On Trump's Nixonian "Peace With Honour" In Afghanistan

So over the past few days in Afghanistan, there've been more than six dozen Taliban attacks and the US has resumed airstrikes against them. Yet I seem to keep running across people hailing Trump as some kind of visionary diplomatic savant (as opposed to the *other* kind of savant) who's scored some kind of history-diverting coup in securing a sort of 'peace with honour' deal in Afghanistan.

"Peace with Honour", now *there's* a historically resonant phrase. Trump is often compared to Nixon, for reasons that should probably be obvious (although with the people making the comparisons generally forgetting that Nixon won re-election despite the allegations against him being well-publicized all throughout the electorate quite some time before polling-day); yet it's that particular 'promise' of Nixon's that springs to mind now.

Facing an arguably unwinnable war in Vietnam, the American public had understandably soured upon its continued prosecution. Yet a simple cut-and-run would have been substantively politically unpalatable. So instead, Nixon ran for the Presidency on a "pledge" (as he put it) of "honourable peace", which some might have noted was a subtle yet important distinction from his earlier declaration of intent to secure a "victorious peace". Not that either ambition came with an actual detailed stratagem for its attainment; prior to winning the White House, the closest he seemed to come to one was vague braggadocio about implicitly threatening via supporting parties the North Vietnamese et co til they stopped gaining ground.

Once in office, he attempted to make good upon this approach through escalating bombings (including of sites in officially neutral Cambodia, carried out in secret; a gambit Trump has also tried, including thermobaric-style) and blustering bombast about massively increased pressure in other areas. But he also pressed forward with another much more important strand of his strategy - "Vietnamization". Or, phrased another way, making the war on the ground and its unstaunchable flow of casualties effectively somebody else's problem.

If it had any meaning, Nixon's dictum of an "honourable peace" probably just meant attempting to give the South Vietnamese military an allegedly "fighting chance" as far as the 'honourable' component went - and when it came to the "peace" bit, one could quote the worlds of Ronald Reagan (ironically, speaking about the then-brewing Vietnam War in 1964) - "Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace?"

Much of the American public did, indeed, "want to be left in peace" by the Nixon presidency, and understandably so. Nixon's inability to actually *deliver* on his previous pledge of "peace" - "victorious", "honourable", or "otherwise" - over the four years of his first term in office, didn't seem to significantly harm his electoral prospects in 1972; with the run-up to the November election featuring a steady stream of announcements as to the ongoing 'progress' of peace negotiations, in any case.

These eventually culminated with the Paris Peace Accords signed some four and a half months later, that secured the near-total withdrawal of US and allied forces from Vietnam. That's where Nixon's iconically famous phrase of "Peace With Honour" actually comes from - his trumpeting of the eventual 'success' of his Administration's negotiation (and negotiation-from-30,000-feet) in late January 1973 a few days before the Acccords' signing.

On January 27 1973, the Paris Peace Accords came into effect.

The ceasefire held for, it appears, less than 24 hours.

However, within two weeks the US Senate would begin its formal investigation of Watergate; and as the increasingly disconcerting revelations from *that* particular low-light of the Nixon Era began to take over the headlines in earnest, the failure of both the War nobody wanted to care about anymore, as well as the Peace With Honour which was supposed to end it with something resembling "integrity", edged ever further out of the public-political consciousness.

Lies, atrocities, and illegal acts carried out far away across the Pacific Ocean seemed far less significant, somehow, than those purportedly engaged in against the American People at home, by their own ruling caste.

Within two years, South Vietnam had effectively ceased to exist; the Fall of Saigon in late April 1975 also encompassing the last US combat deaths of the War.

Now lest I be misinterpreted ... I am not for a moment seeking to draw the more immediately obvious parallel that so often gets trotted out pertaining to Trump and Nixon. Both men faced Impeachment. One is still standing afterward; and it would seem unutterably foolhardy to presume that, barring some seismic shift in American politics, there shall be any more successful foreshortening of Trump's time in office via legal means, and with it being only slightly more probable at this late stage that electoral means shall prove any greater or more successful in this endeavour.

Instead, I simply seek to suggest to the various sorts of people I've seen hailing Trump's 'peace with honour' in Afghanistan - that what is likely to ensue there is probably not entirely far removed from what Nixon "achieved" in Paris with regard to Vietnam.

That is to say, a great flurry of headlines, a certain upswing in cautious optimism from some of those who (understandably) want the American (involving) war effort there to be at an end, and a much more pronounced positivity from those ... enthusiastic sorts for whom Their President Can Do No Wrong.

In real terms? Just as with Vietnam - official involvement and boots-on-the-ground will dramatically decrease. Actual American involvement, in the form of longer-range efforts that don't create so many *American* casualties like drone-strikes and aerial sorties, shall likely continue (a 'Linebacker', you might call it); as will the under-the-table and downright dodgy efforts and illicit activities that are part and parcel of the Entanglements of Empire in the Back of Beyond. "The Great Game", it was once called - perhaps this is the Great Videogame, with occasional hints of Minesweeper.

But Trump will be able to proclaim to his public that he (finally) fulfilled a campaign pledge, and brought American troops home - he may even ill-fittingly over-inflate his own achievements in Afghanistan to place him on a par with Ranjit Singh (look him up, one of the only rulers to ever win a war there).

He'll be able to say - rightly or wrongly - that Americans shall now be "left in peace" by the conflict. Because that's what this was really about. They don't want a "cease-fire" - they just want to cease being fired upon. An ambition common, also, to just about everybody involved. Even if it means simply deferring and/or duplicating some of the more active conflict down the road and via the continuation of warfare via any other means in the local political arenas.

The Taliban, meanwhile, are presumably looking forward to a re-run of the chaotic sequence of events following the withdrawal of Soviet troops in the late 1980s; that is to say, taking advantage of an increasingly fractious internal situation that they themselves are going to be doing their darndest in many cases to fracture further - to rebuild their rulership back to something approaching pre-2001 levels.

