Run-up to war?

Good recent resources/commentary on Donald Trump's move to neo-connery.

Adam Shatz, "The Drift towards War," on the LRB Blog.

Over the last few years, Israel has carried out hundreds of strikes inside Syria, mostly aimed at Hizbullah military convoys suspected of transferring advanced weapons into the Bekaa Valley. In February, however, after intercepting what it claimed to be an armed Iranian drone in its airspace, Israel struck for the first time at Iranian targets, killing at least seven members of the Quds Force, the external operations unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The possibility of an Israeli-Iranian war is now higher than it has ever been, since Iran feels encircled, and Israel believes that it has a green light from Washington for further military adventures.

Elliott Colla, "Fog (of War) Machine"

When the US invaded Iraq fifteen years ago, it did not do so accidentally -- we were led there: first and foremost by the neocons who wanted war at any cost; and secondly, by a liberal media that was all too willing to create the fog that made the war possible. There are salient differences between now and then. In 2003, one could plausibly make the argument that US war policy was not driven by Islamophobia and the most toxic forms of Zionism. Not so this time. By this stage in 2003, we had gone out in the millions to protest. We haven't even begun to do so yet.

The fog bank is rolling in again this week, bringing with it mass human suffering.

Do not think of it is a natural event. It is entirely man-made. It's what happens when a blast of neocon will-to-power hits the hot, moist air of liberal humanitarianism. 

And do not think that this fog emanates from distant places "over there" in Syria. This fog is an entirely local meteorological phenomenon, designed to prevent only Americans from seeing things for what they are. It will not impact weather or vision in other parts of the globe. 

Tweet from Laleh Khalili

To which I add: I met an Israeli in 1971, in New York City, who told me that he grew up in an Israeli community very close to the Syrian controlled Golan Heights and that he never felt under threat, at least prior to spring 1967. And as Dayan clarifies, the reason for shooting in the area was Israeli provocation.

The fate of art in the Middle East: two comments

"One day, the war will end and I will return to my poem" 

from Kifah H. Alim

Not sure who the artist is for this one

weird vet kufiya

My friend John grabbed this off of some vet FB page and sent it to me. We don't know who took the photo or what the story is behind it but it's one of those images that is floating around. I have no idea what to make of it. I'm befuddled.

The baseball cap says 'kafir' in Arabic, which is correctly translated as infidel. A synonym is unbeliever. I believe that Islamist insurgents in Iraq fighting against the US occupation would have used this term fairly routinely to describe the US military forces. I did not know that (some) US troops had embraced the term.

Just plain weird, to rest your sleeping baby in a red kufiya with gun shells and some sort of weapon behind him/her....

drone life 3: Lynn Hill on "Capacity" (Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd's Holding It Down: The Veterans' Dreams Project)

I learned of this thanks to a tweet of Teju Cole.

As you no doubt know, the great jazz pianist Vijay Iyer just received a prestigious MacArthur Award.

You will find him even more deserving when you learn, as I just have, of his recent release, with Mike Ladd, of Holding It Down: The Veterans' Dreams Project. I've only listened to a few tracks (it came out on September 24) but what I've heard is great. The publicity from Pi Recordings describes the album as follows: "a thought-provoking, sometimes frightening, and ultimately exhilarating combination of music, poetry and song, created from the actual dreams of young veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars." And check out the vid below that introduces the project.



But because I sometimes blog here (not very profoundly) about drones, I was particularly interested in the track "Capacity" (which you can listen to here), featuring the poetry and recollections of Lynn Hill, who worked as a drone operator, firing missiles remotely into Iraq from her base in Las Vegas. "Soft kill," she calls it. It's very powerful stuff.

Here's a section of her poem:

I have a capacity for war. I have a capacity for hate. I have a capacity for insanity. For anger. For lies. 525,600 minutes times 2, before I break into an explosion of thoughts, of insurgents and soft kills, and career moves. Capacity for destruction. Capacity for loss. Capacity for death, violence, nothingness. 24 months of pain and disgust. Actions of my hands accuse me. Guilty, charge. Unclear clear details and shaky intell, but still I pull the trigger. There’s a limit to madness. Gague clocks out at two years, but they serve up poison like entrees at Blueberry Hill. Crazy with a side of numb. It took 63,720,000 seconds to go from me to somebody else. 

And check out the NEA interview with Lynn Hill, where she reflects more on her poetry and her work as a Predator Drone operator.

