber maniacs being launched against its civilian population like so many human missiles by a culture that glorifies death.  I didn't vote for guy, but I respect President Bush's unwillingness to join the international pretense that both sides are behaving equally badly. To do otherwise would be to undermine America's own behavior in the "war against terrorism."  What are suicide bombers if not terrorists?  What were the skyjackers of 9/11 if not suicide bombers?
     Will Yasser Arafat take the opportunity he has been given to save his skin?  I would be surprised if he does not.  Morocco has been persuaded to offer him a sanctuary. Morocco is about as far away from Israel as Spokane is from Wall Street.  Arafat is holed up at the moment with about 70 supporters, many of whom are top terrorists wanted by Israel. They would not be allowed to accompany the Chairman into exile.  The situation at the Ramallah compound is extremely delicate because only Arafat's presence prevents the Israelis from taking them all into custody.  Will they go down Alamo-style?
     Meanwhile, unnoticed by the American public is a badly distorted economy that is not "recovering" from the extreme credit follies of recent years, only moving the bubble from the Nasdaq to the housing market, fueled by ridiculous interest rates and reckless mortgage creation by government supported entities (GSEs) Fanne Mae and Freddie Mac.  When the inflation of house prices crests and turns down, and over-leveraged owners of overpriced houses rush to sell in a collapsing market, we'll see an incredible fiesta of family financial ruin.  The question to ask right now is will these conditions coincide (or be brought about) by rapidly rising oil prices or an outright Arab export boycott? The oil markets are already anticipating trouble.  Read the numbers. We also know that every time oil prices rise, the US economy slips back into trouble-- since our economy is mainly about driving, long-distance transport of goods, and suburban real estate development.  This is the heart of the clusterfuck argument: if oil markets wobble even moderatly, the US economy could crash and burn.  
       Add a red-hot war in the Mideast and we could find ourselves in a permanent emergency.

March 29, 2002
      The Passover bombing at Netanya and several other bushwhackings during and directly after the Arab League Summit prove, among other things, that Islamic heads of state have no ability to control the intifada that is enexorably building into a jihad. They couldn't control the violence during the few hours when you'd think they would have wanted the world's undivided attention, that is, when Saudi Prince Abdullah pitched his peace plan on TV. Yasser Arafat couldn't control Palestinian bombers or gun squads during the hours he offered a cease fire -- at least six more Israeli civilians were killed.  Israel is no longer under any obligation to pretend that its adversaries are interested in talking about peace.
      Israel will now mount a massive operation to enter the Palestinian towns, territories, and camps, capture the arsenals of small arms, and round up the personnel who are itching to use them. Meanwhile, Arafat will not only be isolated in the basement of his shattered compound, but he will be made personally, physically, extremely uncomfortable while he remains alive.
      We've got to wonder whether the other states in the neighborhood will stand still while the Israelis systematically disarm and round-up the local jihadistas on the grand scale. Will the angry multitudes of Islam pressure their leaders into reckless action?  The bottom line is that Israel possesses an arsenal of several hundred nuclear weapons, so a concerted gang-up by legitimate armies seems unlikely to me.  It's possible, though, that Syria might be enlisted as a proxy, at least in the short-term, to begin some formal hostilities against Israel; not enough to invite an overwhelming counterstrike, but enough to create a distraction.  If radical Islam possesses any weapons of mass destruction, the days ahead would be the time we might expect to see them put to use inside Israel, and most likely in the form of something carried into a strategic location by a suicide bomber, not a rocket fired from outside.  How permeable are Israel's borders?  It is well-defended but it is not a fortress. Would-be martyrs of many nationalities can probably enter at will.  Were Sadaam Hussein were to attempt any mischief, Israel will counterstrike as harshly as possible. The US will be unable to restrain Prime Minister Sharon -- indeed, in the event it could be in America's interest to allow Israel a free hand against Iraq.  But it would be in Sadaam's interest to lay low a while longer because of the following.
      If Israel is successful at disarming the intifada / jihad and taking its most active players into custody, then it is conceivable to me that the Saudis will then be pressured into finally using their oil weapon against the US -- withholding the roughly 18 percent of our total oil imports.  Unless they are in a coma, US strategists must have been anticipating just such a hairy situation in which America's addictive dependence on Arabian oil would be cut off.   Lately there has been an idea floated in such establishment forums as The New York Times that Russia is ready to pick up the oil export slack when our relations with Saudi Arabia crap out.  Personally, it seems rather insane to me that the US would prefer to be dependent on a nation with whom, until a few years ago, we were locked in a half-century life-or-death power struggle.  
      Tacticians at the Pentagon, State Department, and NSC must realize that sooner or later the US will have to go through an oil supply wringer.  I don't believe the line that says that the Saudis would never give up the revenue they enjoy from us.  They can probably make up much of it with sales to China in the immediate future. And anyway, the jihad sentiment may simply force them to stop selling us oil, whether the princes and sheiks like it or not.  If they didn't talk about this in the back rooms of the Arab League summit, then these guys are truly ninnies.
     The American public will probably flip out if we suffer oil market disruptions on the order of what happened in 1973.  We are more vulnerable by orders of magnitude than we were then, and especially more car-dependant.  The parts of the nation most infatuated with the suburban lifestyle will get creamed economically by a cutoff of Arabian oil.  It happens that these places are the most heavily Republican, too. So much for self-satisfied complacency with the status quo.  Imagine Houston and Atlanta without cheap air-conditioning, let alone gas for the SUV.
      The next question, of course, is what might we do about it?  I doubt that even the craziest three-star cowboy general in the US armed forces believes that we could defend the surface infrastructure of the Arabian oil fields, so forget about occupying that sand dune.  We'll probably have to lump it, limp along, see how we enjoy our new dependence on Vladimir Putin, and scheme to get our mitts on the oil around the Caspian Sea -- a project which, I hasten to add, we will never succeed at over the long term, since this is some of the most contested real estate in the world, and the contestants are all muslims of one sort or another.
      Welcome to Clusterfuck Nation.