And The World at large shall move on.

We've got other "Peaces" to turn into mere "Honorifics".

Almost puts one in the mind of a favourite quotation of mine; from a much earlier cynical Joaquin Phoenix movie -

"'When there is peace, the warlike man attacks himself.' That's Nietzsche, and his point is that there really is no peace. There's always some war, somewhere, with someone. And there are no winners or losers either. Just those who are still around to fight another day."

That seems to be Afghanistan these days - in much the same way that Pakistan is not, as other countries are, a state with a military ... but rather, a military with a state; Afghanistan seems less a country having a civil war, than a civil war having a country.

Trump's "Peace With Honour" then, is a "Peace Agreement" lacking in that most fundamental ingredient: a potentially viable prospect for "Peace".

What it has instead is a commodity in conspicuously hot demand in recent weeks - a vast quantity of hand sanitizzer, for the vigorous Washing Hands Of This. With a similarly vocal cry of "Out Damned Spot!"

As applies the ineluctable comparison between Nixon's crab-(rave-)scuttle out of Vietnam, and Trump's "dealmaking" to leave Afghanistan, it is once again abundently clear that while History may not, strictly speaking, repeat - it sure does rhyme.

So When Shane Jones Claims Wealthy Donors Are Influencing Immigration Decisions ...

Shane Jones says you can't trust the National Party on immigration, because they're "funded by certain very rich overseas donors" with a vested interest in the matter.

On this particular matter, I shall have to defer to the superior experience of Jones - after all, I seem to recall an Associate Immigration Minister also by the name of Shane Jones who personally intervened against a mountain of official advice (including from Interpol), to get Kiwi citizenship for a foreign criminal festooned with fraudulent passports and other documents. Who had, as it happened, donated and otherwise fraternized pretty extensively with both Labour and National.

It seems like Jones' outrage about supposedly suspect immigration is seriously selective. If it's "Indian", he's against it. If it's "Chinese", he seems rather more circumspect (as in "silent"); and I mention this because I'm pretty sure that many of the shifts in our export education sector from the early-mid 2000s onward (or, as Jones calls it, the "ruining" thereof) were the result of a significant expansion in Chinese student visa numbers over that period.

This doesn't mean it's morally right to blame said students, of whatever nation of origin, either. As a country, we apparently decided we wanted Export Education to be a cornerstone of our growth and development strategy; and started energetically pushing the 'recruitment' for this in various target markets including India, the People's Republic of China, and other such places.

This appears to have included sotto-voce 'sweeteners' about how long-term study in New Zealand would offer an easy pathway to Work-Visas and then eventually Residency.

And while an array of that is down to unscrupulous immigration brokers and sketchy education providers looking to make a quick buck by mass-importing fee-paying foreign students (I don't just mean fly-by-night language schools, either - from my time in  the tertiary education sector, it seemed that even some of New Zealand's more 'reputable' universities were quite intentionally in on it) ...

... the manifest fact is that these policy decisions were made by *our* Government. Including, as it happens, two that Jones was personally part of.

I've previously covered in some detail how Jones' bloviating references to "Butter Chicken" and "Bollywood Overreaction" when castigating immigration, appears to be an effort at setting a narrative, making a name for himself - getting 'known' as a guy against immigration via the specific, spurious, and repeated targeting of one stereotypable set of migrant demographics.

Yet now I think I'll go further. Jones is patently aware that whenever the issue of immigration numbers or the sorts of immigration taking place comes up - that it's *his own* record (or lack thereof) in Government that is effectively under scrutiny. Not the rambunctious rhetoric. The actual facts of what he and his have - or, more pointedly - have not done upon the matter.

That's a losing wicket; so instead of allowing attention to be cast upon it, he's attempting to redirect your attention to somebody .. anybody else.

So don't look at his actual record, personally enabling *actual* dodgy immigration to New Zealand in a Ministerial capacity ... instead keep your eye on the spectral shadow-puppet he's projecting on that wall over there yonder: "3 million people [coming] here from New Delhi."

To do anything else is, apparently, some kind of Greek Chorus "Overreaction".

Everybody We Don't Like Is Literally A Russian Hacker - On The Latest Anti Sanders Smear

So yesterday, I saw headlines shrilly proclaiming that Bernie Sanders had just been briefed by the authorities that Russia was reportedly attempting to "help" his Presidential campaign.

Now, personally, I'm more than a bit cynical when I see "candidate who isn't 'supposed' to be doing well or even winning, is now associated with RUSSIAN HACKING" turn up in the news media; as it generally means that a) various somebodies in various establishment-style institutions aren't able to mentally handle the prospect that a candidate other than their preferred, anointed, and/or allegedly 'mainstream palatable' one(s) is doing well, therefore requiring some sort of Deus Ex Russia 'explanation' to justify why it's not they who were out of touch; and b) that on the offchance it actually *is* genuine democratic enthusiasm (in a democracy and/or Democratic Party, no less!) that's fueling said candidate's rise ... that you can probably knock them down a peg or three by claiming they're some form of Russian and/or Manchurian Candidate.

Or, phrased another way, you could almost imagine the contents of Sanders getting a briefing from American authorities of this nature as being something like "you're winning too much -
we think you're cheating."

But matters became somewhat more complex when I opened my newspaper over dark lunch this morning ['dark lunch' being the meal sometime after midnight, enjoyed by those of us who are nocturnal in both our rest and our repast-ery rhythms], to find that it was proclaiming U.S. intelligence officers were telling the American government that Russia was intervening for Trump.

Which would therefore suggest that the Official Narrative as from now is going to be that the Russians are 'meddling' on behalf of *both* Trump *and* Sanders.