I have a capacity for war. I have a capacity for hate. I have a capacity for insanity. For anger. For lies. 525,600 minutes times 2, before I break into an explosion of thoughts, of insurgents and soft kills, and career moves. Capacity for destruction. Capacity for loss. Capacity for death, violence, nothingness. 24 months of pain and disgust. Actions of my hands accuse me. Guilty, charge. Unclear clear details and shaky intell, but still I pull the trigger. There’s a limit to madness. Gague clocks out at two years, but they serve up poison like entrees at Blueberry Hill. Crazy with a side of numb. It took 63,720,000 seconds to go from me to somebody else. To change. - See more at: http://arts.gov/audio/lynn-hill#file_audio_default_group_audio_transcript

I have a capacity for war. I have a capacity for hate. I have a capacity for insanity. For anger. For lies. 525,600 minutes times 2, before I break into an explosion of thoughts, of insurgents and soft kills, and career moves. Capacity for destruction. Capacity for loss. Capacity for death, violence, nothingness. 24 months of pain and disgust. Actions of my hands accuse me. Guilty, charge. Unclear clear details and shaky intell, but still I pull the trigger. There’s a limit to madness. Gague clocks out at two years, but they serve up poison like entrees at Blueberry Hill. Crazy with a side of numb. It took 63,720,000 seconds to go from me to somebody else. To change. - See more at: http://arts.gov/audio/lynn-hill#file_audio_default_group_audio_transcript

I have a capacity for war. I have a capacity for hate. I have a capacity for insanity. For anger. For lies. 525,600 minutes times 2, before I break into an explosion of thoughts, of insurgents and soft kills, and career moves. Capacity for destruction. Capacity for loss. Capacity for death, violence, nothingness. 24 months of pain and disgust. Actions of my hands accuse me. Guilty, charge. Unclear clear details and shaky intell, but still I pull the trigger. There’s a limit to madness. Gague clocks out at two years, but they serve up poison like entrees at Blueberry Hill. Crazy with a side of numb. It took 63,720,000 seconds to go from me to somebody else. To change. - See more at: http://arts.gov/audio/lynn-hill#file_audio_default_group_audio_transcript

PS: Vijay Iyer's 2003 collaboration with Mike Ladd, In What Language?, is also terrific.

drone life: swarms of insect sized MAVs by 2030

Please read Charlie Booker writing in The Guardian on February 24 on the US Air Force plans to develop bird- and insect-sized micro-drones with flapping wings, known as micro air vehicle or MAV. They can operate in swarms and their purpose is, among other things, to kill. The bird MAVs are planned to go operational in 2015, the insect MAVs by 2030. Be sure to read and then watch the chilling video, from 2009. Our tax dollars at work.

drones of war: kill a man with a dronestick in your hand

John Caramanica reviewed Fatima Al Qadiri's new release Desert Strike today in the New York Times. Given the subject matter and its stylistic connections to grime, I of course immediately purchased it. I'm not entirely convinced that it does all that Caramanica claims it does. It's good but I don't find it so "morose, ominous, moving" as JC. I don't hear "Ghost Raid" quite as "nihilistic" as he does. The "hints of grime" on "Hydra" are too weak for me. It's true that "Oil Well" is "littered with the sounds of weapons being cocked and emptied" but given that the EP is meant, according to JC, to be "a conversation piece about war," I want it to be "grimier." I want it to convey much more of the horror and the blood and guts. Especially after Gaza.

Louis Pattison also reviewed Al Qadiri's EP for The Guardian last Friday. There we learn that Al Qadiri was raised in Kuwait, that she used to play a Megadrive game called "Desert Strike: Return To The Gulf" when she was 10, in 1992, just two year after the Iraqi invasion. She now lives in Brooklyn. (Of course!).

I think Pattison overplays the "horrors" evoked by Al Qadiri's music as much as Caramanica does. But Pattison did alert me to a much more interesting piece of music that reflects much more vividly on the interconnections between war, video games, and drones: Montreal producer d'Eon's "Kill a Man with a Dronestick in Your Hand."

I find the video and the song to be quite riveting. It's electronic, it opens with some great, electronically altered oud playing (perhaps played by d'Eon), then shifts to a slow dance beat. The sing-songy lyrics are a bit hard for me to catch because the voice is slightly modified through electronics. But it's a very simple and clever rhyme scheme where all the lines rhyme with Man and Hand. Thus: Taliban, Pakistan, etc. Two lines I can catch are "Kill a man far away in Pakistan" and "There's no blood on your hand."

The video mixes images of what appears to be the men and women who sit in rooms in the US and guide the drones to their targets; video footage of "real" drone strikes from above and on-the-ground; video games that simulate drone war; a woman in a very short skirt dancing; scenes of the Taliban flogging a prisoner, and so on. Sometimes it's not clear whether you're watching video games or "real" war scenes.