March 21, 2002
     If the Catholic Church is unwilling to allow its priesthood to wed, it ought to consider castration as an alternative.  The current arrangement is simply sadistic and unworkable.  Castration could be performed as painlessly as any up-to-date surgical technique. Unless "treated" before puberty, they would probably not be considered eunuchs in the technical sense, but they would be the next best thing.  History contains instances of high accomplishment by castrated males, including a great admiral of the Chinese Navy, and Narses, the Byzantine General and, briefly, prefect of Venice (AD 552).  It must do wonders for concentration.
     

March 17, 2002
      Personally, I don't think Palestinian militants have any intention of joining in a cease-fire. As a tactical matter, I think, they are interested only in marshalling world opinion against Israel, and thereby paralyzing or confounding Israel's ability to defend itself.  Getting the US involved in bootless peace negotiations will reinforce the impression to the Islamic world that Israel and the US stand together, a single infidel enemy.  The ultimate result will be 1.) a wider war against Israel, 2.) Islamic solidarity against any US moves in Iraq. 3.) stoked sentiment for a greater jihad against the west. 
      Just as the Palestinans want their sovereign state to be where Israel currently exists, they also want to have a cease-fire without any halt by their side to shootings and bombings. They want to continue the conflict, and they are betting that asymmetrical warfare carried on endlessly by an urban rabble with a bottomless supply of small arms and willing martyrs will eventually defeat the Israelis by demoralization. The Palestinians' greatest weapon, in fact, is their population bomb.
      The Palestinians may feel that they have nothing to lose by keeping the pressure on by any means necessary, including fake diplomacy. The US is compelled to play its lugubrious role in the cease-fire melodrama because the tactical gambit of Prince Abdullah's "peace plan" offering "normal relations" to Israel leaves the US no choice except to act as if this is a serious proposal deserving a full-scale diplomatic effort.  Israel has to play along, too, until the bluff is called.  Prime Minister Sharon has already stated that any Palestinian attacks during a cease-fire will generate an appropriate Israeli response -- meaning, you shoot at us and we will shoot back. There were already two incidents on Sunday: a bus was shot up killing an Israeli woman and wounding seven, and a suicide bomber blew himself up near another bus, killing nobody. So far, the Israelis have not responded.
       So far no other Muslim state or freelance group has ratified Prince Abdullah's peace initiative. Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia may have his own reasons for pitching the peace plan.  It makes the Saudis look more important than they actually are.  It appears to place them on a high moral ground.  It will please Islamic militants (whom the Saudi regime fears) because the proposal is designed to trip up the Israelis and stymie the US.
     The fact is, the US has no ability to control what the Palestinians do, and limited influence with the Israelis. There is an epochal force to events that is beyond even real good intentions.
     