Now to be fair and sure, in theory and in principle that's not as conceptually ridiculous as it might otherwise sound. If I were trying to destabilize and weaken America - get internal divisions exacerbated to the point that it was so busy internally it couldn't be bothered acting anywhere else - eagerly supporting its own already-running interior processes that seem to do this *anyway* , would certainly be one way to do it.

But that's not usually how this seems to go when reported on in the media, or utilized in political mudslinging (but, then, I repeat myself). Instead, it's utilized to suggest that "The Russians" have a 'preferred candidate', whom they're going to puppeteer and/or lead about by the nose [rather than a previous generation's hysteria around Kennedy - who was presumably to be controlled from offshore .. en mass; which differs from some of the more lurid recent hysteria around Karl Rove *also* using chanted latin as a form of binding and control].

In which case, we find ourselves in the current odd situation of - again, taking things at face value - those gosh-darn Russians apparently deeply and abidingly wanting every American to have access to healthcare.

Yet as we continue to slouch toward the Democrats' Convention, I doubt the accusations of Russian interference are going to be restricted to just Sanders and Trump. Indeed, the charge had already been leveled at fellow Democratic candidate, Tulsi Gabbard - who's presently suing Hillary Clinton for defamation in response [Clinton, interestingly, keeps using improper means to dodge the Defamation papers being served, including by making use of her Secret Service detail] .

Instead, what I strongly suspect we are going to see is an escalating tide of "EVERY CANDIDATE OTHER THAN A PARTICULAR NARROW RANGE OF NEOLIBERAL (and/or NEOCON) ESTABLISHMENT APPROVED ONES , IS A RUSSIAN CANDIDATE". For reasons which should be eminently obvious, and have precious little, if anything, to do with Russia.

Although do, in a sense, have quite something to do with the concept of intervening or meddling in a democratic process.

Chaos in the Caucuses - Iowa Democrats' Corn App A Real Bad Dud

There is a quotation ascribed to Stalin - “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.”

Now, I am rarely the sort of person to accuse the Democratic Party of being "Stalinist" [even their 'relative' left-wing candidates I would hardly work up the enthusiasm to laud "Socialist"] ... but after what we have just seen in the Iowa Caucuses yesterday, the most famous son of the Caucasus seems to have put it best.

Like many burned-out politi-hacks, I had been paying somewhat idle attention to the inflow of results coming out of the Corn-Hole over the course of Tuesday afternoon [local NZ time], and had made a joking remark to an associate when unexpected delays began to set in quite early on that this must mean the Democrats had seen the same early results everybody else had on live news ... featuring an insurgent Sanders well out in front, and a Biden seemingly lost somewhere out in the field of Corn Pops, and were frantically attempting to work out how to 'massage' the results to produce an 'appropriate' outcome.

It was noted that this would also presumably explain part of the reason they were being so seriously ... not "Stalinist", but, tight-lipped, secretive, stringently censorious about 'leaks' or early disclosure of results, as these'd undermine any later ability to just release "right" numbers - in exactly the same manner that the provision of exit-polling figures which don't match up with e-voting ballots may suggest the latter has been tampered with.

I was joking ... mostly ... but it appears that reality liked my sense of humour.

A little later that afternoon, news broke that the reason for the delay in results coming out was due to difficulties with the app built to feed these back to the party. The initial statements were that officials had had difficulty logging in to make use of it.

I again made a "joke", suggesting it might be because some of these local chairs had realized that the app was rather similar to what had been alleged about the e-voting machines used in the US Presidential Election in 2004 - i.e. that they'd 'mysteriously' record votes for the "right" candidate, regardless of what you actually put in.

Several hours passed. Paint dried. Pete Buttigieg somehow declared victory (on 0% of the vote). Some results crawled in. Which seemed to put supposed-to-be-front-runner Biden somehow behind otherwise-also-ran Klobuchar. Eyebrows slightly raised.

And then, it happened.

Word came out of Iowa that the app had potentially been "hacked" ... and, swiftly following in its wake, the allegation that it had been produced by people formerly affiliated with the Clinton campaign in 2016.

I nearly fell out of my chair. Surely we weren't going to see the Democratic Party again allege that establishment Democrats weren't doing well because of Russian hacking ... of Iowa?

Well, as it happened, not quite - yet, anyway. There's still time for this to all somehow lead back to Putin armed with an iPhone personally masterminding the corn-heist of the year.

The official statement was simply the rather terse statement that the results had been held back for "quality control" checking. I should have learned my lesson by now, but I again "joked" about this perhaps being because any result showing Sanders massively ahead of one of the Democrat Establishment approved choices would be deemed to be an error, hence "quality control" checking to produce a "correct version", somehow, at the end of the night.

Matters got worse. Iowan Democratic Party chairs started telling media that the unspecified 'issues' we'd heard about earlier on in the evening, were to do with the app refusing to send proper numbers on down the chain to the Party HQ; and, when they'd resorted to the old-fashioned means and mechanisms of calling up HQ to manually report their results, they were being hung up on. Or facing spiraling delays. Or both.

We're still not quite sure what actually went wrong with the app. Some Democratic officials were just saying that there were technical issues with accessing the app and actually getting it to send information; others, from higher up and more central, began speaking about "Inconsistencies" in the results that had come in via the app versus paper and photographic mechanisms of accounting (while seemingly denying a crash or accessibility issues); and others from outside the party began collating together material to support some ... darker views altogether. 

Now, I am something of a paranoid man from time to time; and I take it to the understandable 'next level' of also applying the sustained knife of critical scrutiny to my own thoughts of shadowy political conspiracies.