You can watch the vid below. You can buy the song (well worth it) from iTunes and, no doubt, other venues. d'Eon records on the Hippos in Tanks label. "Kill a Man with a Dronestick in Your Hand is from his album Palinopsia. (In 2011 d'Eon recorded a split 12" with the fabulous Grimes, called Darkbloom. For the record, Grimes has been kufiyaspotted.)

d'Eon "Kill a Man With a Joystick In Your Hand" from OLDE ENGLISH SPELLING BEE on Vimeo.

Music and Torture, Music and War

Very interesting documentary from al-Jazeera, called "Songs of War." It features Christopher Cerf, a composer for Sesame Street, who, after learning that some of his music was used in the torture of US-held prisoners of the "War on Terror," at Guantanamo and in Iraq, tries to make sense of what it all means.

Massive Attack and the Palestine Connection (of course)

Massive Attack's latest (fifth) album, Heligoland, is out now. I am listening to it right now, because it is now available to listen to in its entirety, thanks to NPR. (This almost, but does not quite, make up for the execrable attack on All Things Considered last week on the late Howard Zinn. Almost.)

Go here for NPR's take on Heligoland. To listen:

I've only listened to a few tracks, so can't give an informed opinion, except to say that so far I like it. I've loved Massive Attack ever since the first one, Blue Lines, back in 1991.

Long after I had become an avid fan, I learned of another reason to admire Massive Attack: for their politics. I noted back in 2007 that the band had played benefits for the Hoping Foundation, which supports projects for children in Palestinian refugee camps.

I want to quote now from a longish article about Massive Attack that was published in New Statesman back in 2007 ("Two-man Army," by Alice O'Keeffe, Feb. 5), that tells us a bit more about the group's notions about Palestine, about the Iraq war, and about the potentiality for development of a Middle Eastern trend in the British music scene. NPR won't be talking about this aspect of Massive Attack. (In the photo above, which is "sampled" from Massive Attack's blog, Grant (Daddy G) Marshall is at left, Robert (3D) Del Naja at right.)

It quickly becomes evident that [Robert] Del Naja is unfashionably political, and not in the woolly way we have come to expect from our pop stars. "When you are travelling around the world on tour, you see all these places that you hear about on the news and you start to actually feel some connection with them," he says. "We've been to Israel, to Bethlehem twice, and to Lebanon, performing in Baalbek, which was heavily bombed in the last [Israeli] attacks. You see these places and you start to feel a connection, and to feel a bit more responsible for what happens there. I wanted to actually do something."

Thus it is that Massive Attack will be playing three benefit concerts this month in Birmingham and London for the HOPING (Hope and Optimism for Palestinians in the Next Generation) Foundation, a charity set up by Jemima Khan, Bella Freud and the academic Karma Nabulsi to support grass-roots organisations in the Palestinian refugee camps across the Middle East. Primal Scream played a similar concert in 2004 (it was Primal Scream's lead singer, Bobby Gillespie, who introduced Massive Attack to Nabulsi), but Del Naja insists this is not simply a case of "sleb" guilt. "It is easy to get cynical about this kind of thing. As much as an event like Live 8 was monumental, it left me cold. It does raise awareness, but then you ask, 'Were any of those ambitions really met? Which targets have been reached?' This charity is a small group of people, with specific aims. You can understand that; you know where you are."

For more on some of the Hoping Foundation benefits, which have involved the likes of Elton John, Jade Jagger, Kate Moss, Hugh Grant, Chrissie Hynde, Nick Cave...go here. I've said this before, but here goes again: our US celebrities are lame on the question of Palestine compared to the Brit stars. Or is it that we have no Karma Nabulsi to mobilize them?

Del Naja has occasionally been sneered at by less earnest music-industry types for his interest in political issues - an indication, perhaps, of how disengaged pop music has become. On the eve of the 2003 Iraq invasion, he and Damon Albarn tried to organise a group of similarly prominent musicians into an anti-war campaign, only to be greeted, he says, with a silence bordering on hostility. "We approached people who we knew, people who were our peers or who we respected. But no one was interested. The only ones who got behind it with us were [the British Asian rap group] Fundamental. The majority didn't even respond, and those who did asked us if we supported Saddam Hussein's regime.

"Everyone is happy to get behind a cause like Make Poverty History, or fair-trade and environment issues. But when it comes to politics, they are reluctant."

Comment: props, once again, to Damon Albarn--who, as far as I can tell, is not often credited for being so politicized. The heavy involvement he has had in promoting Arab music in England, through his Honest Jons label, is certainly connected to his politicization around Middle East issues. As for Fun'Da'Mental, well, if you read this blog, you know about Fun'Da'Mental.