March 14, 2002
      Edward Luttwak's fine book Turbo Capitalism (HarperCollins 1999) includes a disccusion of the diminishing returns in the current arrangement of deregulated hyper-competitive free markets.  The main consequence in America, he says, is the tremendous anomie and loneliness produced by the destruction of families (rich, poor middle, everyone) and of the rich web of community relations that no longer exists.  "Americans," he says, "are emotional destitutes, as poor in their familiy connections as Afghans or Sudanese are in money."  The replacement, he says, for family and community -- destroyed by such things as national chain retail, commercialized elder care, constant geographical relocation, and overwork -- are junk religion, drugs and alcohol, overeating, and consumerism, the last of which he defines as constantly buying oneself presents.
     Luttwak's take on this kind of compensatory shopping is interesting:

"It is always very nice to receive presents, but the presents in question are not gifts. They are not given by others. Americans instead buy presents for themselves, in shops and department stores, mass-mailed catelogs and direct mail and telephone solicitations, by calling in to order objects displayed on television, and lately on-line through the internet on a colossal multi-trillion-dollar scale. One shopper interviewed by the Wall Street Journal had bought thirteen Christmas presents: two for her boyfriend, eleven for herself. 'I deserve them all,' was her comment. . . . Much of what Americans buy nowadays amounts to baroque elaborations in which the original functional purposes are submerged by excesses, fripperies, frills, or simply overdesign. . . .Any puritanical outrage at other people's enjoyment of fancy goods is really beside the point: the peculiar preferences of American buyers have enormous economic consequences, because they cripple the US export of consumer goods. Buyers around the world who are not in need of boosting their morale refuse to buy 'gift' versions of the objects they seek. Most notably, the US automobile industry nowadays produces very few unadorned vehicles meant to provide a means of transportation. . . . Great fun is had by all, but foreign car buyers reject the results for reasons of fuel economy, plain economy, environmental economy, or just plain good taste. The result is manifest in US trade figures. Instead of contributing to a favorable trade balance, the automnbile industry, by far the largest of all US manufacturing industries, is so weak an exporter that the sector accounts for the single biggest item in persistent US trade deficits."

March 10, 2002,
     Thomas Friedman of the New York Times calls it "a foul wind. . . blowing through the Arab-Muslim World." It's the odor of bloodlust as the Mideast careens toward all-out war. The Muslim masses want it.  Friedman says the true Muslim moderates must now do everything possible to prevent that from happening.  It would be nice, but Tom is whistling past the graveyard for the Times' genteel readers.  It has gone beyond that.  Not a single Muslim leader nor all of them put together -- Arafat, Mubarak, young King Abdullah of Jordan, or Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, or Basaar al-Assad of Syria, or god-help-us Saddam Hussein or Muhammar Qadaffi -- can stop the trajectory of events now arcing toward war.  
     The Prince Abdullah "peace plan" -- A.) return to pre-1967 borders plus B.) free movement and access for Palestinians within Israel -- sounded immediately like a cynical fantasy to me, a way of saying (insincerely) "we tried to help. . . ."  The Palestinians themselves came close to achieving most of part A through the Oslo process, but then Chairman Arafat blew it at the last moment by refusing to sign the protocols (proving himself to be incontrovertably an unreliable negotiating partner). The argument against part B is eighteen months of Palestinian suicide bombers blowing up cafes, buses, schools, and pizza parlors.
      I don't believe that anybody -- Muslim or otherwise -- can stop the Palestinian attacks currently underway. They are determined to drag the rest of the Muslim world into a war against Israel, and they may succeed because Friedman is right, that the Muslim masses see this as their golden moment to destroy Israel for once and for all.  It may be completely delusional on their part, but that would not necessarily stop them. My guess is that the Israeli government -- including even the moderates -- see Israel as, indeed, at the edge of a fight for the nation's life, and that no power on earth will induce them to pull back from meeting each Palestinian act of aggression with ferocious counter-attacks.  The rocketing of Arafat's Gaza headquarters -- empty now that he is bottled up in Ramallah -- ought to be a clear signal to him (and the world) that the next suicide bomb will result in Arafat's death.
      Were a conventional catastrophic escalation to occur, the Israeli military is capable of defeating the armies of its immediate neighbors: Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan (though I do not believe their governments want to engage Israel in a big hot war). Who knows what Iraq might do. Or Iran. Who knows what kind of biological or nuclear devices militant Islam is capable of setting off in Israel in the days ahead.  It may not be necessary for the other Muslim governments to engage their official militaries against Israel.  The masses themselves might just conveniently bypass their governments, travel to Israel by any means necessary, jihad-style, by Toyota or on foot or by camel, armed with the stock-in-trade of asymmetrical warfare, small arms, kalashnikov automatic rifles, shoulder-launched rockets and grenades, and join the Palestinians in what would turn out to be a horrendous urban insurrection.
     I am not convinced that the US can accomplish anything besides acting as a horrified bystander.
     Even in a conventional war scenario -- governments against governments using soldiers and advanced weaponry -- it is hard to imagine any role that the US might play.  We are a powerful nation, but we're not omnipotent.