I think it's important to acknowledge here that new tech does fail, and often quite spectacularly, upon its earlier outings (even though I'm not aware of any similar nor comparable issues with the Microsoft-developed app used in Iowa in 2016); and that overconfident early-adopters with considerable stakes in its success may not adequately plan forward for this, and persist with theoretically outmoded 'old ways' backups right ready to go on standby for when things do fall over like the proverbial brown paper bag in the thunderstorm. This is particularly the case, given that the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars which have gone into the purchasing, development, and rollout of the new-tech solution ... will often have left the organization's coffers rather sparsely furnished to actually maintain the usually more staffing-intensive previous-infrastructure (or some semi-skeleton crewed simulacrum thereof) that the new app was supposed to replace as a backup.

However, acknowledging that it's possible for this sort of technological (and then backup system) failure to occur, does not mean leaving unacknowledged nor underacknowledged the rather massive optics effects which this can have.

And I don't simply mean the fact that an appreciable proportion of American voters, for the next five minutes at any rate, presumably now don't think the Democratic Party is capable of organizing itself out of that aforementioned thunder-struck proverbial paper bag. Especially when Trump (who appears to have 'won' the Iowa Democratic Caucus/Primary so far) was able to put out a release showing he'd just breezed to victory - with the implicit underlying contrast of "Chaos" on the one hand, and "Order", on the other.

Leaving aside the more 'conspiratorial' looking stuff for the moment (we'll return to that later), the fact is that what's happened in Iowa this week (or, rather, not happened, and been diffused, occluded, eclipsed) has significant strategic import. In previous years, claiming victory (and, in light of Buttigieg''s gun-jumping antics, I should perhaps instead say confirming victory) in Iowa has been a great way to provide energy for a candidacy going forward. It can even do the unthinkable, and help trigger an "upset" - propelling an 'outsider' or 'insurgent' candidacy to start racing past a more middle-of-the-road "sensible" and "predicted to win" 'establishment' option. As happened back in 2008, when a young senator nobody'd ever heard of called Obama somehow managed to 'hope and change' his way past the 'born for the role and spent more than half a century preparing' Hillary Clinton.

Now, if you're an increasingly nervous Democratic Establishment, who have already made abundantly clear that they kinda-sorta-actually blame Sanders for preventing President Hillary (almost more than they blame President Trump), by doing too well during the 2016 Primary season ... the last thing you want to occur in 2020, is Sanders somehow managing to 'pull an Obama', and being populares-anointed The Frontrunner as the result of a good, solid win in Iowa. [As a point of interest, he came painfully close to winning the state during the 2016 season - being 0.25% behind Clinton for votes, in part because he lost six coin tosses used in cases of tie ... because in America, it appears, they literally let money decide elections]

So while I'm not saying that the Democrats deliberately presided over an absolute fiasco in Iowa, which they triggered and then exacerbated as soon as they saw that Sanders was poised to win ... I am saying that it's pretty helpful for those Democrats who are opposed to Sanders, that instead of being able to claim a clear and unambiguous win that'd bolster his momentum going forward - he's now left with the big news story, almost whatever the outcome there amidst the cornfields ultimately turns out to be, being about the flawed and possibly unreliable Results themselves. Not his place within them.

In a manner similar to how the gabion [a rock-filled wire-mesh cage placed on shorelines as a countermeasure to erosion] disrupts the force of the onrushing wave by dissipating it off up into the small stones, rather than letting it pound forth at the cliff face behind directly ... so, too, will the sweeping spray of Sanders find itself diffused amidst all the swirling detritus that's been distributed via this sudden storm.

Another way you could look at it, I suppose, would be observing the rapidly intensifying Bern, and then attempting to douse it with a smothering spurt of foam, drastically reducing its inflow of oxygen, even if only temporarily. Gives you time to rally other resources to do a more comprehensive job later on down the line, and tries to prevent it going into any further contests any bigger and Bern-ier than it already is. If nothing else, it gives you more time to work out how to spin the actual results coming out of Iowa, while everybody waits for the official count to be released (something which Sanders semi-pre-empted when his campaign responded to Buttigieg's self-declared victory, by putting out partial-polling of about 40% of the state's caucusing, which instead showed him in first place - and, to be fair, Buttigieg in a rather surprising second).

And while it's one thing to observe that however it might have occurred, the debacle in Des Moines has been rather useful for those who find themselves arrayed against Sanders (again) ... it's quite another to assert that what's happened with the app was, to quote the jargon "not a bug, but a feature". That is to say, that the chaos of the Caucuses was something decidedly both less - and more - than "accidental".

To be fair and sure, I am once again not stating that this is the case. Only that, given an array of the other data-points we have since become aware of, I can see how an array of people out there have already leapt to this conclusion.

Now partially, this is because it's "deja vu all over again" for Sanders supporters. They either remember 2016 themselves, viscerally, personally ... or they've heard about it - often in venomous and disparaging tones from Democrat establishment supporters who frequently portray the whole thing as a beat-up by a sore-loser (who 'should', by rights, have been an 'also-ran', or more likely a not-even-ran-at-all-coz-not-Democrat) which eventually culminated in the combination of Sour Grapes and "Russian Hacking" costing the world its Madam President.

But it's also largely because of a lot of much more recent petty [and I do in some cases mean that in the sense other than 'small'] political happenings. For one thing, there's the curious fact that Pete Buttigieg's campaign has turned out to possess remarkably close ties to ACRONYM, the company which owns the app at the center of all of these circles in the corn. This goes beyond the tens of thousands of dollars Buttigieg's campaign put into said company last year, to encompass what appears to be direct relationships between the Buttigieg campaign and ACRONYM's leadership. By which I mean the CEO of ACRONYM, one Tara McGowan (who'd earlier expressed enthusiastic excitement about the Buttigieg candidacy right from the get-go in early 2019, and has continued to retweet a lot of #TeamPete recently) seems to be married to Buttigieg's strategist, Michael Halle (who also describes himself, I note, as a "proud alum" of the Hillary Clinton campaign -a distinction which he shares with a number of the app developer's engineers, as they themselves tell you). ACRONYM's official position on all of this is that there should be no problem, because while they do (part)own the company that produced the app, there's nothing to see here because "we [ACRONYM] have not provided any technology to the Iowa Democratic Party", as they are "not a technology company".

