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conflux

Salon When should we fight?

"You already know, if you want to know, what the pundits have to say about the war on terrorism, whether the United States should expand the battlefront to other countries and to what extent America should engage in nation-building in Afghanistan and elsewhere. And polls will tell you that Americans overwhelmingly support the war in Afghanistan, and are in favor of extending it to other countries by slightly smaller but still substantial majorities.

But as the Bush administration sets its sights on other military targets -- including the regimes of Iraq, Iran and North Korea that the president directly threatened in his State of the Union speech -- Salon has ventured behind the poll numbers and TV sound bites to talk directly with Americans about the role that the world's only superpower should play today."

The New York Times: Opinion The Limits of Power
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"Mr. Bush appears to be developing an assertive new military doctrine that includes the threat of armed intervention against nations that are developing weapons that may put the United States in peril. The evolving Bush Doctrine implies a pre-emptive use of conventional force to take out missile launchers, industrial enterprises and facilities that appear to be involved in the fabrication of unconventional weapons. This is a radical departure from what went before. Traditionally, the United States has employed its military forces in retaliation for an attack rather than striking first itself. That should not preclude other options when there is a clear and present danger of attack, but firing first is not a step to be taken lightly.

The apparent success of the Afghan campaign should not encourage Mr. Bush to overreach."

redux [09.14.01]
Red Rock Eater Imagining the Next War: Infrastructural Warfare and the Conditions of Democracy

"War in the old conception was temporary: the idea was explicitly that the state of war would end, and that the normal rules of democracy would resume once their conditions had been reestablished. Civil liberties and the institutions of democratic government are not entirely eliminated during wartime; rather, they are reduced in their scope while retaining their same overall form. Even in conditions of total war mobilization, clear boundaries between the military and civilian sides of society are maintained. But war, we are told, no longer works that way. No such boundaries are possible. It follows, therefore, that "war" in the new sense -- war with no beginning or end, no front and rear, and no distinction between military and civilian -- is incompatible with democracy, and not just in practice, not just temporarily, but permanently and conceptually. If we conceptualize war the way the defense intellectuals suggest, then to declare war is to destroy the conditions of democracy. War, in this new sense, can never be justified."

"The danger of "total war" against the spectre named Osama bin Laden, then, is that it will reinforce the worst tendencies in our society, and that far from preserving the conditions of democracy it will undermine the cultural and institutional foundations upon which democracy rests. It will be war without end, without boundaries, without even a coherent conception of itself save as the expression of an impulse to vengeance."

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“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

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