Skull Session

OK, stop your damn moping about the election. Keep educating yourself and others. Concentrate on the parts of the world where there really is rubble and ruin. Start by trying to find word in the jingoistic U.S. press about the number of civilians being killed in Fallujah.

That's a dead end, but there are other things to learn. Go to this page on Tom Englehardt's excellent TomDispatch.com. You'll see the shockingly moronic quote from U.S. soldier Gareth Brandl about hunting Satan in Fallujah. (Also see this November 7 Bush Beat item.) Now scroll down a little bit on the TomDispatch page until you reach Mark LeVine's "Four Times Fallujah Equals?"

Read it and weep.

LeVine, a Left Coast professor and one of the editors, along with Viggo Mortensen and Pilar Perez, of Twilight of Empire: Responses to Occupation, lays out four possible futures after we finish our bloodbath in Fallujah. They range from bad to worse, but now's the time to read this.

A professor of modern Middle Eastern history, culture, and Islamic studies at Cal-Irvine, LeVine draws on history to present these "plausible" scenarios, introducing them this way:

They offer us a grim picture of how the window of success has closed on American strategists in Iraq. Even the "best" outcomes (from the [Bush] administration's point of view) have lost the trappings of freedom and democracy that helped justify the invasion nineteen months ago.