In fact, going off their official statement, they appear to be as surprised as anybody to hear that their 'shadow' company [as in, seriously, the company's called "SHADOW"] has anything to do with the Iowa contest - "We are reading confirmed reports of Shadow's work with the Iowa Democratic Party on Twitter, and we, like everyone else, are eagerly awaiting more information" ... which is a bit of a contrast from the release they put out a little more than a year ago (coincidentally, five days before Buttigieg announced his exploratory committee for the Democratic nomination for President), wherein ACRONYM stated they were "launching Shadow, a company focused on building the technology infrastructure needed to enable Democrats to run better, more efficient campaigns."

Or, for those of you playing at home - it is technically true that ACRONYM (who "are not a technology company") "have not provided any technology to the Iowa Democratic Party" ... because the company they set up and own which has as its explicit purpose as stated by ACRONYM themselves "building the technology infrastructure needed to enable Democrats to run better, more efficient campaigns", has done so for them. Presumably with their parent company's awareness, given ACRONYM's acquisition of the 'Groundbase' asset that 'Shadow' was in their own words set up to "operate" for just such a purpose.

Also, while we are on the subject of all of this, it frankly astounds me that somebody would set up not just one, but two linked corporate entities designed to operate in the murky world immediately adjacent to the cloak-and-dagger fueled Corridors of Power ... with names like "ACRONYM" and "Shadow". Nothing suspicious-looking, or wannabe-Bond-villain about that, at all. Although you could, potentially, be forgiven for thinking otherwise given the actual description Shadow offers for its own raison d'etre - "When a light is shining, Shadows are a constant companion. We see ourselves as building a long-term, side-by-side “Shadow” of tech infrastructure to the Democratic Party and the progressive community at large."

Hell, with a pitch like that, you could just about call them the tech-end of the "Deep Party" (like the "Deep State" ... only, er, "Fun". Or something.).

Whether or not any actual, provable impropriety has occurred, you put all of this together - the eager young(ish) Clinton-campaign stalwarts doing the developing and operations, the senior Buttigieg strategist married CEO, the suspiciously specific denials that are worded in just the right way that they're not technically untrue, the significant financial contribution of the Buttigieg campaign to 'Shadow' [specifically, the for the purpose of "software rights and subscriptions"] (although to be fair, the Biden campaign had also put in a much smaller amount for messaging services, late last year), as well as the fact that Buttigieg himself was straight-out-the-gate taking advantage of the situation caused by the app to pre-emptively announce his own victory while nobody could contest it ...

... well, it doesn't look like the most "transparent" political transpiration, in either sense of the term (Terry Pratchett once sagely observed that in Politics, "transparency" has two meanings - like a window, as in you can see right through it ... or like the air, as in you can't see it at all). Instead, the whole thing's kinda occluded. Almost as if there were some sort of "Shadow" looming large across our visionary skein.

That "Shadow", of course, isn't just one sub-standard tech-outfit (no matter how earnest it's been about providing "a permanent advantage for progressive campaigns and causes through technology."); nor, for that matter, is it the absolute greaseberg of hairy 'rough optics' connections tying said app and its developers/owners back to Buttigieg, or even to Hillary Clinton herself; all laid out on company or personal websites and twitter profiles for any and all to see. (And speaking of Clinton, despite her own endeavours to continue to interpose herself into the 2020 Primary race with snide remarks about the purported improbability of Sanders actually managing to work productively with anyone, etc., she's in some ways only a symptomatic shade at this point of the (pen)umbral umbrage of which I am speaking)

What it is, is a pervasive and sweeping sense of malaise. That "we've been down this road before", as applies potentially dubious [or, if you like, "Dubya-ous"] electoral processes, and internal party struggles to let a more genuine voice be heard. Partially, that means we spend all our time with events like these with one eye over our shoulder - insistently overlaying the terrain of these previous hopes-frustrations-and-defeats, the topography of yesteryear, upon the trajectories of the still(to-be)born political present. But it also, and more worryingly, entails a steady dwindling of hope at prospects for the future - a gradual drawing down of not just 'activist', but 'mass' enthusiasm for the concept that Change [possibly accompanied by Hope] is even possible.

A previous contender for the Democratic Presidential Nomination - Dennis Kucinich - attempted to galvanize and inspire his supporters by boldly stating "You're looking at a guy who believes he can beat a rigged game." And it is certainly true that, should you happen to flip even a two-headed coin enough times, it shall eventually land upon its side (and therefore 'neither' substantively indistinguishable 'head' - a third option; the subjunctive, the 'mood of the possible').

But what we have seen this past day and a half, it reminds me - as events amidst American politics so often do - of the wise words of Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser:

"The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them we are missing."

And I shall explain what I mean by invoking that here. You see, the great big Existential Threat (tm) to the Democratic Party (other than, it might be convincingly argued, the Democratic Party - "we have met the enemy, and he is us", indeed), is not the Republican Party; nor, despite occasional breathless assertions to the contrary, is it "Russian Hacking", or something else of similar external-conspiratorial nature - real or rhetorical and otherwise.

Rather, for the Democratic Party Establishment, the genuine threat which keeps them up at night, is that they are, in a sense, 'obsolete', outmoded, no longer with "it" (if, in fact, many of them ever really were) - and are soon to be replaced by these uprising insurgent idealist types who, shock horror, actually believe in things, and seem to have not-immediately-biddable-away personal values and ethics and principles. More bizarrely, some of them aren't young 'children's crusade' enlistees, but older people and military veterans who should know better, dangnabbit!