I wonder if Asian and Middle Eastern cultures might begin to permeate popular music, in the same way as Massive Attack and their ilk absorbed African-Caribbean influences during the 1990s. "It's interesting - we have done some exciting work with Asian and Arab artists, but I think there is still an unbridgeable gap there in terms of what happens in clubs and bars," he says. "When I was a kid, the Asians got more passive abuse than any other race, just because people are ignorant - they don't understand the culture. And of course, integration is difficult in the current political climate."

Again, Del Naja is pretty clear-eyed on the problems of racism toward Asians and Middle Easterners in England. We can only hope that the work of artists like U-Cef and Natacha Atlas are helping to shift things, at least a bit.

(Wish I knew which Arab artists Massive has worked with.)

I seem to remember that Massive Attack had made some statement in the wake of Israel's assault on Gaza. If they did, I cannot put my hands on it. But check out the group's blog. Almost every one of the 'relevant links' is about Gaza. (And people think I'm obsessed!)

Soundtrack for the Next Misadventure

I love the title of this post, I wish I had invented it.

I intend in future (between finishing off a couple articles and getting ready to head off for Morocco) to post other sources for music from what may be the next target of US intervention. Meanwhile, Magic of Juju is a great source for all kinds of music, including Sabah and Fairuz.

Fayetteville rally: US out of Iraq

Pink for peace
Originally uploaded by tsweden.

A belated post: on March 11, about 200+ marched in Fayetteville against the US occupation of Iraq. The march marked the fourth anniversary of the US invasion, which was launched on March 17 2003. (Most rallies are this weekend, but not here--we marched a little early due to spring break.) About twice as many showed up last year--not sure why, but nonetheless, it was a spirited event.

Michael Franti in Fayettville: What's the Use of Political Music?

Michael Franti & Spearhed played at George's Majestic Lounge in Fayetteville, AR on March 6, and I manage to catch the show. I first hear of Franti back in the early nineties, when he led Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, who are best known for their song, "Television: Drug of the Nation." I saw him perform with Spearhead in Seattle, I think it was back in 1996. I've not followed him so closely of late, but I still consider him one of the most important political artists around.

The concert was sold out, just jammed with a crowd of 2-300 that could loosely be termed "hippies." The crowd was very appreciative, very familiar with the music. Franti seemed quite surprised at the enthusiastic reception he received in his first-ever concert in Arkansas--and the crowd was of course very glad to hear themselves praised by the likes of Franti.

But all during the concert--which I enjoyed immensely--I couldn't get the thought out of my mind that this Sunday, March 11, the Omni Center for Peace and Equality is organizing anti-war, anti-occupation demonstration, on the fourth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq.
There were flyers advertising the march spread around in the club, and due to the efforts of a couple of my younger friends, the flyer managed to end up in Franti's hand at the conclusion of the concert and he read it out. I'm pretty certain, however, that despite Franti's endorsement, and despite the fact that Franti's music is consistently progressive and political (and the politics is expressed very clearly), that very few of those at the concert will come out to the march. Twenty at most, I imagine, and I will know most of them. The march (if the weather holds up) will probably include several hundred people, if the last march is any guide, but it won't be the hippies who attended the Franti/Spearhead concert. They're sympathetic with Franti's message, but they'd pay $20 and show up to dance and drink beer (and smoke some Chronic--a lot of that in the air) than participate in a demo. Our demo on March 11 will include people of all age groups (with a lot of middle aged folks like me), but it will be very short on young folks of the "alternative" or hippy variety.

So is Franti's music, so infused with radical politics, of any political use in a place like this? I discussed this with my friend Dave, and he suggested that probably, in a place like San Francisco, there would be more of a convergence between the audience at a Franti concert and marchers at an anti-war rally. I think that's probably true. And I'm not sure why all the good-hearted pot-smoking longhaired young people here are so unlikely to show up at a rally. I have no answers, only a feeling of depression...

Fayetteville Vigil: in commemoration of the dead in Iraq

Yesterday, January 2, the Omni Center for Peace, Justice and Ecology organized a vigil to remember the now 3000+ US soldiers who have lost their lives in Iraq and the half million or so Iraqis who have died since March 2003. About 40-50 people attended, holding candles and dressed in black as a sign of mourning. (Not, as some kid yelled out of the window at those assembled, to look "cool" and "kinda gothic.") The vigil received front page coverage in today's Northwest Arkansas Times. The group assembled in front of the Federal Building, on College Ave., a major thoroughfare, from 4:30-6:30, and so lots of people driving by saw the event. The response was overwhelmingly positive, and I saw no, zero, negative responses from drivers to our posters and the peace signs we waved. This is an extremely unpopular war--but how to get more people actively mobilized, and how to pressure the Democratic-controlled Congress to stop funding the war?

Tags: Iraq, war, protest, peace