Various 'Establishment' Dems know this, and they are frightened of it. As well they should be. For they are also painfully, patently (a)ware(y), that they have been steadily losing ground over the past few years to them. And it is now a somewhat open question as to whether their own breed shall die out of natural causes whilst still enjoying the baubles of office and simulacra-relevancy .... or by being turfed out via determined interior-to-party psephological pushes upon an escalating quotient of fronts.

So as to what we may, potentially, be 'missing' in the insta-reaction to the "Shadow" of democracy over up there in Iowa ... in amidst all the interpretation-knife-fighting about whether Bernie was robbed, whether Buttigieg (or his team) have just semi-hacked an election, possibly with Clintonite assistance (or just been guilty of some bad optics so unbelievably dire that people would struggle to take you seriously if you pitched it all as a genuine conspiracy for film), whether the Democrats are taking advantage of the 'breather' provided by the contratemps to work out how to spin supposed front-runner Biden just about off the map entirely, or any of the rest of it ...

What we are missing, is how it - all of it - makes the young(ish) (more rarely, the 'young-at-heart' - for whom disappointment on a nation-sweeping, country-stealing, war-starting scale is rarely anything truly new) people, activists, and voters, who'd otherwise be joining up and fueling the ongoing not-that-radical transformation of the Democratic Party, and American politics in general, how it makes them feel when they find themselves confronted with what looks so anguished-sigh inducingly like yet another instance of what one of my associates described as the Democrats "Gettin Riggy With It".

And the answer to that is, probably, disenchanted, disenfranchised, disillusioned, and monumentally disinterested all up.

If you can't fight City(/Tammany) Hall, then perhaps the only 'winning move' is not to play. And what does that mean in practice? Probably one of two things. Either less people getting interested and involved in unpredictable and less controllable 'groundwell' 'populist' political crusades like that of Sanders in 2016 - or, people not necessarily becoming less interested and involved in general and in principle, but switching away from attempts to work 'inside the tent' of the Democrats, to setting up their own 'third party' vehicle or vehicles. The record for longevity and electoral success for which, in modern American politics, is not exactly great; meaning that if some third party manages to draw off a swathe of sorts the Democratic Establishment probably didn't want inside their own demesnes anyway, and then leads to some of these troublesome representatives failing to attain re-election, while also tying up others who might make trouble internally, somewhere *elsewhere* ... it's a net win.

And, for an added venomous sweetener, if the thing that actually acts as the active catalyst for all of this is some newfangled tech-app-thing, of exactly the kind and the sort that Millennials had been bragging about bringing into the political arena and using to turn the whole place upside down and make it all suddenly "progressive" with ... well, that's some kind of contrapasso bonus par excellence.

Now, it's certainly possible that I'm putting rather more thought into all of this than many of the people actually making decisions for the Democratic Party have; and leaving far too much room for cogent, calculating, clear-minded intent in what might actually just be some of the worst optics since the U.S.S. Maine (accidentally) blew itself to smithereens at exactly the moment that the Americans were looking for an aggressive Spanish military action with which to justify the starting of an imperialist near-global war.

But that almost doesn't matter. The likely prospective outcome's not going  to be all that different if these types of shenanigans just seem to keep happening all the way from now to the Convention later this year. Which they almost certainly will, for a variety of reasons including but not limited to at least half the candidates still left with a (semi-)serious shot in the running.

There's a lot of uncertainty out there in politiworld (where everything's made up and the points don't matter) at the moment, about some semi-serious things  ... including, at time of writing, who actually won the Iowa Democratic Primary.

One thing there's not so much uncertainty about, though:

Faith in the Democratic Party didn't kill Itself.

On Taking Responsibility For Downing A Passenger Jet

Despite what some are suggesting, there is little direct equivalency between the inadvertent Iranian shoot-down of Ukranian International Airlines Flight 752 earlier this week, and the American shoot-down of Iranian Air Flight 655 in 1983.

For that to be true, the Iranians would have to not only have obstinately refused to apologize for their actions, but also awarded their equivalent to the Legion of Merit decoration to the Iranian military unit responsible.

I'm not kidding. That's exactly what happened.

In the aftermath of that incident, the Americans did not remove the officer responsible from command, even despite the observations of a number of other US Naval personnel about his aggressive shortcomings which lead directly to the tragedy.

Instead, Captain William C. Rogers III was bestowed with just such a medal "for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer" of the vessel which had brought down the Iranian passenger jet, specifically for the time-period in which the outrage had occurred.

The insults and the immaturity did not end there. Washington pointedly refused to apologize or even really admit culpability (indeed, even going so far in its official analysis as attempting to suggest that the outcome had been partially Iran's own fault for allowing civilian aircraft to fly along "a normal commercial air flight plan profile, in the assigned airway" which happened to be proximate to a US Navy vessel violating Iranian territorial waters); with George H.W. Bush arguably making *not* apologizing a campaign theme for his 1988 Presidential run.

It took another eight years, and a long-running International Court of Justice suit for the Americans to reach a settlement with Iran which pointedly, again, mandated no apology - although did afford a multi-million dollar settlement to attempt to bring the matter to a close.

Now, you contrast this with the Iranian response to the downing of the Ukranian airliner on Wednesday. Its immediate reaction had been to declare a Day of Mourning for the victims; and while there had been two days of uncertainty and downplaying of potential culpability (during which time, again to their credit, the Iranians had invited Ukrainian and other foreign personnel to help investigate the cause of the crash), today's statements from the Iranian Government and Armed Forces have been anything but.

The Iranians have shouldered their share of the burden of responsibility for the "unforgivable mistake" [as President Rouhani called it] of the shoot-down; and instead of talk of medals for the personnel involved, the Iranian military have promised that they shall be held "accountable", in a judicial setting.

That vital "A-word", "Apologies", has also issued forth from their Government - clearly and unequivocally.

All within the span of two to three days, rather than being left hanging for a period of just under a decade.

Now, it almost goes without saying that none of this brings anybody back from the dead; and that it would be hugely preferable for none of this to have ever occurred.

Pointing out how much worse it could have been (if, for instance, the Iranians had followed the "American model" in the wake of this tragedy) does not really make circumstances any better.

Yet without intending to unduly politicize - or, worse, seek to 'capitalize' upon - a senseless loss of life, it seems to me that in a period wherein month-in and month-out, we have seen seemingly endless attempts to portray the Iranians as being frothing-at-the-mouth fundamentalist inhuman monsters ... responses such as these show not only a common humanity and empathy - but that (especially when compared to their leading detractors) maybe the Iranians aren't the irrational ones, after all.

On The Tantalizing Possibility Of "The People's Prince"

So over the past few weeks, the Royal Family has 'lost' two princes. I mean, they're still there, nobody's been exiled nor beheaded (potential migration to Canada notwithstanding), but nevertheless two Princes (and one Duchess) have taken a step back from being "Senior Royals".

The first of these ... only did so, not once his position had become "untenable" - but arguably many, many moons post-facto to that point, and following possibly the largest crash-and-burn display of a museum-piece broadcast through media since the Hindenburg re-enactment society (flying under the command of one Captain Will Rogers III [Legion of Merit]) dive-bombed a 1/4th scale model Titanic (built from the hull of the Exxon Valdez), somewhere in the Persian Gulf adjacent to a B.P. oil rig.

And even after that torrid display, incorporating such frankly incredible lines as Prince Andrew claiming that the accusations against him could not be true, because he's allegedly physically incapable of sweating in stressful situations following being shot at during the Falklands War - the messages being broadcast from the Royal Household were basically that the whole thing was made up nothing to see here stop bullying our poor Andrew.

[To be fair and sure, there is also suggestion that Prince Andrew's brother, Charles, had a rather more ... realistic assessment of affairs, hence the semi-forced step-back/step-down; yet this was all carried out sotto voce and out of the public eye, and apparently running counter to the Queen's "blind-spot" in reference to her other son.]

The second Prince (and Duchess) 'lost' is rather different. Not least because Prince Harry's approach to "relating to the young people" is entirely unlike that alleged of his uncle. Despite the marrying of a North American tv-star, I think it could be fairly suggested that he might have had a claim to the title "The People's Prince" [or, in his younger days, and to recall a certain other figure of some notoRoyalty , perhaps the "Prince of Parties"]. And unlike certain of his cousins, he really does appear to have inherited his father's strong desire to utilize such blessings of prominence and prestige as his birth may have equipped him with, to "make a difference".

There are many things which could, and already have been speculated as to the reasoning both for the Sussexes' 'departure', and about the 'establishment' Royal reaction thereto. You can read those elsewhere.

My own take on it is that it's perhaps understandable - if it's true - that leaving 'unannounced', and leaving your own father and grandmother and formerly close brother to find out about this via shock newsflashes on the television ... might possibly be regarded as a bit impolite. Alternatively, if it isn't true that that's what happened - then presenting the departure in this way would be one manner in which you might attempt to grab back 'control' of the narrative and some form of resolute moral high ground.

Yet two things stood out to me in both the Sussexes' announcement, and the ensuing firestorm of "THEY CAN'T DO THAT" emanating from various quarters.

The first of which, was their apparent determination to move towards "financial independence", and by that I take it they have meant not just 'paying their own way', but also the double-meaning of 'independence' as entailing not being reined by the purse-strings of the Palace. The "independence" thus sought, therefore, is both for the Commonwealth taxpayer, and from the Commonwealth 'First Family''s constraining governance.

The second, and this appplies to the reaction to all of the above, was a raised eyebrow of surprise at everybody suggesting that 'Harry & Meghan' were now making the Royal Family look bad via their tacit absence from same. Which is as distinct, you understand, from a few weeks beforehand, wherein they were apparently making the Royal Family look bad via their being part of same.

Perhaps I am cynical, but the implicit suggestion seems to be that the Monarchy only works provided it is a Mono-archy. [there is only one "Archie", thus far, but that is another pun for another time, I'm sure] . That any attempt to move off and 'do one's own thing', and perhaps look a bit better than the beleaguered Imperial Center, even unintentionally, is therefore an express and tangible threat thereto.

Nobody's seriously suggesting that Prince Harry is retreating off to a Colonial fortress in order to plot a Schism within the Merry House of Windsor, so as to stage a daring back-door palace-coup and elevate himself to plenipotentiary power as some kind of Bonnie Prince Son of Charlie .. although I am rather taken, quietly, with the notion of Prince Archie running for President of the United States and bringing the whole thing back under Union Jack sodality, at least partially because the Windsor dynasty, for all its faults, is responsible for rather fewer in the number of direct wars of expansionist aggression than the Clinton dynasty, the Bush dynasty, or more recently, the Trump Dynasty [no matter the latter's previous cultivation of support from the isolationist segments of what would become the Trumpenproletariat].

But, then, the Sussexes don't need to even contemplate anything so brash in order to upend a fairly large proportion of the extended Monarchial order.

While it was only relatively recently that Prince Andrew et co lost access to their round-the-clock taxpayer-funded protection etc. and other such outlays from the Public Purse, the rest of the Royal Family still being heavily state subsidized has from time to time created some degree of disquiet in certain quarters.

It's not something I have a huge problem with, for the record; but I can see how two young(ish) royals declaring that at least as applies themselves, "enough is enough" and endeavouring to move towards "financial independence" might cause a bit of consternation elsewhere within the Royal institution.

Overall, I suspect that the reasoning for the annoyance about the Sussexes' decision has less to do with the idea that they're doing something potentially rash for themselves and which might end in screaming disaster - for them ...

.. and much much more to do with the looming specter that maybe, just maybe, Prince Harry and Wife, are in the process of setting up a new kind of Prncedom for the British Realm. One which is much more self-empowered and self-sustaining, and deliberately sets out to Do Things. You could definitely argue that Princess Anne had beat them to it, of course - but for various reasons, she didn't get anything like the same attention in recent years for doing so. Probably because she was less public about it, and possibly because she wasn't so directly proximate to the lineage of succession and public mind's eye.

Will it work? Who knows.

But I, for one, am rather eager to see what happens next - perhaps we really shall be getting our "People's Prince".

A Few Thoughts On Iran Perception As The Stars Begin To Fall

As the missiles began to fall yesterday afternoon NZ time, I was struck by a few observances. Both of how much some things had changed - and, within those, how much yet disappointingly remained the same.

Almost seventeen years ago, in 2003, we gathered at high school to watch opening salvos of the American invasion of Iraq on a tv set up in the library.

Today, we are watching missile salvos over Iraq again ... only this time, we are doing so largely via twitter and other forms of regularly updated online media.

Partially, it is because the televised broadcast has gone the way of the wireless radio-set (upon one of which, The Rev. Rolinson still recalls our proudly French forebear listening with sadness and then announcing that Dien Ben Phu had fallen as the high-water mark of another country's out-of-time imperialist programme). And partially, it is because you find out so much more by going off and hunting out primary sources and secondary commentary out there in the wilds of the internet than you ever do simply watching and awaiting for special television bulletins or the 6 o'clock news.

Which does not, of course, mean that it's assured to be more correct than what is visible via official channels - but given the nature of some of the stuff either turning up twisted upon them, or worse, not turning up at all, it doesn't necessarily mean you're much the worse off, either.

One prominent example of all of this 'in motion' concerns the character and the dispositions and the deeds of the figure at the heart of all of this. Major General Qassem Soleimani - now eternally of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

You read a lot of newspapers, see a lot of public newscasts quoting American politicians or talking heads, and you start to come away with one, overwhelming and throbbing impression. That even if you're not wild about another American fireworks-display-into-fire-out-of-handling in the Middle East, that the guy was somehow monstrously "evil". Yet it goes further!



The perverse alchemy of 'official narratives' is plainly visible in the way in which a man who had spent much of the 1990s fighting the Taliban, and much of the past decade fighting ISIS and otherwise pushing back against Saudi-emanated objectionable forces (including Al Qaeda franchises I can think of in at least three countries offhand) ...

... is now attacked and castigated as a "terrorist", and some kind of latter-day Osama bin Laden. [I had somewhat less overt sympathy for Saddam, but the man found himself afflicted by a similar downright pernicious no doubt intentional mislabeling. He, too, had spent years opposing many of the same forces as the Americans, and had directly offered to assist after both 9/11 and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in fighting back against Al Qaeda - none of which stopped him being linked in press reports and in Presidential rhetoric to exactly those terrorists aforementioned. Gosh, it's almost like some words have meanings that simply convey "you're supposed to actively hate that guy", and little more.]

Now, "terrorist", to be sure, does not simply mean "Sunni extremist" ... but, then, it certainly does not just mean "person incongruent with the active extension of the power and agenda of America And Friends (tm)".

As Malcolm X once put it - "If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing."

And that is only one of a few areas in which the strange radioactivity of embedded mis-perceptions can be observed making itself known in relation to Iran in recent days.



Ever since the footage started coming out of ... literally thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people being pretty outraged by Soleimani's death, I have noticed this small but pert attempted push-back, predominantly from persons of a 'certain age', insisting that the whole thing has to be staged.

And while I can understand thinking that massive demonstrations which happen to be pretty politically and optically potent might be staged (after all, you just have to look back at some of the trick photography and such utilized in some recent Anglosphere events) ... I suspect rather strongly that there is something else going on here.

Several days ago we heard from a wise Iranian cleric who asked who the equivalent figure to Soleimani was in Western culture ... whom the Iranians could kill and have it carry a similar resounding impact in all of our collective psyche ("...Spongebob?"), noting that almost all the modern-day 'heroes' of the West are made up, and highly animated only in the two-dimensional sense (possibly involving a Korean sweat-shop).



Well, not only was he right about that, but he also gave voice to just why some people frequently (yet not always) 'of a certain age' and/or political disposition are having such great difficulty grasping that actually, yeah, a lot of Iranians, Shi'ites elsewhere in the world, and other people entirely are annoyed about what has occurred and have been actively expressing and demonstrating their feeling upon the matter.

I do not intend to turn this into a fully-blown lecture-discursion upon the Disenchantment of the World, but it could be fairly suggested that this minority of disbelieving is perhaps symptomatic of growing up in an era wherein the last time something like that happened in the Anglosphere West was Beatlemania.



To mash up Grettir's Saga and Nietzsche:

"BARE IS THE BACK OF THE MYTHLESS MAN"

Also, speaking of 'myths' [here, somewhat, in the sense directly opposite to that in which I more usually mean it ... ], take a look at Netanyahu earlier in the week.



If there is one thing that Netanyahu is (and there are .. many), it is a survival expert. That a man such as he who has spent quite some effort attempting to stir up fear of Iran in recent years, would be backpeddling frantically and attempting to put distance between his country and the killing of Soleimani ... I think that it speaks volumes as to the actual realities of the situation.

In specia, serving to undercut somewhat the illusory "all be home by Christmas" mis-thusiasm being put forward by the principle instigators of this now-escalating conflict safely ensconced all the way over on the other side of the Atlantic.

That, too, was the hubristic attitude which characterized the previous American adventurism in this region, also on trumped up charges against an "Ira-" country, almost deliberately flouting international law and norms, and to general opposition from experts and ordinaries across the globe.

All of which has me reaching for Marx's well-worn quip that:

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."